AgriAku, a Jakarta-based B2B marketplace for farmers, announced today it has raised a pre-Series A of $6 million. The round was led by Go-Ventures, with participation from MDI Arise, MDI Centauri, Mercy Corps Social Venture Fund and angel investors. The funding will be used on hiring and increasing AgriAku’s market penetration.

The marketplace enables retailers to buy supplies, including seeds, fertilizers and agrochemicals, from wholesalers and manufacturers. Then the retailers sell those items to farmers. AgriAku’s goal is to give retailers and farmers a bigger selection of products and access to transparent pricing. It also gives suppliers business software, like bookkeeping and inventory management tools, to help them make forecasts about what farmers will need. 

AgriAku’s marketplace launched in May 2021 and the company says it has seen average month-on-month growth of 200% in gross merchandise value over the past four months. The number of active users on AgriAku is now about 10,000 registered farmer stores. 

The company was launched last year by Irvan Kolonas, also founder of social enterprise agritech startup Vasham and Danny Handoko, whose was previously CEO of Airy, an Indonesian hospitality startup. The team also includes Rezky Haryanto Agustia, former assistant vice president for supply chain and operations at e-commerce giant Bukalapak. 

Kolonas told TechCrunch that AgriAku is a “culmination of a lifelong mission for me, as I first took on the mission 10 years ago with the start of my first company Vasham, a social enterprise, doing a full close-loop, full-stack model helping smallholder corn farmers.”

After spending years trying different models, including direct-to-farmer and retail stores, Kolonas said he realized it was not sustainable to sell directly to farmers. “Instead, we believe firmly now that the most important stakeholder is the Toko Tanis. The Toko Tanis are our mitras or agents who distribute not only inputs but eventually other services to farmers. We want to leverage the decades of relationship that have been built up by them as community leaders with the farmers in their surrounding areas.” 

AgriAku is the latest among several agritech startups in Indonesia that have recently announced funding rounds. Other B2B marketplaces include TaniHub Group, which focuses on connecting farmers with customers to sell their produce. Kolonas said AgriAku eventually also wants to enable farmers to sell produce, by connecting them to offtakers, or factories like rice millers or corn dryers 

In a prepared statement, Go-Ventures partner Aditya Kamath said, “Indonesia’s agricultural industry contributes significantly to the economy, at approximately 13.5% of GDP. However, the upstream agricultural market is highly fragmented with a disorganized value chain for agricultural inputs such as seeds, fertilizers and agrochemicals.” He added, “AgriAku’s B2B input marketplace platform is ideally positioned to improve price transparency and market access for all stakeholders in the agricultural inputs sector.” 

Snowflake helps customers store and manage oodles of data in the cloud without cloud vendor lock-in. Streamlit is a startup that developed a popular open source project for building data-based apps. Seems like a pretty good match, and today Snowflake announced it was acquiring Streamlit for $800 million.

Benoît Dageville, co-founder and president of products at Snowflake, said the company became familiar with Streamlit as customers were using it, as were people in-house, and as they talked it seemed increasingly like a good fit. “We have both the same vision — Streamlit and Snowflake — which is all about democratizing access to data. I would describe it very simply as making it super easy to interact with data,” Dageville told me.

He said that Streamlit fills in a big missing piece in the platform by allowing data scientists and others to interact with the data and build apps that bring the data to life for non-technical users. Snowflake has all the technical pieces for accessing and managing the data in the cloud, but they lacked a native data visualization piece, and that’s what they’re getting with Streamlit.

Streamlit co-founder and CEO Adrien Treuille said that he and his co-founders began talking to Snowflake last fall and over time it became readily apparent that they would match up well together, not just technologically, but also culturally. “I think there’s a really deep cultural alignment beyond the technical and business alignment between the two companies,” Treuille explained.

When the startup launched in 2018, it was the brainchild of some former GoogleX and Zoox employees looking to build an open source project to make it easier to build custom applications to interact with data. As Treuille told me at the time of the launch, they wanted to build a flexible tool:

“I think that Streamlit actually has, I would say, a unique position in this market. While most companies are basically trying to systemize some part of the machine learning workflow, we’re giving engineers these sort of Lego blocks to build whatever they want,” Treuille explained.

