Monthly Archives: February 2021

News: Sennheiser partners with Formlabs for customized headphones

• February 18, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

3D printing has come a long way over the course of the last decade, but questions about mainstream adoption still linger around the technology. Medical devices have been a pretty compelling use case — they’re not really mass produced and require a high level of personalization. Clear orthodontics are a great example of something that

3D printing has come a long way over the course of the last decade, but questions about mainstream adoption still linger around the technology. Medical devices have been a pretty compelling use case — they’re not really mass produced and require a high level of personalization. Clear orthodontics are a great example of something that falls in that sweet spot — in fact, dental in general has been a big application.

Audio, too, holds a lot of potential. Imagine, for example, a set of headphones custom designed for your ears. The technology has been available on high-end models for a while, courtesy of molding, but 3D printing could unlock a more easily scalable version of that kind of luxury.

This week, Sennheiser announced a partnership that will utilize Formlabs technology to print custom earphones. Specifically, the headphone maker will be using the Form 3B, a printer design for use with biocompatible material that has largely been utilized for dental applications. Product specifics haven’t been revealed, but the audio company’s Ambeo division will be using the tech to create custom headphone eartips. Users would be able to scan their ears with a smartphone and send that to the company to get a tip printed.

Image Credits: Sennheiser

“Our technology collaboration with Sennheiser seeks to change the way customers interact with the brands they love by enabling a more customized, user-centric approach to product development,” Formlabs audio head Iain McLeod said in a release.. “Formlabs’ deep industry knowledge and broad expertise in developing scalable solutions enable us to deliver tangible innovations to our customers. In this case, we are working with Sennheiser’s Ambeo team to deliver a uniquely accessible, custom fit experience.”

The product is still very much in the prototype phase. And while such a partnership seems like a no-brainer for headphone makers going forward, there are some big questions here, including pricing and scalability. Clearly such a product would come at a premium over standard headphones, but not at so high a cost that supersedes such novelty.

The release calls it “an affordable and simple solution is now available to mass 3D print custom-fit earphones.” What, precisely, it means by affordable remains to be seen.

News: Proptech startup Knock secures $20M to grow SaaS platform for property managers

• February 18, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

In recent years, the U.S. has seen more renters than at any point since at least 1965, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau housing data.  Competition for renters is fierce and property managers are turning to technology to get a leg up. To meet that demand, Seattle-based Knock – one startup

In recent years, the U.S. has seen more renters than at any point since at least 1965, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau housing data. 

Competition for renters is fierce and property managers are turning to technology to get a leg up.

To meet that demand, Seattle-based Knock – one startup that has developed tools to give property management companies a competitive edge – has raised $20 million in a growth funding round led by Fifth Wall Ventures.

Existing backers Madrona Venture Group, Lead Edge Capital, Second Avenue Partners and Seven Peaks Ventures also participated in the financing, which brings the company’s total capital raised to $47 million.

Demetri Themelis and Tom Petry co-founded Knock in 2014 after renting “in super competitive markets” such as New York City, San Francisco and Seattle. 

“After meeting with property management companies, it was eye-opening to learn about the total gap across their tech stacks,” Themelis recalled.

Knock’s goal is to provide CRM tools to modernize front office operations for these companies so they can do things like offer virtual tours and communicate with renters via text, email or social media from “a single conversation screen.” For renters, it offers an easier way to communicate and engage with landlords. 

“Apartment buildings, like almost every customer-driven business, compete with each other by attracting, converting and retaining customers,” Themelis said. “For property management companies, these customers are renters.”

The startup — which operates as a SaaS business — has seen an uptick in growth, quadrupling its revenue over the past two years. Its software is used by hundreds of the largest property management companies across the United States and Canada and has more than 1.5 million apartment units using the platform. Starwood Capital Group, ZRS, FPI and Cushman & Wakefield (formerly Pinnacle) are among its users.

As Petry explains it, Knock serves as the sales inbox (chat, SMS, phone, email), sales calendar and CRM systems, all in one. 

“We also automate certain sales tasks like outreach and appointment scheduling, while also surfacing which sales opportunities need the most attention at any given time, for both new leases as well as renewals,” he said.

