Tag Archives: Blog

News: Crypto tax software provider TaxBit raises $130M at a $1.33B valuation

• August 12, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Just five months after raising a $100 million Series A, TaxBit announced today it has raised $130 million in a Series B round of funding. The latest financing officially makes the Salt Lake City, Utah-based provider of crypto tax and accounting software a unicorn, with a valuation of $1.33 billion. It also brings the startup’s

Just five months after raising a $100 million Series A, TaxBit announced today it has raised $130 million in a Series B round of funding.

The latest financing officially makes the Salt Lake City, Utah-based provider of crypto tax and accounting software a unicorn, with a valuation of $1.33 billion. It also brings the startup’s total raised to $230 million since brothers Austin and Justin Woodward founded the company with their cousin Brandon Woodward in 2017.

IVP and Insight Partners co-led the Series B, which also included participation from Tiger Global, Paradigm, 9Yards Capital, Sapphire Ventures, Madrona Venture Group and Anthony Pompliano. 

TaxBit connects digital asset transactions across exchanges so individuals and enterprises can more accurately file their taxes, manage their portfolios and make tax-optimized trades through its platform, explains CEO and co-founder Austin Woodward. Put simply, its software automates all aspects of cryptocurrency tax compliance. 

Since its early March raise, the company has tripled its headcount to about 100 people, launched an office in Seattle, deployed services with the IRS and inked partnerships with a number of digital asset platforms. For example, it’s connected to exchanges such as Coinbase, BlockFi and Gemini.

The digital economy’s need for tax and accounting software is growing with the industry as regulators require more formal reporting practices. As a result, TaxBit has seen impressive growth. In 2020, it issued over two million tax forms. This year, it is on track to issue over 50 million forms, according to Austin Woodward. 

“The digital asset space experienced a watershed moment during the pandemic, resulting in an accelerated push toward digital payments and alternative stores of value,” Austin Woodward told TechCrunch. “The momentum of adoption across the digital economy is quickly becoming the new normal among the traditional financial institutions and disruptors.”

Indeed, the crypto world can be a very complex one and TaxBit’s products, designed by CPAs and tax attorneys, provide tax filing and accounting services to not just financial institutions but also to individuals and governments so they can “more easily” navigate those digital complexities.  

Those products include Tax Center Suites, which was built for end users and automates back-office accounting functions for finance teams, and TaxBit Consumer, which aims to make filing taxes on digital asset investments “simple and painless, while equipping users with real-time directional insights to optimize their tax liability throughout the year.” 

The startup also works with governmental agencies, including the IRS, to provide data analysis and tax calculation support for taxpayers with digital assets. 

Dozens of financial institutions are integrating TaxBit’s Tax Center Suite technology, the latest being FTX US.

The company plans to use its new capital to scale its tax and accounting offerings across enterprise, consumer and government sectors. TaxBit also plans to double its headcount by year’s end and continue to open new offices in the U.S. and the United Kingdom. Long term, the company has plans for global expansion, with the U.K. “on the horizon and other jurisdictions to quickly follow,” Austin Woodward said.

Its investors are bullish on the company’s offerings, and potential.

Tom Loverro, general partner at IVP, believes TaxBit is in the right place at the right time. He’s taking a seat on the company’s board with the raise.

“Almost every company touching crypto needs tax reporting software. As we all saw with the recent legislation, crypto tax reporting obligations are only getting more rigorous,” he said. 

And crypto-native companies are not the only ones that need tax reporting. Every fintech and financial institution that is rolling out a crypto offering does too, Loverro added.

“And don’t forget about state and federal governments here in the U.S. and abroad,” he said. “Then there is the buy side, which includes both consumers and institutions. It’s a deceptively large and rapidly growing market.”

Loverro went on to say that a common refrain that he hears with regards to anything crypto is “Why can’t [incumbent] just add that as a feature?” 

As a former board observer for Coinbase, the investor can attest that crypto is “incredibly deep and complex.”

“Crypto requires intense dedication and focus. Calculating taxes on buying and selling a single lot of bitcoin may not be that complicated from a tax perspective but what about airdrops, staking and DeFi,” Loverro asked. “Things get pretty complex quickly!”

Nikhil Sachdev, managing partner at Insight Partners, points out that crypto is already a $1.5 trillion market and that is continually expanding as new asset classes begin transacting on blockchains. 

“Our current tax, accounting and ERP software infrastructure isn’t equipped to manage this shift, yet TaxBit has built a platform to help manage tax compliance financial reporting on crypto transactions across industries,” Sachdev said. “TaxBit is the only scaled B2B solution across crypto taxes and already won contracts with blue chip logos.”

