September 2021 – Page 50

News: LinkedIn doubles down on development with new learning hub, free courses and new search fields for hybrid working

September 9, 2021
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The wider world of employment has seen a huge shift in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Looking for a job, finding someone to fill a role, or simply developing professionally are just not the same as they used to be for many of us. So it’s no surprise to see companies that have built business models catering to these areas changing, too: today, LinkedIn, Microsoft’s social networking platform for the working world, announced a wave of news aimed at moving ahead with the times.

It’s launching a new Learning Hub aimed at organizations to provide professional development and other training to employees. And it’s making 40 courses free of charge to LinkedIn members specifically to address some of the changes afoot, such as how to adapt to hybrid working, how to be a better manager in the new normal, and how to return to the office, and run facilities when they are spread beyond a building to also include people’s private homes. Lastly, it’s also starting to tweak details that people can use to list and search for job openings to account for these kinds of working conditions, and more.

The Learning Hub was first previewed back in April of this year and has been running in a limited beta. Today, as part of a bigger event hosted by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky where they are discussing new trends in the world of work, the Hub is being rolled out more widely.

For some context, LinkedIn has been long on education for years, with acquisitions like the remote learning platform Lynda back in 2015 bolstering its own education strategy and position as a go-to platform for professional development; partnerships to bring in significant amounts of third-party content (for example, when it added some 13,000 courses via third parties in 2018); and efforts to tie together the concept of skills development with professional profiles, running research and building interactive tools for its users.

The free courses that are being launched today (and will remain free until October 9) are a timely set of videos to help companies as some of them start to make (or think about) the transitions from remote to in-office environments, but the bigger product launch, The Learning Hub, is not exactly an altruistic endeavor in that longer journey. It is being sold as a premium service for businesses — existing LinkedIn Learning Pro users will be able to use it for free until July 2022, potentially longer, it said. In addition to being a salient business, it is also connected to the company’s bigger efforts to bring in more businesses-focused services, and more engagement from HR departments, to bolster one of its other main revenue drivers, recruitment.

As a learning experience platform (often described as LXPs), LinkedIn’s relaunch of its own learning hub will bring it into closer competition with the likes of 360Learning, Coursera for Business, Workday, Cornerstone, and the many other platforms used by organizations to manage their own in-house and third-party professional training content. In addition to this, LinkedIn says it will be using its own data on employment trends, plus AI, to personalize content for organizations and users. The fact, however, that it’s also a platform whee those HR teams can also list jobs and source candidates makes it a significantly stickier experience, and one that might feel more cohesive at a time when so much else might be more fragmented.

The new fields that LinkedIn is bringing into its recruitment service are also notable in that regard. It will now let recruiters indicate whether a job is remote, hybrid or onsite; and soon those looking for jobs will also be able to indicate which of these it’s looking for in a new role. Companies will also be able to start indicating more details on their own company status as it relates to things like vaccination requirements, and to let the world (employees, partners, customers, interested others) know whether your physical offices are open for business or not.

These new fields may sound a little trivial, or at least very specifically related to concerns and circumstances that we live with today, but I think they are more notable than this. They speak to what LinkedIn sees (and what many of us feel) are strong priorities in how we view jobs today. That opens the door to how and if LinkedIn might consider other kinds of details in company and personal profiles, as well as details that could be used in recruitment. This is something the company has also been working on for a little while already: in June it started to give users the option of adding pronouns to their profiles. All of this is pretty important, considering that there are a lot of smaller companies and calls for someone to knock LinkedIn off its pedestal. As LinkedIn dabbles with new formats and sunsets others, it’s all signals that it’s attempting to be more adaptable to counteract that.

News: Wisetack closes on $45M to bring ‘buy now, pay later’ to in-person services

September 9, 2021
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Buy now, pay later is growing globally — with various companies expanding to, and in, different parts of the world, such as Africa, Latin America and Asia. Here in the U.S., Affirm and Klarna are big players, and Square recently announced plans to acquire Afterpay, which also is eyeing growth here. Traditional buy now, pay

Buy now, pay later is growing globally — with various companies expanding to, and in, different parts of the world, such as Africa, Latin America and Asia.

Here in the U.S., Affirm and Klarna are big players, and Square recently announced plans to acquire Afterpay, which also is eyeing growth here.

Traditional buy now, pay later (BNPL) gives consumers the opportunity to pay in installments at the point of sale, either online or, increasingly, in person as well. But even domestically, the ability to pay in installments is branching out beyond e-commerce and retail.