Image Credit: Knock

The company, Themelis said, was well-prepared for the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Our software supports property management companies, which operate high-density apartment buildings that people live and work in,” he told TechCrunch. “You can’t just ‘shut them down,’ which has made multifamily resilient and even grow in comparison to retail and industrial real estate.”

For example, when lockdowns went into effect, in-person property tours declined by an estimated 80% in a matter of weeks.

Knock did things like help property managers transition to a centralized and remote leasing model so remote agents could work across a large portfolio of properties rather than in a single on-site leasing office, noted Petry.

It also helped them adopt self-guided, virtual and live video-based leasing tools, so prospective renters could tour properties in person on their own or virtually.

“This transformation and modernization became a huge tailwind for our business in 2020,” Petry said. “Not only did we have a record year in terms of new customers, revenue growth and revenue retention, but our customers outperformed market averages for occupancy and rent growth as well.”

Looking ahead, the company says it will be using its new capital to (naturally!) hire across product, engineering, sales, marketing, customer success, finance and human resources divisions. It expects to grow headcount by 40% to 50% before year-end. It also plans to expand its product portfolio to include AI communications, fraud prevention, applicant screening and leasing, and intelligent forecasting. 

Fifth Wall partner Vik Chawla, who is joining Knock’s board of directors, pointed out that the macroeconomic environment is driving institutional capital into multifamily real estate at an accelerated pace. This makes Knock’s offering even more timely in its importance, in the firm’s view.

The startup, he believes, outshines its competitors in terms of quality of product, technical prowess and functionality.

“The Knock team has accomplished so much in just a short period of time by attracting very high quality product design and engineering talent to ameliorate a nuanced pain point in the tenant acquisition process,” Chawla told TechCrunch.

In terms of fitting with its investment thesis, Chawla said companies like Knock can both benefit from Fifth Wall’s global corporate strategic partners “and simultaneously serve as a key offering which we can share with real estate industry leaders in different countries as a potential solution for their local markets.”

News: Magical raises $3.3M to modernize calendars

• February 18, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Calendars. They are at the core of how we organize our workdays and meetings, but despite regular attempts to modernize the overall calendar experience, the calendar experience you see today in Outlook or G Suite Google Workspace hasn’t really changed at its core. And for the most part, the area that startups like Calendly or

Calendars. They are at the core of how we organize our workdays and meetings, but despite regular attempts to modernize the overall calendar experience, the calendar experience you see today in Outlook or G Suite Google Workspace hasn’t really changed at its core. And for the most part, the area that startups like Calendly or ReclaimAI have focused on in recent years is scheduling.

Magical is a Tel Aviv-based startup that wants to reinvent the calendar experience from the ground up and turn it into more of a team collaboration tool than simply a personal time-management service. The company today announced that it has raised a $3.3 million seed round led by Resolute Ventures, with additional backing from Ibex Investors, Aviv Growth Partners, ORR Partners, Homeward Ventures and Fusion LA, as well as several angel investors in the productivity space.

The idea for the service came from discussions on Supertools, a large workplace-productivity community, which was also founded by Magical founder and CEO Tommy Barav.

Image Credits: Magical

Based on the feedback from the community — and his own consulting work with large Fortune 500 multinationals — Barav realized that time management remains an unsolved business problem. “The time management space is so highly fragmented,” he told me. “There are so many micro tools and frameworks to manage time, but they’re not built inside of your calendar, which is the main workflow.”

Traditional calendars are add-ons to bigger product bundles and find themselves trapped under those, he argues. “The calendar in Outlook is an email sidekick, but it’s actually the center of your day. So there is an unmet need to use the calendar as a time management hub,” he said.

Magical, which is still in private beta, aims to integrate many of the features we’re seeing from current scheduling and calendaring startups, including AI-scheduling and automation tools. But Magical’s ambition is larger than that.

Image Credits: Magical

“We want to redefine how you use a calendar in the first place,” Barav said. “Many of the innovations that we’ve seen are associated with scheduling: how you schedule your time, letting you streamline the way you schedule meetings, how you see your calendar. […] But we’re talking about redefining time management by giving you a better calendar, by bringing these workflows — scheduling, coordinating and utilizing — into your calendar. We’re redefining the use of the calendar in the modern workspace.”