News: Motivo raises $12M Series A to speed up chip design with AI

• August 12, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Chip design is a long slog of trial and error, taking years to bring a design to market. Motivo, a five year old startup from a chip industry veteran is creating software to speed up chip design from years to months using AI. Today the company announced a $12 million Series A. Intel Capital led

Chip design is a long slog of trial and error, taking years to bring a design to market. Motivo, a five year old startup from a chip industry veteran is creating software to speed up chip design from years to months using AI. Today the company announced a $12 million Series A.

Intel Capital led the round along with new investors Storm Ventures and Seraph Group, as well as participation from Inventus Capital. The company reports it has now raised a total of $20 million with its previous seed funding.

Motivo co-founder and CEO Bharath Rangarajan has worked in the chip industry for 30 years, and he saw a few fundamental trends and issues. For starters, the chip design process is highly time-intensive, taking years to come up with a successful candidate, and typically the first to market wins.

What’s more, Moore’s Law where you fit more and more electronics onto an increasingly powerful chip increases the complexity of these designs, and once in production, there is a lot of waste producing them. Rangarajan started the company to put artificial intelligence to work on the design process and bring chips to market faster with more accuracy in the production cycle.

“We can train an AI engine to bring about human judgment, and do a lot of design for manufacturability on the design without causing any other issue. So we avoid all these iteration loops [and we can also] design code and validation and timing and again we’re going from weeks and months to days,” he said.

The company’s ultimate goal is to take the chip design process and distill it down using software and intelligence from three years to three months, and while they are not there yet, they have started to attack the problem, and have a working product that looks at chip layout, the underlying RTL code that runs the chip and the netlist, which describes how the various pieces and electronics on the chip connect together.

One other differentiator is that the company is trying to make its AI transparent to explain why it made the decisions it did. “A lot of AI is just a black box. I don’t know why the self-driving car suddenly decided to swerve here. Our AI is understandable. We built the solution so that we can tell you why the AI is saying change the chip this way, or why it’s saying change it that way,” Rangarajan explained.

The company has paying customers. Although it can’t name them, there is probably a limited market for this kind of software, so you could make an educated guess that it’s the chip companies, especially with Intel Capital a lead investor on this round. At this point, the company has 15 employees, 12 of them being full time with plans to double or even triple over the next year, depending on how things go.

Hiring is always challenging for a company with a specific engineering focus like this one, but Rangarajan says that the team is already fairly diverse, and he is definitely looking at keeping that going as he builds the company. “We have to find the right people to join the company and you’re looking for any and all sorts of great people or backgrounds. […] In fact, the more the merrier as far as we’re concerned. We’ve got very experienced people who’ve grown up in the industry and we’ve still built up a fairly diverse team here,” he said.

For now, he plans to keep the office hybrid where people who want to come in can come in, but people who don’t want to like those with younger kids who aren’t vaccinated yet, can continue to work from home, he said. And that flexibility should continue even after offices open more completely.

News: Youreka Labs spins out with $8M to provide smart mobile assistant apps to field workers

• August 12, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

The company is developing robotic smart mobile assistants that enable frontline workers to perform their jobs more safely and efficiently.

Mobile field service startup Youreka Labs Inc. raised an $8 million Series A round of funding co-led by Boulder Ventures and Grotech Ventures, with participation from Salesforce Ventures.

The Maryland-based company also officially announced its CEO — Bill Karpovich joined to lead the company after previously holding executive roles with General Motors and IBM Cloud & Watson Platform.

Youreka Labs spun out into its own company from parent company Synaptic Advisors, a cloud consulting business focused on the customer relationship management transformations using Salesforce and other artificial intelligence and automation technologies.

The company is developing robotic smart mobile assistants that enable frontline workers to perform their jobs more safely and efficiently. This includes things like guided procedures, smart forms and photo or video capture. Youreka is also embedded in existing Salesforce mobile applications like Field Service Mobile so that end-users only have to operate from one mobile app.

Youreka has identified four use cases so far: healthcare, manufacturing, energy and utilities and the public sector. Working with companies like Shell, P&G, Humana and the Transportation Security Administration, the company’s technology makes it possible for someone to share their knowledge and processes with their colleagues in the field, Karpovich told TechCrunch.

“In the case of healthcare, we are taking complex medical assessments from a doctor and pushing them out to nurses out in the field by gathering data into a simple mobile app and making it useful,” he added. “It allows nurses to do a great job without being doctors themselves.”

Karpovich said the company went after Series A dollars because it was “time for it to be on its own.” He was receiving inbound interest from investors, and the capital would enable the company to proceed more rapidly. Today, the company is focused on the Salesforce ecosystem, but that can evolve over time, he added.

The funding will be used to expand the company’s reach and products. He expects to double the team in the next six to 12 months across engineering to be able to expand the platform. Youreka boasts 100 customers today, and Karpovich would also like to invest in marketing to grow that base.

In addition to the use cases already identified, he sees additional potential in financial services and insurance, particularly for those assessing damage. The company is also concentrated in the United States, and Karpovich has plans to expand in the U.K. and Europe.

