Yearly Archives: 2021

News: BreachQuest emerges from stealth with $4.4M to modernize incident response

• August 25, 2021
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BreachQuest, an early-stage startup with a founding team of cybersecurity experts building a modern incident response platform, has emerged from stealth with $4.4 million in seed funding. The investment was raised from Slow Ventures, Lookout founder Kevin Mahaffey, and Tinder co-founders Sean Rad and Justin Mateen, who described BreachQuest as having a “disruptive vision and

BreachQuest, an early-stage startup with a founding team of cybersecurity experts building a modern incident response platform, has emerged from stealth with $4.4 million in seed funding.

The investment was raised from Slow Ventures, Lookout founder Kevin Mahaffey, and Tinder co-founders Sean Rad and Justin Mateen, who described BreachQuest as having a “disruptive vision and a world-class team.”

The latter is certainly true. BreachQuest is made up of former U.S. Cyber Command, National Security Agency, and Department of Defense employees that it sees as its biggest competitive advantage. The second is its Priori platform, which the Texas-based company believes will re-engineer the incident response process and move incident preparedness into the future.

Currently, it takes most organizations thereabouts 280 days to detect a breach, the startup says, and the slow recovery process that typically follows means this largely manual process costs the average U.S. business just shy of $4 million. The startup’s Priori platform uses aims to improve on what the team sees as “unacceptable industry standards,” enabling organizations to detect intrusions and compromises far faster. That allows companies to near-instantly respond and contain the compromise, the startup says.

BreachQuest’s co-founder and CTO is Jake Williams, a former NSA hacker and founder of Rendition Infosec, an Augusta, Ga.-based cybersecurity company that was acquired by BreachQuest. Williams told TechCrunch that while most other incident response firms are focused on preventing incidents, BreachQuest is focusing on preparing for the inevitable.

“It’s a reality that determined adversaries will get into your network regardless of what tools you put in place to keep them out,” he says. “That’s not [fear, uncertainty and doubt], it’s just a reality that if you’re targeted you’re going to be compromised. That’s what our mission is all about: preparation to facilitate response.”

BreachQuest, which will also assess the cybersecurity risks posed to an organization by potential mergers and acquisitions, believes it has little competition in the market right now because incident preparation is a tough market.

“We continuously see statistics about how IT managers think their security controls will prevent them from being breached, so selling incident response preparation tools and services to those organizations is a hard sell,” Williams said. “But given the landscape of ransomware and other cybersecurity threats being regular front-page news, we think the market is ready.”

BreachQuest will use its $4.4 million seed investment to accelerate the rollout and development of its Priori platform, with future plans to speed up its forensic evidence collection processes and improve response coordination across its disparate team members.

“Incident response is chaotic and it’s hard for people who infrequently work in these situations to address all the issues identified throughout the investigation,” Williams said. “Fundamentally, the problem is a combination of the difficulties getting the right evidence in a timely manner and understanding the status of the response.”

Read more:

• Passwordstate customers complain of silence and secrecy after cyberattack
• FireEye to sell products unit to Symphony-led group for $1.2B
• Why incident response plans fail

News: MaxAB gets an extra $15M, acquires YC-backed Moroccan startup WaystoCap

• August 25, 2021
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Last month, MaxAB, the Egyptian B2B e-commerce platform that serves food and grocery retailers, raised one of the largest Series A on the continent, to the tune of $40 million. Today, it has raised a $15 million extension from existing investors — RMBV, IFC, Flourish Ventures, Crystal Stream Capital, Rise Capital, Endeavour Catalyst, Beco Capital

Last month, MaxAB, the Egyptian B2B e-commerce platform that serves food and grocery retailers, raised one of the largest Series A on the continent, to the tune of $40 million. Today, it has raised a $15 million extension from existing investors — RMBV, IFC, Flourish Ventures, Crystal Stream Capital, Rise Capital, Endeavour Catalyst, Beco Capital and 4DX Ventures —  bringing its total Series A fundraise to $55 million.

The company, founded by Belal El-Megharbel and Mohamed Ben Halim in 2018, manages procurement and grocery delivery to shops in Egypt. Store owners can use the platform to purchase goods, request delivery or logistics to move the goods, and access a customer support team.

When CEO El-Megharbel spoke to TechCrunch during its first Series A tranche, he said MaxAB, which operates in Egypt alone, was looking to expand across the Middle East and North Africa besides launching new product offerings and growing its team.

Today’s announcement marks MaxAB’s first step toward regional scale. The startup is announcing the acquisition of Morocco-based B2B e-commerce and distribution platform WaystoCap for an undisclosed amount.

