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Clearbanc is disrupting startup funding by providing companies cash to buy ads in exchange for a revenue share so they don’t have to sell as much equity to venue capitalists. That idea has proven so appealing that 1000 companies seeking up to $1 billion total hit up Clearbanc since we reported it raised $70 million last month. So to meet the demand of the most eligible startups asking for marketing cash, Clearbanc has just raised a $50 million fund from Seamless co-founder Jason Finger’s new firm Upper90.

If a company’s Facebook ads and Stripe sales metrics show it’s a sure bet, Clearbanc can provide $5,000 to $10 million in funding to pour fuel on the fire. Startups invest that into ad spend, and then split the revenue with Clearbanc from the sales triggered by those ads until it’s paid back plus six percent. Essentially, Clearbanc offers an alternative to selling valuable equity and control to VCs by offering capital based on new data sources traditional banks aren’t looking at.

“In 2018, Clearbanc has funded over $100M into 500 different companies. Our portfolio companies are putting that capital to work and growing at over 100% year over year on average” co-founder and CEO Andrew D’Souza tells us.

Clearbanc co-founder Michele Romanow

To back the investments, Clearbanc raises sub-funds from LPs who earn a return through a slice of the revenue sharing deals. Part of the last $70 million was used to set up the first Clearbanc fund, and the whole $50 million being announced today is the second fund. Clearbanc expects the funds to mature and pay out after just two years, offering LPs a faster but lower-stakes return then typical eight-year VC funds. Upper90’s goal is just those sort of steady gains. “This deal literally came together in 3 weeks from first meeting to close, which was unheard of” D’Souza notes.

He wouldn’t say exactly how much Clearbanc has raised in traditional equity for itself, but revealed most of the $70 million round’s investors were buying standard equity and it has some flexibility in how it applies some of the funding. D’Souza tells me “We have been largely focused on ecommerce companies and subscription ecommerce, but have started doing some deals with enterprise companies.  In 2019 we plan to expand internationally beyond the US and Canada, introduce new verticals, and launch new financial products to help entrepreneurs.”

Previously at McKinsey, D’Souza had raised over $300 million in venture for startups before teaming up on angel investments with Michele Romanow, an investor from Canada’s Shark Tank-style TV show Dragons’ Den. The two have become a romantic couple amidst Clearbanc’s start in 2015. It’s now taken cash from Emergence Capital, Social, Social Capital, CoVenture, Founders Fund, 8VC and others. Groupon co-founder Ranjen Ruparell and Third Point hedge fund partner Keri Findley are now joining Clearbanc’s board. “We may take on more traditional equity in the future but we don’t need it right now” D’Souza reveals. “We will raise an additional 250-300M in LP capital next year to continue to meet demand.”

“We are witnessing an evolution of the growth capital business – entrepreneurs do not want to be forced to choose between restrictive equity or debt arrangements to fund their business growth” Cleabanc’s new board member Findley says. “Clearbanc is building a new asset class that is compelling for entrepreneurs as well as investors looking for strong risk-adjusted returns.”

The business model depends on Clearbanc accurately assessing demand for the products for which it’s funding ad buys. If products flop and the startups don’t have much revenue to share, its influx of LPs will dry up. Clearbanc is also vulnerable to changes in the ad market and platforms like Facebook or Google. If ad prices go up or new content formats like Instagram Stories don’t work as well for direct response ecommerce ads, that could also put the squeeze on Clearbanc. “We’re funding customer acquisition across platforms (it just happens to be primarily on Facebook and Google right now)” D’Souza counters. “We’re looking at data across our portfolio and building relationships with emerging platforms to help our companies stay ahead of the curve”

Given the explosion of direct to consumer brands in the wake of successes like Dollar Shave Club’s acquisition for $1 billion, there may be plenty of startups clamoring for Clearbanc’s capital.

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Animoca Brands will produce and publish blockchain-based versions of RollerCoaster Tycoon and Goon Squad worldwide (excluding China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau); the new titles will feature the integration of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The term of the Agreement extends through to 31 March 2022.

