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Minted, a company we’ve been covering on this site for a decade-plus, plans to double down on its wholesale and licensing business, which helps larger retailers sell stationery, art and home decor designed by its community of independent artists.

To fund the growing initiative, the design marketplace is today announcing a $208 million Series E funding led by Permira, with participation from T. Rowe Price. The round brings Minted’s total raised to date to $300 million. The company, founded in 2007, has previously landed backing from Benchmark, Menlo Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Technology Crossover Ventures and others.

“Minted is playing into a trend that’s really fortunate for us, which is a need for differentiated design that helps retailers compete,” the company’s founder and chief executive officer Mariam Naficy told TechCrunch.

Naficy, a former vice president of U.S. e-commerce at The Body Shop, declined to disclose the company’s valuation but says it’s profitable on an earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) basis and is on track to post “low hundreds of millions” in revenue this year. Its wholesale and licensing operation, she says, is itself expected to become a nine-figure business, too, and will likely represent 50 percent of Minted’s earnings in four years.

Minted is best known as an online marketplace for printed goods, like wedding invitations, greeting cards, notebooks, stationery and wall art. The company crowdsources work from independent illustrators, textile designers, painters and other artists, then lets its customers vote on the designs they like best to determine what is sold on Minted. Then, the platform leverages predictive analytics to forecast bestsellers. As a result, Naficy says they’ve collected hoards of valuable data surrounding consumer preferences.

Minted, in addition to fueling growth of its wholesale business, will use the investment to build out a robust supply chain, expand the team and continue experimenting with new business strategies, like its first brick-and-mortar store that recently popped up on San Francisco’s Fillmore Street, where the company is selling wall art and stationery.

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Minted, a company we’ve been covering on this site for a decade-plus, plans to double down on its wholesale and licensing business, which helps larger retailers sell stationery, art and home decor designed by its community of independent artists.

To fund the growing initiative, the design marketplace is today announcing a $208 million Series E funding led by Permira, with participation from T. Rowe Price. The round brings Minted’s total raised to date to $300 million. The company, founded in 2007, has previously landed backing from Benchmark, Menlo Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Technology Crossover Ventures and others.

“Minted is playing into a trend that’s really fortunate for us, which is a need for differentiated design that helps retailers compete,” the company’s founder and chief executive officer Mariam Naficy told TechCrunch.

Naficy, a former vice president of U.S. e-commerce at The Body Shop, declined to disclose the company’s valuation but says it’s profitable on an earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) basis and is on track to post “low hundreds of millions” in revenue this year. Its wholesale and licensing operation, she says, is itself expected to become a nine-figure business, too, and will likely represent 50 percent of Minted’s earnings in four years.

Minted is best known as an online marketplace for printed goods, like wedding invitations, greeting cards, notebooks, stationery and wall art. The company crowdsources work from independent illustrators, textile designers, painters and other artists, then lets its customers vote on the designs they like best to determine what is sold on Minted. Then, the platform leverages predictive analytics to forecast bestsellers. As a result, Naficy says they’ve collected hoards of valuable data surrounding consumer preferences.

Minted, in addition to fueling growth of its wholesale business, will use the investment to build out a robust supply chain, expand the team and continue experimenting with new business strategies, like its first brick-and-mortar store that recently popped up on San Francisco’s Fillmore Street, where the company is selling wall art and stationery.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2SL2u4Z

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Minted, a company we’ve been covering on this site for a decade-plus, plans to double down on its wholesale and licensing business, which helps larger retailers sell stationery, art and home decor designed by its community of independent artists.

To fund the growing initiative, the design marketplace is today announcing a $208 million Series E funding led by Permira, with participation from T. Rowe Price. The round brings Minted’s total raised to date to $300 million. The company, founded in 2007, has previously landed backing from Benchmark, Menlo Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Technology Crossover Ventures and others.

“Minted is playing into a trend that’s really fortunate for us, which is a need for differentiated design that helps retailers compete,” the company’s founder and chief executive officer Mariam Naficy told TechCrunch.

Naficy, a former vice president of U.S. e-commerce at The Body Shop, declined to disclose the company’s valuation but says it’s profitable on an earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) basis and is on track to post “low hundreds of millions” in revenue this year. Its wholesale and licensing operation, she says, is itself expected to become a nine-figure business, too, and will likely represent 50 percent of Minted’s earnings in four years.

Minted is best known as an online marketplace for printed goods, like wedding invitations, greeting cards, notebooks, stationery and wall art. The company crowdsources work from independent illustrators, textile designers, painters and other artists, then lets its customers vote on the designs they like best to determine what is sold on Minted. Then, the platform leverages predictive analytics to forecast bestsellers. As a result, Naficy says they’ve collected hoards of valuable data surrounding consumer preferences.