Niama El Bassunie co-founded WaystoCap with Mehdi Daoui, Anis Abdeddine and Aziz Jaouhari Tissafi in 2015. The company was originally a cross-border trade platform for transacting business goods in Africa. That business model got WaystoCap into Y Combinator’s Winter batch in 2017, making it the first company accepted from Morocco. The company subsequently raised a $3 million seed round.

WaystoCap took its cross-border services to Ivory Coast and Togo, and at some point, was processing over $3 million worth of transactions per quarter. However, since its pivot to a similar model to MaxAB, in that it connects retailers with suppliers across Morocco, WaystoCap has pulled out from both countries while growing to a network of over 8,000 retailers in Morocco.

El-Megharbel mentioned to TechCrunch that MaxAB’s plan to move into Morocco coincided with WaystoCap’s bid to raise new funding (the last time the company took venture capital was in 2017) and push further into the Moroccan market. But both companies agreed to work together rather than compete with each other.

“I love the team. They share the same values and they’re on a mission that is using a tech-enabled supply chain to optimize food distribution across the continent,” he said in an interview. “For us, our strategy is to build a global team that can think local and execute properly. And we figured out that they’re already a perfect fit for that.”

While the acquisition signals MaxAB’s move into Morocco, it also shows the company’s entry into the Maghreb markets — Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia, where there’s little or no contest.

MaxAB says more than 70,000 retailers across both platforms will “benefit from its technology, expanded end-to-end supply chain solutions and business intelligence tools as well as WaystoCap’s knowledge and expertise.”

El Bassunie will take over the position as the managing director at MaxAB Morocco. Commenting on the acquisition of her startup, she said, “… We are thrilled to play a pivotal role in the new all-star team being created and led by experienced, innovative entrepreneurs to establish a regional market leader in food and grocery supply. We are looking forward to continuing our close working relationship with our new team and taking the business to its next phase.”

The Maghreb market is new territory for MaxAB and the acquisition positions it as the most funded and largest B2B e-commerce platform for retailers and suppliers. Morocco’s growing tech hub offers huge potential and the acquisition of WaystoCap empowers MaxAB to become a truly global team with a targeted local approach, setting the company on track to be the leading B2B retail and grocery platform in the Middle East and Africa.

“At the end of the day, what we want to do is build a tech-enabled supply chain, in all the African countries, in the Middle Eastern countries, and then connect them together. That’s where the magic happens. This is where we can actually have a real impact by putting the right amount of food at the right place at the right time, and minimizing the waste which MENA cannot afford,” said MaxAB CEO El-Meghabel.

MaxAB’s acquisition of WaystoCap is the second local cross-border acquisition that has played out in Africa this week. On Monday, Nigeria and Canada-based mobility startup Plentywaka announced the acquisition of Stabus, its counterpart in Ghana, for an undisclosed amount. From a narrower consolidation perspective, Kenyan consumer experience platform Ajua acquired Kenyan AI and ML messaging and payments company WayaWaya, early in April.

WaystoCap is also the second YC-backed company in Africa to exit, after Paystack got bought by Stripe for more than $200 million last October.

News: Vietnam after-school learning startup Marathon raises $1.5M pre-seed round

• August 25, 2021
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Marathon Education was created after its founders realized after-school education in Vietnam hadn’t evolved much since they were kids. Some of the most popular tuition centers in big cities teach hundreds of students at once. “They’re packed like sardines and that really has not changed in the past one or two decades when I went

Marathon Education was created after its founders realized after-school education in Vietnam hadn’t evolved much since they were kids. Some of the most popular tuition centers in big cities teach hundreds of students at once. “They’re packed like sardines and that really has not changed in the past one or two decades when I went to these sorts of classes in Vietnam,” said co-founder Pham Duc.

Pham launched Marathon six weeks ago with his brother-in-law Tran Viet Tung to make after-school learning more accessible in Vietnam. Today the startup is announcing it has raised $1.5 million in pre-seed funding led by Forge Ventures (a new fund launched by Alto Partners), with participation from investors including Venturra Discovery and iSeed SEA.

Marathon is currently focused on math and science courses for grades six to 12 of the National Curriculum developed by Vietnam’s Ministry of Education and Training (MOET), and will eventually cover all MOET subjects.

Before founding Marathon, Pham was an investor at TPG Global, while Tran is a serial entrepreneur whose previous startups include travel platforms Triip.me and Christina’s. Both grew up in Hanoi and spent much of their childhoods going to after-school learning centers.

About 50% to 70% of K-12 students attend after-school classes, but the industry is very fragmented, says Pham. Many learning centers are run by former public school teachers, and are clustered in major cities.

“If you speak to students, I think the biggest issue we’re seeing is accessibility,” said Pham. “If you’re a student in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, there’s no guarantee that you’ll get into classes run by top tutors.” Meanwhile, students in other areas often travel to Tier 1 cities before major tests, like university entrance exams, staying in a hostel for about a month while attending prep courses.

