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The onset of the pandemic has led to increased demand across customer income groups around the world for digital banking options. We’ve seen how digital banks like Zolve and Nubank have raised money in recent months to fill this need. This time, a startup from Africa has joined the party.
TymeBank, a South African digital bank, announced today that it has secured an R1.6 billion (~$109 million) investment from new investors in the UK and Philippines. The company made this known via a statement. This investment will be used to bolster TymeBank’s growth and drive its commercial expansion across the country.
However, this investment will come in two tranches. According to the company, R500 million ($34 million) has already been invested in the business, while the rest — R1.1 billion ($75 million) — will be invested over the next 12 to 15 months.
TymeBank offers a transactional bank account with zero or low monthly fees and a savings product. Most of its customers are onboarded via physical kiosks, usually in Pick n Pay and Boxer stores around the country. Since launching in February 2019, TymeBank has grown rapidly and now has about 2.8 million customers. The company says that it’s on track to reach 3 million by the end of next month.
The investors for this unnamed round include Apis Growth Fund II, a private equity fund managed by Apis Partners, and Gokongwei-owned JG Summit Holdings, one of the largest conglomerates in the Philippines. Both these investors are experienced in financial services in emerging markets; Apis, for instance, is a private equity asset manager that supports growth-stage financial services and financial infrastructure businesses.
It is noteworthy that this is one of the largest raises, if not the largest, for a digital bank on the continent. Tauriq Keraan, the CEO of TymeBank, considers this to be largely due to more investors buying into the importance of digital banking and also the company’s value propositions — the first which is improving access to underbanked and underserviced customers in South Africa, and the other, satisfying customer demand for low and transparent bank fees which is generally viewed as both costly and difficult to understand across the country.
“The establishments of digital banks in South Africa is in its infancy. Growth in this particular segment of financial services is only possible with investments from partners who understand and support the growth trajectory of digital banks,” he said.
With already existing shareholders like African Rainbow Capital (founded by South African billionaire Patrice Motsepe), TymeBank says these new investors will grow the company into a top tier retail bank in South Africa. The investment will also help the company expand its range of banking products and grow its lending portfolio. Diversification of offerings is key as well as TymeBank seeks to enhance its propositions in insurance and credit cards to its customers.
“As the controlling shareholder in TymeBank, African Rainbow Capital is delighted to have our new co-investors onboard. Equally important, Apis and the Gokongwei family invest in TymeBank at a time when significant uncertainty reigns globally and in South Africa as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Dr Patrice Motsepe, the majority owner of TymeBank and chairman of African Rainbow Capital. “The invested amount of R1.6 billion is no small feat both in terms of drawing investment into South Africa’s financial services sector as well as investing into a fledgling part of the sector in our country.”
TymeBank claims to onboard an average of 110,000 new customers per month. This makes it globally recognized for digital banking in emerging markets, and the plan is to reach 4 million customers next year. In terms of growth, TymeBank currently outpaces its competitors in Africa and can be argued to be one of the fastest-growing digital banks in the world at the moment. The company is the first bank in South Africa to be fully operated off a cloud-based infrastructure network and the first to be granted a commercial banking license in the country since 1999.
TymeBank isn’t indigenously South African though. It is a member of the Tyme group of companies headquartered in Singapore. The holding company, Tyme, focuses on designing, building, and operating digital banks for emerging markets. With its success in South Africa, Tyme is planning to launch operations in Asia and has entered into an agreement to launch a digital bank in the Philippines in the coming months.
Based in Singapore, ErudiFi wants to help more students in Southeast Asia stay in school by giving them affordable financing options. The startup announced today it has raised a $5 million Series A, co-led by Monk’s Hill Ventures and Qualgro.
ErudiFi currently works with more than 50 universities and vocational schools in Indonesia and the Philippines. Co-founder and chief executive officer Naga Tan told TechCrunch that students in those countries have limited financing options, and often rely on friends or family, or informal payday lenders that charge high interest rates.
To provide more accessible financing options, ErudiFi partners with accredited universities and schools to offer subsidized installment plans, using tech to scale up while keeping costs down. Interest rates and repayment terms vary between institutions, but can be as low as 0%, with loans payable in 12 to 24 months.
By providing their students with affordable financing plans, ErudiFi can increase retention rates at schools, helping them keep students who would otherwise be forced to drop out because of financial issues.
Tan said ErudiFi’s value proposition for educational institutions is “being able to offer a data-driven financing solution that helps with student recruitment and retention. Students also greatly benefit because our product is one of the few, if not the only, affordable financing option they have access to.”
In a press statement, Peng T. Ong, co-founder and managing partner of Monk’s Hill Ventures, said, “Access to affordable tertiary education remains a huge pain point in Southeast Asia where the cost is nearly double then the average GDP per capita. ErudiFi is tackling an underserved market that is plagued with high-interest rates by traditional financial institutions and limited reach from peer-to-peer lending companies.”
