Yearly Archives: 2021

News: D2C specs purveyor Warby Parker files to go public

• August 25, 2021
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Warby Parker has two main sales channels, largely attractive economics, falling losses and rising adjusted profitability. You could even argue it handled the pandemic well. So what’s it worth? 

Did you miss IPOs? I sure did. They could be coming back after a summer lull.

Warby Parker, a D2C glasses company backed by over a half-billion dollars of private capital, filed to go public yesterday. For investors like General Catalyst, Tiger Global and Durable Capital Partners, it’s an important debut. Having taken on equity capital since at least 2011, investors have been waiting a long time for Warby to float.

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And there’s quite a lot to like about the company, the first parse of its IPO filing reveals. There are some less attractive elements to its business worth discussing, and we need to examine how COVID-19 impacted the company’s 2020 performance.

Warby last raised known private capital in August 2020, a $120 million Series G that valued the company at just over $3 billion on a post-money basis. D1 Capital Partners led that transaction, which included both Durable Capital and Baillie Gifford.

For D2C startups, the Warby IPO is something of a do-over. The Casper IPO from early 2020 is now a cautionary tale for companies employing the business model; the company reduced its IPO range, priced at $12 per share and today trades for just over $5.

But there’s more to Warby Parker’s IPO than just the D2C category. It’s a public benefit corporation, which it says in its filing means that it is “focused on positively impacting all stakeholders” as opposed to merely shareholders. And the company has a charitable bent to its efforts through a foundation and donation model of giving away eyewear when customers purchase their own set. Warby also has a hybrid sales model, leaning on both IRL and digital retail channels. There’s lots to dig into.

So let’s parse Warby’s growth history, its profitability progress over time and how the company is blending IRL shopping with digital channels. We’ll close by examining just how the company was priced last year, taking a guess at what it might be worth in today’s public markets.

Inside Warby Parker’s historical growth

Looking at Warby’s full-year results for 2020 is not inspiring. The company grew well from 2018 to 2019, expanding from $272.9 million in revenue to $370.5 million in revenue, or around 36%. That’s not an astounding pace of growth, but it’s more than respectable for a company of Warby’s age and size.

Then in 2020 the company only managed to eke out 6% growth to $393.7 million in top line. What happened to slow the company’s growth rate from Just Fine to Not Fine At All? COVID, it appears.

News: Mindset, an artist-driven mental wellness audio platform, raises a $8.7M from Scooter Braun and others

• August 25, 2021
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Mindset, a platform featuring personal story collections from recording artists, announced today that it raised $8.7 million in seed funding. As co-founders of the K-pop focused podcast production company DIVE Studios, brothers Brian Nam, Eric Nam and Eddie Nam noticed that the studio’s best performing content came from podcast episodes where stars discussed how they

Mindset, a platform featuring personal story collections from recording artists, announced today that it raised $8.7 million in seed funding.

As co-founders of the K-pop focused podcast production company DIVE Studios, brothers Brian Nam, Eric Nam and Eddie Nam noticed that the studio’s best performing content came from podcast episodes where stars discussed how they handle struggles in their personal lives. So, the Nam brothers came up with the idea for Mindset, an off-shoot of DIVE Studios.

“We found that this was a unique selling point people really wanted more of — so we started to think about ways to really double-down on that aspect,” said CEO Brian Nam. “How do we provide more of this valuable content to Gen Z and young millennial audiences? We decided that there wasn’t really the right kind of platform out there for this type of storytelling, so we decided to develop our own mobile platform to uniquely share these stories in an audio format.”

In its current format, Mindset features four audio collections from artists like Jae, Tablo, BM, and Mindset co-founder Eric Nam, who happens to be a K-pop star himself. Each collection has ten episodes of around ten to twenty minutes long — the introductory episode is free, but to gain access to the rest of an individual artist’s collection, users need to pay $24.99. The app also has free Boosters, which are Calm-like, five-minute clips of bedtime stories and motivational mantras.

“Up until now, the primary source of income, especially for musicians, has been touring, music streams, and then maybe some endorsement deals, but we’re able to unlock this fourth one, which is monetizing your stories,” Nam said. “The pricing is similar to how they might price a ticket, or how they would sell merchandise.”