It reached version 1.0 last October, and was working on a commercial cloud service. That piece will eventually become part of the Snowflake platform. While the company plans to integrate the Streamlit technology into the Snowflake platform, of course, the plan is to continue to build and support the popular open source project and the community behind it. Treuille says there are tens of thousands of people using the platform and millions using apps built on top of Streamlit.

Snowflake launched in 2012 and raised $1.4 billion before going public in September 2020. Streamlit launched in 2019 and raised $62 million.

The deal is going to have to pass regulatory muster. The hope is that it gets done sooner than later, certainly this quarter, but Dageville said that would be up to the various regulatory bodies involved. Snowflake stock is down almost 23% in after-hours trading after reporting slowing revenue growth.

Zeller’s EFTPOS terminal

Zeller, the Australian neobank for SMBs, has raised a $100 million AUD Series B (about $72.7 million USD), doubling its valuation to more than $1 billion AUD (about $727 million USD). The funding was led by Headline, with participation from Australian superannuation fund Hostplus. Returning investors included Square Peg, Addition and Spark Capital.

The fintech was founded in 2020 by Ben Pfisterer, Square’s former Asia Pacific and Australian head and Dominic Yap, its strategy and growth lead. TechCrunch first covered Zeller in March 2021, when it announced a pre-launch Series A led by Addition, the venture capital firm founded by Lee Fixel.

Over the span of eight months, Zeller signed up over 10,000 Australian businesses, which is one of the reasons Headline decided to invest in it, principal King Goh told TechCrunch.

“The growth of the business is some of the most impressive we’ve seen in any industry. To go from zero to 10,000 customers in eight months is remarkable – you rarely ever see that,” Goh said. “When we invest, we look for companies that are growing many standard deviations above other technology companies and Zeller is a great example of this.”

He added, “We like the company’s first act around acquiring customers via its best-in-class point-of-sale/merchant-acquiring product in a capital-efficient manner, followed by expanding into a broader set of business banking solutions. This may seem audacious, but the team is clearly experienced and well-placed to drive that ambition.”

Pfisterer told TechCrunch that Zeller was created because merchants looking for a financial service provider “were underserved through lack of innovation, opaque pricing and restrictive contracts.” He added that many had to cobble together card payments, banking, expense management and accounts from different providers, with most relying on up to five different systems.

Zeller was created to give SMBs a fully integrated, centralized alternative. Its products for Australian businesses currently include an EFTPOS terminal, business transaction accounts and Zeller Mastercards. Pfisterer said that over 80% of its customers during the first 10 months switched to Zeller from a traditional banking institution, and the majority of them now use their Zeller account as their primary financial services solution. He added Zeller’s customer research showed three in five business owners left traditional banks because of dissatisfaction with outdated tech, poor reliability and reductions to bank services like branch closures and customer support.

The company has a simple sign-up process for merchants. First, they open an account on Zeller’s website. Then they can order a Zeller POS terminal online or in Officeworks stores. Another advantage Zeller has over traditional banks is quick customer support, Pfisterer said, with average call wait times of less than 45 seconds.

Zeller’s product roadmap include new omni-channel commerce capabilities, like the ability to accept online payments through integrations with website and e-commerce platforms. It will also give merchants the option of new accounts to manage and store funds, including the ability to transfer money to more places, and tools to track spending across customer profiles and business locations. Also in the works is Zeller Financial Services, which will include credit and debit cards and expense management tools; and enhanced analytics through Zeller’s dashboard.

“This year we will extend payment acceptance beyond Zeller Terminal to online payments and invoicing via Xero, enabling merchants to get full visibility over transactions across all areas of their business,” said Pfisterer. “In the last two years, Australian merchants have had to adapt and adopt flexible operating models, with the ability to accept payments seamlessly in both person and online—giving their customers as much choice as possible.”

UK-based TrueCircle, a computer vision startup founded just last year, has nabbed $5.5 million in pre-seed funding in a bid to bring data-driven AI to the recycling industry to improve recovery rates and quality — with the overarching goal of transforming the economics of waste reuse to shrink demand for virgin materials.