For teachers, running a center means handling administrative tasks like marketing, admissions and parent communications, which cuts into the time they spend designing their courses. When the current COVID-19 lockdowns started a few months ago, they had to switch quickly to online teaching platforms.

When teachers join Marathon, the company takes over administrative tasks. Its online model also means they can reach more students, including in other cities. Pham says teachers who switch from offline centers to Marathon can potentially increase their earnings two to three times.

Before joining Marathon, teachers go through a screening process, including how many of they previous students passed exams or improved their grades. Marathon pairs them with teaching assistants who work directly with groups of about 20 to 25 students during online lectures, answering questions through instant messenger, and then manage breakout rooms to go through the lessons in detail.

Marathon launched first in Ho Chi Minh City and its expansion strategy will take cultural differences between the north and south of Vietnam into account. For example, it will find tutors with regional accents, and adjust its marketing strategies.

“We are going to focus on the teachers and curriculum separately, because the two regions are quite different. Parents in the south are more experimental and more willing to try out new services. Parents in the north very much rely on their network and word-of-mouth, so they are more cautious about trying out what we’re doing,” Tran said. “So when we serve the north and south, we serve distinctive sets of customers.”

Marathon plans to continue its online-only model after lockdowns end and kids go back to in-person classes for regular school. “After one year in intermittent lockdowns, we’ve noticed there’s been a marked shift in parents’ behavior. They are much more receptive to online learning. Right now, even though there’s a lockdown, attendance rates are 99%,” said Pham. “In the future, I think online is the way to go and it’s much more scalable, so we want to focus our strategy around that.”

News: Musk admits Full Self-Driving system ‘not great,’ blames a single stack for highway and city streets

• August 24, 2021
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It hasn’t even been a week since Tesla hosted its AI Day, a livestreamed event full of technical jargon meant to snare the choicest of AI and vision engineers to come work for Tesla and help the company achieve autonomous greatness, and already CEO Elon Musk is coming in with some hot takes about the

It hasn’t even been a week since Tesla hosted its AI Day, a livestreamed event full of technical jargon meant to snare the choicest of AI and vision engineers to come work for Tesla and help the company achieve autonomous greatness, and already CEO Elon Musk is coming in with some hot takes about the “Full Self-Driving” (FSD) tech.

In a tweet on Tuesday, Musk said: “FSD Beta 9.2 is actually not great imo, but Autopilot/AI team is rallying to improve as fast as possible. We’re trying to have a single tech stack for both highway & city streets, but it requires massive [neural network] retraining.”

This is an important point. Many others in the autonomous space have mirrored this sentiment. Don Burnette, co-founder and CEO of Kodiak Robotics, says his company is exclusively focused on trucking for the moment because it’s a much easier problem to solve. In a recent Extra Crunch interview, Burnette said:

One of the unique aspects of our tech is that it’s highly customized for a specific goal. We don’t have this constant requirement that we maintain really high truck highway performance while at the same time really high dense urban passenger car performance, all within the same stack and system. Theoretically it’s certainly possible to create a generic solution for all driving in all conditions under all form factors, but it’s certainly a much harder problem.

Because Tesla is only using optical cameras, scorning lidar and radar, “massive” neural network training as a requirement is not an understatement at all.

Despite the sympathy we all feel for the AI and vision team that may undoubtedly be feeling a bit butthurt by Musk’s tweet, this is a singular moment of clarity and honesty for Musk. Usually, we have to filter Tesla news about its autonomy with a fine-tuned BS meter, one that beeps wildly with every mention of its “Full Self-Driving” technology. Which, for the record, is not at all full self-driving; it’s just advanced driver assistance that could, we grant, lay the groundwork for better autonomy in the future.

Musk followed up the tweet by saying that he just drove the FSD Beta 9.3 from Pasadena to LAX, a ride that was “much improved!” Do we buy it? Musk is ever the optimist. At the start of the month, Musk said Tesla would be releasing new versions of its FSD every two weeks at midnight California time. Then he promised that Beta 9.2 would be “tight,” saying that radar was holding the company back and now that it’s fully accepted pure vision, progress will go much faster.

Perhaps Musk is just trying to deflect against the flurry of bad press about the FSD system. Last week, U.S. auto regulators opened a preliminary investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot, citing 11 incidents in which vehicles crashed into parked first responder vehicles. Why first responder vehicles in particular, we don’t know. But according to investigation documents posted on the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration’s website, most of the incidents took place after dark. Poor night vision is definitely a thing with many human drivers, but those kinds of incidents just won’t fly in the world of autonomous driving.

