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Genetics testing and genome research company 23andMe is set to go public via a merger with special purpose acquisition corp (SPAC) VG Acquisition Corp, a vehicle set up by Richard Branson and his company Virgin Group. The transaction is expected to result in 23andMe having around $984 million in cash available at close to spend on product development, hires and other growth strategies, and will value the company at around $3.5 billion, close to the total cited by an earlier report detailing the talks leading up to this deal.
23andMe, founded in 2006 and led by co-founder Anne Wojcicki, has raised a total of just under $900 million to date, including an $85 million Series F round announced last December. The company was one of the first to debut at-home genetic testing for individual consumers, providing kits that people can use to find out more about their own DNA, and what it says about their potential health issue, ancestry and more.
More recently, the company has turned its massive genomic data store into an opt-in genetic research resource that is used for discovery of future therapies and treatments. It also monetizes through aggregated, anonymized sharing of the data it collects with third-parties, for research and business purposes.
The deal will include $25 million each invested into the private investment in public equity (PIPE) transaction that accompanies the merger from Wojcicki and from Richard Bransons. It’s expected to close in the second quarter of this year, and the resulting company will be listed on the NYSE under the ticker “ME.”
The current SPAC craze has proved a path to an exit for a number of startups, and long-private companies like 23andMe that technically still fit our definition because of the lack of an exit event, but that have also seemed content to rely on private investors to supply their cash reserves for a long time.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/04/23andme-set-to-go-public-via-a-virgin-group-spac-merger/
Monkey, a financial marketplace for receivables in Latin America, has raised $6 million in Series A funding.
Quona Capital and Kinea Ventures co-led the round.
The São Paulo-based startup was founded in 2016 by a trio that includes former Citi investment banker Gustavo Müller, Bruno Oliveira (who worked in strategic planning for Telefonica) and Felipe Adorno, an ex-senior developer for Netshoes and Infracommerce.
Monkey has developed what it describes as Supply Chain Finance (SCF) programs for small and medium enterprises. So what does that mean exactly? It pairs up SMEs with large enterprises such as Brazilian petrochemical giant Petrobras and Fiat Chrysler, and banks. Through its network, the company claims that buyers can “find the best receivables in the market, suppliers get the best sales conditions, and sponsors strengthen their businesses and production chains.”
Monkey was founded on the premise that the Brazilian financial system is highly concentrated among just a few players, with little competition — a common refrain in Latin America.
“You have high rates, the spreads are crazy and it’s almost impossible for small and medium companies to access additional capital at a reasonable price,” CEO Müller told TechCrunch.
Monkey’s goal, he said, is to solve SMEs frustrations by creating “a competitive environment that brings multiple financial institutions onto Monkey’s platform to compete for the purchase of SMEs’ receivables with top tier buyers.”
Today, Monkey has 55 large companies on its platform, many of whom signed on in 2020, leading the startup to see its trading volume surge from about $187 million to $1.5 billion over the course of the year.
Jonathan Whittle, partner and co-founder of Quona Capital, said his firm — which invests in startups focused on fintech for inclusion in emerging markets — was impressed with what he described as Monkey’s “novel approach.”
By combining buyer-sanctioned marketplaces and auction-based pricing through a multi-funder platform, small and medium enterprises in Brazil have access to credit in a way that they never have before, making the cost of capital more affordable, he said.
“What we’re excited about with Monkey is how it is opening up access to Supply Chain Finance for all the suppliers of larger enterprises, not just the large and mid-sized ones that have typically had access to it,” Whittle told TechCrunch.
The startup plans to use its fresh capital to double its team of 40 in 2021, and to grow operations not only in Brazil, but across Latin America by providing the same offerings for its own clients in other countries. It also plans to use the money to improve user experience and roll out new products such as a credit card marketplace.
“We actually think that what they’re doing is fundamentally different to the way that Supply Chain Finance has been done anywhere around the globe,” Whittle said. “Typically these have been relationships between one bank and a buyer. And what Monkey is doing is kind of turning it on its head with a value proposition that we think is super strong for all three participants in the marketplace.”
Quona’s other investments in the region include Creditas, BizCapital, Neon, Contabilizei, Kovi, Konfio, Klar and ADDI.
Kinea Ventures is a venture capital fund focused on investments in the financial services and technology space. The new fund is part of one of the main alternative investment managers in Brazil, Kinea Investimentos, which was founded in 2007 in a partnership with Itaú Unibanco, and currently has US$13 billion in assets under management.
Monkey had previously raised about $1.5 million through two seed rounds.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/04/brazils-monkey-nabs-6m-series-a-for-financial-marketplace/
London and Barcelona based audio-as-a-service SaaS startup Aflorithmic has scooped up $1.3 million in seed funding from Crowd Media Holdings, an Australia-based company focused on influencer-based ‘social commerce’ and marketing.
It’s taking a 10% stake in Aflorithmic, per a press release, where it says the strategic investment is aimed at enabling it to offer FaceTime conversations with celebrities through “best-in-class voice cloning technology”.
