Yearly Archives: 2021

News: FDA fully approves Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine

  • August 23, 2021
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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted full approval to Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine, making it the first vaccine to achieve that status. The mRNA-based vaccine has been available since late last year through an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA), and will continue to be offered under that designation for those aged 12 to 15

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted full approval to Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine, making it the first vaccine to achieve that status. The mRNA-based vaccine has been available since late last year through an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA), and will continue to be offered under that designation for those aged 12 to 15 until that separate approval process goes through, but the U.S. drug regulator now recognizes the Pfizer vaccine as fully approved and certified for adults 16 and up.

Part of receiving the approval means that Pfizer and BioNTech can now officially market their vaccine in the U.S., and the FDA revealed it’ll be offered under the trade dress ‘Comirnarty,’ which doesn’t strike me as particularly catchy but at least it’s less of a mouthful than ‘the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.’ FDA approval also means that the vaccine has met all of the administration’s standards for safety and efficacy, including preclinical and clinical trial data, as well as information about tits manufacture, and data gathered from its use during the EUA period.

There’s hope that this new full authorization will encourage fence-sitters who have offered up ‘I’ll wait until it’s fully approved’ as an excuse for not yet having gotten the vaccine despite its availability. At the very least, it’s going to be a lot harder for those hesitating to justify their unreasonable and irresponsible stance in the face of the ongoing pandemic.

Comirnarty got flagged for ‘Priority Review’ by the FDA, which essentially means that the administration devoted its full attention to the process in order to expedite it. No word yet on a timeline for Moderna’s approval, but it’s also in the priority review queue.

We’ll be talking to BioNTech CEO and co-founder Uğur Şahin at TC Disrupt 2021 this year, so be sure to check out that virtual event coming up September 21-23.

News: Why have the markets spurned public neoinsurance startups?

  • August 23, 2021
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The companies we’re examining cover auto insurance (Root, MetroMile), home and rental insurance (Hippo, Lemonade), and health insurance (Oscar Health). All are taking a whacking by the market. Why?

We’ve spent quite a lot of time of late wondering just what the heck is up with the valuations of insurtech startups that went public in the last year. Keep in mind that we’re discussing neoinsurance providers like MetroMile and Hippo, not insurtech marketplaces like Insurify or Zebra.

There was a stream of insurtech exits in 2020 and early 2021. After Lemonade’s firecracker IPO, MetroMile and Hippo and Root also went public. Since those debuts, we’ve seen their valuations erode significantly.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

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But Oscar Health got somewhat lost in our larger analysis of the space. An investor pointed out to The Exchange this weekend that we were a bit early in wondering just what investors were thinking when Oscar was going public — its IPO price range felt incredibly high, and we said so. Then, Oscar Health priced above that $32 to $34 per share interval, kicking off its life worth $39 per share.

Today’s it’s worth $13.58 per share.

We could call it another data point in our larger analysis, but it’s a bit more than that as Oscar Health expands the list of insurance types that startups tackled, scaled, took public and then saw fall out of investor favor. The companies that we are examining cover a number of industries, from auto insurance (Root, MetroMile), to home and rental insurance (Hippo, Lemonade), and, thanks to Oscar Health, health insurance as well. All are taking a whacking by the market.

Why? Happily, I think I’ve figured it out. More precisely, a CEO of a neoinsurance company in a different niche talked The Exchange through one particular hypothesis that makes rather good sense.

Show me the money metrics

Last week, I chatted with Pie Insurance co-founder CEO John Swigart. Pie sells SMB-focused insurance, with a focus on workers’ comp coverage. In Swigart’s view, small businesses have historically been overcharged and underserved for insurance. With a bit of tech, his company can offer coverage to smaller companies than many traditional insurance providers found attractive, and at better price points to boot.

Pie raised a $118 million Series C in March, with Crunchbase tallying $306 million in external capital for the company thus far. We’ll talk more about Pie at a later date.

What matters for our needs this morning is what Swigart said when I asked him what in the flying fuck was going on with public insurtech share prices. Given that he is building a related company, I was hoping that he would be both up to speed and have a take. He did.