 

News: Daily Crunch: Internet watchdog Citizen Lab says iPhone spyware dodges Apple’s security measures

• August 24, 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.

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for August 24, 2021. Today’s news cycle was particularly beefy, so we have a lot of ground to cover. Especially if you want to know the latest from Spotify, Waymo and other large tech companies.

But before we do, Disrupt is less than a month away and will feature the two heirs apparent of Salesforce, Stewart Butterfield and Bret Taylor. Get hyped! — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Airbnb to house 20,000 Afghan refugees: Corporate gimmicks are hollow gestures at best. What Airbnb is promising is the opposite. By offering free housing to tens of thousands of refugees from Afghanistan, the company is using its business network for material good. Other wealthy tech companies, what are you going to do?
• Ramp raises $300M at $3.9B valuation: The startup war to own the growing corporate spend market heated up even more today with Ramp raising fresh funds. Brex and Ramp and Airbase are locked in a multiparty duel after erstwhile competitor Divvy sold to Bill.com. Ramp also made its first acquisition, it announced.
• For more on the Ramp-Brex rivalry, and what their acquisitions may detail about their diverging strategies, head here.
• Boom times in Beantown: The global startup scene is accelerating, but few markets have turned on the afterburners to the same degree as Boston. The venerable startup hub is putting up record venture capital tallies across more rounds than ever. And a bevy of local investors don’t see the momentum slowing in coming quarters.

Startups/VC

So much happened in the last 24 hours that we’re forced to proceed in sections. Make sure you are following TechCrunch on Twitter so that you can stay up to date all day long.

We start in India:

• Bankers hunt Byju’s: Its IPO, that is. Per our own Manish Singh, bankers are pitching the famous edtech startup, hoping to secure a piece of its future IPO action. And the numbers being thrown around are truly astounding: “Most banks have given Byju’s a proposed valuation in the range of $40 billion to $45 billion, but some including Morgan Stanley have pitched a $50 billion valuation if the startup lists next year,” he writes.
• Khatabook raises $100M more: Now valued at around $600 million, Khatabook’s business of digitizing India’s myriad SMBs is doing well, it appears. The company’s fresh Series C will help power its 10 million monthly active users, and likely help it expand its staff of 200 people.

To lead us into startup rounds more generally, our own Natasha Mascarenhas published an article today digging into NoRedInk’s huge $50 million Series B. Its goal is to help students become better writers. I asked her why she picked the round to cover, to which she said the following:

Usually, I see edtech companies working on subjects that have one right answer, or at least can be sorted into a single category the way STEM or coding often are. NoRedInk caught my eye because it wants to bring tech to a highly emotional and subjective subject: writing. That’s a hard challenge, but it’s cool to see the education community bet on ambitious projects beyond teaching more students to code.

Next up we have a few regular startup bulletins:

• Substack buys the team behind Cocoon: Substack is having quite the week. After hiring a general counsel, the startup announced that it has acquired the team at Cocoon, what TechCrunch described as “subscription social media app built for close friends.”
• Maybe 3D-printed homes will be a thing? Investors are betting that they will be, pouring $207 million into ICON after its 3D-printed home business saw revenue growth of 400%. In realistic terms, we have a national housing crisis. So if this leads to more, cheaper homes, it’s hard to oppose.
• Sora raises $14M for HR ops automation: Sora is back this year with a fresh capital raise, after scaling its customers by 7x and revenues by 8x since its 2020 seed round. Now flush with Series A cash, the startup has big plans to grow its team and double down on making the HR tech stack work in concert, cutting out busywork as it does so.
• And in a slightly related area, Tango announced that it has raised $5.7 million to grow its process documentation service. The startup watches how employees execute a particular task, and then creates a how-to guide so that others can follow in their footsteps. For new employees, especially in a remote world, it could be a neat service.
• Finally from startupland, Sara Mauskopf (CEO and co-founder of Winnie) and Elana Berkowitz (founding partner at Springbank Collective) wrote an essay for TechCrunch noting that one industry in particular is huge, yet somehow devoid of venture dollars: childcare.

Back to the suture: The future of healthcare is in the home

It was once common practice for doctors to visit sick patients in their homes: In 1930, 40% of all consultations were house calls. By 1980, that figure was less than 1%.

Today, urgent care centers occupy Main Street storefronts and 33% of medical expenditures occur in hospitals. This leads to higher prices, but not necessarily better results, according to Sumi Das and Nina Gerson, who lead healthcare investments at Capital G.

“We can improve both outcomes and costs by moving care from the hospital back to the place it started — at home,” they write in a post that explores five innovations enabling at-home care and identifies investment opportunities like acute care and infrastructure development.

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

Big Tech Inc.

