Number26 Grabs $10.6 Million To Bring Its Bank Of The Future To Everyone

Ola, Uber’s Big Rival In India, Raises $400M To Grow To 200 Cities This YearIt feels like Number26 opened its doors yesterday, but the young startup just raised a $10.6 million Series A round (€10 million) from Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures, with Daniel S. Aegerter and existing investors Earlybird and Redalpine also participating. This represents Valar Ventures’ second investment in a European fintech startup — the VC fund also participated in TransferWise’s impressive $58 million round.
“We didn’t actually start fundraising — it was all inbound requests,” co-founder and CEO Valentin Stalf told me. “A lot of people contacted us, but these guys were actually the perfect match.”
As a reminder, Number26 participated in our Battlefield competition and told us that it wanted to create the best banking experience in Europe. Creating an account takes minutes and everything happens on your phone. After that, will receive a MasterCard that works particularly well with Number26’s app. For example, when you use your Number26’s MasterCard, you receive a push notification to make sure that the transaction was approved and there is no fraudulent use. You can also disable features or set limits so that you don’t have any surprise. For example, you can disable online payments if you don’t plan on using this card for your favorite ecommerce websites.
And even more important, opening and maintaining an account is free and lets you pay anywhere in the world without any foreign transaction fee. Instead, the startup makes money from MasterCard’s tiny cut on every transaction. While Number26 only accepts German and Austrian customers for now, 8,500 people signed up already and 15,000 others are waiting for an invite.
I opened a Number26 account to test it out, and was really impressed by the overall experience. Opening an account takes minutes, push notifications are incredibly useful and being able to pay in other currencies without any fee is a killer feature.
Until now, the company didn’t do any marketing to attract all these customers. Number26 wants to spend a part of this round on marketing and build a solid brand to compete with banking heavyweights. For instance, Number26 could boost its growth by giving a bit of cash for user referrals.
Today’s round is also essential when it comes to growing the team, and in particular Number26’s customer support team. The startup is slowing down its growth with invites on purpose so that it can provide a solid customer support experience. The team of 30 employees should double in the next 12 months.
Existing customers can also expect a few new features. “We are going to work a lot on bringing more intelligence into the account,” Stalf said. “Currently, if you look at the timeline of your transactions, it’s completely static. Going forward, we want to inform you more actively when important transactions come in.”
Other new features include a better fraud management system by comparing the geolocation of your smartphone and the geolocation of the transaction in real time. The MasterCard will also be compatible with Maestro ATMs in the coming months. Budgeting features should get an upgrade as well as the company is working on a more precise automatic clustering system.
When asked about European expansion plans, Stalf told me that his company is really focused on Germany and Austria for now. But Number26 should come to other countries eventually. “With this round, we will open up one or two other countries in Europe,” he said. “But we are actually not sure what country, and it’s probably not happening in the next 6 months.”

By: Unknown On 02:58

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Nintendo Partners With DeNA To Bring Its Games And IP To Smartphones

Rakuten To Put Its Bitnet Investment To Work And Accept Bitcoin WorldwideNintendo is finally bringing its games and characters to mobile after the company surprised the tech world with an alliance with Japanese mobile gaming firm DeNA.
The duo announced a collaboration that will see them jointly develop games for “smart devices.” Secondly, a service that lets users play games across a variety of devices, including mobile devices, PCs and Nintendo’s own consoles like the 3DS and Wii U is slated to launch “in the fall of 2015″.
Nintendo said that it will create new titles from the ground up, rather than porting existing games from its consoles so as to “ensure the quality of game experience that consumers expect” from the coming together.
In what may be music to Nintendo fans — like this one — the companies said that “all Nintendo IP will be eligible for development and exploration by the alliance.” That said, the duo will not flood the market with vast numbers of games, the approach appears to be qualitative rather than quantitative.
At a joint-press conference, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata revealed that talks began as early as the summer of 2010, but became more concrete last year. Iwata admitted that Nintendo wasn’t able to transition to its handheld consoles “as smoothly as expected.” He denied that the growth of mobile means that the business of dedicated games consoles is dead but said it would be a waste to not look at opportunities with smartphones.
“We have come to hold a stronger passion and vision for the video games console” with this decision, Iwata said. Essentially, he believes that compelling mobile games can act as a “bridge” that pushes more consumers to buy dedicated Nintendo games consoles.
The alliance will see both sides make 22 billion yen ($181 million investments) in each other. That corresponds to around 10 percent of DeNA stock for Nintendo, while DeNA is picking up 1.24 percent of Nintendo.
Founded in 1999, DeNA may be less known outside of Asia, but it is a multi-billion dollar mobile games firm in its own right. It initially emerged with the growth of web-based mobile games in Japan and its Mobage service, but over the past few years it has transitioned into apps making acquisitions along the way, including the $400 million purchase of Ngmoco, and social games maker Punch.
That transition hasn’t been easy for the company, particularly with competition from the growth of new, dedicated mobile gaming firms that have focused on apps from day one. DeNA’s most recent financials saw revenue dip 17 percent year-on-year to $287 million. Operating profit was down 55 percent to $43 million, so it’s fair to say that this tie-in with Nintendo could be a very important turning point.