Wisetack is a startup that brings buy now, pay later to in-person services. And it just raised $45 million in a Series B funding round led by Insight Partners.

Existing backers Greylock Partners and Bain Capital Ventures also participated in the financing, bringing the company’s total raised to $64 million since its 2018 inception. The latest round comes just six and a half months after Wisetack announced it had raised $19 million across its seed and Series A rounds, which were both led by Greylock.

Wisetack raises $19M as its buy-now-pay-later service for IRL services scales

In a nutshell, the San Francisco-based startup helps in-person businesses offer financing to consumers. Wisetack is not the first company to do this, but what makes it different, according to co-founder and CEO Bobby Tzekin, is that it actually embeds financing options into software platforms that businesses have already built out and are using in their operations.

Its focus is on service-based businesses, such as HVAC contractors or plumbers. For example, if your AC unit goes out and costs thousands to replace, you could have the option of paying for it in installments if the contractor has Wistack’s API embedded into its site.

So far, Wisetack has been able to grow rapidly by partnering with vertical SaaS businesses such as Housecall Pro and Jobber. Those companies offer consumer financing to their respective customer base, which include tens of thousands of home services professionals.

Wisetack clearly seems to be filling a gap. So far in 2021, it has grown its revenue and loan volume “over 10x” compared to 2020. And it works with thousands of merchants, according to Tzekin.

The executive left his job in 2018 to start Wisetack because he felt there was “clearly a massive need,” teaming up with Liz O’Donnell and Mykola Klymenko (who was co-founder and CTO at VaroMoney, the holding company of Varo Bank).

With its new capital, Wisetack plans to expand into other service-based verticals, such as auto repair, elective medical, dental and veterinary and legal services. It also plans to double its team of 40 over the next year.

To Tzekin, the opportunity is huge.

Most service businesses are SMBs, which have historically been harder to serve than large e-commerce players. Americans spend more than $400 billion a year on residential renovations and repairs alone, according to this Harvard report. And the United States automotive repair and maintenance services market is projected to reach $250 billion by 2026, up from $201 billion in 2020.

And while the average BNPL online transaction is a few hundred dollars, purchases made to service-based businesses average closer to $4,000 to $5,000, according to Tzekin.

The CEO believes that buy now, pay later can be more attractive than paying for such purchases with a credit card, for a few reasons. For one, consumers have the option of paying in installments for anywhere from three months to 60 months.

“This often means it’s more affordable to buy the better piece of equipment since they can spread the costs over time,” he said.

Also, just how much they will be paying over time will be made clear at the time of purchase, whereas when paying with a credit card, the amount could vary depending on interest rates and how long it takes to pay the money back, Tzekin added.

The company makes money by charging a processing fee to merchants, as well as charging interest to consumers — which can be anywhere from 0% to 29%, “depending on how good their credit is,” Tzekin said.

“But credit cards charge compounded interest, whereas we charge simple interest,” he added.

Insight Partners Principal Rebecca Liu-Doyle describes Wisetack as “a standout in the industry.”

“Wisetack has a differentiated platform for embedded BNPL that is purpose-built to address use cases that are both more complex and less well-served than e-commerce,” she wrote via email.

Note: The article headline was updated post-publication to reflect the accurate funding amount

As BNPL startups raise, a look at Klarna, Affirm and Afterpay earnings

News: Dispo launches a test to gauge user interest in selling their photos as NFTs

September 9, 2021
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The photo-sharing app that emulates disposable cameras, Dispo started rolling out a test yesterday that will record user interest in selling photos as NFTs. Some users will now see a sell button on their photos, and when they tap it, they can sign up to be notified when the ability to sell Dispo photos launches.

CEO and co-founder Daniel Liss told TechCrunch that Dispo is still deciding how it will incorporate NFT sales into the app, which is why the platform is piloting a test with its users. Dispo doesn’t know yet what blockchain it would use, if it would partner with an NFT marketplace, or what cut of sales Dispo would take.

“I think it’s safe to say from the test that there will be an experience native to the Dispo app,” Liss said. “There are a number of ways it could look — there could be a native experience within Dispo that then connects through an API to another platform, and in turn, they’re our partner, but to the community, it would look native to the Dispo app.”

