Tag Archives: Blog

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

• August 23, 2021
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Getting children to school safely is a challenge nearly as old as public education. But rarely have entrepreneurs tackled the problem of updating and optimizing one of our largest transit systems.

Getting children to school safely and reliably is a challenge as old as public education itself. But rarely have any entrepreneurs tackled the problem of updating and optimizing one of the nation’s largest legacy transit systems, now nearly a century old. It’s still common to find people at U.S. student transportation hubs speaking into walkie-talkies and wrangling clipboards as they sort passengers into gas-guzzling yellow buses.

Ritu Narayan was working as a product executive at eBay when her two children began attending school. Finding safe and reliable options for getting them to campus was sometimes so difficult that anytime those options would fall out, she would be on the verge of leaving her job.

Bearing in mind that her mother in India had set aside a career to raise Narayan and her three siblings, she founded Zūm in 2016 with brothers Abhishek and Vivek Garg to optimize routes, create transparency and make school commutes greener; since then, Zūm has operated in several California districts (including San Francisco), as well as in Seattle, Chicago and Dallas. In Oakland, Zūm has optimized routes to reduce the previous bus requirement by 29 percent, with the balance being serviced by midsized vehicles.

Zūm also plans to have a fleet of 10,000 electric school buses by 2025 and is partnering with AutoGrid to transform that fleet into a virtual power plant with the potential capacity to route 1 GW of energy back to the grid.

To get a deeper look into the startup’s plans and hear what Narayan has learned from its journey so far, we discussed the pandemic’s impacts on Zūm’s development, where she thinks the company will be a year from now, and how she convinced investors to back a business model that embraces accessibility and equity.

(Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for clarity and length.)

How did COVID-19 affect your business? What percentage of your business is back now?

It’s funny, because we used to say that student transportation is a recession-proof business, and no matter what, kids are still going to go to school, but the pandemic was the first time in probably the last 100 years when kids across the globe did not go to school. It was an interesting time for us, because overnight, all the rides were closed and we had to focus on what was needed immediately to support our districts and students.

We realized that the school is such an important physical infrastructure that’s not just for education, but students get meals there as well as physical and emotional help. So we helped the school districts with reverse logistics, taking the meals or laptops from the school districts and delivering them to homes, because our software could handle that kind of thing. That was just an interim to make sure the communities settled. Starting last year, rides started coming back around 30%, and this year starting in April, it has been 100% back in the business.

News: With more cash and a launch, Vannevar Labs is reconnecting Silicon Valley to its defense industry roots

• August 23, 2021
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Silicon Valley was once one of the most productive regions in the country for the defense industry, churning out chips and technologies that helped the United States overtake the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Since then, the region has been known far less for silicon and defense than for the consumer internet products of

Silicon Valley was once one of the most productive regions in the country for the defense industry, churning out chips and technologies that helped the United States overtake the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Since then, the region has been known far less for silicon and defense than for the consumer internet products of Google, Facebook and Netflix.

A small number of startups though are attempting to revitalize that important government-industry nexus as the rise of China pushes more defense planners in Washington to double down on America’s technical edge. Vannevar Labs is one of this new crop, and it has hit some new milestones in its quest to displace traditional defense contractors with Silicon Valley entrepreneurial acumen.

I last chatted with the company just as it was debuting in late 2019, having raised a $4.5 million seed. The company has been quiet and heads down the past two years as it developed a product and traction within the defense establishment. Now it’s ready to reveal a bit more of what all that work has culminated in.

First, the company officially launched its Vannevar Decrypt product in January of this year. It’s focused on foreign language natural language processing, organizing overseas data and resources that are collected by the intelligence community and then immediately translating and interpreting those documents for foreign policy decision-makers. CEO and co-founder Brett Granberg said that the product “went from one deployment to a dozen adoptions.”

Second, the company raised a $12 million Series A investment in May from Costanoa Ventures and Point72 with General Catalyst participating. Costanoa and GC co-led the startup’s seed round.