Since Magical is still in its early days, the team is still working out some of the details, but the general idea is to, for example, turn the calendar into the central repository for meeting notes — and Magical will feature tools to collaborate on these notes and share them. Team members will also be able to follow those meeting notes without having to participate in the actual meeting (or get copied on the emails about that meeting).

“We’ll help teams reduce pointless meetings,” Barav noted. To do this, the team is also integrating other service into the calendar experience, including the usual suspects like Zoom and Slack, but also Salesforce and Notion, for example.

“It’s rare that you find an entrepreneur who has so clearly validated its market opportunity,” said Mike Hirshland, a founding partner of Magical investor Resolute Ventures. “Tommy and his team have been talking to thousands of users for three years, they’ve validated the opportunity, and they’ve designed a product from the ground-up that meets the needs of the market. Now it’s ‘go time’ and I’m thrilled to be part of the journey ahead.”

News: Fintech Marqeta expands into credit card space days after filing for an IPO

• February 18, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Marqeta is expanding into the consumer credit card space to help other brands launch credit card programs.  The move comes just days after the payment card issuing company reportedly filed confidentially for an initial public offering, making it the latest fintech to make a move to the public markets. The value of the IPO is

Marqeta is expanding into the consumer credit card space to help other brands launch credit card programs. 

The move comes just days after the payment card issuing company reportedly filed confidentially for an initial public offering, making it the latest fintech to make a move to the public markets.

The value of the IPO is expected to be around $10 billion, according to Reuters. Marqeta — which is working with Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase on the offering — is reportedly hoping to complete the IPO by April.

Oakland, California-based Marqeta raised $150 million last May at a $4.2 billion valuation, TechCrunch previously reported. Then in October, Mastercard put an undisclosed amount of money in Marqeta.

The company, which provides the tools for financial services platforms of all stripes to provide cards, wallets and other payment mechanisms, counts Cash App, Affirm, DoorDash, and Instacart among its customers. At the end of 2020, Marqeta says it had issued 270 million cards through its platform, up from 140 million at the end of 2019. The company, which has over 550 employees, is live in 35 countries.

Now, Marqeta is partnering with another startup, Deserve, on its new credit card initiative.

As Deserve CEO Kalpesh Kapadia explains it, his company’s technology and open API platform will power Marqeta’s program management services, including origination, underwriting, bank and bureau Integration, customer service, compliance and risk management. 

Marqeta founder and CEO Jason Gardner described Marqeta’s expansion into building new credit products as a “major milestone” for the company in building out a “truly comprehensive card issuing platform, able to support any card type.”

“This technology is complex, and we saw that this barrier to market had created an opportunity for us to take what we’ve learned helping customers innovate in the prepaid and debit space and adapt that to credit,” he told TechCrunch.

“These innovators want to launch modern card products but having to rely on legacy technology, which allows much less options for flexibility and personalization, has slowed down innovation,” Gardner added.

Image Credits: Marqeta

“They want seamless digital experiences, rewards that match their lifestyle, and personalized apps that track financial health, but there’s been little innovation that speaks to this,” he said.

With the COVID-19 pandemic accelerating touchless payments — as more people avoided in-person interaction and shopping — the demand for more digital financial offerings has exploded.

With its new initiative, Marqeta aims to be able to help its customers launch new customized credit card products “in a fraction of the time, with more flexible controls and features.”

For example, they will have what Marqeta describes as a modern credit system of record that can adjust account parameters, such as rewards, APR and credit lines, in real time based on custom rules. Customers will have the ability to instantly activate cardholders upon approval and provision cards directly into digital wallets.

Gardner called Menlo Park-based Deserve “an ideal first strategic partner” in its expansion into the credit card market.

“We plan to offer program management services for customers using our credit card issuing platform through an ecosystem of partners,” he said. “They are a good DNA fit for what we’re trying to accomplish – with a strong belief in the power of open APIs to increase speed to market, and also targeting innovators looking to build truly modern card products. They’re experienced in the credit card space, which has a unique set of requirements, and have a unique approach to underwriting.”