By: Unknown On 14:09

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Y Combinator-Backed Bright Aims To Bring Solar Power To Mexico

Jonah Greenberger envisions Mexico’s rooftops covered in cost-effective, environmentally friendly, dark blue solar panels. The 28-year-old founder of Y Combinator-backed solar power startup Bright left his job working in fossil fuels at Chevron to work on lowering exorbitant energy costs for the people of Mexico.

“The third world pays the most for electricity. Mexico has the most potential to be disrupted because it’s really sunny there,” he told me over the phone.

The electric system in Mexico is both expensive and complicated. The government subsidizes the poorest people, and the wealthier citizens end up paying the most. Fees can get up to over $4,000 USD in the hot month of August when not subsidized, according to the Mexican Federal Electric Commission.

Solar energy could lower power bills by 20 to 50 percent per household, according to Bright. It works by installing the panels for free and then providing a subscription service similar to what we do here for cable television. Private investors purchase the solar panels and front the installation costs. The investors then lease the use of the panels to the homeowner. The investor makes their money back on the power generated from the panels.
Jonah Greenberger, Bright Founder

Y Combinator tends to take on co-founding teams. Greenberger is an unusual choice as a sole founder. But it seems the idea for Bright was enticing enough to bring him into the batch.

“I think that inexpensive sources of planet-friendly energy are one of the most important things for us to pursue,” Y Combinator president Sam Altman said in regards to why he chose Bright. “The correlation of quality of life and cost of energy is huge.  Also, Jonah’s first market seemed like a very good decision, and we think energy businesses that innovate on financing are interesting.”

Bright competes with one other solar provider in Mexico called Envolta. This company both builds and installs the panels and then finances them to customers. Bright doesn’t build the panels itself. Instead, it leverages a large contractor system in Mexico to install ready-made panels. Both companies ultimately own and then lease the panels to customers.

It seems a no-brainer to install something that won’t cost a dime and will lower your energy bill a ton. However, it’s not all sunshine. Bright needs to make sure the households that agree to installation will actually pay up each month. But the country has existed on a mostly cash system up until the last few years. That means there’s not a lot of repayment history to go on. Bright compensates for that with a built-in software system that pulls in data where it can find it from government systems and public databases.

I think that inexpensive sources of planet-friendly energy are one of the most important things for us to pursue.

— Sam Altman
The startup says it’s currently doing about one installation a day and believes it will hit 50 installations by demo day. That doesn’t seem like a lot when compared to app downloads, but to Greenberger that number is right on target to start netting the fledgling startup a six-figure profit by the end of the year.

One installation costs an investor about $10,000 to $20,000, depending on the contractor and area. Households then start to pay Bright about $250 per month on average for the use of power. Bright splits that payment with the private investor.

Households are allowed, based on the Bright contract, to cancel the service at any time. Should they do that, the investor may take a loss. Greenberger says this means Bright needs to carefully select those households that are the least likely to do that in order to lower risk for investors.

Greenberger would like to eventually build out the software so that it is easy for private investors and contractors to sell the service directly themselves. Though Mexico seemed the most profitable first choice to him, he also mentioned plans to expand into Chile and Brazil next.

By: Unknown On 03:42

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Magic Is A Startup That Promises To Bring You Anything — If You’re Willing To Pay For It

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SHARESNext StoryThis Adorable Robot Sits On Your Shoulders And Feeds You Tomatoes While You Run
Get sushi on a boat, a tiger at your door, or make your parking ticket vanish into thin air. An ambitious new startup says it will let you text for anything you want (and they do mean anything) as long as it’s legal, and it will magically come to you.
Just text 408-596-5017 and Magic, a texting service that seems to have blown up over the weekend, promises to deliver.
Magic is only 48 hours old, but we’re told it has already had over 17,000 text messages as of this morning. Someone added Magic to Product Hunt over the weekend and it was No. 1 on Hacker News within 20 minutes.
Requests have ranged from help getting out of court to a tiger delivered to a customer’s door, according to co-founder Mike Chen.
Magic seems to have blown up because of what I call

By: Unknown On 04:45

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Main Street Hub Lands $20M To Bring Social Media Marketing To Small Business

Main Street Hub, a company that helps mom and pop businesses run social media marketing, customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation recently announced it has received $20M in debt financing from Silicon Valley Bank.
The company has raised a total of $40M. The most recent funding before this announcement was $14M in Series B in January, 2014. It has 6000 subscribers who are paying an average of $350 per month using a tiered pricing model, according to company officials.
Most small business owners are swamped just trying to keep their businesses running. They have little time to deal with modern online marketing or monitoring their Yelp page reviews. That’s where Main Street Hub comes in.
For a monthly fee, Matt Stuart, co-CEO at Main Street Hub says his company does all the heavy lifting across online channels for these businesses.

By: Unknown On 01:11

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