iZettle, the mobile payments company that has been described as a European version of Square, is today making a move that puts it one national boundary away from the U.S. mobile payment company’s own backyard: iZettle is launching its iOS and Android service in Mexico. This is the Swedish company’s first move outside of Europe, and comes in the wake of a $6.6 million funding round from the Spanish financial services behemoth Banco Santander, announced just last week and made specifically to build out the solution into more markets globally.

Yes, the mobile payments market — like those chilies being sold by the small merchant pictured here, who probably only accepts cash payments today — is heating up.

To coincide with the launch, iZettle is also appointing a new MD for Mexico, Luis Arceo, who had been with Visa.

Jacob de Geer, the founder and CEO of iZettle, tells me that of the many markets where Banco Santander is active — the bank has operations across Latin America, the U.S., Portugal, Germany and Poland, in addition to the UK and Spain, with $1.86 trillion in managed funds, 102 million customers and 14,392 branches — it chose Mexico first for three reasons.

For starters, he notes that nearly all (99.8%) of the businesses in Mexico are small and medium enterprises, iZettle’s target market because, compared to bigger chains, they may be more likely to lack enough turnover to justify the investment needed for more tradition card payment processing services.

Similar to Square’s dongle and those of Here and many other competitors, iZettle’s smartphone accessory lets merchants and other businesses process credit cards using an app on a smartphone or tablet. iZettle’s particular service works on iOS and Android devices, and the company today is launching a new device that is all-in-one for all platforms and payment methods, be they chip or mag stripe. Interestingly, though, it looks like iZettle will be hiking up fees in the country. In Europe, the company charges a flat 2.75% fee, while in Mexico the fee for chip-based transactions will be 3.75% and for mag-stripe 4.75%. On top of that, merchants need to pay $499 (MXN) — about 40 U.S. dollars — for the reader, but Banco Santander customers will get a discount.

De Geer notes that 95% of cards in Mexico are chip-based. That, in fact, may be one reason why Square, whose dongle reads the magnetic stripe for transactions, may have yet to make a move here. (It’s thought that this is one reason why it has yet to launch in Europe as well.)

There is also the Santander angle: the bank is the third largest in the country and “growing rapidly,” deGeer notes.

And the third is perhaps the most contentious of all from a competitive standpoint: “Mexico is an interesting bridgehead given its geographical location,” deGeer notes. “With our new Chip & Mag reader that we’re launching, we could theoretically continue expanding north or south with the current infrastructure.”

Them’s fightin’ words, I think. iZettle, prior to today’s news, had operations in the UK, Spain, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland. More specifically, in the past, de Geer has made a point of saying that it would not be looking to tussle with Square in any of the markets where it currently operates, which include the U.S., Canada and most recently Japan.

When iZettle picked up $31.4 million in June 2012 (it’s now raised $66 million in total), the intention was to be the biggest player of its kind in Europe.

“Our priority is to get the UK fully launched, and then look at other major markets like Spain, Italy, France and Germany,” de Geer told TechCrunch at the time. “We’re not interested in the U.S. They’re doing really well with Square and others.”

That tune has changed quite a lot in the last year. Rather than ruling out the U.S., now de Geer notes, “Time will tell” when and if that move gets made.

Given that iZettle already has services in Spanish because of its operations in Spain, this will make one of the challenges of entering a new market a little less complicated. The backing of Santander will also help with connecting with and marketing to local small businesses. “The biggest challenge for us in any market we want to enter is always to localize the service in terms of language, currency, sign up process as well as finding the right distribution channels,” de Geer notes. “We live in a globalized world but to be successful you still need to act local. For those reasons, we believe our strategic partnership with Santander will be very valuable.”

For Santander, it will be one more way of picking up and locking in customers at a time of disruption across the financial services industry, as behemoths like Visa find themselves disrupted by much smaller startups, with everything else in between. “This partnership extends our offering of payment methods available on Banco Santander’s platform globally, and strengthens our position as the leading bank for SMEs,” noted Jorge Alfaro Lara, deputy general director of payment systems at Banco Santander Mexico, in a statement. “We are pushing the boundaries of banking with relevant technological innovation that helps small and medium businesses.”

