Subscribe to Fully Vested at FullyVested.co or through your podcast app of choice.
CASHDROP, a Chicago-based contactless payments and mobile-first e-commerce platform company founded by Mexican immigrant Ruben Flores-Martinez, announced that it raised $2.7 million in seed funding back in early August. Harlem Capital led the deal, which saw participation from Founder Collective, Long Journey Ventures, and M25. Individual investors in the round include Cyan Banister (now a partner at Long Journey Ventures), Adobe chief product officer Scott Belsky, Fullscreen founder George Strompolos, and YouTube pioneer Michelle Phan.
CASHDROP's unique differentiators are its economic model and software platform. The company says new merchants can spin up an online storefront for their products and services in as little as 15 minutes. CASHDROP includes inventory management and reporting features, and may expand to more service business verticals in the future. Its biggest point of leverage is its economic model. Rather than taking a commission/marketplace fee from businesses on the platform, CASHDROP charges the customer a 5% convenience fee, leaving the platform free to use for businesses and relatively inexpensive for consumers. The company has seen significant user growth during COVID, mostly from restaurants seeking to sidestep high marketplace fees imposed by incumbent food ordering platforms like DoorDash, GrubHub, and Uber Eats.
Read more about the deal:
(Disclosure: Jason and Graham are friends with members of the CASHDROP team. Jason served as a compensated advisor and service provider to the company during its funding round announcement, and Graham has financial ties to one of the firms which invested in the round.)
On August 25th, Bay Area-based startup Trove announced it had raised $16 million in a Series A round, with media reporting it was raised at a $75 million post-money valuation. Andreessen Horowitz led the round. The company was part of Y Combinator's S20 batch and successfully raised their round pre-Demo Day.
Trove is in the business of helping startups communicate the potential value of equity (usually offered as options of some sort) issued as part of typical employee compensation packages to prospective recruits and current members of the team. This, in theory, gives employees greater transparency into the current and potential value of the shares they're issued, while also helping employers allocate equity more wisely. Simultaneously, Trove grants access to anonymized market performance data to help employers understand what other industry participants are offering their prospective employees.
Read more about the deal:
On August 26th, Seattle area online marketplace startup Barn2Door raised $6 million in a new round of funding led by Bullpen Capital. Participating investors in the deal include Sugar Mountain, Raine Ventures, Quiet Capital, Lead Edge Capital, and Global Founders Capital. Crunchbase lists the round as a Series A, though the round type was not named explicitly in media coverage of the transaction. Barn2Door raised $3.4 million for the first tranche of its Series A back in October 2019; that particular round was led by Lead Edge Capital out of New York. According to Golden, the company has raised nearly $12.5 million across its publicly-disclosed funding rounds.
Barn2Door operates a vertical-specific marketplace platform aimed at helping farmers sell their produce, proteins, and other agricultural products directly to consumers via e-commerce. The company's platform works for different types of farms (dairy, produce, animal proteins, flowers, etc.) and service models ranging from subscription community-supported agriculture (CSA) boxes, to on-farm pickup, local delivery, and even shipping, depending on the model of the farm's direct-to-customer business. Barn2Door, founded in March 2015, is part of a growing trend of companies which offer more direct connections between farmers and end consumers. The growing D2C side of some farm businesses helps the farmer generate higher margin on agricultural products.
Read more about the deal:
Based in New York City, Undock is a company building software which helps people who schedule lots of meetings (which is probably most of us these days) schedule those meetings right from their email inbox. The interaction model is neat: Using a little NLP magic, Undock's plugin detects when a user is proposing times for a meeting; based on the user's availability and preferred times to meet, Undock will drop down some times which work, and the proposed time is entered as a link in the outgoing email. Recipients can confirm the time by clicking the link in the email. Undock detects if a message is going to another Undock user, and is able to suggest times which are mutually agreeable for all parties. On August 24, the company announced it raised $1.6 million in a seed round led by Lightship Capital. Participating investors in the deal include Bessemer Venture Partners, Alumni Ventures Group, Active Capital, Lerer Hippeau, as well as individual investors Arlan Hamilton (founding partner of Backstage Capital) and veteran startup ops exec Sarah Imbach.
Read more about the deal:
