Shares of , a provider of primary care clinics and telemedicine, closed up nearly 60 percent in first-day trading a month ago. Since then, it’s largely held on to those gains.

Subscribe to the Crunchbase Daily

, a benefits management focusing on fertility, meanwhile, has seen its shares roughly double from its initial offer price back in October. While the broader markets have swooned, Progyny has held strong.

Now, another well-funded health service company is betting investor enthusiasm for the space will trump market skittishness. , a service provider that serves as a kind of go-between for consumers, employers and health insurance companies, is seeking to raise up to $100 million in an IPO, according to a prospectus filed late Friday.

The ups and downs of IPOs

Like most venture-backed companies on the IPO path, Accolade is posting both strong growth and persistent losses. Its most recent financials are for the ninth-month period ending Nov. 30, for which it reported revenue of $88 million, and a net loss of $49 million. For the corresponding period a year earlier, revenue was $60 million, with the same net loss of $49 million. (Accolade operates on a fiscal year ending in February, so results for its last full fiscal year are not yet available.)

The company’s pitch to investors is that its platform will see continued large-scale adoption as health care plans and services become increasingly complicated for people to navigate. Its customers are primarily employers that deploy Accolade to provide employees and their families “a single place to turn for their health, healthcare, and benefits needs,” per the IPO prospectus.

Accolades core offerings includes a software platform backed by a support staff of health assistants and clinicians.

Headquartered in Seattle, with significant operations in the Philadelphia area, Accolade has raised $237 million in known funding since its founding in 2007. Key backers include , and .

Illustration: .

Subscribe to the Crunchbase Daily

According to the company, the equity round was oversubscribed by existing investors including , , , and . It brings Lendio’ssince it was founded in 2011 to $108.5 million. The company’s last funding was a $19 million , raised at a pre-money valuation of $75 million in October 2016, according to Cruchbase data.

Lendio plans to use the new capital “to increase the scope and precision” of its loan marketplace while expanding new bookkeeping and lender services functions.

The startup has 75 loan products on tap and describes itself as a one-stop-shop for business owners looking for capital to start, operate and grow. Lendio has facilitated more than 100,000 loans to nearly 35,000 business owners across the U.S. to date, totaling over $2 billion. It says its year-over-year growth rate has averaged 75 percent over the past two years. The company has more than doubled its customer base in the last two years, according to CEO and co-founder .

It’s also nearly doubled its headcount from 170 people about one year ago to just over 300 today.

Lendio reduced its monthly burn rate to break-even since taking on the Series D round of funding in 2016, according to Blake.

“While the company was in a position of profitability and didn’t need to raise funds, this Series E round will allow Lendio to grow several recently-launched business units,” he wrote via email.

What it does

The company says it wants to make it easy for small business owners to get loans. Owners can complete a 15-minute online loan application that is processed by Lendio’s machine-learning algorithms and matched with” a pool of suitable lenders.”

Lendio’s loan team reviews those options with the business owners and then works to facilitate the loans, often within 24 hours, it claims.

The company has strategic partnerships with the likes of , , , , , Comcast Business, and .

For Mercato Partners’ Senior Investor , Lendio’s “ability to combine data analytics with the human touch to connect small businesses quickly and precisely with ideal lending partners has made all the difference in its success.”

The new capital will be used in part to expand the company’s online bookkeeping platform and further integrate it with its loan marketplace platform, Sunrise by Lendio. It also plans to enhance its lender services division. The company gives banks, credit unions and other online lenders access to its white-labeled online application via a software-as-a-service partnership model.

Meanwhile, lenders are now outsourcing the customer-facing sales function to Lendio, the company said.

The company also has a social component (which I always love). For every new loan facilitated on Lendio’s marketplace platform, Lendio Gives–an employee contribution and employer matching program–provides a microloan to a low-income entrepreneur around the world through .

Blake said Utah was an obvious choice to start a fintech company.