Mindset isn’t meant to be a therapy app. “We’re not licensed therapists, we don’t try to act like we are,” Nam said. Rather, it’s a way for artists to share more intimate experiences with their fans to show that behind they music, they’re people too.

Mindset launched in an MVP (minimum viable product) version in February. Nam declined to share active user or revenue numbers, but said that the app gained enough traction that by May, it raised venture funding. The $8.7 million round is led by Union Square Ventures with strategic participants like record executive Scooter Braun (of TQ Ventures), who has more recently made headlines over the Taylor Swift masters controversy. Other backers include Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin, Opendoor Co-Founder Eric Wu, and more.

“Scooter Braun was a strategic investor,” Nam told TechCrunch.

Braun has also worked with artists like Ariana Grande, Justin Bieber, and Demi Lovato.

“He’s really opened a lot of doors for us to branch out into the Hollywood and Western space, where we traditionally came from the K-pop space,” Nam added.

Mindset is putting its seed funding toward content creation, hiring, and product development. The app is currently available on iOS and Android, but it will officially launch on September 14. After that, Mindset will release another audio collection from an artist or actor every two weeks. Nam declined to share who these artists will be. 

News: Wing approaches 100,000 drone deliveries two years after Logan, Australia launch

• August 25, 2021
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In a blog post this morning, Alphabet drone delivery company Wing announced that it is set to hit 100,000 customer deliveries over the weekend. The news comes on the second anniversary of the service’s pilot launch in Logan, Australia, a city of roughly 300,000 people in the Brisbane metropolitan area. It also, notably, arrives a

In a blog post this morning, Alphabet drone delivery company Wing announced that it is set to hit 100,000 customer deliveries over the weekend. The news comes on the second anniversary of the service’s pilot launch in Logan, Australia, a city of roughly 300,000 people in the Brisbane metropolitan area.

It also, notably, arrives a few weeks after Wired reported that Amazon’s own drone delivery efforts are “collapsing inwards.” Wing comms head Jonathan Bass told TechCrunch that the service is set to enter additional markets in the coming months.

“I think we’ll expand quite a bit,” Bass told TechCrunch. “I think we’ll launch new services in Australia, Finland and the United States in the next six months. The capabilities of the technology are probably ahead of the regulatory permissions right now.”

Of the existing deliveries, more than half were completed in Logan over the course of the last eight months. The first week of August, for instance, found customers place orders for 4,500 deliveries, which works out to one every 30 seconds during Wing’s delivery window.

The numbers include:

• 10,000 cups of coffee
• 1,700 children’s snack packs
• 1,200 hot chooks (roasted chicken, in Australian)
• 2,700 sushi rolls
• 1,000 loaves of bread

Image Credits: Wing

The drones have a range of six miles — limited by their battery life. That means the trips are fairly short, so there’s not a lot of issue with foodstuffs staying hot or cold, in spite of the package (which resembles a Happy Meal) being transported outside the drone. The primarily limitation, the company says, is weight, with capacity to carry up to three pounds. Apparently the system has had no issues carrying extremely fragile objects like eggs.

The drones cruise at around 100 to 150 feet in the air and lower down to about 23 feet when they reach their destination. From there, a tether lowers the package to the ground and unhooks it. No one is required to receive the package.

Image Credits: Wing

“If you combine the test flights with deliveries, it’s close to half-a-million flights over the past four or five years,” says Bass. “We’ve gradually moved into dense environments and listen to communities.” That last bit includes community feedback to reduce the drone’s noise levels.

News: Balance raises $25M in a Ribbit Capital-led Series A to grow its ‘consumer-like B2B checkout platform’

• August 25, 2021
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Balance, a payments platform aimed at B2B merchants and marketplaces, has raised $25 million in a Series A funding round led by Ribbit Capital. Avid Ventures participated in the financing, in addition to existing backers Lightspeed Ventures, Stripe, Y Combinator Continuity Fund, SciFi VC and UpWest. Other individual investors that put money in the round

Balance, a payments platform aimed at B2B merchants and marketplaces, has raised $25 million in a Series A funding round led by Ribbit Capital.

