Technology

Tebi, the new startup by Adyen’s departed cofounder, raises a fresh $30M from Alphabet’s CapitalG

Dutch payments firm Adyen now has a market cap of over $61 billion, but that didn’t stop its cofounder Arnout Schuijff from stepping down in 2021 to focus on his new startup, Tebi.

Now an Amsterdam-based fintech startup with 35 employees, Tebi helps restaurants, bars and other hospitality businesses manage their operations with an all-in-one subscription-based platform that can handle payments, reservations, inventory, and more.

This means that Tebi has a wealth of competitors, from POS systems to reservation platforms and analytics-driven solutions for inventory optimization. But it hopes to have an advantage by tying this all together with enterprise-level functionalities and pricing.

To a casual observer, this appears as something that Adyen could have done. But given its focus on enterprise, building a product for SMBs was better done on the outside, Schuijff said. “That was a much more logical step for me than to try and do it within the context of Adyen.”

However, Tebi wasn’t meant to fill a gap left by Adyen. Nor was it meant to find a new role for Schuijff, who had stayed in his CTO role after the 2018 IPO that made him a billionaire, at least on paper. “My move was really a positive one. I didn’t need to go. I was still enjoying my job,” he recalled.

What he was missing, though, was coding; and this impulse to code was how Tebi was born. During Covid lockdown, Schuijff decided to revisit his attempt to make it easier for his favorite bar to handle value-added tax (VAT) and other reporting hassles.

On a tech level, this was similar to the accounting platform he built for Adyen, and before that, for Bibit, which then RBS-owned Worldpay acquired in 2004. But by 2020, Schuijff had more tools at his disposal. Using streaming, he was able to support instant transaction updates — and it grabbed him.

From side project to company

While this isn’t the case in the Netherlands yet, “you see a move towards tax departments requiring hospitality businesses to report instantly when the sale is happening,” Schuijff said. But more generally, he saw the need for less manual reconciliation work. This was also confirmed to him by bar owner Mazdak Nasori, who became one of Tebi’s five cofounders.

Eventually, Schuijff told Adyen CEO Pieter van der Does he would leave to focus on Tebi full-time. But his goal wasn’t to build another Bibit or Adyen, and still isn’t. “It was just that I got so inspired by the coding and by the opportunity to contribute something to society in another way by helping out a lot of local business owners,” Schuijff told TechCrunch.

As Tebi’s CEO, Schuijff’s role doesn’t involve much programming, and the irony isn’t lost on him. “I miss doing the coding, but then I figured out that I could add more value and increase the success chances of Tebi by actually doing what a CEO is supposed to be doing, which is building the team and many other aspects, helping with the strategy and all these things.”

One of these things is sales. When he goes out to eat or have a drink, Schuijff can’t help talking to owners about their pain points, checking what they are using, and introducing Tebi. “I consider I am doing them a favor, almost,” he laughed.

Still, joining forces with former Adyen EVP Technology Rob Vonk as Tebi’s CTO made for a tech-heavy team that needed balancing, Schuijff said. So he also hired Aki Tas as COO, who was formerly head of business strategy and operations at Notion, and recruited Patrick Studeneer, as CCO, formerly COO at Wolt. “Now we managed to level out the boat and start focusing much more on the commercial side and the expansion side.”

Means for expansion

After using a hyperlocal deployment approach Tebi is now available across the Netherlands, where it says merchants are already processing nine figures of payments annually on the platform. With open roles in Amsterdam and London and plans to double its headcount by the end of the year, its next step is to start serving the U.K. market, followed by “many countries in the coming years,” Schuijff said.

This rollout will be supported by funding. Eight months after raising a €20 million Series A led by Index Ventures (approximately $22 million), Tebi has now closed a €30 million investment (approximately $34 million.) Led by CapitalG, Google parent Alphabet’s growth fund, with participation from Index, it brings its total funding to €56 million (about $64 million).

Although San Francisco-based, CapitalG partner Alex Nichols is a really-thesis driven investor who also has Europe on his radar. He recently led a deal into Belgian startup Odoo, which joined a portfolio that already includes Monzo and Pennylane. He sought out Tebi after observing that European SMBs are underserved by costly, bank-dominated payment solutions.

