News: Nigeria’s Mono raises millions to power the internet economy in Africa

• May 24, 2021
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In February, Nigerian fintech startup Mono announced its acceptance into Y Combinator and, at the time, it wanted to build the Plaid for Africa. Three months later, the startup has a different mission: to power the internet economy in Africa and has closed $2 million in seed investment towards that goal. The investment comes nine

In February, Nigerian fintech startup Mono announced its acceptance into Y Combinator and, at the time, it wanted to build the Plaid for Africa. Three months later, the startup has a different mission: to power the internet economy in Africa and has closed $2 million in seed investment towards that goal.

The investment comes nine months after the company raised $500,000 in pre-seed last September and two months after receiving $125,000 from YC. Mono’s total investment moves up to $2.625 million, and investors in this new round include Entrée Capital (one of the investors in Kuda’s seed round), Kuda co-founder and CEO Babs Ogundeyi; Gbenga Oyebode, partner at TCVP; and Eric Idiahi, co-founder and partner at Verod Capital. New York but Africa-based VC Lateral Capital also invested after taking part in Mono’s pre-seed.

In a region where more than half of the population is either unbanked or underbanked, open finance players like Mono are trying to improve financial inclusion and connectivity on the continent. Open finance thrives on the notion that access to a financial ecosystem via open APIs and new routes to move money, access financial information and make borrowing decisions reduces the barriers and costs of entry for the underbanked. 

Launched in August 2020, the company streamlines various financial data in a single API for companies and third-party developers. Mono allows them to retrieve information like account statements, real-time balance, historical transactions, income, expense and account owner identification with users’ consent.

When we covered the company early in the year, it had already secured partnerships with more than 16 financial institutions in Nigeria. In addition to having a little over a hundred businesses like Carbon, Aella Credit, Credpal, Renmoney, Autochek, and Inflow Finance access customers bank account for bank statements, identity data, and balances, Mono has also connected over 100,000 financial accounts for its partners and analysed over 66 million financial transactions so far.

Mono has done impressively well in a short period. While it appears to have figured out product-market fit, CEO Abdul Hassan is quick to remind everyone that the burgeoning API fintech space is just an entry point to its pursuit of being a data company — a case he also made in February.

“The way I see it, our market is not that big. Compare the payments market now with 2016, when Paystack and Flutterwave just started. The payments space in 2016 was very small and the number of people using cards online was very small,” said Hassan, who co-founded the company with Prakhar Singh. “It’s the same thing for us right now. That’s why our focus isn’t only on open banking but data. We’re thinking of how we can power the internet economy with data that isn’t necessarily financial data. For instance, think about open data for telcos. Imagine where you can move your data from one telco to another instead of getting a new SIM card and making a fresh registration. That’s where I see the market going, at least for us at Mono.” 

Abdul Hassan (CEO) and Prakhar Singh (CTO)

He adds that the company is taking an approach of building a product one step at a time until it can fully diversify from financial data offerings, including connecting with payment gateways (Paystack and Flutterwave) and other fintechs like wealth management startups Piggyvest and Cowrywise.

“When you’re able to connect to all the systems, a lot of use cases will come up. The first step is how can we connect to all available data and open it up for businesses and developers,” he continued.

Therefore, Mono will use the funding to reinforce its current financial and identity data offerings and launch new products for diverse business verticals. Also, a long-overdue pan-African expansion to Ghana and Kenya is top priority. The last time I spoke with Hassan, the end of Q1 looked feasible to get into at least one of the two markets but it didn’t turn out that way. But the wait seems to be over as the company said it’d be going live in Ghana next month with a handful of existing customers from Nigeria and new ones in Ghana. Some of these partners include five banks (GTBank, Fidelity Bank and three unannounced banks) and the mobile money service arm of MTN Ghana.

“Our expansion is mostly inspired by our customers looking to expand to other markets, same with some of our products. We work with our customers to give them the right tools to build new experiences for their customers,” Hassan stated. 

Image Credits: Mono

Mono is one of the three API fintech companies to have raised a seed investment this year. Last month, another Nigerian fintech Okra closed $3.5 million while Stitch, a South African API fintech, launched with $4 million in February. Back to back investments like this show that investors are incredibly optimistic about the market. Avil Eyal, managing partner and co-founder of Entrée Capital, one of such investors, had this to say.

“We are very excited to be working with Abdul, Prakhar and the entire Mono team as they continue to build out the rails for African banking to enable the delivery of financial services to hundreds of millions of people across the African continent.”

News: British AI startup Faculty raises $42.5M growth round led by Apax Digital Fund

• May 24, 2021
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British artificial intelligence (AI) company, Faculty has raised £30 million ($42.5M) in growth funding from the Apax Digital Fund (ADF). The startup has now raised a total of £40m ($56.6M) to date. In April this year, the company announced it had won a contract to work with the UK’s NHS to better predict its future

British artificial intelligence (AI) company, Faculty has raised £30 million ($42.5M) in growth funding from the Apax Digital Fund (ADF). The startup has now raised a total of £40m ($56.6M) to date.

In April this year, the company announced it had won a contract to work with the UK’s NHS to better predict its future needs. It has also picked up at least seven other UK government contracts. Its customers include the UK’s National Crime Agency, Red Bull, Virgin Media, and Moonpig.

The company says it now expects to create over 400 new jobs across its engineering, product and delivery teams. The investment will also be put toward the rollout of Faculty’s new learning and development programme. Founded in 2014 by Dr Marc Warner, Dr Angie Ma and Andrew Brookes, the company is noted for its fondness for hiring swathes of maths and data science PhDs.

Far from being an aloof R&D AI operation, Faculty pitches more as an “AI as a Service”, applying its platform to real-world data for the purposes of real-world outcomes, such as optimizing a company’s marketing spend or forecasting demand for consumer goods. That said, Faculty became briefly notorious after applying its platform to the cause of Vote Leave during the UK referendum.

After helping the campaign win that fight, it’s ironically now been awarded a public contract to help the British government apply machine learning to Britain’s post-Brexit fishing waters, even as the fishing industry comes under considerable strain… because of Brexit.

Speaking to me over a call (a longer interview will be available later) Marc Warner, CEO, and co-founder of Faculty told me the company has no plans to work in the political sphere again: “Never again. It’s very controversial. I don’t want to make out that I think politics is unethical. Trying to make the world better, in whatever dimension you can, is a good thing… But from our perspective, it was, you know, ‘noisy’, and our goal as an organization is, despite current appearances to the contrary, is not to spend tonnes of time talking about this stuff. We do believe this is an important technology that should be out there and should be in a broader set of hands than just the tech giants, who are already very good at it.”

Of the investment, he said: “This is about doubling down on the UK first and then international expansion. We have learned what it takes to do important, impactful AI at scale. And we just don’t think that there’s actually much of it out there. Customers are rightly sometimes a bit skeptical. There’s been hype around this stuff for years and years. We figured out a bunch of real-world applications that actually deliver value. And so, ultimately, the money [we’ve raised] is really just about being able to build out all of the pieces to do that incredibly well for our customers.”

He added that Faculty plans to continue to take advantage of the UK’s talent pool: “The UK is a wonderful place to do AI. It has brilliant universities and a very dynamic startup scene. It’s actually more diverse than San Francisco. There’s government, there’s finance, there’s corporates, there’s less competition from the tech giants, so there’s a bit more of a heterogeneous ecosystem.”

Mark Beith, partner at Apax Digital, who joins Faculty’s board of directors, said: “Faculty is a world-leading AI company with cutting-edge technology, inspiring people and culture, and with phenomenal customer feedback. They enable customers to realize the tremendous value of AI quickly but responsibly, providing robust, fair, and explainable AI, with advanced data privacy. We have seen the power and impact of their solutions first-hand, as a client, and are thrilled to partner with Marc, Angie, Andy, and the team to support their global expansion.”

The Apax Digital Fund joins Faculty’s existing investors, including Guardian Media Group Ventures, LocalGlobe, and Jaan Tallinn, one of Skype’s founding engineers.

The Estonian investor gave Faculty 350 units of Ether in January 2018, worth about $434,000 at the time, and 50 Bitcoins in March 2020, worth about $316,000, according to Faculty’s financial filings at the U.K. business registry Companies House.

News: Taking Microsoft’s Surface Laptop 4 for a spin

• May 24, 2021
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These days, the path of least resistance in laptop design is straight-up knocking off the MacBook. We’ve certainly seen our share of egregious cases over the years. Microsoft, however, has defiantly forged its own path with industrial design across the board. Its products are largely interesting and innovative — something not every hardware manufacturer can

These days, the path of least resistance in laptop design is straight-up knocking off the MacBook. We’ve certainly seen our share of egregious cases over the years. Microsoft, however, has defiantly forged its own path with industrial design across the board. Its products are largely interesting and innovative — something not every hardware manufacturer can say these days.