Avid Ventures participated in the financing, in addition to existing backers Lightspeed Ventures, Stripe, Y Combinator Continuity Fund, SciFi VC and UpWest. Other individual investors that put money in the round include early employees and executives from Plaid, Coinbase, Square, Stripe and PayPal, such as Jaqueline Reses, formerly head of Square Capital. The financing comes just over six months after Balance announced a $5.5 million seed round.

The motivation for starting the company was simple, said CEO and co-founder Bar Geron: “We wanted to create an online B2B experience that doesn’t suck.” He and Yoni Shuster, both former PayPal employees, started the company in early 2020.

B2B payments, he said, have historically differed from B2C primarily in that they have not taken place at the moment of purchase (or at the point of sale) but rather within 30 days and with an invoice. This is not an efficient process for merchants or vendors alike, the company maintains.

Meanwhile, most businesses have avoided paying for their supply with credit cards, because cards can quickly max out, Geron said.

“The only element that keeps many merchants offline is payments,” he told TechCrunch. “It’s a process that is stuck in the flow of those marketplaces and keeping them from scaling. We got fascinated with the problem.”

After starting out at Y Combinator, Balance has developed what it describes as a “consumer-like B2B checkout platform for merchants and marketplaces,” or a “self-serve digital checkout experience company for B2B businesses.”

What that means is that Balance has built a B2B payments platform that allows merchants to offer a variety of payment methods, including ACH, cards, checks and bank wires, as well as a variety of terms, including payment on delivery, net payment terms and payment by milestone. Behind the scenes, Balance underwrites the terms of those transactions requiring financing by evaluating the risk of the customer, the merchant and the specific payment terms selected. Balance is built on top of Stripe and offers all of Stripe’s credit card payment options, but then extends far beyond them.

Balance, according to Geron, invested “a lot” in APIs for marketplaces.

“We have a very robust API platform so that these businesses can manage the entire payment flow without being exposed to the risk and regulation of payments,” he told TechCrunch. “And this is all happening without them even touching the funds.”

The plus for merchants is the ability to get immediate payout that is always reconciled like credits. Marketplaces are equipped with automated vendor disbursement, a full compliance umbrella and reconciliation management, Balance says.

“We want to make the online payments experience for businesses as seamless as it is for consumer payments, and we want to do it globally,” Geron told TechCrunch.

The startup has already partnered with e-commerce giants such as BigCommerce and Magento and will soon also work with Salesforce, according to Geron. Its customers range from startups to publicly traded marketplaces to e-commerce enterprises across a variety of industries such as steel, freight, hardware, food ordering, medical supply and apparel. They include Bryzos, Choco, Zilingo and Bay Supply, among others.

It’s early days yet, but Balance has seen growth of about 500% to 600% since the time of its last raise in February, Geron said. The company, which has offices in Tel Aviv and New York, has about 30 employees.

Jordan Angelos, a general partner at Ribbit and former head of M&A and investment at Stripe, believes the fact that Balance has built its platform specifically for “rapidly scaling” B2B marketplaces and merchants is reflective of a “well-placed” focus.

“B2B marketplaces, for example, have a very particular set of payments and capital markets-related needs that can be much more holistically and elegantly solved with Balance’s flexible toolkit than alternatives,” he wrote via email. “Payments and checkout are two sides of the same coin, and Balance’s products allow users to address them together to better serve their customers as well as their own margins.”

News: Macro relaunches its Zoom skin to focus on self-expression and inclusion

• August 25, 2021
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Productivity has been a focal point for many enterprise businesses since before the pandemic hit, and even more so since its onset. But Macro founders Ankith Harathi and John Keck are taking a different tack. The startup’s Zoom SDK-powered product has been reimagined by its team, and is relaunching today. When Macro first launched into

Productivity has been a focal point for many enterprise businesses since before the pandemic hit, and even more so since its onset. But Macro founders Ankith Harathi and John Keck are taking a different tack.

The startup’s Zoom SDK-powered product has been reimagined by its team, and is relaunching today.