News: Equity Monday: Stocks up, cryptos up, regulation up

  • August 23, 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. This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You

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

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here. I also tweet.

Today’s show was good fun to put together. Here’s what we got to:

Woo! And that’s the start to the week. Hugs from here, and we’ll chat you on Wednesday!

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST, Wednesday, and Friday at 6:00 a.m. PST, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts!

News: Shelf.io closes huge $52.5M Series B after posting 4x ARR growth in the last year

  • August 23, 2021
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This is the sort of deal that we expect to see Tiger in — an outsized investment compared to prior rounds into a high-growth company that has lots of market room.

Covering public companies can be a bit of a drag. They grow some modest amount each year, and their constituent analysts pester them with questions about gross margin expansion and sales rep efficiency. It can be a little dull. Then there are startups, which grow much more quickly — and are more fun to talk about.

That’s the case with Shelf.io. The company announced an impressive set of metrics this morning, including that from July 2020 to July 2021, it grew its annual recurring revenue (ARR) 4x. Shelf also disclosed that it secured a $52.5 million Series B led by Tiger Global and Insight Partners.

That’s quick growth for a post-Series A startup. Crunchbase reckons that the company raised $8.2 million before its Series B, while PitchBook pegs the number at $6.5 million. Regardless, the company was efficiently expanding from a limited capital base before its latest fundraising event.

What does the company’s software do? Shelf plugs into a company’s information systems, learns from the data, and then helps employees respond to queries without forcing them to execute searches or otherwise hunt for information.

The company is starting with customer service as its target vertical. According to Shelf CEO Sedarius Perrotta, Shelf can absorb information from, say, Salesforce, SharePoint, legacy knowledge management platforms, and Zendesk. Then, after training models and staff, the company’s software can begin to provide support staff with answers to customer questions as they talk to customers in real time.

The company’s tech can also power responses to customer queries not aimed at a human agent and provide a searchable database of company knowledge to help workers more quickly solve customer issues.

Per Perrotta, Shelf is targeting the sales market next, with others to follow. How might Shelf fit into sales? According to the company, its software may be able to offer staff already-written proposals for similar-seeming deals and other related content. The gist is that at companies that have lots of workers doing similar tasks — clicking around in Salesforce, or answering support queries, say — Shelf can learn from the activity and get smarter in helping employees with their tasks. I presume that the software’s learning ability will improve over time, as well.

Shelf, around 100 people today, hopes to double in size by the end of the year, and then double again next year.

That’s where the new capital comes in. Hiring folks in the worlds of machine learning and data science is very expensive. And because the company wants to scale those hires quickly, it will need a large bank balance to lean on.

Quick ARR growth was not the only reason why Shelf was able to secure such an outsized Series B, at least when compared to how much capital it had raised before. Per Perrotta, Shelf has 130% net dollar retention and no churn to report, meaning its customers are both sticky and expand organically.

While Shelf is interesting today and has certainly found niches it can sell into in its current form, I am more curious about how far the company can take its machine learning system, called MerlinAI. If its tech can get sufficiently smart, its ability to prompt and help employees could reduce onboarding time and the overall cost of employee training. That would be a huge market.

This is the sort of deal that we expect to see Tiger in — an outsized investment compared to prior rounds into a high-growth company that has lots of market room. Whatever price Tiger just paid for the company’s stock, a few years of continued growth should de-risk the investment. By our read, Tiger is really just the market-leading bull on software market growth in the long term. Shelf fits into that thesis neatly.

News: PayPal expands the ability to buy, hold and sell cryptocurrency to the U.K.

  • August 23, 2021
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PayPal will now allow users outside the U.S. to buy, hold and sell cryptocurrency for the first time. The company announced today the launch of a new service that will allow customers in the U.K. to select between four types of cryptocurrencies — including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash — which can be purchased

PayPal will now allow users outside the U.S. to buy, hold and sell cryptocurrency for the first time. The company announced today the launch of a new service that will allow customers in the U.K. to select between four types of cryptocurrencies — including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash — which can be purchased using a connected bank account or debit card.

