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End-to-end operators are the next generation of consumer business

TechCrunch

The key purpose of being end-to-end is to deliver an even better value proposition to consumers relative to incumbent alternatives. Back in 2014, Chris Dixon wrote a bit about this phenomenon in his post on “ Full stack startups.” The end-to-end approach makes the most sense when disrupting very large markets.

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Predictions for Living, Working, & Traveling Post-Covid in America’s Startup Cities

Revolution

Venture investors pay close attention to the innovation that emerges when startups unbundle the offerings of industry incumbents. And we have since we started our efforts in 2014. The same thing is happening with startup talent recruitment and retention. At Rise of the Rest, we see opportunity first through the lens of geography.

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Sequoia Heritage, Stripe and others invest $200M in African fintech Wave at $1.7B valuation

TechCrunch

Drew Durbin and Lincoln Quirk founded Sendwave in 2014 to offer little or no fee remittances from North America and Europe to select African and Asian countries. ” Going up against incumbents. Third-party providers, mostly fintechs, have tried to capture some market share from these incumbents.

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Ushur, which aims to automate aspects of the customer experience, raises $50M

TechCrunch

Ushur, which Sadasiva co-founded in 2014 with ex-Lucent Technologies staffer Henry Peter, targets enterprises in heavily regulated industries such as insurance, healthcare, financial services and banking with tools designed to simplify the adoption of tech like conversational AI and intelligent document processing. After all, Jiffy.ai

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The Rising Stakes in SaaS

Tomasz Tunguz

Over that 20 year period, annual SaaS investment has increased 20x, peaking in 2014 at $7B. Incumbent client/server technologies have lost their market dominance to new incumbents. Since then, many major categories of software have been saasified. Venture capitalists have financed many of those businesses.

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Kuda raises $25M more led by Valar to become the neobank for ‘every African on the planet’

TechCrunch

Challenger banks continue to make significant advances in attracting customers away from the big incumbents by providing more modern, user-friendly tools to manage their money. These will typically be at incumbent banks, but they do not offer the same ranges of services to customers.

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Polly snags $37M in Menlo-led Series B to automate workflows for mortgage lenders

TechCrunch

Carmel previously founded Ethos Lending (which sold to Fenway Summers in 2014 ) and it was that experience that helped him conclude there were serious gaps in the market for automating workflows for lenders. The need certainly seems to be there. For example, o ne company in the space, Optimal Blue, was purchased by Black Knight for $1.8