OneCarNow!, a fintech company providing vehicles and financial services to gig workers across the Americas, has secured $86 million in a combination of equity and debt financing. This significant capital injection, led by equity funding from Caravela Capital, Collide Capital, and Great North Ventures, with debt financing from i80 Group, is poised to propel OneCarNow! towards a year of significant growth and strategic expansion.

OneCarNow! aims to expand nationally and internationally throughout 2024, continuing to grow as a financing partner for the gig economy. The company aspires to evolve into a horizontal fintech platform, leading to product diversification and broader market reach.

About OneCarNow!:

Founded in 2021, OneCarNow! initially launched in Mexico to help ride-share drivers secure and maintain vehicles, enabling them to generate steady income. Partnering with major ride-share companies like DiDi and Uber, OneCarNow! connects with drivers who qualify for new vehicles based on their driving history who receive attractive rates far better than costly rentals or predatory loans along with other benefits.

How It Works:

Vehicle Procurement: OneCarNow procures new vehicles from OEMs at discounted rates.
Driver Assistance: Provides comprehensive support for drivers to take possession and maintain their vehicles including insurance, licensing, and ongoing maintenance.
Contract Terms: Drivers sign up for 3-year contracts with even weekly payments and no up-front fees. They receive bonuses on the sale of their vehicles at contract-end based on the condition of the vehicle or maintain an option to purchase.

Looking Ahead:

Mairon Sandoval, CEO and Co-Founder of OneCarNow!, expressed the company’s vision of helping gig workers improve their earnings and quality of life. With the new financing, OneCarNow plans to enhance its technology and operational capacity to reach more gig economy workers in Latin America and the US.

OneCarNow! aims to transform into a comprehensive fintech platform, offering a diversified suite of innovative financial products and services. This vision is designed to empower the gig workforce and unlock a new era of financial inclusion, positioning OneCarNow! as a dominant player in the fintech landscape.

Great North Ventures first invested in OneCarNow! in May 2023 as part of the company’s Seed funding round. A Great North Ventures investment theme is to invest in startups building market-driven solutions for workplaces and labor. Great North Ventures previously invested in the Series B round of Branch, the leading instant payment provider for gig and hourly workers. Branch powers the Uber Pro Card. More recently, Great North Ventures also invested in another LATAM fintech startup Mangxo which is servier Latam construction workers. Providing an all-inclusive rental model for ride-share drivers is crucial for economic growth, as it empowers drivers to achieve financial stability and enhances mobility solutions in a rapidly expanding market. Great North Ventures primarily serves startups in underserved geographic markets with a beachhead in the Upper Midwest though more broadly across North America including in Mexico with OneCarNow! marking its first investment.

On June 27, 2024, Pear Commerce, a retail e-commerce enablement platform, announced it has secured $10 million in Series A funding led by Stage 2 Capital. This follows Pear’s significant 5x year-over-year growth and its pivotal role in creating shoppable experiences for five of the top 20 CPG companies. Great North Ventures & Mairs & Power Venture Capital were the two largest investors in Pear’s prior round.

Modern consumers expect an omnichannel shopping experience that bridges channels, platforms, and devices. Pear builds all of a brand’s digital paths to purchase from brand.com and brand media to retail.com seamlessly. Pear’s technology uniquely creates shoppable experiences for over 3,000 retailers and 165,000 store locations–updating inventory daily–creating frictionless paths to purchase while capturing actionable insights on consumer behavior.

Owning the digital paths to purchase enables brands to understand the key drivers of performance and optimize their marketing budgets around crucial events such as clicks, retailer selections, and purchase confirmations. Plus, Pear integrates with all major ad platforms so brands can build owned custom audiences of these retail e-commerce shoppers, improving their return on ad spend.

“Our vision is to empower CPG brands with the same transparency and efficiency that direct-to-consumer brands enjoy,” said Eric Martell, Co-founder of Pear Commerce. “This funding will help us grow our team and enhance our technology to provide exceptional support and insights for our clients, ensuring that every marketing dollar is optimized for maximum impact.”

The funding will support the growth of Pear’s team, enhance its technology, and introduce new products like Pear Connect—a shoppable ad unit that integrates where-to-buy technology directly into the ad itself, bridging shoppers from CPG brands’ digital ads to retailer websites in a single click. Future initiatives include expanding product development, market expansion, and filling key positions such as VP of Sales and VP of Engineering (see all job openings & apply on LinkedIn).

Great North Ventures has an investment theme which is investing in startups that are leveraging AI to transform industries. “Pear’s solutions help CPGs transform their shopper marketing campaigns by providing them with break-through capabilities for measuring their effectiveness,” said Partner Ryan Weber. Prior to Great North Ventures, Ryan led product management and strategy at an advertising tech company he co-founded and scaled to tens of millions of annual revenue which had both desktop and mobile products.

See additional coverage of the release on Pear Commerce’s Website

UPDATE: Signup here for St. Cloud or Red Wing locations! Or View Course Information.

Greater Minnesota has been underperforming in its formation of new startups. When we founded Great North Labs, we recognized this need, and committed to changing it before the region could fall further behind. We founded a Startup School to provide the educational components that we saw local entrepreneurs were missing. By partnering with Red Wing Ignite and ILT Studios, we will greatly expand our reach, capacity, and educational offering. This co-created, yet-to-be-named, Greater MN Startup School initiative will reach across the state to cultivate founders and startups in areas ready for the impact of entrepreneurial innovation.

