London-based legaltech startup Juro has grabbed $23 million in Series B funding for its browser-based contract automation platform. In total the startup has raised $31.5M since being founded back in 2016.

Investors in the Series B are Eight Roads, which led the round — plus existing investors Union Square Ventures, Point Nine Capital, Seedcamp and Taavet Hinrikus (Wise/TransferWise co-founder).

Eight Roads’ partner, Alston Zecha, joins Juro‘s board.

Juro says its annual recurring revenue has tripled year-on-year. And while it’s not disclosing its valuation at this round it says it’s increased more than 5x.

It is finally disclosing customers numbers — saying some 6,000 companies are using its platform, including the likes of Deliveroo, Cazoo, Trustpilot and TheRealReal, with users spread across 85+ countries.

“Right now, we work with more than 20 unicorn-valuation scale-ups,” says CEO and co-founder Richard Mabey. “These companies often process very high volumes of contracts, which is where we really help. But more traditional enterprises like Reach plc have also adopted Juro fully, so we anticipate more enterprise demand during 2022.”

The startup has focused on disrupting the use of legacy tools like Word and PDFs for contracts — offering a dedicated, browser-based contract builder platform, rather than merely creating a cloud-based work flow for moving files around.

“We are challenging the notion that contracts need to be static files at all,” Mabey tells TechCrunch. “We do this by bringing those contracts out of Word and into a custom-built, browser-native editor.”

“This editor is highly modular and integrates seamlessly into a company’s tech stack,” he adds. “250,000 contracts were processed in this way last year and for certain use cases it can be magic (we have an NPS of 72).”

“In the same way that developers use GitHub or designers use Figma to collaborate, in Juro you can process contracts from creation through to signature without ever leaving your browser. In this regard, we really see our main competition as MS Word.”

The latest tranche of funding will go on market expansion in the US and Europe, further investment into the product and for an exec hiring drive to support the planned scaling.

The startup has offices in London and Riga, as well as a growing “remote hub” — and says it is hiring in all locations.

Mabey says its priorities on the recruitment side are to hire a VP of marketing and VP of engineering.

“Juro‘s core strength is in contract creation and we will double down here,” he adds. “We are the only platform with a browser-native editor specifically designed for contracts. A lot of our efforts will go towards this, along with developing new integrations into this editor (e.g. CRM systems).

“For customers, this means one unified experience for creating, approving, negotiating, signing and managing contracts.”

Commenting on Juro’s Series B in a statement, Eight Roads’ Zecha, added: “Until Juro, there hasn’t been an all-in-one platform which automates contracts and provides frictionless integrations with clients’ workflows. Juro is used by legal, sales, HR and other teams at some of Europe’s best high-growth companies including many in Eight Roads’ portfolio. It has market-leading customer satisfaction scores plus the highest employee satisfaction score we’ve seen at a scaleup. We are thrilled to partner with Richard, Pavel and the Juro team.”

Tado, the German smart home startup that specializes in thermostats and more recently moved into flexible “time of use” energy tariffs based on loadshifting technology, is today announcing the next step in its life as a business. It’s going public by way of a SPAC deal.

GFJ ESG Acquisition, a German SPAC entity focused specifically on sustainable technologies, said it will combine with tado and list the new company on the Frankfurt exchange. GFJ and tado are now working on the PIPE transaction, which when completed is expected to value tado at €450 million ($514 million at today’s rates). The new business will continue to trade as tado.

A spokesperson for tado said it is not disclosing how much it plans to raise in the listing, nor when the listing is expected to happen.

The move comes swiftly on the heels of two big developments for tado. Last week, tado acquired aWATTar (yes that is how the company styles its name…) to expand from energy consumption hardware inside the home, to software to better manage energy consumption and costs based both on how the customer uses energy, and how pricing varies depending on the fluctuations of that energy source (which can include renewable sources like solar and wind, as well as more traditional channels).