When Macro first launched into beta, with $4.3 million in Seed capital led by FirstMark, the idea was that Zoom calls lacked the infrastructure to be truly useful (and equitable). As a solution, the company created a Zoom overlay that allowed users to type in action items, takeaways, etc. right in the call. Macro would then transfer all that information into a Google Doc and send it to attendees.

The product also gave users the option to choose their layout, including skin that would just show thumbnails of attendees over the browser or application of choice, rather than taking up the whole screen. It even had a feature called Airtime that showed how much each individual was talking during a meeting, ensuring that everyone’s voices are heard.

It’s that final feature, and the feedback of Macro users, that culminated in this relaunch. Shifting away from its early productivity bend, Macro is now focusing on self-expression.

“We believe that the future of video communications, one of our most intimate forms of communication, will be super personalized. You and I are fundamentally very different people,” Harathi said to me over Zoom. “But we are in the Zoom era, and we’re all using the same really generic interface regardless of how different we are.”

The new Macro allows users to personalize their interface and express themselves, using shapes, colors, filters and more. In fact, the company is working alongside some big-name artists (TBA) to offer users special reactions within their Zoom calls. Whether or not other members of the call are using Macro, they’ll still see you the way present yourself using the service.

Some features remained from the original iteration of Macro remain, such as Airtime. Harathi and Keck explained to TechCrunch that the main feedback they received on the product at launch, back in July of 2020, was that its features around self-expression and inclusivity were resonating the most with users, and that few folks were actually making use of the service’s productivity suite.

Macro is also reintroducing the skin that allowed users to hang out (and see each other in Zoom) while working collaboratively in some other application, calling it Rooms. Macro currently works with MacOS.

The company is keeping its bottoms-up approach to growth, offering the product for free to anyone who wants to use it, without having to get an entire organization on board.

Macro is riding the Zoom wave as the video conferencing behemoth shifts focus to its app ecosystem. Harathi and Keck believe that Macro is to video conferencing what Superhuman is to email, with the main caveat being that Macro is doubling down on self-expression over productivity.

They believe that the UI winner has a lot to gain as the protocol of video meetings continues to prosper, and the company is aiming to be that winner.

News: OnlyFans’ policy change is a tale as old as the internet

• August 25, 2021
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Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture-capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. For our Wednesday show this week, Natasha and Alex and Danny had colleague Amanda Silberling on the show to help us parse through OnlyFans’ precedent-setting move to ban sexually-explicit content on its service. The decision was a bolt from the blue for many of

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture-capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

For our Wednesday show this week, Natasha and Alex and Danny had colleague Amanda Silberling on the show to help us parse through OnlyFans’ precedent-setting move to ban sexually-explicit content on its service. The decision was a bolt from the blue for many of its creators, a great portion of whom created and monetized adult videos and images through the subscription service. It also stirred up a ton of debate around fintech, crypto, venture capital, and the morality of decision-makers.

We put all the facts in context for you, hitting the following points:

• OnlyFans’ recently leaked financials. Of course, the company’s historical, and projected revenues are now dated thanks to the platform’s planned content changes, but all the same the numbers help put into context just how much money OnlyFans’ adult creators were earning on its platform.
• The leaked financials were part of a pitch deck that the company was using on its plight to raise more capital – an endeavor that has apparently been challenging for the startup. This tension made us think about the role that venture capital plays in funding vice startups, and why a tiny clause may stop many from getting into the game. Let’s just say, the money behind the money has a way of having weight.
• And finally, we wondered what might be ahead for adult-content creators. Per Silberling, the world of adult content has ever been in flux, with creators and other sex workers moving from platform to platform as corporate policies, and national laws evolved. To see OnlyFans wind up where Patreon and Tumblr previously tread is not a complete surprise.

News: OnlyFans ‘suspends’ decision to ban explicit content

• August 25, 2021
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OnlyFans has suspended its decision to ban sexually explicit content after it received widespread backlash over the planned policy change. Although Onlyfans was not created specifically for porn, the content has become the platform’s most visible use case. “Thank you to everyone for making your voices heard. We have secured assurances necessary to support our

OnlyFans has suspended its decision to ban sexually explicit content after it received widespread backlash over the planned policy change. Although Onlyfans was not created specifically for porn, the content has become the platform’s most visible use case.