Minted, in addition to fueling growth of its wholesale business, will use the investment to build out a robust supply chain, expand the team and continue experimenting with new business strategies, like its first brick-and-mortar store that recently popped up on San Francisco’s Fillmore Street, where the company is selling wall art and stationery.

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French startup Glose just raised a $3.4 million funding round (€3 million) for its reading app on iPhone, iPad and Android. The company wants to make reading books more social.

If you’re an avid book reader, chances are you always carry a pencil with you to write some notes in the margins. Or maybe you have a tiny notebook with important quotes. But that experience hasn’t worked well with ebooks.

Sure, you can highlight text on your ereader, in the Kindle app and other ebook apps. But it’s hard to do anything with them down the road. Glose wants to leverage your phone to let you do more with the book you’re currently reading.

OneRagTime, Expon Capital, Kima Ventures, Bpifrance participated in today’s funding round as well as business angels, such as Sébastien Breteau, Patrick Bertrand and Julien Codorniou.

Glose has its own bookstore and lets you read your own DRM-free ebooks. The app then keeps you motivated with reading streaks and other gamification aspects. But my favorite feature is that you can highlight texts, write annotations and share them with your friends.

When your friends read the same book six months later, they can open the annotations in the margin to see what you wrote down. You can follow booklists, create private reading groups and see the progress of your friends. 600,000 people have downloaded the app.

Up next, Glose wants to release a separate service called Glose Education. This version will be tailored for universities and high schools. Teachers will be able to create reading groups, assign homework, write down annotations for the class and more. This seems like a natural use case for a social reading app.

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Finalcad, a mobile platform that enables the construction industry to digitize much of its processes, has closed $40 million in Series C funding. The round was led by publicly listed London venture capital firm Draper Esprit, and Cathay Innovation, with the support of Salesforce Ventures. Existing existing French investors Serena, Aster and CapHorn Invest also participated.

Funded in 2012 by Jimmy Louchart, Joffroy Louchart and David Vauthrin, Finalcad has set out to solve the construction industry’s “chronic low productivity” problem. The Paris-based company has developed a SaaS and mobile app to help construction workers and other construction stakeholders collaborate digitally, which is believed to be the key to removing many of the efficiencies in construction.

Specifically — and according to McKinsey — labor-productivity growth in construction has averaged only 1 percent a year over the past two decades, compared with growth of 2.8 percent for the total world economy and 3.6 percent in the case of manufacturing. The construction industry is also lagging behind in terms of digitization: MGI’s digitization index places it among the least digitized sectors.

To help remedy this, Finalcad’s SaaS lets construction site engineers, foremen, architects and consultants work together via the Finalcad mobile app, enabling collaboration across a wide variety of workflows both on site and at the office.

Along with acting as a communication tool — akin to a ‘Yammer for construction’ — the software also enables stakeholders to work on drawings, BIM models, tasks, controls, safety procedures and progress monitoring. From this vantage point, Finalcad is able to provide insights and “best practices at a company level,” powered by its analytics technology.

On who Finalcad’s competition is, unsurprisingly co-founder and CMO David Vauthrin says it’s a “mix of paper and pencil, excel sheets, and IM platforms,” such as WhatsApp or WeChat etc.

“On direct competiton, we face some players, but they are all very small companies, limited to one trade (e.g. buildings) or to a [single] geography,” he says.

Vauthrin also tells me that the Paris-based company’s business model is not based on per project sales, but is designed to encourage company-wide digital transformation. This sees Finalcad operate a subscription model based on a percentage of a company’s turnover.

“We created and implement into our customer’s organisation a ‘change management’ methodology to make sure that the majority of our customer’s workforce is going to embrace this change,” he adds.

To that end, Finalcad says it will use the new Series C funding to extend its SaaS, which spans support for buildings and infrastructure to energy, operations, and maintenance. It will also invest in R&D related to its Construction Insight Platform, and plans to hire an additional 100 people globally, adding to a current headcount of 170 people across 12 countries.

“When we raised our Series B in 2016, we intended to implement pivotal change: moving from a project-based business model to a company-wide digital transformation one. This involved covering all the main activities of our industry: buildings, infrastructure, energy, operations and maintenance,” says Jimmy Louchart, co-founder and CEO, in a statement.

“Since then, we validated this shift with some major contract wins in Europe and Asia. Now this Series C allows us to fully deploy our new strategy on a global scale. We firmly believe that this unique approach is coming to fruition, and the value we bring to our customers is the right path towards changing the way we build”.

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