In 2020, the company grew 300%, which Karpovich attributes to the need of this kind of tool in field service. Youreka has a licensing model with charges per end user per month, along with an administrative license, for the people creating the apps, that also charges per user and per month pricing.

“There are 2.5 million jobs open today because companies can’t find people with the right skills,” he added. “We are making these jobs accessible. Some say that AI is doing away with jobs, but we are using AI to enhance jobs. If we can take 90% of the knowledge and give a digital assistant to less experienced people, you could open up so many opportunities.”

 

News: Wonder Brands picks up $20M, aims to build marketplace of Latin American e-commerce brands

• August 12, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

E-commerce roll-up companies are big in the United States, and Wonder Brands wants to be that for Latin America.

E-commerce roll-up companies are big in the United States, and Wonder Brands wants to be that for Latin America.

The Mexico-based company closed on $20 million in seed funding, co-led by ALLVP and Mountain Nazca, with participation from CoVenture, Victory Park Capital, GFC, QED (Fontes), Korify Capital and Endeavor Catalyst.

Wonder Brands co-founders Nicolás Gonzalez Luna and Federico Malek came together to start the company in January 2021 to acquire digital brands in the MercadoLibre and Amazon ecosystem. It then leverages its technology to scale their operations and grow sales by taking care of the marketing, analytics, supply chain management and working capital needs of the companies. It focuses on companies in the areas of home and garden, sports and fitness, beauty and personal care.

“MercadoLibre has a larger share, but Amazon is entering the region quickly, so there is not one dominating marketplace. MercadoLibre may have half the market, but then it is more balanced between a number of different platforms,” Gonzalez Luna told TechCrunch. “That diversification means operations here are more complex than the classic Amazon seller. Negotiations take longer and require more discussion about who you are to get the trust in you. That’s why we will be doing fewer, but larger deals than our U.S. counterparts.”

Malek’s background is on the commerce side, having worked at Argentinian insurtech company iunigo.com before founding e-commerce fulfillment company Avenida.com, which was acquired by Groupon in 2010. He then worked as Groupon’s managing director in the region. He knew Gonzalez Luna, whose background includes Goldman Sachs where he focused on M&A.

Michael Breitstein, principal at CoVenture, said his firm has made a variety of investments on the debt and equity sides of e-commerce and believes Malek and Gonzalez Luna provide a “great one-two punch” with their backgrounds, as well as the ability to raise capital and build out a platform.

Though there is a lot of competition to acquire digitally native companies in the $1 million revenue range, Malek said Wonder Brands will focus on larger sellers and operators, with a deal target of at least $5 million in revenue. They are also taking a “buy and build” approach rather than the “buy and consolidate” business model many of the other roll-up companies have, he added.

With its approach, the company’s goal is to enable its acquired companies to sell on multiple channels. It provides support in four areas: category management and brand development, marketing and performance, technology to automate processes like inventory and logistics and operations to manage all of the channels needed. For example, in Latin America, inventory has to be consolidated into one warehouse, but then separated depending on the sales channel, Malek.

Acquiring and scaling companies is big business. London-based Hahnbeck Business Systems, an e-commerce M&A firm that tracks funding to FBA (fulfillment by Amazon) acquirers all over the world, reports that e-commerce roll-up companies raised $7.24 billion in disclosed funding to date.

According to the different sources, reports say Latin American e-commerce company MercadoLibre has a market cap of between $70 billion and $94.billion. Meanwhile, marketplace merchants accounted for 55% of units sold on Amazon.com, according to the retailer. In 2020, that accounted for $300 billion in sales, according to Marketplace Pulse estimates based on Amazon disclosures.

The seed financing enables Wonder Brands to invest in building a team to focus on the four support areas and marketing. The company has 20 employees currently and plans to triple that in the next month. The funding is also complementing larger debt facilities that the company has available to acquire brands. Its target is to make six or seven acquisitions this year.

The company is on target to achieve $55 million in revenue by the end of the year and will then move toward $100 million in revenue in the next 12 months, Malek said. It currently operates in Mexico and plans to begin operations in Brazil by the end of 2021.

 

News: Plex’s new feature matches your ‘sonically similar’ music to make playlists

• August 12, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Last year, media software maker Plex released Plexamp, a subscriber-only music app whose name was a nod to the classic Winamp player it aimed to replace. Today, the company is upgrading the app with a new feature called Super Sonic, which offers new ways to mix up your playlists — including by matching songs that

Last year, media software maker Plex released Plexamp, a subscriber-only music app whose name was a nod to the classic Winamp player it aimed to replace. Today, the company is upgrading the app with a new feature called Super Sonic, which offers new ways to mix up your playlists — including by matching songs that are “sonically” similar, instead of by metadata alone — like matching based on musical genre, for example.