Image Credits: Dispo

This marks a new direction for the social media app, which seeks to redefine the photo-sharing experience by only letting users see the photos they took at 9 AM the next morning. From Dispo’s perspective, this gimmick helps users share more authentically, since you take one photo and then you’re done — the app isn’t conducive to taking dozens of selfies and posting the “best” image of yourself. But though it only launched in December 2019, Dispo has already faced both buzzy hype and devastating controversy.

Until about a year ago, the app was called David’s Disposables, named after co-founder and YouTuber David Dobrik. The app was downloaded over a million times in the first week after its release and hit number one on the App Store charts. In March 2021, the app dropped its waitlist and relaunched with social network features, but just weeks later, Insider reported sexual assault allegations against a member of Vlog Squad, Dobrik’s YouTube prank ensemble. In response, Spark Capital severed ties with the company, leading to Dobrik’s departure. Other investors like Seven Seven Six and Unshackled Ventures, who contributed to the company’s $20 million Series A round, announced that they would donate any profits from their investments in Dispo to organizations working with survivors of sexual assault.

Liss told TechCrunch in June, when the company confirmed its Series A, that Dobrik’s role with the company was as a marketing partner — Liss has been CEO since the beginning. In light of the controversy, Liss said the app focused on improving the product itself and took a step back from promotion.

According to data from the app analytics firm SensorTower, Dispo has reached an estimated 4.7 million global installs to date since launch. Though the app saw the most downloads in January 2020, when it was installed over 1 million times, the app’s next best month came in March 2021, when it removed its waitlist — that month, about 616,000 people downloaded Dispo. Between March and the end of August, the app was downloaded around 1.4 million times, which is up 118% year over year compared to the same time frame in 2020 — but it should be expected that this year’s numbers would be higher, since last year, the app’s membership was exclusive.

Image Credits: Dispo

Now, with the announcement that Dispo is pursuing NFTs, Liss hopes that his company won’t just change how people post photos, but what the relationship will be between platforms and the content that users create.

“Why NFTs? The most powerful memories of our lives have value. And they have economic value, because we created them, and the past of social media fails to recognize that,” Liss told TechCrunch. “As a result, the only way that a creator with a big following is compensated is by selling directly to a brand, as opposed to profiting from the content itself.”

Adding NFT sales to the app offers Dispo a way to profit from a cut of user sales, but it stands to question how adding NFT sales could impact the community-focused feel of Dispo.

“I think there is tremendous curiosity and interest,” Liss said. “But these problems and questions are why we need more data.”

News: Quicken, one of the ‘first fintechs,’ is being sold again

September 9, 2021
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Five and a half years after being acquired by a private equity firm, personal finance software company Quicken is announcing that it is being acquired by another private equity firm. In April 2016, an affiliate of H.I.G. Capital acquired Quicken from Intuit Inc. for an undisclosed amount. Today, Menlo Park, California-based Quicken is announcing that

Five and a half years after being acquired by a private equity firm, personal finance software company Quicken is announcing that it is being acquired by another private equity firm.

In April 2016, an affiliate of H.I.G. Capital acquired Quicken from Intuit Inc. for an undisclosed amount. Today, Menlo Park, California-based Quicken is announcing that Aquiline Capital Partners will be acquiring a majority stake in the company — also for an undisclosed amount.

In an exclusive interview with TechCrunch, Quicken CEO Eric Dunn did share some other details about Quicken’s performance since that last transaction, as well as its plans for the future. Dunn has a history with the company, so can speak pretty comfortably about where it’s been, and where it’s going.

While he took over as CEO of Quicken in 2016, he first joined previous parent company Intuit as employee No. 4 in 1986 when Quicken was its only software product. During his tenure at Intuit, he served as the CFO through the 1993 IPO and merger with ChipSoft (now known as TurboTax). While he was CFO, Dunn was also a software developer who worked on almost all of the early versions of Quicken, and was the first VP/general manager of the business.

Since the H.I.G. buy, it appears that Quicken has grown quite a lot. It currently has 2 million active users, which Dunn said is “significantly higher” than what it had at the time of its spinoff from Intuit. The executive declined to reveal hard revenue figures but he did share that the company is profitable and has seen a 50% increase in annual sales volume over the five-year period, (or double-digit growth if you annualize it).

“We’re strongly profitable and have been consistently profitable since the time of the spinoff. We’re a very successful company, revenue-wise — far above what it ever was in the Intuit years,” he told TechCrunch. “More importantly, we’re a successful business that has succeeded in modernizing and improving quality for our customers.”