Image: Flickr

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Buried in the ongoing PRISM debacle, there was actually some hopeful news out of Washington D.C. for startups this week.

The Supreme Court ruled this week that naturally occurring genes can’t be patented, which should be a boon for the host of emerging gene testing and patenting companies that are coming out of the Valley. Silicon Valley VCs like Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, Felicis Ventures and SV Angel have been making more bets in the space, on the assumption that biology is becoming a space that can be attacked by software.

In the case, a company called Myriad Genetics had acquired patents on BRCA1 and BRCA2, two genes that are strongly correlated with breast and ovarian cancer. Because of their patents, the cost of testing for those genes had been pushed higher, sometimes beyond the $3,000 range. That would have made it too expensive for many middle- and low-income women to learn if they were at risk for the cancers.

At the same time, other human genes were being scooped up with somewhere north of 20 percent of all human genes being covered by patents, according to the National Society of Genetic Counselors. The leading gene patent holders are unsurprisingly pharmaceutical giants like DuPont and GlaxoSmithKline, that startups would have a financially hard time competing against in courts.

The court ruled that human genes can’t be patented, but that synthetic genes can be protected.

Now that naturally occurring human genes can’t be patented, expect gene testing companies to benefit broadly with lower-cost products across the board. The costs for full human genome sequencing have already fallen to about $8,000 today from $100 million in 2011.

One of the remaining barriers preventing lower-cost testing has been whether consumers would be on the receiving end of high licensing fees to the patent owners of these genes. Patent holders like Myriad could also monopolize the testing market for these genes too, which would have also forced prices higher.

One company that I’ve written about, Counsyl, tests prospective parents for any hereditary diseases they might pass onto their children like Tay-Sachs Disease. They’ve gotten such broad adoption in medical clinics across the U.S. that they’re now testing for approximately 2 percent of all births in the country every year.

While CEO Ramji Srinivasan didn’t want to comment for this story, you could expect that gene testing companies which don’t currently offer tests linked to patented genes to start considering offering them. 23andMe also didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

At the same time, the host of emerging synthetic biology startups won’t suffer either since the court ruled that synthetic DNA and cDNA or complementary DNA that is synthesized from messenger RNA, can be patented.

“For me, it never made sense that you can patent genes from nature,” said Omri Amirav-Drory, who is the CEO of Genome Compiler, a company that makes software where you can design your own synthetic DNA. “It does say that synthetic DNA is patentable, which means that if one designs a novel sequence…. it will be patentable. That makes a bit more sense as you’ve made this novel sequence yourself.”

But maybe, synthetic biology patents will become less relevant anyway — just like software patents — as computational genetic design power increases, according to Austen Heinz, who runs Cambrian Genomics. He thinks synthetic gene patents may eventually become outmoded in the same way that software patents seem obsolete because the slow and often bureaucratic patent application process can’t keep up with the pace of change in the industry.

“Think of Windows 95′, 98 or Vista,” he said. “Like in the software business, synthetic biology companies will need to ship an updated improved OS (i.e. genome) every few years to stay competitive.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

“No other university in the world has so profoundly shaped our modern age,” New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said today in his commencement speech at Stanford University. Bloomberg’s speech was relevant to both the tech and Stanford communities, and often self-serving, as he touched on entrepreneurship, immigration reform, and marriage equality.

Bloomberg said Stanford has helped everyone in the country move forward, and likened Leland Stanford’s pioneering spirit to present-day entrepreneurs moving to Silicon Valley and New York City.

“Stanford is known for its bold entrepreneurial spirit,” a characteristic shared by Bloomberg, said Stanford President John Hennessy. As Hennessy introduced Bloomberg, the crowd lightheartedly booed Bloomberg’s Harvard MBA.

Hennessy praised many of Bloomberg’s accomplishments as mayor, but declined to mention the NYC tech campus, which Stanford withdrew its bid from.