“This setup closely resembles the U.S. market 15 years ago before the rise of software-embedded payments reduced bank share to less than 30%” he told TechCrunch in a written comment.

That Nichols had done his research was what ultimately won CapitalG the deal, in addition to all the “touch points” between Tebi and Alphabet properties such as Android, Gemini, Google Cloud and Google Maps. “We were not looking for an investment, but we thought, yeah, this is they’re bringing much more than just money,” Schuijff said.

The money in question will fund more than Tebi’s international expansion. It will also let it add more AI features, in addition to what it already implemented for onboarding to automatically pull menu, visual identity and reservation settings. “The future vision,” Schuijff said, is that on top of its all-in-one platform, there will be “an AI platform that will help you run your business better.”

Building this vision and expanding across Europe will take Tebi’s bandwidth for a while. But after that, and “as soon as we are confident that we can grab a significant part of the market there,” a U.S. expansion is in the cards.

Technology

Pintarnya raises $16.7M to power jobs and financial services in Indonesia

Pintarnya, an Indonesian employment platform that goes beyond job matching by offering financial services along with full-time and side-gig opportunities, said it has raised a $16.7 million Series A round.

The funding was led by Square Peg with participation from existing investors Vertex Venture Southeast Asia & India and East Ventures.

Ghirish Pokardas, Nelly Nurmalasari, and Henry Hendrawan founded Pintarnya in 2022 to tackle two of the biggest challenges Indonesians face daily: earning enough and borrowing responsibly.

“Traditionally, mass workers in Indonesia find jobs offline through job fairs or word of mouth, with employers buried in paper applications and candidates rarely hearing back. For borrowing, their options are often limited to family/friend or predatory lenders with harsh collection practices,” Henry Hendrawan, co-founder of Pintarnya, told TechCrunch. “We digitize job matching with AI to make hiring faster and we provide workers with safer, healthier lending options — designed around what they can reasonably afford, rather than pushing them deeper into debt.”

Around 59% of Indonesia’s 150 million workforce is employed in the informal sector, highlighting the difficulties these workers encounter in accessing formal financial services because they lack verifiable income and official employment documentation.

Pintarnya tackles this challenge by partnering with asset-backed lenders to offer secured loans, using collateral such as gold, electronics, or vehicles, Hendrawan added.

Since its seed funding in 2022, the platform currently serves over 10 million job seeker users and 40,000 employers nationwide. Its revenue has increased almost fivefold year-over-year and expects to reach break-even by the end of the year, Hendrawn noted. Pintarnya primarily serves users aged 21 to 40, most of whom have a high school education or a diploma below university level. The startup aims to focus on this underserved segment, given the large population of blue-collar and informal workers in Indonesia.

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“Through the journey of building employment services, we discovered that our users needed more than just jobs — they needed access to financial services that traditional banks couldn’t provide,” said Hendrawan. “We digitize job matching with AI to make hiring faster and we provide workers with safer, healthier lending options — designed around what they can reasonably afford, rather than pushing them deeper into debt.”

image credits: Pintarnya (Founders of Pintarnya Ghirish Pokardas, Nelly Nurmalasari, and Henry Hendrawan)

While Indonesia already has job platforms like JobStreet, Kalibrr, and Glints, these primarily cater to white-collar roles, which represent only a small portion of the workforce, according to Hendrawan. Pintarnya’s platform is designed specifically for blue-collar workers, offering tailored experiences such as quick-apply options for walk-in interviews, affordable e-learning on relevant skills, in-app opportunities for supplemental income, and seamless connections to financial services like loans.

The same trend is evident in Indonesia’s fintech sector, which similarly caters to white-collar or upper-middle-class consumers. Conventional credit scoring models for loans, which rely on steady monthly income and bank account activity, often leave blue-collar workers overlooked by existing fintech providers, Hendrawan explained.

When asked about which fintech services are most in demand, Hendrawan mentioned, “Given their employment status, lending is the most in-demand financial service for Pintarnya’s users today. We are planning to ‘graduate’ them to micro-savings and investments down the road through innovative products with our partners.”