For example, according to Dunn, Quicken has seen an NPS gain of 25 points over a five-year period. (NPS stands for Net Promoter Score, a customer loyalty and satisfaction measurement).

Private equity, a SPAC and an IPO walk into a bar

H.I.G., Dunn added, invested alongside the Quicken management team to improve product quality, bring Quicken to a cloud platform and launch a digitally native product in its personal finance app, Simplifi.

Image Credits: Quicken

“H.I.G. is not a growth-oriented expansion firm. They felt their work was done, and they did what they had set out to do,” Dunn said, “which is to carve out an asset with a lot of potential from a parent company which had neglected it.”

Justin Reyna, managing director at H.I.G. Capital, said the results of its investment in Quicken have been “outstanding.”

In recent years, the number of financial technology companies (and potential competitors to Quicken) has exploded. But, Dunn maintains, Quicken in fact was “the first fintech.”

“It was one of the founding fintechs, the only software product at Intuit when it launched in 1983,” he told TechCrunch. “It started with the idea of automating personal finances to customers as a software tool living only on desktops.”

Moving forward, Dunn said Quicken plans to explore partnering with fintechs as it continues to evolve its model. It’s not ruling out acquisitions, but it’s also not an area of emphasis.

No layoffs are planned with the new ownership. In fact, Dunn expects the company will only continue to hire and add to its 150-person staff (not including 250 contracted “customer care agents).

He said the company will simply focus on continuing the modernization of its Quicken product and bringing more functionality to its web and mobile offerings.

“We’ll also continue to add to our Simplifi product, which is only about 18 months into its life,” he said. “It has a great feature set but there’s lots more we need to do.”

It will also focus on integrated financial services, such as allowing for money movement from account to account in the product as opposed to going to an external site.

Aquiline is a New York- and London-based private investment firm with $6.9 billion in assets under management. Its president, Vincenzo La Ruffa, says he is a Quicken user himself.

“Quicken is trusted by millions of customers, who rely on it to lead healthy financial lives,” he said in a written statement. “As a longtime Quicken user myself, I’ve seen firsthand the work Eric and the team at Quicken have put into building a compelling suite of products and services. I am confident in the growth trajectory ahead as we work with the company to expand the range of innovative solutions it offers in the personal financial management space.”

There has been a flurry of interest in fintechs focused on personal finance as of late. For example, in June, personal finance startup Truebill raised a $45 million Series D funding round led by Accel.

Truebill raises $45 million for its personal finance app

News: Tinder adds a new home for interactive, social features with launch of Tinder Explore

September 9, 2021
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Tinder is redesigning its app to put a larger emphasis on its social, interactive features with the launch of “Explore,” a new section that will feature events, like the return of the popular “Swipe Night” series, as well as ways to discover matches by interests and dive into quick chats before a match is made. Combined, the changes help to push Tinder further away from its roots as a quick match-based dating app into something that’s more akin to a social network aimed at helping users meet new people.

This shift could resonate better with a younger generation that may feel like traditional online dating has lost its novelty. Today, these users are turning to apps marketing themselves as places to meet new friends, while newcomers to the dating app industry are experimenting with other means of connecting users — such as with short, TikTok-like videos, as in Snack, or even audio, as in SwoonMe. For Tinder, these market shifts may have represented an existential threat to its own business. But instead, the company has doubled down on interactivity as being core to the Tinder experience, as means of maintaining its dominant position.

At launch, Tinder Explore will include a handful of existing features alongside a new way to meet people. The latter allows users to connect with others based on interests — like Foodies, Gamers, Music Lovers, Social Causes, Entrepreneurs, and more. Over time, more interests will be added which will allow Tinder members to find someone based on what they’re like, rather than just what they look like.

Image Credits: Tinder

Explore will also be home to Tinder’s “Swipe Night,” the interactive series that launched in 2019 as an in-app “choose your own adventure” story which helped to boost Tinder engagement as it gave users a reason to relaunch the app at a specific time. Tinder hailed “Swipe Night” as a success, saying the feature attracted over 20 million users during its first run and led to a 26% increase in matches. In November, the series will return — this time, with new characters and a new “whodunit”-style storyline. It will now also leverage the “Fast Chat” feature that powers Tinder’s “Hot Takes” experience, which allows unmatched users to chat.

“Hot Takes” will also appear in Tinder Explore, which the company describes as a more low-stakes way to match with other users. As a timer counts down, users who are chatting can choose if they want to match. If the timer expires, they meet someone new — similar to an online version of speed dating. Since launching this summer, millions of Tinder users have tried “Hot Takes,” which is only available from 6 pm to midnight local time.

