Lending startup Figure announced today a rollout of AI tooling to make the home lending process more efficient. The company will be launching an AI tool powered by GPT-4 to help catch errors in lending documents.
Figure, founded in 2018, specializes in helping consumers secure home equity lines of credit. The company touts that its all-online process condenses a normally 45-day process to five. More than half of Figure’s business is B2B, where it’s embedded in companies like solar panel loan company GoodLeap.
The company, which has raised over $1.5 billion and was last valued at around $3 billion, according to PitchBook, is now making a push into AI — a strategy heralded by new CEO Michael Tannenbaum, who left his station as COO at Brex to join the firm. “I thought that this was something that could really transform the way that fintech businesses work,” he said of his move.
The key AI product he’s pushed for is to help with “stare and compare” instances in the lending process. He gave the example of a property-level description, which is a unique description of the asset that has to be exactly the same on many of the legal documents. Traditionally, a human would have to look through over 60 pages to ensure the description is the same. Tannenbaum said their new feature massively decreases the manual labor and time it takes to verify the documents. It’s an example, he said, of AI “taking costs out of complex processes.”
Given the personal information in loan applications, the company had to go back and forth with OpenAI to make sure their privacy agreement was ironclad and “that the models were not being trained on our customer data in a certain way,” he said.
Although the feature runs on GPT-4, Ruben Padron, chief data officer, emphasized that the company made it a priority to build model-agnostic systems. “We’re constantly testing and evaluating different models as they come out, and almost weekly, or sometimes daily,” he said. Their systems “offer us a lot of flexibility to allow us to quickly and dynamically pivot to whatever vendor is offering the highest performance.”
Padron sees many more AI offerings in Figure’s future, emphasizing that the more they can automate the lending application process, the less chance for error or bias. “We’re really trying to lower the cost, eliminate the manual work, reduce the bias,” Padron said. “It’s very much a journey. It’s not a destination.”
Bike-taxi startup Rapido is the latest Indian startup to become a unicorn, meaning it reached $1 billion in valuation. The 8-year-old firm has raised $120 million in a new funding round led by WestBridge Capital, according to a regulatory filing.
The new capital, a Series E infusion, underscores Rapido’s growing prominence in India’s mobility sector where it has emerged as a formidable challenger to the long-standing duopoly of Uber and Ola. It is simultaneously also helping Swiggy’s competitive stance against rival Zomato in the fiercely contested food-delivery market.
Swiggy led Rapido’s last round in April 2022, which valued the mobility startup at $800 million. Rapido has raised about $430 million to date.
Rapido’s focus on two-wheeler transportation, instead of cabs, has allowed it to navigate the challenges that have hindered the growth of traditional cab-hailing services in India, capitalizing on the widespread use of motorcycles and scooters in the country’s congested urban centers.
Rapido didn’t respond to a request for comment.
In Rapido, Swiggy has found a delivery partner that is helping it serve the growing food delivery orders in the country. Rapido is able to provide its drivers more work opportunity through its tie-up with Swiggy, according to an investor of Rapido, who requested anonymity discussing strategy. Swiggy eventually plans to increase its stake in Rapido, according to a person familiar with the situation, but not before the IPO.
Rapido also engaged with Khazanah, Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund, for funding in the current round, TechCrunch previously reported.
Swiggy has filed for an initial public offering, seeking to raise $1.25 billion from the event.
Rapido is the third Indian startup to become a unicorn this year after fintech Perfios and AI upstart Krutrim.
Bike-taxi startup Rapido has become the latest Indian startup to become a unicorn, or reach $1 billion in valuation. The eight-year-old firm has raised $120 million in a new funding round led by WestBridge Capital, according to a regulatory filing.
The new capital, a Series E infusion, underscores Rapido’s growing prominence in India’s mobility sector where it has emerged as a formidable challenger to the long-standing duopoly of Uber and Ola. It is simultaneously also helping Swiggy’s competitive stance against rival Zomato in the fiercely contested food delivery market.
Swiggy led Rapido’s last round, in April 2022, which valued the mobility startup at $800 million. Rapido has raised about $430 million to date.
Rapido’s focus on two-wheeler transportation, instead of cabs, has allowed it to navigate the challenges that have hindered the growth of traditional cab-hailing services in India, capitalizing on the widespread use of motorcycles and scooters in the country’s congested urban centers.
Rapido didn’t respond to a request for comment.
In Rapido, Swiggy has found a delivery partner that is helping it serve the growing food delivery orders in the country. Rapido is able to provide its drivers more work opportunity through its tie-up with Swiggy, according to an investor of Rapido, who requested anonymity discussing strategy. Swiggy eventually plans to increase its stake in Rapido, according to a person familiar with the situation, but not before the IPO.