Also, in May, tado raised $46 million. At the time, the company said this would be its last round before a listing, and that’s what is playing out now. Altogether the company had raised just shy of $159 million, with an impressive list of investors, including Amazon, Siemens and Telefonica. Its valuation in those private rounds was considerably lower than the €450 million it expects to achieve with its market cap at listing: it was around $255 million according to PitchBook data.

The deal is notable because it will be one of the first big green tech startups in Europe to go public. Tado’s bigger goal is to build services to help manage energy use in and end-to-end system, starting at the power grid and terminating with consumers, in their homes. That business has taken two different turns so far. It first started as a maker of smart thermostats, and business that has now sold some 2 million devices. Then, tado diversified into energy tariff and managing use is catapulting the company into a wider business based on big data, predictive analytics and harnessing the wider and very fragmented markets of renewable energy and energy hardware systems.

The company today says that it has sold more than 2 million smart thermostats, and its energy-management technology connects some 400,000 buildings and households in 20 countries, with more than 7 gigawatts of energy capacity under management. Its works with some 18,000 systems from 900 OEMs, and claims that customers using its load-balancing technology save an average of 22% on heating costs annually.

As concerns about climate change continue to become ever-more urgent, and services for consumers to make choices to reduce greenhouse emissions become more readily available and affordable, a new window of opportunity has opened up for green tech and clean tech companies. This listing underscores how one of them feels now confident enough in that traction to make the leap into being publicly traded to grow further.

“The entire team at tado is extremely proud to partner up with GFJ,” said Toon Bouten, CEO of tado, in a statement. “We share the same convictions and the same passion for environmental technologies. And we are determined to jointly help our customers save money and reduce their ecological footprint. Together, we are in a great position to create a more sustainable energy future.”

When the deal is closed, Bouten will step down as the head of the company, with Oliver Kaltner (who lists his current role as President of office solutions provider Room) will be taking on a role as CEO, with Christian Deilmann as CPO and Johannes Schwarz as CTO. Emanuel Eibach will remain CFO. Gisbert Rühl shall become chairman of the supervisory board. Josef Brunner, Petr Míkovec, Toon Bouten and Maximilian Mayer shall also join the supervisory board.

“Both GFJ and tado are determined to turn up the heat on fighting against climate change in a smart way. tado already is a market leader in the very spirit of a new wave of green tech companies,” added Gisbert Rühl, CEO of GFJ. “We are excited to bring in capital and expertise to help them grow even stronger and foster their technology development. Around 21% of energy consumption in the EU is used for heating and cooling private housing alone. If the EU and Germany want to fulfil their commitment to becoming the world’s first climate-neutral economy by 2050, there is no alternative to decarbonising the housing sector.”

tado, as a public business, will gain a new level of transparency to the market, which will be good for the wider green tech industry as a whole. For now, the company is projecting that it will be making more than €500 million in annual revenues in three years, by 2025.

French startup Exotec has raised a $335 million Series D round in a new round of funding led by Goldman Sachs’ Growth Equity business. Following today’s investment, the company has reached a valuation of $2 billion.

Exotec sells a complete end-to-end solution to turn a regular warehouse into a partially automated logistics platform. It’s a hardware and software solution that replaces some human tasks.

83North and Dell Technologies Capital also participated in the funding round. Previous Exotec investors include Bpifrance, Iris Capital, 360 Capital Partners and Breega.

Image Credits: Exotec

The key component of the Exotec system is called the Skypods. These low-profile robots roam the floor autonomously. When they’re next to the right rack, they can go up the rack to pick up a bin and then go down with the right bin. This is particularly useful to increase the storage density of a warehouse as you can store products a few meters above ground.

The Skypod then caries the bin to a picking station so that human operators can pick up the right product in the bin. The robot can then go back to the racks and put back the bin on a shelf.

In that scenario, humans don’t have to roam the warehouse anymore. They can focus on picking, packing and making sure products go in and out of the warehouse. When it comes to adding new products, new shelves and new Skypods, Exotec tries to be as flexible as possible.