However, the bigger story about Tinder Explore isn’t just what sort of features it will host now, but what the company has in store for the future. Earlier this year, Tinder parent Match bought the Korean social networking company Hyperconnect for $1.73 billion — its largest acquisition to date. And it’s preparing to use Hyperconnect’s IP to make the online dating experience even more interactive than it is today, having announced plans to add audio and video chat, including group live video, to several of its top dating app properties, Tinder included.

Tinder Explore provides a platform where features like this could later be added — something Tinder hints towards, noting that the section is designed to offer users access to “a growing list” of social experiences with “many more to follow.”

“A new generation of daters is asking for more from us in the post-Covid world: more ways to have fun and interact with others virtually and more control over who they meet on Tinder,” said Tinder CEO Jim Lanzone, in a company announcement. “Today’s launch of Explore is a major step in creating a deeper, multi-dimensional, interactive experience for our members that expands the possibilities of Tinder as a platform,” he added.

Tinder Explore began rolling out to major English-speaking markets on Wednesday, Sept. 8, and will be available globally by mid-October.

News: Better.com acquires UK-based Property Partner ahead of SPAC close

September 9, 2021
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The deal could give Better a way to augment its lending business with the potential to enable fractional ownership of properties in the U.S. and other markets.

Online mortgage company Better.com has acquired U.K.-based startup Property Partner as it seeks to expand into new markets and offer new product lines. The deal could give Better a way to augment its lending business with the potential to enable fractional ownership of properties in the U.S. and other markets.

Better plans to go public later this year through its planned merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) in a deal that values it at $7.7 billion. In the meantime the company has been active in the M&A market, acquiring two U.K.-based companies in the lead up to the deal’s close.

In July, Better announced its acquisition of Trussle, a digital mortgage brokerage in the U.K. that was widely seen as its first step to international expansion. But with the purchase of Property Partner, Better could gain technology capabilities to expand its feature set in the U.S. and other markets.

Launched in 2015, Property Partner enables fractional ownership of “buy to let” properties throughout the country. Through its platform, users could invest in individual properties or in a portfolio of properties and earn a portion of the rental income generated by those assets. It also created a resale market, enabling users to sell off their shares to other users.

The startup claims more than 9,000 investors on its property crowdfunding market and £140 million of assets under management. With the Better acquisition, the company expects to be able to expand both its investor base and properties to invest in.

Property Partner sent a message to users late last week to inform them of upcoming changes as a result of the deal. The startup announced it was temporarily pausing trading on the resale market while promoting some of Better’s plans as a result of the deal.

Under the new ownership, Property Partner said it would be able to reduce fees, grow its investor base, and dramatically expand investment opportunities by adding properties in the U.S. and other international locations to its platform.

For Better, the deal adds a new income stream in the short term while enabling the company to completely reimagine homeownership over a longer time horizon. Over the years Better has sought to augment its core mortgage lending business with additional products and services, including real estate agents, title and homeowners insurance, and the ability to make all-cash offers in certain markets in which it operates.

But in an interview with TechCrunch last month, Better CEO Vishal Garg previewed a vision for how fractional ownership could reduce friction and enable more freedom for the home-owning public:

You have a large population in this country that is composed of retirees and they don’t have a current income, so they cannot actually refinance their mortgage and they’re still paying interest at 6%. They’d like to move to a warmer climate. Well, they can’t, it’s gonna cost them 6% to sell their house, then it’s gonna cost them 6% to buy the other house.

Why can’t they set it up so they sell 1% of their house in Connecticut every year and establish an income stream that qualifies them to go get a cheap mortgage and sell that house in Connecticut over a period of time, to someone who wants to live there and buy a piece of property in Florida.

There are all these frictions and it’s honestly just a simple data-matching problem. There’s no reason you need to own 100% of your home. What if we could give you the ability to sell 10% a year or 3% of your home or 2% of your home to people who want to buy a home in your neighborhood and are not ready yet because they’re renting.

For a more detailed overview of Better’s upcoming SPAC and its product plans once it goes public, check out our feature on ExtraCrunch.

News: Anatomy of a SPAC: Inside Better.com’s ambitious plans

September 9, 2021
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“We aren’t so easily categorized,” said Better CEO Vishal Garg.