“Thank you to everyone for making your voices heard. We have secured assurances necessary to support our diverse creator community and have suspended the planned October 1 policy change,” the company said in a tweet on Wednesday. “OnlyFans stands for inclusion and we will continue to provide a home for all creators.”

OnlyFans hasn’t elaborated on the specific “assurances” it has secured. The company did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s inquiry about the matter. However, the statement indicates OnlyFans may have been able to resolve its issues with its banking partners by going public about the matter. The company previously noted it had to make the policy change to comply with the requests of its “banking partners and payout providers.” The company indicated the pressure it faced from these partners and providers led to its decision to no longer permit sexually explicit content on its platform.

It’s worth noting OnlyFans’ statement says the decision has been “suspended,” which indicates the policy may not have been cancelled altogether.

In a follow-up tweet to the original announcement, OnlyFans noted that “an official communication to creators will be emailed shortly.”

The decision to ban sexually explicit content had frustrated sex workers who relied on the platform to financially support themselves. In response to the planned policy change, some creators had already deleted their OnlyFans accounts and moved to alternate services. With this recent reversal, creators will have to decide between returning to the platform or leaving it altogether for a rival service.

OnlyFans was founded in 2016 and claims to have over 130 million registered users and more than 2 million creators. The platform managed to attract several celebrities including Bella Thorne, Cardi B and Bhad Bhabie.

News: Level AI lands $13M Series A to build conversational intelligence for customer service

• August 25, 2021
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Level AI, an early stage startup from a former member of the Alexa product team, wants to help companies process customer service calls faster by understanding the interactions they’re having with customers in real time. Today the company launched publicly, while announcing a $13 million Series A led by Battery Ventures with help from seed

Level AI, an early stage startup from a former member of the Alexa product team, wants to help companies process customer service calls faster by understanding the interactions they’re having with customers in real time.

Today the company launched publicly, while announcing a $13 million Series A led by Battery Ventures with help from seed investors Eniac and Village Global along with some unnamed angels. Battery’s Neeraj Agrawal will be joining the startup’s board under the terms of the agreement. The company reports it has now raised $15 million including an earlier $2 million seed.

Company founder Ashish Nagar helped run product for the Amazon Alexa team, working on an experimental project to get Alexa to have an extended human conversation. While they didn’t achieve that as the technology is just not there yet, it did help him build his understanding of conversational AI, and in 2019 he launched Level AI to bring that knowledge to customer service.

“Our product helps agents in real time to perform better, resolve customer queries faster and make them clear faster. Then after the call, it helps the auditor, the folks who are doing quality assurance and training audits for those calls do their jobs five to 10 times faster,” Nagar explained.

He says that the Level AI solution involves several activities. The first is understanding the nature of the conversation in real time by breaking it down into meaningful chunks that the technology can understand. Once they do that, they take that information and run it against workflows running in the background to deliver helpful resources, and finally use all that conversational data they are collecting to help companies learn from all this activity.

“We now have all this call data, email data, chat data, and we can look at it through a new lens to train agents better and provide insights to other aspects of the business like product managers and so on,” Nagar said.

He makes clear that this isn’t looking at sentiment or using keyword analysis to drive actions and understanding. He says that it is truly trying to understand the language in the interaction, and deliver the right kind of information to the agent to help the customer resolve the problem. That involves modeling intent, memory and understanding multiple things at the same time, which as he says, is how humans interact, and what conversational AI is trying to mimic.

While it’s not completely there yet, they are working at solving each of these problems as the technology advancements allow.

The company launched in 2018 and the first idea was to build voice assistants for front line workers, but after talking to customers, Nagar learned there wasn’t a real demand for this, but there was for using conversational AI to help augment human workers, especially in customer service.

He decided to build that instead and launched the first version of the product in March 2020. Today the company has 27 employees spread out in the U.S. and India, and Nagar believes that by being remote and hiring anywhere, he can hire the best people, while driving diversity.