Finally, the company has been on a hiring spree. The team has grown into a crew of 20 employees, and the firm last week brought on Scott Sanders to lead business development. Sanders was one of the earliest employees at Anduril, and had spent several years at the company. Vannevar also added John Doyle, a long-time Palantir employee who was head of its national security business, onto its board according to Granberg. Today, the team is equally split between national security folks and technologists, and he says that the team is set to double this year.

With a few years of hindsight, Granberg says that he has refined what he considers the best model for defense tech startups to break into the hardscrabble market at the Pentagon and across Northern Virginia.

First, there needs to be incredible focus on getting access to actual end users and learning their work. The functions that defense and intelligence personnel perform are completely different from operations in the commercial economy, and trying to translate what works at a large corporation into defense is a fool’s errand. “You need to have both the DNA of understanding new technology and the DNA of deeply understanding a lot of different use cases within DoD,” Granberg said, referencing the Department of Defense.

That’s directly informed how Decrypt has developed over time. “We started focusing on the counter-terrorism space, and as the government moved away from counter-terrorism, we started moving to the foreign actors that were important,” he said. “Once we have our first couple of deployments, we are able to iterate very, very quickly.”

He also strongly eschews a popular view in defense procurement circles that there are “dual-use” technologies that can be used equally well in commercial and defense applications. “Some of the most important mission problems where the government spends the most money and has the most interest,” he explained, are also contexts where commercial off-the-shelf products (dubbed COTS in the industry parlance) are least useful. He says startups targeting defense simply cannot split their bandwidth by also trying to learn commercial use cases.

In fact, he went so far to predict that “you are going to see a lot of companies that have raised a lot of money that will fizzle out in the coming years” because they just can’t nail the dual-use model well.

Second, he argues that defense tech startups need to move beyond the model that each company should work on one platform, and instead move to an organizational model where a company offers multiple products to reach scale. Each product has the potential to reach “a couple of hundred million in revenue” according to Granberg, but it is hard to expand a company’s size if it doesn’t parallelize product development.

To that end, Granberg said that he pushes Vannevar Labs to always be exploring new product lines for growth. “Decrypt is our first product [but]10% of our energy is in new product efforts,” he said. “I can imagine when we are three to four years down the line… it might be 9-10 products.” He said that the one platform approach might have worked for Palantir, which ironically, is the major winner in the defense tech space the last few years. But newer companies like Anduril and Shield AI have been designed around product line expansion.

Finally, noting those other companies, Granberg believes there is something of a collective benefit as each startup makes headway in the defense sector. “There is this theory in our space that we don’t view ourselves as competitors — if one of us does well, we all do well,” he said. Given the varied mission requirements of different agencies and the absolute massive scale of budgets in this field, startups actually have a lot of independent terrain to explore, even if they come up against the big legacy defense contractors on a regular basis.

As for Vannevar Labs, its next goal is to turn its Decrypt product into a program of record, which would guarantee it a certain level of sales and revenue for potentially years into the future. That’s a huge bar to leap, but would be a turning point in the company’s long-term trajectory.

News: Announcing the agenda for TechCrunch Sessions: SaaS

• August 23, 2021
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TechCrunch Sessions is back! On October 27, we’re taking on the ferociously competitive field of software as a service (SaaS), and we’re thrilled to announce our packed agenda, overflowing with some of the biggest names and most exciting startups in the industry. And you’re in luck, because $75 early-bird tickets are still on sale —

TechCrunch Sessions is back!

On October 27, we’re taking on the ferociously competitive field of software as a service (SaaS), and we’re thrilled to announce our packed agenda, overflowing with some of the biggest names and most exciting startups in the industry. And you’re in luck, because $75 early-bird tickets are still on sale — make sure you book yours so you can enjoy all the agenda has to offer and save $100 bucks before prices go up!

Throughout the day, you can expect to hear from industry experts, and take part in discussions about the potential of new advances in data, open source, how to deal with the onslaught of security threats, investing in early-stage startups and plenty more.

We’ll be joined by some of the biggest names and the smartest and most prescient people in the industry, including Javier Soltero at Google, Kathy Baxter at Salesforce, Jared Spataro at Microsoft, Jay Kreps at Confluent, Sarah Guo at Greylock and Daniel Dines at UiPath.