“We had hoped that Stanford itself might help lead our tech boom in New York City. That didn’t work out — no hard feelings — but I think in the end, it will,” Bloomberg said.

Bloomberg talked up the NYC tech scene and urged grads to work there.

“I believe that more and more Stanford graduates will find themselves moving to Silicon Alley, not only because we’re the hottest new tech scene in the country, but also because there’s more to do on a Friday night than go to the Pizza Hut in Sunnyvale,” he said. “And you may even be able to find a date with a girl whose name is not Siri. Stanford graduates thrive in New York City–because both places thrive on innovation and entrepreneurialism.”

The Mayor moved on to discussing entrepreneurship, both from a broad perspective and from his personal experiences.

“Technological disruption drives innovation. And the more disruption there is, the better markets perform and the harder it is for monopolies to survive,” Bloomberg said. His comments are interesting in the wake of many high-profile battles between startups like Airbnb and Uber and New York City regulators.

“No one called us a startup or a tech company. They just called me crazy,” Bloomberg said about the founding of Bloomberg LLP.

“Work hard, take risks, follow your passion, embrace innovation,” he urged graduates. “The secret of success isn’t really a secret. It’s just that many people look for a shortcut…the American dream has no shortcuts and no endpoint. It is the freedom you have to chart your own journey.”

The mayor then discussed his work with the Partnership for a New American Economy, FWD.us, and the tech community in pushing for immigration reform.

“If those in Washington had any sense at all, they would be begging you to stay here in the U.S. But instead, our immigration laws may force some of you to leave in the months and years ahead,” he said. ”It is the most backward economic policy you could possibly come up with,” he said to his loudest round of applause. “Every STEM student graduating today should have a green card stapled to their diploma.

“I hope you will make your voices heard,” he added, telling the crowd to call their elected representatives about immigration reform.

Bloomberg’s speech was at times highly political, but overall had a solid message for the class of 2013. I wonder how effective his efforts to talk up the New York tech scene will be; in my experience, most Stanford students and recent graduates already know that they could have more fun in New York than Sunnyvale, but still keep taking jobs in the area.

In my opinion, Newark Mayor Cory Booker gave a better speech in his 2012 address; Booker, a Stanford alumnus, spoke more to the entire graduating class, rather than focusing mostly on tech, and his references to his own Stanford experiences felt more genuine than Bloomberg’s heavily-researched, buzzwordy references.

And of course, I imagine it will be a while before another speaker comes close to Steve Jobs’ famous 2005 address, which a reader has linked to in the comments.

Bloomberg also spoke about marriage equality and the civil rights movement. He has already been in town meeting with tech folks, like SV Angel’s David Lee, and the Bloomberg “Next Big Thing Summit” starts tomorrow in Half Moon Bay.

You can read Bloomberg’s full prepared remarks here, and you can watch the full commencement ceremony below. Hennessy introduces Bloomberg right before the one-hour mark if you want to skip ahead.

Pic via Steve Case.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Fancy, the one-time Pinterest competitor which has long since set its sights on social e-commerce, is expanding its reach today with the launch of its internationalization efforts. The company is now making its service available in 30 languages and is shipping its products worldwide.

Going forward, Fancy will automatically detect which language to use based on browser settings or device settings. However, web users will also be able to go into the Preferences menu at the top of the screen on the desktop site and change that selection if they choose.

According to Fancy COO Michael Silverman, the company is also handling logistics and customer service locally, as well. He explains that Fancy had been seeing a lot of demand from non U.S. audiences, which is what prompted these changes.

“Just over 50 percent of our users are domestic and the other half is international – including Europe, the Middle East, and Asia,” says Silverman. “Outside of the U.S., there are a bunch of young shoppers on mobile devices who want to shop this way…and we are the only ones doing this.”

That statement could be misinterpreted to mean that young, international shoppers want to buy products using their mobile phone and Fancy is the only social shopping site available to them. That’s not true, of course. What is true is that many of the top competitors in this social shopping market – product discovery sites like Polyvore, Wanelo, or eBay-owned Svpply, for example – link out to other e-commerce sites on the internet, which is not always an ideal experience.

