Pipe Taps $60 Million Seed Extension
Ben Bergman
Ben Bergman is the newsroom's senior reporter, covering venture capital. Previously he was a senior business reporter and host at KPCC, a senior producer at Gimlet Media, a producer at NPR's Morning Edition, and produced two investigative documentaries for KCET. He has been a frequent on-air contributor to business coverage on NPR and Marketplace and has written for The New York Times and Columbia Journalism Review. Ben was a 2017-2018 Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Economic and Business Journalism at Columbia Business School. In his free time, he enjoys skiing, playing poker, and cheering on The Seattle Seahawks. Follow him on Twitter.
Los Angeles-based Pipe Technologies, Inc. announced Wednesday it has raised $60 million in equity and asset financing as an extension to the $6 million seed round it closed in February.
Launched last September, Pipe enables software as a service (SaaS) companies with recurring revenues to tap into their deferred cash flows by getting a cash advance against the full annual value of software subscriptions. Trading limits on the platform range from $10,000 to several million dollars per month, depending on the size of companies.
The round was led by Fin VC with participation from new investors Tribe Capital, Uncorrelated Ventures, Lachy Groom and KSD Capital, and existing investors Craft Ventures, Fika Ventures, and MaC Ventures. The funding will allow Pipe to expand into new markets.
"We believe Pipe's subscription finance platform will radically transform the global SaaS business model, providing liquidity that will generate a tidal wave of growth and innovation for SaaS companies and positioning subscription contracts as a new and highly valued asset class for global investors," said Peter Ackerson, Investment Partner at Fin VC.
Also on Wednesday, Pipe unveiled its subscription financing platform and announced that Michal Cieplinski will serve as the company's chief operating officer and chief legal officer. Previously, Cieplinski served as general counsel at LendingClub, a publicly traded fintech company.
"Pipe already offers a unique value proposition to the booming SaaS industry, but the vision is much bigger than the work Pipe is doing today," Cieplinski said." We've started with reimagining funding, but ultimately want to be a larger one-stop solution for SaaS services."
From Your Site Articles
- Pipe Taps $60 Million Seed Extension - dot.LA ›
- Pipe Gets $6 Million to Launch SaaS Financing Platform - dot.LA ›
Related Articles Around the Web
Subscribe to our newsletter to catch every headline.
El Segundo-based telemedicine technology provider Cloudbreak Health and Florida-based UpHealth Holdings, a digital healthcare provider, announced they will combine and go public via a SPAC in a deal that values the combined companies at $1.35 billion.
Named UpHealth, Inc., the new company aims to streamline online health care by becoming a single provider of four different services: telehealth, teletherapy, a health care appointment and management system and an online pharmacy.
<p>UpHealth runs healthcare platform Thrasys Inc. and MedQuest Pharmacy, along with two other behavioral health companies. The merger with Cloudbreak, which under the pandemic expanded their interpretation services to remote medicine, will give the new company a foothold in almost 2,000 hospitals.</p><p>"What we wanted to do was form a business that could really be a digital infrastructure for health care across the continuum of care, right from home to hospital," said Jamey Edwards, the co-founder and CEO of Cloudbreak. Under the agreement, he will become the company's chief operating officer. </p><p>GigCapital2 expects the merger transaction to close at the start of Q1 2021. UpHealth will be publicly traded under the ticker "UPH" on the New York Stock Exchange. UpHealth's integrated care management platform serves over 5 million people, and is expected to reach 40 million over the next three years, according to the company.</p>
