Monthly Archives: November 2020

News: Marketing automation platform Klaviyo scores $200M Series C on $4.15B valuation

• November 17, 2020
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Boston-based marketing automation firm Klaviyo wants to change the way marketers interact with data, giving them direct access to their data and their customers. It believes that makes it easier to customize the messages and produce better results. Investors apparently agree, awarding the company a $200 million Series C on a hefty $4.15 billion valuation

Boston-based marketing automation firm Klaviyo wants to change the way marketers interact with data, giving them direct access to their data and their customers. It believes that makes it easier to customize the messages and produce better results. Investors apparently agree, awarding the company a $200 million Series C on a hefty $4.15 billion valuation today.

The round was led by Accel with help from Summit Partners. It comes on the heels of last year’s $150 million Series B, and brings the total raised to $385.5 million, according the company. Accel’s Ping Li will also be joining the company board under the terms of today’s announcement.

Marketing automation and communication takes on a special significance as we find ourselves in the midst of this pandemic and companies need to find ways to communicate in meaningful ways with customers who can’t come into brick and mortar establishments. Company CEO and co-founder Andrew Bialecki says that his company’s unique use of data helps in this regard.

“I think our success is because we are a hybrid customer data and marketing platform. We think about what it takes to create these owned experiences. They’re very contextual and you need all of that customer data, not some of it, all of it, and you need that to be tightly coupled with how you’re building customer experiences,” Bialecki explained.

Andrew Bialecki, CEO and co-founder at Klaviyo Image Credits: Klaviyo

He believes that by providing a platform of this scope that combines the data, the ability to customize messages and the use of machine learning to keep improving that, it will help them compete with the largest platforms. In fact his goal is to help companies understand that they don’t have to give up their customer data to Amazon, Google and Facebook.

“The flip side of that is growing through Amazon where you give up all your customer data, or Facebook or Google where you kind of are delegated to wherever their algorithms decide where you get to show up,” he said. With Klaviyo, the company retains its own data, and Ping Li, who is leading the investment at Accel says that it where the e-commerce market is going.

“So the question is, is there a tool that allows you to do that as easily as going on Facebook and Google, and I think that’s the vision and the promise that Klaviyo is delivering on,” Li said.  He believes that this will allow their customers to actually build that kind of fidelity with their customers by going directly to them, instead of through a third-party intermediary.

The company has seen some significant success with 50,000 customers in 125 countries along with that lofty valuation. The customer number has doubled year over year, even during the economic malaise brought on by the pandemic.

Today, the company has 500 employees with plans to double that in the next year. As he grows his company, Bialecki believes diversity is not just the right thing to do, it’s also smart business. “I think the competitive advantages that tech companies are going to have going forward, especially for the tech companies that are not the leaders today, but [could be] leaders in the coming decades, it’s because they have the most diverse teams and inclusive culture and those are both big focuses for us,” he said.

As they move forward flush with this cash, the company wants to continue to build out the platform, giving customers access to a set of tools that allow them to know their own customers on an increasingly granular level, while delivering more meaningful interactions. “It’s all about accelerating product development and getting into new markets,” Bialecki said. They certainly have plenty of runway to do that now.

News: YouTube targets music fans with new audio ad format

• November 17, 2020
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YouTube is announcing new ad products today, designed to help marketers reach YouTube visitors who are doing more listening than watching. The big addition is audio advertising. As the Google -owned video site puts it in a blog post, these are ads designed for viewers who “squeeze in a living room workout before dinner, catch

YouTube is announcing new ad products today, designed to help marketers reach YouTube visitors who are doing more listening than watching.

The big addition is audio advertising. As the Google -owned video site puts it in a blog post, these are ads designed for viewers who “squeeze in a living room workout before dinner, catch up on a podcast or listen to a virtual concert on a Friday night.”

In other words, audio ads are designed for videos where audience members may only be glancing at the screen occasionally, or might ignoring the visuals altogether. To be clear, these ads won’t be audio-only, but YouTube says the audio should be doing most of the communication, while the visual side is limited to “a still image or simple animation.”

The company says that in early testing, more than 75% of audio ad campaigns on YouTube resulted in a significant lift in brand awareness. For example, this Shutterfly ad resulted in a 14% lift in ad recall and a 2% increase in favorability in its target audience.