You’ll be able to find and engage with people from all around the world through world-class networking on our virtual platform — all for $75 and under for a limited time with even deeper discounts for nonprofits and government agencies, students and up-and-coming founders!

Our agenda showcases some of the powerhouses in the space, but also plenty of smaller teams that are building and debunking fundamental technologies in the industry. We still have a few tricks up our sleeves and will be adding some new names to the agenda over the next month, so keep your eyes open.

In the meantime, check out these agenda highlights:

Survival of the Fittest: Investing in Today’s SaaS Market
with Casey Aylward (Costanoa Ventures), Kobie Fuller (Upfront) and Sarah Guo (Greylock)

• The venture capital world is faster, and more competitive than ever. For investors hoping to get into the hottest SaaS deal, things are even crazier. With more non-traditional money pouring into the sector, remote dealmaking now the norm, and an increasingly global market for software startups, venture capitalists are being forced to shake up their own operations, and expectations. TechCrunch sits down with three leading investors to discuss how they are fighting for allocation in hot deals, what they’ve changed in their own processes, and what today’s best founders are demanding.

Data, Data Everywhere
with Ali Ghodsi (Databricks)

• As companies struggle to manage and share increasingly large amounts of data, it’s no wonder that Databricks, whose primary product is a data lake, was valued at a whopping $28 billion for its most recent funding round. We’re going to talk to CEO Ali Ghodsi about why his startup is so hot and what comes next.

SaaS Security, Today and Tomorrow
with Edna Conway (Microsoft), Olivia Rose (Amplitude)

• Enterprises face a constant stream of threats, from nation states to cybercriminals and corporate insiders. After a year where billions worked from home and the cloud reigned supreme, startups and corporations alike can’t afford to stay off the security pulse. Find out what SaaS startups need to know about security now, and in the future.

Automation’s Moment Is Now
with Daniel Dines (UiPath), Laela Sturdy (CapitalG), and Dave Wright (ServiceNow)

• One thing we learned during the pandemic is the importance of automation, and that’s only likely to be more pronounced as we move forward. We’ll be talking to UiPath CEO Daniel Dines, Laela Sturdy, an investor at CapitalG and Dave Wright from ServiceNow about why this is automation’s moment.

Was the Pandemic Cloud Productivity’s Spark
with Javier Soltero (Google)

• One big aspect of SaaS is productivity apps like Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Drive. We’ll talk with executive Javier Soltero about the role Google Workspace plays in the Google cloud strategy.

The Future is Wide Open
with Abby Kearns (Puppet), Aghi Marietti (Kong), and Jason Warner (Redpoint)

• Many startups today have an open source component, and it’s no wonder. It builds an audience and helps drive sales. We’ll talk with Abby Kearns from Puppet, Augusto “Aghi” Marietti from Kong and Jason Warner an investor at Redpoint about why open source is such a popular way to build a business.

How Microsoft Shifted from on Prem to the Cloud
with Jared Spataro (Microsoft)

• Jared Spataro has been with Microsoft for over 15 years and he was a part of the shift from strictly on prem software to one that is dominated by the cloud. Today he runs one of the most successful SaaS products out there, and we’ll talk to him about how Microsoft made that shift and what it’s meant to the company.

How Startups are Turning Data into Software Gold
with Jenn Knight (Agentsync), Barr Moses (Monte Carlo), and Dan Wright (DataRobot)

• The era of big data is behind us. Today’s leading SaaS startups are working with data, instead of merely fighting to help customers collect information. We’ve collected three leaders from three data-focused startups that are forging new markets to get their insight on how today’s SaaS companies are leveraging data to build new companies, attack new problems, and, of course, scale like mad.

What Happens After Your Startup is Acquired
with Jyoti Bansal (Harness), Nick Mehta (GainSight)

• We’ll speak to three founders about the emotional upheaval of being acquired and what happens after the check clears and the sale closes. Our panel includes Jyoti Bansal who founded AppDynamics, Jewel Burkes Solomon, who founded Partpic and Nick Mehta from GainSight.

