Megathread - Crowdfunding

Itā€™s not quite Flux though. Itā€™s just an email reader that you have to forward your emails to.

Flux is pulling retailer info at the point of payment, much more sophisticated.

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At the risk of repeating myself thatā€™s not how Flux does it. Flux comes directly from the merchant no messing around.

Thatā€™s reading an email and attaching it to a transaction. You really think Sainsburyā€™s sent that receipt with ā€œBog Rollā€ as one of the items?

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Hey! Iā€™m the developer you speak of here - and I appreciate the words, but I did want to clarify a few things.

First off, Iā€™m not an engineer at Monzo. It uses their public APIs, thereā€™s no support from them, no relationship with them, and other than a few of their team opting to help test it - theyā€™ve not been involved in any way.

There is no real plan to expand to in-person receipts, I may explore using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to ā€œreadā€ receipts and turn that into something Monzo can store - but this isnā€™t going to be a silver bullet.

ā€œFlux is dead in the waterā€ - This couldnā€™t be further from the truth as far as Iā€™m concerned. Iā€™ve proven that a single developer, with a bit of time and some effort can create a basic service that meets the desires of a lot of people. It has itā€™s own list of pros/cons vs Fluxā€™s plan - and Flux are most definitely aware of this (Not going to go into detail, but Iā€™ve spoken to them in fair detail).

Iā€™m very excited to see what Flux can do in the short-medium term.

Can I also clarify that Simonā€™s tweet is not using my tool. In a reply to the post he mentioned he named things manually and therefore throws out the automation. Simon named it ā€œBog Rollā€.

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Thank you for your reply,butvInstand by my comments. If it isnā€™t you that develops the in app/in person receipts for Monzo then some other savvy engineer will and the Flux will indeed be dead in the water. I thank you for bringing this to my attention. Regards Brian

But what if itā€™s Flux?

Theyā€™re already in the market of providing receipts. They already have integrations into Monzo, Starling and Barclays Launchpad and are clearly looking to add more to that list. It doesnā€™t seem far fetched that they could do the same?

Trend shifts? Evolve and Adapt.

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Thereā€™s a SanFran/Bay Area startup that uses good old convolutional neural nets (deep learning/or ā€œAIā€ in the news as youā€™re aware) to translate images of receipts into text. However, because the receipts are not uniform, I hear they end up using people in emerging markets to manually label them afterwards :rofl: ā€”Mechanical Turk style. Itā€™s supervised learning, after all, and needs tons of labeled data to work well.

The market pie is big and preferences vary, so perhaps youā€™re spot on. DocuSign is an example of a company that offers ā€œa featureā€ but can surivive despite competing with Adobe and others.

The reason why we are here on this planet right now is because our ancestors evolved and adapted :rofl: :+1:

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I invested Ā£10 into their last Seedrs round. With some companies it makes sense to me to invest the minimum amount to gain access to the post funding page and follow their progress if I find them interesting. Right now Iā€™m not too inclined to invest more because Iā€™m not sure there is scope for a contactless fundraising solutions company to grow bigger than a niche business. It makes more sense to me for Square or some other bigger firm to take the charity sector than for Goodbox to. I doubt theres a significant advantage to Goodboxā€™s core payments hardware and processes as compared to Square if you take away the screen and collection trays. Maybe itā€™s not an interesting enough market though for bigger players to start building bespoke solutions and by the time they get round to doing so Goodbox is already embedded with charities?

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Anyone interested in vertical farming?

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ID Finance is now in private mode on Crowdcube

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Bnextā€™s crowdfunding campaign is open for pre-registration here. Just type your name, email and intended investment amount/pledge in the form at the top of the page

Here is a translated version of the website if you donā€™t speak spanish. To address @saf 's rightful concern (that will likely be shared by others), the campaign will be in english, as the founder has stated.

The gist is that they have 300k active customers, a 80m EUR pre-money valuation, and the campaign will be on crowdcube. Oh, and the campaign will go live around the beginning of November, but youā€™ll get a heads up via email if you pre-register anyway.

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Thinking in terms of investing, and understanding the proposition. Is it not worrying it is all in Spanish? Will there be a English pitch as well?

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Iā€™ve invested in ID Finance. They are a big player on Mintos the P2P website which I invest in. Thanks for the heads up that itā€™s opened

Bnext is only a prepaid card? I understand spanish and read that it does not have a banking license, so cannot directly be compared to Monzo.

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Hi Seb, did you read this in relation to the crowdfund or just on their site? Iā€™m wondering if they are going after a banking license and where. The LATAM opportunity is what is very enticing to me.

Hey Seb could you point us to the Spanish where it says no banking licence and that its a pre-paid card. Hablo un pocito tambien :grinning:

I thought everybody knew they operated via e-money? @SebReitz is right, they are most certainly not a bank, and the founder has suggested they arenā€™t immediately pursuing a license to remain capital efficient, and iā€™m sure any details will be revealed in their pitch deck/investment memorandum. Thereā€™s spanish on their main site that says something along the lines of ā€œWe work with an Electronic Money institution regulated by the Bank of Spain. Unlike a bank, the money deposited in our accounts is neither lent nor investedā€.

Also, whilst I havenā€™t dived into research yet, Nubank are killing it in Latin America so iā€™m probably not as excited about bnextā€™s expansion there as everybody else :grimacing:

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So just wanted to recap on the upcoming campaigns that have come into the fore since I started this thread.

Coconut - An app that automates accountancy. Campaign will be in early 2020.

Ovalmoney - a savings app (not unlike chip) with a strong presence in the UK and Italy. Pre-register here. Courtesy of @WJL1993

Zazu - An african neobank that recently obtained a zambian banking license. Pre-register for the campaign here.

Honcho - A VC backed reverse auction marketplace (e.g. carwow) for car insurance.

Donr - A platform for charitable donation via text. pre-register here

Pynk - a platform that powers investment decisions by ā€˜the crowdā€™. pre-register here

Thereā€™s some promising businesses that arenā€™t fintechs but no one seems to be interested in those haha! If you are interested let me know and Iā€™ll try to collate them into a post :slight_smile: Thereā€™s talk of even more promising fintech raises on crowdcube soon (these things are planned months in advance), so stay tuned.

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