Two year old Aflorithmic may not have chosen a name that trips off the tongue but it’s all about speech and audio. It’s built a platform that offers fully automated, scalable audio production by using AI-driven synthetic media, (“ethical”) voice cloning, and audio mastering — which can be delivered to people’s ears via websites, mobile apps, smart speakers and so on via its APIs.
“Text in beautiful audio out” is its pithy slogan.
Sample clips on its website illustrate the personalization element with synthesized (robot-voiced) voice overs greeting a named customer before plunging into the detail of whatever content it’s been programmed to deliver.
Some of Aflorithmic’s current customers are using its tools to create audio books for kids, for personalized narration of wellness/nutrition programs and even a robot butler concierge service for hotel guests, to name a few. Its business thesis is that demand for audio far outstrips the ability of studio-produced human-spoken voiceovers to deliver.
Hence it reckons synthesized media will be needed to plug the demand gap — serving up infinite permutations of a voice track, each one personalized to a particular customer of the brand or enterprise.
At the same time, the popularity of podcasts and live-voice streaming shows no sign of abating — speaking to the staying power of audio in a video-heavy era.
Aflorithmic’s new investor, Crowd Media Holdings, has rather more ambitious designs on what its tools can help it do — and talks about ‘completely reshaping the way consumers engage in ecommerce’.
The specific driver for its investment in Aflorithmic (aka ALFR) is a plan to blend synthesized voice with video to let fans engage in “immersive” video chats with simulated versions of their favorite celebrities.
Taking a stake in the audio startup to partner on that project helps it de-risk that plan, it said.
“ALFR brings the audio tech that will replicate a celebrity’s accent, tone and mannerisms as if the celebrity were on the other end of a call,” Crowd Media writes, noting that “the actual content” the (future) cloned celebrity will sweetly whisper to your face will be “driven by” its own AI-driven chatbot technology — based on drawing on a knowledge base of answers built up from responding to more than 180M user-submitted questions (“via text-only mediums”).
Turning all that text into soothing synthesized voice is where Aflorithmic comes in. While the video piece of the cloned celebrity plan entails 3D imaging — with the tech for that being provided by three other synthetic media firms (UK-based Forever Holdings, digital human makers Zoe01 and Uneeq).
More broadly, Crowd Media says it will be integrating Aflorithmic’s technology into other of its social commerce applications, including its AI-driven chatbot (CM8) — which is targeted at customer service use cases across sectors like marketing, education, and health sectors.
For its part, Aflorithmic says it will be using the new funding for R&D for its API audio-production engine, voice cloning, and talent acquisition.
It offers its API-based audio-as-a-service to a range of customers — noting use-cases such as “hyper-personalized newsletters and podcasts” and voice cloning for marketing applications.
It also touts a “vast” voice library for customers to choose a robot speaker. But it also lets them record a snippet of their own voice to create personalized audio content through its voice cloning AI.
“Users can compose professional-quality pieces including music and complex audio engineering, then deliver the final product to any device or platform such as websites, mobile apps, or smart speakers — all without any previous production experience,” it writes.
Commenting on the funding in a statement, Timo Kunz, co-founder, and CEO at Aflorithmic, said: “We are excited to learn from Crowd’s experience in empowering companies to reach mass markets, and are pleased to accompany them as they define the future of social commerce. We believe audio creation as we know it is making way for automated, scalable, dynamic audio experiences — and companies like ours are at the forefront.”
“Synthetic audio production has a seemingly endless range of functions — the potential within marketing applications alone is mindblowing,” he added. “Imagine Kim Kardashian being a personal shopper for each of her 200M followers, or Lewis Hamilton explaining why YOU personally need the new Pirelli P Zero Rosso. All of this is just around the corner with our tech.”
Alforithmic’s other two co-founders are Peadar Coyle and Björn Ühss.
The startup’s claim of “ethical” voice cloning points to the challenges inherent for all companies working on commercial tools to power the production of synthesized media.
While a cloned celebrity might just sound like a bit of fun, there is huge potential for misuse and abuse via individual voice cloning — from phishing scams and identity theft to emotional manipulation and blackmail.
In an ethics section of its website Alforithmic offers a brief nod to the risks in “making personalized audio scalable”.
“With great innovation comes great responsibility,” it writes, adding: “We are committed to ethical, fair, transparent AI following the UK´s and European Union’s Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence. All our work and voice models and algorithms are only trained on and with the full compliance and approval of the individual data owner.” (We’ve asked for more details on how it prevents misuse of the voice cloning tech.)
On the competitive front, the startup points to Descript, which raised a $30M round just last month — and acquired another voice cloning startup, Lyrebird, back in 2019 — although its tools cover both video and audio vs Alforithmic being more fully focused on automating the entire audio production process.
Most Indians can’t access credit from formal financial institutions because they don’t have a credit score of any form to prove their creditworthiness.
As an alternative, they look at informal institutions such as pawn shops or more recently, apps that offer loans without any paperwork but could charge interest rates as high as 1,000% and threaten anyone in your phone’s contact list in case of delays in repayment.