When executives at online mortgage company Better.com decided to take their company public earlier this year, they elected not to go the traditional IPO route or direct listing. Instead, Better will hit the public markets by merging with blank-check company Aurora Acquisition Corp in a SPAC deal that values it at $7.7 billion.

While the stock performance of post-merger SPAC companies has been shaky at best this year, the team at Better believed they were getting a preferable deal through their combination with Aurora (and additional investment by SoftBank) than if they decided to pitch bankers and institutional investors through a traditional IPO roadshow.

“When an investment bank signs up to sell your stock to the public, there’s no guarantee of a price or no certainty of execution,” said Better CEO Vishal Garg. “We just were not confident that the investment bankers were going to be able to execute.”

You can hardly blame Better’s leadership for that lack of confidence. In the past year, two other online mortgage lenders — Rocket Companies and loanDepot — were listed through traditional IPOs that priced below range due to lackluster demand from institutional investors.

The same thing happened to real estate brokerage Compass, which lowered its target range on the day of its IPO and has seen its stock price continue to slide since going public.

“A traditional public offering makes sense for a story that your traditional investment banker can understand and categorize,” Garg said. “If you can be easily categorized as an enterprise SaaS company or a payments company, then a public offering makes sense.”

But the team at Better has bigger ambitions than just being seen as a mortgage lender and compared with other financial services companies. With mortgage lending at its core, Better has added a number of additional products and services, including realtors, title insurance and homeowners insurance.

In the second half of this year, Better plans to begin offering home services and improvement loans, and eventually will expand to other finance and insurance products like personal, auto and student loans, as well as life and disability insurance.

“We aren’t so easily categorized,” Garg said.

Making mortgages cheaper, faster and easier

Like many digital disruptors seeking to upend established industries, Better was borne out of one person seeking to solve a problem for himself. Sometime around 2012 Vishal Garg, founding partner of One Zero Capital and founder of the online student lending company MyRichUncle, was hoping to buy his “dream home” but got hung up during the process of securing a mortgage and lost out on the bidding to a buyer who could close the deal faster.

As the apocryphal founding story goes, there were few options available for someone looking to apply for and secure a mortgage online — or even get a mortgage pre-approval letter. So Garg set out to build it.

“The original vision was to make the process of going from being a renter to a homeowner. cheaper, faster and easier,” Garg said. “We built a product that let you get a pre-approval letter online in five minutes, instead of five days or five weeks.”

According to Sarah Pierce, who joined the company as one of its first 30 employees and now runs all sales and operations, Better was able to fulfill the goal of getting approved for a mortgage faster by using its technology to assess borrower risk.

News: DotCom Therapy raises $13M to provide therapy for kids, in and out of school

September 9, 2021
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DotCom Therapy, a pediatric teletherapy company, just closed a $13 million series A round. It’s far from the only teletherapy company looking to capitalize on a boom in venture capital investment in mental health startups, but it’s operating in a hyper-specific sphere: therapy for kids. DotCom Therapy was originally co-founded in 2015 by Rachel Mack

DotCom Therapy was originally co-founded in 2015 by Rachel Mack Robinson, who, at the time, was a practicing pediatric therapist at a neurology clinic in Missouri, and Emily Purdom, also a speech language pathologist. Purdom is no longer involved with the company.

The pair noticed a pattern that still holds true in 2021: about one in five children in the US experience a mental disorder (like ADHD, or anxiety or depression for example), but just 20 percent receive treatment from a mental healthcare provider, per the CDC.

DotCom Therapy’s bet is that teletherapy can close that gap.

In the company’s infancy, Robinson called school districts across the country asking to pilot a teletherapy program. Her first greenlight was a district in rural Alaska, where Robinson delivered a combination of in-person and teletherapy.

Today, the company provides fully online speech, occupation and behavioral therapy and has still focused on partnering with schools and other youth programs, like Little League (the company provided mental health services for the Little League World Series Tournaments). DotCom Therapy has partnered with over 400 schools (in over 100 districts) in 38 states, so far.

With this most recent round of funding, the company plans to expand operations beyond school districts, and scale up their service to reach kids both in and out of school. The program for families specifically is called Zesh, an online therapy platform that matches kids with therapists, schedules visits and hosts video calls.

“Our main customer base was K-12 school districts. We have the core of our business rocking and rolling with our education market,” says Robinson. “But we know that we are wanting to expand our footprint, enter into health systems and also offer services for private patients through working different health plans,” she says.

