The secret to a successful raise

“How much do you want to raise?
How much do you want to dilute?
There’s your answer…”

That was me asking a VC pal of mine to value my business for a possible fundraise next year. Fortunately, this wasn’t his only advice.

And so, the past fortnight has been mainly spreadsheets, pitch deck iterations and long lunches. That and spending a decent amount of client time better operationalising how to scout emergent tech and manage activity across teams.

Given Visa’s acquisition of Earthport – another cross-border payment platform – in May this year, delayed briefly by an attempted gazumping by Mastercard, borderless transactions are clearly a space that’s heating up at some speed. (Later in the year, by the way, Mastercard scratched that particular itch with Transfast).

So whether it’s Savvy using customer data for credit scoring, Tide building SME financial services on Open Banking, or Rapyd’s API offering partners a wealth of possibility, these companies and many like them are creating stellar emergent tech which is driving them relentlessly forward.

The specific problem being solved may be relatively niche, but it promises to be an elegant solution to what can often be quite the difficulty for non-Brits moving here, and which could get even harder post-Brexit.

I can take an Uber copter to JFK. I can rent an electric scooter. I’m sure for the foreseeable future I’ll still ‘avocado’

The entire industry from Valley tech-preneurs to Detroit’s gas-guzzling dinosaurs is busier than ever, trying out new ideas and leaning on investors as it goes.

Market-leading scooter e-rental firm Bird shook off the nay-sayers to close a $275M Series D last week at a value of over $2.5B. I can’t but help think of China’s bike graveyards – a tough reminder of what happens when investors chase growth at any cost.

Closer to (my) home, Bird contemporary German-based Tier Mobility will be hoping for market longevity as they closed their $60M raise, including participation from AXA.

Another quirk of UK transport law is that the average fine for driving a car without insurance is now cheaper than the average motor insurance premium. Whilst that overlooks the obvious liability issues, it does feel something somewhere has gone badly wrong. Downwards pressure on UK motor premiums may also soon be applied by our financial regulator, following their findings that 6m policyholders per annum are paying a ‘loyalty penalty’ worth £1.2bn. Gulp.

Looking upstream to the manufacturers, Ford are keeping themselves busy – training their AI to create future urban transport solutions (aren’t they all) and figuring how to stop bug splats from messing up the LIDAR sensors which enable their self-driving cars to ‘see’. Sounds sensible.

At the same time, ‘Russian Google’ Yandex is testing its self-driving cars in Tel Aviv while ‘Chinese Google’ Baidu does the same in Changsha. And Vodafone (which has nothing to do with Google in this context) is helping Kia to connect up its vehicles in India.

Time to take your foot off the accelerator?

Last bit of news is that a couple of global accelerators have new programs launching: Plug & Play announced their emergent tech Europe batch and Rainmaking are kicking off a new 30-day course in Australia.

Is it just me or is anyone else feeling this model is starting to feel a little outdated? Or at least the value becoming less clear? We’re hearing from/working with a bunch of insurers who have been paying through the nose for such little, and often seriously parochial, output.

A good counter in a report from CapGemini this week, is the continued global increase in corporate + emergent tech startup partnerships. This was backed up by a statement from Wrisk which stated it is actively courting new corporate partners, going so far as to recently restructure their leadership to better build and manage those relationships.

Finally, I read Aussie banking group ANZ ran a 3-day hackathon last month, where 125+ internal participants presented 20+ ideas. That’s fun but the bit I LOVED is that the ideas were presented to a 70-stong customer panel. Excellent work ANZ.

On that note, I promised our pals at Zurich that we’d push their Innovation Championship 2020 – “Protecting the Next Generation”

Right, time to wrap up.

As always, if you want to more information, do get in touch. Accessing the right innovation intelligence can be massively time-consuming and/or freaking expensive. We get that. And that’s why we built Sønr and that’s why insurance companies around the world are now using it.

Always happy to give you a tour around.

Have good weekends.

Matt

We achieve this by presenting our clients with timely and relevant intelligence from the world’s most comprehensive source of innovation data.

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