So far the startup has its tech up and running in eight UK waste sorting facilities but is ramping up quickly, with more launches coming in Q2 — when it will be expanding internationally into Europe and the US.

It tells TechCrunch it’s shooting to have some 30-40 customers using its tech within 12 months’ time. 

The pre-seed is notable for its size. The round is led by Chris Sacca’s climate focused Lowercarbon Capital fund, with participation from Passion Capital, Giant Ventures and firstminute Capital, as well as the founders of companies including Revolut, Monzo, Infarm and Unity investing in a personal capacity.

Commenting on TrueCircle’s pre-seed raise in a statement, Lowercarbon Capital’s Clay Dumas, said: “Single-use plastic is a 300 million tonne scourge on our oceans and landfills that keeps the petrochemical industry in business. We backed TrueCircle because they’re harnessing technology and markets to build a solution that scales to the dimensions of the problem.”

TrueCircle’s two co-founders, Eamon Jubbawy and Rishi Stocker, are not new to the startup game. (Indeed, Jubbawy actually has two startups on the go at once right now; the other being an a16z-backed fintech called Sequence.)

The pair, who originally met at school, tout a lot of relevant tech and business smarts they’re bringing to bear here: Including computer vision experience from Onfido, another of Jubbawy’s startups, where he built up a computer vision team focused on identity document verification and face matching (he left Onfido in summer 2020); and commercial experience from fintech startup Revolut, where Stocker was one of its first employees and spent four years running global partnerships. He also previously worked at FMCG giant Unilever, and says he’s no strange to the challenges of increasing packaging recycling rates.

Recycling isn’t the most glamorous topic ofc but low levels of efficiency in the waste processing industry are a pressing problem from multiple angles — not least when combined with humanity’s pressing need to radically shrink global consumption in order to cut emissions and avoid catastrophic climate change — meaning there are real, meaningful problems here that tech could help solve.

Problems that scale all over the globe, too. So the disruption potential — and revenue ‘opportunities’ — look huge.

Regulation is also driving a lot more attention to what’s passing down the conveyor belts, as lawmakers start to impose conditions on use of virgin materials for things like packaging — actively changing the economics of recycling.

Equally, widespread public anger over direct environmental impacts of discarded waste, like single-use plastic polluting the oceans and creating a risk to marine life, is creating energy for change.

Meanwhile AI-driven efficiency gains — and the digitalization of industrial processes more generally — are being specifically looked to to address climate change, including by policymakers in the Europe Union who are pushing a combined ‘green and digital’ transformation investment strategy for the bloc to try to hit net zero carbon emissions by 2050.

“The beauty of [our approach] is if you scale it up across the tonnage that’s been processed in the world today it’s a very scalable business model — if we were to just focus on this data-as-a-service business but our ambitions don’t stop there,” says Stocker. “I think this is the thing that gets us all super excited. We have a chance here to disrupt a $20BN per year industry through a much more digitalized trading infrastructure.”

“Historically, attempts to revolutionize this industry were maybe a bit more academic and technology based but I think the approach which we’ve taken, from our experience of building and commercializing technology companies — at Onfido; Rishi was heading up a lot of our monetization strategies at Revolut — we’ve realized you need a lot more than that,” adds Jubbawy.

“You need great tech but you also need to find a way to make this industry work commercially. Hence turning our focus to getting the sales process working really effectively because that’s just another reason why the recycling industry hasn’t been given the attention that it should.”

Rewinding slightly, TrueCircle’s founders are starting with a pretty elementary idea of applying computer vision technology to the waste streams flowing through processing facilities so it can provide its customers with real-time time flows of data on what’s passing through their plants — powering waste analytics and alerts.

This means the startup is installing connected camera and lighting kit in their customers’ waste processing plants — and doing that free of charge since the business model is a SaaS-style fee, based on the processing per tonnage scanned.

“What we realized is these facilities — their major issue today is they have absolutely no data,” explains Stocker. “It’s a completely data-sparse industry.