If you want to add new racks, you can expand your infrastructure without starting from scratch again. Similarly, Exotec lets you add more Skypods in the system. And when you receive a delivery of products, Exotec relies once again on its Skypods to store products in the fulfillment center.

From Skypods to Skypickers

With its standardized bin system, Exotec can store several products in a single bin. There might be 18 products in that bin but customers want one, two or three products in that bin — most likely they don’t want the entire bin. That’s why Exotec can’t simply empty small bins in a bigger bin to put together an order.

The startup has created new robots to remove humans from one more step of the ordering process. Exotec customers can now use Skypickers to automatically pick goods from an inventory bin and put them in a ready-to-ship bin.

This is what it looks like:

“Following the most significant supply chain disruptions of the modern era, there’s only room left for innovation,” co-founder and CEO Romain Moulin said in a statement. “While the entire logistics sector is fraught with uncertainty, one of the most prevalent challenges is ongoing labor shortages. Exotec pioneers a new path: elegant collaboration between human and robot workers that delivers warehouse productivity in a lasting, far more sustainable way.”

Exotec has always positioned its product as a service that can’t replace humans altogether. An Exotec warehouse is run by a combination of humans and robots. With the Skypickers though, the startup is positioning itself as a logistics advantage in a tight labor market.

Following today’s funding round, the startup plans to hire 500 engineers by 2025 and continue its push in North America. It has recently signed eight large customers in the region, such as Gap and Geodis. Decathlon is also using Exotec in its Montreal fulfillment center.

Like you, I check NFT marketplace volume a few times each day to keep tabs on the burgeoning market for buying and selling digital signatures on various blockchains that point to images and the like. We’re very cool.

Mostly, the data is steady. OpenSea volumes tend to lead the space, with other, smaller NFT exchanges and some crypto games filling in the list. You can take a look at DappRadar’s NFT marketplace data set here, a related list of numbers from NonFungible here, and some great charted data from The Block here, if you want to dive in on your own.

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Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

But recently the data changed, and an NFT marketplace called LooksRare shot up on the charts, quickly surpassing OpenSea’s results and taking the top slot among its competitors in volume terms.

Is OpenSea in trouble? Did LooksRare suddenly surge to the top of the charts thanks to a better model, price list or other business effort? Kinda, but it appears that there’s a lot of bullshit going down to make the numbers look better than they are. So let’s talk about incentives and governance tokens to parse out what’s up with LooksRare and the larger future of the financialization of everything.

Incentives

The data is pretty funny. In the last 24 hours, LooksRare has seen just under $290 million worth of NFT trades, per DappRadar data. OpenSea’s 24-hour tally is a more modest $131.6 million. Given how far ahead of OpenSea that single data point puts LooksRare, have we seen a new marketplace king crowned? No.

Like you, I check NFT marketplace volume a few times each day to keep tabs on the burgeoning market for buying and selling digital signatures on various blockchains that point to images and the like. We’re very cool.

Mostly, the data is steady. OpenSea volumes tend to lead the space, with other, smaller NFT exchanges and some crypto games filling in the list. You can take a look at DappRadar’s NFT marketplace data set here, a related list of numbers from NonFungible here, and some great charted data from The Block here, if you want to dive in on your own.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

But recently the data changed, and an NFT marketplace called LooksRare shot up on the charts, quickly surpassing OpenSea’s results and taking the top slot among its competitors in volume terms.

Is OpenSea in trouble? Did LooksRare suddenly surge to the top of the charts thanks to a better model, price list or other business effort? Kinda, but it appears that there’s a lot of bullshit going down to make the numbers look better than they are. So let’s talk about incentives and governance tokens to parse out what’s up with LooksRare and the larger future of the financialization of everything.

Incentives

The data is pretty funny. In the last 24 hours, LooksRare has seen just under $290 million worth of NFT trades, per DappRadar data. OpenSea’s 24-hour tally is a more modest $131.6 million. Given how far ahead of OpenSea that single data point puts LooksRare, have we seen a new marketplace king crowned? No.

Quick blog here to update you on some pretty important movements in the market. Today, in a nasty day for stocks generally, shares of software and cloud companies took a pounding.