The company doesn’t always get it right. It swung for the fences with the Surface Duo, for example. While certainly innovative, the product came up short in enough categories that made it extremely hard to recommend. The Surface Laptop, on the other hand, while not the most groundbreaking product in the line, has pretty consistently been one of the best, marrying a Windows-ready touchscreen with a more standardized notebook design.

The last few models have been solid, and this year’s — perhaps predictably — doesn’t present a big change. The big upgrades after about a year and a half are new chips (your choice of AMD Ryzen or an Intel Core i5 or i7) and enhanced battery life that offers a beefy additional 8.5 hours. Essentially, it’s the sort of thing you’d expect — or hope for — from a regular system refresh.

Image Credits: Brian Heater

The design language remains largely unchanged. The Surface Laptop is nothing if not unique on that front, with its tapered sides and felt-covered palm rests. The material has a nice feel to it — one that bests just straight-up metal on a cold day, though I’ve already noticed a bit of wear after some light use.

The keyboard remains on the soft side, with a surprising amount of give to it. Not the best keyboard I’ve seen on a laptop, but certainly not the worst (who can forget that rough run for Apple?), and like anything else, it takes a bit of getting used to.

You’d think I’d have learned my lesson by now. Maybe it’s the fact that Microsoft’s Surface Laptops keep coming out when the weather is nice that I always feel inclined to take them outside. But jeez is that display reflective. Almost distractingly so. Plenty of laptop screens are glossy, of course, but Microsoft’s really leaned in here, to the point I wouldn’t recommend using it in any sort of sunshine — even at full brightness, the screen can’t counteract that reflection.

Image Credits: Brian Heater

When you can see it, the display looks great. Microsoft sent along the smaller of the two. At 13.5-inches, the screen clocks in at 2256 x 1504 at 201 ppi (you get the same pixel density on the 15-inch version, as well). Ours was the new Ice Blue color. It’s subtle, though. Honestly, I read it more as a silver/gray. The speakers sound great, and the webcam is just fine, but it’s safe to say it’s probably time to upgrade to 1080p across the board as teleconferencing remains front of mind.

The 13.5-inch system starts at $1,000, which gets you 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, along with the AMD Ryzen 5 4680U process. As configured, our system runs $1,700, which doubles the RAM and storage and swaps the AMD in for an Intel Core i7. Another $600 will double the RAM and storage yet again (same processor). Geekbench scored the processor at a solid 1378 on single-core and 4876 on multi-core. Performance was solid throughout — though after spending a fair amount of time using Apple’s M1, it’s clear that Intel has its work cut out for it.

Microsoft is still hanging onto its magnetic proprietary charging port here. I know it still has its diehard fans, but I’d much prefer to see the company go with something more universal, like adding another USB-C port — though that impacts the system’s compatibility with a slew of different Surface accessories. Around the other side you get USB-A, USB-C and a headphone jack. It’s a nice mix, but more ports would certainly be a step up.

I was fairly disappointed with the various corners the company cut on the Surface Laptop Go last year. Of course, the entry-level 13.5-inch Laptop is $300 more than the 12-inch Laptop Go. But if you’re looking to do more than just the basics, this is probably is a wise investment.

News: Air India passenger data breach reveals SITA hack worse than first thought

• May 23, 2021
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Three months after air transport data giant SITA reported a data breach, we are still learning about the damage. Air India said this week that personal data of about 4.5 million passengers had been compromised following the incident at SITA, Indian flag carrier airline’s data processor. The stolen information included  passengers’ name, credit card details,

Three months after air transport data giant SITA reported a data breach, we are still learning about the damage.

Air India said this week that personal data of about 4.5 million passengers had been compromised following the incident at SITA, Indian flag carrier airline’s data processor. The stolen information included  passengers’ name, credit card details, date of birth, contact information, passport information, ticket information, Star Alliance and Air India frequent flyer data, Air India said in a statement (PDF).

CVV/CVC data of credit cards were not held by SITA, said Air India as it urged passengers to change passwords “wherever applicable to ensure safety of their personal data.”

The attack compromised data of passengers who had registered with the Indian airline over the past decade, between August 26, 2011 and February 3, 2021, Air India said in a statement.

The revelation comes months after SITA said it had suffered a data breach that involved passenger data. At the time, SITA said it had notified several airlines — Malaysia Airlines, Finnair, Singapore Airlines, Jeju Air, Cathay Pacific, Air New Zealand, and Lufthansa — of the breach.

The Geneva, Switzerland-headquartered firm — which is said to serve 90% of the world’s airlines — had declined to reveal the specific data that had been compromised at the time of disclosure in early March, citing an investigation — which is still ongoing.

Air India said that it was first notified about the cyber attack by SITA on February 25, but the nature of the data was only provided to it on March 25 and April 5.

The struggling Indian airline, which has been surviving on taxpayer’s money, claimed that it had investigated the security incident, secured the compromised servers, engaged with unnamed external specialists, notified the credit card issuers, and had reset passwords of its frequent flyer program.

Air India is the latest Indian firm to disclose a data breach in recent quarters. Payments giant MobiKwik said in late March that it was investigating claims of a data breach that allegedly exposed private information of nearly 100 million users.

Alleged records of nearly 20 million BigBasket (a top grocery delivery startup in India that is now owned by local conglomerate Tata) customers leaked on the dark web for anyone to download in late April. A security lapse at Indian telecom giant Jio Platforms exposed results of some users who had used its tool to check their coronavirus symptoms. Indian state West Bengal and giant blood test firm Dr Lal PathLabs suffered similar breaches. Air India’s peer, Spicejet, also confirmed a data breach last year.

Read more:

• MobiKwik investigating data breach after 100M user records found online
• Breach at Indian airline SpiceJet affects 1.2 million passengers
• Dr Lal PathLabs, one of India’s largest blood test labs, exposed patient data
• Security lapse at India’s Jio exposed coronavirus symptom checker results
• Alleged records of 20 million BigBasket users published online

News: Billboards? Nah, just buy a media company instead

• May 22, 2021
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Startups used to be obsessed with billboards. It was the first thing I noticed when I moved to San Francisco: venture-backed companies including Eaze, Airbnb, and notoriously, Brex, would post large billboard advertisements all over the city to grab attention and eyeballs. When I dug into it more, I learned this type of old school,

Startups used to be obsessed with billboards. It was the first thing I noticed when I moved to San Francisco: venture-backed companies including Eaze, Airbnb, and notoriously, Brex, would post large billboard advertisements all over the city to grab attention and eyeballs. When I dug into it more, I learned this type of old school, outdoor advertising was a response to the increasingly crowded online channels, such as Facebook and Instagram advertisements.

Well, folks, years later, we have a new response to crowded marketing channels: Ditch the billboards and just buy a media company instead. There has been a recent push for startups and venture capital firms to acquire or create media companies, which I’d argue is them finding a creative way to position content marketing. This past week, Axios discovered that Coinbase is launching a media operation about cryptocurrency. At the same time, Clubhouse wants to hire freelance writers, while its biggest lead investor to-date, Andreessen Horowitz, has ambitions to open up an opinion desk. Other news bits like The Skimm exploring a potential sale and Hubspot acquiring the Hustle also add to the narrative of broader media ambitions across tech.

We got into the impact of a venture-backed media push on Equity, our award-winning (!) podcast, this week. My take, as you can tell by this introduction, is that it’s not a rush to compete with journalism. It’s a rush to compete with a noisy world, and rebrand advertisements to media operations.

I could talk about journalism and tech and media forever, but that is all on that topic today. In the rest of this newsletter, we’ll get into new IPOs, startups providing upfront revenue to other startups and tactical advice on building versus buying a tech stack. As always, you can find me podcasting @Equitypod and tweeting at @nmasc_.

IP(Oats)

Oatly went public this week, and there entirely weren’t enough jokes or puns about it. (Although I did appreciate this one). My complaint aside, it’s been a busy week for the public markets.

Here’s what to know: Marqueta, which is focused on card issuing and payments tech, has a fascinating S-1 filing — including what I’d say it’s a Peloton-Affirm relationship with Square. Alex dug into the numbers and told you what to think about its filing in The Exchange.

