Yearly Archives: 2021

News: Front introduces customer-centric features with deeper CRM integration

• September 15, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Customer communication platform Front is holding an event today to introduce three new features. These new features focus on showing you more information about your customers right from Front’s user interface. If you’re not familiar with Front, the company started as a shared email inbox product so that you can interact with incoming emails as

Customer communication platform Front is holding an event today to introduce three new features. These new features focus on showing you more information about your customers right from Front’s user interface.

If you’re not familiar with Front, the company started as a shared email inbox product so that you can interact with incoming emails as a team. For instance, if your company uses email lists, such as support@companyname.com, sales@companyname.com or jobs@companyname.com, multiple team members can see incoming emails in Front.

Before replying, you can triage conversations by assigning them to specific team members, discuss the current conversation in the comment section or show your email draft before sending it.

Over time, Front has evolved to integrate more communication channels. You can now use Front for SMS conversations, live chat on your website with your customers, Facebook messages, etc. The company has also refined its product with more powerful features.

For instance, you can set up rules to automate your workflow with simple ‘if this then that’ rules. It’s a good way to spread out work across multiple team members and make sure the right person sees the incoming message as quickly as possible.

Today, the company is showcasing features that will be particularly useful for teams that interact with bigger customers, such as sales, support and customer success teams. First, Front users will be able to learn more about the customer they’re interacting with directly from their inbox.

The refreshed context panel works better if the team is interacting with multiple people working for your client. Instead of viewing past conversations with someone in particular, you can view past conversations with everyone working for this client.

Front already integrates with your CRM, such as Salesforce or HubSpot. You can now more easily pull data into the context panel. You can see the name of the account owner, the customer segment and the SLA (service-level agreement) commitment with this customer.

Image Credits: Front

Second, Front is adding new capabilities for its automated routing feature with deeper integrations with your CRM. For instance, you can find the name of the account owner in your CRM and assign incoming emails to the account owner directly.

If the account owner changes in Salesforce, rules will be automatically updated in Front. You can also fetch annual revenue data from your CRM and set a VIP tag if you’re receiving a message from an important customer.

Image Credits: Front

Finally, Front will soon upgrade the analytics pages. For instance, you can track the team’s performance for a specific account and compare that to the SLA.

These updates position Front as a tool that works better for bigger enterprise clients with expensive B2B contracts. Current Front customers include Shopify, Dropbox, Flexport, Checkout.com, Lydia and Airbnb.

Image Credits: Front

News: Check out the amazing speakers joining us on Extra Cru… ahem, TechCrunch Live

• September 15, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

It’s been an Extra Crunch summer. We’ve heard how to craft your pitch deck around the one thing that really hooks an investor, and how the industry experience of Retail Zipline’s Melissa Wong ticked every box for Emergence when raising her Series A. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. We’ve also gotten a

It’s been an Extra Crunch summer. We’ve heard how to craft your pitch deck around the one thing that really hooks an investor, and how the industry experience of Retail Zipline’s Melissa Wong ticked every box for Emergence when raising her Series A. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

We’ve also gotten a sneak peek at the Disrupt Startup Alley companies in our summer episodes of Extra Crunch Live: Startup Alley Edition.

But there’s more where that came from this fall. Without any further ado, check out the incredible speakers joining us on upcoming episodes of Extra Crunch Live.

Oh, and by the way, we’re changing the name. Henceforth, ECL shall be known as TechCrunch Live. Here’s why: We realized that hanging out with TechCrunch in this context should be accessible to everyone. We interview startup founders and the investors that finance them to learn how the deal actually gets done, and we have folks in the audience pitch to get the expert feedback of our guests. Everyone should be able to benefit from that.

Because of that, we’re calling the series TechCrunch Live, as the live event hasn’t been an EC member perk for quite some time. Although the live portion is free upon registration, the video replays from TechCrunch Live will remain behind the paywall.

So, let me try that again.

Here are the upcoming speakers joining us on TechCrunch Live in October.

Nicole Quinn (Lightspeed Venture Partners) + Vlad Novakovski (Lunchclub)

October 6 – 3pm ET/12pm PT

Nicole Quinn, partner at Lightspeed, has spent her career helping startups reach their target audiences on digital platforms. Her portfolio includes Cameo, Zola, Goop, Calm and Haus Laboratories, among others. Hear Quinn and Lunchclub founder Vlad Novakovski talk through how they came together for the startup’s Series A, and get their feedback on your startup’s elevator pitch!