Rapido also engaged with Khazanah, Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund, for funding in the current round, TechCrunch previously reported.
Swiggy has filed for an initial public offering, seeking to raise $1.25 billion from the event.
Rapido is the third Indian startup to become a unicorn this year after fintech Perfios and AI upstart Krutrim.
Alan’s meteoric rise in the French tech ecosystem has been both figurative and literal. A few years ago, the startup’s office was limited to one floor in a nondescript office building near the Canal Saint-Martin in Paris.
Over time, the company added another floor, then another floor — now the company of 550 employees also occupies the top floor of the building. It’s a common area with a kitchen in a corner and a beautiful view of Paris’ typical gray zinc rooftops.
This morning, Alan’s co-founder and CEO Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve and its chief revenue officer, Ludovic Bauplé, held a press conference with a group of reporters. Some of them cover tech startups, while others focus on the insurance industry. It’s an unusual mix of reporters but that’s because Alan is an unusual company.
The company originally started with a health insurance product that complements the national healthcare system in France. French companies must provide a health insurance product to all their employees when they join. Today, over 500,000 people are covered by Alan’s insurance product.
Image Credits: Romain Dillet / TechCrunch
But Alan is also a tech company that has raised quite a few funding rounds. With its most recent €183 million Series E funding round ($196 million at today’s exchange rate), the company reached a valuation of €2.7 billion ($2.9 billion).
Alan has integrated and automated as many things as possible for its core product, the insurance part. It has also expanded to other services so that its app can be a sort of a one-stop shop for all things related to your health.
After years of explosive growth, the French tech ecosystem has slowed down with funding drying up and many companies looking for a quick exit — unless you’re working for a generative AI company. As Alan is one of the biggest private tech companies in France, it’s interesting to keep a close eye on the company to understand how it sees the future.
Still $63 million in losses in 2023
Despite 39% of revenue growth in 2023 compared to 2022, Alan is still losing quite a bit of money. In 2023 alone, the company reported $63 million in losses (€59 million).
But things are improving. Last year, 5,000 companies became new clients. In France, Alan is no longer the hip health insurance company for tech startups, as new clients include Celio, Duracell, Mantu, and Clinitex, as well as the employees of France’s National Assembly.
Alan also operates in Belgium and Spain. And the difference is quite clear in Spain, for instance, as Alan names N26, Cabify and Eventbrite as new clients in the country — in other words, tech companies with local teams in Spain.
“Profitability is a core topic for us. Our goal has been to reach profitability in 2025 for France. And we are confirming it once again,” Bauplé said. As for other markets, the company says that it expects to be profitable as a whole in 2026.
“Our cash position is more than €180 million. Our solvency ratio is now 450%, which is well above the minimum requirement and twice the market average,” Bauplé added.
Image Credits: Romain Dillet / TechCrunch
Does it mean that Alan is done with funding rounds? This part is a bit unclear, as it has become much harder to raise late-stage rounds at high valuations. Things could change. And of course, never say never.
“We don’t need to raise a new round to stay on plan and maintain this growth rate until we reach profitability,” Samuelian-Werve said later in the conversation. “At the same time, we’ve received unsolicited offers from investors in the past . . . we’ll continue to look at them, but today that’s not really our strategy.”
Growing revenue, not costs
Alan’s path to profitability includes growing the company’s bottom line without necessarily growing much as a team. Right now, Alan has a gross margin of 10% after deducting all health reimbursements. But if you include all expenses, the net margin becomes negative at –17%.
In 2024, Alan expects to grow its revenue by 40%. But the company only plans to hire 30 people — a modest 5% increase in its workforce.
That’s because Alan’s service has been designed to scale well without necessarily adding more people. It’s a self-serve app and service. Reimbursements are automated as much as possible with optical character recognition, a fraud engine that has been developed in-house, automated bank transfers, etc.
Preventive care in the app is also a big part of Alan’s offering with a focus on eight different topics ranging from mental health to back pain. This part is mostly handled by a library of videos and 80 health professionals who partner with Alan to answer questions via a messaging interface.
Alan also says that artificial intelligence is going to be key when it comes to scaling. Like with many customer support teams today, some of the interactions between Alan’s customers and its team are optimized by artificial intelligence.
But all teams leverage artificial intelligence in one way or another. Alan CEO Samuelian-Werve told me that every employee is now 40% more productive.
They get meeting reports much faster thanks to automatic transcriptions and LLM-powered summaries. They use Dust to query AI assistants with the team’s data. Developers can iterate faster thanks to AI copilots.
Samuelian-Werve also happens to be a non-executive co-founder and board member of Mistral AI, France’s much talked about foundational model maker. In fact, Mistral AI’s office is located in the same building as Alan’s office.
While it’s harder to raise massive funding rounds in France, artificial intelligence might appear as an alternative to ever-growing teams at Big Tech companies like Alan.