How Confluent Rode the Open Source Wave to IPO
with Jay Kreps (Confluent)

• Confluent, the streaming platform built on top of Apache Kafka, was born out of a project at LinkedIn and rode that from startup to IPO. We’ll speak to co-founder and CEO Jay Kreps to learn about what that journey was like.

We’ll have more sessions and names shortly, so stay tuned. But get excited in the meantime, we certainly are.

Pro tip: Keep your finger on the pulse of TC Sessions: SaaS. Get updates when we announce new speakers, add events and offer ticket discounts.

Why should you carve a day out of your hectic schedule to attend TC Sessions: SaaS? This may be the first year we’ve focused on SaaS, but this ain’t our first rodeo. Here’s what other attendees have to say about their TC Sessions experience.

“TC Sessions: Mobility offers several big benefits. First, networking opportunities that result in concrete partnerships. Second, the chance to learn the latest trends and how mhttps://techcrunch.com/2021/06/24/databricks-co-founder-and-ceo-ali-ghodsi-is-coming-to-tc-sessions-saas/obility will evolve. Third, the opportunity for unknown startups to connect with other mobility companies and build brand awareness.” — Karin Maake, senior director of communications at FlashParking.

“People want to be around what’s interesting and learn what trends and issues they need to pay attention to. Even large companies like GM and Ford were there, because they’re starting to see the trend move toward mobility. They want to learn from the experts, and TC Sessions: Mobility has all the experts.” — Melika Jahangiri, vice president at Wunder Mobility.

TC Sessions: SaaS 2021 takes place on October 27. Grab your team, join your community and create opportunity. Don’t wait — jump on the early bird ticket sale right now.

News: Givz raises $3M in seed funding to make donations a marketing tool for businesses

• August 23, 2021
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Givz, which has developed an API-powered platform that gives brands a way to convert discounts into donations, has raised $3 million in seed funding. Eniac and Accomplice co-led the financing for the New York-based startup. Additional investors include Supernode Ventures, Claude Wasserstein of Fine Day, Phoenix Club and Dylan Whitman. Givz was founded in 2017

Givz, which has developed an API-powered platform that gives brands a way to convert discounts into donations, has raised $3 million in seed funding.

Eniac and Accomplice co-led the financing for the New York-based startup. Additional investors include Supernode Ventures, Claude Wasserstein of Fine Day, Phoenix Club and Dylan Whitman.

Givz was founded in 2017 to make charitable giving more accessible and convenient for the masses. In March 2020, right before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the company pivoted from B2C to B2B and used the technology rails it had built to create the e-commerce marketing platform that Givz is today.

The company aims to drive “full-price purchasing behavior” by giving consumers the ability to convert the money they would be saving if getting a discount, and donating it to their favorite charities. 

Prior to the funding, Givz had been working with more than 80 enterprise, mid-market and SMB retail and e-commerce clients such as H&M, Tom Brady’s TB12, Seedlip and Terez, and accumulated more than 40,000 individual users. Since the shift last year, the company has helped drive more than $1 million to 1,100 charities, according to CEO and founder Andrew Forman.

It just launched on Shopify, which Forman says will give the startup access to the 1.7 million retailers that use Shopify as their e-commerce platform.

Givz operates under the premise that “donation-driven marketing” consistently outperforms discounts and costs less, “making it an attractive addition” to corporate marketing.

“We are creating a new marketing category and generating the largest sustainable charitable giving platform in the process,” he told TechCrunch. 

An example of a company using Givz can be found in Tervis, which offered customers “For every $50 you spend, you’ll receive $15 to give to the charity of your choice.” 

“They used Givz technology to allow consumers to choose the charity of their choice and make a turnkey disbursement to hundreds of charities,” Forman explained. “They saw a 20% lift in website conversion and a 17% increase in average order value as a result of this offer.”

Currently, Givz has eight employees with plans to more than double that number over the next year.

The company plans to use the new capital toward that hiring, and to do some marketing of its own.

“We also want to explore the full potential around the consumer behavior data we collect,” Forman said.

In the short term, Givz is focused on “Shopify growth” with direct to consumer brands.