The resulting link may be dead, the product may be sold out, or you find that the company doesn’t ship to your country (or charges so much for international shipping, that you wouldn’t want to bother). On Fancy, users are buying directly from its own website and checkout directly there, too.

That being said, Fancy still has some tough competition.

In the U.S., its iPhone app is ranked #237 in the “Lifestyle” section, behind eBay Fashion (#130), Polyvore (#47) and Wanelo (#18), as well as hot, young adult e-commerce stores like ModCloth (#108), and brick-and-mortars gone mobile like American Eagle (#95) or Nordstrom (#94). However, it is a bit ahead of Pose (#305) and Svpply (#389).

And a quick (non-scientific) look at its web traffic shows similar trends in terms of stateside competition, at least. It’s closely tied with Wanelo, for example, which now has over 8 million registered users according to its website.

Officially, Silverman says Fancy has over 7 million registered users worldwide and 12 million uniques across all platforms (web and mobile) as of last month.

(Note that Fancy had until recently been thefancy.com. It now redirects to Fancy.com, but there’s no data on that URL.)

It makes sense that Fancy would try to shift its battle to the world’s stage instead, by focusing on growing its footprint in other areas where competition may not be as fierce.

The company has been experimenting in other directions as well. Earlier this year, it acquired Samplrs.com, an artisanal foods seller, which Fancy used to beef up its Fancy box subscription service. As for all those acquisition rumors we keep hearing (with unsubstantiated reports ranging from Apple to Yahoo), Silverman says only “I don’t know why you are hearing that, it’s not something that is coming up in discussion over here.” Hmm.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

CodeAcademy has been a huge story in the last couple of years. Now a new player is emerging with a complimentary real-world model. Code Club, a UK network of volunteer led after school coding clubs, is launching a new open source Code Club World framework to give every child in the world the chance to learn to code. This will provide project materials and a volunteering framework to support the running of after-school coding clubs.

The project is backed by Google, CodeAcademy, and Mozilla and the first international Code Club World clubs are set to launch in Luxembourg and Kiev.

Code Club World will provide all of the Code Club teaching materials in plain text form in English, uploaded to a special Code Club World page on Github, for programmers and developers to download and translate into local languages. There will be tips and practical advice on building a Code Club.

Code Club founder, Clare Sutcliffe said they’ve had people contact them from all over the globe asking if they can set up a Code Club in their country. “We’re a small operation here in the UK, so we’re been unable to support anyone outside the UK. But, we’ve been listening and we don’t feel that Code Club should be restricted to just this small island. Which is why we’re incredibly excited, on our first birthday with over 800 active Code Clubs set up in the UK, to launch the Code Club World framework for the developer and programmer community to make a difference globally.”

Zach Sims, co-founder of CodeAcademy added, “It’s great to see Code Club open to the world. We’ve seen the impact coding has on children first hand at CodeAcademy, and we are excited to watch Code Club open in more countries.”

Code Club World will write a new set of projects every school term and post them to the Github page, and will launch with French, Brazilian Portuguese, Ukrainian and Turkish with more to follow.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Lamoda, the Russian online fashion site incubated by the Samwer Brothers’ Rocket Internet, is upgrading its wardrobe. On Tuesday, the company is announcing a new injection of $130 million — understood to be a record round of funding for a Russian ecommerce site, passing the $100 million that Ozon, Russia’s Amazon, picked up in 2011. This latest round was led by Access Industries, the VC and holding company controlled by Len Blavatnik, with participation also from Rocket Internet regulars, Summit Partners and Tengelmann Ventures.

Like these two, Access Industries is also a repeat Rocket Internet investor, with stakes in Pinterest clone Pinspire and home furnishings site Westwing. Last May, Blavatnik and Access Industries also put $200 million as a direct investment into Rocket Internet itself. The company has told us that today’s investment is separate and new.