The company explains that Super Sonic is designed to use the music’s sound to understand how different tracks relate to one another in your library. This is a different way of approaching a large music catalog and brings to mind something like Pandora’s Music Genome where songs are categorized based on attributes, like mood, tone, or beats per minute, among others.

But unlike the Music Genome, where trained musicologists analyze songs across hundreds of attributes, Super Sonic uses technology.

The new sonic analysis feature in Plexamp leverages a neural network and A.I. to map all the tracks, albums and artists in your library. Super Sonic extracts around 50 parameters from its analysis, which are then weighted appropriately. “Sonically similar” refers to two points in N-dimensional space being close to one another, Plex says.

The setup process for using the new feature is fairly CPU-intensive and can take hours or even days to complete, depending on your library’s size. However, once finished, you’ll be able to use a whole new set of features for discovering music. This can be particularly helpful in particular if you listen to a lot of indie or obscure music, where metadata may be limited or perhaps not available at all.

After the analysis is complete, a new “Related Tracks” feature will let you see which tracks you have that are sonically similar, which can sometimes lead to surprises that you wouldn’t have otherwise found if only matching on standard metadata.

Another addition, “Mixes for You,” will cluster the songs you’ve had on heavy rotation into mixes, but then add sonically similar tunes alongside your recent favorites. The server will also look back in time to make a few historical mixes based on past habits, too, so you have more to explore.

The company is also rolling out new radio features to address the removal of the popular Plex Mix feature a few years ago, after a metadata provider change. It now sees the new Sonic data as a way to replace the feature with Track Radio and Album Radio, which play either tracks or full albums that are sonically similar, respectively.

Other additions arriving alongside the Super Sonic launch include a new way to organize and filter albums by type (e.g. demos, live albums, etc.) and an “on this day” feature that reminds you of notable album milestones — like album releases that took place 20, 30 or 50 years ago.

To use the new sonic analysis feature, Plex users will need to be paid Plex Pass subscribers, and will need to be running Plex Media Server v1.24.0 on a macOS, Windows or Linux machine. ARM CPUs are not supported, however.

Plex has been working over the years towards making its subscription service more appealing to power users, who are a smaller part of the company’s some 25 million registered users. But the company is no longer fully dependent on subscriber revenue to remain profitable, as it’s expanded into the free, ad-supported streaming market and raised funding.

Today, Plex’s larger focus is on expanding the streaming business into areas like rentals, purchases and subscription content. But as Super Sonic proves, the team at Plex will continue to explore technology that will appeal to its core audience of digital media collectors and enthusiasts.

News: Reddit is raising up to $700M in Series F funding

• August 12, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Earlier this year, Reddit raised $250 million, bringing the 16-year-old site up to around $800 million in total funding. Today, it announced plans for an even more massive windfall, with a Series F led by Fidelity. The company has secured $410 million, with plans to raise up to $700 million, putting Reddit at a $10

Earlier this year, Reddit raised $250 million, bringing the 16-year-old site up to around $800 million in total funding. Today, it announced plans for an even more massive windfall, with a Series F led by Fidelity. The company has secured $410 million, with plans to raise up to $700 million, putting Reddit at a $10 billion valuation.

The company says funding will go toward building out community and advertising efforts and increasing headcount.

“These efforts require us to grow our teams and make smart bets on how to make Reddit better, faster, easier to use, and more empowering for communities,” Reddit writes. “We are also evolving as a business, maturing, and building the operational structures that will help propel us into the future with transparency, values and integrity.”

As we noted back in February, an extraordinarily strange couple of years found the content aggregation service playing a key role in rollercoaster stock figures for companies like Gamestop and AMC, by way of the r/WallStreetBets subreddit. It also kicked off 2021 with a short Super Bowl spot. All of that helped lead to a doubling of the company’s valuation to $6 billion.

For now, it seems, the hype train is continuing. In Q2, Reddit broke $100 million in advertising revenue for the first time, marking a 192% year-over-year increase for the quarter. The site now attracts 50 million daily visitors and hosts 100,000 active subreddits. In March, it announced Drew Vollero would be joining on the site’s first-ever CFO, after assisting with Snap’s IPO efforts, four years prior.

In an interview with The New York Times, cofounder Steve Huffman notes that it hadn’t planned to raise another round so quickly, but ultimately couldn’t turn down what Fidelity was offering. He adds that the funding will also factor into Reddit’s eventual IPO plans.

“We are still planning on going public, but we don’t have a firm timeline there yet,” he told the paper. “All good companies should go public when they can.”

News: TikTok to add more privacy protections for teenaged users, limit push notifications

• August 12, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

TikTok today becomes the latest tech company to roll out increased protections for minors on its platform in the wake of increased regulatory scrutiny. The company says it will introduce a series of product changes for teen users aged 13 to 17, aimed at making their TikTok experience more private, safer and less addictive. TikTok’s

TikTok today becomes the latest tech company to roll out increased protections for minors on its platform in the wake of increased regulatory scrutiny. The company says it will introduce a series of product changes for teen users aged 13 to 17, aimed at making their TikTok experience more private, safer and less addictive. TikTok’s news follows similar moves recently announced by other tech companies catering to teens, including Google and YouTube, as well as Instagram.

