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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. Justin Da Rosa is a vice president with Battery Ventures in San Francisco. He focuses on consumer internet, online marketplace and software investments.

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CommerceIQ gets its horn as capital continues to flow into e-commerce infrastructure startups

TechCrunch

When much of the shopping shifted online during the global pandemic, startups developing software and other products to aid the transition began to garner attention from venture capital firms. The CEO is Guru Hariharan, who you might remember from retail analytics company Boomerang Commerce , a Startup Battlefield finalist in 2014.

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

TechCrunch

That player, Crowdz , recently secured $10 million in financing co-led by Citi and Dutch growth equity firm Global Cleantech Capital, with participation from Bold Capital Partners, TFX Ventures and Augment Ventures. That experience led the pair to start Crowdz, and they bootstrapped the company for its first five years.

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

TechCrunch

Polly, a SaaS technology startup aiming to “transform” the mortgage capital markets, announced today that it has raised $37 million in a Series B funding round led by Menlo Ventures. New backers Movement Mortgage, First American Financial and FinVC joined existing investors 8VC, Khosla Ventures and Fifth Wall in participating in the round.

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The Rising Stakes in SaaS

Tomasz Tunguz

Venture capitalists have financed many of those businesses. Over that 20 year period, annual SaaS investment has increased 20x, peaking in 2014 at $7B. Those venture dollars have financed a panoply of competition. Incumbent client/server technologies have lost their market dominance to new incumbents.

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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.