In honor of this exciting announcement I’d like to propose the following blockchain-based products available for license to those hunting for a quick buck:

Blockchain! The Musical
Blockchain Cereal
Blockchain Brand Kombucha
Blockchain & Me, An Alien Adventure
Blockchain Whiskey
Blockchain Soda
Blockchain The Miniseries
Blockchain Lingerie – Shake His Merkle Tree
Blockchain Brand Firestarters
Blockchain Pessaries For Her
Blockchain French Ticklers
Blockchain Getaway Cars
Blockchain Killer Apps (rumored not to exist)
Blockchain Airlines
Blockchain Margarita Mix
Blockchain Cowboy Hats
Blockchain Burgers
Blockchain Dance Studios
Blockchain Pants

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Tonsser, the Copenhagen-based startup that offers a “football performance app” aimed at youth soccer players who want to build their own online profile and potentially get discovered by a bigger club, has raised €5.5 million in Series A funding. The round is led by Alven Capital, with participation from existing investors SEED Capital and Wellington Partners

Currently launched in eight European countries — including France, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway — and claiming more than 800,000 football players registered on the app, Tonsser could well be described as akin to a LinkedIn for youth soccer players, perhaps with a bit of Instagram thrown in, but actually the company’s mission is a lot more defined than that.

As reiterated in a call this week with Peter Holm, the soccer app’s co-founder and CEO, Tonsser wants to make it easier for young soccer talent to become better players by learning and being inspired by each other and through sponsored competitions and soccer skills content. And, perhaps more lofty, the Danish startup wants to make the beautiful game more meritocratic by enabling unsigned talent to be discovered by professional football clubs through the app, and in turn help the soccer industry become more accountable. Impressively, he says this has already started happening.

At the heart of this mission is Tonsser’s increasing emphasis on using technology and data — namely, sporting metrics — to help bubble up undiscovered players. The iOS and Android app’s features include the ability to create your own soccer profile, upload and share photo and videos of match highlights, add various match and team stats, and follow other clubs and players. Tapping into some of this data is Tonsser’s algorithm that gives every player registered on the app a dynamic score.

“After a match the Tonsser algorithm computes a rating for each player based on the individual performance, the performance of the team and ‘Man of the Match’ votes from teammates,” explained Holm in a follow-up email.

“The rating system has been developed and tested over the past 3 years with pro licensed coaches and academies to provide the most accurate calculation for each player. Match after match and season after season the rating becomes the reference point for each player and the gateway for leaderboards, awards like Team of the Week and Player of the Season and also for pro trials, scout reports and the chance of getting discovered by clubs and scouts”.

It’s this data — or discovery engine — along with brand partnerships, and sponsored content, competitions and trials (see video below), that forms Tonsser’s business model. The app is free for players and coaches, but scouts pay for special access. Related to this, I’m told that premier League clubs like Huddersfield are now using Tonsser to identify and scout youth talent.

To enhance this in 2019, Tonsser will add integrations with “automated video recordings” using computer vision, enabling players and teams to catch and share their match highlights in a simple way. It is also working on how to accommodate data from wearables to track physical performance and potentially feed this into the Tonsser score.

Meanwhile, Tonsser says the new investment will be used to support growth and to maintain the startup as the leading community for youth players. Holm says that 86 percent of French youth teams from 15-19 are now using Tonsser,. The app will launch in England in Spring 2019 and is preparing a global roll out that will include the U.S. and beyond.

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YouGov, the international data and analytics group, has acquired ‘social analytics’ startup Portent.IO, a company that it had previously invested in. Terms of the deal remain undisclosed, although I understand the acquisition includes Portent.IO‘s technology, clients and its team, including its data scientists.

“We’re all staying on and the entire team including myself have 3-year lock-ins,” Portent.IO co-founder and CEO Hamish Brocklebank tells me. “We are also going to be rebranded as ‘YouGov Signal’ and the existing team will continue to run the business — I’ll be MD & founder of YouGov Signal, for example — but with the added operational, administrative and technical support of the broader YouGov family”.