The changes TikTok plans to roll out over the coming months will address in-app messaging, the public nature of users’ videos, the default download settings for videos and TikTok’s use of push notifications.

This expands on the changes to privacy settings and defaults for users under the age of 18 that TikTok introduced in January. At the time, TikTok debuted stricter rules for teens aged 13 to 15 and slightly more permissive settings for users 16 to 17 focused on default account types, commenting and the use of TikTok’s interactive features, like Stitch and Duet.

Now, TikTok says new users aged 16 to 17 will have their Direct Message setting be set to “No One” by default and existing users would be prompted to review and confirm their settings the next time they use the messaging feature.

The company won’t prevent teens from using Direct Messages, however, but they will have to make a more explicit choice to do so.

The app will also now display a pop-up message when a teen under the age of 16 publishes their first video that asks them to choose who can watch their content — either followers, friends only or only themselves. (The “Everyone” option is disabled.) Before, TikTok had limited who would come across the accounts belonging to teens under the age of 16, which would reduce the visibility of their content to only followers they approved, when using the default settings. Now, it’s more directly pushing teens to make a choice about how public they want their content to be — and they have to decide in order for the video to be published, TikTok notes.

TikTok also said it will disable Duet and Stitch for users under 16, but this is not new — it was a part of the privacy changes that rolled out in January.

Separately, teens 16 to 17 will now be asked to make a decision about whether or not their videos can be downloaded by others. While TikTok won’t prevent the teens from making their content downloadable, it will pop up a box that asks them to reconfirm their choice, while reminding them that this means the videos could be shared to other platforms. (Downloads remain disabled for users 13 to 15, meanwhile.)

The final change is perhaps the most interesting because it’s something neither YouTube nor Instagram introduced: TikTok will limit push notifications.

Younger teens ages 13 to 15 won’t receive any push notifications after 9 PM, while those aged 16 to 17 won’t receive any notifications after 10 PM.

This part of the update is reflective of TikTok’s global mindset and its parent company’s Chinese roots. Today, China is in the midst of a tech crackdown, encompassing antitrust regulations, data security practices, tech business models and even social mores — like the addictive nature of video games, which state media equated to a drug like “opium.”

TikTok, too, has been called out as one of the most addictive social apps on the market, thanks to its advanced personalization technology, interactive design and simple interface, and psychological tricks that activate the pleasure center of users brains. The company already inserts “take a break” videos inside its main feed, because users have been losing hours to scrolling the app. Its decision to limit notifications is yet another acknowledgment of the app’s ability to lead users — and particularly younger users — to create negative digital media habits. By preventing notifications during certain hours, TikTok can point potential regulators to a feature that demonstrates it’s doing something to address that problem.

The changes come at a time when there’s a broader shift in the industry in terms of how tech companies cater to their younger users, as concerns about screen time, addictiveness, online abuse, data collection, privacy and more have been brought to light.

In the U.S., Congress has been pressuring companies to do more to protect younger users from the more harmful and negative impacts of technology.

One key piece of legislation in the works is an update to the decades-old children’s privacy law, COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act). A new bill, the Protecting the Information of our Vulnerable Children and Youth Act, would expand COPPA to include teens under the age of 18 and prevent tech companies from using targeted advertising, among other things.

As a result, tech companies have been revamping their products to make teens’ experience more private and they’ve increased protections, including over how teens’ data is collected and used by advertisers.

TikTok was early to take action on protections to teens, as a result of the multimillion-dollar fine by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission for earlier violations of children’s privacy laws in a crackdown by the government agency that later extended to YouTube. Beyond the privacy changes from earlier in the year and take a break reminders, TikTok also led the market by bundling parent controls inside its app with the Family Pairing feature. The company also offers other resources for parents, including educational safety videos and parental guides. And it brought in outside experts to advise on policy creation, with the introduction of the TikTok Content Advisory Council.

“Our priority is to ensure teens on TikTok have a safe and age-appropriate experience as they create and share on our platform,” said Tracy Elizabeth, TikTok’s Global Minor Safety Policy Lead, in a statement about today’s changes. “This announcement builds on our industry-leading efforts to make all accounts under 16 private by default, age-restrict features like direct messaging, and empower parents with Family Pairing,” she said.