Agrawal, who is lead investor for the round, sees a company solving a fundamental problem of delivering the right information to an agent in real time. “What ​​he’s built has real time in mind. And that’s kind of the holy grail of helping the customer service agents. You can provide information after the call ends, and that’s […] helpful, but […] you get the real value [by delivering information] during the call and that’s where real business value is,” he said.

Nagar acknowledges this technology could extend to other parts of the business like sales, but he intends to keep his focus on customer service for the time being.

News: Messenger celebrates its 10th anniversary with new features and a plan to become the ‘connective tissue’ for real-time experiences

• August 25, 2021
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To celebrate its ten year anniversary, Messenger today announced a handful of new features: poll games, word effects, contact sharing, and birthday gifting via Facebook Pay. But beyond the fun features, Facebook has been testing a way to add voice and video calls back into the Facebook app, rather than on Messenger. “We are testing

To celebrate its ten year anniversary, Messenger today announced a handful of new features: poll games, word effects, contact sharing, and birthday gifting via Facebook Pay. But beyond the fun features, Facebook has been testing a way to add voice and video calls back into the Facebook app, rather than on Messenger.

“We are testing audio and video calls within the Facebook app messaging experience so people can make and receive calls regardless of which app they’re using,” a representative from Facebook told TechCrunch. “This will give people on Facebook easy ways to connect with their communities where they already are.”

Although earlier in Facebook history, the Messenger app had operated as a standalone experience, Facebook tells us that it’s now starting to see Messenger less as a separate entity — more of an underlying technology that can help to power many of the new experiences Facebook is now developing.

“We’ve been focused more on real-time experiences — Watch Together, Rooms, Live Audio Rooms — and we’ve started to think of Messenger as a connective tissue regardless of the surface,” a Facebook spokesperson told us.  “This is a test, but the bigger vision is for us to unlock content and communities that may not be accessible in Messenger, and that the Facebook app is going to become more about shared real-time experiences,” they added.

Given the company’s move in recent months to integrate its underlying communication infrastructure, it should come to reason that Facebook would ultimately add more touchpoints for accessing its new Messenger-powered features inside the desktop app, as well. When asked for comment on this point, the spokesperson said the company didn’t have any details to share at this time. However, they noted that the test is a part of Facebook’s broader vision to enable more real-time experiences across Facebook’s services.

Despite the new integrations, the standalone version of Messenger isn’t going away.

Facebook says that people who want a more “full-featured” messaging, audio and video calling experience” should continue to use Messenger.

Image Credits: Messenger

As for today’s crop of new features — including polls, word effects, contact sharing, and others — the goal is to  celebrate Messenger’s ability to keep people in touch with their family a friends.

To play the new poll games, users can tap “Polls” in their group chat and select the “Most Likely To” tab — then, they can choose from questions like “most likely to miss their flight?” or “most likely to give gifts on their own birthday?”, select names of chat participants to be included as potential answers, and send the poll.

Contact sharing will make it easier to share others’ Facebook contacts through Messenger, while birthday gifting lets users send birthday-themed payments on Messenger via Facebook Pay. There will also be other “birthday expression tools,” including a birthday song soundmoji, “Messenger is 10!” sticker pack, a new balloon background, a message effect, and AR effect to celebrate Messenger’s double-digit milestone.

Image Credits: Messenger

Meanwhile, word effects lets users manually input a phrase, and any time they send a message with that phrase, an accompanying emoji will float across the screen. In an example, Messenger showed the phrase “happy birthday” accompanied with a word effect of confetti emojis flooding the screen. (That one’s pretty tame, but this could be a remarkable application of the poop emoji.) The company only shared a “sneak peak” of this feature, as it’s not rolling out immediately.

In total, Facebook is announcing a total of ten features, most of which will begin rolling out today.

Messenger has come a long way over the past decade.

Ten years ago, Facebook acqui-hired a small group messaging start-up called Beluga, started by three former Google employees (apparently, a functional group thread was a white whale back then — simpler times). Several months later, the company unveiled Messenger, a standalone messaging app.