For its part, Deserve says its B2B business has been growing in recent years, with it currently adding one prospect every week and one new partner to its business every month. More than 1.5 million consumers have applied and interacted with its platform over the past three years and the company is currently serving hundreds of thousands of customers (directly and indirectly), with tens of millions of dollars transacting every month on its platform, according to Kapadia.

Deserves also manages the entire credit card infrastructure for companies like Sallie Mae in the cloud, whereby consumers applying for and using Sallie Mae credit cards are engaging with Deserve behind the scene. It also provides origination services to companies such as BankMobile. Other fintechs such as Opploans, BlockFi and Earnest use its entire credit card infrastructure to launch their credit products. 

“The credit market is dominated by legacy technologies, high cost of operations and lack of customization and speed,” Kapadia told TechCrunch. “Marqeta’s leading card-issuing platform paired with Deserve’s digital card expertise will enable further innovation in the credit industry and provide consumers with superior card experiences.”

News: App monitoring platform Sentry gets $60 million Series D at $1 billion valuation

• February 18, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Application performance monitoring startup Sentry announced today that it has reached unicorn status, raising a $60 million Series D with a post-funding valuation of $1 billion. The round was led by Accel and New Enterprise Associates, both returning investors, and Bond. Accel led Sentry’s seed funding in 2015, and has invested in each of its

Application performance monitoring startup Sentry announced today that it has reached unicorn status, raising a $60 million Series D with a post-funding valuation of $1 billion. The round was led by Accel and New Enterprise Associates, both returning investors, and Bond.

Accel led Sentry’s seed funding in 2015, and has invested in each of its rounds since then. The startup, which serves 68,000 organizations, has now raised a total of $127 million. Its clients include Disney, Cloudflare, Peloton, Slack, Eventbrite, Supercell and Rockstar Games.

Sentry’s software monitors apps for potential issues, helping developers catch bugs before they result in outages, downtime and frustrated users. Its Series D will be used on product development, like adding support for more languages and frameworks, and hiring for its offices in San Francisco, Toronto and Vienna.

While Sentry’s products are used by a wide range of sectors, it is seeing continued growth in gaming and streaming media, and new demand in industries that are digitizing more of their infrastructure and services, including finance, commerce and healthcare.

In July, Sentry announced the launch of frontend monitoring software for Python and Javascript. At the time, Sentry’s chief executive officer Milin Desai told TechCrunch that its customers in all verticals were relying more heavily on the platform as the COVID-19 pandemic increased the usage of work, education and e-commerce apps.

In a press statement, Accel partner Dan Levine said, “With nearly all companies moving to digital-first ways of working and engaging with customers, application health has become a business-critical initiative, and as a result, Sentry is poised for explosive growth.”

News: Facebook knew for years ad reach estimates were based on ‘wrong data’ but blocked fixes over revenue impact, per court filing

• February 18, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Some more internal emails Facebook really doesn’t want you to see: Turns out in 2017 COO Sheryl Sandberg had already known for years there were problems with a free ad planning tool the company offers to marketeers to display estimates of how many people campaigns running on its platform may reach, per newly unsealed court

Some more internal emails Facebook really doesn’t want you to see: Turns out in 2017 COO Sheryl Sandberg had already known for years there were problems with a free ad planning tool the company offers to marketeers to display estimates of how many people campaigns running on its platform may reach, per newly unsealed court documents.

The filing also reveals that a Facebook product manager for the ‘potential reach’ tool warned the company was making revenue it “should never have” off of “wrong data”.

The unsealed documents pertain to a US class action lawsuit, filed in 2018, which alleges that Facebook deceived advertisers by knowingly including fake and duplicate accounts in ‘potential reach’ metric.

Facebook denies the claim but has acknowledged accuracy issues with the ‘potential reach’ metric as far back as 2016 — and also changed how it worked in 2019.

While the litigants have continued to accuse Facebook of continuing to misrepresent the ad reach estimate in updates to their 2018 complaint.

Redacted documents from the lawsuit, reported by the WSJ last year, included the awkward detail that a Facebook employee had asked “how long can we get away with the reach overestimation?”