In numerical terms, the Nasdaq Composite lost 2.51%, per CNBC data. That’s a very bad day for a huge, critical category of publicly traded wealth. And then the Bessemer Cloud Index, our favorite method of tracking a more targeted basket of modern software concerns, tanked 5.45% during regular trading.

That’s a lot of deleted value in a single day. But because the declines come after the startup-critical index already endured sharp drops recently, it was insult to injury. Here’s the chart:

Image Credits: YCharts

You need to glean two things from this collection of graphed data:

1. Software stocks have given back more than all their gains from late 2020, and have retreated more than 30% from recent highs. That’s pretty bad.
2. Software stocks remain richly valued and are worth far more than they were at the start of 2020, a period of time roughly two years ago. That’s pretty good.

So things are not great, but also not terrible, for modren public software companies.

The issue that TechCrunch continues to track is how quickly — if at all — the declines shown above begin to trickle into startup valuations. We’re seeing some chop in the private-public market divide, where IPOs and direct listings try to carry companies from one shore to the other. But in terms of sheer startup fundraising momentum, you wouldn’t know that revenue multiples are taking a huge cut on the public markets. For most startups, it’s still heady days.

That the venture capital market is incredibly exuberant at the moment is not news. Data from 2021 paints the picture of a startup fundraising game at peak velocity, with more capital, unicorns and nine-figure deals than ever.

And let me tell you, some venture capitalists are tired of it. PitchBook has a post up detailing how startup prices are too high from the viewpoint of investors. That startup investment and resulting valuations may have gotten out of hand is not an unpopular perspective. Reuters’ prediction series for the new year included the idea that startups “seeking to raise capital in 2022 may [have] to sell shares at a lower valuation than before,” to flag another example.

But missing from the discussion of the prices that venture capitalists and other private-market investors are paying for startup shares is the fact that they are still doing it.

This, of course, is a choice.

Venture capitalists have the ability to stop writing checks. They can hit the brakes — and quickly. We saw this in 2020 when, for several weeks while early-COVID uncertainty reigned, venture capitalists around the world started to circle the wagons around their existing portfolio companies. So, it is possible for investors to just, well, not for a bit.

If a bunch of venture investors decided to effectively go on strike, it would have an impact. And that impact would be to lessen competition, perhaps leading to lower overall startup valuations in the near term.

Will that happen? Hell no. Venture capitalists are putting capital to work at revenue multiples that even they know are elevated past reason. They are doing so because they think it is the best move from where they currently sit in the market. The game here is pretty simple: Invest the current fund, enjoy paper markups from other investors, raise an even bigger fund, repeat until your AUM makes you feel important.

This is why the complaints — and I do not mean to single out any particular investor here; most are only content to whine while off the record, I’ve noticed, so points to investors saying out loud what others are thinking — are somewhat silly to me. It’s investors complaining about their own activity.

For founders that can access more capital than ever at lower prices, godspeed. May you never find yourself in a valuation trap. But will I feel bad for the investing class? Never.

Meet Stoïk, a new French startup that wants to protect small and medium companies against cybersecurity incidents. The company offers an insurance product as well as a service that monitors your attack surface.

The startup recently raised a $4.3 million (€3.8 million) seed round from Alven Capital, Anthemis Group, Kima Ventures as well as several business angels, such as Raphaël Vullierme, Emmanuel Schalit and Henry Kravis.

Stoïk targets SMEs specifically as they are quite vulnerable when it comes to ransomware and other cyber attacks. And yet, small companies often aren’t doing enough to protect their software infrastructure.

“We’re going to insure you and protect you,” co-founder and CEO Jules Veyrat told me. “But what we’re going to sell is the insurance product. If you get attacked, you have a phone number that you can call 24/7 and all the cost implications are insured.”

At the same time, Stoïk is going to offer monitoring tools so that small companies can fix vulnerabilities in their infrastructure. In that case, incentives between Stoïk and Stoïk’s clients remain aligned.

