First Up
Jim: Happy Tuesday. Let's drop a beat...
The Big One
A breakdown on the day’s biggest Inno story.
Katherine: A Chicago startup has developed a new contactless commerce platform for small businesses that makes accepting payment as easy as sending a Venmo, and it’s quickly catching on with companies across the U.S. by helping them create online storefronts without charging commissions or monthly fees. Jim has more.
Jim: Cashdrop, founded in August of last year by Ruben Flores-Martinez, has created a digital commerce platform that solves a range of different pain points that small businesses have seen during the Covid-19 pandemic. It allows merchants to set up online storefronts in less than 15 minutes, facilitates contactless payment without handling cash or swiping credit cards, and charges no fees to the business.
In less than a year, Cashdrop has added more than 200 merchants across the country to its platform—including restaurants, food trucks, barber shops, food halls, fashion designers, event planners and more—who’ve generated more than 100,000 transactions through Cashdrop to date.
The startup’s platform combines the simplicity and ubiquity of Venmo or Cash App, but on the back end has the power of Square or Shopify to be a store’s entire point-of-sale system, Flores-Martinez said.
To keep the momentum going, Cashdrop announced Tuesday that it raised a $2.7M seed round from some notable investors. The round was led by Harlem Capital, a New York-based VC firm that takes a special focus in backing founders of color. Other investors in the round include Founder Collective, Long Journey Ventures and M25, along with individual angel investors such as Silicon Valley investor Cyan Banister, Adobe Chief Product Officer Scott Belsky, Fullscreen founder George Strompolos and streaming video star Michelle Phan.
“We want to take the baton from Shopify and become the e-commerce platform for the internet,” said Flores-Martinez, who immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico when he was 13 and taught himself to code from YouTube tutorials.
The startup, which currently has seven employees, says it’s on track to do over $10M in gross sales in its first year.
Read more: Cashdrop raises $2.7M to change how small businesses do e-commerce
Making Moves
Inside the people, companies and organizations making moves in Chicago.
Jim: Researchers at the University of Chicago have developed software that protects your photos from facial recognition. The technology, created by a team of computer engineers at UChicago, can disguise pictures with "pixel-level changes" that confuse facial recognition systems. The goal is to thwart services like Clearview AI, a controversial startup that scans online images for facial recognition. More here.
Katherine: New startup alert: Honest Game, founded in 2019 by Kim Michelson and Joyce Anderson, creates a tool to help high school athletes navigate the college eligibility process. The startup works with public and private high schools, coaches and counselors, club sports teams and individual athletes to ensure students complete the academic requirements required to play sports in college. The startup tracks a student’s academic progress in real time so they can meet National Collegiate Athletic Association requirements and access available college athletic scholarships. More here.
Jim: Ad Age named Chicago startup Tock as one of its 20 hottest brands in 2020, alongside names like Zoom, Peloton, and Instacart. This year, in response to Covid-19 Tock launched Tock To Go, a feature that lets restaurants offer pickup and delivery. More here.
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