Daricus Releford always wanted to be a founder.
In high school, he ran a hot dog station and in college launched a chocolate-covered strawberry business, making millions in sales before moving to Silicon Valley to pursue his dreams in tech. Entrepreneurship simply runs in his family, he told TechCrunch. “My grandfather was one of the first Black hotel owners in the U.S., and my mom always started businesses. I think it’s just in my blood,” he continued.
It’s no wonder then, that no matter what tech job he took he always found himself going back to launching something new. In 2020, he founded StoreCash, a mobile payment solution that lets users pay for items and earn maximum cash-back rewards. He said he launched the company because he wanted to help people save more money.
Releford said StoreCash is different from its competitors because it transfers cash back to consumers immediately, in comparison to others which offer lower returns that also take longer to get to customers.
“Knowing about 56% of Americans have less than $1,000 in savings, I wanted to help the average American build generational wealth,” he said. “Now, StoreCash users earn around $900 annually just by using the app.”
The app is quite simple: StoreCash integrates its API into fintech partners and alerts users when stores like H&M Gap or AMC Theatres offer cash back. When in person, customers scan a QR code generated by the app that applies the cashback savings to their purchase. Online, a consumer simply opens the StoreCash app and selects the store they want to shop at, manually typing in the serial number and barcode to complete the transaction.
Cashback is mainly earned through affiliate marketing, as seen with Rakuten (formerly known as Ebates), or credit and debit card rewards, which are known to have hidden fees.
The company has attracted some top investors and today announces the closing of a $3.7 million seed round led by BlackOps Ventures, with participation from returning investors MaC Venture Capital, 43North, and Alumni Ventures. The company has raised $6.4 million to date.
“The fintech space is ripe for a major player to take over with a solid personal finance tool for consumers,” Marlon Nichols, a co-founder of MaC Venture Capital, told TechCrunch. “Daricus and the team have big plans to add budgeting features to make a real impact in helping people better track and organize their finances.”
But fundraising was no simple feat for Releford. He used the word “unconscious bias,” when asked how he would describe his fundraising process. “The process was brutal, taking about a year filled with ‘no’s’ before things started to align.” He was introduced to Nichols through Ethan Austin, a director in the TechStars program in which Releford participated. He met James Norman from BlackOps after winning a pitch competition where Norman was a judge.
“Winning the 43North pitch competition was a turning point, bringing more pending investors on board.”
The fresh capital will go toward expanding product development and the team.
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Crusoe Energy, a startup building data centers reportedly to be leased Oracle, Microsoft, and OpenAI, is in the process of raising $818 million, according to an SEC filing.
The filing indicates that Crusoe has secured $686 million of the $818 million total that it hopes to raise. Seventy investors have contributed to the tranche so far, per the filing.
“A company at our stage of growth is always talking to investors,” a spokesperson for Crusoe told TechCrunch.
The Financial Times reported earlier this year that Crusoe was in talks to raise roughly $500 million in a funding round led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund with participation from Felicis Ventures. It seems investors had an appetite for a larger tranche, which presumably would come at a higher valuation than the rumored $3 billion — which was already double Crusoe’s previous valuation.
Should Crusoe successfully raise $818 million, it would bring the startup’s total raised to approximately $1.5 billion in equity and debt. Late last year, Crusoe secured $200 million in debt using its data center chips as collateral to buy thousands of AI processors.
Crusoe launched in 2018 as a cryptocurrency business, powering its data centers with natural gas that would otherwise be “flared off” and wasted. Like many crypto mining operations, Crusoe pivoted as AI rose to prominence, securing deals with AI companies to provide high-performance computing and AI infrastructure.
In early October, Crusoe announced it would enter into a $3.4 billion joint venture with asset manager Blue Owl Capital to build a massive data center in Abilene, Texas. The campus is expected to be leased to Oracle, which will in turn rent it to Microsoft and its close collaborator, OpenAI.
There’s a booming market for “neocloud” startups building low-cost, on-demand clouds for AI.
CoreWeave, the GPU infrastructure provider, has raised more than $12 million over a series of deals in the past ~18 months. Lambda Labs in early April secured a special purpose financing vehicle of up to $500 million. The nonprofit Voltage Park, backed by crypto billionaire Jed McCaleb, last October announced that it’s investing $500 million in GPU-backed data centers. And Together AI, a cloud GPU host that also conducts generative AI research, in March landed $106 million in a Salesforce-led round.
The environmental impact of the build-outs could be substantial. IDC expects global data center electricity consumption to more than double between 2023 and 2028. And according to Morgan Stanley, data center tech suppliers will create emissions equivalent to 2.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide by 2030.
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