The company first rolled out support for cryptocurrency in the U.S. last fall, in partnership with Paxos Trust Company. That service reached all U.S. customers as of mid-November. PayPal-owned Venmo also added support for cryptocurrency last spring.

U.K. customers who want to purchase cryptocurrency can now do so via the PayPal website or mobile app, where they can choose from pre-determined purchase amounts or enter another amount of their own choosing. PayPal says users will be able to start buying as little as £1 of cryptocurrency, if they choose. There are, however, transaction fees and currency conversion fees when buying and selling cryptocurrency, the company notes. These vary based on the amount of cryptocurrency being bought or sold.

The new service itself is very much like PayPal’s U.S. offering with one notable exception. PayPal told us it’s tailoring the transaction limits for its U.K. customers. At launch, the maximum amount for any single crypto purchase is £15,000. The maximum amount for purchases over a 12-month period is £35,000. In the U.S., the company had initially launched the service with a $20,000 weekly purchase limit. But it upped that to $100,000 in July and dropped its annual purchase limit.

The company also told TechCrunch the U.K. made sense as the first international expansion for its cryptocurrency service because it’s a fintech hub as well as PayPal’s second-largest market globally, where it has a sizable base of consumer customers.

“We think that we’re going to be helping the cryptocurrency ecosystem develop further in the U.K. In the U.S, we knew there was high demand for this service. Yet we were surprised to see the level of customer engagement for PayPal’s in-app crypto service from day one,” a PayPal spokesperson said. “Since we’ve launched, we’ve seen incredible and sustained engagement from our users. Consumers who buy, hold and sell  cryptocurrency on our platform in the US log on at 2x their previous rate,” they added.

Cryptocurrency will also be a key feature in PayPal’s forthcoming “super app,” which is due to roll out over the next several months.

The company would not comment on if or when it would expand its other cryptocurrency services to the U.K., including its more recently launched “Checkout with Crypto,” which allows customers to checkout using their cryptocurrency at millions of online businesses by first converting the crypto needed for the transaction into fiat currency. Instead, PayPal said it wanted to first learn and observe how its U.K. customers adopt the new offering to buy, hold and sell cryptocurrency before rolling out more features and functionality.

Beyond its support for cryptocurrency in its own apps, PayPal’s venture capital arm has also made a number investments in crypto and the blockchain over the past months, including by participating in the $14 million Series A for cryptocurrency risk management software TRM Labs; in the $40 million Series A for digital asset trading infrastructure company, Talos; and in the $100 million Series A for crypto tax software company TaxBit.

“The pandemic has accelerated digital change and innovation across all aspects of our lives— including the digitization of money and greater consumer adoption of digital financial services,” Jose Fernandez da Ponte, Vice President and General Manager, Blockchain, Crypto and Digital Currencies at PayPal, in a statement.

“Our global reach, digital payments expertise, and knowledge of consumer and businesses, combined with rigorous security and compliance controls provides us the unique opportunity, and the responsibility, to help people in the U.K. to explore cryptocurrency. We are committed to continue working closely with regulators in the U.K., and around the world, to offer our support—and meaningfully contribute to shaping the role digital currencies will play in the future of global finance and commerce,” he added.

Currently, PayPal offers support for cryptocurrency in the U.S., excluding Hawaii, and U.S. territories, in addition to the U.K., but says it’s exploring the potential for digital currencies through partnerships with licensed and regulated cryptocurrency platforms and with central banks elsewhere in the world.

News: Moesif secures $12M to provide user behavior insights on API usage

  • August 23, 2021
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As more companies provide more API-first services, Moesif has developed a way for those companies to learn how their customers are utilizing them.

As more companies provide more API-first services, Moesif has developed a way for those companies to learn how their customers are utilizing them.

The San Francisco-based startup is adding to its capital raise Monday with the announcement of a $12 million Series A round led by David Sacks and Arra Malekzadeh of Craft Ventures. Existing investor Merus Capital, which led Moesif’s $3.5 million seed round in 2019, also participated in the round, bringing the company’s total raise to $15.5 million, Moesif co-founder and CEO Derric Gilling told TechCrunch.