This Series A was led by New Capital Partners – a firm with a history of success in the telemedicine space. New Capital Partners were early investors in Teladoc, a virtual healthcare company founded in 2002. Teladoc went public in 2015 at an enterprise value of $620 million. The round was flushed out with investment from LRVHealth and OSF Ventures.

Will Cowen, general partner of LRVHealth, Stan Lynall, the vice president of investments for OSF Ventures, and James Outland, managing partner of New Capital Partners will join DotCom Therapy’s board. In total, the company has raised $14 million in funding.

Before the pandemic, Robinson says the greatest barrier to success would have been hooking school districts and families on teletherapy. The pandemic has changed that outlook significantly.

In response to COVID-19, restrictions on reimbursement for telehealth services, as well as geographic requirements for telehealth services were loosened. Use of telehealth services peaked in April 2020, but has since stabilized at about 38 times pre-pandemic usage, according to a July 2021 McKinsey report.

With a move outside of school-based partners, DotCom Therapy will be entering into the wider sphere of mental health and telehealth, where there’s a significant amount of competition. Those range from unicorns like TalkSpace to other startups.

At least in Robinson’s view, a specific focus on kids’ telehealth, and the specific disciplines of occupational and speech therapy will help to set DotCom apart in an increasingly crowded space.

“The majority of our competitors, I like to think, are the Teladocs, or the Gingers. But for them, the main focus has been on the adult population,” she says.

DotCom Therapy does have general research backing the idea that online speech and occupational therapy for kids works. One systematic review of seven studies on telehealth-delivered speech and language therapy made significant improvements in children’s language skills that were comparable to in-person therapy – though the research is still limited.

In general, a lack of platform specific validation has common critique for other mental-health telemedicine companies. DotCom Therapy has released white papers suggesting children have benefited from their teletherapy program. However, Robinson didn’t disclose any additional ongoing validation studies focused specifically on DotCom’s service.

Instead she notes that the company has worked with two advisors Andre Ostrovsky, a former chief medical officer of Medicaid and Colleen Kraft, a past president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, to develop and track outcome metrics for each service.

“This will include DSM-5 cross cutting measures, ASHA’s functional communication metrics & proprietary occupational therapy outcomes generated from a team of occupational therapists from masters to doctorate level,” says Robinson.

On the business side, DotCom’s current school district based approach is a multifaceted process – it takes more than just downloading an app. In one sense, they provide a service rather than just a platform.

DotCom Therapy aims to become embedded within school districts the company works with. If a school has about 150 students that require speech therapy, for instance, DotCom Therapy will determine how many therapists they believe a school might need.

“We have a proprietary calculator that we’re able to identify the number of therapists that we need to deploy for that specific location,” Robinson says. Overall it takes about 21 days to match therapists with students, per DotCom Therapy’s website.

DotCom Therapy will also coordinate with administrators at K-12 school districts who can be in the room while kids participate in therapy (there’s a video of how that works here), and will also handle the scheduling, and tracking of all student sessions.

So far, DotCom Therapy has employed about 200 therapists, says Robinson, who are all employed as W-2 employees, rather than independent contractors. The company has about a 97 percent retention rate for employees, says Robinson. On the customer side, the company has retained about 90 percent of customers.

With this Series A round, Robinson says the company is focusing on expansion into all fifty states by January, and by building out the services for private families.

“I just feel a lot of urgency for us to grow quickly, but in a very smart way to be able to meet the demand without compromising quality. So what keeps me up at night is really making sure that we can grow at a healthy pace,” says Robinson.

News: Affinity, a relationship intelligence company, raises $80M to help close deals

September 9, 2021
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Affinity is focused on industries like investment banking and venture capital, where there aren’t CRMs or networking platforms that cater to the specific needs of the long-term relationship.

Relationships ultimately close deals, but long-term relationships come with a lot of baggage, i.e. email interactions, documents and meetings.

Affinity wants to take what Ray Zhou, co-founder and CEO, refers to as “data exhaust,” all of those daily interactions and communications, and apply machine learning analysis and provide insights on who in the organization has the best chance of getting that initial meeting and closing the deal.

Today, the company announced $80 million in Series C funding, led by Menlo Ventures, which was joined by Advance Venture Partners, Sprints Capital, Pear Ventures, Sway Ventures, MassMutual Ventures, Teamworthy and ECT Capital Partners’ Brian N. Sheth. The new funding gives the company $120 million in total funding since it was founded in 2014.