“From a regulatory standpoint, Utah is very business friendly, the cost of living is affordable, and there’s a deep talent pool to draw from,” he said. Plus, he appreciated “the strong VC community and the entrepreneurial culture pervasive across the state.”

Illustration:

Subscribe to the Crunchbase Daily

Over the years, Iguodala’s funded over 40 companies including , , and . As an investor and a board member, he helped the company grow and go public in April 2019 with a billion-dollar IPO.

In recent weeks, Iguodala has taken on new roles in both the basketball and startup worlds. He recently joined the with . And on Feb. 5, he was for Catalyst Fund, the venture capital arm of Catalyst’s focus will be on early-stage investments in companies founded by African American, Latinx and female entrepreneurs.

For ’ Head of Funds and Managing Director , Iguodala’s investment experience and network, combined with his “his passion for supporting entrepreneurs from diverse backgrounds,” is a perfect fit for the firm’s Catalyst Fund.

Since its formation in 2011, the fund has backed .

Catalyst Fund Principal (a Muslim of Indian descent) told me the fund gives her and Iguodala a chance to help back founders who might not otherwise have access to capital and networks.

“We both come from unconventional backgrounds, and we want to be able to help founders who also come from unconventional backgrounds,” she told me. “We both truly believe talent and brilliance is equally distributed amongst individuals and that we can help get them the right level of resources.”

In a telephone interview, Crunchbase News caught up with Iguodala to hear more in-depth about his and Husain’s plans for the fund, and just how the NBA star got into startup investing.

CB News: How did you get into startup investing in the first place?

Iguodala: About 8 or 9 years ago, I started seeing a large return in the tech sector in the public markets. From there, I got interested and wanted to dive deeper into learning how I could invest before companies hit the public markets. I started seeing the growth in the private space, and that eventually led to where I am now.

Things I look at are: market size, does a company have a competitive advantage, can it fight off tech giants like , and ? I also look at founders and their vision–where they see themselves in 10 years. I ask myself, “How can I personally add value to a company, not just from a capital standpoint?”

CB News: What’s the most interesting part about investing in startups and helping them grow?

Iguodala: For Fatima and I, it’s really exciting. Look at technology, and how it’s changed our lives from everything to scheduling a flight or getting my son’s basketball game schedule. Everything is on my phone these days, and how we move in general is so much different than just say, eight years ago. Technology is doing so much to make our lives more efficient. So when I’m looking at that, this is an exciting time to be in this space. Not only for capital gains, but what you’re adding by having involvement in people’s day-to-day lives over the next 20, 30 or 40 years.

CB News: How does being a pro basketball player help you when it comes to making startup investments?

Iguodala: I just joined a new team, , in basketball, and one here at Catalyst. With the Heat, I was hyper focused my first couple of times on the court. While every team runs the same plays, each one has different terminologies for them. So I’ve been watching and learning on the fly, and having to figure out things fast.

It’s similar in the tech space. There’s different terminology and different acronyms for different industries and teams. Different companies have different vibes, some are more laid back and others are more buttoned-up. I have had to learn how to add value to different cultures within companies in the same way as I have with different teams.

There’s lots of egos on both sides. I thought it was just in the sports world, but I see it too in tech in other VCs, entrepreneurs or the best engineers. So I’ve had to learn how to deal with different personalities in both sports and investing. I’ve also learned to adapt and learn about different industries, from consumer to enterprise brands for example.

CB News: As someone with an unconventional “non-traditional VC” background, what skills or perspective do you have that make you a better investor and startup consultant than someone who may not have this diverse background?

Iguodala: I’m really excited because what we’re doing with the Catalyst Fund and what we represent is investing in underrepresented communities, and determining how we can put them in our ecosystem and help them grow in a responsible and sustainable way.

Being a minority, you have to have a grander scope in terms of the people you deal with on a daily basis. Many of us have that back against the wall mentality, and a passion and grit.