As well as YouGov providing financially backing for Portent.IO, the two firms had also been working together, with Portent.IO utilising YouGov data within its solution, which mainly focussed on the film and television industry. This includes using YouGov’s panel to survey consumers and using YouGov Profiles data to help media teams plan their marketing campaigns by “mining” audiences around movies, programmes, and actors.

Portent.IO’s customer base includes Paramount, Sony, Lionsgate, the BBC, along with other major film studios and a number of TV networks.

“Without trying to be too buzzwordy, we’re a data science-focused social listening and digital media analytics platform,” says Brocklebank. “In short, we track social, news, product reviews and digital data around movies, TV shows, sports teams and now brands across the web and across 40 countries. This data includes text analysis data, view counts of videos, comments, likes, retweets and more”.

Meanwhile, the acquisition is said to enable YouGov to increase the scope of its offering and provide clients with better social monitoring and data science analytics tools. And although Portent.IO’s tech is currently focussed on the entertainment industry, YouGov plans to extend its application across other sectors.

“The platform plugs into YouGov’s wider product suite – complementing its current services, including data products, data services, and custom research – to provide a 360 degree view of marketing campaigns,” says the two companies in a statement.

“Our data science team and advance machine learning NLP tools will be assisting with YouGov’s ongoing data science efforts and a lot of our text classification tools can be applied to their broader market research efforts,” adds Brocklebank. “Our expertise in the film and TV space will [also] help YouGov expand further into that market”.

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Every year I teach an MBA course at Stanford about the exciting opportunities for tech investors and entrepreneurs in developing economies. When we designed the syllabus back in 2013, Rocket Internet was still firing on all cylinders on four continents. The unapologetic machine built to copy big American internet companies created billions of dollars for the Samwer brothers and its backers. During Rocket’s golden years, the best startups in the developing economies seemed to inevitably have an original reference in Silicon Valley.

Accordingly, we added a class about the opportunity of replicating business models to seize this information arbitrage. Call it the second-mover advantage.

Despite my conviction about the model, the copycat word  —  short for replicating startups and attached to these ventures  —  annoyed me from the start. More than a term to describe a straightforward recipe to launch, I see it as an unconscious way to belittle an entire group of hard-charging founders and investors.

Indeed, while in foreign eyes, we have been building a Mexican Kickstarter, a Middle Eastern Uber, an Indian Amazon or a Colombian Postmates, I argue visionary founders are taking a simple idea that already exists and creating new worlds.

Gateway to entrepreneurship

While impact is the final goal, founders can approach the journey in different ways. The most common approach in the startup world is to use the business method, or more pompously, the design thinking methodology. “Fall in love with the problem, not the solution,” mentors keep telling a succession of startup clusters in acceleration programs. The best and “leanest” way to product market fit is by starting small then keep iterating the solution until you nail it.

A second way to start is favored by engineers and scientists: Take a new promising technology or a forgotten molecule, then find a big problem. Keep iterating until you find a problem worth solving, like a hammer looking for a nail.

A third way is starting like painters create, building skills by copying classics, or like a new chef cooks by starting with iconic recipes: replicate a proven idea and iterate until you find traction.

Until a few years ago it was ostensibly the only way to scale in developing economies. The model helped raise local capital from risk-averse investors who needed reassurance. The playbook to scale was unfolding a couple of years ahead and served as a guide to founders without previous startup experience and no local role models. The potential acquirer was identified and sometimes contacted in advance. Founders weren’t crazy and investors weren’t dumb.

Photo courtesy of Flickr/A_Marga

Riding the next wave

According to conventional wisdom, new ecosystems around the world grow through the following three stages, be them in developing economies or more developed countries. First, local and foreign entrepreneurs replicate successful models focused on local markets. Then as the ecosystem evolves, founders start applying existing technologies to solve local problems. Finally, as the tech space matures, new technologies begin to flourish.