But sections of the filing pertaining to Sandberg and other Facebook executives were redacted.

Newly unsealed documents from the suit — which we’ve reviewed — now reveal that in fall 2017 Sandberg “acknowledged in an internal email she had known about problems with Potential Reach for years”.

They also show Facebook repeatedly rejected internal proposals to fix the issue of fake and duplicate accounts inflating the estimates its platform showed to advertisers of the number of people who could see their ads — citing impact on revenue as a reason not to act.

In early 2018 Facebook estimated that removing duplicate accounts would cause a 10% drop in potential reach, per the unsealed filing. While Facebook management rejected an employee’s suggestion to change the language the tool showed to advertisers, declining to swap out the words “people” and “reach” for the (more accurate) term “accounts” — on the grounds that “people-based marketing was core to Facebook’s value proposition”.

The filing also reveals that a product manager for ‘potential reach’, Yaron Fidler, proposed a fix for the tool that would have decreased its numbers. His proposal was rejected by Facebook’s metrics leadership on the grounds that it would have a “significant” impact on the company’s revenue — to which Fidler responded: “It’s revenue we should have never made given the fact it’s based on wrong data.”

In 2016, when Facebook published an update on metrics — a few weeks after publicly disclosing it had been over-inflating average video view times, as it sought to regain advertiser trust in its reporting tools — the tech giant also announced a new channel for “regular information on metrics enhancements”, called Metrics FYI.

This is where it made the aforementioned fuzzy disclosure of accuracy issues with ‘potential reach’ — writing then that it was “improving our methodology for sampling and extrapolating potential audience sizes” to “help to provide a more accurate estimate for a given target audience and to better account for audiences across multiple platforms (Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network)”.

“In most cases, advertisers should expect to see less than a 10% change (increase or decrease) in the audience sizes shown in the tool,” it added at the time.

However the December 2016 blog post did not go into any detail about the nature of the accuracy problems Facebook thought needed improving — reading more like another classic slice of Facebook crisis PR.

The class action suit, meanwhile, alleges that rather than accepting internal proposals to fix the accuracy problems of ‘potential reach’, Facebook instead “developed talking points to deflect from the truth”.

The tech giant did announce some changes to the ad tool in March 2019 — when it said an advertiser’s campaign’s estimated potential reach “is now based on how many people have been shown an ad on a Facebook Product in the past 30 days who match your desired audience and placement criteria” (vs the estimates being previously based on “people who were active users in the past 30 days”).

But the litigants argue that the changes to the tool which displays an estimate to advertisers as they are beginning to create a campaign — and therefore when they’re deciding/considering whether/how much money to spend with Facebook — do not fully fix the issue of the metric not corresponding to the potential audience of people who could see the ad on Facebook.

An analyst report back in 2017 showed that Facebook’s ad platform claimed to reach millions more users among specific age groups in the U.S. than official census data indicated reside in the country.

At the time the company said the audience reach estimates “are based on a number of factors, including Facebook user behaviors, user demographics, location data from devices, and other factors”, per the WSJ, and claimed they are “not designed to match population or census estimates”. Facebook added then that it is “always working to improve our estimates”.

Asked about the latest batch of unsealed court documents pertaining to the lawsuit — including the revelation that Facebook’s COO had told staff she knew about “problems” with the ad tool “for years” as far back as fall 2017 — Facebook sent us this statement, attributed to a spokesperson: “These allegations are without merit and we will defend ourselves vigorously.”

Problems with self-reporting ad metrics have been a recurring theme for Facebook.

Last year the tech giant disclosed yet another issue on this front — saying its ‘conversion lift’ ad tool had a code error that meant it had miscalculated the number of sales derived from ad impressions for a number of advertisers.

That ‘technical problem’ with Facebook’s internal calculation of the efficacy of third parties’ ad campaigns meant advertisers saw skewed data which they may have used to determine how much to spend on its platform.

News: Yext brings more answers to its site search by processing unstructured data

• February 18, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Yext Answers allows businesses to provide a better search experience on their own websites — but as the name implies, the goal is really to make sure consumers get the answers they’re looking for. “If we deliver a link [in response to a search query], we consider it a failure on our side,” Chief Strategy

Yext Answers allows businesses to provide a better search experience on their own websites — but as the name implies, the goal is really to make sure consumers get the answers they’re looking for.