News: Contact, a platform for creatives backed by Maisie Williams, raises $1.9M Seed led by Founders Fund

• August 12, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

With the pandemic digitizing every aspect of our lives, the Creator Economy has taken off like never before, with some estimates saying it’s now a $100Bn+ market. And yet, managing your professional life as a model, actor, writer or designer remains a mish-mash of emails, manual booking processes, and dreaded PDFs. Creatives face late payments,

With the pandemic digitizing every aspect of our lives, the Creator Economy has taken off like never before, with some estimates saying it’s now a $100Bn+ market. And yet, managing your professional life as a model, actor, writer or designer remains a mish-mash of emails, manual booking processes, and dreaded PDFs. Creatives face late payments, often opaque industry practices, even as top talent agencies have collectively achieved a valuation of $20Bn in value. But while modeling talent can be charged as much as a 20-40% commission fee, social media has been gradually displacing traditional agencies by reducing the barriers to entry and making talent more accessible. However, as everyone knows, social media is nowhere near a place anyone can manage their career.

Late last year the Contact platform launched, initially offering models a way to take bookings and manage some aspects of their work. It’s now looking to address the wider problems referred to above, with a new round of funding involving some key players in the creative industries.

It’s backed and supported by Maisie Williams, best known for her work on Game of Thrones, who has become Creative Strategist and Advisor to the startup after becoming a passionate advocate for better conditions for creatives in the industry.

Contact has now raised a $1.9 million (£1.4 million) Seed round of funding led by Founders Fund. Also participating is LAUNCH (the fund led by investors Jason Calacanis), Sweet Capital (via Pippa Lamb), Rogue VC (via Alice Lloyd George) and Angel investors Simon Beckerman (co-founder of Depop), Eric Wahlforss (co-founder of SoundCloud and now Dance), Abe Burns and Joe White.

Although Contact’s initial incarnation is addressing the modeling world, its vision is far bigger. Contact co-founder and CEO Reuben Selby — a fashion designer who was formerly of William’s founding team, when she started her career — has worked with Nike, Thom Browne, and JW Anderson. He says the platform aims to become a scalable back-end solution across the $104.2 Billion Creator Economy, “democratizing” access to the world’s best creative talent.

Selby, who recently spoke about being a founder with autism is also the founder and creative director of his own label Reuben Selby, and co-founder of Cortex a creative agency and community. Selby is joined by CTO Josh McMillan previously of Deliveroo, Daisie, the Government Digital Service, and among others.

While its competitors might, broadly speaking, include Patreon, Creatively, and The Dots, it’s fair to say that Contact’s vision to bring many aspects of these platforms under one roof could be described as ambitious, it is also tantalising.

In a radical move for what is an industry dominated by agencies, individuals and businesses can discover and book creators and creative services directly, without going through an agency.

Contact initially launched its platform in October 2020 with the ability to discover and book fashion models, but post-fundraising plans to roll out other creative verticals such as photographers, stylists, videographers, and more.

Selby says the idea for Contact has been informed by his own personal experiences trying to break into the creative industry as a model, photographer, and creative director. After finding scant methods for secure and safe ways to get paid – while booking companies lacked basic technological tools – he realized that ‘middle-men’ and agencies were there main ones that benefitted, taking cuts on both sides and often still delivering a sub-par-product.

So how does Contact work?

When a Creator joins, they are able to showcase their portfolio across different creative services and take direct bookings.

A business can then browse and discover talent using filters, shortlist creative talent, providing details about the job, and book creators directly. Creatives can accept or reject jobs via the web platform or, soon, via a smartphone app. Once the job has been completed, the talent gets paid out via Contact.

Since soft-launching within the modeling vertical, Contact says it has onboarded almost 600 creatives and over 1,400 clients including Depop, Farfetch, Nike, Vivienne Westwood, and Vogue. Users of the platform have increased 100% YoY, says the startup.

Selby says Contact intends to remain in the background and allow the talent to brand itself independently across different verticals. Crucially, Contact does not take money from creators, only booking companies, from which it will levy a 20% fee on transactions.

Commenting, Trae Stephens, Partner at Founders Fund, said: “We are always excited when we find founders who seem to have been born to build a specific company. Reuben definitely seems like one of those founders. We are really excited to watch the company scale and expand into new creative verticals.”

Pippa Lamb, Partner at Sweet Capital, added: “The team at Contact have been pushing frontiers in the creator economy long before ‘the creator economy’ became a buzzword. Contact possesses a rare combination of world-class technical talent with the raw innovation of today’s most creative minds. We are excited about this next chapter.”

Williams, best known for playing Arya Stark on Game of Thrones, is no stranger to working on startups. She previously contributed to the Daisie platform, which continues to connect creators with one another to work on each others’ projects, helping creators find collaborators for their art.

But clearly her desire to disrupt the creative world largely controlled by ‘middle men’ was not sated by the experience.

Speaking to me in an exclusive interview, Williams and Selby outlined their vision:

Selby said the existing marketplace for models is just the start: “The vision has always been about creatives, and getting creatives paid for their work. We basically started out in one vertical, the modeling industry… and we’re in the process of rolling out new verticals so bringing on photographers, makeup artists, stylists, etc. But that’s a very very small part of the overall vision.”