ErudiFi’s Series A will be used on hiring for its product and engineering teams and to expand in Indonesia and the Philippines.
A new VC fund, “2150“, is launching with the first close of a €200m ($240m) fund which will back technologies aimed largely at reducing the carbon footprint of cities. For example, startups that inject carbon into concrete, or monitor the energy of buildings. The final close is anticipated by mid-2021.
The advisory board for 2150 comprises the former chief sustainability officer in the Obama administration and renowned urbanist and academic, Richard Florida. 2150 is based around the idea that half of the world’s population lives in cities, and this will increase to two-thirds by 2050, creating a growing environmental impact that the world can ill-afford, given the climate crisis.
Based across London, Copenhagen and Berlin, the fund’s Limited Partners include a mix of institutional capital and family offices including Chr. Augustinus Fabrikker, Denmark’s Green Future Fund and Novo Holdings. 2150 says it has other LP partners who are building or managing “over 16 million square meters of real estate”, who will come in handy, kicking the tires on the efficacy of 2150 investments. The anchor funding has come from NREP, a sustainable real estate fund manager with a large Northern European footprint and platform.
The founding partners include Mikkel Bülow-Lehnsby, Chairman and co-founder of large real estate logistics company NREP; Jacob Bro, former Chief Product Officer at Rocket Internet; Christian Jølck, the founder and former Chairman of industry climate advocacy group SYNERGI; Christian Hernandez, former Facebook executive and VC; Nicole LeBlanc, formerly with Alphabet’s urban product incubator Sidewalk Labs; Rahul Parekh, founder of VC-backed foodtech startup EatFirst and former executive director at Goldman Sachs; and Alexandra Perez, who incubated and launched urban tech startups at Tech City Ventures.
2150 will focus on startups that can make cities more resilient, efficient and sustainable, investing in tech associated with the urban environment, materials, automation, and sensor-based monitoring to improve the health, safety, and productivity of building occupants. It says it will only invest where sustainability impact can be measured, aiming for a first portfolio of around 20 companies. Ticket sizes will be €4-5m series A for startups, but it will also invest in existing companies that want to expand.
Its first investment is in CarbonCure Technologies – a Canadian company lowering the CO2 footprint of concrete – in which 2150 participated in a funding round for last year, investing alongside Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, Bill Gates-backed Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund. At present, concrete accounts for 8% of all global CO2 emissions
Speaking to TechCrunch, Hernandez said 2150 was particularly interested in what’s coming to be known as “ESG Analytics” or “Carbon Accounting”. In other words, platforms that can analyze the impact of developments for an ESG and CO2 perspective.
The other background data which inspired the creation of the fund includes the fact that two billion new homes will need to be built over the next 80 years ; cities consume over two-thirds of the world’s energy and account for more than 70% of global CO2 emissions; 13% of global GDP is spent on construction, but the industry is slow to adopt new technology; and the UN has said ground-breaking innovation is needed in cities, where the battle for sustainable development will be “won or lost”.
Mikkel Bülow-Lehnsby, Partner at 2150 and Chairman and co-founder of NREP, said: “With NREP we have been on a 15-year mission of making real estate and cities more efficient, customer-centric and sustainable. With 2150 we are leveraging all of NREP’s learnings and ambitions and partnering with our industry peers to identify and accelerate technology that can help us support our purpose of making real estate better. I am convinced that 2150’s mission-aligned team will play an important role in designing a future in which the convergence of entrepreneurship, technology and sustainability will reverse the built environment’s negative impact on the planet.”
Christian Hernandez, Partner at 2150, said: “Cities are complex living systems that are constantly expanding, evolving and adapting, with half the world’s population now living in urban environments and rising. Cities, while vehicles for the betterment of humanity, currently emit 70% of the world’s greenhouse gases and generate the vast majority of the planet’s waste. We see a huge opportunity to make a serious impact on the way cities are developed and the way our citizens live, work and are cared for by completely reimagining and reshaping the urban environment for good.”
The advisory board for 2150 includes technologists, scientists and designers including well-known architect, Bjarke Ingels, the Director of Princeton’s Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment; Dr. Lynn Loo, Unity’s head of AI; Danny Lange, the former Chief Sustainability Officer in the Obama Administration; Christine Harada, the founder of sustainable developer EDGE Technologies; and Coen van Oostrom.
Spreadsheet software — led by products like Microsoft’s Excel, Google’s Sheets and Apple’s Numbers — continues to be one of the most-used categories of business apps, with Excel alone clocking up more than a billion users just on its Android version. Now, a startup called Rows that’s built on that ubiquity, with a low-code platform that lets people populate and analyze web apps using just spreadsheet interfaces, is announcing funding and launching a freemium open beta of its expanded service.