But three years into Messenger’s existence, it was no longer an optional add-on to the Facebook experience, but a mandatory download for anyone who wanted to keep up with their friends on the go. Facebook removed the option to send messages within its flagship app, directing users to use Messenger instead. Facebook’s reasoning behind this, the company told TechCrunch at the time, was that they wanted to eliminate the confusion of having two different mobile messaging systems. Just months earlier, Facebook had spent $19 billion to acquire WhatsApp and woo international users. Though removing Messenger from the Facebook app was controversial, the app reached 1.2 billion users three years later in 2017.

Today, Facebook has declared that it wants to evolve into a “metaverse” company, and on the same day as the anti-trust filing last week, Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a product that applies virtual reality in an impressively boring way: helping people attend work meetings. This metaverse would be enabled by technologies built by Facebook’s platform team, noted Vice President of Messenger Stan Chudnovsky. However, he added that people in the metaverse will still need platforms like Messenger.

“I don’t think messaging is going anywhere, even in the metaverse, because a asynchronous communication is going to continue to exist,” Chudnovsky said. People will still need to send messages to those who aren’t currently available to chat, he explained. Plus, Chudnovsky believes this sort of communication will become even more popular with the launch of the metaverse, as the technology will help to serve as a bridge between your phone, real life, and the metaverse.

“if anything is gonna happen more, not less. Because messaging is that things that just continues to grow with every new platform leap,” he said.

Additional reporting: Sarah Perez

News: Cybersecurity VC funding surges to a record $11.5B in 2021

• August 25, 2021
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The pandemic completely upended the threat landscape as we know it. Ransomware accounted for an estimated 2.9 million attacks so far in 2021, and supply-chain attacks that targeted Kaseya and SolarWinds have increased fourfold over 2020, according to the European Union’s cybersecurity agency, ENISA, which recently warned that the more traditional cybersecurity protections are no longer

The pandemic completely upended the threat landscape as we know it. Ransomware accounted for an estimated 2.9 million attacks so far in 2021, and supply-chain attacks that targeted Kaseya and SolarWinds have increased fourfold over 2020, according to the European Union’s cybersecurity agency, ENISA, which recently warned that the more traditional cybersecurity protections are no longer effective in defending against these types of attacks.

This has created an unprecedented need for emerging technologies, attracting both organizations and investors to look closer at newer cybersecurity technologies.

“We are seeing a perfect storm of factors coming together to create the most aggressive threat landscape in history for commercial and government organizations around the world,” said Dave DeWalt, founder and managing director of NightDragon, which recently invested in multi-cloud security startup vArmour. “As an investor and advisor, I feel we have a responsibility to help these organizations better prepare themselves to mitigate this growing risk.”

According to Momentum Cyber’s latest cybersecurity market review out Wednesday, investors poured $11.5 billion in total venture capital financing into cybersecurity startups in the first half of 2021, up from $4.7 billion during the same period a year earlier.

More than 36 of the 430 total transactions surpassed the $100 million mark, according to Momentum, which includes the $543 million Series A raised by passwordless authentication company Transmit Security and the $525 million round closed by cloud-based security company Lacework.

“As an investor in the cyber market for over fifteen years, I can say that this market climate is unlike anything we’ve seen to date,” said Bob Ackerman, founder and managing director of AllegisCyber Capital, which recently led a $26.5 million investment in cybersecurity startup Panaseer. “It is encouraging to finally see CEOs, boards of directors, investors and more paying serious attention to this space and putting the resources and capital in place to fund the innovations that address the cybersecurity challenges of today and tomorrow.”

Unsurprisingly, M&A volume also saw a massive increase during the first six months of the year, with significant deals for companies in cloud security, security consulting, and risk and compliance. Total M&A volume reached a record-breaking $39.5 billion across 163 transactions, according to Momentum, more than four-times the $9.8 billion spent in the first half of 2020 across 93 transactions.

Nine M&A deals in 2021 so far have been valued at greater than $1 billion, including Proofpoint’s $12.3 billion acquisition by Thoma Bravo, Auth0’s $6.4 billion acquisition by Okta, and McAfee’s $4 billion acquisition by TG.

“Through the first half of 2021, we have witnessed unprecedented strategic activity with both M&A and financing volumes at all-time highs,” said Eric McAlpine and Michael Tedesco, managing partners at Momentum Cyber. “We fully expect this trend to continue through the rest of the year and into 2022.”

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