And a splash of oat milk please:

• Can Squarespace dodge the direct listing value trap?
• Fast growth pushes an unprofitable no-code startup into the public markets: Inside Monday.com’s IPO filing
• WalkMe is going public: Let’s stroll through its numbers

Image Credits: Getty Images / Eugene Mymrin

Build or buy?

Telemedicine needs to prepare for a post-pandemic world, which comes with its own upfront costs, risks, and, as Marcela points out, opportunities. Around $3.1 billion in funding flowed into the sector in 2020 — about three times what we saw in 2019, according to her latest story. In order to get money and impact out, startups have some work to do.

Here’s what to know: It’s time for you to read a marketmap about telemedicine, from its current state, to different tensions, to affordability and the out-of-pocket dynamics that no one talks about.

And here’s some dessert to finish your healthy meal:

• Should startups build or buy telehealth infrastructure
• Ro acquires modern fertility in a reportedly $225 million deal 

Image Credits: MoMorad / Getty Images

Pipe’s get burst

Everyone is paying attention to Pipe, which just raised $250 million at a $2 billion valuation. As Mary Ann puts it, the company is claiming to be the Nasdaq for revenue, and it gives SaaS companies a way to get their revenue upfront by “pairing them with investors on a marketplace who will pay a discounted rate for the annual value of those contracts.”

Here’s what to know: That wasn’t the only check that went into startups providing other startups with upfront revenue this week. Uncapped, which is the European equivalent of Pipe, raised $80 million in funding. Put differently, in less than 24 hours, TechCrunch reported that nearly $330 million went into backing the concept of startups providing other startups with upfront revenue.

Other dollar signs to pay attention to:

• Bain Capital Ventures raised $1.3 billion to fund young startups, and young VC firms, too
• Gojek and Tokopedia merge to form GoTo Group

Image Credits: MirageC / Getty Images

Around TC

TechCrunch is looking for 20 early-stage companies to feature in Startup Battlefield at TC Disrupt 2021 this year. Startups receive a feature article on TechCrunch.com, intensive pitch training from the TC team, the chance to win $100,000 in equity free prize money, and the attention of thousands of global press and investors.

So, what are you waiting for? Apply by May 27!

Across the week

Seen on TechCrunch

• Crypto and blockchain must accept they have a problem, then lead in sustainability
• What has four wheels and loses money?
• Twitter launches account verification applications
• Everything Google announced at I/O today

Seen on Extra Crunch

• Mapping out one edtech company’s $200M bet on lifelong learning
• For companies that use ML, labeled data is the key differentiator
• The battle for voice recognition inside vehicles is heating up
• How Expensify got to $100M in revenue by hiring ‘stem cells’ and not ‘cogs in a wheel’

Thanks for reading! Do something that requires zero technology this week. After, of course, you share this newsletter with at least two people.

Always,

N

News: Watching startups eat markets is good fun

• May 22, 2021
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Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter for your weekend enjoyment.

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.

Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors.

The huge sale of Utah-based startup Divvy to Bill.com is still bouncing around my head this week, not only because the $2.5 billion exit was huge for both the company and its local scene, but also because its target market is exciting to watch.

Divvy competes in what we call the corporate spend market with a few other unicorns, including Ramp and Brex. Now with Divvy taken off the table, the pair of competitors are differentiating in a few ways that matter.

And Brex is getting back on its billboard game.

This week Brex announced that it is rolling out IRL advertising in a few American cities. Residents of San Francisco back when Brex was a baby will recall how the startup plastered its brand all over the city. Essentially, it was a cheap way to get a lot of impressions.

Now the startup is taking the strategy to Houston and Miami and D.C. Why? The Exchange caught up with Brex CEO Henrique Dubugras this week to chat about the matter. Per the executive, his company has two goals for its renewed meatspace marketing push. First, Brex wants to talk up its software game over its initial branding as a corporate card for startups. And, second, it wants business owners to know that it works with all types of companies now, not merely those with Sand Hill Road on speed dial.

The push to get the Brex name out in markets less known for their startup activity than overall business climate makes sense, if the unicorn wants to attract more nonstartup customers. But it’s the software element of its efforts that unsurprisingly caught our attention.

That’s because Brex recently rolled out Brex Premium, a package of software services that it charges around $600 per year for. Brex and rivals like Ramp and Divvy have spent lots of energy and money in recent quarters building out increasingly sophisticated software around their traditional corporate card products. The result thus far are codebases more and more able to supplant other pieces of enterprise software, like expense software.

But as Brex looks to double down via an advertising push on its decision to charge for Brex Premium — which Dubugras says is performing better than his company had initially anticipated — competitor Ramp is pushing its free software as an edge.

Ramp CEO and co-founder Eric Glyman pointed The Exchange to his company’s refreshed pricing page, which highlights its zero-cost software. And, he said in an email, the new page was “powering the fastest growth month we’ve ever had.”

Broadly, what we’re seeing with Ramp and Brex and Divvy — along with Airbase and others that also compete in the space — is a cohort of startups attacking an aged corporate issue with more nimble, lower-cost products. And proving while doing so that there was huge untapped demand for something different and better. The various players competing for the startup crown in the corporate spend world wouldn’t all be growing as rapidly as they are if that weren’t the case.

If you want more, here’s our dig into the Divvy-Bill.com deal.

More from startup-land

The Exchange was lathered up in SPACs this week, which means that we missed a host of interesting news that we otherwise would have loved to poke into. For example, here are some very neat venture rounds that it would have been fun to dig into more deeply:

• ProducePay raised a $43M Series C: LA-based ProducePay helps food growers access capital, software and market data, linking them to food demanders (importers, etc.). Per its website, ProducePay funded a Bajío, Mexico-based asparagus growing operation to the tune of a half million dollars to hire labor and invest in its growing operation. Repayment, again per the company, starts when product ships.
• Farming is hard, fickle, expensive and not always aligned with traditional banking requirements. Throw in an increasingly global production/consumption food network, and you can see why G2VP and IFC co-led the round.
• Oh, and The Exchange learned that ProducePay’s reported 2020 doubling was measured in GAAP revenue terms. The startup’s gross margins “grew by over 75% from 2019 to 2020, thanks to improved underwriting policies and a more attractive cost of funds as volume scaled,” per its PR team. That’s super cool.

Another neat company that raised this week was Panther, which put together a $2.5 million round. Panther wants to help companies hire in 160 different countries. Our read of the company and its round is that, as more companies go remote-first, this sort of service is going to become a must-have. Gusto also competes in the market, so it should be an active one to watch from both VC and M&A perspectives.

Panther is based in Florida, and raised funds from, per its release, “Tribe Capital, Eric Ries, Naval Ravikant and Carta Ventures.”

One more round: Lance, a freelancer-focused neobank, raised $2.8 million this week. The round was led by, per the company, “Barclays, BDMI, Great Oaks Capital, Imagination Capital, Techstars, DFJ Frontier, New York Venture Partners” along with some angels.

Now that the fintech world has created Chime and other broad-remit neobanks, it’s not surprising to see more targeted efforts get put together. And Lance CEO Oona Rokyta is betting that the freelance world is set to grow further. Given how the labor market has evolved in the last few years, I’d hazard she’s making an intelligent bet.

To close out today, a quick note on Alpaca. It’s a startup that TechCrunch has dug into here and there, as it fits into both our general focus on API-delivered services (on-demand pricing is hot), and it exists in the consumer fintech world (powering other companies’ equities trading services). We caught up with CEO Yoshi Yokokawa this week to chat about what’s been going on at his company since we last tracked its growth rates.

After all, whatever we can learn about the world of consumer investing — and Robinhood told us quite a lot this week — is useful given the somewhat global savings/investing boom that we’ve seen in the last year or so.

Per Yokokawa, Alpaca has global plans, including rolling out with new partners on a few continents in the coming months. The company is handling 1,000 new accounts daily outside the United States, which Yokokawa expects to rise sharply in the coming months. And the company recently built out a broker API to make onboarding users simpler for its partners.

Sounds like growth to us. More when we can milk it out of, er, the alpaca.

Alex

News: This Week in Apps: Google I/O hits and misses, Snap goes shopping, Parler returns to App Store

• May 22, 2021
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Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry continues to grow, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy.

The app industry continues to grow, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices alone. And in the U.S., app usage surged ahead of the time spent watching live TV. Currently, the average American watches 3.7 hours of live TV per day, but now spends four hours per day on their mobile devices.

Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re also a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus. In 2020, investors poured $73 billion in capital into mobile companies — a figure that’s up 27% year-over-year

This week we’re reviewing Google’s I/O developer event, rounding up the latest from Snap’s partner summit and taking a look at how Parler got back on the App Store, among other things.