Kicking off our Big Tech rundown today, our own Ron Miller has a neat look into how Cisco makes acquisitions. The dotcom boom company is among the most acquisitive companies in the world, making its approach to snagging startup talent and products worth understanding.

And now, the crush of Big Tech news:

• Your iPhone isn’t safe from this spyware: That’s the gist of the latest Zack Whittaker story, delving into how a zero-click attack executed by NSO software broke the security of a “Bahraini human rights activist’s iPhone.” Not good!
• Peloton’s Tread is back, hopefully safer: One of the weirder self-inflicted wounds in the world of exercise tech came when Peloton tried to argue that its treadmills were safe. They weren’t. Peloton eventually relented and offered a recall. Now they are back!
• TikTok keeps making business moves: This time the social giant is moving further into e-commerce, it announced today, detailing an expanded partnership with Shopify. A service called TikTok Shopping is also coming to the U.S., the U.K. and Canada.
• All U.S. podcasters can now access Spotify’s subscription option: Paid podcasting is big in China, but less popular elsewhere in the world. Spotify is betting that the model will have legs into other markets as well. Now all U.S. podcasters can access the paid service if they so choose.
• To round us out, Waymo is rolling out its self-driving car service to San Francisco. Given the City by the Bay’s inability to ever finish a roadworks project, this is big news. As someone who doesn’t want to drive, that’s great news.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

We’re reaching out to startup founders to tell us who they turn to when they want the most up-to-date growth marketing practices. Fill out the survey here.

Read one of the testimonials we’ve received below!

Marketer: Avi Grondin, Variance Marketing

Recommended by: Adam Czach, Explorator Labs

Testimonial: “They have a hands-on approach and worked with my team to not only drive results, but educate us on how we can grow our company further.”

News: Ai Palette raises $4.4M to help companies react faster to consumer trends

• August 24, 2021
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Developing new packaged foods and consumer goods can take a couple years as companies research, prototype and test products. In a society that runs on social media, however, people expect to see trends land on store shelves much more quickly. Founded in 2018, Ai Palette uses machine learning to help companies spot trends in real

Developing new packaged foods and consumer goods can take a couple years as companies research, prototype and test products. In a society that runs on social media, however, people expect to see trends land on store shelves much more quickly. Founded in 2018, Ai Palette uses machine learning to help companies spot trends in real time and get them retail-ready, often within a few months. The startup, whose clients include Danone, Kellogg’s, Cargill and Dole, announced today it has raised an oversubscribed $4.4 million Series A co-led by pi Ventures and Exfinity Venture Partners. Both will join Ai Palette’s board.

The round also included participation from returning backers food tech venture firm AgFunder and Decacorn Capital, and new investor Anthill Ventures. It brings Ai Palette’s total raised to $5.5 million, including a seed round announced in 2019.

Ai Palette is based in Singapore, with an engineering hub in Bangalore. Its customer base started in Southeast Asia, before expanding into China, Japan, the United States and Europe.

Its customer base started in Southeast Asia and India, and expanded to China, Japan, the United States and Europe. Ai Palette supports 15 languages, which the company claims is the most of any AI-based tool for predicting consumer packaged goods (CPG) trends. Its funding will be used to expand into more markets and fill engineering and data science roles.

Ai Palette was founded in 2018 by chief executive officer Somsubhra GanChoudhuri and chief technology officer Himanshu Upreti, who met through Entrepreneur First, the “talent investor” that recruits and teams up potential founders.

Before Ai Palette, GanChoudhuri worked in sales and marketing at Givaudan, the world’s largest manufacturer of fragrances and flavors. This allowed him to see how product innovation is done for many types of consumer products, ranging from snacks and fast food to packaged goods. Many of the companies he worked with were beginning to realize that a two-year product innovation cycle could no longer meet demand. Upreti, an advanced machine learning and big data analysis expert, previously worked at companies including Visa, where he built models that can handle petabytes of data.

Ai Palette’s first product is Foresight Engine, which tracks trends like ingredients or flavors, analyzes why they are popular and predicts how long demand will last. It also identifies “white space opportunities,” or situations where there is unmet demand. For example, GanChoudhuri said the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way people eat — they are now eating health snacks up to six times a day in front of screens — so companies have the chance to release new kinds of products.

Foresight Engine gives contextual information, said Upreti. “For example, is a food item eaten on the go, or at a café. Is a product consumed socially or individually? What’s trending at kids’ birthday parties? For a specific product or ingredient, images provide information on product pairings and product format.”

The platform uses data from sources like social media, search, blogs, recipes, menus and company data. “Data sets popular to each market are prioritized, like a local recipe or a food delivery app,” said GanChoudhuri. “And they are tracked over the years to determine growth trajectory with a strong degree of confidence.”