In my opinion, those stages never happen sequentially as stated by ecosystem observers. Successful startups that started with a foreign inspiration can outgrow the master. If they are not bought into submission by the first mover, some of the most famous copycats reinvented the original and made it better: Mercado Libre is much more relevant in the e-commerce space than eBay . Flipkart is hardly an Amazon, not to mention WeChat. These companies are in turn some of the most prolific tech innovators on the globe. Truly ecosystems evolve organically in unique ways reflecting their history, geopolitical environment, economic structure and cultural features.

Two ways to defend the status quo: “It’s been done before” and “It’s never been done before.” –Thibault @Kpaxs

In defense of talent

Recently, it’s hard to hear American observers use the word copycat to describe any American company. After all, Guilt replicated VentesPrivees and Lime, Chinese dockless bike sharing and many more examples. All American startups are treated as innovators while the rest as mere followers.

Recently, Chinese or Indian startups seem to be given the benefit of the doubt regarding their originality. Is it because these regions have become more innovative? Maybe. But it’s also because these ecosystems have gained the respect of Silicon Valley. Indeed, Chinese consumer tech surpassed decisively the U.S. as the most important country in terms of investments.

So here’s my humble suggestion to our wealthier and more accomplished colleagues: stop using the c-word with founders. It’s offensive. Most probably, these founders are facing more challenges to build their companies and lower odds for success that the first mover. If anything, they have more merit than the originals.

As for founders, when they call you a me-too, remember all teams started somewhere, somehow. In fact, most started like Bob the Builder before turning into Einsteins. The truth is, it doesn’t matter where you start. You can start by applying a new technology or protocol. You can start with a problem you feel passionate about. You can start by replicating a business model. It doesn’t really matter if you take a big swing at the future and trust you will figure out how to make it happen. It doesn’t matter what label they use while you change the world for the better.

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Moonbug, a kid-focused media business founded by a pair of entertainment executives, has brought in a $145 million Series A investment led by The Raine Group, a merchant bank that supports technology, media and telecom efforts.

Venture capital firms Felix Capital and Fertitta Capital also participated in the financing.

Moonbug, headquartered in London, acquires and distributes media content made for kids. Recently, the company completed its first IP acquisition of Little Baby Bum, a children’s sing-along show popular on YouTube, Amazon and Netflix. According to a Los Angeles Times report, one of the show’s videos is the 20th most popular video in YouTube history, boasting 2.1 billion views. In total, Moonbug says Little Baby Bum has clocked in 23 billion views across multiple platforms.

With its Series A investment, Moonbug will amp up its M&A activity to expand its portfolio of content that “helps children build essential life skills.” Moonbug chief executive officer René Rechtman, who spent the last three years as the head of digital studios at The Walt Disney Co., says they plan to acquire eight media businesses.

Rechtman and John Robson, a former senior vice president of digital distribution at Paramount Pictures and vice president of global content at HTC, launched Moonbug earlier this year.

“I see an independent creator and I put them in very simple brackets: one is high viewership and engagement and one is quality of IP,” Rechtman told TechCrunch. “If they have both of those, I am very interested.”

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Lightspeed China Partners, the China-focused affiliate of Silicon Valley-based Lightspeed Venture Partners, has set a $360 million target for its fourth flagship venture fund, according to a document filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission today.

If the target is reached, the fund will be Lightspeed China’s largest yet, per PitchBook. Lightspeed China’s previous two funds each closed on $260 million. The VC raised $168 million for its debut fund in 2013.

Lightspeed China is led by David Mi (pictured). Mi, an investor in multiple billion-dollar Chinese companies, was previously the director of corporate development at Google, where he helped lead the search giant’s investment in Baidu. He joined Lightspeed in 2008 and established the firm’s China presence in 2011. Yan Han, a long-time Lightspeed investor and a founding partner of the firm’s Chinese branch, is also listed on the filing.

Lightspeed China has backed e-commerce platform Pingduoduo and loan provider Rong360, a pair of Chinese “unicorns” that both completed U.S. initial public offerings since 2017. Typically, the firm makes early-stage investments in the internet, mobile and enterprise spaces. 