REGISTER FOR LIGHTSPEED VENTURE PARTNERS AND LUNCHCLUB

Image Credits: Lightspeed Venture Partners / Lunchclub

Shawn Carolan (Menlo Ventures) + Chris Britt (Chime)

October 13 – 3pm ET/12pm PT

Chime, helmed by Chris Britt, has raised over $2 billion, with a valuation of $25 billion. Hear Britt, alongside investor and Menlo Ventures partner Shawn Carolan, share how the company got its earlier funding and how they’ve strategized growth since. Carolan and Britt will also hear live pitches from the audience and give their feedback.

REGISTER FOR MENLO VENTURES AND CHIME

Image Credits: Menlo Ventures / Chime

Mark Goldberg (Index) + Jessica McKellar (Pilot)

October 20 – 3pm ET/12pm PT

Jessica McKellar’s Pilot has taken an old-school business (taxes, bookkeeping, etc.) and made it simple through software, with more than $160 million in funding. Index led the company’s A and B rounds. On TCL, we’ll hear why Index doubled down from partner Mark Goldberg, and McKeller, and they will give live feedback on pitches from the audience.

REGISTER FOR INDEX VENTURES AND PILOT

News: Microsoft now lets you sign-in without a password

• September 15, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Microsoft is further nudging users away from passwords by rolling out passwordless sign-in options to all consumer Microsoft accounts. The tech giant, like many others in the industry, has waged a war against traditional password-based authentication for some time. This is because passwords are a prime target for cyberattacks, since weak or reused passwords can

Microsoft is further nudging users away from passwords by rolling out passwordless sign-in options to all consumer Microsoft accounts.

The tech giant, like many others in the industry, has waged a war against traditional password-based authentication for some time. This is because passwords are a prime target for cyberattacks, since weak or reused passwords can be guessed or brute-forced through automated attacks.

To that end, and as it gears up to launch Windows 11 in just a few weeks time, Microsoft is rolling out its passwordless sign-in option, previously available only to commercial customers, to all Microsoft accounts. This means that users will be able to sign in to services, such as Outlook and OneDrive, without having to use a password. Instead, users can use the Microsoft Authenticator app, Windows Hello, a security key, and SMS or emailed codes.

Some Microsoft apps will still continue to require a password, however, including Office 2010 or earlier, Remote Desktop and Xbox 360. Similarly, those using now-unsupported versions of Windows won’t be able to ditch their passwords just yet either, as the feature will only be supported on Windows 10 and Windows 11.

Microsoft says that passwordless sign-in will be rolled out to consumer accounts over the coming weeks, so you might not be able to get rid of your password just yet. It added that it’s also working on a way to eliminate passwords for Azure AD accounts, with admins set to be able to choose whether passwords are required, allowed, or don’t exist for specific users.

News: News aggregator SmartNews raises $230 million, valuing its business at $2 billion

• September 15, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

SmartNews, a Tokyo-headquartered news aggregation website and app that’s grown in popularity despite hefty competition from built-in aggregators like Apple News, today announced it has closed on $230 million in Series F funding. The round brings SmartNews’ total raise to date to over $400 million and values the business at $2 billion — or as

SmartNews, a Tokyo-headquartered news aggregation website and app that’s grown in popularity despite hefty competition from built-in aggregators like Apple News, today announced it has closed on $230 million in Series F funding. The round brings SmartNews’ total raise to date to over $400 million and values the business at $2 billion — or as the company touts in its press release, a “double unicorn.” (Ha!)

The funding included new U.S. investors Princeville Capital and Woodline Partners, as well as JIC Venture Growth Investments, Green Co-Invest Investment, and Yamauchi-No.10 Family Office in Japan. Existing investors participating in this round included ACA Investments and SMBC Venture Capital.

Founded in 2012 in Japan, the company launched to the U.S. in 2014 and expanded its local news footprint early last year. While the app’s content team includes former journalists, machine learning is used to pick which articles are shown to readers to personalize their experience. However, one of the app’s key differentiators is how it works to pop users’ “filter bubbles” through its “News From All Sides” feature, which allows its users to access news from across a range of political perspectives.

It has also developed new products, like its Covid-19 vaccine dashboard and U.S. election dashboard, that provide critical information at a glance. With the additional funds, the company says it plans to develop more features for its U.S. audience — one of its largest, in addition to Japan —  that will focus on consumer health and safety. These will roll out in the next few months and will include features for tracking wildfires and crime and safety reports. It also recently launched a hurricane tracker.