“If we deliver a link [in response to a search query], we consider it a failure on our side,” Chief Strategy Officer Marc Ferrentino told me.

Ferrentino said the company will be able to do an even better job of that starting on March 17, with the launch of the “Orion” update to its search algorithm.

Yext will then be able to pull answers directly from unstructured pages on a business’ website. The key, he said, is that Yext can “extract structured information” from an unstructured document — whether that’s a webpage, a blog post or a help document — rather than just searching for keywords. So instead simply presenting a link or a “blob of text,” it will offer a “rich snippet” that actually answers your question.

Image Credits: Yext

There’s a good chance that you’re familiar with something similar from Google’s consumer search experience, where the results often include a widget with questions and answers. Ferrentino welcomed the comparison, saying this will allow Yext customers to close the “experience gap” between Google’s search experience and their own.

To demonstrate the technology, Ferrentino showed me how Yext Answers could crawl pages about presidential history and then return the correct answer when asked, “Who was the only U.S. president to be impeached twice?”

Or for a more commercial (albeit slightly meta) example, he showed me how it could answer questions about Yext’s technology. As another example, Yext says it could search a bank’s website to answer a question about the difference between a 401(k) and Roth IRA.

And Yext co-founder and President Jon Brod noted that this change won’t just improve things for business and their customers, but also Yext’s non-profit clients, including the World Health Organization, which is using Yext to provide pandemic-related answers online.

News: Leverage Edu raises $6.5 million to help Indian students land in top colleges abroad

• February 18, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Each year, millions of students in India rush to get an admission in universities abroad. Often they don’t know which program they should focus on, or the college that is right for their skillset and ambition. Scores of legacy and newfound firms are attempting to offer counselling to these students. But despite India accounting for

Each year, millions of students in India rush to get an admission in universities abroad. Often they don’t know which program they should focus on, or the college that is right for their skillset and ambition.

Scores of legacy and newfound firms are attempting to offer counselling to these students. But despite India accounting for more students than any other country, most firms aiming to address this challenge are not focused on India, and struggle to understand some unique problems students from the world’s second most populous country face.

An Indian startup that is bridging this gap on Thursday said it has raised $6.5 million in a new financing round as it looks to scale its platform in the world’s second largest internet market.

Leverage Edu said Tomorrow Capital led the Delhi-headquartered startup’s Series A financing round. Existing investors Blume Ventures and DSG Consumer Partners also participated in the round.

Akshay Chaturvedi, founder and chief executive of Leverage Edu, told TechCrunch in an interview that he believes that eventually the firm that is going to serve the students best and emerge most successful will be the one that is physically closer to them, and not to the universities.

Chaturvedi, 30, spent the first year experimenting with the right model for his startup. One of the earliest iterations of Leverage Edu offered mentorship to students and rewarded counselors with points.

Today, the startup offers a broad range of services in addition to offering personalized mentorship. Through its workshops, it helps students find the right college, guides them with complex applications and grade conversions, as well as assists with education loan, VISA, and accommodation. “It’s one digital dashboard. You get everything from flight ticket to local phone number, to education loan in one place,” he said.

“We believe it is inevitable that the next stellar brand in the global cross-border education space will be a home-grown one. We have a great belief in Akshay as a founder – he has a fantastic roadmap for scaling the business and the passion to build a truly global Indian edtech brand – and are excited about working with the Leverage Edu team on this journey,” said Rohini Prakash, chief executive of Tomorrow Capital, in a statement.

Leverage Edu helps students land admission in the most prestigious colleges, but also works with those that didn’t score the most marks and find high-profile colleges.

“Students going to the top colleges is just 10% of the potential audience,” explained Chaturvedi, who spent his teen years attending talks from startup founders and also made money by bringing more people to those talks.  “There are many universities that don’t have the best branding. To connect them with students, we have Univalley.com,” he said.

The startup plans to deploy the fresh capital to help students find colleges in more geographies including UK and Australia, he said.