Affinity, based in San Francisco, is focused on industries like investment banking, private equity, venture capital, consulting and real estate, where Zhou told TechCrunch there aren’t customer relationship management systems or networking platforms that cater to the specific needs of the long-term relationship.

Stanford grads Zhou and co-founder Shubham Goel started the company after recognizing that while there was software for transactional relationships, there wasn’t a good option for the relationship journeys.

He cites data that show up to 90% of company profiles and contact information living in traditional CRM systems are incomplete or out of date. This comes as market researcher Gartner reported the global CRM software market grew 12.6% to $69 billion in 2020.

“It is almost bigger than sales,” Zhou said. “Our worldview is that relationships are the biggest industries in the world. Some would disagree, but relationships are an asset class, they are a currency that separates the winners from the losers.”

Instead, Affinity created “a new breed of CRM,” Zhou said, that automates the inputting of that data constantly and adds information, like revenue, staff size and funding from proprietary data sources, to assign a score to a potential opportunity and increase the chances of closing a deal.

Affinity people profile. Image Credits: Affinity

He intends to use the new funding to expand sales, marketing and engineering to support new products and customers. The company has 125 employees currently; Zhou expects to be over 200 by next year.

To date, the company’s platform has analyzed over 18 trillion emails and 213 million calendar events and currently drives over 500,000 new introductions and tracks 450,000 deals per month. It also has more than 1,700 customers in 70 countries, boasting a list that includes Bain Capital Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, SoftBank Group, Nike, Qualcomm and Twilio.

Tyler Sosin, partner at Menlo Ventures, said he met Zhou and Goel at a time when the firm was looking into CRM companies, but it wasn’t until years later that Affinity came up again when Menlo itself wanted to work with a more modern platform.

As a user of Affinity himself, Sosin said the platform gives him the data he cares about and “removes the manual drudgery of entry and friction in the process.” Affinity also built a product that was intuitive to navigate.

“We have always had an interest in getting CRMs to the next generation, and Affinity is defining itself in a new category of relationship intelligence and just crushing it in the private capital markets,” he said. “They are scaling at an impressive growth rate and solving a hard problem that we don’t see many other companies in the space doing.”

Building customer-first relationships in a privacy-first world is critical

News: Twitter users in Turkey can now emoji-react to tweets

September 9, 2021
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Starting today, Twitter is testing Tweet Reactions in Turkey for a limited time. Users in the region will be able to react to tweets using , , , , in addition to . But if you can’t remember the chaos that ensued when the heart react replaced the favorite star in 2015… brace yourself. Last year, Twitter added

Last year, Twitter added emoji reactions to DMs, but this isn’t the same set of emojis. This announcement comes after Twitter surveyed users in March about how they’d react (ha) if the platform were to adopt a Facebook-like way to engage with tweets, and what emojis they’d want to communicate with. In the survey, some of the proposed emoji sets included “agree” or “disagree” buttons, a dislike button, or Reddit-like upvotes and downvotes. But Twitter found from its survey that users were concerned about getting negative emoji feedback.

Image Credits: Emoji sets that Twitter surveyed users about in March. Screenshot by@WFBrother on Twitter. (opens in a new window)

“Although ‘frustration’ and ‘anger’ are also common emotions people feel while reading Tweets, and some people want to express disagreement with Tweets, we’re not incorporating these as emoji reactions right now,” Twitter said in a press release. “Our goal is always to support healthy public conversation and we want to see how our current set of emoji will impact conversations.”

Unlike Facebook, which added reactions in 2015, Twitter isn’t testing an “angry” reaction, which was proposed in its survey. This is likely due to users’ hesitancy around negative responses, but still — if you’ve never been on the receiving end of an ill-intended “ha ha” react… Good for you! And it’s not as though arguments don’t happen on Twitter without emoji reactions.

Image Credits: Twitter

Twitter says that it wants emoji reactions to give people an easier way to show how they feel, which would — in a perfect world — lead to improved expression and participation in public conversation.

This test is only the latest feature that Twitter has tinkered with in the last week. You may also notice interest-based communities, full-width photos and videos, and new safety features cropping up on your feed. With this particular experiment, Twitter said that it will continue to consider community feedback as it tests additional emoji reactions. Based on user responses, it may expand the test’s availability to other regions.

Users in Turkey can experiment with this feature on iOS, Android, and web, which will roll out across the country in the coming days.

Monthly Archives: September 2021