There are plenty of companies operating outside the unicorn and public company spotlight, but that doesn’t mean their stories aren’t worth sharing. They offer a peek around the corner at what’s coming next, and what investors today are placing bets on. 

Without further ado, let’s check out a few rounds from the week that was in venture land.

Be My Eyes

I don’t know how you’re reading this, but you are. Most of us read with our eyes, but some read with their ears or their fingers. Blind people frequently have options when it comes to reading, but there’s more to life than just reading. 

Imagine going to a grocery store and stepping up to the bakery counter. You might be able to read a label with your eyes, but if there’s no label you could still probably figure out what type bread you’re buying based on its color and shape. But what if you couldn’t see (or see well)? What are you going to do, touch all the bread to figure out its size and shape? Get real down low and smell ’em all? (Which, for the record, sounds lovely, if a little unhygienic.)

You’d probably ask someone who can see for some help. That’s the kind of interaction a service like facilitates. Headquartered in San Francisco, the startup founded in 2014 connects blind people and people with low vision to sighted volunteers over on-demand remote video calls facilitated through the company’s mobile applications for Android and iOS. The sighted person can see what’s going on, and offer real time support for the person who can’t see.

The company this week that it led by . In 2018, Be My Eyes launched a feature called “Specialized Help,” which connects blind and low-vision people to service representatives at companies. , , and are among the companies enrolled in the program. 

Be My Eyes initially launched as an all-volunteer effort. The company says it has a community of more than 3.5 million sighted volunteers helping almost 200,000 visually impaired people worldwide. According to Crunchbase data, the company has raised in combined equity and grant funding.

Wildnote

The environment is, like, super important. It’s the air we breathe and the water we drink. Regardless of your opinion on environmental regulations, most come from a good place: Ensuring the long-term sustainability of life on a planet with finite resources by putting a check on destructive activity. Where there’s regulation, there’s a need to comply with it, and compliance can be kind of a drag. There is a lot of paperwork to do.

is a company based in San Luis Obispo, California. It’s in the business of environmental data collection, management and reporting using its eponymous mobile application and web platform. Field researchers and compliance professionals can capture and record information (including photos) on-site using either standard reporting forms or their own custom workflows. The company’s data platform also features export capabilities, which produce PDFs or raw datasets in multiple formats.

The company from and , the corporate venture arm of . Wildnote was part of the 2019 cohort of The Heritage Group’s accelerator program, produced in collaboration with , which aimed to assist startups working on problems from “legacy industries” like infrastructure, materials and environmental services.

Enveil

Encryption uses math to transform information humans and machines can read and understand into information that we can’t. Encrypted data can be decrypted by those in possession of a cryptographic key. To everyone else, encrypted data is just textual gobbledegook. 

The thing is, to computers, encrypted data is also textual gobbledegook. Computer scientists and cryptographers have long been looking for a way to work with encrypted data without needing to decrypt it in the process. has been a subject of academic research and corporate research and development labs for years, but it appears a commercial homomorphic encryption product has hit the market, and the company behind it is raising money to grow. 

The company we’re talking about here is . Headquartered in Fulton, Maryland, the company makes software it calls ZeroReveal. Its ZeroReveal Search product allows customers to encrypt and store data while also enabling users to perform searches directly against ciphertext data, meaning that data stays secure. Its ZeroReveal Compute Fabric offers client- and server-side applications which let enterprises securely operate on encrypted data stored on premises, in a large commercial cloud computing platform, or obtained from third parties.

Enveil raised $10 million , which was led by . Participating investors include , , and . The company was founded in 2014 by and has raised a total of $15 million; prior investors include cybersecurity incubator and , the nonprofit venture investment arm of the .

Image Credits: Last Week In Venture graphic created by  Photo by Daniil Kuzelev, via Unsplash.

On Tuesday, credit card giant announced the completion of its previously announced acquisition of , a global payments company “with significant cross-border network reach.”

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Founded in 1988, Transfast is hardly a startup. Indeed, the company is older than a portion of the current Crunchbase News staff. Crunchbase data is a , but it does have two recorded rounds, and . So we can infer from its fundraising activity that the firm’s pace of activity in recent years was likely high.

Details surrounding its most recent deal aside, the transaction prompted us to take a closer look at the credit card giant’s historical M&A activity. What we found is that the company has announced four acquisitions this year. That’s up from just one in 2018.

That pace of change was worth a closer look. Let’s see what firms MasterCard has bought, and when.

A History of Deals

Since 2009, MasterCard has made , according to its Crunchbase profile. That means one-fourth of its total acquisitions have taken place this year alone.

Here’s a chart of the firm’s deals since 2010, mirroring the time period of our recent look at rival �վ�����’s own pace of acquisitions:

A few things to discuss. First, we’re intrigued by Mastercard’s as a “technology company in the global payments industry.” Every company wants to be a tech company in 2019, just as firms wanted to paint themselves with the .com brush back in the 2000-era. The reason why is somewhat pedestrian: tech companies can command price multiples that other industries cannot. And if you are MasterCard, even a slightly higher multiple can mean billions in market cap.

Second, the company did not reveal financial terms of most of the deals. But the uptick in buying is notable nonetheless.

The fact that MasterCard does not disclose prices may be more a function of its own size (a market cap of over $275 billion) than the size of deals; public companies only have to disclose information on deals that are material. It’s hard to reach material deal size when the acquiring company is that large.

Still, we do know some prices. In May, MasterCard picked up , a New York-based SaaS payments platform, for $57 million. Transactis had raised since its inception in 2007, according to its Crunchbase profile. That means that its exit wasn’t a win for its investors or employees, but landing at MasterCard is far from the worst ending for a startup.

And in April, MasterCard acquired Austin fintech startup for an undisclosed sum. Vyze’s technology, according to the, “allows retail consumers to apply for a loan while standing in the checkout line.” Since it was founded in 2008, Vyze had raised in venture funding, according to its Crunchbase profile.

(As a general note, when a company has raised several rounds of venture capital, it reaches a scale that implies some sort of material buy; with over $45 million in invested capital, Vyze was probably of decent size. It’s not a hard rule, but the more venture capital a startup has raised, generally speaking the larger the deal is to acquire it.)

Lastly, in March, MasterCard announced it was buying Canada’s , a “collaboration-based tech services company” that had raised over its 14-year lifetime.

What About Investing?

MasterCard has also (across 46 rounds) over the years, leading at least , according to its Crunchbase profile. This year alone, it’s put money into five companies, including and African ecommerce startup .

The trend of large credit card companies buying smaller shops is picking up. Earlier this year, we took a look at recent buys, as well as American Express’ latest M&A activity.

Given that we are seeing an increased pace of buying startups by Visa, American Express and MasterCard, it’s not impossible to guess that other related players are going to pick up the pace of buying themselves. This is the sort of mid-sized startup buying that can provide material liquidity when measured in aggregate.

For now, we have the start of a trend. If the trio of credit card companies keep it up, we could have something more.

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