The Berlin-based startup — which rebranded from dashdash at the end of last year — closed a Series B round of $16 million, money that it is using to continue investing in its platform as well as in sales and marketing.
The round was led by Lakestar, with past investors Accel (which led its $8 million Series A in 2018) and Cherry Ventures also participating. Christian Reber has also invested in this round. Reber knows a thing or two about software disrupting legacy products — he is the co-founder and CEO of presentation software startup Pitch and the former CEO and founder of Microsoft-acquired Wunderlist — and notably he is joining Rows’ Advisory Board along with the investment.
A little detail about this Series B: CEO Humberto Ayres Pereira tells us that the round actually was quietly closed over a year ago, in January 2020 — just ahead of the world shutting down amid the Covid-19 pandemic. The startup chose to announce that round today to coincide with adding more features to its product and moving it into an open beta, he said.
That open beta is free in its most basic form — free is limited to 10 users or less and a minimal amount of integration usage. Paid tiers, which cover more team members and up to 100,000 integration tasks (which are measured by how many times a spreadsheet queries another service), start at $59 per month.
One strong sign of interest in this latest iteration of the software will be in the lasting popularity of spreadsheets. Another is Rows’ traction to date: in invite-only mode, it picked up 10,000 users, and hundreds of companies, as customers.
No-code and low-code software, which let people create and work with apps and other digital content without delving deep into the lines of code that underpin them, have continued to pick up traction in the market in the last several years.
The reason for this is straightforward: non-technical employees may not code, but they are getting increasingly adept at understanding how services function and what can be achieved within an app.
No-code and low-code platforms let them get more hands-on when it comes to customizing and creating the services that they need to use everyday to get their work done, without the time and effort it might take to get an engineer involved.
“People want to create their own tools,” said Ayres Pereira. “They want to understand and test and iterate.” He said that the majority of Rows’ users so far are based out of North America, and typical use cases include marketing and sales teams, as well as companies using Rows spreadsheets as a dynamic interface to manage logistics and other operations.
Stephen Nundy, the partner at Lakestar who led its investment, describes the army of users taking up no-code tools as “citizen developers.”
Rows is precisely the kind of platform that plays into the low-code trend. For people who are already au fait with the kinds of tools that you find in spreadsheets — and something like Excel has hundreds of functions in it — it presents a way of leaning on those familiar functions to trigger integrations with other apps, and to subsequently use a spreadsheet created in Rows to both analyse data from other apps, as well as update them.
You might ask, why is it more useful, for example, to look at content from Twitter in Rows rather than Twitter itself? A Rows document might let a person search for a set of Tweets using a certain chain of keywords, and then organise those results based on parameters such as how many “likes” those Tweets received.
Or users responding to a call to action for a promotion on Instagram might then be cross referenced with a company’s existing database of customers, to analyze how those respondents overlap or present new leads.
There have been a number of other startups building tools that are providing similar no- and low-code approaches. Gyana is focusing more on data science, Tray.io provides a graphical interface to integrate how apps work together, Zapier and Notion also provide simple interfaces to integrate apps and APIs together, and Airtable has its own take on reinventing the spreadsheet interface. For now, Ayres Pereira sees these more as compatriots than competitors.
“Yes, we overlap with services like Zapier and Notion,” he said. “But I’d say we are friends. We’re all raising awareness about people being able to do more and not having to be stuck using old tools. It’s not a zero sum game for us.”
When we covered Rows’s Series A two years ago, the startup had built a platform to let people who are comfortable working with data in spreadsheets to use that interface to create and populate content in web apps. It had a lot of extensibility, but mainly geared at people still willing to do the work to create those links.
Two years on, while the spreadsheet has remained the anchor, the platform has grown. Ayres Pereira, who co-founded the company with Torben Schulz (both pictured above), said that there are some 50 new integrations now, including ways to analyse and update content on social media platforms like Instagram, YouTube, CrunchBase, Salesforce, Slack, LinkedIn and Twitter, as well as some 200 new features in the platform itself.
It also has a number of templates available for people to guide them through simple tasks, such as looking up LinkedIn profiles or emails for a list of people; tracking social media counts and so on.
One of the most common details of spreadsheets, however, has yet to be built. The interface is still banked around rows and columns, with no graphical tools to visualize data in different ways such as pie charts or graphs as you might have in a typical spreadsheet program.
It’s for this reason that Rows has yet to exit beta. The feature is one requested a lot, Pereira said, describing it as “the final frontier.” When Rows is ready to ship with that functionality, likely by Q3 of this year, it will tick over to general “1.0” release, he added.
