Welcome to week 51! One more week until we’ve covered a full years worth of awesome, high growth start-ups.
A partner shout out: Hedgehog Trivia
As a co-founder & CEO of Swapstack, a fully remote organization from the start, I know from experience that it is extremely hard to build a consistent and sustainable culture. While there are many aspects of building a healthy culture, one hugely important focal area is…fun. Teams who have fun together, and laugh together, are more likely to work well together. (I don’t have stats on this, but I dare you to tell me that’s not true!).
Hedgehog Trivia is one of many awesome companies who helps remote first (and hybrid) teams have fun & exciting virtual events together, to build bonds and have fun!
The company hosts live virtual trivia games for remote teams. These events are designed with challenging but approachable questions to get the entire team interacting and having fun. Their professional hosts are great at entertaining and engaging the whole group and provide a much more immersive experience than Zoom-based trivia games can deliver.
If you run a remote organization, I definitely suggest you check them out!
This weeks companies:
Company: Blip Labs, Inc.
Founder: Michael Bank
Raise Details: Raising $3m seed round, $850k committed.
Vertical: Fintech
Business Model: B2B2C
1-Liner: The developer-first bill pay API with automatic user enrollment and engagement
Description: 74% of consumers want centralized bill pay experiences, but they hate using existing ones because of insufficient bill pay infrastructure. This represents >$8b opportunity as traditional bill pay is terrible to integrate for fintechs/banks and fails to enroll/engage users. We built the only bill pay system that’s effortless to integrate, automatically enrolls users, and keeps them engaged.
Traction Indicators:
Launched in January 2022
5 signed customers with a combined 150k transaction accounts.
Those 5 customers are projected to generate $1.8m in ARR.
On average a transaction account generates $12 in ARR, and we project an additional $69 per year per transaction account from offer conversions.
Company: Klanto
Founder: Trilok Hebbur
Raise Details: We are tranching our round. 35% of the 1st tranche is in the bank.
Current investors include:
- Shamir (Founder of Sila Money and Bank Simple)
- Markus (Founder of Taulia and Centrifuge)
- Experienced operators/founders from MasterCard, Coinbase, Paypal & Sezzle
Vertical: Fintech
Business Model: B2B
1-Liner: Corporate Cards + Payments for Canadian SMBs
Description: We are building Klanto - A modern Financial OS for Canadian SMBS, starting with Corporate cards (Brex/Ramp for Canada).
Founders:
- Trilok: 15+ years experience across various roles (12+ years as an entrepreneur). Have generated millions of $$$ in revenues from SMBs and built teams from scratch.
- Divya: 15+ years as a full stack developer and has worked with all major Canadian banks in the past (RBC, CIBC, and BMO).
Early Team:
- Raj: IIT Madras grad with 17+ years experience. Worked with FinTechs such as Wave App.
- Sahil: Full-stack developer. Won Bug Bounty from PayTm (Indian FinTech Decacorn.)
Traction Indicators:
Platform built/launched in 4 months with < $50,000 spent.
Ten businesses in closed beta (~120 cards generated and ~400 transactions, $50,000 TPV, $1000 Revenue).
80+ businesses on the waitlist (projected $4 Million in aggregate card spend resulting in $700K in ARR).
That’s all for this week!
Jake