The aggregator’s business model is largely focused on advertising, as the company has said before that 85-80% of Americans aren’t paying to subscribe to news. But SmartNews’ belief is that these news consumers still have a right to access quality information.

In total, SmartNews has relationships with over 3,000 global publishing partners whose content is available through its service on the web and mobile devices.

To generate revenue, the company sells inline ads and video ads, where revenue is shared with publishers. Over 75% of its publishing partners also take advantage of its “SmartView” feature. This is the app’s quick-reading mode, and alternative to something like Google AMP. Here, users can quickly load an article to read, even if they’re offline. The company promises publishers that these mobile-friendly stories, which are marked with a lightning bolt icon in the app, deliver higher engagement — and its algorithm rewards that type of content, bringing them more readers. Among SmartView partners are well-known brands like USA Today, ABC, HuffPost, and others. Currently, over 70% of all SmartNews’ pageviews are coming from SmartView first.

SmartNews’ app has proven to be very sticky, in terms of attracting and keeping users’ attention. The company tells us, citing App Annie July 2021 data, that it sees an average time spent per user per month on U.S. mobile devices that’s higher than Google News or Apple News combined.

Image Credits: App Annie data provided by SmartNews

The company declined to share its monthly active users (MAUs), but had said in 2019 it had grown to 20 million in the U.S. and Japan. Today, it says its U.S. MAUs doubled over the last year.

According to data provided to us by Apptopia, the SmartNews app has seen around 85 million downloads since its October 2014 launch, and 14 million of those took place in the past 365 days. Japan is the largest market for installs, accounting for 59% of lifetime downloads, the firm noted.

“This latest round of funding further affirms the strength of our mission, and fuels our drive to expand our presence and launch features that specifically appeal to users and publishers in the United States,” said SmartNews co-founder and CEO Ken Suzuki. “Our investors both in the U.S. and globally acknowledge the tremendous growth potential and value of SmartNews’s efforts to democratize access to information and create an ecosystem that benefits consumers, publishers, and advertisers,” he added.

The company says the new funds will be used to invest in further U.S. growth and expanding the company’s team. Since its last fundraise in 2019, where it became a unicorn, the company more than doubled its headcount to approximately 500 people globally. it now plans to double its headcount of 100 in the U.S., with additions across engineering, product, and leadership roles.

The Wall Street Journal reports SmartNews is exploring an IPO, but the company declined to comment on this.

The SmartNews app is available on iOS and Android across more than 150 countries worldwide.

News: Chamath Palihapitiya is coming to Disrupt

• September 15, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Retail investors love him. Venture capitalists envy him. But pretty much everyone writing checks these days is paying attention to Chamath Palihapitiya, whose star has been on the rise since the outset of his career at an early online media player called Winamp that was acquired by AOL. Indeed, over the last 20 years, Palihapitiya

Retail investors love him. Venture capitalists envy him. But pretty much everyone writing checks these days is paying attention to Chamath Palihapitiya, whose star has been on the rise since the outset of his career at an early online media player called Winamp that was acquired by AOL.

Indeed, over the last 20 years, Palihapitiya — whose family moved from Sri Lanka to Canada as refugees when he was five — has been changing up the status quo of nearly everything he touches. At AOL, he became the company’s youngest VP and wound up doing a small deal with Facebook whose “biggest outcome of the deal was the connection Palihapitiya formed with Mark Zuckerberg,” as writer Steven Levy reported last year. (Palihapitiya later said that one of his biggest takeaways from AOL was that, “Most people at most companies are really shit.”)

Hired into Facebook in 2007, his role there would prove more seminal. Though Palihapitiya reportedly floundered at first — even proposing after a year that Zuckerberg should perhaps fire him, according to Levy — he zeroed in on how to make both himself and Facebook more valuable by building a data-driven “growth team” that focused relentlessly on improving and growing the engagement of monthly active users.

Among its biggest successes: Facebook’s “People You Know” feature, which was heavily inspired by a similar LinkedIn feature after Palihapitiya’s team identified that new users needed to discover seven friends and fast.

That period of Palihapitiya’s life would have wide-ranging ripple effects. For one thing, like a lot of people working at Facebook before it went public in 2012, he made a fortune from his Facebook shares, such that around the same time that he was leaving in 2011, he acquired a stake in the Golden State Warriors and founded his own venture capital firm, Social Capital.

Being a “former Facebook exec” also made Palihapitiya more widely famous, including as he began expressing regret publicly over his role with the company, which he began to see as corrosive.

Indeed, in 2017, he told an audience at the Stanford Graduate School of Business what many had already begun to fear about Facebook: “I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works,” he said.