The key, YouTube says, is that the audio has to carry the message: “Think: If I close my eyes, I can still clearly understand what this ad is about.”

In addition to launching audio ads in beta, YouTube is also announcing dynamic music lineups, allowing marketers to target their campaigns at collections of music channels on YouTube. These lineups can be focused on a genre, such as Latin music or K-pop, or on an interest like fitness.

In a separate blog post, YouTube’s Head of Music Lyor Cohen made a broader case to advertisers about why they should see YouTube as an essential music streaming platform.

After all, according to Cohen, more than 2 billion logged-in viewers are watching at least one music video each month. And, he wrote, “music is more front and center than you might think” — 60% of YouTube’s music viewing happens on mobile, where background viewing/listening is disabled.

That might seem like an odd thing to emphasize while launching an ad format better suited to background listening, but Cohen continued, “Regardless of when and how people are tuning in, we have ways to help advertisers connect, even when they’re consuming music in the background. Now you can complement the moments your consumers are watching, by engaging them in moments when they’re listening, with newly announced audio ads.”

News: John Legend and Natalie Portman want you to try wearing fungus instead of leather

• November 17, 2020
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Natalie Portman and John Legend are joining a group of venture capitalists and unnamed fashion brands backing MycoWorks, a company that just raised $45 million to commercialize its technology that makes a fungal-based biomaterial that can replace leather. The goal is to get consumers to trade in their leather and lizard skin couture for some

Natalie Portman and John Legend are joining a group of venture capitalists and unnamed fashion brands backing MycoWorks, a company that just raised $45 million to commercialize its technology that makes a fungal-based biomaterial that can replace leather.

The goal is to get consumers to trade in their leather and lizard skin couture for some fungus fashion.

The company said it has inked some deals with big fashion brands as partners as it looks to bring its funky fungus to the masses in shoes, wallets, belts, and other goods that traditionally use cowhide or other animal skins.

“We have been working with a few luxury brands and a major footwear manufacturer in very close collaboration,” said Matt Scullin, the chief executive officer at MycoWorks .

The unnamed fashion brands have already started producing products for stores in a range of items including shoes, ready to wear apparel and bags, according to Scullin.

MycoWorks likes to differentiate itself from other brands that want to bring a fungus among us or plant new plant-based fabrics in fashion — companies like Bolt Threads (mushrooms), Ananas Anam (pineapple fibers), and Desserto (cactus leather) — with its emphasis on the durability of its fabric.

“We’ve had the product tested in a huge range of different applications of various leather-based apparel to upholstery to standard leather goods like handbags and wallets. The key difference between our material and mushroom leather is that the structural components is so high,” Scullin said. “We’re confident in the material’s ability to perform in a really wide range of applications so there’s a wide range of uses for that.”

To that end, MycoWorks is focused on the high-end fo the market. “There’s a misconception that brands are willing to sacrifice performance for sustainability and that’s not true,” Scullin said. “The real adoption occurs in an industry like this when the performance is there.”

Scullin won’t say how much the MycoWorks material costs nor would he talk about which specific companies are working with the company’s product right now. He did say that the company hopes eventually to be price competitive with not just the traditional leather market, but the plastic market for leather replacements, which is worth $70 billion per-year alone.

With the company’s current capacity it can produce tens of thousands of square feet of fungal material per yar, according to Scullin. That means MycoWorks still has a long way to go to catch up to an industry that produces billions of square feet of leather.

The funding for MycoWorks is impressive, but it also has to contend with some competitors that are getting traction of their own in the fashion industry.

In October, Bolt Threads announced the creation of a consortium alongside longtime partners Adidas, Stella McCartney and the fashion house behind brands like Balenciaga to explore mushroom leather-based products.

For MycoWorks investors including WTT Investment Ltd. (Taipei, Taiwan), DCVC Bio, Valor Equity Partners, Humboldt Fund, Gruss & Co., Novo Holdings, 8VC, SOSV, AgFunder, Wireframe Ventures, and Tony Faddell, the competition is expected. But they believe that MycoWorks functionality makes it the king (oyster) of the leather substitute world. 