“Lamoda is a dynamic e-commerce company with strong growth and an experienced management team,” noted Blavatnik in a statement on the investment.

Niels Tonsen, one of the German co-founders and the CEO of Lamoda, tells TechCrunch that the funding will be used to continue expanding the company into more of Russia and adjacent markets like Ukraine.

Riding the double trends of a growing middle class and a rising population of internet users — Russia is currently ranked as the largest internet market in Europe by comScore with 61.3 million consumers — Lamoda competes against the likes of Ozon, as well as KupiVIP and a number of smaller sites. The addressable market in the whole of the Russian-speaking world counting other CIS states, Tonsen notes, is 200 million. It also fits with the Samwers’ wider focus on fast-growing emerging markets where large U.S. players like Amazon or eBay have yet to make significant inroads — although eBay has set a goal to focus much more on Russia, and Amazon is now also getting more active in the country.

Like its rivals, Lamoda aggregates and resells clothes and accessories from some 800 brands — 1 million products in all — and also runs a logistics operation to deliver them, called Lamoda Express.

Russia, as we have pointed out before, has a notoriously inefficient postal service, and so the bigger ecommerce companies tend to take matters into their own hands and run both logistics and delivery themselves, along with a cash-on-delivery payment scheme because credit card penetration is also low. Lamoda’s aim, says Tonsen, is to offer its courier service in over 25 cities by the end of this year, from its current number of 10.

“Our company had very good traction in recent months,” he tells TechCrunch. “Things are going well on delivery platform and in our warehouse, so now is the right time to continue building the service.”

The company is not releasing any revenue figures, nor will it say whether it has become profitable yet. But Tonsen points out that its 1 million customers make 20 million visits per month to its two sites (there is a second in Kazakhstan), and that it has a “multiple three-digit million run rate, and growing by a couple of hundred percentage points per year.” Some 15% of its traffic comes via mobile devices and is rising, he adds.

Today’s round comes on the heels of a funding round announced just in September 2012, which was reportedly between $40 million and $80 million and led by JP Morgan, another big Samwer backer. Before that, there was an investment of an undisclosed amount made by Rocket Internet and the Samwers themselves. Other Russian backers of the Samwers include Yuri Milner’s DST, which also invests in Rocket Internet, but not publicly in any individual company.

One area that Tonsen says today’s investment will not be used is in acquisitions. “We are a believer of building things ourselves, such as what we’ve done with fulfilment and sales,” he says. “We have a private label, and we will continue to push into that part.” Other investments — and a common focus for online fashion sites — may get made in technologies that will help Lamoda offer better visualizations for internet shoppers to pick fits and looks they’re more likely to keep than return.

And like other companies in the Samwer portfolio, Lamoda may work with other Rocket Internet startups. “We’re considering eerything that could make sense,” he says. “But some like Payleven, which relies on mobile payments with cards, wouldn’t make that relevant at the moment here.”

Lamoda is a good news story today for Rocket Internet, but it wasn’t always this way. Today’s funding and growth are turnaround tales for the company, which once was something of an embarrassment for Rocket Internet. In 2011, an email surfaced from Oliver Samwer admitting early mistakes when first launching the company, and calling for a more aggressive strategy as a result — a “blitzkrieg,” in his words. That may bristle with some critics of the Samwers, but ironically, it looks like, for now at least, it has paid off for Lamoda and the Samwers’ Russian ambitions.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Indian housing marketplace, Housing.co.in has expanded out of its home base of Mumbai into another major Indian city, Bangalore—its fifth city in the country.

The company, which operates similarly to Trulia and Zillow, provides a real estate search site which displays a visual map of available housing for rent or sale. The search results are filtered by how many rooms are available per property, and there are photos for each listing as well.

Housing.co.in just received $2.5 million from Nexus Venture Partners from the latter’s newly-raised, India-focused fund of $270 million.

Co-founder Advitiya Sharma said the team plans to use its new funding to expand its data science teams. The eventual goal is for its teams to use the housing data collected to display new metrics like area-based pricing, listing decay rates and ratings on neighborhoods, to name some.