Gilling and Xing Wang founded Moesif in 2017 and went through the Alchemist Accelerator in 2018.

Companies seeking data around API usage and workflow traditionally had to build that capability in-house on top of a tech like Snowflake, Gilling said. One of the problems with that was if someone wanted a report, the process was ad hoc, meaning they would file a ticket and wait until a team had time to run the report. In addition, companies find it difficult to accurately bill customers on usage or manage when someone exceeds the rate limits.

“We started to see people build on top of our platform and pull data on APIs, and they started asking us how to directly serve customers, like making them aware if they are hitting a rate limit,” Gilling added. “We started to build new functionality and a way to customize the look and feel of the platform.”

Moesif provides self-service analytics that can be accessed daily and features to scale analytics in a more cost-effective manner. Customers use it to monitor features to better understand when there are issues with the API, and there are additional capabilities to understand who is using the API, how often and who may be likely to stop using a product based on how they are using it.

The company is also now seeing its revenue grow over 20% month over month this year and adoption by more diverse use cases and larger companies. At the time of the seed round, the company was just getting started with analytics and user trials, Gilling said. Today, it boasts a customer list that includes UPS, Tomorrow.io, Symbl.ai and Deloitte.

The company has also gone from a team of two to nine employees, and Gilling expects to use the new funding to bolster that roster across engineering, sales, developer relations and customer success.

He is also focusing on being a thought leader in the space and is pushing go-to-market and building out a new set of features to monetize APIs and improve its dashboard to better differentiate Moesif from competitors, which he said focus more on server health versus customer usage.

As part of the investment, Craft Ventures’ Malekzadeh is joining Moesif’s board. She was introduced to Gilling by another portfolio company and felt Moesif fit into Crafts’ thesis on SaaS companies.

Malekzadeh’s particular interest is in developer tools, and while in her previous position working at a startup developing APIs, she felt firsthand the pain point of not being able to know how those APIs were being used, how much customers should be billed and “was always bugging the product and engineering teams for reports.”

Moesif didn’t exist at the time she worked at the startup, and instead, her company had to build it own tools that turned out to be clunky, while at the same time recruiting top engineers that didn’t want to take up their time with building something that wasn’t the company’s core product.

“The two founders are highly technical, but they provided great content on their website that helped me learn about them,” Malekzadeh added. “One of the interesting things about them is that even though they are technical, they speak the same language as a business user, which makes them special as a developer-first company. Just the growth in their revenue was super impressive, and their customer references were glowing.”

News: African fintech OPay valued at $2B in SoftBank Vision Fund 2-led $400M funding

  • August 23, 2021
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Chinese-backed and Africa-focused fintech company OPay raised $400 million in new financing led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Bloomberg reported Monday, valuing the company at $2 billion. The round which marks the Fund’s first investment in an African startup had participation from existing investors like Sequoia Capital China, Redpoint China, Source Code Capital, and Softbank

Chinese-backed and Africa-focused fintech company OPay raised $400 million in new financing led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Bloomberg reported Monday, valuing the company at $2 billion.

The round which marks the Fund’s first investment in an African startup had participation from existing investors like Sequoia Capital China, Redpoint China, Source Code Capital, and Softbank Ventures Asia. Other investors including DragonBall Capital and 3W Capital also took part in the new financing round.

This news comes three months after The Information reported that the company was in talks to raise “up to $400 million at a $1.5 billion valuation” from a group of Chinese investors. The new financing also comes two years after OPay announced two funding rounds in 2019 — $50 million in June and a $120 million Series B in November.

In an emailed statement, OPay CEO Yahui Zhou said OPay “wants to be the power that helps emerging markets reach a faster economic development.” The company, founded in 2018, had an exclusive presence in Nigeria where it provided an array of digital services ranging from mobility and logistics to e-commerce and fintech at cheap rates for consumers.