More drama, more money and more fame have followed. In recent years, Social Capital has shed most of its employees — Palihapitiya now describes himself as a solo GP. He has become a regular guest on CNBC.

He has become closely identified with special purpose acquisition vehicles, or SPACs, owing both to his early and bullish embrace of them. The first SPAC he organized merged with Virgin Galactic Holdings, enabling the space tourism company to begin trading publicly in October 2019. It performed so well that it kicked off a massive boom in SPAC activity, with Palihapitiya — whose many earlier bets include Yammer, Palantir and Box — forming or investing in more than a dozen SPACs since, including one that took public Opendoor and another that took public Clover Health. (Earlier this year, The New Yorker dedicated valuable real estate to Palihapitiya in a profile titled, “The Pied Piper of SPACs.”)

One question is whether Palihapitiya is now moving on. SPAC activity has cooled, with enthusiasm around the vehicles dampened by class-action lawsuits (including against Clover Health) and the widespread expectation that the Securities & Exchange Commission is about to regulate them more closely.

Back in March, Palihapitiya was also believed to be shifting his gaze toward environmental investment, including through the sale of his entire personal stake in Virgin Galactic for more than $200 million — a move he said was designed to help finance “a large investment I am making towards fighting climate change.”

(He also late last month donated $7 million to an organization that is affixing hydropanels that supply clean water to homes in the California counties of Fresno, Monterey, Kern and Tulare, which has become “ground zero” for the climate crisis, observes Fast Company.)

What has come of that large investment he was planning to make? Is he past SPACs? And what else does the inimitable Palihapitiya have cooking? We’re very excited to say we’ll have the opportunity to talk with him about all of these things and much more in roughly one week at TechCrunch Disrupt, our signature annual event, which is entirely virtual this year. While 25 minutes will surely prove too short a time, we’ll cover as much ground with him as we can in a conversation that, if you know Palihapitiya at all, you know you definitely don’t want to miss.

Even better, Palihapitiya joins a whole host of amazing speakers at Disrupt, including Canva CEO Melanie Perkins, actor-entrepreneur Ryan Reynolds, and U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

The show is coming up fast. Get your ticket now for less than $100 just for a few short days, and we’ll see you next week.

News: Forge’s SPAC deal is a bet on unicorn illiquidity

• September 15, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

The total addressable market that Forge serves is growing by the day, with more and more unicorns being born and a steady drumbeat of unicorn IPOs doing little to clear the decks.

As Warby Parker, Freshworks, Amplitude and Toast look to list in the coming weeks, we shouldn’t forget the SPAC boom. This week, for example, Forge Global (Forge), a technology startup that operates a market for secondary transactions in private companies, announced that it would go public via a blank-check combination.

And while we’re not unpacking every single SPAC combination that crosses our radar, the Forge deal is a good one to spend time parsing.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

Read it every morning on Extra Crunch or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

Why? Several reasons. First, we’re curious about how the company generates revenue and how diversified its revenue is. We’re also interested in how big the market may prove to be for trading secondary shares in unicorns — late-stage tech startup equity is popular on secondary exchanges. Additionally, we want to know whether the deal feels expensive, because that may help us get a heat-check on the SPAC market more broadly.

First, some details concerning the transaction. Then we get to have fun. To work!

The Forge SPAC

Forge is merging with Motive Capital, a blank-check company that raised $360 million in December 2020.

Per the company’s calculations, the combined entity will sport a roughly $2 billion valuation on a “fully diluted equity value on a pro forma basis.” The company’s anticipated enterprise value is a smaller $1.60 billion thanks to an expected $435 million in cash after the deal’s completion, though that number will change some before it trades.

Skipping the nuances of the transaction — there’s a PIPE, 90% equity rollover from existing shareholders and more, in case you wanted to get into it — what matters is that Forge will be worth around $2 billion in equity terms and have hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank after the deal.

The resulting valuation is notable not only for making Forge a unicorn, but also for representing a dramatic upward movement in the worth of the company. PitchBook and Crunchbase data agree that Forge was last valued at $700 million (post-money) when raising $150 million earlier this year. So, the company appears set to provide a solid return to more than just its early backers; even the private investors who put capital into the company rather recently should do well in the deal.

That brings us to the company’s business, and business model. Forge helps pre-IPO companies trade before they float. It’s somewhat ironic that price discovery is something that the company claims its platform can help companies with before they debut, while the company is set to see its private valuation quickly beaten by a public debut.