This Week in Apps will soon be a newsletter! Sign up here: techcrunch.com/newsletters

Top Stories

Google I/O was kinda boring this year

Image Credits: Google

Sorry, sorry. But it’s true. Without any new hardware announcements, the software-only event just didn’t feel as big and buzzy as it has in the past — which is kind of a bummer, since I/O was canceled entirely last year due to COVID-19. There was no announcement of an affordable Pixel 5a or 6 smartphone, no rumored Pixel Watch, no news on Pixel chips, no new smart home devices, no update on Google Stadia, and not even the Pixel Buds A-Series, which Google accidentally tweeted about ahead of schedule. What gives? Instead, Google I/O was filled with a lot of product news that could have been announced as blog posts — like Google Workspace improvements or neat Google Maps and Photos features. I mean, sure, a life-size 3D video calling booth is cool, but it’s not exactly going to be in your living room next year.

That’s not to downplay Google’s technical advancements, but if you’re sitting through a long live-ish (??) event, you don’t only want to hear about more conversational AI or less racist cameras (much less from the company that just fired multiple AI ethics researchers). You want to get excited about Google’s next new…thing.

When all was said and done, what stood out was Android 12.

The updated version of Google’s mobile OS with its new personalization features targets a current iPhone weakness: customization.

Image Credits: Google, compilation via Techspot (opens in a new window)

While iOS finally added support for widgets with iOS 14 and an App Library to clean up home screen clutter, Apple seemed almost caught off guard by the personalization madness that ensued after widgets went live. It had to quickly fix how app shortcuts worked — a workaround people had been using to tediously customize their home screen icons to match their wallpaper and widgets.

Android 12 addresses this demand for its own users and takes things a step further. Now, when Android 12 users set a new wallpaper the system can automatically create a custom palette of colors as the Android theme, including both the dominant and complementary colors. This is applied across the OS, including in the Quick Settings under the Notification Shade, in buttons on the lock screen, widgets and more. Google calls this “Material You,” which is a bit silly but gets the point across. The phone can really start to feel like yours.

Material You also introduces refreshed widgets with interactive controls and easier personalization options, smoother transitions, more animations and a privacy dashboard, where you can check in on which apps are accessing your location, mic and camera, for instance. But what sells it is how all those parts come together to present a new version of Android that actually feels fresh.

ICYMI: An I/O Round-up

• Stats: Android now powers 3 billion devices globally, up from 2.5 billion in May 2019. The figure includes 250 million active tablets as of last year.
• Foldables: Google announced a series of Android 12 updates that add support for foldable screens. (Is a foldable Pixel coming?)

• Design: “Material You” is Android’s new, adaptive design language which fully embraces the home screen personalization trend, allowing users to set themes that apply across the operating system. One of its more clever tricks is that it’s able to build the color palette for the theme based on the wallpaper you choose.

• Wearables: Google and Samsung team up on a unified wearable platform to take on Apple’s watchOS. The goal will be to combine the best of both worlds, Android Wear OS and Samsung’s Tizen, allowing apps to start faster and battery life to last longer, while users will gain more apps and watch faces. Meanwhile, the best of Fitbit — like tracking health progress and on-wrist goal celebrations — will come to Android Wear. Other updates include a Tiles API, watch face designer from Samsung, new consumer experience focused on speed and customization and redesigned Maps, Assistant and Pay.
• Auto: Google is working with BMW and others to allow Android smartphones to unlock and start vehicles, by leveraging support for Ultra Wideband technology (UWB). It’s also making it easier for developers to bring Android apps to the car as they can now create an app that supports both Android OS and Android Auto.
• AR: Google says there are now 850 million ARCore-compatible devices on the market. It also added Raw Depth & Recording/Playback APIs to ARCore to help make more immersive experiences possible.
• Flutter: Google’s cross-platform UI toolkit for building mobile and desktop apps now powers 200K Play Store apps, including those from WeChat, ByteDance, BMW, Grab and Didi. The new version, Flutter 2.2, adds reliability, performance improvements, a payment plugin for IAPs and a more streamlined process for bringing Flutter apps to Windows, macOS and Linux.
• Android Studio: Google announced the next version of its Android Studio IDE, Arctic Fox, which focuses on bringing more of the tooling around building apps directly into the IDE. The marquee feature of the update is Jetpack Compose, the toolkit for building modern UIs for Android.

• Google Play: Google shared details on sharing details (from 30% to 15%) and is adding new resources like an SDK website to help you find the right ones for you, and a dedicated Policy and Programs section in Play Console. Apps will later this year be able to monetize in new ways, including multi-quantity purchases, multi-line subscriptions and prepaid plans (access to content for a fixed amount of time).
• Ads: Google’s App campaigns on Android will expand to the desktop versions of Google.com and the Google Display Network. That means if a user clicks an ad in the desktop browser, they’ll be directed to the Play Store website to install the app to their linked device. Also, the Google Analytics for Firebase SDK now allows event creation and modification without app updates. Plus, Google introduced a deep link validator and impact calculator to make it easier to get started with deep linking.

Snap’s Partner Summit: AR and e-commerce and more

Snap, an app with now with 500 million MAUs, this week hosted an event for its partners, where the company unleashed a host of news about what’s next for its platform, including developer tools, AR updates, shopping features and more.

Among the highlights was Snap’s computer vision-enabled Scan product, which will analyze content in the camera feed to pull up matching products, similar to efforts by Pinterest and Google. Meanwhile, AR updates and partnerships with brands like Farfetch and Prada will make possible virtual try-on of clothes using AR. (Honestly, sometimes it feels like Snap’s tech is being lost in an app that’s mainly used by teenagers and young adults for socializing. Are they really Prada shoppers?)

Image Credits: Snap

Another big news item was Snap’s plans to release a brand-new app, Story Studio, which will give creators access to more powerful editing tools, for precisely trimming shots, adding captions, stickers and other visual elements, accessing licensed music, and more. Creators can then publish to Snapchat Spotlight, which is now available on the web, as well as other platforms.

Meanwhile, Snap Map is getting an update with a product called Layers, that allows users to add data from Snap’s developer partners to their map to personalize their experience. For instance, a Ticketmaster Layer will show nearby concert venues.

Image Credits: Snap

The company also gave an update on its creator funding efforts, saying it had doled out more than $130 million to more than 5,400 creators making content for its TikTok rival, Spotlight, since November. It now says it will now longer pay out $1 million per day to encourage creator adoption.

Weekly News

E-commerce

Facebook debuted “Live Shopping Fridays” across the web and Facebook’s mobile apps to encourage consumers to make appointments to shop for beauty, skin care and fashion items from major brands like Abercrombie and Fitch, Bobbi Brown, Clinique, Sephora, Dermalogica and others.

Image Credits: Facebook

Fast fashion e-commerce app Shein took the crown from Amazon this week to become the most downloaded app on iOS and Android in the U.S. The company controls its own production chain, from prototype to manufacturing, allowing it to churn out products tailored to different regions and tastes at a daily rate, giving it the name the “TikTok for e-commerce.”

Africa’s largest carrier, Vodacom, has developed Africa’s first super-app with help from China’s Alibaba. The app will include a range of services, including e-commerce, banking and making mobile payments.

Adtech

Apple’s IDFA change has pushed Android ad spending up by 21%, per Liftoff. The growth comes when as many as 63.5% to 83.2% of iOS users are opting out of being tracked.

Apple released an update, iOS 14.5.1, which fixed the ATT bug that had grayed out the App Tracking Transparency toggle for some users in the Settings.

Fintech

Google Pay’s app was redesigned to make it easier for users to find businesses in the U.S., India and Singapore to start, with new discovery features, branded experiences for businesses, money organization tools and spending insights, Google Pay APIs for Web and Android, and a loyalty enrollment and sign-in API.

Social

Image Credits: TechCrunch

 Parler’s back. After getting booted from the app stores and from its web host for inciting violence ahead of the January 6 Capitol riots, Parler has returned to the App Store. Now, posts that are labeled hate, (yes, “hate,” — this app doesn’t take down hate speech), won’t be visible on iPhone. The “hate” posts, which may include things like racial slurs, will be visible on other platforms and on the web version.

Apple had insisted that Parler must follow Apple’s App Store guidelines in order to return to its app marketplace, which meant Parler had to moderate its content. Parler however, would rather the option to view hate speech be a toggle, not hidden entry, saying it would prefer to put tools in the hands of it users. The company also dismissively referred to the sanitized version of Parler for iOS as “Parler PG.” The app is now No. 10 in the News category on iPhone.