Every morning I wake up with a chip on my shoulder, and know I have to wake up with that passion and juice to go and prove myself. I’ve learned that I have to sacrifice, work hard and step up when it’s my turn. I’m ready to help other unconventional founders, and founders who are underrepresented in funding in the tech space, in their own journey.

Reporter’s note: For more on NBA players who are also startup investors, check out this article I wrote last summer here.

Blog Roll Illustration:

Subscribe to the Crunchbase Daily

Why are we a day late to this story? Because I forgot that yesterday was Tuesday when reading my embargo notes thanks to the holiday. But! Despite being late to the news, I found the company pretty interesting after yammering to Hive founder last week so let’s talk about it.

What’s Hive?

is a New York-based software company focused on worker productivity.

But it’s not a clone. Instead, Hive bakes a number of different tools and services into a single package. Hive features, for example, “Project Layouts” that feel similar in form to how details information in various formats. It has a to-do list function (). It also includes chat functionality and video calls. You can also take notes inside of Hive, and send email.

If that sounds like a lot, to some degree it is. But in Furneaux’s view, it’s better to provide a more complete toolset than to sell a product that only completes one element of a user’s productivity flow. “If you are brave, you want to cover the user journey,” he told Crunchbase News. That means that if a user needs to complete a task, Hive wants to provide all the tools they need from start to finish. The company doesn’t want you to use Hive and another tool to get something done.

After talking to Furneaux about where Hive fits into the market, I was curious if building the product felt like constructing an operating system. As it turns out, Furneaux told Crunchbase News, the company once considered calling the service HiveOS.

One final note about Hive the product. The small company which has raised more than $16 million to date isn’t trying to build a better and a better Slack and a better Airtable and a better . Instead, it wants to “win the user journey” according to Furneaux, while not trying to copy every power-feature of the underlying pieces it’s stitching together.

Furneaux gave the example of Evernote, a product with myriad features that befit its age. Hive, instead, wants to give you enough Evernote-like functionality to take solid notes, but not more.

What’s fun about Hive is that it feels almost old-school. The company isn’t building a single slick tool that it can go thrash about the market with yet another enterprise sales team. Instead, it’s building a coven of interconnected tools that hopefully work in concert, allowing workers to stick inside of one app instead of using 47.

Now the question we care more about here at Crunchbase News: Is the model working, and, if so, how well?

Growth

According to Hive’s release, “in the last year alone, the company quintupled [its] revenue.” Happily for us, Furneaux provided a little more context during our call. Hive had a “smidgen” under $1 million in ARR at the start of the year according to the founder. So, five times that would put Hive at around $5 million ARR today.

In terms of venture norms, that’s a very solid growth rate. Powering it is a non-freemium model; Hive has a trial, but no free tier. The lack of a free tier isn’t a handicap it seems, as according to Furneaux, Hive’s trial draws in thousands of potential new paying users each month. The company also has an upsell feature similar to what Dropbox made famous, bringing its product into companies by their employees using it for their own work.

Right, so: With 5x yearly ARR growth, the ability to accrete new users without a free tier, why did Hive only raise $10.6 million, and why did it raise from Comcast Ventures?

The Round

Hive’s Furneaux told Crunchbase News that the company only raised $10.6 million as it wanted to raise as much as it could deploy in 12 months. Why? Because equity capital is expensive, and Hive would rather raise more later when it can do so at a higher valuation.

Finally, why Comcast Ventures. Sure, Hive isn’t based in San Francisco but surely the company could have raised from a better-known VC? Furneaux’s take on the choice was actually a bit surprising. Instead of optimizing for, say, the name-brand-ness of its Series A investor, it picked Comcast Ventures because it is a customer and has “real relationships to real companies.” According to Furneaux, Hive wants to sell to “everyone in Chicago,” and “everyone in the middle of the country.”

“We sell software to the 99 percent,” he said.

That’s enough for today. More when we get another ARR figure out of the company, probably when it hits $10 million which should take place in Q2 2020 if all things go well.

Illustration: .