Some specific examples of how Ai Palette’s tech has translated into new products include brands that want to launch a new flavor, like for a potato chip or soda, in a specific country. They can use the Foresight Engine to not only see what trends are rising, but which ones have the potential to become long-term favorites, so they don’t invest in a product that will almost instantly lose its popularity.

Many of Ai Palette’s clients have used it to react to new trends and consumer behavior patterns during the COVID-19 pandemic. Not surprisingly, people in many markets are interested in healthy food or ones that are supposed to boost immunity. For example, in Southeast Asia there is more demand for lemon and garlic, while acerola and yerba mate are trending in the United States.

On the other hand, “in China, taste is paramount, even over health, because people are looking for food that brings back a sense of normalcy,” said GanChoudhuri. Meanwhile in India, there is demand for products with longer shelf life as people continue to cope with the pandemic, but many consumers are also seeking interesting snacks to ease the boredom of lockdown, with kimchi and other Korean flavors becoming especially popular.

Ai Palette’s ability to work with many languages is one of the ways it differentiates from other machine learning-based trend-prediction platforms. It currently supports English, simplified Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Bahasa Indonesian, Bahasa Melayu, Tagalog, Spanish, French and German, with plans to add more as it targets new European countries, Mexico, Latin America and the Middle East.

 

News: Extra Crunch roundup: Zūm CEO interview, Cisco’s M&A ethos, neoinsurance bad romance

• August 24, 2021
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When is the last time your doctor treated you at home?

It was once common practice for doctors to visit sick patients in their homes: In 1930, 40% of all consultations were house calls. By 1980, that figure was less than 1%.

Today, urgent care centers occupy Main Street storefronts and 33% of all medical expenditures occur in hospitals. It’s clear that the additional overhead is generating higher prices, but not necessarily better results, according to Sumi Das and Nina Gerson, who lead healthcare investments at Capital G.

“We can improve both outcomes and costs by moving care from the hospital back to the place it started — at home,” they write in a post that explores five innovations enabling at-home care and identifies investment opportunities like acute care and infrastructure development.

Today, in-home care comprises just 3% of overall healthcare spending, but Gerson and Das estimate that will expand to 10% in the next 10 years.

“To make these improvements, in-home healthcare strategies will need to leverage next-generation technology and value-based care strategies. Fortunately, the window of opportunity for change is open right now.”

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Tomorrow’s episode of Extra Crunch Live will feature guests VC Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures and Rachel Carlson, CEO and co-founder of Guild Education.

Among other topics, Lee will talk about how Guild Education met her criteria for investment before the duo offer feedback on startup pitches submitted by audience members.

Register now to join the free chat on Hopin on Wednesday, August 25, at 11:30 a.m. PDT/2:30 p.m. EDT.

Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch; have a great week!

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

Zūm CEO Ritu Narayan explains why equity and accessibility works for mobility services

Ritu Narayan founded Zūm with her two brothers in 2016 to disrupt student transportation, a space that hasn’t seen much innovation since pupils began finding their way to and from little red schoolhouses.

Since then, Zūm has inked partnerships with school districts around the country to create more efficient routes and reduce vehicle emissions.

By 2025, Narayan says her company will have 10,000 electric school buses and plans to put the fleet into service to generate power and feed it back to the grid.

To learn more about the company’s development, its immediate plans for the future and how the pandemic impacted operations, read on.

Bird shows improving scooter economics, long march to profitability

For The Exchange, Alex Wilhelm looked at recent financial data from scooter sharing service Bird, which — like Lyft, Uber, Airbnb and others — took a beating during the pandemic as potential riders stayed home.

Bird flipped its business model and its results improved, but it still has a ways to go. “In the bull case, Bird can get rid of its adjusted losses in a few years,” Alex writes.

“If any issues arise at the top of the company’s table — say, for example, that rides per scooter do not scale as the company rolls out more hardware, or merely slower than expected — the anticipated profitability results could evaporate or be pushed into the future.”

India’s path to SaaS leadership is clear, but challenges remain

By 2030, India’s SaaS industry is estimated to comprise 4%-6% of the global market and generate between $50 billion and $70 billion in yearly revenue, according to a SaaSBOOMi/McKinsey report.

“With the right approach, it won’t be long before the Indian SaaS community becomes a large-scale employer of talent, a significant contributor to India’s GDP and a creator of unmatched products,” says Manav Garg, CEO and founder of Eka Software Solutions.

In a guest post, he lays out several key growth drivers, which include “the largest concentration of developers in the world” and the fact that “SaaS is not a winner-take-all market.”

Even so, the region still faces challenges, since “growth requires a growth mindset.”

Why have the markets spurned public neoinsurance startups?