Pinterest introduced Idea Pins, a video-first evolution of its Story Pins feature, aimed at creators. The Pins allow creators to publish videos of up to 60 seconds per page, with a total of 20 pages per Pin. They can also feature stickers, music and detail pages with more info, like recipe ingredients or project instructions.

TikTok rolled out new tools that allow creators to bulk delete and report comments as well as bulk block users. The feature could help someone quickly clean up their comments section when being trolled and keep their account safe from abusers. But it also could help them to create a false persona of being well-liked, as all negative feedback is removed.

Instagram will host its first Creator Week as an invitation-only series of events June 8-10. The virtual event will include 5,000 creators from the U.S. and will discuss topics like how to grow your online following and make money.

Facebook’s experimental app from its NPE team, Tuned comes to iPhone. The app is designed for users in relationships to stay in touch, messaging and sharing photos, replaying moments and sharing memories, and participating in newly expanded Q&A challenges.

Image Credits: Facebook

Photos

Reface’s buzzy face-swapping app now lets users upload their own source material for face swapping and animations, which rely on GAN algorithms. That means you can face-swap yourself into a famous piece of art, for instance. The app, launched 14 months ago, now has more than 100 million installs.

Google Photos update adds new Memories and a Locked Folder and previews Cinematic moments which animate a series of photos.

Image Credits: Google

Utilities

Google Maps is adding a number of updates this year, including new routing updates designed for safety, Live View enhancements, an expansion of detailed street maps to 50 more cities, a new “area busyness” feature, which shows crowded blocks and neighborhoods, and a more personalized Maps experience, which adjusts to your location and time of day.

The Chrome app for Android is bringing back RSS. A new feature for users in the U.S. on Chrome Canary is a “follow” button that will allow you to get the latest content from websites and blogs directly in Chrome. The feature relies on the open RSS web standard, so maybe stop building “blogs” that don’t have an RSS feed, OK?

Messaging

WhatsApp rivals, including Telegram and Signal, saw nearly 1,200% growth ahead of WhatsApp’s privacy policy deadline, Sensor Tower reports.

India told WhatsApp to withdraw its new privacy policy terms, or else the government of India will consider various options available to it under laws in India.

WhatsApp is testing disappearing messages with its TestFlight users. No word on public availability.

Streaming & Entertainment

Image Credits: Getty Images

Spotify launched a virtual concert series with The Black Keys and other artists. The pre-recorded streams are $15 each for the 40-75 minute show. Some unknown portion of that revenue is shared with the artists.

Spotify is adding automatic transcripts to its own Original and Exclusive podcasts, with the goal of rolling out transcripts to all shows over time.

Apple announced it’s bringing lossless audio streaming to Apple Music in June, as a free upgrade. The upgrade will also include support for Dolby Atmos and lossless audio files. The Android version will support lossless but not Dolby Atmos at launch. On Apple devices, lossless does not work on AirPods, AirPods Pro or AirPods Max, even when in wired listening mode. Nor does it work on HomePod devices.

On the same day, Amazon announced its own lossless music streaming service, Amazon Music HD, would also be a free upgrade for Amazon Music Unlimited subscribers.

Deezer technically beat Spotify to offer offline listening on Apple Watch this week, but not by much. Spotify on Friday added support for downloads on the Apple Watch so you can enjoy phone-free listening. Meanwhile Spotify is adding offline listening to Android Wear, too.

Android 12 will add built-in remote control features for controlling the now 80 million monthly active Android TV devices in the world.

HBO Max to add ad-supported streaming at $9.99 per month — a much cheaper option than its $14.99/mo ad-free experience. The option will roll out in June.

Clubhouse goes live globally. Meanwhile, Twitter rival Spaces shows off what Ticketed Spaces look like, and says it’s taking 20% cut of sales.

Books

Mobile reading app Wattpad expanded its publishing arm with new adult fiction imprint, W by Wattpad Books, shortly after its acquisition by Naver was finalized.

Spotify expands into the audiobooks market by partnering with Storytel. The partnership is the first notable example of what’s possible with Spotify’s recently introduced Open Access Platform (OAP), which aims to give creators and publishers a way to extend their reach. With OAP, Storytel subscribers will be able to connect their account in Spotify, then stream their audiobooks through Spotify’s app.

Gaming

The Epic-Apple trial revealed that Apple generated at least $100 million in revenue and possibly much more from Fortnite’s time on the App Store from 2018 until it was pulled in 2020. Sensor Tower had estimated the figure was around $354 million.

Security & Privacy

Local crime-spotting app Citizen got into trouble for sparking a $30,000 manhunt for the wrong person. The app’s real-time feature, OnAir, broadcast to users that there was a reward for a man suspected of setting an LA area wildfire. But the person described — which was sent to the app’s 860K users — was not the person actually responsible, who was later arrested.

The Epic trial also revealed that there have been 130 types of Mac malware since last May, a level the company doesn’t find acceptable. The point was made as a defense for why the iOS App Store needs to exist — without it, the more than 1 billion iPhones in use would be an attractive target for attackers.

Funding and M&A

 Indonesia’s BukuKas raised $50 million in Series B funding for its app helping to digitize small businesses. The startup began as a bookkeeping app but expanded to include online payments and an e-commerce platform that now services 6.3 million businesses.

Ethel’s Club founder Naj Austin raised $3.75 million in seed funding for Somewhere Good, a Clubhouse-ish mobile app that connects people across interests, allowing them to post content and have real-time audio conversations.

Mobile-first car ownership “super app” Jerry raised $57+ million to date, including its new $28 million Series B led by Goodwater Capital. The Palo Alto-based startup launched its car insurance comparison service and now has nearly 1 million U.S. customers.

 Egyptian digital banking app Telda raised $5 million pre-seed funding to help grow its business focused on helping Egyptians save, send and spend money.

 Spot Meetings raised $5 million from Kleiner Perkins to modernize remote meetings for mobile. The app includes an assistant “Spot” that can transcribe meeting notes, and offers a scratch pad for copying / pasting snippets of important info, among other things.

 PhonePe is in talks to acquire the Samsung-backed Indus OS, an Indian startup that operates an eponymous third-party Android app store.

 U.K.-based Robinhood rival Stake raised $30 million from Tiger Global and London-based DST Global to expand into Europe. The app has grown 6x since its U.K. launch in early 2020 and now has over 330K customers.

 Snap acquired AR startup WaveOptics for over $500 million. The company, which represents Snap’s biggest acquisition to date, provides the waveguides and projectors used in Snap’s AR glasses, Spectacles.

 Jam City has filed to go public via a SPAC at $1.2 billion value. Th Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery publisher will use some of the money to acquire mobile game publisher Ludia for $175 million.

Downloads

Halide for iPad

Image Credits: Lux

The popular third-party camera app Halide made its way to the iPad this week, with an interface designed from scratch for the iPad with controls placed within reach near the edge of the big screen, special features for composition and iPad shooting (yes, really), custom icons to match either your Silver or Space Gray iPad Pro and support for either right or left handed users. The app is free with in-app purchases for iPad.

Silk + Sonder (Soft Launch)

Image Credits: Silk + Sonder

AAPI, female-founded Silk + Sonder was created by Meha Agrawal, a software engineer and PM for companies including Goldman Sachs, Stitch Fix, The Muse, and others to take an analog-first approach to mental wellness. Now, the company is launching its first mobile app after growing its me business to tens of thousands of subscribers and raising $4+ million in seed funding.

The new app offers curated self-care experiences, daily affirmations, a community club, a private memories feature and others meant to complement the company’s analog journal/planners that are shipped to member’s doorstep monthly. In calming shades of pinks and whites, the app guides users through their wellness journey and helps them stay accountable to their goals.

Since the app’s soft launch this month, it’s added thousands of users, more than 50% of whom engage regularly.

The new app is initially available only to active subscribers, but other users will be able to join a waitlist.

Herd (Beta)

Image Credits: Herd

Female-founded Herd has been building demand for its non-toxic Instagram alternative via TikTok. Now the app is live on iOS as a beta.

The goal of Herd is to give users a safer, social space focused on community, not influence, clout-chasing or data collection.

Users can customize their home feed by interest and use sliders to control what they want to see more of less of, while also posting their own photos, saving favorites, and staying private, if they choose. At present, Herd offers a basic photo-sharing experience. There are no Stories or photo filters or videos or much of anything that could lure users away from more advanced, feature-rich social apps. But what it does have is a mission that users feel connected with — and that pushed the app to No. 18 in the Social category on the App Store on launch day, May 18. It’s now still sitting in the top 50 a few days later.