That might not work for every tech company, as Alan’s internal culture is quite peculiar. Everything is written down and fully transparent with regular check-ins from teammates. Nevertheless, it’s a pragmatical example of the real-world impact of artificial intelligence on the financial outlook of a tech company at the growth stage.
Image Credits: Searchlight / Searchlight co-founders Kerry Wang and Anna Wang
Multiverse, the U.K. unicorn that builds apprenticeship programs for people to learn technology skills while on the job, has made an acquisition as it aims to skill up itself. The company has bought Searchlight, a startup that builds AI-based recruitment and assessment products. The plan will be to use Searchlight’s tech to create new AI products that Multiverse can use to expand its training services for professionals.
“Searchlight’s AI, platform and exceptional talent will allow us to better diagnose the skills needed within companies and deliver impactful solutions,” said Multiverse’s founder and CEO, Euan Blair, in a statement. “Combining our scale and world-class learning with Searchlight’s technology and team will ensure even more companies and individuals benefit.”
Searchlight was co-founded by twin sisters Kerry and Anna Wang (the company’s CEO and CTO, respectively). Its existing customers include Udemy, Zapier, Talkdesk and other tech companies, and they will continue to be served until the ends of their contracts, Kerry said. After that, Multiverse will wind down Searchlight’s recruitment services to focus on Multiverse’s business.
The deal underscores the increasing priority that AI is taking for startups straddling the worlds of work and education. Some people use AI to speed up what they do; others claim that AI is taking over certain jobs altogether. This acquisition addresses another area where AI is being employed: Edtech companies focusing on working environments want — and are expected by their customers — to use AI to build more efficient professional training services to fill recruitment gaps.
AI and recruitment have been somewhat controversial bedfellows. Amazon famously once had to scrap an AI recruitment tool after it was found to be inherently biased against women for technical roles due to being trained on typical recruitment data, which more commonly came from men.
But technology and awareness around how models are being built and trained have come a long way since then, Searchlight’s CEO told TechCrunch.
“Our AI model is able to identify a good match for a role four times better than a traditional interview,” Kerry said. She claimed that Searchlight was one of the first organizations in the world to independently audit its own AI models to ensure that the talent recommendations that it gave were without bias. “We’re solving for the exact same problem, which is increased equitable access to economic opportunity for everyone. Multiverse had a great business, but they’re looking to expand into an all-in-one workforce development platform.”
Kerry will become director of product at Multiverse, while Anna will become head of AI.
There are many questions you could ask about what role AI should play in learning, and whether some of its impact is more harmful than good. There is concern, for example, that students might use generative AI to write essays or take tests; some might worry that over-reliance on AI will make it harder to understand what students are really learning. But in supplemental training environments, AI can help personalize learning to an individual’s needs at scale, and it can be more engaging and dynamic for some learners than more traditional forms of education.
Founded and led by Blair (the son of former U.K. prime minister Tony Blair and high-profile barrister Cherie Booth Blair), Multiverse currently has around 1,000 customers, and its list of past and present clients include Cisco, government organizations, financial services and industrial companies.
While Multiverse first made its name with a focus on apprenticeships as a viable alternative for people looking to build careers in fast-moving fields like technology, it has since expanded to cover professional training for people who are already employed.
Multiverse has some AI-based services live now, said Ujjwal Singh, the company’s CTO and CPO, which include a personalized AI assistant coach for users. Now it clearly wants to keep layering in more technology to improve the overall platform and its credibility with customers intent on buying and using more modern services.
Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed, but for some context, the Wang sisters (both impressive and accomplished Stanford grads) took their startup through Y Combinator in 2018. But in times like these, those calling cards are only part of the calculus underpinning which startups thrive and which do not.
Altogether, Searchlight raised nearly $20 million, primarily via a $17 million Series A in 2021. Its long list of investors include a number of prominent names such as Accel, Founders Fund, Emerson Collective and Shasta Ventures. PitchBook estimated its valuation at $64 million in 2021.
Multiverse, meanwhile, was last valued at $1.7 billion in 2022 and has been on a fundraising tear over the last several years, raising several hundred million dollars from investors that include General Catalyst and Lightspeed. This is the company’s second acquisition after Eduflow, another YC company that it bought last year. Singh said Multiverse still has “plenty” of cash when I asked how it would be financing this round and whether it was in the process of raising more capital.
From what we understand, investors are “happy” with the outcome. “From the start, Anna and Kerry have been thoughtful about building Searchlight’s AI models to complement their vision,” Keith Rabois, who led the Searchlights’ Series A, said in a statement. “Searchlight’s differentiated technology is a magnet for innovative companies like Multiverse. I am excited by the upside of this acquisition for Searchlight and Multiverse.”