“Fine mycelial leather is customizable to client needs” said DCVC Bio investor Kiersten Stead. “[It’s] customizable in terms of shape, and application. And prices will vary depending on what the application and the criteria from customers is.”

In all, MycoWorks has raised $62 million and the company’s new financing announcement coincides with the opening of a new Emeryville, Calif. production plant that takes its capacity up to its current tens-of-thousands of feet of fungal leather replacement capacity.

Behind all of this push to find replacements for animal skins is a growing awareness of the problems associated with traditional methods for manufacturing leather for clothes and shoes. It’s a terribly toxic and polluting process, both in the tanning and dyeing and in the waste and landfilling associated with both animal leather and its plastic replacements.

“The process of growing the mycelium is carbon negative. Customers will look at [our product] vs. an animal hide and say why wouldn’t I choose [that],” said Sculin. “In addition you have the non-animal aspects and the plastic free aspects that are driving so many decisions right now… what we really are to our brand partners is an advanced manufacturing company. We are motivated by sustainability. We represent a way for them to change their supply chains.”

News: 5 questions from Airbnb’s IPO filing

• November 17, 2020
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Airbnb filed to go public yesterday, offering the world a look into its financial performance over the past several years. The company’s S-1 detailed an expanding travel giant with billions in annual revenue that was severely disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. But past our overview of Airbnb’s core financial results and our look into which investors

Airbnb filed to go public yesterday, offering the world a look into its financial performance over the past several years. The company’s S-1 detailed an expanding travel giant with billions in annual revenue that was severely disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

But past our overview of Airbnb’s core financial results and our look into which investors will make the most from its public debut, there are still questions that need answering.

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We need to to better understand how far Airbnb’s bookings fell during the end of Q1 and the start of Q2, when travel first collapsed. And, how far those numbers have come back since. We also want to understand what sort of booking activity is driving those gains — is Airbnb really benefiting from a surge of long-term, local stays?

Then, to close, how profitable was Airbnb when times were good, and what sort of cash stockpile does the company have to get back to its former scale?

These five questions should help us better understand how Airbnb managed to survive some tough months and still file to go public before 2020 ran out. Let’s get to work!

We’ll take each question individually, to make our homework today as simple as possible.

How far did Airbnb’s bookings fall during Q1 and Q2?

Let’s start by looking at Airbnb’s gross bookings on a quarterly basis. The company defines gross bookings as “net of cancellations and alterations,” so these numbers are not artificially inflated.

Here’s the chart:

Where does the decline begin? Q1, as we’ll see when we dig into monthly data, but the above chart does a good job painting just how bad things got for Airbnb in growth terms as Q1 closed and Q2 kicked off.

As you can see, Airbnb’s second quarter gross bookings were its lowest in recent history; Q2 2020 put up the smallest bookings result since at least the first quarter of 2017. For a company that had done $10.0 billion in gross bookings in a single quarter just over a year before, the declines were catastrophic.

But the results are actually worse than that chart shows; Airbnb actually saw gross bookings go negative for a few months.

How is that possible? Recall that the gross bookings figure discounts cancellations and alterations. So, if Airbnb had a big wave of cancellations, its gross bookings number could fall so sharply it goes negative, even if the company were still seeing some new bookings.

That’s what happened in March and April. Observe:

So how far did Airbnb’s gross bookings fall? They fell to -$900 million in March. More simply, Airbnb saw its expected rental volume fall by nearly $1 billion in a single month. And then in April it fell by another $600 million as more cancellations piled up.

That’s why Airbnb cut staff and took on expensive capital; its business had gone from accreting to bleeding in no time at all.

How far have Airbnb’s bookings come back since?

News: Hey look, glow-in-the-dark PowerBeats

• November 17, 2020
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Now that Apple’s getting more serious about its own branded headphones, Beats have, perhaps, lost a little bit of luster within the company. The products are still wildly popular, of course, and the brand offers a lot more options than its parent. Powerbeats are one of the more utilitarian entries among the brand’s wireless offerings

Now that Apple’s getting more serious about its own branded headphones, Beats have, perhaps, lost a little bit of luster within the company. The products are still wildly popular, of course, and the brand offers a lot more options than its parent.