But ultimately, all the marketing and social buzz can’t prop up an app forever. Herd needs to capitalize on the goodwill it’s built by leaning into quickly upgrading the UI/UX so the app itself feels as fresh as the ideas it espouses.

Reading Rec’s

• The Verge: Apple’s Phil Schiller Gives Epic iPhone Testimony
• Wired: Online Dating Apps are Actually Kind of a Disaster
• Protocol: Free-to-play is the future. Not everyone is on board.
• Not Boring: Shein: The TikTok of Ecommerce
• The Information: Apple’s Blissful Ignorance on App Store Profits

Tweets

News: Extra Crunch roundup: Jam City SPAC, startup PR, telemedicine market map, more

• May 21, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Full disclosure: the second time I worked at a startup founded by Mark Pincus, his dog Zinga slept behind my desk and I was one of her favorite dog-sitters.

For this morning’s edition of The Exchange, Alex Wilhelm studied information recently released by mobile gaming studio Jam City as it prepares to go public in a $1.2 billion blank-check deal with DPCM Capital.

“Jam City is a bit like Zynga, but unless you are a mobile-gaming aficionado, you might not have heard of it,” he writes.

Since its launch, Jam City has raised upwards of $300 million, including a $145 million round in 2019. At the time, the company was riding high after signing a deal with Disney to adapt some of the media giant’s intellectual property, which includes brands like Marvel, Fox and Pixar.

Almost half of all Americans play mobile games, so Alex reviewed Jam City’s investor deck, a transcript of the investor presentation call and a press release to see how it stacks up against Zynga, which “has done great in recent quarters, including posting record revenue and bookings in the first three months of 2021.”

(Full disclosure: the second time I worked at a startup founded by Mark Pincus, Zinga slept behind my desk and I was one of her favorite dog-sitters.)

Thanks for reading Extra Crunch; I hope you have an excellent weekend!

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

Full Extra Crunch articles are only available to members
Use discount code ECFriday to save 20% off a one- or two-year subscription

5 ways to raise your startup’s PR game

Image Credits: Andrii Yalanskyi (opens in a new window)/ Getty Images

The ability to effectively communicate can make or break your launch. It will play a role in determining who wins a new space — you or a competitor.

So how do you make a splash? How do you stay relevant?

For one, you have to stop thinking that what you are up to is interesting.

Every early-stage startup must identify and evaluate a strategic advantage

Image Credits: Eoneren / Getty Images

Whether you’re building a company or thinking about investing, it’s important to understand your strategic advantage.

In order to determine one, you should ask fundamental questions: What’s the long-term, sustainable reason that the company will stay in business?

As M&A accelerates, deal-makers are leveraging AI and ML to keep pace

Image Credits: Fanatic Studio (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

The global pandemic has changed the way we work, including how and where we work. For those involved in the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) industry, a notoriously relationship-driven business, this has meant in-person boardroom handshakes have been replaced by video conference calls, remote collaboration and potentially less travel in the future.

The pandemic has also accelerated digital transformation, and deal-makers have embraced digital tools to help them execute effectively.

The quickening pace of digital transformation is no longer about ensuring a competitive edge. Today, it’s also about business resilience. But what’s on the horizon, and how else will technology evolve to meet the needs of companies and deal-makers?

There are still many inefficiencies in managing M&A, but technologies such as artificial intelligence, especially machine learning, are helping to make the process faster and easier.

New Relic’s business remodel will leave new CEO with work to do

Image Credits: Malte Mueller / Getty Images

Lew Cirne, New Relic’s founder and CEO, is stepping into the executive chairman role. He will be replaced by Bill Staples on July 1.

Cirne spent the last several years rebuilding the company’s platform and changing its revenue model, aiming for what he hopes is long-term success.

TechCrunch decided to dig into the company’s financials to see just what challenges Staples may face as he moves into the corner office. The resulting picture is one that shows a company doing hard work for a more future-aligned product map and business model, albeit one that may not generate the sort of near-term growth that gives Staples ample breathing room with public investors.

Fast growth pushes an unprofitable no-code startup into the public markets: Inside Monday.com’s IPO filing

Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)

At long last, the Monday.com crew dropped an F-1 filing to go public in the United States. TechCrunch has long known that the company, which sells corporate productivity and communications software, has scaled north of $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR).

The countdown to its IPO filing — an F-1, because the company is based in Israel, rather than the S-1s filed by domestic companies — has been ticking for several quarters.

The Exchange has been riffling through the document since it came out, and we’ve picked up on a few things to explore.

The battle for voice recognition inside vehicles is heating up

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin

Until recently, integrating affordable voice-recognition software into an automobile was something from science fiction.

But last year, the percentage of vehicles offering in-car connected services reached 45%. By 2024, analysts predict cars with voice recognition will comprise 60% of the market.

Considering how much time many of us spend behind the wheel, there’s an infinite number of applications for the technology. For our latest Extra Crunch market map, we sized up the general market opportunity before creating a roster of major players and reaching out to investors to see where they’re placing bets.

Industrial automation startup Bright Machines hauls in $435M by going public via SPAC

Image Credits: Teera Konakan / Getty Images

Bright Machines is going public via a SPAC-led combination that will see the 3-year-old company merge with SCVX, raising gross cash proceeds of $435 million in the process.

After the transaction is consummated, the startup will sport an anticipated equity valuation of $1.6 billion.

The Bright Machines news indicates that the great SPAC chill was not a deep freeze. And the transaction itself, in conjunction with the previously announced Desktop Metal blank-check deal, implies that there is space in the market for hardware startup liquidity via SPACs. Perhaps that will unlock more late-stage capital for hardware-focused upstarts.

We took a look at what Bright Machines does, and then the financial details that it shared as part of its news.

Want to double your rate of return? Seek counsel from experienced executives

Image Credits: Sujin Jetkasettakorn / EyeEm (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

As a rule of thumb, it takes 7-8 years for a successful startup to achieve an exit. But there’s a simple way to speed up the clock: Bring in one or more founders who have previous executive experience.

According to data gathered by Rob Olson, partner and head of data strategy at venture engine M13, startups that have two or more experienced founders tend to exit 33% faster and raise 34% less capital.

“Combined, these two improvements can nearly double an investor’s rate of return,” says Olson.

Should startups build or buy telehealth infrastructure?

Image Credits: Georgijevic (opens in a new window)/ Getty Images

Digital health in the U.S. got a huge boost from COVID-19 as more people started consulting physicians and urgent care providers remotely in the midst of lockdowns. So much so that McKinsey estimates that up to $250 billion of the current healthcare expenditure in the U.S. has the potential to be spent virtually.

The prominence of digital health is undoubtedly here to stay, but how it looks and feels from provider to provider is still a debate among sector startups.

But for providers who want to deliver care virtually across the country, it’s not as simple as adding a Zoom invite to an annual check-up. The process requires intention every step of the way — right from the clinicians delivering remote care to the choice of payment processor.

Help TechCrunch find the best email marketers for startups

Image Credits: Getty Images under a MirageC (opens in a new window) license.

Email marketing has been with us for decades, but today it has been refined to a science and an art form.

If you’re an early-stage founder, it is one of the best ways to build and grow your direct relationship with your customer. You know how fickle the platforms can be. You can’t afford to mess this up.

So when and how should you think about doing email marketing, versus all of your other frantic priorities?

Here at Extra Crunch, we’re helping you find the answers. We launched a survey of founders who want to recommend a great email marketer or agency they have worked with to the rest of the startup world.

Fill out the survey here.

For companies that use ML, labeled data is the key differentiator

Image Credits: gremlin / Getty Images

When a company chooses supervised learning, it needs to have a strategy that allows it to label data as quickly as it acquires it.

Supervised learning is currently the most practical approach for most ML challenges, but it requires the crucial additional step of making raw data smart by labeling it.

For companies that use ML, labeled data is the key differentiator

How Expensify got to $100M in revenue by hiring ‘stem cells’ and not ‘cogs in a wheel’

Image Credits: Nigel Sussman

The influence of a founder on their company’s culture cannot be overstated. Everything from their views on the product and business to how they think about people affects how their company’s employees will behave, and since behavior, in turn, informs culture, the consequences of a founder’s early decisions can be far-reaching.

So it’s not surprising that Expensify has its own take on almost everything it does when you consider what its founder and CEO David Barrett learned early in his life: “Basically everyone is wrong about basically everything.”