As Alex Wilhelm has repeatedly noted in The Exchange, neoinsurance companies, from healthcare to auto to home and rental, have taken a whacking by the market.

But he hadn’t quite figured out why until he chatted with Pie Insurance co-founder and CEO John Swigart, who had an interesting hypothesis.

Summing up their conversation in a single sentence: “From the public markets’ perspective, it’s the results, stupid.”

How Cisco keeps its startup acquisition engine humming

Ron Miller interviewed three Cisco executives to learn more about the company’s “rich history of buying its way to global success”:

• CFO Scott Herren
• Derek Idemoto, SVP for corporate development and Cisco investments
• Jeetu Patel, EVP and GM, Security and Collaboration

Since its founding, Cisco has acquired 229 companies, buying more than 30 startups in the last four years that focus on everything from edtech to event management.

“Indeed, one of the big reasons for all these acquisitions could be about maintaining growth,” writes Ron.

Future tech exits have a lot to live up to

“Inflation may or may not prove transitory when it comes to consumer prices, but startup valuations are definitely rising — and noticeably so — in recent quarters.”

That’s Alex Wilhelm’s summation of a recent PitchBook report rounding up valuation data from U.S. startup funding events.

He dug into the report and analyzed what the numbers mean for startup valuations and potential exits.

News: Digital locker app Movies Anywhere adds AI-powered lists to organize your library

• August 24, 2021
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Movies Anywhere, an app that allows you to centralize your digital movie collection from across services, is rolling out a new feature that will help you make better sense of your growing library. The company today introduced an AI-powered feature called “My Lists,” which automatically groups movies together based on any number of factors —

Movies Anywhere, an app that allows you to centralize your digital movie collection from across services, is rolling out a new feature that will help you make better sense of your growing library. The company today introduced an AI-powered feature called “My Lists,” which automatically groups movies together based on any number of factors — like genre, actors, franchise, theme and more.

For digital movie collectors with larger libraries, the feature could make browsing through the available options feel more like scrolling through the recommendations you’d find on a modern-day streaming service, like Netflix. That is, instead of scrolling down through endless pages showing you all your purchased movies in order of purchase or alphabetically, as before, you can now quickly scan rows where the content is organized in ways that make it easier to discover what’s actually in your library.

For example, if you had purchased all the movies from a particular franchise, they would now be on their own row together. This is an improvement over how you had to locate these movies in your collection before — where they’d be sandwiched between the other titles you bought in between the franchise purchases.

You may also discover that you own a lot of movies within a particular category, like “Action Thrillers,” or those with a central theme, like “strong female friendships,” which could help you narrow down your movie night selection.

These algorithmically created lists can also be edited, allowing you to add or remove titles — or even delete the list altogether.

Plus, you can now make lists of your own, too. So you could make a list of favorites, movies you want to watch with your family, or however else you want to further organize your collection. You could even use the feature to make a “to watch” list of movies you’ve purchased, but hadn’t yet made time for.

The Movie Anywhere app has been around for years, but is now jointly operated by Disney, Universal, WB, Sony Pictures and 20th Century Fox, after migrating to a new platform back in 2017. Its biggest selling point for digital movie collectors is that you can in one place get to all the movies you bought from various services. That includes digital downloads offered by iTunes, Vudu, Prime Video, YouTube, Xfinity and others. Before, you would have to switch from app to app to figure out if you had ever purchased a given title.

My Lists is one of many features the company has added over time to keep its app feeling current. Last year, for instance, it introduced a digital movie lending feature called Screen Pass, and it earlier had launched a co-watching feature called Watch Together, which let users watch with up to nine friends.

The new My Lists is available today in the Movies Anywhere mobile app, desktop and on streaming devices from the navigation bar.

News: Linktree partners with PayPal to allow users globally to accept direct payments

• August 24, 2021
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Linktree, the popular “link in bio” service with more than 16 million users, is partnering with PayPal to expand its recently launched “Commerce Links” tools for direct payment on Linktree globally. The Melbourne-based startup says creators in over 200 countries where PayPal operates can now accept payments through the transaction tools. Launched in March, Commerce

Linktree, the popular “link in bio” service with more than 16 million users, is partnering with PayPal to expand its recently launched “Commerce Links” tools for direct payment on Linktree globally. The Melbourne-based startup says creators in over 200 countries where PayPal operates can now accept payments through the transaction tools.

Launched in March, Commerce Links allow users to take payments directly on their Linktree profile without opening a new browser or tab. The new integration lets Linktree customers connect their PayPal account and receive payments from their followers or customers via PayPal, a debit card or a credit card. Linktree notes users can also access information regarding their transactions, payment conversion rate and more. The company says the available relevant data is meant to help creators manage their digital presence.

