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

TechCrunch

The investment is the largest-ever Series A round for the region, and it values Wave at $1.7 Four big-name backers jointly led the round — Sequoia Heritage, a private investment fund and a subsidiary of Sequoia; Founders Fund; payments upstart Stripe; and Ribbit Capital. ” Going up against incumbents. Wave , a U.S.

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

TechCrunch

Roger Lee is a general partner at Battery Ventures, based in Menlo Park, CA, who focuses on investments in software and consumer tech, including online marketplaces. He focuses on consumer internet, online marketplace and software investments. Contributor. Share on Twitter. More posts by this contributor. Justin Da Rosa.

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

Revolution

The percentage of early-stage venture capital dollars invested into Bay Area startups dropped 15% over the last 10 years, from 39% to 24%. 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.

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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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Citi backs Crowdz, a Pipe competitor that just raised $10M for its blockchain-powered invoice financing marketplace

TechCrunch

Payson Johnston and Steven Lee started Crowdz in 2014 after working as B2B supply-chain senior managers for global processes at Cisco. With this latest investment, Crowdz and Citi plan to collaborate based on that goal of giving SMEs “rapid and efficient access to the working capital needed to keep their businesses running.”

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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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South Africa’s Mobiz nabs $4M to expand personalized SMS marketing into the US

TechCrunch

The investment comes as the startup is ramping up efforts to expand into the U.S. Part of the investment will be used to hire more staff in South Africa and support the commercial expansion to the U.S. and double down on marketing, sales and account management. Chen adds that now that the company is going full tilt in the U.S.