“In the absence of any data, on the composition of waste coming in, and more importantly the actual quality they’re able to achieve on those distinct output lines, they come across the same problem again and again: 1) Their buyers don’t trust what they’re purchasing so they always get underpaid for the materials. And 2) they actually don’t know when there are issues in their plant because they have no way of capturing real-time data.”

“That was the real lightbulb moment for us — especially where Eamon’s computer vision knowledge of setting up and building Onfide from scratch came into play — we realized with a few very quick tests, actually by installing a very cheap camera with a lighting set-up on the conveyor belts that are in these facilities we could then feed that data to the cloud and apply a computer vision machine learning model to tag every single item,” he adds.

We’ve seen this sort of idea before — such as by TechCrunch Disrupt battlefield alum Greyparrot (another UK-based startup), which was founded back in 2019 and already sells an AI waste recognition system that’s been globally deployed.

But TrueCircle suggests its approach is more “full stack” as it’s also building an automation piece, initially via digital alerts its system sends to factory employees when quality thresholds drop below a customizable level — providing them with a root cause diagnosis so they can take immediate action to correct a problem with their sorting machinery.

Later it says it wants to integrate the alert system with the plant’s machinery in order that its software could automatically undertake those sorts of corrections too.

“The next step that we’re working on now is actually programmatically integrating with their existing machinery — such that when we spot an issue we can adjust the settings of that device and ensure it resolves it without manual intervention,” says Stocker. “So that’s really where we want to get to. We want to be this data as a service layer that spots issues, fixes them and then certifies the quality to maximize the selling potential.”

There’s more too: In parallel, TrueCircle is building a marketplace to support waste processing facilities in selling the verified material they reclaim.

Here its premise is that it will be able to help facilities achieve better prices for the processed waste as a result of the data that will come attached to it — aka, the analytics and quality/purity guarantee its AI is able to provide.

So the pitch is that — finally — waste processing facilities will have the data to show buyers that ensures they can get a fair price.

“By having a bit more of a full stack approach, to helping recycling facilities work with each other, connect with each other, obviously have better data on what they’re doing and make better decisions you can get the whole industry working more effectively,” suggests Jubbawy.

“We go after buyers who care about quality,” adds Stocker. “We’ve been able to attract buyers from Germany, for example, onto the platform — because they can see exactly what they’re buying and they can place a bid that’s reflective of that quality.

“This is a classic data as a service business — at least in its first module — because now a facility can come onto the platform and say okay I want to understand the quality of my outputs to help our facility get better revenues from a range of buyers. So they’re able to log on and generate a report for buyers. When they sell material at the end of every month they’re able to attach this report of real-time data which shows the exact quality of that line to all of the buyers.”

“I come from the fintech world so I kind of bring it back to Moody’s ratings,” he adds. “We see it as we become this Moody’s equivalent for the recycling industry and then that enables us to build the rest of the infrastructure that the industry needs to facilitate efficient recycling.”

TrueCircle says its AI models can currently identify around 50 different categories associated with waste — such as the material of the item, its weight, the brand, whether it’s food grade item etc.

While accuracy rates for its waste scanning AIs are slated at between 92-98%.

And after two months, the startup says it was able to demonstrate — in “some” of the initial facilities using its alerts dashboard — that its customers were getting a 10-15% higher recovery rate vs how they were operating before, i.e. without any AI to keep an eye on waste purity.

Given the types of jobs set to be automated here — i.e. dirty, smelly and potentially dangerous low paid manual labor — this is one application of AI that might be more welcomed than feared, Jubbawy also suggests.

“Ultimately the reason I’m motivated by this is I remember reading Bill Gates’ book on How to Avoid a Climate Disaster where he categorizes all the causes of this 51BN tonnes of greenhouse gases that we need to remove and the unnecessary use of virgin materials for packaging adds around 2-3% — so well above 1Gigaton,” he says, adding that the team’s overriding motivation is “doing our part to get those 51BN tonnes down to zero”.

Meet Athenian, a new startup that analyzes your software delivery workflow and gives you insights. When companies adopt a tool like Athenian, they’re trying to find ways to ship new features at a faster pace and fix bugs more quickly.

