Ever wondered whether Ned Stark would have survived the Thanos snap?
Source: CNET
Qupital, a fintech startup that bills itself as Hong Kong’s largest trade financing platform for SMEs, has closed a $15 million Series A led by CreditEase FinTech Investment Fund (CEFIF), with participation from returning investors Alibaba Hong Kong Entrepreneurs Fund and MindWorks Ventures, both participants in its seed round. To date, Qupital has raised $17 million, including a seed round two years ago, and will use its latest funding to expand its supply chain financing products, launch in mainland Chinese cities and hire more people for its tech development and risk management teams.
CreditEase, which provides loans and other financial services for SMEs in China, will act as a strategic investor, aiding with Qupital’s geographic expansion. Existing investor Alibaba has already helped Qupital reach small businesses on its platform. Qupital will open branches in Chinese cities including Shanghai, Hangzhou, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, along with setting up a new technology center in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area for talent and tech development. In total, it will hire about 100 people for its Hong Kong office this year.
Founded in 2016, Qupital offers lending for SMEs that frequently have cash flow issues because they are in a cycle of waiting for invoices to be paid. Qupital’s loans cover most of the value of an invoice, then matches that with investors and funders who cover the cash with the expectation of a return. The company makes money by charging SMEs a service fee that is a fixed percentage of the total invoice value and then a discount fee, and taking a percentage of net gains made by investors.
Qupital has now processed 8,000 trades, totaling HKD $2 billion in value. It won’t disclose how many SMEs it has worked with, but co-founder and chairman Andy Chan says that number is in the hundreds.
Chan tells TechCrunch that in China, Qupital will not compete directly against traditional financial institutions, because it focuses on financing the Hong Kong business entities of Chinese companies in U.S. and Hong Kong currency, instead of onshore renminbi. It will also target SMEs underserved by traditional lenders, by using alternative data sources to determine their creditworthiness.
In a prepared statement, CEFIF managing director Dennis Cong said “The growing volume of SME and cross-border trading drives a huge demand for alternative financing for SME’s who are underserved in the market and opportunities for investors to earn a decent risk-adjusted return. We look forward to working with Qupital to broaden its source of capital base and create unparalleled investment opportunities for CreditEase.”
Source: TechCrunch
Glassdoor has released its latest gender pay gap data analysis. In the U.S., the unadjusted pay gap comes in at 21.4 percent, meaning women make just $0.79 for every $1 men earn.
But, when controlling for variables like age, education, location, experience, occupation and industry, the pay gap is 4.9 percent. That’s a slight improvement from three years ago, when Glassdoor did its first analysis. That means, women make about $0.95 cents for every $1 men make.
In the tech industry, there is an adjusted wage gap of 5.4 percent, meaning, men generally make 5.4 percent more than women. On an adjusted basis, men make 11.8 percent more money than women.
In technical roles, while the wage gap is shrinking, it’s still quite large. Across the U.S., 79 percent of all computer programmers are male, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The wage gap between men and women is 11.3 percent, which comes out to about $0.88 for every $1 men make. In the tech industry, referred to as information technology, the wage gap is 5.4 percent (about $0.95 for every $1).
The wage gap among computer programmers represents the largest pay gap shrink (among the 15 job occupations with the highest wage gaps) since 2016, where the wage gap was 28.3 percent and women made about $0.72 for every $1 men made.
Other jobs with high pay gaps include pilot (number 1), professor, branch manager, C-suite and chef. Perhaps the tech industry is getting slightly better with equal pay, but it’s rather disconcerting that the computer programmer role is still among the top 15 jobs with the largest pay gaps.
“Knowing the facts about the gender pay gap is critical to helping close the gap,” Glassdoor senior vice president and head of product and UX/design Annie Pearl said in a statement. “Combining knowledge with leveraging valuable resources is the next step to ensuring equal pay for equal work everywhere… We all have a part to play to close the pay gap.”
The industries with the widest wage gap (6.4 percent) are retail and media. That means women make $0.93 for every $1 men earn. With that, I’m signing off.
Source: TechCrunch
The triple threat match between Ronda Rousey, Charlotte Flair,and Becky Lynch has all the ingredients for pay-per-view success, but the real story is better than the TV drama.
Source: CNET
Huawei hopes the four cameras on the back of the P30 Pro will take down the Galaxy S10 Plus.
Source: CNET
HBO tweets out the victors of its game of social media.
Source: CNET
Everything we know about the Apple Card in one place.
Source: CNET
The Trump administration moves up its deadline for putting new boot prints in the lunar dust.
Source: CNET
Jon Sakoda needed to decompress, he says. The founder-turned-venture investor had logged a dozen years with the investing heavyweight New Enterprise Associates after selling his last startup to Symantec in 2006. And what he wanted by last summer was more time with his kids and less time with his phone, so he turned it off for three weeks.
“I can’t recommend it enough,” says Sakoda, who has since returned to work and is today taking the wraps off his new venture firm, Decibel, a term sometimes used to describe exponential changes in the power of sounds or signals sent through a network, and one that speaks to the “exponential power” of the firm’s network, says its new website.
While it’s tempting to poke fun at this claim, it appears from the outside to be true. Though Sakoda is the sole founding partner of Decibel — he says he’s looking to add investing professionals right now — not only does Decibel have the benefit of his extensive connections in Silicon Valley; it’s also majority backed by Cisco, the network gear maker that’s aggressively transforming itself into more of a software-focused company.
That translates into reach. Though Sakoda declines to comment on the exact size of Cisco’s investment or the fund’s overall composition, citing SEC restrictions, he tells us he’s working very collaboratively with the company, including its corporate venture arm, Cisco Investments.
He’s also working with some of the many founders to be swept into Cisco over the years via its brisk M&A strategy. For example, one of these, Jon Oberheide, a founder who sold his company, Duo Security, to Cisco for more than $2 billion last year, is currently working with one of Decibel’s portfolio companies already as an advisor.
Put into context, Oberheide is helping with half of Decibel’s portfolio, which includes the three-year-old, Vancouver-based cybersecurity startup CMD, which last month closed on $15 million in funding led by GV. (It’s this team that Oberheide is helping.) Decibel has also backed Blameless, a developer of software for site reliability engineers that announced $20 million in funding just last week led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Sakoda says more deals are in the works, and he explains that what he’s shopping for has little overlap with Cisco today but could eventually be a strategic fit for the corporate giant. For example, though Sakoda was involved in funding Snap on behalf of NEA, he says it’s not so likely he’ll be shopping for e-commerce or media startups for Decibel.
Absent these areas, though Sakoda suggests that anything goes as long as the company isn’t too far along. “We’re really going to be looking for startups trying to find product market fit and help with how to grow,” he explains. “If a company has lots of revenue and is already scaling, it’s probably too late for us.”
It makes a kind of sense, considering that Decibel itself has a ways to go to establish itself. Though an earlier SEC filing suggests the fund is targeting $500 million, a pool that will be structured like a traditional venture fund (“investments, personnel, and fund governance is all independent” from Cisco, says Sakoda), and though Decibel already has plans to write checks of between $5 million and $15 million to seed- and Series A-stage companies, ask Sakoda where the firm is based, and he’ll laughingly tell you he doesn’t quite know.
Though Decibel has (and takes advantage of) access to Cisco’s many offices, including six in San Francisco alone, Sakoda says he hasn’t “quite figured that out — yet. I’m working on it.”
Source: TechCrunch
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Source: Wired