He said the focus now is “on the distribution of work, how that relationship works with that audience, how they can monetize it. So it’s basically giving them a toolkit to monetize their creativity rather than just the physical constraints. That’s what we’re exploring right now. We have this marketplace but we see that as being a very small part, but the larger piece.”

He said the marketplace model can connect brands directly to creators or creatives, but, he said, brands continue to have a great deal of power: “The creators are just sitting there waiting for somebody to give them something. So we’re now working out how they can just distribute by their own work and monetize it in their own ways, with the back end of how all of the logistics work, and the operational side handled by the product that we’ve built, handling the payments and the licensing and insurance.”

Despite being a major Hollywood star, Williams told me the creative and entertainment industry she’s familiar with and works in remains stuck in an old world of emails and links, rather than the kinds of platforms the tech industry is used to building and using: “Being someone who has been represented by talent agencies for my career, that whole interaction online is emails. At no point are any of the assets digitised. There’s no ‘vault’ where all of my scripts go. There’s no place where I can upload all of my audition tapes. It’s always just a link in an email. There’s not really an industry standard. From an agency perspective, none of the work that they is very streamlined or directional.”

She says that need to change: “There’s a casting process and at the moment, and it’s a hugely dated way of doing things between the casting directors and the actors, the writers etc. We want to build a very streamlined process.”

Speaking about the investors he’s assembled to back Contact, Selby said the team chose Founders Fund to be their lead investor because of their approach: “The way that they work with founders… I found that personally very empowering. [They] give you a lot of freedom and space to think creatively. So there was a clear alignment.”

Talking about the other Angel investors in the round he said: “People like Eric and Simon are majorly connected in fashion and music culture in general.”

Speaking about how the entertainment industry might react to Contact, Williams said: “Actors have many other things that they do. Being able to have a platform that they can monetize all those other things is really important, especially because, as an actor you spend a lot of time unemployed.” But said the system is constructed in such as a way that “you’re only valuable as the auditions your agent puts you up for. It’s not very inspiring or rewarding. So a lot of actors make their own shows on streaming platforms or create their own documentaries or sell their work in other ways.”

She said Contact wants to be able to facilitate that through the platform, and for creatives to have more independence: “The film industry and the music industry is full of incredibly talented people who are multi-talented across many different industries. But they are still, kind of held by representatives and agencies and record labels or managers who have a lot of power in, sort of, keeping them ‘small’. Being able to introduce something which can offer so many other tools, I think, is really important.”

It’s clear that the vision Selby, his co-founders, and Williams have, is very big. The question is, will they be able to pull it off?

It has to be said, however, that the combination of a passionate Gen-Z-influential team (with added star power), a full-blown technology platform, heavyweight US investors, and Angels pulled from creative industries certainly points to the potential for success.

News: Construction tech startup Agora raises $33M in Tiger Global-led round amid 760% YoY ARR growth

• August 12, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Agora, a startup that has built a materials management platform for contractors, has raised $33 million in a Series B round of funding led by Tiger Global Management. 8VC, Tishman Speyer, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, Michael Ovitz, DST, LeFrak and Kevin Hartz also participated in the financing, which brings the startup’s total raised since its

Agora, a startup that has built a materials management platform for contractors, has raised $33 million in a Series B round of funding led by Tiger Global Management.

8VC, Tishman Speyer, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, Michael Ovitz, DST, LeFrak and Kevin Hartz also participated in the financing, which brings the startup’s total raised since its 2018 inception to about $45 million.

Construction tech is one of those sectors that has not historically been considered “sexy” in a startup world that often favors glitzier technology. But construction fuels the commercial and real estate industries, which in turn impacts all of us in one way or another.

Meanwhile, the $10 trillion construction industry has long been plagued with productivity challenges. In fact, according to McKinsey, labor productivity growth in the industry has been stagnant since 1947.

Maria Rioumine and Ryan Gibson founded Agora with the mission of making it easier for commercial trade contractors to order and track materials, automate manual data entry and give everyone involved in the procurement process a single platform by which they can communicate with each other.

The end goal is to help projects move along faster, and contractors to avoid unnecessary delays by reducing building costs. The bigger picture impact, Agora hopes, is that its SaaS platform can help make the “built environment faster and more efficient to build,” and thus help make cities “more affordable and accessible to all.” 

San Francisco-based Agora is tackling the problem in a very specific, niche way that is proving to be popular both with contractors and investors alike. Rather than attempting to be a blanket solution for all trades, Agora is focusing on specific trade verticals, one by one. For example, it started out with electrical and is now moving into mechanical.

“Last year, there was more than $101 billion worth of electrical work done. Our customers work on all types of products,” Rioumine told TechCrunch. “For example, we have customers that do power stations, some that build hospitals and others that build school classrooms and university campuses, and still others that build churches and casinos. The work that these contractors do is so essential.”