Powerbeats are one of the more utilitarian entries among the brand’s wireless offerings (though not quite to the extent of those new $50 models), trading the fully wireless form factor for a behind-the-neck cable and a lower price. Today Beats is offering a new special edition take on the product, launched a collaboration with the Ambush jewelry line and Nigerian singer, Burna Boy.

You’ve got your usual lineup of specs here: 15 hours of battery, sweat and water resistant design and Apple’s H1 chip, et al. Most importantly, though, they’re the first glow-in-the dark product from Beats. And hey, we could all use a little commoditized magic in this dark and depressing world that too often amounts to a ceaseless and increasingly intense parade of pain and suffering, right?

Image Credits: Apple

Here’s Ambush cofounder Yoon Ahn’s decidedly less defeatist take, ” “I thought it would be really cool to design a product that could capture that same city energy when you’re outside late at night listening to music.”

That way is nicer, I suppose.

Anyway, the limited edition comes at a bit of a premium at $200 (the standard Powerbeats are currently listed at $150). They’re available starting tomorrow.

News: Turo puts $1 million toward helping Black people make money sharing cars

• November 17, 2020
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Car sharing marketplace Turo has teamed up with Kiva to offer interest-free loans to Black people and folks from traditionally underserved communities to buy cars and then share them on Turo. The $1 million commitment aims to address the issue of wealth inequality in the United States. Called the Turo Seed Initiative, those who are

Car sharing marketplace Turo has teamed up with Kiva to offer interest-free loans to Black people and folks from traditionally underserved communities to buy cars and then share them on Turo. The $1 million commitment aims to address the issue of wealth inequality in the United States.

Called the Turo Seed Initiative, those who are eligible can raise up to $7,500 via crowdfunding small loans platform. In order to raise money on Kiva, folks must use the funding for business purposes, which includes car-sharing on Turo. Turo will then match whatever the person raises. From there, they can buy a car and list it on Turo.

“This will make it easier for people who don’t have existing assets or the right credit score or doesn’t own a car to be able to get started that way,” Turo CEO Andre Haddad told TechCrunch. “They borrow the money and only reimburse the capital.”

Throughout the program, Turo says it will also work with hosts to ensure they can be effective in sharing their cars on Turo. In terms of repayment, Turo has a one-month grace period before hosts must start repaying the funds over a period of 42 months.

The program is limited to Turo’s top 15 markets, which include San Francisco, Atlanta, Boston and Houston, in order to ensure that there’s enough to demand to make it worthwhile for hosts. On average, hosts earn around $600 per month by sharing their vehicles about 11 days per month. On top of that, hosts can also use their cars to drive for Uber or Lyft, or deliver for companies like DoorDash and GrubHub.

“We’re very confident that there is real profit to be made here,” Haddad said.

Turo has raised $467.4 million to date and competes against the likes of Getaround, Car2Go, ZipCar and others. In September, Turo says it saw 17%% year over year growth in revenue and is on track to deliver 20% year over year growth in October. In October, Getaround raised a $140 million Series E round to bring its total funding to $600 million. At the time, Getaround said its worldwide revenue had mroe than doubled from its pre-COVID baseline.

News: Facebook’s Messenger Kids app redesigned to look more like Messenger

• November 17, 2020
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Facebook today is rolling out an updated version of its Messenger Kids app with the goal of making it easier for kids to interact with their friends and family, navigate the app, and personalize their experience with features like custom chat bubble colors. The redesign also gives the kid-friendly app a look-and-feel that’s more like

Facebook today is rolling out an updated version of its Messenger Kids app with the goal of making it easier for kids to interact with their friends and family, navigate the app, and personalize their experience with features like custom chat bubble colors. The redesign also gives the kid-friendly app a look-and-feel that’s more like Messenger itself.

The updated app does away with the larger, colorful blocks that would flash when messages arrive for a more traditional messaging app design where chats are stacked in a vertical list. The child’s unread messages, now at the top of the inbox, are in bold with a blue dot next to them to call the eye’s attention. Media and message previews have also been added, too, allowing kids to more easily see updates for their conversations.

The redesign introduces new navigation with two dedicated “Chat” and “Explore” navigation tabs at the bottom of the screen, allowing for kids to switch between their conversations and the other in-app activities the app provides, like its mini-games

And with a new swipe gesture, kids can start a call from their inbox.