<img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://dot.la/media-library/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNDgyNzgyMy9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYzNDgxMDgyN30.BBOt2w5PHj-GHsDtBH4XQwpLHZa2BwLUc5sUZUrQwNs/image.jpg?width=980" id="b32f1" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="3f3a3b5e42958baca13aa7e4e68217da" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" alt="Jamey Edwards, Cloudbreak" />
Jamey Edwards, co-founder and executive director of Cloudbreak
<p>COVID-19 caused a meteoric growth in the use of telehealth services. In February, 0.1% of Medicare primary visits were provided through telehealth. In April, that number was nearly 44%, <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6943a3.htm" target="_blank">according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services</a>.</p><p><span></span>"Key stakeholders have seen and responded well to the benefits that telemedicine can bring, but they need a more comprehensive, integrated solution," said Al Gatmaitan, who has been named the co-chief executive officer of UpHealth. "This is what UpHealth focuses on, the adoption of digital health solutions well beyond the pandemic crisis."</p><p>The deal with the blank check company GigCapital2 gives the two digital health companies access to a wider network. UpHealth and its family of companies operate in 10 countries and their pharmacy has 13,000 e-prescribers in the U.S.</p>
<p><br/>UpHealth will use the Cloudbreak platform as part of their global telehealth services to provide patients with round-the-clock care under a variety of specialties, including telepsychiatry and tele-urology. UpHealth also has contracts internationally, to provide country-wide care in India, Southeast Asia and Africa.</p><p>Edwards joined Cloudbreak in 2008 when it went from public to private. It has raised $35 million in venture funds, most recently in the first quarter of this year scoring $10 million from Columbia Partners Private Capital. </p><p><em>Editor's note: An earlier version of this story identified Jamey Edwards as executive director of Cloudbreak, he is its CEO.</em></p>From Your Site Articles
- How Telemedicine Can Save Lives and Protective Equipment - dot.LA ›
- Is Telemedicine At a Tipping Point? L.A. Doctors Hope So - dot.LA ›
Related Articles Around the Web
Read more
Show less
The Case for Triller: The TikTok Competitor Approaching Unicorn Status, And Getting Big Breaks
Jul 31 2020
Fresh off of closing a $50 million round that valued the company at $300 million, Triller – headquartered in L.A. and with offices in New York, London and Paris – is now seeking $250 million at a valuation of $1.25 billion, according to executive chairman Bobby Sarnevesht. The short-form, user-generated video sharing app's momentum has picked up lately thanks to increased usage during the pandemic and the troubles of TikTok.
<p>"The numbers look crazy recently," said Anis Uzzaman, chief executive of Pegasus Tech Ventures, which invested several million dollars in the $50 million round. Those numbers include 120 million total downloads and 60 million monthly active users, Sarnevesht told dot.LA. </p><p>Triller's user count is now close to what Musical.ly's (now TikTok) was back <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/09/chinas-toutiao-is-buying-musical-ly-in-a-deal-worth-800m-1b/" target="_blank">when it was acquired by Chinese conglomerate ByteDance in 2017</a>, and as TikTok comes under more regulatory scrutiny, Uzzaman predicts that Triller will become "the American TikTok." </p><h2>How Could It Get There?</h2>
<img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://dot.la/media-library/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzUyNjQ0NS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY0NDcxNjYxM30.NIZ9Htq-tt3_k_0nUE4MDIX7AO8H4xbXnQ-dwKpqETY/image.jpg?width=980" id="62bb4" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="fed6922503c4c419ea01ad0d33a33de2" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
Triller executive chairman Bobby Sarnevesht.