Right now, the company’s mobile money arm thrives the most. This year, its parent company Opera reported that OPay’s monthly transactions grew 4.5x last year to over $2 billion in December. OPay also claims to process about 80% of bank transfers among mobile money operators in Nigeria and 20% of the country’s non-merchant point of sales transactions. Last year, the company also said it acquired an international money transfer license with a WorldRemit partnership also in the works.

Per Bloomberg, the company’s monthly transaction volumes exceed $3 billion at the moment.

OPay plays in an extremely competitive fintech market. Nigeria is Africa’s most populous nation, and with a large share of its people underbanked and unbanked, fintech is arguably the most promising digital sector in the country. The same can be said for the continent as a whole. Mobile money services have long catered to the needs of the underbanked, and per GSMA, Africa had more than 160 million active mobile money users generating over $495 billion in transaction value last year.

Last year, Opay expanded to Egypt and according to the company, that’s an entry point to the Middle East market.

Kentaro Matsui, a managing director at SoftBank Group Corp, said “We believe our investment will help the company extend its offering to adjacent markets and replicate its successful business model in Egypt and other countries in the region.”

News: Virtual dressing room startup Revery.ai applying computer vision to the fashion industry

  • August 23, 2021
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Revery.ai is developing a tool that leverages computer vision and artificial intelligence to create a better online dressing room experience.

Figuring out size and cut of clothes through a website can suck the fun out of shopping online, but Revery.ai is developing a tool that leverages computer vision and artificial intelligence to create a better online dressing room experience.

Under the tutelage of University of Illinois Center for Computer Science advisrr David Forsyth, a team consisting of Ph.D. students Kedan Li, Jeffrey Zhang and Min Jin Chong, is creating what they consider to be the first tool using existing catalog images to process at a scale of over a million garments weekly, something previous versions of virtual dressing rooms had difficulty doing, Li told TechCrunch.

Revery.ai co-founders Jeffrey Zhang, Min Jin Chong and Kedan Li. Image Credits: Revery.ai

California-based Revery is part of Y Combinator’s summer 2021 cohort gearing up to complete the program later this month. YC has backed the company with $125,000. Li said the company already has a two-year runway, but wants to raise a $1.5 million seed round to help it grow faster and appear more mature to large retailers.

Before Revery, Li was working on another startup in the personalized email space, but was challenged in making it work due to free versions of already large legacy players. While looking around for areas where there would be less monopoly and more ability to monetize technology, he became interested in fashion. He worked with a different adviser to get a wardrobe collection going, but that idea fizzled out.

The team found its stride working with Forsyth and making several iterations on the technology in order to target business-to-business customers, who already had the images on their websites and the users, but wanted the computer vision aspect.

Unlike its competitors that use 3D modeling or take an image and manually clean it up to superimpose on a model, Revery is using deep learning and computer vision so that the clothing drapes better and users can also customize their clothing model to look more like them using skin tone, hair styles and poses. It is also fully automated, can work with millions of SKUs and be up and running with a customer in a matter of weeks.

Its virtual dressing room product is now live on many fashion e-commerce platforms, including Zalora-Global Fashion Group, one of the largest fashion companies in Southeast Asia, Li said.

Revery.ai landing page. Image Credits: Revery.ai

“It’s amazing how good of results we are getting,” he added. “Customers are reporting strong conversion rates, something like three to five times, which they had never seen before. We released an A/B test for Zalora and saw a 380% increase. We are super excited to move forward and deploy our technology on all of their platforms.”

This technology comes at a time when online shopping jumped last year as a result of the pandemic. Just in the U.S., the e-commerce fashion industry made up 29.5% of fashion retail sales in 2020, and the market’s value is expected to reach $100 billion this year.

Revery is already in talks with over 40 retailers that are “putting this on their roadmap to win in the online race,” Li said.

Over the next year, the company is focusing on getting more adoption and going live with more clients. To differentiate itself from competitors continuing to come online, Li wants to invest body type capabilities, something retailers are asking for. This type of technology is challenging, he said, due to there not being much in the way of diversified body shape models available.

He expects the company will have to collect proprietary data itself so that Revery can offer the ability for users to create their own avatar so that they can see how the clothes look.

“We might actually be seeing the beginning of the tide and have the right product to serve the need,” he added.