(Google caught wind of this recently, and last month removed hundreds of such apps from the Play Store in India. But it wasn’t until several people committed suicide in the country in an attempt to save themselves from embarrassment from family, colleagues and society.)
Deepak Abbot and Nitin Misra, two former executives of Paytm, India’s most valuable startup, believe that this problem can be solved for many by using an asset that has been sitting idly in nearly 200 million homes in the country: Gold.
For generations, Indians across the socio-economic spectrum have preferred to stash their savings — or at least a part of it — in the form of gold. In fact, such is the demand for gold in India (Indians stockpile more gold than citizens in any other country), that the South Asian nation is also the world’s third-largest importer of this precious metal.
But once most Indians have bought gold, they don’t really do much with it other than hoarding and getting it off circulation, thereby dragging down the economy. According to estimates by the World Gold Council, Indians have stashed 25,000 tons of gold, whose value today is over $1.4 trillion.
Monetizing even a third of it can add 2% to the GDP growth rate, analysts say. Banks and other financial institutions love gold as it’s a great secure asset whose value has only grown over the decades.
New Delhi has made several efforts, too, to get stashed gold back in circulation through initiatives such as the gold monetization scheme, but it hasn’t had much success with it so far.
The core challenge with convincing people to part ways with their gold is that it’s an emotional asset, said Misra and Abbot in an interview with TechCrunch. Gold jewellery is a show of strength and pride in India, and families pass on their reserve to future generations.
“Irrespective of your state, religion, community, in India, gold has a certain auspicious sentiment attached to it. You worship it. Even when tax concession and premium price is offered to someone, they can’t fathom the idea of their necklaces and other jewellery being melted and going away,” said Misra.
The other challenge is that even when someone absolutely needs to sell their gold, which is often their last resort, to attend a family emergency or other urgent and unavoidable cause, the process of selling it is an awkward and embarrassing experience for many because of the stigma of pawning their family’s precious property.
In recent years, a handful of firms and startups — in collaboration with banks — have attempted to remove this stigma by visiting the customer at their doorstep to some success.
Abbot and Misra, pictured above, think they have a better approach and broader idea.
Many people in India keep their gold stash and other precious items in a safe locker at a bank that can charge as high as $65 a month for this service. (Banks require customers to pay the fee annually, however.) There are some downsides to using a bank’s locker: Accessing this locker is a long-process and can easily take half of your day, if not more. There’s also no insurance protection on items people keep in the locker. Customers are also required to put up a security deposit of a few hundred dollars to avail this service — and, there is also a long-waiting period before people can even avail this service.
Through their newfound startup indiagold, Abbot and Misra are offering customers a similar locker service for as little as $1.36 a month, which also includes full insurance coverage. The idea, the duo explained, is to make it easier and convenient for people to secure their previous metal reserve.
“You sign up on indiagold app, our agents come to your house, inspect and weigh the gold, and put it in a tamper proof bag. We also attach an RFID sticker to the bag, which once scanned, can detect if there was any attempt to open it. They then put the bag inside a steel box, which is locked by the customer with their fingerprint. And all of this is being captured through a body camera by one of our agents, which is streaming the feed in real-time to the customer as they leave the premise to the designated vault location,” said Misra.
With crime rates going up, very few people bark at the idea of securing their jewelries and especially when they know that their property is being insured, the duo said. Once they have deposited their gold stash with indiagold, the startup displays the real-time value of their property and offers a line of credit that could be accessed within seconds.
“It’s fine if the customer doesn’t want a loan, but should they ever need it, they have a zero-touch option available. They know that their gold is secured in a locker with their fingerprint, so their jewellery is not going to be melted or broken. If they ever need a line of credit, they can avail it in 30 seconds without talking to anyone, or even having someone quietly visit their home,” he said.
“If they have deposited multiple jewellery items, they can avail loan against just some of them. Say if the person knows that they need to use some necklace in an event soon, they can take a loan against other items in that case. And we charge at max 1% interest rate on the loan,” he added.
This is just part of the problem that indiagold, which kickstarted its operation late last year, is trying to address.
It has built a platform that determines the credit worthiness of its customers, and provides APIs to banks and other lenders who are trying to reach this untapped market.
The startup, which is currently operational in Delhi-NCR, recently raised $2 million in a financing round led by Leo Capital, with participation from high-profile investors including Kunal Shah of Cred, Amrish Rau of PineLabs, Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal of Snapdeal, Ashneer Grover and Bhavik Koladiya of BharatPe, Miten Sampat of Cred and MX Player, Sameer Mehta of Boat, Ashish Sharma of Innoven Capital, Ankit Agarwal of Alteria Capital, Rahul Soota of MyMoneyMantra, Ramakant Sharma of Livspace, and Blume Founders Fund.
“We think this is the only way this huge market can really be addressed, and now we are beginning to scale our efforts,” said Misra.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/04/former-paytm-execs-team-up-indiagold/