<p>One clue lies in India. When <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/30/technology/india-china-tiktok.html" target="_blank">Narendra Modi banned TikTok and 58 other Chinese apps in June</a> amid escalating military tensions between the two countries, Triller's usage "went through the roof," Sarnevesht said. In early July, Triller <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6684933651794411520/" target="_blank">CEO Mike Lu wrote that his company had become the top iOS app in India "without spending a dime."</a></p><p>"We're seeing (Indian) users say they prefer Triller to TikTok, but just didn't know about it," Sarnevesht said.</p><p>To Uzzaman, Triller's ability to handle the surge of Indian users proved the strength of the platform's underlying technology. "I'm sure many other platforms would have choked with the new volume of clients," he said. With the "possibility of the same thing happening in the U.S.," Uzzaman feels confident that Triller would be ready for another upswing.</p>
<img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://dot.la/media-library/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzIxNjE0My9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYyODU1OTYyNH0.idWD75Hkmhk2hzcEyw8c94cL7UkErfPDAfv6xXRrKUo/image.png?width=1500&coordinates=965%2C347%2C965%2C347&height=2000" id="25068" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="65db52fdfc0610b27e569a3c4bac0ba1" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
Pegasus Tech Ventures chief executive Anis Uzzaman
Anis Uzzaman<p>TikTok, which <a href="https://www.theinformation.com/articles/bytedance-investors-discuss-tiktok-purchase?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=page" target="_blank">is reportedly the subject of preliminary discussions for a sell-off</a>, has a big head start. According to analytics firm SensorTower, it has been <a href="https://sensortower.com/blog/tiktok-downloads-2-billion" target="_blank">downloaded over 2 billion times</a>. TikTok's global user count is <a href="https://datareportal.com/social-media-users?rq=tiktok" target="_blank">estimated at over 800 million</a>. And <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bytedance-tiktok-exclusive/exclusive-bytedance-investors-value-tiktok-at-50-billion-in-takeover-bid-sources-idUSKCN24U1M9" target="_blank">a recent Reuters piece pegged its valuation around $50 billion</a>.</p><p>If TikTok is banned in the U.S. that would obviously put Triller in a place to pick up some ground. Four factors stand out that could shift the balance in Triller's favor.</p><h2>Privacy & Security</h2><p>The government isn't the only one concerned about privacy and security concerns, Uzzaman said.</p><p>"The market is getting more concerned about security and privacy," he said. "People are getting more vocal." Having Triller's teams based in "the top democracies in the world...definitely makes a huge difference."</p><p>Sarnevesht emphasized that Triller "treat(s) the face as an object – we don't map the face. Data is secure. We don't track geo-locations on where users are."</p><p>Concerns around whether TikTok shares data with the Chinese government, meanwhile, <a href="https://stratechery.com/2020/the-tiktok-war/" target="_blank">have been well documented</a>.</p>
<p><br/></p><h2><br/></h2><h2>Music First, Social Second
</h2><p>"Our business is music. It's in our DNA," said Sarnevesht. Uzzaman said this confers two key advantages. </p><p>One is Triller's product mix. Uzzaman pointed to Triller's "Step Up Challenge," a music battle where competitors can win prizes, and the TrillerFest virtual music festival, which attracted over 5 million viewers and participants this April. </p><p>"We have a music-centric, music-first app that has amazing creator tools," Sarnevesht said. "Amazing events. Concert series coming out in different locations and different genres. It's a very different destination for content users and producers and watchers." </p><p>That musical foundation has lately sprouted other kinds of content. "We're starting to see a tremendous influx of content…(like) cooking, practical jokes, and gaming," Sarnevesht added. </p><p>Another advantage to being music-first, Uzzaman said, is that musical stars like posting on the app. "Alicia Keys, Cardi B, Marshmello: they're regularly posting music videos in the app – we've never seen that in TikTok," he said. "Regular people can create music videos and have people watch them right next to Eminem…(It makes) people feel like they're celebrities." </p><p>"I think artists appreciate the organicness of Triller," Sarnevesht added. </p><h2>Partnerships
