article thumbnail

My First 16: Competing in a Crowd of Incumbents with Mercury’s Immad Akhund

Andreessen Horowitz

In this episode, a16z partner Seema Amble talks with co-founder and CEO of Mercury Immad Akhund about the idea of a minimum delightful product in fintech, doing the spreadsheet math on unit economics early on, and how to compete in a category already filled with incumbents. Immad Akhund: Sure. And does anyone care?

article thumbnail

The Breakout Tech Company Of 2018

Haystack

As a little tradition on this blog, I’ve singled out companies starting in 2013 with Stripe ; there was Snap back in 2014; Slack in 2015; took a break in 2016, as I wasn’t inspired to select one then; and last year, 2017, was Coinbase. 5/ The Enduring Allure Of Platform Potential: Revenue is important.

Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Argentinian fintech infrastructure startup Geopagos leaves the boot straps behind with $35M funding round

TechCrunch

Founded in 2013, the Argentinian startup serves as a white label infrastructure software provider, with the aim of giving businesses the ability to launch financial services. Geopagos , a payments infrastructure startup based in Buenos Aires, has raised $35 million in a round led by Riverwood Capital.

startup 84
article thumbnail

Together raises $20M to build open source generative AI models

TechCrunch

There’s scores of competition, including incumbents like OpenAI and Anthropic. Prakash previously founded social media search platform Topsy, which was acquired in 2013 by Apple, where he later became a senior director. ” He has a point — insofar as incumbents are feeling the pressure, at least.

article thumbnail

So much fintech M&A

TechCrunch

Jason Furtado and Stephan Richter founded Boston-based Shoobx in 2013, according to Crunchbase. ” And this line was the classic motivation for all incumbents buying fintechs: “Why not just bring it in to our platform and get it to customers as quickly as possible?”. billion, had cut 10% of its staff.

article thumbnail

The Blockbuster Software M&A Market of 2018

Tomasz Tunguz

The increasing competition amongst incumbents. The corporate tax holiday. The growing sizes of the software market. The desire for continuing growth. The pace of innovation within software. A vibrant public market that is continuing to price companies aggressively. EV/NTM revenues. SAP/Callidus. Microsoft/LinkedIn. Oracle/Responsys.

article thumbnail

Disrupting Finance From Above: Wealthfront

abovethecrowd.com

First, they believe that the current offerings from the financial incumbents are lacking. In 2013 there were 967 million FPS transactions. Regulation becomes the friend of the incumbent in highly regulated industries through a process known as regulatory capture. The basis of this argument is really two fold.