The Necessity of Startup Entrepreneurship

From 2000-2017, 52% of companies in the Fortune 500 have either gone bankrupt, been acquired, or ceased to exist. Digital disruption is the primary catalyst of change. Adaptability is key to success. A key to any community, or organization, strengthening its adaptive intelligence is for it to master a disciplined approach to startup entrepreneurship. Disciplined startup entrepreneurship isn’t new but techniques have emerged the past 15 years that emphasize a more agile process for startup entrepreneurship that is needed in an environment with such accelerating changes.

One measure of the strength of startup entrepreneurship in a community is the number of first venture financings that it produces. The Twin Cities (Minneapolis-St. Paul) now have 1% of the countries first venture financings, but Greater Minnesota (generalized as non-urban MN, or specifically as all of Minnesota outside of the Twin Cities region) has lagged behind. Comparing the efficiency –the number of first venture financings per population– of the Twin Cities to the next largest markets in Minnesota is revealing. St. Cloud, Duluth, and Mankato have 50% or lower startup efficiency. Rochester (home of the Mayo Clinic) is a standout, and outperformed with a 200%+ startup efficiency compared to the Twin Cities.

The Need for Startup Education

My twin brother and Great North Labs Partner, Rob Weber, and I have previously angel invested in 25 startups from 2006 to 2017 while scaling our own startup with offices in Silicon Valley and Minnesota. I served for 10+ years as Chief Product Officer, and noticed an inefficiency in the startup teams resulting from a lack of disciplined startup entrepreneurship practices compared to Silicon Valley. I struggled finding Minnesota-based product managers trained in the more adaptive style of product management made popular by lean startups so we invested in developing a common process and trained our team on it.

As investors, too often we’d hear from a founder that they just need $300K to prove out their latest thesis. We’d meet teams that burned through $500K in angel funding that still couldn’t present evidence validating their thesis. This evidence we’d expect a product manager to answer at our company in their first two months of leading a new product idea with nothing more than qualitative research.

For most of the funded startup teams, they were immersed in the market and sought to solve a problem they thought they understood well. However, they usually struggled to identify the problem that’s the most impactful to solve, the minimal viable solution that solves that problems needs, and an offer that communicates the value proposition clearly and for a price the buyer will accept.

The Great North Labs Startup School

Great North Labs was formed in the fall of 2017. In addition to our early-stage venture fund, we started an initiative called the Startup School to invest in strengthening our disciplined startup education in the region. We led a group of practitioners who ran workshops on Digital Transformation, Lean Startups (most frequent), and Agile Development. The free or low-cost workshops attracted over 200 participants through the end of 2019. The workshop materials were also shared with many others and we gave lectures at a number of universities and conferences in cities across the Upper Midwest.

For the Lean Startup Workshop, we found that participants were engaged with low attrition rates and heard from them after the fact as they reported on their progress. We had the Executive Director of a significant non-profit mention using the process to discover a new innovation they were pursuing to commercialize, several tech founders launching their MVPs after researching, and many staying in touch to assist and support each-other but also in some cases joining forces on a startup.

We saw a greater gap in the smaller markets across Minnesota and throughout the Upper Midwest. However, one bright spot was in Iowa. There, the state had invested in programming similar to ours, and had expanded across the state with their Venture School initiative.

The Greater MN Startup School Initiative

We are taking the experience and lessons learned along the way from our initial Startup School, from Iowa’s Venture School, and from other startup education programs to expand our program to our new Greater MN Startup School initiative. This new Startup School will make the skills and training necessary for disciplined startup entrepreneurship more accessible to Minnesota entrepreneurs than ever before. It will also open up networks and possibilities for people across the state that were previously unavailable. Across the state, we hope to see this cultivation of startups drive innovation, economic activity, and value creation.

Local Tech Vet Ryan Weber Launches Great North Labs Startup Incubator

19 May 2017

Great North Labs is a new technology incubator in St. Cloud to “build new startups that apply breakthrough technologies to disrupt large markets.”

Greetings Everyone:
I wanted to briefly share a note about my new venture, Great North Labs, that we created to support the growth of tech startups in our region. There was a write-up yesterday on SC Times about it in case you missed it.
Our new incubator kicked off the summer on May 11th in St. Cloud with a focus on free product and engineering boot camps to train talent to later assist with developing new startups here. We’ll be picking at least one business model to develop a product for by the end of June using talent assembled from the incubator (including professional and student contributors). Later in the summer, we’ll be formalizing a new fund for Great North Lab’s to provide fuel to the incubator backed startups in addition to a formal mentor ship program.
I wanted to personally invite you to join us for a social event in support of Central Minnesota Tech Startups that is coming up in just a few days. Business Leaders, Students, Trainers, Developers, Founders, Mentors, and Other Supporters are gathering (families are welcome to join too) for a free picnic (Custom Catering is providing the food service) on Wednesday, May 24th from 5pm to 7pm at Riverside Park in St. Cloud. A buffet style dinner and beverages will be provided to all who attend (we have the shelter reserved). To ensure we can adequately plan food portions, please RSVP by 10am on Monday by sending an email with your name, the number of people attending, and if you have any special food needs in your party to: events@greatnorthlabs.com
Happy to answer any questions you may have too!
P.S. Please forward this email to anyone you think may have an interest.
Regards. Ryan Great North Labs