This round of financing is its fourth in the past year since its birth. The company has never canvassed for funding since it was started in June 2012, Sharma said.

Besides Bangalore and Mumbai, the site also serves Gurgaon, Pune and Hyderabad.

In spite of its age, Housing.co.in has already crossed 200 employees. The tech team is just 13 people-strong, however, but it will add 21 more engineers from the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) within the month. These will add to about 30 IIT-educated engineers already employed, said Sharma.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Turkish authorities have arrested 25 protesters for the high crime of using Twitter. Amid widespread violent clashes, police rounded up netizens on Tuesday night for “spreading untrue information.” Embattled Turkey Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has labeled social media “the worst menace to society,” saying of Twitter, “The best example of lies can be found there.”

Social media has been an essential tool for Turkish protesters to skirt the tight-lipped government-run media. “The Turkish media should be ashamed. For the past 48 hours, the people have been waging a struggle and you have not reported anything about it. Shame on you,” said Fatih Akin, a prominent Turkish film director.

Indeed, over the weekend, government-run newspaper, Sabah, splashed the front page with a story of the Prime Minister receiving an award for combating smoking and made no mention of the country-wide protests that have been front-page headlines around the world.

Below are a few of the Vines and Instagram photos that protesters have shared of the harsh government crackdowns and large student uprisings.

Shifting fences and water cannons. A Vine view of events in turkey. #turkey #occupygezi vine.co/v/b3amzhdEFiZ

—
Amin Musa (@aminmusa) June 02, 2013

Saint Benoit! #dayangeziparki #occupygezi #bubirsivildirenis vine.co/v/b356YEmje1l

—
Başak Kaya (@agizmatematigi) June 03, 2013

[photo link]

Research by NYU Politics Ph.D. candidates Pablo Barberá and Megan Metzger have found that, unlike past protests such as Egypt, nearly all of the geo-located tweets are coming from within Turkey (90 percent). In other words, social media is a tool for the protestors themselves, not just a medium to show solidarity from citizens abroad.

And the protesters seem to be making friends in the hacking community. Early reports show that the hacktivist collective Anonymous and the Syrian Electronic Army, infamous for its hacks of several mainstream newspaper Twitter feeds, have joined the fight and have attacked Turkish government websites.

This is an ongoing story, and we’ll update as more information comes in.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Kuapay, a startup offering a consumer mobile wallet application and accompanying loyalty platform for merchants, is rolling out an upgraded version of its mobile app today. The app focuses on improved speed, security and a new user interface that makes it easier for users to track their credit card details, as well as discover nearby local merchants that support the Kuapay service.

Based in Santa Monica, Calif., the company was founded in 2011 by Joaquin Ayuso de Paul, previously the co-founder of Tuenti, which sold to Telefonica for $100 million. The company uses an interesting combination of QR codes, barcodes, NFC or manual entry, any of which can be used at point-of-sale as an alternative to the credit card swipe. For security purposes, the app doesn’t actually transmit the credit card information between the phone and the register. Instead, the company integrates with POS systems like NCR, Micros, Aloha and others to complete the purchases.

Security is a big focus for the company, which PIN-protects its app and encrypts financial data in a Kuapay vault, which is also only accessible with device-specific, encrypted tokens. In the case of a lost device, users can remotely disable their accounts via the web, which would prevent anyone from using their credit card data, even if they could get past the PIN.

Around this time last year, Kuapay had 40 supporting merchants, mainly in the Santa Monica area. Today, it has grown its worldwide footprint to 600 locations. Instead of targeting the market region by region, however, Kuapay is spreading out in Europe, South America and Latin America, in addition to the U.S.

The company is running a pilot program with KFC here in the States, which includes trials in more than 100 KFC stores, a dozen of which are also testing a mobile ordering system that allows customers to pay ahead of their arrival at the store. It’s now piloting trials at two gas stations (76 Gas) which would allow drivers to pay without having to swipe their cards at the pump, too. And it has closed deals with several major retailers in Europe, including two large pizza delivery chains. Meanwhile, in Chile, it has moved into production mode with three banks and the national processor in the country. (The company has $4 million in funding from a single, private investor in Chile, it should be noted).