The startup raised a $6 million seed round led by Point Nine. Frst, Xavier Niel, 20VC, Abstraction Capital and Air Street Capital are also participating in the round. Some business angels, such as Renaud Visage, Julien Lemoine and Sam Ramji are investing in the company as well.

Athenian isn’t the first company trying to provide analytics for software development. But founder and CEO Eiso Kant told me that tools like Jellyfish and Code Climate focus too much on individual performance. In other words, engineers hate them because they feel like surveillance software.

Athenian wanted to start over from scratch and focus on teams and events instead of individuals. When you start using the product, you first connect it to various data sources, such as GitHub, Jira and your CI/CD system. Athenian then regularly fetches new data from those sources.

After that, you get “a true graph of all the events that are happening in the organization from the planning work to feedback from customers,” Kant told me.

The startup breaks down your pipeline in several categories, such as ‘plan & design’, ‘review’ and ‘release’. You can see the release frequency, the number of outstanding bugs and other metrics that help you get an overview.

Image Credits: Athenian

When a project becomes more complex, the engineering team needs to ship new features, but also fix bugs and refactor some old code to prevent technical debt from creeping up. Athenian gives you tools to track bugs by priority and see how their statuses change over time. Similarly, you can get insights about your CI/CD process (continuous integration and continuous delivery) — you can track the build failure rate over time and you can identify bottlenecks in order to fix them.

I asked Eiso Kant about the investors in the company. He gave me a long list of reasons why he selected those investors specifically. “We set a set of five criteria for who we wanted in the company. We want an investor who is deeply kindhearted as an individual. They need to be incredibly deep in SaaS. They need to have very high convictions. They need to be a specialist in seed and [Series] A. And the partner we go with needs to be a general partner or a founder of the fund,” he told me.

It says a lot about his ambitions for his company as he doesn’t seem to be optimizing for a quick acqui-hire down the road. How big does he want Athenian to become? “We want to build a Datadog-sized business,” Kant said.

Image Credits: Athenian

French startup Synapse Medicine has raised a new $28 million funding round (€25 million) led by Korelya Capital. The company has built a product that helps healthcare professionals get reliable drug information and prevent medication errors.

In addition to Korelya Capital, existing investors XAnge, MACSF and BNP Paribas Development also participated in the funding round.

There are many reasons why medication can turn against a patient — drug interaction, wrong dosage, side-effects, contraindications, etc. As the world’s population is aging and drugs are becoming more and more specific, it has become harder to know for sure that you’re prescribing the right medications as a doctor or pharmacist.

There are some existing software solutions that help you with prescriptions and medication reconciliation. “It’s a hyper fragmented market. Those solutions have been around for 30 years and people aren’t satisfied with what they’re using,” co-founder and CEO Clément Goehrs told me.

Synapse Medicine uses natural language processing to analyze and classify medication information from several sources — medication documentation from manufacturers, official recommendations from health authorities, and results from research papers.

After that, the company has built a software-as-a-service platform that can be used as a standalone product or as an extension to your existing Electronic Health Record (EHR) solution.

When you want to make a prescription, Synapse Medicine can draw information from its knowledge base and identify potential issues. Every time Synapse Medicine makes a recommendation, the product tells you the source of its conclusions.

It’s all about augmenting human decisions. And the product is constantly evolving with new recommendations added every week.

The startup mostly addresses hospitals. It doesn’t want to replace EHR altogether, such as Dedalus in Europe or Epic in the U.S. Instead, Synapse Medicine believes these products are going to evolve and become platforms that aggregate several healthcare products. Synapse Medicine wants to build the best prescription assistance brick for existing EHR products.

In addition to that go-to-market strategy, Synapse Medicine also integrates with telemedicine companies. “We have dozens of telemedicine companies as clients and more than a hundred hospitals,” Goehrs said.

With today’s funding round, the company plans to grow to 150 employees by the end of the year with offices in Paris, Bordeaux, Berlin, London, New York and Tokyo. As you can see, the startup wants to turn Synapse Medicine into a global company as quickly as possible instead of focusing on specific European markets.