Earlier this year, Lightspeed Venture Partners filed to raise a record $1.8 billion in new capital commitments. This month, it tacked five new partners onto its consumer and enterprise investment teams, including Slack’s former head of growth and Twitter’s former vice president of global business development.

Lightspeed didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Lightspeed China Partners, the China-focused affiliate of Silicon Valley-based Lightspeed Venture Partners, has set a $360 million target for its fourth flagship venture fund, according to a document filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission today.

If the target is reached, the fund will be Lightspeed China’s largest yet, per PitchBook. Lightspeed China’s previous two funds each closed on $260 million. The VC raised $168 million for its debut fund in 2013.

Lightspeed China is led by David Mi (pictured). Mi, an investor in multiple billion-dollar Chinese companies, was previously the director of corporate development at Google, where he helped lead the search giant’s investment in Baidu. He joined Lightspeed in 2008 and established the firm’s China presence in 2011. Yan Han, a long-time Lightspeed investor and a founding partner of the firm’s Chinese branch, is also listed on the filing.

Lightspeed China has backed e-commerce platform Pingduoduo and loan provider Rong360, a pair of Chinese “unicorns” that both completed U.S. initial public offerings since 2017. Typically, the firm makes early-stage investments in the internet, mobile and enterprise spaces. 

Earlier this year, Lightspeed Venture Partners filed to raise a record $1.8 billion in new capital commitments. This month, it tacked five new partners onto its consumer and enterprise investment teams, including Slack’s former head of growth and Twitter’s former vice president of global business development.

Lightspeed didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Lightspeed China Partners, the China-focused affiliate of Silicon Valley-based Lightspeed Venture Partners, has set a $360 million target for its fourth flagship venture fund, according to a document filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission today.

If the target is reached, the fund will be Lightspeed China’s largest yet, per PitchBook. Lightspeed China’s previous two funds each closed on $260 million. The VC raised $168 million for its debut China-focused fund in 2013.

Lightspeed China is led by David Mi (pictured). Mi, an investor in multiple billion-dollar Chinese companies, was previously the director of corporate development at Google, where he helped lead the search giant’s investment in Baidu. He joined Lightspeed in 2008 and established the firm’s China presence in 2011. Yan Han, a long-time Lightspeed investor and co-founder of the Chinese branch, is also listed on the filing.

Lightspeed China has backed e-commerce platform Pingduoduo and loan provider Rong360, a pair of Chinese “unicorns” that both completed U.S. initial public offerings since 2017. Typically, the firm makes early-stage investments in the internet, mobile and enterprise spaces. 

Earlier this year, Lightspeed Venture Partners filed to raise a record $1.8 billion in new capital commitments. This month, it tacked five new partners onto its consumer and enterprise investment teams, including Slack’s former head of growth and Twitter’s former vice president of global business development.

Lightspeed didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Lightspeed China Partners, the China-focused affiliate of Silicon Valley-based Lightspeed Venture Partners, has set a $360 million target for its fourth flagship venture fund, according to a document filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission today.

If the target is reached, the fund will be Lightspeed China’s largest yet, per PitchBook. Lightspeed China’s previous two funds each closed on $260 million. The VC raised $168 million for its debut China-focused fund in 2013.

Lightspeed China is led by David Mi (pictured). Mi, an investor in multiple billion-dollar Chinese companies, was previously the director of corporate development at Google, where he helped lead the search giant’s investment in Baidu. He joined Lightspeed in 2008 and established the firm’s China presence in 2011. Yan Han, a long-time Lightspeed investor and co-founder of the Chinese branch, is also listed on the filing.

Lightspeed China has backed e-commerce platform Pingduoduo and loan provider Rong360, a pair of Chinese “unicorns” that both completed U.S. initial public offerings since 2017. Typically, the firm makes early-stage investments in the internet, mobile and enterprise spaces. 

Earlier this year, Lightspeed Venture Partners filed to raise a record $1.8 billion in new capital commitments. This month, it tacked five new partners onto its consumer and enterprise investment teams, including Slack’s former head of growth and Twitter’s former vice president of global business development.

Lightspeed didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

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