Stateside, Kuapay is being used in Santa Monica, L.A., San Francisco and New York, primarily with small businesses like dry cleaners, coffee shops and bookstores, for example. In the updated version of the application, users can now view all these merchants in their area and view their locations on the map, which is especially helpful in tracking food trucks using the service.

Though Kuapay has some significantly sized deals under its wing now, the company’s efforts in attacking a worldwide market instead of growing region by region may find it struggling to gain consumer awareness and adoption. Shoppers already have far too many alternative ways to pay on hand, including Square and its overseas clones, PayPal, Google Wallet, and NFC-based initiatives, such as U.S. carrier-backed Isis, plus mobile payments services from leading credit card companies and banks. None have yet to establish a significant traction at point-of-sale — consumers still just swipe their cards or pay with cash. The fragmented mobile payments market is due for consolidation, which means smaller players like Kuapay may either get swept up by larger firms, or find themselves in need of a new strategy.

On that front, Kuapay has another potential area of expertise it could fall back on, as it turns out. The company is supporting e-commerce transactions, too — in Europe with the pizza companies, but with a few major retailers here in the U.S., as well. De Paul says he’s not able to disclose which U.S. e-retailers are on board, saying only that the deals are “in the works” now and we’ll hear more about those soon.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

When many people hear “wealth management,” they think of elite advisors meeting old money clients at the country club, or decades-old firms with big names such as Fidelity or Schwab. But in the years ahead, one Silicon Valley startup is aiming to shake up that establishment — and just has raised a nice chunk of new funding to help.

Personal Capital, the online-oriented personal wealth management platform company, has taken on $25 million in a new round of funding led by Crosslink Capital with the participation of asset management giant BlackRock and previous investors Institutional Venture Partners (IVP) and Venrock. The round, which serves as Personal Capital’s Series C, brings the total amount invested in the nearly four year old company to $52.3 million.

In an interview this week, Personal Capital’s CEO Bill Harris, whose history in the financial software space includes time as CEO of both Intuit and PayPal, said that the funding comes after some solid growth on both sides of Personal Capital’s business. The online side, which provides free asset management tools through the web, currently has more than 200,000 users with in excess of $20 billion assets being tracked on the platform. The financial advisory services side, which charge a commission and are provided on the phone or via email through Personal Capital’s team of full-time advisors, currently reaches more than 700 clients with nearly $200 million being managed.

Those numbers are encouraging for an upstart player in a space like wealth management. But Harris says he sees the opportunity in front of Personal Capital as much, much bigger. He said:

“This is the largest market I’ve ever encountered. Individually managed investable assets is a $32 trillion dollar market in the United States… that’s twice the GDP of the entire country. And nobody is dominating it. Even the biggest guys in the space — Fidelity, Schwab — they all have low single digit shares of the market.

What we’re building, consumer technology with customer-centric and holistic advice, I think this represents where the industry will go over next 10 to 15 years.”

In that same vein, when asked about whether Personal Capital has courted M&A offers along the way from bigger tech or finance firms, Harris says he’s focused on staying independent for the time being. “A lot of companies in Silicon Valley are not companies, they’re products. And once they’ve demonstrated the abilities of that product it’s time to be acquired,” he said. “I believe that the service we’re offering is broad and deep enough and the market we’re selling into is large enough that we have the opportunity to be a true company rather than just a product.”

In the near-term, the funding will also be put toward growing Personal Capital’s staff, which currently consists of some 70 full-time employees. The company is also set to open its first new satellite office outside of the San Francisco Bay Area, in Denver.

Overall, though, Harris said the plan is to stay the course. “We have built built the personal advisory piece and technology piece, and proven the economics of acquiring users and converting them to clients. At this point we have a formula which is working. The most important thing for us for the next year is to rinse and repeat.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch