Better Tomorrow Ventures

During Beyond Summit 2024 by Allocate in May, Sheel Mohnot of Better Tomorrow Ventures shared with us the advantages of being a thematic or specialized #VentureCapital firm in #fintech and the 3 key ways they work with to impact portfolio companies: 1) recruiting beyond initial screenings, 2) building a strong community of founders who cross-pollinate efforts with each other, and 3) outsource business development in the financial services industry

One of the things I say most often to companies in themint.vc and around BTV.vc is “you’re overthinking it” Embrace the chaos and just go!

Always fun gathering fintech friends in NYC, especially at a lovely, tucked away carriage house + courtyard. At Better Tomorrow Ventures, we're continuing to lay down deeper roots in NYC (obviously the best city in the world) but, more importantly, maybe the best city to build in fintech as well 👀 Shoutout to our friends at Silicon Valley Bank who co-hosted with us (Ilana Fass, Noah Grubman, Beau Kraft, Jake Mendel)! See y'all at the next one 🤝

The journey continues! Albert and I started Cadana in 2021, building the first earned wage access solution in emerging markets such as Africa. We quickly added cross-border payroll capabilities for our customers. The early days were particularly difficult because the infrastructure to support payroll did not exist in most emerging markets, so we had to build from scratch. Over the past three years, we have developed a proprietary employment law engine, custom payment networks, and a multi-currency wallet with embedded financial services. Our infrastructure has powered over $150 million in transactions to workers in 50+ emerging market countries, saving workers $2.5 million in fees and approximately 350,000 days waiting for their salaries. We’re excited to announce that we’re opening up our technology to global hiring platforms! Cadana’s Payroll API and white-label products allow global hiring platforms to scale their operations, launch new product lines, and provide an unparalleled experience to their workers in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. We’re also excited to announce our fundraising of over $7 million from world-class investors such as Better Tomorrow Ventures, Costanoa Ventures, and 500 Global. Our vision at Cadana is to empower brilliant people around the world to have equitable access to global opportunities. We’re grateful for the support of our people, customers, and stakeholders as we march toward this vision. Discover more about how Cadana is revolutionizing global payroll below https://lnkd.in/d-_pCjkX

It’s a special day at InScope. We are officially launching our product today, making financial reporting and audits more accurate and efficient for private companies. We also raised a seed round of $4.3M to help further our mission. To learn more about InScope and how we’re looking to change an area that’s been overlooked, check out our article in TechCrunch.

Excited to announce our investment in InScope! It was a real privilege to have Mary Antony and Kelsey Gootnick, CPA join us for the first cohort of our pre-seed program, The Mint. InScope is automating the generation of GAAP-compliant financial statements, footnotes, and audit-ready documentation. Today, putting together financial statements and disclosures can take a company weeks to months to compile and is prone to errors. It is expensive, manual, slow, and painful. Still, U.S.-based public and private companies spend $30 billion every year on financial audits, just to prove that historical financials are accurate. Adding to the strife, in the last 2 years, 300,000 accountants have left the profession (1 in every 6 accountants!). With this acute talent shortage, the timing for a solution like this couldn’t be better. InScope’s technology gives accountants superpowers to help them complete their reporting tasks in minutes instead of months. Their technology compiles information from the company’s core systems, like their ERP, and publicly available information from SEC guidance. Then, their internal rules engine transforms those inputs into GAAP-compliant financials and audit documents. This team understands this problem incredibly well. Mary and Kelsey have over 30 years of domain experience, with first-hand knowledge about how painful the problem is. They scaled and led accounting and finance teams at companies like Miro, Autodesk, Dropbox, Flexport, and Yelp, guiding the organizations through over 25 audits. InScope is already working with a handful of fast-growing companies to help streamline their financial reporting needs. If you are a mid-market or enterprise company preparing for financial audits, get in touch! Great to support InScope alongside Justin Overdorff and Aaron Frank at Lightspeed, along with some awesome angels! https://lnkd.in/eYng68r6

Life news - i'm back in startups as CEO & cofounder of Blaide! I'm thrilled to join friends and former colleages Lex Georgiou, Peter B., and Jamu Kakar in solving tangible problems for home contractors as they work to electrify 140M american's homes. I'm estatic I get to be partnering with Jake & Sheel of Better Tomorrow Ventures and April & Jess of Adverb Ventures a second time around - and thankful for their immediate belief in our team and opportunity ahead. We're having a blast building a joyful place to work, making an impact on climate, leveraging the latest in AI and all of our fintech craft. More to come.... https://www.blaide.com

Pretty fun to see The Mint featured in Times Square 🤩 Applications for cohort III are open!! Wanna learn more? Head over to http://themint.vc Shoutout to Brex + Lauren Messner for making this happen!!

Today we’re announcing that Relay has raised a USD $32.2 million Series B, led by Bain Capital Ventures. This brings Relay’s total funding to USD $51.6 million. This raise is a result of two things: our small business customers, whose ambition and ingenuity inspire us to build products that actually help their day-to-day success, and our team, who bring their all to Relay every day. I really feel lucky to work alongside both. Small businesses need financial tools that support them in a meaningful, fundamental way. Since day one, our focus at Relay has been not just to build business banking, but to give SMBs cash flow control and create a material impact on their financial success—and we know it’s working. Just last month, we crossed another milestone by reaching 100,000 customers. These customers include the salon owner who avoided a major financial crisis by combining Relay with Profit First. The marketing agency that stopped missing payroll. The home reno contractor who’s finally getting his business out of debt, and so many more. There are 33 million small businesses in the United States, and 68% of them will experience a cash flow crisis at some point. We have a really audacious mission here at Relay: to bring that number down to zero. A fundraise is an opportunity to accelerate our trajectory—and it’s fun news to announce. But it’s not validation. That’s what comes next, as we double down on building tools that tangibly help our customers. Next for us means deeper credit products to give business owners flexibility, spend management tools, and robust integrations with the entire back-office suite. I’m grateful to the small businesses and advisors who trust us with their everyday banking needs. And I’m proud of the Relay team for what we’ve been able to deliver for business owners to date. Stay tuned as we build this next chapter of business banking with all of you.

Today we’re incredibly proud to announce Better Tomorrow Ventures' continued investment in Relay—the banking platform that gives U.S. small businesses cash flow clarity and control—as part of their $32 million Series B financing. The company has seen incredible growth over the last few years. Their revenue grew 3x in 2022, and close to 6x in 2023, driven by their unwavering commitment to solving one of the core challenges small businesses face: cash flow. 68% of U.S. small business owners report having cash flow problems, and half operate with just 27 days of cash buffer. For too long, they’ve struggled to find banking solutions that provide actual solutions to the cash flow challenges behind these stats. Relay is building the banking platform where business owners can go to understand their cash position, manage back-office processes, and collaborate with their teams on key financial workflows. And in doing so, they’re helping to increase the success rate of small businesses. We’re eager to continue working with them in pursuit of that mission as they enter their next stage of growth! Learn more about Relay’s plans to invest in the success of small businesses: https://lnkd.in/e_XZJPAQ cc Jake Gibson Sheel Mohnot Yoseph West