Image Credits: Synapse Medicine

European spend management startup Payhawk has added $100 million to its Series B round that I already covered back in November. The startup confirms that it has reached a post-money valuation of $1 billion, as The Information’s Kate Clark previous reported.

Lightspeed Venture Partners is leading the new $100 million investment. Sprints Capital, Endeavor Catalyst, HubSpot Ventures and Jigsaw VC are also participating in the round. All existing investors are putting more money on the table as well.

When the company raised the first part of its Series B, it raised $112 million at a $570 million valuation. Today’s news represents a 75% increase in valuation in just three months.

If you are familiar with Brex or Ramp in the U.S., Payhawk offers a somewhat similar product, but for the European market. It also competes with Spendesk, Pleo, Revolut Business and others. The company wants to replace multiple services in the B2B payment stack with a single, unified platform.

In particular, you can use Payhawk to centralize all your payments in a modern interface. When you first open a Payhawk account, you get a dedicated IBAN and you can upload money from your existing bank account.

After that, you can start using Payhawk cards, track payments more efficiently and use Payhawk’s software stack for all your expenses.

When it comes to cards, employees can get virtual and physical Payhawk cards to spend money more easily. The startup lets you set up rules, budgets and an approval workflow. Payhawk customers receive 3% cash back on card payments with a cap at the Payhawk subscription price.

Sometimes, it’s not possible to pay with a card. Employees can also enter cash payments and get reimbursed later. Similarly, you can pay for bills with outgoing bank transfers from your Payhawk account.

There are several integrations with ERP and accounting systems. This could be useful to reconcile payments and collect invoices from Payhawk directly.

The startup currently operates in 30 countries and focuses on large SMEs. It has been growing nicely as the company’s annualized recurring revenue has been doubling every quarter for the past few quarters.

Payhawk plans to launch new features, such as Oracle Netsuite integration, subscription management and budgets. It has offices in London, Sofia, Berlin and Barcelona. Up next, the company plans to open offices in Amsterdam, Paris and New York. Originally from Bulgaria, Payhawk is also the first ever Bulgarian unicorn.

News that Zip, an Australian buy now, pay later (BNPL) company, intends to buy Sezzle, a U.S. company of similar ilk, caught our eye this morning. Both concerns are public in Australia, which means that the deal provides a fascinating window into the real value of this particular sort of fintech revenue.

TechCrunch has covered more BNPL startup funding rounds than I can hold straight in my head. The global fintech boom brought with it a parade of checks for startups building installment credit options under the BNPL aegis in recent quarters, meaning that our keyboards have been busy.

For example, MarketForce raised $40 million last week, Alma raised $130 million earlier this month, Ascend picked up $280 million in equity and debt capital in late January, BillEase raised $11 million in mid-January, ThankUCash raised $5.3 million for its fintech work that includes BNPL, and Lipa Later is targeting new markets for its BNPL services after raising $12 million. And that’s merely what I found with a quick scan of TechCrunch this morning.

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It is clear that venture interest in BNPL-focused startups remains incredibly active. But as The Exchange explored earlier this month, the value of some public companies in the sector has suffered. For example, the value of U.S. BNPL giant Affirm has suffered mightily in recent quarters, shedding the majority of its value.

To see a combination in the space, then, means that we’re not seeing BNPL tie-ups at market highs; we’re seeing the Zip-Sezzle deal at market ebb, instead.

Let’s parse the deal’s terms and sort out what the public markets are saying BNPL incomes are worth. For the myriad startups chasing what they hope to be fat profits and valuable cash flows from offering installment credit, the day’s news is more than important; from a valuation perspective, it could prove existential for some.

What’s BNPL revenue worth?

When we examined Affirm earlier in the month, we noted that its take-rate, or revenue as a percentage of gross merchandise volume, was falling over time. From a peak of 12.7% in the company’s Q4 of its fiscal 2020 to 8.1% in its most recent quarter, the second quarter of its fiscal 2022.

Zip is facing similar headwinds, with its “revenue margin” slipping from 7.1% in the back half of 2020 to 6.9% in the first half portion of 2021 to 6.7% in the last six months of last year.

