Danish startups Responsibly raises $2M to benchmark supply chains on climate, diversity

If the world is to reach NetZero, and avoid climate disaster it needs to make every product sustainable and that means every purchase. But to do that you need a lot more transparency, so that means more data on suppliers to improve sourcing and benchmarking companies. While companies are often doing their best, the problem with issues like CO2 emissions lies in the supply chain.

Danish startup Responsibly, reckons it has the answers in providing retailers, builders, and others with a supply network a scorecard against this supply chain of providers. Thus, a company can check if any level of its supply chain is involved in deforestation, water pollution, as well as human rights violations or gender pay gap issues.

It’s now raised a $2 million pre-seed investment round led by Flash Ventures. Also participating is Pirate Impact (the family-office of Fabian & Ferry Heilemann) and Michael Wax, Founder and CEO of Planetly Benedikt Franke.

The startup will now soft-launch the first version of its platform which will look at the supplier data of more than 10,000 suppliers for pilot customers.

Responsibly’s co-Founder and CEO Thomas Buch Andersson said: “If we can make it as easy for purchasers to evaluate how their suppliers compare on a planetary agenda, as it is to compare them on price, then we think we can unlock the huge force for change that’s sitting in the world’s procurement departments.”

Being developed with Google’s Startup Advisor: Sustainable Development Goals Program, Responsibly

Johann Nordhus Westarp, Founding Partner at Flash Ventures said: “The timing is perfect, and companies will fundamentally change the way they procure in the next couple of years. Price- or value-driven procurement will give way to impact-driven procurement. Companies are acting somewhat blindly today, treading-water to solve the ‘problem of the day’. Responsibly helps them finally get visibility into their procurement footprints and make forward-thinking decisions for all the right reasons.”

According to CDP, some 40% of global GHG emissions are driven or influenced companies through their purchases and the products they sell. Meanwhile, Gartner found that 23% of supply chain leaders expect to have a digital ecosystem by 2025, up from only 1% today.

Speaking to me over a call Buch Andersson said: “The space for responsible sourcing has really evolved quite a lot over the past 20 years. We are building a layer on top of all of the different data providers to essentially allow the procurement team to flexibly read any information, interpret it and then use it for sourcing decision making.”

Responsibly competes with EcoVadis and Integrity Next.

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PayEm comes out of stealth with $27M and its answer to the expense report

Itamar Jobani was a software developer working for a medical company and “hated that time of the month” when he had to use the company’s chosen reimbursement tool.

“It was full of friction and as part of the company’s wellness team, I felt an urge to take care of the employee experience and find a better tool,” Jobani told TechCrunch. “I looked for something, but didn’t find it, so I tried to build it myself.”

What resulted was PayEm, an Israeli company he founded with Omer Rimoch in 2019 to be a spend and procurement platform for high-growth and multinational organizations. Today, it announced $27 million in funding that includes $7 million in seed funding, led by Pitango First and NFX, with participation by LocalGlobe and Fresh Fund, as well as $20 million in Series A funding led by Glilot+.

How a band of P2P hackers planted the seeds of a unique expense management giant

The company’s technology automates the reimbursement, procurement, accounts payable and credit card workflows to manage all of the requests and invoices, while also creating bills and sending payments to over 200 territories in 130 currencies.

It gives company finance teams a real-time look at what items employees are asking for funds to buy, and what is actually being spent. For example, teams can submit a request and go through an approval flow that can be customized with purchasing codes tied to a description of the transaction. At the same time, all transactions are continuously reconciled versus having to spend hours at the end of the month going through paperwork.

“Organizations are running in a more democratized way with teams buying things on behalf of the organization,” Jobani said. “We built a platform to cater to those needs, so it’s like a disbursement platform instead of a finance team always being in charge.”

The global B2B payments market is valued at $120 trillion annually and is expected to reach $200 trillion by 2028, according to payment industry newsletter Nilson Report. PayEm is among many B2B payments startups attracting venture capital — for example, last month, Nium announced a $200 million in Series D funding at a $1 billion valuation. Paystand raised $50 million in Series C funding to make B2B payments cashless, while Dwolla raised $21 million for its API that allows companies to build and facilitate fast payments.

Meanwhile, PayEm itself saw accelerated growth in the second quarter of 2021, including increasing its transaction volume by four times over the previous quarter and generating millions of dollars in revenue. It now boasts a list of hundreds of customers like Fiverr, JFrog and Next Insurance. It also launched new features like the ability to create corporate cards.

The company, which also has an office in New York, has 40 employees currently, and the new funds will enable the company to triple its headcount, focusing on hiring in the United States, and to bring additional features and payment capabilities to market.

“Each person can have a budget and a time frame for making the purchase, while accounting still feels in control,” Jobani added. “Everyone now has the full context and the right budget line item.”

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Meizu 18x, 18s and 18s Pro appear in 3C listing, will do up to 40W charging

Meizu is expected to add a few new members to its 18 series smartphones soon and three of them were spotted in the database of China’s 3C agency. In addition, well-known tipster Digital Chat Station revealed more details regarding the corresponding devices’ model numbers as well as their battery capacities. Meizu 18s, 18s Pro and 18x listings on 3C database The 3C listing reveals the Meizu 18x (M172Q) supports 30W charging, Meizu 18s (M182Q) goes with slightly faster 36W charging while the top-dog 18s Pro (M192Q) will support 40W speeds. The 18x is rumored to pack a 4,200 mAh...