“But we have successful use cases and huge potential with enterprise retailers and financial institutions,” Forman told TechCrunch. “In the future, we have our sights set on restaurants, the gaming industry and global expansion. I believe that using personalized donations to incentivize consumer behavior has endless application across industries, verticals and continents.”

Eniac partner Vic Singh said that there’s been a trend of brands experimenting with different ways to target the socially conscious consumer. 

“We believe Givz’s donation-driven marketing platform offers brands the best way to attract the socially conscious consumer while elevating their brand, moving more inventory and driving increased order value rather than simplistic traditional discounting,” he added.

Accomplice’s TJ Mahony said that both he and Singh believed SMS would emerge as a new marketing category, which led to early investments in Attentive and Postscript, respectively.

“We both saw a similar opportunity with Givz,” he wrote via e-mail. “Discounting is a well worn marketing muscle, but it’s detrimental to the brand, margins and customer expectations. We believe continuous impact marketing becomes the alternative to discounting and marketers will begin to build teams and budget around thoughtful and persistent giving strategies.”

News: Lux Capital’s Deena Shakir is helping judge Startup Battlefield at this year’s Disrupt

• August 23, 2021
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Deena Shakir is a partner at Lux Capital, where she looks to invest in technologies that are streamlining analog industries while also improving lives and livelihoods. Among the companies she has backed, for example, are Shiru, which is leveraging computational design to create enhanced proteins to help feed the world; and AllStripes, which aggregates and

Deena Shakir is a partner at Lux Capital, where she looks to invest in technologies that are streamlining analog industries while also improving lives and livelihoods. Among the companies she has backed, for example, are Shiru, which is leveraging computational design to create enhanced proteins to help feed the world; and AllStripes, which aggregates and analyzes medical records, then sells the de-identified data to pharma companies to help them develop medicines.

It’s not a surprise that Shakir is focused on empowering people. Shakir’s father is a psychiatrist and as she once told us, “for a hot minute, I thought I was going to be a doctor myself.” Instead, after attending Harvard, then Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, she wound up working for the State Department during the Obama administration, then headed to Google. She would stay for the next seven years, spending the last of them with GV, Google’s venture unit. There, her work revolved in part around some of the alternative protein companies in GV’s portfolio. Then, in 2019, she was poached by Lux.

Indeed, while Shakir might have once imagined working with people on an individual basis, she has become an increasingly sought-after investor in startup teams, which is why we couldn’t be more excited that she’s able to join us this year for TechCrunch Disrupt. Specifically, we’re thrilled that Shakir will be judging our Startup Battlefield competition, the centerpiece of Disrupt every year and oftentimes a life-changing event for the winning team — and often runners-up, too. Consider that past winners include Vurb, Dropbox, Mint and Yammer, while runner-up Cloudflare currently boasts a market cap of $26 billion.

It’s because we take the competition — and our record to date — so seriously that we’re exceedingly thankful to savvy investors like Shakir, who ask the right questions, and make the tough decisions when it comes time to decide which teams to move along.

Want to watch and judge from home? With our entirely virtual event this year, you’re more than welcome to join us from the comfort of your home or office (and let us know what you think of the startups within the many networking forums you’ll find).

To watch this year’s 20+ startups compete for $100,000 — and to interact with more than 100 hours of content and thousands of enthusiastic startup fans — make sure to book your pass to TC Disrupt, happening September 21-23 — all for less than $100.

Secure your seat today.

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.

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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:

• Global stocks are up to kick off the week. It’s a great way to start Monday, frankly.
• Thinking broadly, the latest regulatory news from China regarding ByteDance is not super bullish for the nation’s tech industry. And what the Indian government is doing to its own technology industry is not encouraging. But all of that and tension between the two countries, is not stopping deals. You can’t stop deals!
• Facebook bowed to pressure, and released a content report that it had previously shelved.
• Zetwerk raised a $150 million Series E. The Indian startup scene is trucking right along, perhaps acting a bit as-if its government wasn’t increasingly authoritarian.
• Shelf.io raised a $52.5 million Series B in what we’re somewhat considering a classic Tiger-led deal.
• And the SPAC boom is not over yet, with yet another Virgin space company headed for the public markets.

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.