As we saw in part 1 of this EC-1, this led him to the revelation that it’s easier to figure things out for yourself than finding advice that applies to you. Eventually, these insights would inform how he would go about shaping Expensify.

How Expensify got to $100M in revenue by hiring ‘stem cells’ and not ‘cogs in a wheel’

Inside Marqeta’s fascinating fintech IPO

Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)

Marqeta, long a darling of the fintech market though less well known than some companies in its sector due to its infrastructure nature, filed to go public late last week

If you are not familiar with Marqeta, it powers the payment card tech behind products that you use, like Square, a key customer and driver of the unicorn’s growth. Marqeta exhibits a number of fascinating fintech characteristics (majority revenue from interchange, a rabidly competitive market) that make it very interesting to unspool.

Inside Marqeta’s fascinating fintech IPO

May Mobility’s Edwin Olson and Nina Grooms Lee and Toyota AI Ventures’ Jim Adler on validating your startup idea

When a founder has a work history that includes the name of the parent company of one of their key investors, you probably assume that was one of the first deals to come together. Not so with May Mobility and Toyota AI Ventures, which connected for the company’s second seed round after May went out and raised its original seed purely on the strength of its own ideas and proposed solutions.

That’s one of the many interesting things we learned from speaking to May Mobility co-founder and CEO Edwin Olson, as well as Chief Product Officer Nina Grooms Lee and Toyota AI Ventures founding partner Jim Adler on an episode of Extra Crunch Live.

Extra Crunch Live goes down every Wednesday at 3 p.m. EDT/noon PDT. Our next episode is with Sequoia’s Shaun Maguire and Vise’s Samir Vasavada, and you can check out the upcoming schedule right here.

Meanwhile, read on for highlights from our chat with Olson, Grooms Lee and Adler, and then stay tuned at the end for a recording of the full session, including our live pitch-off.

WalkMe is going public: Let’s stroll through its numbers

Image Credits: Getty Images / Somyot Techapuwapat / EyeEm

WalkMe is the second Israel-based technology company to file to go public this week: No-code startup Monday.com is also pursuing an American IPO.

WalkMe’s software provides visual overlays on websites that help users navigate the product in question. Per the company’s F-1 filing, other elements of its service that matter include its onboarding system, Workstation, or its “single interface to the applications within an enterprise and simplifies task completion through a natural language conversational interface and automation.” We’re including that last feature because it says “automation,” which, in the wake of the UiPath IPO, is a word worth watching. Investors are.

At a high level, WalkMe is a SaaS business, which means that when we digest its results we are digging into a modern software company. Let’s do just that.

WalkMe is going public: Let’s stroll through its numbers

Can Squarespace dodge the direct-listing value trap?

Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)

Squarespace’s reference price has been set at $50 per share.

We went over Squarespace’s recently disclosed Q2 and full-2021 guidance and asked how its expectations compare to its reference-price-defined pre-trading valuation. Then, we set some stakes in the ground regarding historical direct-listing results and what we might expect from the company as it adds a third set of data to our quiver.

Let’s get into the numbers!

Can Squarespace dodge the direct-listing value trap?

Mapping out one edtech company’s $200M bet on lifelong learning

Image Credits: Getty Images / DrAfter123

Mumbai-based Emeritus, an edtech company that works with universities to create online upskilling courses for employed folks, just spent a big chunk of cash to break into K-12.

Emeritus, which is part of the Eruditus group, announced this week that it plans to acquire iD Tech, a STEM education service for children. The acquisition, which has not yet closed, is estimated to be around $200 million and leaves iD Tech operating as an independent brand for now.

ID Tech brings a whole different set of customers to its umbrella: The startup offers courses for elementary through high-school students across the globe taught by college students in the U.S.

Mapping out one edtech company’s $200M bet on lifelong learning

5 innovative fundraising methods for emerging VCs and PEs

Image Credits: Hiroshi Watanabe / Getty Images

According to Versatile VC founder David Teten, five new strategies are gaining traction among fund managers looking to raise capital from family offices and high-net-worth individuals:

• Online communities and virtual events.
• Platforms that help other investors access your fund.
• Soliciting under the 506(c) designation.
• Launching a rolling fund.
• Crowdfunding from retail investors into a general partnership.

In a summary of a class he taught for the Oper8r VC fund accelerator, Teten offers actionable advice for anyone who wants to connect with pre-qualified investors.

5 innovative fundraising methods for emerging VCs and PEs

Dear Sophie: What’s happening with visa application receipt notices?

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

Dear Sophie,

Our startup employs several individuals who are on work visas or have employment authorization. Many of them have been waiting for quite a while for the government to tell them their applications have been received.

Why? When will things be back on track? We have a few employees who are waiting for green cards, and a few F-1 visa holders who will be extending their OPT to STEM OPT.

Is there anything we can do?

— Patient in Pasadena

Dear Sophie: What’s happening with visa application receipt notices?

Arrival’s Denis Sverdlov on the new era of car manufacturing

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin

Electric vehicle company Arrival wants to break the current auto manufacturing model. Instead of one giant factory and an assembly line, Arrival’s commercial electric vans, buses and cars are robotically built in small, regional microfactories, of which the company wants to open 31 by the end of 2025.

If you want to achieve something radically more efficient, you have to go deeper, into complex, high-level computational algorithms that are not normally used in consumer-facing products.

The London-based company, founded in 2015, joined the ranks of EV companies going public via SPAC, merging with blank-check company CIIG Merger Corp. in March. UPS has already ordered 10,000 of Arrival’s robotically engineered vans, and the company recently signed a deal with Uber to create purpose-built EVs for ride-hail drivers.

Arrival founder Denis Sverdlov has been at the intersection of technological advancement and societal change before.

Arrival’s Denis Sverdlov on the new era of car manufacturing

 

Chasing hype is human nature: The tyranny of startup trends

Image Credits: Nuthawut Somsuk / Getty Images

The fear of missing out (FOMO) spreads faster than wildfire and often overwhelms rational decision-making.

In the VC community, investors look for lessons from disruptive startups they can use to identify other potential winners. But hype leads to bad decision-making, rushed due diligence and wishful thinking.

When and if those startups actually do well, “irrational FOMO takes over” because the initial assessment was based on bad information, says Victor Echevarria, a partner at Jackson Square Ventures. “Trends are addictive; to remain disciplined and avoid hype is to deny our innate instincts.”

It’s natural for investors to follow the crowd, but in the race to the bottom, FOMO can be high-octane fuel.

Chasing hype is human nature: The tyranny of startup trends

Robinhood’s epic Q1 growth explains its fundraising boom

Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)

The Exchange explores Robinhood’s financial results using the lens of payment for order flow (PFOF) income, which the company said during a congressional hearing constitutes the majority of its revenues.

This particular revenue growth — or the lack thereof — is a good way to understand not only Robinhood’s own results but also its larger market. If Robinhood is seeing rapid growth and strong trading volumes, we can infer with some confidence that others in its space are enjoying a related, if not similar, level of interest.

For Public.com, eToro and others like Freetrade (as well as our own understanding), how Robinhood performed recently is key. So, let’s explore the data.

Robinhood’s epic Q1 growth explains its fundraising boom

How to ensure data quality in the era of Big Data

Image Credits: gremlin / Getty Images

A little over a decade has passed since The Economist warned us that we would soon be drowning in data. The modern data stack has emerged as a proposed life-jacket for this data flood — spearheaded by Silicon Valley startups such as Snowflake, Databricks and Confluent.

Today, any entrepreneur can sign up for BigQuery or Snowflake and have a data solution that can scale with their business in a matter of hours. The emergence of cheap, flexible and scalable data storage solutions was largely a response to changing needs spurred by the massive explosion of data.

Currently, the world produces 2.5 quintillion bytes of data daily (there are 18 zeros in a quintillion). The explosion of data continues in the roaring ‘20s, both in terms of generation and storage — the amount of stored data is expected to continue to double at least every four years. However, one integral part of modern data infrastructure still lacks solutions suitable for the Big Data era and its challenges: Monitoring of data quality and data validation.

How to ensure data quality in the era of Big Data

Investors help Procore build a decacorn valuation in public debut

Image Credits: the_burtons (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Watching construction tech software company Procore go public Thursday after pricing above its range makes the IPO slowdown look like the deceleration that wasn’t.

Investors quickly bid up the company’s value in trading, giving Procore a higher valuation than it might have anticipated, along with a boost of confidence for the IPO market in general.

Construction tech may not be as glamorous as space travel, but it’s a massive industry that’s fraught with inefficiencies.