The team of 15 have already signed partnerships with insurance companies to design the insurance products. Stoïk sells insurance products and charges its clients directly — it takes a cut on each contract. It works with a third-party company called Inquest to handle crisis management.

Stoïk works a bit like Coalition in the U.S., except that it doesn’t partner with brokers to distribute its insurance product. The French startup wants to build a direct relationship with its customers.

As for the tech product, when you sign up to the service, you enter your domain name and start a scan. Stoïk looks at DNS records, finds IP addresses and scans online databases for password leaks associated with this domain name.

You get a score and several tips to improve that score. For instance, Stoïk can tell you that some services are externally exposed even though they shouldn’t be. If your score is above a certain threshold and if you generate less than €50 million in annual revenue, you can subscribe to the insurance product.

The company is currently in the pre-launch phase with contracts that range from €50 to €400 per month. Up next, it plans to add more features to its monitoring service. For instance, Stoïk wants to scan internal accounts. You could imagine scanning your Amazon Web Services configuration to spot some vulnerabilities. And that should also help when it comes to closing new contracts with potential customers.

Justworks, a venture-backed software startup focused on the HR market for small and medium-sized businesses, announced earlier today that it would delay its IPO. In a statement to TechCrunch, Justworks said that it “decided to delay its IPO due to market conditions at this time.”

An IPO delay is just that, a public debut pushed back. But Justworks’ decision to put its public offering on temporary hiatus comes on the heels of rapid declines in the value of recent technology debuts employing traditional IPOs, SPACs and direct listings. Even more, Justworks’ now-delayed IPO follows a selloff in the value of software and technology shares more generally.

Is there something bigger afoot than one company’s stumble?

Reading the tea leaves

The Justworks IPO delay is the latest data point in what could be a worsening exit market for unicorns. Otherwise, we wouldn’t make a fuss.

Why? Sometimes when a private company wants to go public, it finds that public-market investors are not willing to buy its shares at the price it had in mind. By taking more time, the IPO hopeful can tidy up its numbers, perhaps answering some of its critics head-on with results or business tweaks. Once the company has tuned its performance and image, it can try to float once again.

Such a private-public disconnect can stem from a gap between a company’s results, what it thinks they are worth, and the public market’s view of the particular firm in question. Alternatively, a similar disconnect can arise from the public markets simply being on a different page regarding valuations than the private markets. Our read of the Justworks news is that it’s likely dealing with at least the latter issue, and perhaps the former as well.

The possibility of a gap between how private investors value growth-focused tech companies and how the stock market values those companies matters because of how many richly valued tech startups need to find an exit in the coming year. In bad news for those companies, a number of factors likely made Justworks’ IPO timing difficult, hinting that other unicorns could also struggle to exit in today’s investing climate.

Eureka, a Tel Aviv-based startup that provides enterprises with tools to manage security risks across their various data stores, today announced that it has raised an $8 million seed round led by YL Ventures.

The company was founded by Liat Hayun (CEO), a former VP of Product Management at Palo Alto Networks, and Asaf Weiss (CTO), who was formerly a Director of Engineering at Microsoft and Palo Alto Networks. During their time at these companies, they noticed the need for better cloud data security and management tools as businesses continued to amass more data spread across a wider range of clouds and services.

“Data is a valuable asset for helping businesses operate and compete. However, it has spiraled well beyond the feasible control and management of enterprise security leaders, leaving it exposed and at risk of leaks and loss as well as destruction and exfiltration by bad actors,” Hayun said.

A lot of companies are only now realizing the magnitude of this problem, she noted, in part because they are still going through their transitions to the cloud and because sensitive data is often the last asset to make this move.

The idea behind Eureka then is to give these businesses insights into all the cloud data stores that are connected to their systems and help them manage access policies and discover configuration issues and policy violations. While many organizations have clear ideas about how they think about data protection, implementing those policies across different data stores, all with their own settings and capabilities, is often a challenge.