BNPL companies, then, appear to be losing their ability to claim part of their aggregate transaction volume as income; this is not a surprise, given how competitive their market is proving to be. Seeing pricing pressure in busy sectors is a good thing for consumers — and marks a maturing of the product in question.

With that as our backdrop, let’s talk about the deal.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Every Monday, Grace and Alex scour the news and record notes on what’s going on to kick off the week.

This weekend was yet another that was full of news from Ukraine, which meant that the tech market was slightly quieter than usual. But not so quiet that we didn’t have lots to chat about, so here’s the latest:

• The Russian startup market isn’t huge — data here — but when we consider the number of startups in Ukraine as well, the impact of Russia’s war and the world’s sanctions will bite. Russia is also tangling with American tech giants, which isn’t going well.
• Over the weekend, the American Republican Party bashed large American tech companies. Gone are the days when the GOP was a reliable simp for corporate power. Today it’s more fashionable to pump SPACs like TMTG, or Rumble.
• Weee! raised a huge sum from the second Vision Fund, we report, and OneCard is set to raise a massive round in short order, despite how recently it announced its preceding round. (Oh, and this looks very neat.)
• And Zip is buying Sezzle, in more BNPL market consolidation. A sign of the times, we decide.

That is our show! Lots more to come this week, so get ready!

Coinbase utterly crushed its most recent quarter. Its results came in far ahead of street expectations, with the U.S. crypto exchange posting net revenues of $2.49 billion, net income of $840 million and adjusted EBITDA of $1.21 billion. In comparative terms, Coinbase’s Q4 2021 results bested its full-year 2020 results by a huge margin.

And yet, Coinbase shares are up just over a point in pre-market trading, and the company is worth around $70 per share less than its direct listing reference price; Coinbase is also down around 57% from its recent highs. The company’s incredibly profitable 2021 — net income of $3.62 billion from $7.35 billion in total net revenue — has led to a less valuable Coinbase, at least according to recent trading.

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For a company worth $8 billion back in 2018, a 2022 market cap of $47 billion is far from a failure. But it’s still a fraction of what Coinbase was worth just months ago and around the time of its public-market debut.

No one knows what anything is worth.

It’s a theme we’ve touched on before, but a recent repricing of the entire technology market makes the point once again.

There’s more to the matter than just Coinbase, however, even though it’s curious that it appears to be valued on a profit multiple today more than a revenue multiple. The surge in SaaS valuations has come back to Earth, with Altimeter Capital’s Jamin Ball reporting this week that “high growth software revenue multiples have now normalized back to where they were pre-covid for the first time since the pandemic started.”

The former venture capitalist also writes that the fastest-growing cohort has performed “worse than low and medium growth software” companies this year. It’s upside-down season in terms of what software companies are worth, with the growth premiums falling sharply.

I think this is why we’re seeing reports that the late-stage capital cannons of 2021 are pulling back from such deals. Tiger, D1 and others were betting that they could flood the middle- and later-stage software markets with capital — and reap the rewards when their portfolios followed an open IPO window into welcoming public markets. If the IPO window had stayed open, and if software valuations hadn’t tumbled so sharply in just a few months, the strategy could have been incredibly accretive in the near term.

The opposite happened, however. So where does that leave late-stage startups? In trouble, I reckon.

Are they really in trouble, or are you just being pessimistic on a Friday, Alex?

I hear you, but consider the following chart from Ball:

Meet Specify, a startup that is creating a common language for Figma and GitHub. Specify acts as a central repository and API for your design tokens and assets. In other words, designers can update canonical Figma files, and changes will be reflected in GitHub repositories.

The startup raised a $4.6 million (€4 million) seed round led by Eurazeo. Bpifrance’s Digital Venture fund, 360 Capital and Seedcamp are participating as well. Some business angels also invested in the company, such as Clément Vouillon and Didier Forest.

When organizations start to get serious about design, they want to create a design system with a unified style for buttons, icons, fonts, logos, colors and more. For instance, the login page looks completely different on Facebook, Twitter, Gmail or Pinterest.

And yet, it often remains a manual process for both designers and developers. Designers create documentation pages with design tokens and assets in Confluence or Notion. Developers then manually have to check the documentation and make sure that they’re using the latest elements.