“We want to focus on a few things and do them really really well. There is also this myth around foreign education being expensive that we’ve been busting for last four years. 18 months from now, we want to be among the top study abroad companies in India, both by number of students and a roof-hitting NPS – because a happy student is why we are all really motivated everyday to do this!”, he added.

News: Event networking app Grip raises $13M, as pandemic forces events to stay virtual

• February 18, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

With offline events now firmly moved to online for the foreseeable future, startups in the networking space had to pivot fast in the face of the pandemic. One of those was Grip, previously better known as a networking app for physical conferences (including TechCrunch Disrupt, at one point). Since last year, Grip moved into an

With offline events now firmly moved to online for the foreseeable future, startups in the networking space had to pivot fast in the face of the pandemic. One of those was Grip, previously better known as a networking app for physical conferences (including TechCrunch Disrupt, at one point). Since last year, Grip moved into an ‘omnichannel’ experience, combining various event types across virtual, hybrid, and live. That strategy appears to have paid off as it has now raised a $13 million Series A funding round, taking its total amount raised to $14.5 million.

The round was led by London-based growth equity fund Kennet Partners. The raise is reflective of the boom in online events, which saw London-based startup Hopin raise a $40m Series A last year. Founded in 2016, Grip counts some large event organizers as clients including Reed Exhibitions and Messe Frankfurt.

In a statement Tim Groot, CEO and founder of Grip, said: “Our mission is to empower organizers to bring professionals together to advance industries. This funding round is going to enable us to take the experience to a new level, leveraging our extensive industry-leading platform, offering unique value for Virtual, Hybrid and In-Person events.”

He said they would now be investing heavily in the product and looking to global expansion.

Other competitors to Grip have, in the past, included Brella which raised $1.5m, and Swapcard which raised $6m to date.

So why is it that Grip seems to have pulled away from pack in this way?

Groot told me: “We took a slightly different approach in that we managed to work in a plug-and-play method alongside other platforms. So grip gets used as a standalone virtual event platform by lots of these organizers. So they might use Hopin for the conference but Grip for the networking. So maybe we managed to get more traction that way, over the course of 2020.”

In 2020, following the pivot to virtual events, Grip hosted over 100 events a month and was used by 1.5m people. As a result, the company says revenue grew almost 4x in 2020, and this year it expects to do over 10,000 events on its platform with over 5 million participants.

Grips AI-powered algorithms mean attendees get more personalized matchmaking recommendations based on their interests, including pre-event meeting scheduling. For exhibitors, the software captures business leads and provides post-event analytics.

People can be added to meetings to have group conversations and the startup is also working on a topic-based “speed networking” functionality to hold instant 3 minute conversations.

Grip integrates with various streaming platforms such as Vimeo, Youtube, Zoom, BlueJeans and others, unlike “full-service” platforms such as Hopin or Bizzabo.

Hillel Zidel, Partner at Kennet and Grip board member, added: “Grip’s ability to organize virtual events with a key focus on networking has meant that the company has seen tremendous growth over the last year. Event organizers and their clients have been able to remain connected with their customers despite the constraints on in-person events. As live events resume in the future, Grip is extremely well-positioned to continue to assist event organizers through the provision of software solutions supporting live, virtual and hybrid events.”

Brent Hoberman, co-founder of Founders Factory and a previous investor, said: “Grip was born out of a need we saw in running events at Founders Forum – how do you use smart technology to catalyze the most relevant and valuable connections between your guests?”

News: Emerging as an Eastern powerhouse, Earlybird Digital East Fund launches new $242M fund

• February 18, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Earlybird Digital East Fund — a fund associated with Germany’s Earlybird VC, but operating separately — has launched a €200m ($242m) successor fund. The fund’s focus will remain the same as before: a Seed and Series-A fund focusing on what’s known as ‘Emerging Europe’, in other words, countries stretching from the Baltics to Central and

Earlybird Digital East Fund — a fund associated with Germany’s Earlybird VC, but operating separately — has launched a €200m ($242m) successor fund. The fund’s focus will remain the same as before: a Seed and Series-A fund focusing on what’s known as ‘Emerging Europe’, in other words, countries stretching from the Baltics to Central and Eastern Europe, and Turkey. The firm has also promoted Mehmet Atici, who’s been with the firm for eight years, to Partner. The new fund has made four investments so far: FintechOS, Payhawk, Picus, and Binalyze.