“Humberto and Torben have really impressed us with their ambition to disrupt the market with a new spreadsheet paradigm that tackles the significant shortcomings of today’s solutions,” said Nundy at Lakestar. “Data integrations are native, the collaboration experience is first class and the ability to share and publish your work as an application is unique and will create more ‘Citizen developers’ to emerge. This is essential to the growing needs of today’s technology literate workforce. The level of interest they’ve received in their private beta is proof of the desirability of platforms like Rows, and we’re excited to be supporting them through their public beta launch and beyond with this investment.” Nundy is also joining Rows’ board with this round.
A new VC fund, “2150“, is launching with the first close of a €200m ($281m) fund which will back technologies aimed largely at reducing the carbon footprint of cities. For example, startups that inject carbon into concrete, or monitor the energy of buildings. The final close is anticipated by mid-2021.
The advisory board for 2150 comprises the former chief sustainability officer in the Obama administration and renowned urbanist and academic, Richard Florida. 2150 is based around the idea that half of the world’s population lives in cities, and this will increase to two-thirds by 2050, creating a growing environmental impact that the world can ill-afford, given the climate crisis.
Based across London, Copenhagen and Berlin, the fund’s Limited Partners include a mix of institutional capital and family offices including Chr. Augustinus Fabrikker, Denmark’s Green Future Fund and Novo Holdings. 2150 says it has other LP partners who are building or managing “over 16 million square meters of real estate”, who will come in handy, kicking the tires on the efficacy of 2150 investments. The anchor funding has come from NREP, a sustainable real estate fund manager with a large Northern European footprint and platform.
The founding partners include Mikkel Bülow-Lehnsby, Chairman and co-founder of large real estate logistics company NREP; Jacob Bro, former Chief Product Officer at Rocket Internet; Christian Jølck, the founder and former Chairman of industry climate advocacy group SYNERGI; Christian Hernandez, former Facebook executive and VC; Nicole LeBlanc, formerly with Alphabet’s urban product incubator Sidewalk Labs; Rahul Parekh, founder of VC-backed foodtech startup EatFirst and former executive director at Goldman Sachs; and Alexandra Perez, who incubated and launched urban tech startups at Tech City Ventures.
2150 will focus on startups that can make cities more resilient, efficient and sustainable, investing in tech associated with the urban environment, materials, automation, and sensor-based monitoring to improve the health, safety, and productivity of building occupants. It says it will only invest where sustainability impact can be measured, aiming for a first portfolio of around 20 companies. Ticket sizes will be €4-5m series A for startups, but it will also invest in existing companies that want to expand.
Its first investment is in CarbonCure Technologies – a Canadian company lowering the CO2 footprint of concrete – in which 2150 participated in a funding round for last year, investing alongside Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, Bill Gates-backed Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund. At present, concrete accounts for 8% of all global CO2 emissions
Speaking to TechCrunch, Hernandez said 2150 was particularly interested in what’s coming to be known as “ESG Analytics” or “Carbon Accounting”. In other words, platforms that can analyze the impact of developments for an ESG and CO2 perspective.
The other background data which inspired the creation of the fund includes the fact that two billion new homes will need to be built over the next 80 years ; cities consume over two-thirds of the world’s energy and account for more than 70% of global CO2 emissions; 13% of global GDP is spent on construction, but the industry is slow to adopt new technology; and the UN has said ground-breaking innovation is needed in cities, where the battle for sustainable development will be “won or lost”.
Mikkel Bülow-Lehnsby, Partner at 2150 and Chairman and co-founder of NREP, said: “With NREP we have been on a 15-year mission of making real estate and cities more efficient, customer-centric and sustainable. With 2150 we are leveraging all of NREP’s learnings and ambitions and partnering with our industry peers to identify and accelerate technology that can help us support our purpose of making real estate better. I am convinced that 2150’s mission-aligned team will play an important role in designing a future in which the convergence of entrepreneurship, technology and sustainability will reverse the built environment’s negative impact on the planet.”
Christian Hernandez, Partner at 2150, said: “Cities are complex living systems that are constantly expanding, evolving and adapting, with half the world’s population now living in urban environments and rising. Cities, while vehicles for the betterment of humanity, currently emit 70% of the world’s greenhouse gases and generate the vast majority of the planet’s waste. We see a huge opportunity to make a serious impact on the way cities are developed and the way our citizens live, work and are cared for by completely reimagining and reshaping the urban environment for good.”
The advisory board for 2150 includes technologists, scientists and designers including well-known architect, Bjarke Ingels, the Director of Princeton’s Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment; Dr. Lynn Loo, Unity’s head of AI; Danny Lange, the former Chief Sustainability Officer in the Obama Administration; Christine Harada, the founder of sustainable developer EDGE Technologies; and Coen van Oostrom.