Regardless, let’s talk unicorns.

A solution to the unicorn traffic jam?

One of my favorite long-term issues with the late-stage startup market is that it is far better at creating value than it is at finding an exit point for that accreted value. More simply, the startup market is excellent at creating unicorns but somewhat poor at taking them public.

That antitrust regulatory concerns have made it harder for wealthy tech companies to snap up promising startups that could challenge them is only part of the matter. There just aren’t enough IPOs, even this year, to counterbalance the growth in the number of global unicorns.

That pressure is a good bit of why Forge is an interesting firm. The more unexited unicorns there are in the world, the more demand, presumably, there is for marketplaces like the one it operates, which allows existing shareholders in valuable private companies to drive liquidity for themselves ahead of eventual public-market debuts.

News: Relyance AI scores $25M Series A to ensure privacy compliance at the code level

• September 15, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Relyance AI, an early stage startup that is helping companies stay in compliance with privacy laws at the code level, announced a $25 million Series A today. At the same time, they revealed a previously unannounced $5 million seed round. Menlo Ventures and Unusual Ventures led the A round, while Unusual was sole lead on

Relyance AI, an early stage startup that is helping companies stay in compliance with privacy laws at the code level, announced a $25 million Series A today. At the same time, they revealed a previously unannounced $5 million seed round.

Menlo Ventures and Unusual Ventures led the A round, while Unusual was sole lead on the seed. Serial entrepreneur Jyoti Bansal from Unusual will join the board under the terms of the deal. His partner John Vrionis had previously joined after the seed round. Matt Murphy from Menlo is coming on as a board observer. The company has now raised $30 million.

Relyance takes an unusual approach to verifying that data stays in compliance working at the code level, while ingesting contracts and existing legal requirements as code to ensure that a company is in compliance. Company co-CEO and co-founder Abhi Sharma says that code-level check is key to the solution. “For the first time, we are building the legal compliance and regulation into the source code,” Sharma told me.

He added, “Relyance is actually embedded within the DevOps pipeline of our customers infrastructure. So every time a new ETL pipeline is built or a machine learning model is receiving new source code, we do a compiler-like analysis of how personal sensitive data is flowing between internal microservices, data lakes and data warehouses, and then get a metadata analysis back to the privacy and compliance professionals [inside an organization].”

Leila R. Golchehreh, the other founder and co-CEO brings a strong compliance background to the equation and has experienced the challenge of keeping companies in compliance first-hand. She said that Relayance also enables companies to define policy and contracts as code.

“Our approach is specifically to ingest contracts. We’ve actually created an algorithm around how [you] actually write a good data protection agreement. We’ve extracted those relevant provisions and we will compare that against [your] operational reality. So if there’s a disconnect, we will be able to raise that as an intelligent insight of a data misalignment,” she said.

With 32 employees, the co-founders hope to double or perhaps even triple that number in the next 12-18 months. Golchehreh and Sharma are a diverse co-founder team and they are attempting to build a company that reflects that. They believe being remote first gives them a leg up in this regard, but they also have internal policies to drive it.

“The recruiters we work with have a mandate internally to say, ‘Hey, we really want to hire good people and diverse people.’ Reliance as a company is the genesis of two individuals from two completely different ends of the spectrum coming together. And I think hopefully, we can do our job of relaying that into the company as we scale,” Sharma said.

The two founders have been friends for several years and began talking about forming a company together in 2019 over a pizza dinner. The idea began to gel and they launched the company in February 2020. They spent some time talking to compliance pros to understand their requirements better, then began building the solution they have today in July 2020. They released a beta in February and began quietly selling it in March.

Today they have a number of early customers working with their software including Dialpad, Patreon, Samsara and True.

News: Dear Sophie: Should I apply for citizenship if I have a conviction?

• September 15, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

A few years ago, I was charged with a misdemeanor for smoking marijuana in public and driving under the influence. I have a green card and want to apply for U.S. citizenship next year. Can I?

Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.

“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”

Extra Crunch members receive access to weekly “Dear Sophie” columns; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off.

Dear Sophie,

At Burning Man a few years ago, I was arrested and charged with a misdemeanor for smoking marijuana in public (in my car) and driving under the influence.

I currently have a green card and want to apply for U.S. citizenship next year.

Can I? If so, how should I handle my criminal record?

— Remorseful About the Reefer

Dear Remorseful,

As you’ve discovered, you have to be extra careful when you’re an immigrant: Obviously, you should never break the law, but as an immigrant, if you do, it can have severe and lasting consequences.

