Harvard Archives - Crunchbase News /tag/harvard/ Data-driven reporting on private markets, startups, founders, and investors Fri, 14 Feb 2020 16:49:12 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.5 /wp-content/uploads/cb_news_favicon-150x150.png Harvard Archives - Crunchbase News /tag/harvard/ 32 32 Boston’s Newest Unicorn: Flywire Raises $120M In Goldman Sachs-Led Series E /venture/bostons-newest-unicorn-flywire-raises-120m-in-goldman-sachs-led-series-e/ Fri, 14 Feb 2020 16:39:46 +0000 http://news.crunchbase.com/?p=25443 , a Boston-based vertical payments startup, has raised $120 million in a Series E round that takes its valuation to “over $1 billion.”

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(which has been ramping up its startup investment as of late) led the round, which also included participation from and along with existing backer , which used its pro rata, according to Flywire.

The new financing takes Flywire’s since its 2011 inception to $263.2 million, according to Crunchbase data.

Flywire also announced it has acquired , a developer of payments software for the health care industry that had raised $36.4 million in venture capital funding.

In a phone conversation with Flywire CEO , I learned more about what the company does and how much it’s grown. He was refreshingly transparent.

So, let’s get into the details.

More than software

Fundamentally, Flywire is a payments company but it has also built software to help process payments. (Which makes it both a SaaS operator and a transactions platform.) Its focus is on the education, health care and travel industry verticals.

“All three are fraught with a lack of digitization, and are inherently complex with legacy systems involved,” Massaro told Crunchbase News. “We think these areas have been underserved.”

Flywire CEO Mike Massaro

To date Flywire says it has processed over $12 billion in total payments volume for over 2,000 clients around the world. Seven of the eight Ivy League schools use it to collect cross-border payments, for example. As do hundreds of hospitals, including the top four hospital systems in the United States. People going on exotic trips such as African safaris can use it during their travel.

“We don’t just deliver the software that helps around payments,” Massaro said. “We actually move the money.” In fact, it claims to “move billions of dollars across 200+ countries and 150 currencies.”

Flywire has two revenue streams. It makes SaaS revenue off the software it’s using to help clients such as , or . But the majority of its revenue is transaction-based.

Speaking of which, Flywire is a unicorn with “well over $100 million in revenue,” according to Massaro. Despite being around for nine years, it’s still seeing nearly 40 percent revenue growth year over year, he said.

It also has 530 employees, which is 10 times the 50 it had just five years ago.

Massaro expects Flywire to return to profitability this year, and said the company has been “very capital efficient.”

“Prior to this round, we had $45 miillion in cash on the balance sheet, and now we have about $75 million to $80 million,” he told me. “And we don’t expect to burn a lot this year.”

Acquisition

In acquiring Simplee, Flywire picked up a competitor, sort of. Flywire has historically focused on the provider side, helping digitize their back offices. Simplee is focused more on the patient experience.

“We both help providers engage their patients digitally,” Massaro said. “They can help explain the cost of patients’ medical care, and how much they owe insurance, in addition to helping them digitize payments.”

With the buy, Flywire also expanded its geographical footprint, as Simplee has offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv. In addition to its Boston headquarters, Flywire has 10 offices, including locations in Europe and Asia.

Last year, the company expanded into Latin America and plans to continue that expansion geographically. It also plans to double down on all its verticals.

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Where Funded CTOs Went To College /business/where-funded-ctos-went-to-college/ Mon, 12 Aug 2019 19:00:54 +0000 http://news.crunchbase.com/?p=19928 Chief executives go to . Chief technology officers go to . Unless of course, they go to .

At least that’s the stereotype you might have in mind if you had to guess the most common alumni affiliations of startup executives. And in truth, you’d be reasonably accurate.

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While of course there’s no degree required to be a venture-backed startup executive, in practice it sure helps to graduate from one of a shortlist of prestigious universities. That’s true for CEOs. It’s true for founders. And, as we recently put to the test, it’s also true for chief technology officers.

With another back-to-school season upon us, Crunchbase News decided to celebrate with a data dive into top universities among funded startup CTOs. For this dataset, we looked at U.S. schools attended by chief technology officers of companies that have raised $500,000 or more in funding in roughly the past two years.

For the most part, the results aren’t too different from lists we’ve put together previously for founders and CEOs. But there is one large and very obvious difference: CTOs are much more likely to graduate from technical universities and other schools renowned for their engineering and computer science departments.

So what’s the top school for funded CTOs? We list the top twenty below:

Ok, so what stands out about the list above? For one, we should note that every time we do one of these lists for any education ranking related to funded startups, Stanford is the school that winds up on top.

One might expect to see Stanford’s dominance slip a bit as the center of gravity in startup-ville shifts North from the university’s Palo Alto hometown to San Francisco, the current capital of the unicorn boom. However, that doesn’t seem to be happening. VCs still love to fund Stanford grads, and Stanford grads are still happy to cash their checks.

Seeing MIT in the Number 2 slot is also noteworthy, if not surprising. While MIT reliably ranks in the Top 3 for our funded CEO and founder rankings that don’t include business schools, it’s higher for the CTO rankings. One might expect this for what many lists as the nation’s top technical school.

University of California at Berkeley also performs well in our CTO list. The school reliably ranks as one of the top five American universities for engineering and technology, and its proximity to San Francisco and Silicon Valley don’t hurt. In fact, a majority of Berkeley-affiliated CTOs in our list work at startups in the San Francisco Bay Area.

We also found that public universities appear to be graduating a higher relative proportion of funded CTOs than funded CEOs or founders (a group that may also include CTOs). Half of the top ten schools for funded CTOs are public universities.

Methodology

You see a lot numbers above. So just how definitive is this dataset, you may be asking? In truth, it’s more a general guide than a definitive count, given that a majority of Crunchbase CTO profiles do not list where the subject went to school.

For this dataset, we looked at chief technology officers of companies that raised $500,000 or more since August of 2017. There were nearly 5,500 Crunchbase profiles that met that criteria, but of those, fewer than half had a college or university listed.

CTO alum also did not necessarily obtain a technical degree from the university listed. Our search parameters did not allow us to specify a major. Also, we include business, law and medical school grads in the CTO search, although these accounted for very few of the degree recipients.

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