“Security leaders are especially excited about Eureka’s policy translation engine,” Hayun explained. “The engine automatically translates data protection policies around privacy, risk, compliance and security into platform-specific controls that can be implemented into each cloud data store. It is currently very difficult to translate one into the other, especially as these translation results will vary across different data stores.”

The team tells me that it believes products from competitors like Imperva and IBM are mostly trying to apply an on-prem approach to a cloud native problem, while platform-specific solutions aren’t able to address the larger problem of managing access across data environments.

“By offering security leaders the operational powers they require without causing friction to business interests, Liat and Asaf are ushering in an entirely new kind of digital transformation in the coming years,” says John Brennan, Partner at YL Ventures. They’re enabling companies to leverage any cloud data store they wish while ensuring that security teams maintain full visibility and understanding into the organization’s entire cloud footprint and can easily evolve and manage policy whenever needed.”

Payments company Checkout.com isn’t just a unicorn — it has closed a $1 billion Series D founding round. Following today’s round, the company is now valued at $40 billion.

That’s a stark increase compared to last year’s valuation. With its Series C round, the company raised $450 million at a $15 billion valuation — it represents a 167% valuation jump in 12 months is not too bad.

Checkout.com is building a full-stack payments company — it acts as a gateway, an acquirer, a risk engine and a payment processor. The company lets you process payments directly on your site or in your app, but you can also rely on hosted payment pages, create payment links, etc.

It supports card payments, Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, Alipay, bank transfers, SEPA direct debits and even cash payments through various local networks.

Last year, the company also added the ability to issue payouts. Checkout.com customers can send money to a bank account. It also supports payouts to a card on the Mastercard or Visa network. For instance, TikTok and MoneyGram have been using Checkout.com’s payouts feature.

Unlike Stripe, Checkout.com focuses specifically on large global enterprise merchants with a high volume of transactions. Some of the company’s clients include Netflix, Farfetch, Grab, NetEase, Pizza Hut and Shein. The company also contributes to the payments stack of several fintech unicorns such as Klarna, Qonto, Revolut and WorldRemit.

When it comes to today’s funding round, fasten your seatbelt as the list of investors is quite long. Investors who participated in the round include Altimeter, Dragoneer, Franklin Templeton, GIC, Insight Partners, the Qatar Investment Authority, Tiger Global, the Oxford Endowment Fund and “another large west coast mutual fund management firm,” the company writes in its announcement.

Some of the company’s existing investors are also participating, such as Blossom Capital, Coatue Management, DST Global, Endeavor Catalyst and Ribbit Capital.

Why did Checkout.com raise so much money? Because they can. The company says it has been profitable for several years, which means that investors are just adding money to the balance sheet for long-term growth. Checkout.com only had to hand out 2.5% of the company’s shares in exchange for $1 billion.

“By combining an elegant technology stack with industry expertise and an ‘extra-mile’ approach to service over the past decade, we’ve built deep partnerships with some of the world’s most innovative companies,” founder and CEO Guillaume Pousaz said in a statement. “Our Series D is validation of that work—but given we’re still in ‘chapter zero’ of our journey, it will also fuel our efforts to unlock the enormous untapped opportunity ahead.”

The company processed hundreds of billions of dollars in payments in 2021 alone. It has tripled its transaction volume for the third year in a row and it now has 1,700 employees across 19 countries.

Up next, Checkout.com wants to focus specifically on the U.S. market. With its headquarter in London, the company originally focused on the EMEA region. And yet, as it tries to work with global enterprise merchants, having a solution that works across all markets could be a big selling point for future clients.

“Much like our approach in EMEA, we will maintain our focus on the enterprise — especially fintech, software, food delivery, travel, e-commerce and crypto merchants. We’re looking to help our U.S. customers grow domestically and internationally, and to help our non-US customers expand into the market here,” Checkout.com’s CFO Céline Dufétel said in a statement.

The web3 opportunity

With today’s funding round, Checkout.com will most certainly hire more people and sign new clients. But the company doesn’t plan to stand still as it wants to launch new products.