Finally, the update introduces a new option to personalize conversations, including both individual and group chats, with a custom chat bubble color.

Image Credits: Facebook

Facebook refers to the update as a “test,” but the changes here are not small tweaks to the layout, navigation or feature set — they’re a revamp. That makes it less likely that this is just some experiment that will later be rolled back based on user feedback. Instead, by referring to it as a test, Facebook gives itself more time before committing to a global rollout.

The company says the new features will first roll out to kids using iPhones in the U.S. and Canada. The update will later expand to other devices and markets in the months ahead.

The changes arrive shortly after Messenger itself received a significant update of its own, which included a visual makeover and new features, including support for chat themes, custom reactions, selfie stickers and vanish mode, in addition to support for cross-app communication with Instagram users. Those updates could have led to the Messenger Kids makeover as well, given there’s likely some underlying messaging infrastructure that’s shared here.

The Messenger Kids app has been steadily updated in the years since its launch, most recently with a big explainer on what Facebook is doing with all that data it’s collecting.

Image Credits: Facebook

Parents should be aware this app today collects a lot of personal information, including names, profile photos, demographic details (gender and birthday), a child’s connection to parents, contacts’ information (like most frequent contacts), app usage information, device attributes and unique identifiers, data from device settings (like time zones or access to camera and photos), network information and information provided from things like bug reports or feedback/contact forms. While some of this does allow the app to properly function, there’s also concern from some parents about how this data is really being used.

While the app does offer a suite of parental controls that make it easier for parents to monitor and restrict how and when their children chat online, Messenger Kids’ privacy policy still leaves itself a lot of wiggle room about how the data may be used to “evaluate, troubleshoot, improve, create, and develop our products” and be shared with other Facebook Companies. Parents should carefully weigh the risks of allowing their child to use a Facebook product with the conveniences of being able to use an app with a robust set of parental controls.

News: Mati reshapes online trust and reputation with a Plaid-like API

• November 17, 2020
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Meet Mati, a startup that recently raised a $13.5 million Series A round to build a digital reputation API that could change the way you interact with online services. Mati uses an API-first approach and lets users seamlessly share pieces of their legal identity. Investors in today’s funding round include Tribe Capital with Arjun Sethi

Meet Mati, a startup that recently raised a $13.5 million Series A round to build a digital reputation API that could change the way you interact with online services. Mati uses an API-first approach and lets users seamlessly share pieces of their legal identity.

Investors in today’s funding round include Tribe Capital with Arjun Sethi joining the board, Jerry Murdock from Insight Partners, Sima Gandhi who is the former head of business development and strategy at Plaid and Will Hockey, the CTO of Plaid.

Mati isn’t just an ID verification company with biometric checks. In many ways, Mati works a bit like Plaid, but not just for other types of data. When a company starts using Mati, they can verify various data points, such as residency, income and taxes.

Instead of taking a photography of important documents, Mati can help you connect to a government database or a utility provider to download and share data from those services directly.

“What we do is a digital reputation API that turns anonymous strangers into trustworthy users,” co-founder and CEO Filip Victor told me. And this kind of verifications are extremely important for fintech startups and companies operating in the so-called sharing economy industry.

Filip Victor himself has suffered in the past from poor reputation processes. As an immigrant in the U.S., he couldn’t verify himself on Airbnb. The issue is that most reputation services aren’t that flexible. You run into edge cases quite quickly when you’re an immigrant or you don’t have the right documents.

Mati has chosen to focus on high-growth regions, such as Latin America and South East Asia because they tend to be underserved when it comes to digital reputation. Clients include Te Creemos, Taptap Send and Tropipay.

“We went region by region, country by country and scraped into different databases. We gained access to things like social security access via the user,” Victor said.

Mati is thinking about other use cases beyond financial services and sharing economy startups. Many online services could benefit from some level of trust. By letting users choose what they want and don’t want to share, the company believes it has found the right balance between privacy and trust.

“Privacy is not about being anonymous or hidden. It’s about controlling your data,” Victor said.

For now, the company has managed to attract 200 customers. In the past year, Mati has tripled the number of customers. The startup now has 50 employees and plans to add another 20 employees with the Series A round.