You even need to be careful to avoid doing things that an immigration officer might consider to be outside the bounds of good moral character, even if they are not crimes. All immigrants should remember that even though limited use of marijuana for recreational and medical uses is legal in several states, it’s illegal under federal law.

My law partner, Anita Koumriqian, recently podcasted on how various crimes can impact your green card status and affect your ability to become a U.S. citizen. Take a listen and (always in this situation) consult an experienced immigration attorney. Tell your attorney about your DUI and marijuana charges, any subsequent marijuana use, any other arrests or citations, and even things you might consider minor such as speeding, parking or jaywalking tickets. An immigration attorney can determine whether you should proceed with applying for U.S. citizenship and if so, when and how to do so.

Image Credits: Joanna Buniak / Sophie Alcorn (opens in a new window)

What is good moral character?

As you know, you must be a permanent resident (green card holder) for at least five years — or three years if you have a green card through marriage — to be eligible to apply for U.S. citizenship. Additionally, you must demonstrate “good moral character” during the five- or three-year statutory period.

News: Airbase adds spend support for international subsidiaries

• September 15, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Airbase, a corporate spend management startup, announced this morning that it now supports subsidiaries in different countries for U.S.-based businesses. As more companies lean into remote work, and a great many startups are founding themselves on multiple continents, the new capability could boost Airbase’s effective total addressable market. The product news is interesting, but more

Airbase, a corporate spend management startup, announced this morning that it now supports subsidiaries in different countries for U.S.-based businesses. As more companies lean into remote work, and a great many startups are founding themselves on multiple continents, the new capability could boost Airbase’s effective total addressable market.

The product news is interesting, but more so when we consider Airbase’s feature decisions in the larger context of the corporate spend management space itself. Startups competing in the market offer customers corporate cards and a software suite to help them manage spend more generally, along with other functionality that varies based on the provider in question.

TechCrunch has spilled much ink in recent months tracking Airbase competitors Ramp and Brex, for example, as they raise capital and look to differentiate their products to better serve their target markets. They are doing so by both pricing decisions and feature choices.

Image Credits: Airbase

Airbase, while perhaps less well-known than its rivals, was early to the decision to charge for its software in addition to deriving interchange revenues from its business. Brex added a paid package of software at an SMB-friendly price point. Ramp is sticking to its zero-cost guns for now.

Now with support for international subsidiaries and currencies for U.S.-based companies, Airbase is executing against its vision to provide spend management services for companies from inception through IPO, founder and CEO Thejo Kote told TechCrunch an interview.

In more detailed terms, Airbase supports payouts to some 200 countries, as well as support for moving money around more generally in a more constrained geographic area.

The product news fits into Airbase’s goal of supporting companies even as they scale. Other competitors in its market have a greater SMB focus, it appears. Not that that is a diss; offering corporate spend services as a free package has proven lucrative for some companies looking to onboard a host of smaller enterprises. Divvy did so and sold for more than $1 billion. And Ramp and Brex are pricing their services to be well within the reaches of smaller firms.

Airbase does offer a free tier, but more as a method of attracting customers that could scale into large accounts in time, it explained. Those larger accounts are the startup’s goal. Kote said during a conversation that his company now has a number of customers paying six figures per year for its software, a change from when the company raised $60 million earlier this year, when such account sizes were rarer.

By adding more capabilities for multinational companies, Airbase may be able to land more large customers, which, in turn, would generate both software and interchange incomes for the startup.

Kote also disclosed new growth metrics for Airbase, though in relative instead of absolute terms. The startup has scaled annual recurring revenue — a metric that calculates annualized subscription software sales at a company — by 3.5x in the last 12 months, he said, and 2x in the last half-year. Kote also disclosed that his company is “approaching” $2 billion in annualized payment volume through its service, up 5x in the last 12 months.

Now in the process of digesting its Series B, Airbase has graduated from baby startup metrics, and we’ll expect something a bit harder the next time we cover the company.

Still, as Airbase looks to support larger companies longer, we’re seeing an interesting divergence between the corporate spend startups battling for North American market share. With three major players charging nothing, a little and a lot, it isn’t hard to guess where each will focus their product efforts in customer terms.

News: Constructor finds $55M for tech that powers search and discovery for e-commerce businesses

• September 15, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

One of the biggest problems in the world of e-commerce is the predicament of shopping cart abandonment: when shoppers aren’t getting to what they want fast enough — whether it’s finding the right item, or paying for it in a quick and easy way — they bounce. That singular problem is driving a wave of