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Opportunity Amid Volatility

Haystack

TechCrunch’s Kate Clark has done a round-up of the largest “private VC” rounds of 2018, and there’s a whole other list for just $100M+ financings led by Softbank’s Vision Fund. Speaking of acquisitions — many leaders of larger VC funds have privately given up on the incumbents buying their companies.

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Monzo Makes Money Work For Everyone

Y Combinator

2 Incumbent banks miss the mark in two crucial areas: The banking experience has not evolved to match modern consumer. In this post, we will walk through what drove Monzo’s early success, how it has come to dominate the UK market, and the company’s opportunity to change the landscape of global financial services with its beloved brand.

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

TechCrunch

” In 2018, the product was piloted as Wave in Senegal but it was still within the Sendwave ecosystem. ” Going up against incumbents. . ” Going up against incumbents. Third-party providers, mostly fintechs, have tried to capture some market share from these incumbents.

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LMS365, a learning management system built into Microsoft 365 and Teams, raises $20M

TechCrunch

Embedding a learning management system directly into workers’ core everyday tools is one of LMS365’s core selling points versus incumbents in the LMS space such as Workday , Eloomi , or TalentLMS. Holst joined LMS365 last year from secure messaging company Wire , where he previously served as chief revenue officer.

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How a Little Bit of Fear Breeds Innovation

Entrepreneurs' Organization

Without industry-wide master unique identifiers for medical-surgical (med-surg) items, hospitals cannot easily compare products by their attributes to identify cost-savings opportunities, or map product selection to the best patient outcomes. This challenge spelled fear and opportunity in equal parts. We didn’t know the domain.

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Gusto: The People Platform for SMBs

Y Combinator

But where there is a gap, there is an opportunity. Gusto launched in 2012 to tackle this opportunity, and more. In the long run, software platforms have the potential to be much larger than traditional incumbents. Gusto saw an opportunity to upend the way payroll was done. SMBs had historically been hard to reach.

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Textio’s Founder Kieran Snyder on the Two Advantages Startups Have in AI (While Remaining Skeptical Of The Funding Gold Rush)

Hunter Walk

Are there specific paths/opportunities in AI that you believe startups are actually better qualified to take advantage of than incumbents? A recent essay covered the ‘AI gold rush’ and as it related to startups operating in this area, very much ‘caution ahead’ in terms of building a sustainable, differentiated business.

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