“As the creator economy grows, creators want new ways to collect payments and support from their audience with as little friction as possible,” said Linktree co-founder and CEO Alex Zaccaria in a statement. “We are excited to be collaborating with PayPal to further expand our solutions to our users globally and enable them to further manage and monetize their digital presence.”

There are two types of Commerce Links that creators can use to take payments from their followers and customers: A “Support Me Link” allows Linktree users to collect payments and donations from their visitors, while “Request Links” lets customers and followers request goods and services from creators directly from their Linktree profile.

Linktree says its collaboration with PayPal is the latest in a series of creator-focused efforts. The partnership announcement comes days after Linktree announced its acquisition of automated music link aggregation platform Songlink/Odesli. Linktree is integrating Songlink/Odesli into its newly launched “Music Link” feature, which automatically displays the same song or album across all music streaming services to let users listen to content on their preferred platform.

Founded in 2016, Linktree now competes with several “link in bio” platforms, including Shorby, Linkin.bio and Beacons. In March, Linktree announced it raised $45 million in Series B funding. The funding round was co-led by Index Ventures and Coatue, with participation from returning investors AirTree Ventures and Insight Partners.

News: ForgeRock files for IPO as identity and access management business grows

• August 24, 2021
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ForgeRock filed its form S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) this morning as the identity management provider takes the next step toward its IPO. The company did not provide initial pricing for its shares, which will trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol FORG. The IPO is being led by

ForgeRock filed its form S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) this morning as the identity management provider takes the next step toward its IPO.

The company did not provide initial pricing for its shares, which will trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol FORG. The IPO is being led by Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., with the company being valued as high as $4 billion, according to Bloomberg, which is a significant uplift over the $730 million post-money value that PitchBook had for the company after its last round in 2020.

With the ever-increasing volume of cybersecurity attacks against organizations of all sizes, the need to secure and manage user identities is of growing importance. Based in San Francisco, ForgeRock has raised $233 million in funding across multiple rounds. The company’s last round was a $93.5 million Series E announced in April 2020, which was led by Riverwood Capital alongside Accenture Ventures. At that time, CEO Fran Rosch told TechCrunch that the round would be the last before an IPO, which was also what former CEO Mike Ellis told us after the startup’s $88 million Series D in September 2017.

While the timing of its IPO might have been unclear over the last few years, the company has been on a positive trajectory for growth. In its S-1, ForgeRock reported that as of June 30, its annual recurring revenue (ARR) was $155 million, representing 30% year-over-year growth. 

While revenue is growing, losses are narrowing as the company reported a $20 million net loss down from $36 million a year ago. There certainly is a whole lot of room to grow, as the company estimates that the total global addressable market for identity services to be worth $71 billion. 

Among the many competitors that ForgeRock faces is Okta, which went public in 2017 and has been growing in the years since. In March, Okta acquired cloud identity startup Auth0 for $6.5 billion in a deal that raised a few eyebrows. Another competitor is Ping Identity, which went public in 2019 and is also growing, reporting on August 4 that its ARR hit $279.6 million in its quarter ended June 30, for a 19% year-over-year gain. There have also been a few big exits in the space over the years, including Duo Security, which was acquired by Cisco for $2.35 billion in 2018.

“ForgeRock has a good access management tool and they continue to be a strong player in customer identity and access management (CIAM),” commented Michael Kelley, senior research director at Gartner.

Kelley noted that in 2020, ForgeRock converted most of its core access management services to a SaaS delivery model, which helped the company catch up with the rest of the market that already offered access management as SaaS. Also last year the company expanded into identity governance, introducing a brand new identity, governance and administration (IGA) product.

“I think one of the more interesting products that ForgeRock offers is ForgeRock Trees, which is a no-code/low-code orchestration tool for building complex authentication and authorization journeys for customers, which is particularly helpful in the CIAM market,” Kelly added.

ForgeRock was founded in 2010, but its roots go back even further to an open-source single sign-on project known as OpenSSO that was created by Sun Microsystems in 2005. When Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems in early 2010, a number of its open-source efforts were left to languish, which is what led a number of former Sun employees to start ForgeRock. 

Over the last decade, ForgeRock has expanded significantly beyond just providing a single sign-on to providing an identity platform that can handle consumer, enterprise and IoT use-cases. The company’s platform today handles identity and access management as well as identity governance.

The ability to scale is a key selling point that ForgeRock makes in the S-1, noting that its platform can handle over 60,000 user-based access transactions per second per customer. 

“As of June 30, 2021, we had four customers with 100 million or more licensed identities, the company stated in the S-1. “Our ability to serve mission-critical needs in complex environments for large customers enables us to grow our base of large customers and expand within each of them. “