Agora’s annual recurring revenue has grown 760% year over year while its customer base is up 6x during the same time frame, according to the company. It has also tripled its headcount to 45 people and today is processing $140 million in annualized materials volume for its customers.

The startup wasn’t actively raising for the Series B — instead, investors were proactively offering term sheets, Rioumine said.

“A few investors that knew us well approached us about preempting the round,” she told TechCrunch. “Twelve days after the first conversation, we had multiple term sheets.”

Tiger Global Partner John Curtius said he was drawn to Agora’s “unique” trade-specific approach.

In his view, the startup is “defining the future of procurement in construction.”

“Agora is solving a huge and critical problem,” Curtius wrote via email. “Billions of dollars a year are wasted because of inefficient procurement processes and breakages in the supply chain.”

The platform specifically does things like give contractors the ability to: customize templates, create pre-approved materials lists and easily reorder frequently needed items, order from a catalogue that offers more than 400,000 SKUs and eliminate manual data entry, which reduces errors and automates basic processes.

By bringing both field and office teams onto one digital platform, Agora claims it saves office teams 75% of the time they spend processing purchase orders, and field teams 38% of the time their foremen spend on materials management. In total, the company said its technology can provide up to $300,000 of potential annual savings for its average customer.

The company plans to use its new capital to hire across a number of teams, as well as continue to expand beyond 30 states and into other trade verticals.

“There has been this really heavy underinvestment in tech in construction for a long time,” Rioumine said. On average, the technology spend as a proportion of revenue in construction is about 1.5%, “which is actually the lowest of the industries out there where the median is 3.3%,” she added.

“So when we think about just how large this industry is and how little productivity improvements there have been recently, I think now we have this amazing opportunity to really invest in technology and bring it on to the job sites and into trade contractors’ hands.”

News: Consumer goods software company Aforza bags $22M to open US headquarters

• August 12, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Built on Salesforce and Google Cloud platforms, consumer goods companies can use Aforza to digitally transform product distribution and customer engagement.

Aforza, developing cloud and mobile apps for consumer goods companies, announced a $22 million Series A round led by DN Capital.

The London-based company’s technology is built on the Salesforce and Google Cloud platforms so that consumer goods companies can digitally transform product distribution and customer engagement to combat issues like unprofitable promotions and declining market share, Aforza co-founder and CEO Dominic Dinardo told TechCrunch. Using artificial intelligence, the company recommends products and can predict the order a retailer can make with promotions and pricing based on factors like locations.

The global market for consumer packaged goods apps is forecasted to reach $15 billion by 2024. However, the industry is still using outdated platforms that, in some cases, lead to a loss of 5% of sales when goods are out of stock, Dinardo said.

Dinardo and his co-founders, Ed Butterworth and Nick Eales, started the company in 2019. All veterans of Salesforce, they saw how underserved the consumer goods industry was in terms of moving to digital.

Aforza is Dinardo’s first time leading a company. However, from his time at Salesforce he feels he got an education like going to “Marc Benioff’s School of SaaS.” The company raised an undisclosed seed round in 2019 from Bonfire Ventures, Daher Capital, DN Capital, Next47 and Salesforce Ventures.

Then the pandemic happened, which had many of the investors leaning in, which was validation of what Aforza was doing, Dinardo said.

“Even before the pandemic, the consumer goods industry was challenged with new market entrants and horrible legacy systems, but then the pandemic turned off pathways to customers,” he added. “Our mission is to improve the lives of consumers by bringing forth more sustainable products and packaging, but also helping companies be more agile and handle changes as the biggest change is happening.”

Joining DN Capital in the round were Bonfire Ventures, Daher Capital and Next47.

Brett Queener, partner at Bonfire Ventures, said he helped incubate Aforza with Dinardo and Eales, something his firm doesn’t typically do, but saw a unique opportunity to get in on the ground floor.

Also working at Salesforce, he saw the consumer goods industry as a major industry with a compelling reason to make a technology shift as customers began expecting instant availability and there were tons of emerging startups coming into the direct-to-consumer space.

Those startups don’t have a year or two to pull together the kind of technology it took to scale. With Aforza, they can build a product that works both online and off on any device, Queener said. And rather than planning promotions on a quarterly basis, companies can make changes to their promotional spend in real time.

“It is time for Aforza to tell the world about its technology, time to build out its footprint in the U.S. and in Europe, invest more in R&D and execute the Salesforce playbook,” he said. “That is what this round is about.”

Dinardo intends on using the new funding to continue R&D and to double its employee headcount over the next six months as it establishes its new U.S. headquarters in the Northeast. It is already working with customers in 20 countries.

As to growth, Dinardo said he is using his past experiences at startups like Veeva and Vlocity, which was acquired by Salesforce in 2020, as benchmarks for Aforza’s success.

“We have the money and the expertise — now we need to take a moment to breathe, hire people with the passion to do this and invest in new product tiers, digital assets and even payments,” he said.