News: Y Combinator-backed Adra wants to turn all dentists into cavity-finding ‘super dentists’

  • August 23, 2021
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Adra is bringing AI into the dentist’s day-to-day workflow so they can spend less time finding cavities and more time with patients.

Like other areas of healthcare, the dental industry is steadily embracing technology. But while much of it is in the orthodontic realm, other startups, like Adra, are bringing artificial intelligence into a dentist’s day-to-day workflow, particularly in finding cavities, of what will be a $435.08 billion global dental services market this year.

The Singapore-based company was founded in 2021, but was an idea that started last year. Co-founder Hamed Fesharaki has been a dentist for over a decade and owns two clinics in Singapore.

He said dentists learn to read X-rays in dental school, but it can take a few years to get good at it. Dentists also often have just minutes to read them as they hop between patients.

As a result, dentists end up misdiagnosing cavities up to 40% of the time, co-founder Yasaman Nemat said. Her background is in imaging, where she developed an artificial intelligence machine identifying hard-to-see cancers, something Fesharaki thought could also be applied to dental medicine.

Providing the perspective of a more experienced dentist, Adra’s intent is to make every dentist “a super dentist,” Fesharaki told TechCrunch. Its software detects cavities and other dental problems on dental X-rays faster and 25% more accurately, so that clinics can use that time to better serve patients and increase revenue.

Example of Adra’s software. Image Credits: Adra

“We are coming from the eye of an experienced dentist to help illustrate the problems by turning the X-rays into images to better understand what to look for,” he added. “Ultimately, the dentist has the final say, but we bring the experience element to help them compare and give them suggestions.”

By quickly pointing out the problem and the extent of it, dentists can decide in what way they want to treat it — for example, do a filling, a fluoride treatment or wait.

Along with third co-founder Shifeng Chen, the company is finishing up its time in Y Combinator’s summer cohort and has raised $250,000 so far. Fesharaki intends to do more formalized seed fundraising and wants to bring on more engineers to tackle user experience and add more features.

The company has a few clinics doing pilots and wants to attract more as it moves toward a U.S. Food and Drug Administration clearance. Fesharaki expects it to take six to nine months to receive the clearance, and then Adra will be able to hit the market in late 2022 or early 2023.

News: Virgin Orbit to go public via $3.2B SPAC deal

  • August 23, 2021
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Virgin Orbit is set to go public via a merger with a special purpose acquisitions company (SPAC), the company has confirmed. The deal values the combined enterprise at $3.2 billion, and will provide Virgin Orbit with $483 million in cash at close, including a $100 million PIPE. The combined company will trade under the ticker

Virgin Orbit is set to go public via a merger with a special purpose acquisitions company (SPAC), the company has confirmed. The deal values the combined enterprise at $3.2 billion, and will provide Virgin Orbit with $483 million in cash at close, including a $100 million PIPE. The combined company will trade under the ticker VORB on the NASDAQ if and when the transaction concludes.

In June, CNBC reported that such a deal was in the works, and it’s been a popular exit option for private space startups in recent months. Rocket Lab’s SPAC merger was just approved, for instance, and it’ll begin trading on Wednesday, and Richard Branson’s other space company, Virgin Galactic, was the first big SPAC deal that ushered in the craze.

Virgin Galactic, which focuses on flying people to suborbital space, and Virgin Orbit, which transports small satellite payloads to low Earth orbit using similar technology, used to be a single company before the two split to provide more focus on their respective markets. Both Virgin Galactic and Virgin Orbit made significant progress this year, achieving milestone flights, including a first full crew space launch for Galactic, and a first commercial satellite payload delivery mission for Orbit.

Virgin Orbit launches its LauncherOne rocket from the wing of a customized 747 aircraft, which acts as a fully reusable first stage for the overall launch system. The company also has a subsidiary called VOX Space that its as a dedicated launch service provider to the national security launch market.

NextGen, the blank check company that Virgin Orbit is merging with to complete this transaction, is led by a former Goldman & Sachs partner, and will provide up to $383 million in cash from its funds held in trust when the merger goes through.

  


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