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“Autonomous accounting” platform Vic.ai raises $50M round led by ICONIQ Growth

Vic.ai, a startup that has built an AI-based platform it claims can ‘automate’ enterprise accounting, has raised a $50M Series B round led by ICONIQ Growth, with participation from existing investors GGV Capital, Cowboy Ventures and Costanoa Ventures, bringing total capital raised to $63 million.

The company’s customers include HSB (Sweden’s largest real-estate management company), Intercom Inc. and HireQuest Inc., as well as accounting firms KPMG, PwC, BDO, and Armanino LLP. Vic.ai says its platform has processed more than 535 million invoices with 95 percent accuracy.

Vic.ai says it can do this by learning from historical data and existing processes to deliver more automation in accounting processes thus saving time, reducing errors and duplicates.

Alexander Hagerup, CEO of Vic.ai (launched in 2017) said: “It’s 2021, and it’s high time for finance and accounting teams to embrace AI technology. Accounting work is tedious and repetitive, but it no longer needs to be. Our AI platform delivers both autonomy and intelligence for finance and accounting teams.”

Will Griffith, founding partner at ICONIQ Growth said Vic.ai team “demonstrates the same passion, product focus and customer-first mentality that we see in other exceptional founders.”

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Vector design tool Vectornator raises $20M round led by EQT Ventures

It’s an age-old tech industry story: company comes up with a tool to solve its own problem, then realizes the tool is actually worth more than the existing company. Something similar happened to Linearity. Its 17-year-old founder, Vladimir Danila, came up with the Vectornator tool to make vector design easier in 2017. It’s now used by Apple, Disney, Wacom and Microsoft. Disney uses Vectornator to create artwork for hotels in Disneyland, in fact.

The vector-focused platform has now raised a $20 million funding round led by EQT Ventures together with 468 Capital. It’s been joined by Angels including Bradley Horowitz (VP Product, Google), Jonathan Rochelle (Co-Founder Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets, Google Slides, Google Drive), Charles Songhurst (Ex. Corporate Strategy, Microsoft) and Lutz Finger (Group Product Manager, Google). 
 
The company says the funding will be used to double down on its mobile-first product, Vectornator, adding AI-powered automation and collaboration features, and new products and expand in the USA and Europe as well as Asia. 
 
Vladimir Danila, CEO and founder at Linearity said: “When I first got into design aged 10 over a decade ago, I found the tools hard to use and intimidating. I immediately wanted to create my own suite of tools to solve that issue as vectors become more relevant than pixels and are also superior in every aspect except for photography. Vectornator is all about customer experience, simplicity and not overcomplicating the software. I’m thrilled to be working alongside Ted and the team to glean knowledge and market understanding and help to grow our platform.”

Ted Persson, Partner at EQT Ventures commented: “For me, there were two clear sides to joining forces with the Linearity team. Vladimir is a very clear-cut founder who has built an outstanding product. Design tools are some of the hardest tools to build, but Vladimir and his team have shown that anything is possible.”

Investor interest in design tools has exploded since the success of Canva, which is now valued at $15 billion.

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Apple starts rolling out eighth beta of iOS, iPadOS and its watch and TV OSes

Apple is still putting the finishing touches on the upcoming versions of the operating systems of its smart gadgets. The company has started rolling out new beta versions and there may be one more before the final versions come out. The changelog at this point has crystallized, these last few releases focus on squashing bugs. This is the eight round of betas with a new one coming about once a week, so there’s time for one more before the expected mid-September launch of the iPhone 13 series. Those phones will come with iOS 15 out of the box. New features include spatial audio support...

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CoachHub raises $80M in Series “B2” round, as coaching goes digital in the pandemic

The world of professional coaching has grown over the years as coaches realised they could easily counsel people remotely and clients realized digital coaching was far more efficient. But, equally, a problem arose in how to sift the wheat from the chaff. At the same time corporates realised that their own staff could benefit – but faced the same sifting problem. In a classic Internet play, CoachHub came along three years ago and applied AI to a marketplace to do the sifting. All well and good, but with training and personal development going almost completely digital due to the pandemic, the market has exploded.

Berlin-based CoachHub has now raised $80m in a Series “B2” funding, increasing its total Series B capital to $110m. Investors Draper Esprit, RTP Global, HV Capital, Signals Venture Capital, Partech, and Speedinvest all participated bringing the total funds raised to $130m, since 2019.

Last year it raised a $30 million Series B round, also led by Draper Esprit, alongside existing investors HV Capital, Partech, Speedinvest, signals Venture Capital, and RTP Global.

The startup competes with other aggregators such as AceUp out of Boston, which has raised $2.3M.
 
The three year old startup says it has tripled its employees, and added new clients including Fujitsu, Electrolux, Babbel, ViacomCBS and KPMG.
 
Co-founder and Chief Sales Director Yannis Niebelschütz said in a statement: “This latest round of funding will allow us to meet the ever-growing demand for digital solutions for training and personal development, which has been triggered by the pandemic.”
 
Christoph Hornung, investment director at Draper Esprit said: “It’s no longer just about the pandemic. What we are increasingly seeing with digital-first, highly enriched platforms such as CoachHub are more dynamic and – crucially – more accessible tools to transform companies through training and education.”
 
CoachHub says it uses AI to match individuals with 2,500 business and well-being coaches in 70 countries across six continents. Coaching sessions are available in 60+ languages.

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