</h2><p>In line with Triller's music origins, it has long-term deals with the big three music labels and numerous music publishers. This enables Triller users to include songs from those rights holders' extensive catalogs without having to worry about copyright issues. </p><p>"What differentiates Triller is we've always had music licenses in place," said Sarnevesht. "It gives artists a platform to have their content in a place where it's not being stolen." </p><p>Conversely, <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/music/news/tiktok-and-nmpa-reach-a-global-partnership-agreement-exclusive/ar-BB176fnk" target="_blank">TikTok has mostly operated via short-term deals</a> with labels and publishers. It does, however, have <a href="https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/tiktok-inks-new-global-deal-with-believe-one-of-the-worlds-biggest-independent-music-companies/" target="_blank">a long-term deal with Believe, a big independent music company</a>, and it recently forged an agreement with the <a href="https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/tiktok-inks-global-multi-year-deal-with-music-publishers/" target="_blank">National Music Publishers' Association</a>. NMPA's President and CEO David Israelite isn't done negotiating; he <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CDOTK5Vh-DH/" target="_blank">posted a warning earlier this week on his Instagram that Triller should 'watch out,</a>' later elaborating that the company "<a href="https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/triller-warned-that-it-must-legitimize-its-business-by-properly-licensing-all-music-on-its-platform/" target="_blank">must legitimize its business by properly licensing all music on its platform.</a>"</p><p>Triller also has partnerships with Spotify and Apple Music. Jack Warning of Pegasus Ventures said these help boost user engagement. If a Triller user likes a song on the app, for instance, they can add it to a Spotify or Apple Music playlist. And users can pull songs from Spotify and Apple Music into Triller to make videos. </p><p>But "the biggest partnership that really got our attention," Uzzaman said, "was with Billboard." Alongside charts like the Billboard Hot 100, <a href="https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/chart-beat/9417698/billboard-triller-partner-weekly-top-triller-u-s-global-charts" target="_blank">it has begun publishing weekly charts of top songs from the Triller app</a>.</p><h2>Technology
</h2><p>There is "more technology behind (Triller) than people understand," said Uzzaman, who likened Triller to the earlier days of Google, when it was chasing the heels of Yahoo. He pointed to Triller's AI tools for editing videos, and protocols for helping brands advertise on the platform. </p><p>Among other features, Sarnevesht pointed to new, "game-changing" recommendation algorithms, and highlighted how <a href="https://techstartups.com/2019/10/24/ai-music-platform-triller-raises-new-funding-acquires-uk-based-mashtraxx/" target="_blank">Triller's 2019 acquisition of UK-based MashTraxx</a> came with "13 employees, 11 Ph.D's, all specializing in AI. One of them wrote a thesis on recommendation engines and AI in the short-form video space." </p><p>TikTok has no shortage of technology, which <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/29/21346390/tiktok-algorithm-moderation-policy-transparency-china" target="_blank">it has recently begun to share more openly</a>. But it is currently <a href="https://www.thewrap.com/triller-sues-rival-tiktok-patent-infringement/" target="_blank">being sued by Triller for patent infringement</a>, and <a href="https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/triller-sues-tiktok-for-patent-infringement/" target="_blank">potentially for antitrust as well</a>.</p><p>TikTok has <a href="https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/were-starting-to-see-a-generation-of-artists-born-and-raised-on-tiktok/" target="_blank">highlighted its relationships with creators as a competitive advantage</a>, which it is hoping to entrench with its <a href="https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/introducing-the-200-million-tiktok-creator-fund" target="_blank">recently announced creator fund</a>. But reports have indicated that <a href="https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2020-07-28/creators-leave-tiktok" target="_blank">TikTok creators are beginning to look elsewhere</a>, including to Triller.</p><p>Meanwhile, as Facebook builds its own TikTok competitor on Instagram called Reels, it has <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-seeks-to-reel-in-tiktok-creators-raising-stakes-in-social-media-rivalry-11595928600" target="_blank">reportedly offered big deals to entice TikTokkers to defect</a>. TikTok CEO <a href="https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/fair-competition-and-transparency-benefits-us-all" target="_blank">Kevin Mayer has called Reels a copycat product</a>, and pointed out that Facebook's previous "copycat Lasso failed quickly." </p><p>"The same thing can happen for Reels," noted Uzzaman. "Until they are playing in the market, there is no guarantee...Triller is already far ahead of anyone else in the U.S. market."</p><p>---</p><p><em>Sam Blake primarily covers entertainment and media for dot.LA. Find him on Twitter @hisamblake and email him at samblake@dot.LA</em><br/></p>From Your Site Articles
- The LA Dodgers Get Into Food Delivery - dot.LA ›
- Instagram Launches TikTok Competitor, Reels - dot.LA ›
Related Articles Around the Web
Read more
Show less
RELATEDTRENDING