Image Credits: Specify

Specify acts as a central repository for your design tokens and assets. You first connect Specify with one or several sources, as well as one or several destinations.

For instance, you can fetch information and data from Figma files directly. Designers can update something in Figma and changes will be reflected in the Specify repository. Specify acts as the single source of truth.

But changes can also appear in your application more quickly. When something is updated, Specify can automatically create a pull request on GitHub — there’s also a command-line interface. Developers can accept changes in one click. This way, colors, logos, fonts and more are updated without any manual work.

Specify doesn’t want to restrict its product to Figma and GitHub. There will be more data sources down the road, such as Dropbox and Google Drive. And Specify will be able to update more destinations, such as Notion. The ability to push one design change to multiple destinations could be particularly useful.

The product vision is clear. Specify wants to become the unifying glue of design teams. “With our approach, we consider our product quite similar to Segment, but for design,” co-founder and CEO Valentin Chrétien told me.

Image Credits: Specify

French startup Finary has raised a $9 million Series A round (€8 million). The company has built a comprehensive aggregator so that wealthy individuals can get the full picture when it comes to tracking wealth. And that means that Finary isn’t restricted to bank accounts. You can track a lot of assets, from real estate to cryptocurrencies and stocks.

And the startup’s vision hasn’t changed much since my original post on the company. Aggregating data was just the first step. Finary wants to build a private bank from scratch with a different set of founding principles.

If you think about the private banking industry, there is a misalignment between customers and banks. Instead of generating revenue from customers directly, banks try to sell financial products and generate revenue from those products. They call it financial advice, but it’s just a shady sales process.

“Because we’re independent, we can tell you everything. Existing actors only suggest solutions that generate commissions for them,” co-founder and CEO Mounir Laggoune told me

Finary believes the next generation of rich people will be looking for a different experience. They’ll want to see information directly and make educated decisions on their own. In other words, just like you no longer call your banker to transfer money to a family member, Finary wants to empower wealthy people with the right tools and information.

Some existing investors are leading today’s round in Finary, namely Speedinvest and Y Combinator. Business angels are also participating, such as Qonto’s founders Steve Anavi and Alexandre Prot, as well as Bitpanda’s Eric Demuth.

But that’s not all. Finary also believes that building a new private bank also means that the most active customers should be able to own a stake in the startup. The startup will soon launch an equity crowdfunding campaign.

In practical terms, people will be able to invest as little as €10 to buy shares or fractions of a share through an equity crowdfunding platform that is launching soon in France. “We have allocated €500,000 but we’re OK with some ‘overfunding’,” Laggoune said.

Since my previous post, Finary has launched a mobile app for both iOS and Android. That app has become a popular way to access the service as users tend to check their Finary account nine times per week on average — that’s more than once per day.

The startup has also added more integrations and it can now track 10,000 different pockets of money in France, the U.S., Canada, Spain, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. For instance, you can connect several bank accounts, stock trading accounts, add your real estate, gold bars, the public address of your cryptocurrency wallet, etc.

Finary is using several API-based aggregators to track accounts, such as Plaid and Budget Insight. It also runs bitcoin and Ethereum nodes to track wallet addresses.

Overall, the startup has attracted 30,000 users and tracks €10 billion worth of assets — it means that on average the company’s users track more than €300,000 each. The company currently makes money through a premium subscription that costs €10 per month.

And this is where the product gets interesting. In addition to aggregating data, Finary can make recommendations. For instance, the service helps you uncover hidden fees in mutual funds. Users can also generate performance reports and learn how they could diversify their investments through different geographical allocations, sectors and risk profiles.

With today’s funding round, the company plans to fully cover financial institutions in the U.K., Germany and Switzerland. The company is also working on additional features, such as a family mode, a better way to track RSUs (or BSPCE in France) and the ability to separate personal wealth from professional wealth.

Finary will hire 25 additional people. There are many potential product expansions down the road. For instance, you could imagine buying cryptocurrencies directly from the platform. The service could also help you with tax filings. By the end of 2022, Finary expects to grow its userbase tenfold and reach 300,000 users.