The new funding will enable Pintarnya to strengthen its platform technology and broaden its financial service offerings through strategic partnerships. With most Indonesian workers employed in blue-collar and informal sectors, the co-founders see substantial growth opportunities in the local market. Leveraging their extensive experience in managing businesses across Southeast Asia, they are also open to exploring regional expansion when the timing is right.

“Our vision is for Pintarnya to be the everyday companion that empowers Indonesians to not only make ends meet today, but also plan, grow, and upgrade their lives tomorrow … In five years, we see Pintarnya as the go-to super app for Indonesia’s workers, not just for earning income, but as a trusted partner throughout their life journey,” Hendrawan said. “We want to be the first stop when someone is looking for work, a place that helps them upgrade their skills, and a reliable guide as they make financial decisions.”

Technology

OpenAI warns against SPVs and other ‘unauthorized’ investments

In a new blog post, OpenAI warns against “unauthorized opportunities to gain exposure to OpenAI through a variety of means,” including special purpose vehicles, known as SPVs.

“We urge you to be careful if you are contacted by a firm that purports to have access to OpenAI, including through the sale of an SPV interest with exposure to OpenAI equity,” the company writes. The blog post acknowledges that “not every offer of OpenAI equity […] is problematic” but says firms may be “attempting to circumvent our transfer restrictions.”

“If so, the sale will not be recognized and carry no economic value to you,” OpenAI says.

Investors have increasingly used SPVs (which pool money for one-off investments) as a way to buy into hot AI startups, prompting other VCs to criticize them as a vehicle for “tourist chumps.”

Business Insider reports that OpenAI isn’t the only major AI company looking to crack down on SPVs, with Anthropic reportedly telling Menlo Ventures it must use its own capital, not an SPV, to invest in an upcoming round.

Technology

Meta partners with Midjourney on AI image and video models

Meta is partnering with Midjourney to license the startup’s AI image and video generation technology, Meta Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang announced Friday in a post on Threads. Wang says Meta’s research teams will collaborate with Midjourney to bring its technology into future AI models and products.

“To ensure Meta is able to deliver the best possible products for people it will require taking an all-of-the-above approach,” Wang said. “This means world-class talent, ambitious compute roadmap, and working with the best players across the industry.”

The Midjourney partnership could help Meta develop products that compete with industry-leading AI image and video models, such as OpenAI’s Sora, Black Forest Lab’s Flux, and Google’s Veo. Last year, Meta rolled out its own AI image generation tool, Imagine, into several of its products, including Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. Meta also has an AI video generation tool, Movie Gen, that allows users to create videos from prompts.

The licensing agreement with Midjourney marks Meta’s latest deal to get ahead in the AI race. Earlier this year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg went on a hiring spree for AI talent, offering some researchers compensation packages worth upwards of $100 million. The social media giant also invested $14 billion in Scale AI, and acquired the AI voice startup Play AI.

Meta has held talks with several other leading AI labs about other acquisitions, and Zuckerberg even spoke with Elon Musk about joining his $97 billion takeover bid of OpenAI (Meta ultimately did not join the offer, and OpenAI denied Musk’s bid).

While the terms of Meta’s deal with Midjourney remain unknown, the startup’s CEO, David Holz, said in a post on X that his company remains independent with no investors; Midjourney is one of the few leading AI model developers that has never taken on outside funding. At one point, Meta talked with Midjourney about acquiring the startup, according to Upstarts Media.

Midjourney was founded in 2022 and quickly became a leader in the AI image generation space for its realistic, unique style. By 2023, the startup was reportedly on pace to generate $200 million in revenue. The startup sells subscriptions starting at $10 per month. It offers pricier tiers, which offer more AI image generations, that cost as much as $120 per month. In June, the startup released its first AI video model, V1.

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Meta’s partnership with Midjourney comes just two months after the startup was sued by Disney and Universal, alleging that it trained AI image models on copyrighted works. Several AI model developers — including Meta — face similar allegations from copyright holders, however, recent court cases pertaining to AI training data have sided with tech companies.

Got a sensitive tip or confidential documents? We’re reporting on the inner workings of the AI industry — from the companies shaping its future to the people impacted by their decisions. Reach out to Rebecca Bellan at [email protected] and Maxwell Zeff at [email protected]. For secure communication, you can contact us via Signal at @rebeccabellan.491 and @mzeff.88.

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