Image Credits: Mati

News: Dropbox shifts business product focus to remote work with Spaces update

• November 17, 2020
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In a September interview at TechCrunch Disrupt, Dropbox co-founder and CEO Drew Houston talked about how the pandemic had forced the company to rethink what work means, and how his company is shifting with the new requirements of a work-from-home world. Today, the company announced broad changes to Dropbox Spaces, the product introduced last year,

In a September interview at TechCrunch Disrupt, Dropbox co-founder and CEO Drew Houston talked about how the pandemic had forced the company to rethink what work means, and how his company is shifting with the new requirements of a work-from-home world. Today, the company announced broad changes to Dropbox Spaces, the product introduced last year, to make it a collaboration and project management tool designed with these new requirements in mind.

Dropbox president Timothy Young says that the company has always been about making it easy to access files wherever you happen to be and whatever device you happen to be on, whether that was in a consumer or business context. As the company has built out its business products over the last several years, that involved sharing content internally or externally. Today’s announcement is about helping teams plan and execute around the content you create with a strong project focus.

“Now what we’re basically trying to do is really help distributed teams stay organized, collaborate together and keep moving along, but also do so in a really secure way and support IT, administrators and companies with some features around that as well, while staying true to Dropbox principles,” Young said.

This involves updating Spaces to be a full-fledged project management tool designed with a distributed workforce in mind. Spaces connects to other tools like your calendar, people directory, project management software — and of course files. You can create a project, add people and files, then set up a timeline and assign and track tasks, In addition, you can access meetings directly from Spaces and communicate with team members, who can be inside or outside the company.

Houston suggested a product like this could be coming in his September interview when he said:

“Back in March we started thinking about this, and how [the rapid shift to distributed work] just kind of happened. It wasn’t really designed. What if you did design it? How would you design this experience to be really great? And so starting in March we reoriented our whole product road map around distributed work,” he said.

Along these same lines, Young says the company itself plans to continue to be a remote first company even after the pandemic ends, and will continue to build tools to make it easier to collaborate and share information with that personal experience in mind.

Today’s announcement is a step in that direction. Dropbox Spaces has been in private beta and should be available at the beginning of next year.

News: GoodRx, Walgreens, CVS shares all down on Amazon’s Pharmacy news

• November 17, 2020
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Consumer healthcare stocks are plummeting this morning on news that Amazon has finally launched its integrated pharmacy service. Amazon launches Amazon Pharmacy, a delivery service for prescription medications The news, which could dramatically reshape the healthcare landscape by offering deep discounts on prescription medication and two-day delivery services for Amazon Prime customers, has already taken

Consumer healthcare stocks are plummeting this morning on news that Amazon has finally launched its integrated pharmacy service.

The news, which could dramatically reshape the healthcare landscape by offering deep discounts on prescription medication and two-day delivery services for Amazon Prime customers, has already taken a toll on the share price of companies like GoodRx, Walgreens, and CVS.

GoodRx was hit the hardest, with its shares slumping 19% in pre-market trading. Walgreens Boots Alliance was down nearly 10% before market open and CVS Health slid 7%.

Amazon has been steadily encroaching on pharmacy businesses in the same way the company has moved into grocery delivery and everyday consumer staples.

The convergence of food and pharmacy has been a decades-long evolution for mega-retailers on both sides of the divide — with grocers building out pharmacy services and pharmacies adding food to their shelves.

Since its acquisition of Pillpack in 2018, Amazon has been adding additional pharmaceutical and healthcare services. It launched its own over-the-counter drugs in 2019, and rolled out a healthcare network for its employees — Amazon Care for its workers in Seattle.

In August, Amazon launched its fitness tracker, Halo. The personal health and wellness monitoring and advice service includes a $64.99 wrist tracker and an application suite for monitoring health.

As TechCrunch noted, the service includes more than the standard health tracking gadget/app combo, by taking a comprehensive look at various measures of health, including body fat percentage, as measured at home with just your smartphone’s own camera and the Amazon Halo app.

Taken together, Amazon’s array of hardware, software, pharmacy services and healthcare network represents the most complete package of health services across industries.

It’s a powerful pitch to consumers, and one that could ultimately significantly drive down healthcare costs. And drive down the revenue of other pharmacies, which investors are not stoked to imagine.