The back-story to DEF is a fascinating tale of what happened to Europe in the last 15 years, as tech took off and Europeans returned from Silicon Valley.

Following his exit from SelectMinds (where he was the Founder & CEO) in 2005, Cem Sertoglu moved back to Turkey. Although he says he “accidentally became the first angel investor” there, he was clearly the right man, in the right place, at the right time. He told me: “I was very lucky and ended up writing the first checks in some of the first large outcomes in Turkey.”

In 2013, Sertoglu partnered with Evren Ucok (the first angel in Peak Games and Trendyol), and Roland Manger (Earlybird). Dan Lupu, a Romanian investor who had covered the region for Intel Capital, joined them, and together they raised the ‘Earlybird Digital East Fund I’ set at $150m fund in 2014, focusing on CEE and Turkey. This was and is an area where there can be high-quality ventures to be found, but very little in the way of VC. 

Thereafter, between 2014 and 2019, the fund invested in UiPath, Hazelcast, and Obilet. UiPath has become a global leader in the area known as ‘Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Hazelcast is a low latency data processing platform startup with Turkish roots. Obilet is a marketplace focused for the massive Turkish intercity bus travel market. DEF has also exited Vivense, Dolap, and EMbonds and in more recent times the fund has exited Vivense, the “Wayfair of Turkey” to Actera, the top local PE fund.

The team had spectacular early success. Peak Games, Trendyol, YemekSepeti and GittiGidiyor are the four largest Turkish tech exits to date. Digital East Fund was an investor in all of them. Peak games exited for $1.8 billion in cash to Zynga only last year.

As of Q4 2020, the fund’s metrics are:
Investment Multiple: 24.9x
Gross IRR: 104.4%
Net IRR: 84.1%

So in VC terms, they have done pretty well.

I interviewed Sertoglu to unpack the story of Earlybird Digital East Fund.

He told me DEF has achieved a 17 times investment multiple on a $150 million fund. He thinks “this might be the biggest European VC fund performance in history, and it’s not coming from Berlin, it’s not coming from London, but it’s coming from Eastern Europe. We have been told by some of our LPs that they think we’re the top 2014 vintage VC fund in the world, nobody’s seen stronger numbers than this.”

“Peak Games turned out to be a phenomenal story. When you look at how tough it’s been for Turkey, macroeconomically. The fact that a single company with 100 people essentially sold for $1.8 billion in cash, was just… it was staggering for the local market here.”

DEF’s emergence from Turkey, together with its relationship with a fund in Berlin, was not the most obvious path for the VC fund.

“One thing we realized early one was that we could invest with our own capital and syndicating to our friends, but for follow-on funding, we’d always have to go global. And that made us feel vulnerable. It made us feel we were always dependent on others’ comprehension of the opportunity that we were facing. So that’s when the first fund idea came out this was,” said Sertoglu.

“We felt that there was this unusual dislocation between opportunity and capital in Eastern Europe. Our first fund was $150 million funds – I mean, a very quaint size compared to Western markets. But we became the largest fund in the region, and decided to focus on this series A gap where we felt that there was this big opportunity, because of the way we think series A is still very much a local play.”

“Being a local player that understands the region would be an advantage, so this was proven to be true. We could essentially see pretty much everything in Eastern Europe for the last eight years. And we caught the biggest one, fortunately, which was UiPath. I think very few funds around the world can say that they see the majority if not all of the opportunities that fall into their mandate,” he said.

“We have this dual strategy of backing local champions as well as contenders for global markets as well. 20 years ago you had to be in Silicon Valley. Now, Transferwise comes out of Estonia, UiPath comes out of Romania. And that was even before the pandemic.”

Sertoglu concluded: “So we now have fresh capital, coming on the heels of a very successful first fund, which we’re keen to deploy. We’re calling all the opportunities, seeing very ambitious, strong teams coming out of the region. And we have 200 million euros to focus on these types of opportunities in the region.”