Procore initially set an IPO range of $60 to $65 per share before pricing at $67 per share Wednesday night. Its debut was worth gross proceeds north of $600 million and a fully diluted valuation of $9.6 billion. As of early afternoon Thursday, shares were trading at a solid $85.25.

In light of Procore’s debut, TechCrunch is digging quickly into the company’s new valuation and its resulting revenue multiples.

Investors help Procore build a decacorn valuation in public debut

Telemedicine startups are positioning themselves for a post-pandemic world

Image Credits: LaylaBird (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

It’s impossible to predict how healthcare institutions will operate post-pandemic, but with so many people now accustomed to telemedicine, startups that provide services around virtual care continue to be poised for success.

Telemedicine has faced an uphill battle to become more relevant in the U.S., with challenges such as meeting HIPAA compliance requirements and insurance companies unwilling to pay for virtual visits. But when COVID-19 began raging across the globe and people had to stay home, both the insurance and healthcare industries were forced to adapt.

Now that people see the benefits and conveniences of “dialing a doc” from the kitchen table, healthcare has changed forever.

Telemedicine startups are positioning themselves for a post-pandemic world

News: Daily Crunch: Snap spends more than $500M to acquire AR display startup WaveOptics

• May 21, 2021
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Hello friends and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here.

Welcome to Daily Crunch for May 21, 2021. Closing out the week, bitcoin dropped sharply today on (more?) news from China about possible restrictions on cryptocurrencies more broadly. Depending on your priors, the most recent news is purely FUD, or it’s indication that Bitcoin and friends are terrible inflation hedges. Pick your poison! Regardless, we have a grip of startup news to get to, so off we go! — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Snap spends a half billion on AR: Yesterday’s news from consumer photo giant Snap didn’t stop with the company plunking down $500 million for WaveOptics, which we reported “makes the waveguides and projectors used in AR glasses.” That sure sounds like Snap gearing up for eventual mass production? Right?
• Startups heart farming: TechCrunch covered a huge $65.5 million Series B for Indonesian startup TaniHub Group today. Part of what it does is loan capital to farmers ahead of their harvests. In related news, ProducePay raised $43 million earlier this week to do something similar in Latin America. There’s notable startup activity, then, at the intersection of agtech and fintech.
• Mobile gaming is bigger than you thought: Did you know that former gaming darling Zynga is in the midst of a comeback? Mobile gaming, its core focus, had a huge 2020, leading to the company posting record Q1 results. Riding the same way is Jam City, another mobile gaming shop is going public. More here.

Startups and VC

To round out the week, how about a few smaller venture capital rounds? We have a number from today that are well worth our time:

Secai Marche raises $1.4M for farm-to-table food distribution: We don’t cover enough Japanese startups, frankly, but here’s to doing better. Tokyo-based Secai Marche is building a B2B “logistics platform for farmers that sell to restaurants, hotels and other” food and beverage companies, and we think it’s neat. Rakuten and Beyond Next supplied the capital.

Mio raises $1M to bring social commerce to rural Vietnam: Quickly growing e-commerce market Vietnam is seeing rising penetration in major cities. Mio wants to bring e-commerce to smaller cities and rural areas. Per our reporting, it is “building a reseller network and logistics infrastructure that can offer next-day delivery to Tier 2 and 3 cities.” Our present may be someone else’s future, so it’s swell to see startups bring the latest to more folks.

To round out our round coverage today, a slightly larger deal for a mental-health focused service:

Wysa raises $5.5M for AI-powered mental health: This is at a minimum cool on paper. We’ll have to get some time with the service as it evolves through time, but TechCrunch reports that “Jo Aggarwal, the founder and CEO of Wysa, is hoping you’ll find it easier to confide in a robot. Or, put more specifically, “‘emotionally intelligent’ artificial intelligence.” I, for one, welcome our robot mental-health overlords. Jokes aside, there is a therapist shortage in the world, and if Wysa can help more folks handle their mental health better, we’re all for it.

5 predictions for the future of e-commerce

The United States is one of the world’s most advanced economies, but until quite recently, South Korea and China had much higher e-commerce penetration.

American consumers and companies are closing that gap. In 2016, the percentage of total retail spend where the goods were bought and sold online in the U.S. was about 8%. Today, that figure is closer to 17%.

Despite the last two decades of disruption, we’re still in the early days of e-commerce. But as more merchants of every size start making their goods and services available online, we’ve reached an inflection point.

In an exclusive report for Extra Crunch, Ethan Choi, a partner at Accel, offers five well-researched predictions about where e-commerce is heading in terms of D2C and the overall enablement landscape.

“We’re entering what we at Accel believe is ‘the golden age of D2C e-commerce,’” says Choi.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

Today we have to stretch the Big Tech portion of this newsletter to include entities even larger than the largest technology companies, namely governments.

The Indian government is mad at tech companies yet again. This time it’s Twitter’s turn. Per TechCrunch, New Delhi “has expressed strong objection to Twitter for classifying tweets by Indian politicians as ‘manipulated media,’ and separately asked social media firms to remove posts that refer to an ‘Indian variant’ of the coronavirus.”

A few thoughts here: One, Twitter is going to have to navigate an increasingly complicated global climate for free speech in general. And figure out how to handle governments’ reactions to its decisions on labeling content. That’s going to be hard. And asking a social service to blanket-ban a particular phrase is going to be essentially impossible. After all, even in China, where banned phrases on social media are common, individuals have found myriad ways around the restrictions. So, good luck, Indian government.

On a related note, if you are interested in privacy more generally, what’s going on in the European Union regarding data protection is fascinating.

Moving back to the world of corporate news, Spotify is finally bringing offline listening to the Apple Watch. For runners, this is big news. Our own Brian Heater is hype about the update.

To close us out today, the Equity podcast team has thoughts on the growth in corporate “media” and what it means for unicorns and other large technology companies.

Community

Two quick things heading into the weekend: Ford’s new electric truck looks cool, but you, our readers, are hodling out for Tesla’s Cyber Truck. If you’re a founder of a startup of any stage and want to try your pitch out on some really cool investors … then Extra Crunch Live is the place to go. Check out this week’s pitch by Capri Money. From the audience to the stage, just like that! See you there next week.

TechCrunch Experts: Email Marketing

Image Credits: Getty Images

We’re thrilled with the responses to our survey about the top email marketers. It’s not too late to weigh in: Fill out the survey here.

In addition to giving founders who respond to the survey a discount to a new Extra Crunch subscription, we’ll be featuring a couple of nominations in Daily Crunch starting next week!

If you’re a growth marketer, pass the survey on to your clients — we’d love to hear from them!

To find out more details about this project and how we plan to use it to shape our editorial coverage, visit techcrunch.com/experts.

TC Eventful

The Extra Crunch Live party carries on into June, with new episodes connecting you with some of tech’s biggest names.

News: Develop a buyer’s guide to educate your startup’s sales team and customers

• May 21, 2021
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The buyer’s guide is a win for both sides: Buyers are informed of what’s to come, and startups can expedite a potential deal by preempting any concerns about a product and/or the sales process.

Every company wants to be innovative, but innovation comes with its share of difficulties. One key challenge for early-stage companies that are disrupting a particular space or creating a new category is figuring out how to sell a unique product to customers who have never bought such a solution.

This is especially the case when a solution doesn’t have many reference points and its significance may not be obvious.

My view is simple — some buyers could use a walkthrough of the buying process. If you are building a singular product in a nascent market and necessitates forward-looking customers, and want to drastically shorten sales cycles, I have a proposal: Create a buyer’s guide.

A buyer’s guide is essentially a prescriptive summary that provides an understandable overview of how a customer may buy your solution. What does your product actually do? Is it secure? How would you implement the technology? What does it replace, if anything? It should be short, simple, and speak the customer’s language. It also acts as a sales enabling tool. Sales teams, especially at smaller startups, can review the guide quarterly and analyze what is and isn’t working as the company goes to market.

Here is how to put together a buyer’s guide, including what to sort out before you type a single word.

Know your audience

From the start, it’s important to think about who the stakeholders are for your product’s buying cycle. One typical issue with early-stage startups is they meet with an enthusiastic buyer — a CIO, CTO, or VP of product — but neglect to include the other stakeholders who should be part of the conversation. More importantly, a lot of companies don’t realize the impact of their product on a group or team that they would not typically sell to.

For example, target the security team as an early stakeholder, because they’re probably going to review your product. If the solution is focused towards, say, integration, then hone in on who would be owning the integration process on the buyer’s team.

If you’re selling a martech solution, on a business level, you have to consider a finance business partner for marketing. Think about the problems your customers face and also how others in their company relate to them.