The ability to issue payouts has created new opportunities. In particular, Checkout.com plans to support marketplaces and payment facilitators later this year. It’ll be a full end-to-end solution with identity verification and the ability to split payments so that marketplace operators can keep a cut on each transaction.

Marketplace customers will also be able to hold funds directly on a marketplace thanks to a new treasury-as-a-service feature. It opens up a ton of possibility as marketplaces can embed financial services directly in their products.

Stripe announced Stripe Treasury last year. Shopify has been using the feature for Shopify Balance. It proves once again that both Stripe and Checkout.com want to cover a bigger chunk of the payment chain.

In addition to new products, Checkout.com has realized that web3 represents a market opportunity. The company already powers some of the payments features of several cryptocurrency companies, such as Coinbase, Crypto.com, FTX, MoonPay and Novi from Meta.

But creating bridges between fiat currencies and cryptocurrencies is just one part of the web3 equation. Checkout.com is also beta-testing a solution that could let its customers settle transactions for merchants using digital currencies. In other words, the Checkout.com of web3 could very well be Checkout.com

Jakarta-based investment app Pluang announced that it has raised $55 million led by Accel. This is a follow-on to its Series B and brings that round’s total to $110 million. The funding will be used to make Pluang available in more Southeast Asian countries, increase its asset classes and on hiring. 

Pluang’s last round of funding was a $3 million Series A in 2019. 

Other participants in the newest round include Trung Nguyen, Andy Ho, Aleksander Leonard Larsen, and Jeffrey Zirlin, founders of Axie Infinity founders; Alexa von Tobel, former Learnvest CEO); Pismo CTO Daniela Binatti; Monzo COO Sujata Bhatia; Public.com co-CEOs Jannick Malling and Leif Abraham; FalconX CEO Raghu Yarlagadda; Flink CEO Sergio Jimenez (Flink CEO), The Chainsmokers and BRI Ventures. Existing investors Square Peg, Go-Ventures and Openspace Ventures also contributed. 

Launched in 2019, Pluang started with gold and has since grown its range of asset classes, so investors can diversify their holdings and decrease risk. Investments can start as low as IDR 10,000 (or less than $1 USD) in gold, indexes, mutual funds and crypto assets. The app is also launching a new features that will users to invest in fractional U.S. stocks. 

“Affordability is an incredibly important thing to address for our new retail investors,” said co-founder and co-CEO Claudia Kolonas. 

Pluang is integrated in Indonesian super apps like Gojek, DANA, Tokopedia and Bukalapak, and now claims 3.5 million registered users in Indonesia, and says that from January 2020 to November 2021, it marked 22x growth in monthly transacting users and 28.5x growth in users with an active balance. 

Indonesia has high rates of savings and relatively low rates of retail investing, but that is quickly changing.

Other investment apps focused on Southeast Asia include Indonesia-based Pintu, robo-advisor Bibit and Ajaib and Singapore-based Syfe.

Kolonas said the new interest in investment is driven by the country’s high rates of smartphone penetration and savings per capita. “Because of this, there are millions of potential first-time investors just starting to establish money management habits and practices that were previously impossible where they live. Until very recently, most of the asset classes that can be accessed through Pluang were only available to the privileged and wealthy while most others were faced with low financial literacy and very limited investing options.” 

Like many other investment apps in Indonesia, Pluang includes financial literacy features, which Kolonas said it is “laser-focused on” improving. The new funding will enable Pluang to “provide the tools, resources and education necessary to set our users up for long-term wealth creation.” 

In a statement to TechCrunch, Accel partner Ethan Choi said Pluang is Accel’s fourth investment in consumer-focused investment apps globally, after the United States’ Public.com, Europe’s Trade Republic and Latin America’s Flink. “We were looking for the leader in Southeast Asia,” he said, adding that “after meeting Claudia and Richard [Chua, Pluang’s other co-founder and co-CEO], we were deeply impressed by the traction they have achieved on minimal capital and the fact that they were the only player that had the licenses and product to offer multiple asset classes including equities, indexes, and crypto – which we believe is critical to building a big business in the region.”