FinTech news in DoorDash category

When Sequoia’s portfolio company Stripe eventually goes public, for example, rather than distribute Stripe’s shares to its investors, Sequoia — assuming it has the blessing of its limited partners —  is more likely to move the prized company’s shares from the many different vehicles that it has used to back Stripe into its Sequoia Capital Fund with the expectation that those shares will continue to rise in value. Indeed, presumably to ensure some stability at its outset, Sequoia banned redemptions from the Sequoia Capital Fund for its first two years, though going forward, if its investors want some liquidity from Sequoia Capital Fund, they will have two chances each year to ask for this via some combination of shares and cash. The number represents two things: the value of the stock that Sequoia has rolled into its permanent fund from its legacy funds — these are shares in now-public companies that Sequoia backed as startups, including Airbnb, DoorDash, Unity, and Snowflake. Almost a year ago to the day, the 50-year-old investing powerhouse Sequoia Capital announced that it had reorganized itself around a singular, permanent structure: The Sequoia Capital Fund.

Ghost Financial is developing API integrations with point-of-sale systems, like Toast, and delivery apps, like DoorDash, so it can pull metrics that represent areas including operational health and efficiency, hourly and daily sales, average food preparation ties, ratings and reviews to determine credit limit and provide an instant loan decision. After operating his own ghost kitchen, Keto Kitchen, in Austin for the past year, serial entrepreneur John Meyer saw that fintech resources for the industry were lacking.

YC says 16% of the companies in its current list (44 out of 267) are based outside the U.S., compared to its first list, which included just seven non-U.S. companies.

Raad Ahmed and Ashish Walia started the company in 2016 with an initial focus on startups and small businesses, trying to find product-market fit (as one does), but finding that legal usage among companies of that size was often project-based, infrequent and short-term if the company folds. In 2019, the company pivoted to working with mid-market and enterprise-level companies by selling into legal departments, and that when growth took off, Ahmed told journalist. Similar to other industries embracing contract work, Lawtrades is giving legal professionals a way to become independent and run their own virtual law practices. Ahmed plans to use the new funding to rebrand the company, launch an iOS app, expand into other professional categories, like finance and management consulting, and gain an international footprint.