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My First 16: Competing in a Crowd of Incumbents with Mercury’s Immad Akhund

Andreessen Horowitz

ABOUT MY FIRST 16 Our new video podcast series My First 16 features interviews with founders and CEOs of fintech companies about how they acquired their initial customers and the hard lessons they learned along the way. Seema: Like so many of our founders, you had the pain point yourself and decided to go tackle it head on.

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Israeli fintech Personetics raises $85M for tools to help incumbents personalize banking services to compete with neobanks

TechCrunch

Today a startup that is building tools to help incumbent address this challenge is announcing a round of funding on the back of a lot of demand for its services. “T hey are seeing the impact of the alternatives,” he said, with the migration away from the incumbents happening gradually. That’s a common thing.”

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How I Invest

Both Sides of the Table

During the Q&A I was asked about how I make investment decisions in early-stage businesses. I was asked again in an LP meeting later in the week and then again at a founder breakfast gathering we hosted yesterday. I know that sounds trite but it’s the best way I can describe my early-stage investments. I fall in love.”

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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.

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Pinecone drops $100M investment on $750M valuation, as vector database demand grows

TechCrunch

Today, the company announced a $100 million Series B investment on a $750 million post valuation. These kinds of numbers have been hard to come by in a conservative investment environment, but the company is growing fast and investors saw an opportunity to grab a market leader, says Pinecone CEO and founder Edo Liberty. “We

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The BS List - We Don't Like This Space (No. 52)

This is going to be BIG.

I sent a very specific note that outlined the issues that I thought VCs have with many business models in this industry with the subject line “Travel startups suck” and then positioned the company has not falling prey to any of those reasons why someone wouldn’t want to invest in travel. Is it too hard to unseat entrenched incumbents?

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Cloud optimization startup ProsperOps lands $72M investment

TechCrunch

Incredibly, prior to the investment, ProsperOps had only raised around $800,000. Co-founder and CEO Chris Cochran says that the company approached H.I.G. “This investment allows us to expand the scope of the work we perform for our customers and continue growing our engineering and sales teams.” ” “H.I.G.