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News: Arrows raises $2.75M to build out its customer onboarding software

• June 29, 2021
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This morning Arrows, a startup building software to help software companies onboard their customers, announced that it has raised a $2.75 million round led by Google’s Gradient Ventures. The round was joined by a host of angels, including funds from Sprout Social founder and CEO Justyn Howard. Per Arrows CEO Daniel Zarick, the company had

This morning Arrows, a startup building software to help software companies onboard their customers, announced that it has raised a $2.75 million round led by Google’s Gradient Ventures. The round was joined by a host of angels, including funds from Sprout Social founder and CEO Justyn Howard.

Per Arrows CEO Daniel Zarick, the company had bootstrapped until this round. That allowed the startup to allow dozens of smaller investors to take part in this funding event, including 28 micro-checks that it rolled into a single cap-table line-item thanks to an AngelList service that allows for smaller investments to be combined.

Arrows sells to software CEOs and heads of customer success, the people who care the most about ensuring that new customers get up and running with new digital products as quickly as possible. Per Zarick, successful customer onboarding to a new product or service can speed up adoption, helping boost revenue from usage-based products; it’s also generally known that stronger onboarding can also lead to better adoption inside of customer organizations, potentially limiting later churn.

Given the scale of the modern software market, Arrows is selling into fertile ground. That’s the reason that Zarick and his co-founder Benedict Fritz decided to stop being a two-person shop, and raise more capital. They were worried, Zarick explained, about suffocating their company without more capital.

Luckily for Arrows, one investor had already taken a keen eye to their work. Namely Gradient Ventures’ Darian Shirazi, who had reached out a number of times before the startup was even considering raising external funds. Per the Arrows CEO, Shirazi had already sent the startup his own portfolio companies as leads before he invested, some of whom have become customers. So, when Zarick and Fritz decided to pursue venture capital, there was a leading name already on hand.

The $2.75 million round was raised using a SAFE at a single cap, sans discount.

Arrows CEO Daniel Zarick, via YouTube.

Arrows initially launched its service in March, but is revamping its pricing this week, closing its self-serve model for the near-term.

It’s interesting to listen to the CEO of a seed-stage startup discuss evolving from a bootstrapped model to one backed by a good-sized amount of venture funding. Zarick described to TechCrunch in an interview how much his job was changing now that the company is working to scale up to a team of around eight. The company intends to stay at that human scale for a little while.

Per its CEO, Arrows can get along for two years with its current capital sans revenue growth; though we’d expect that now that it has attracted seed capital, other VCs will look to pile on — a trend that we’ve seen often in recent weeks and months.

The Arrows product is also going to evolve in the coming months. While attacking customer onboarding teams’ use of spreadsheets with modern software has worked thus far, the startup has lots of planned work ahead of it, including more integrations with external software. Let’s see how quickly we hear from Arrows again. I’ll wager anyone a high-five that it’s before the end of the year.

News: Construction robotics company Toggle raises $8M

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New York-based construction startup Toggle this morning announced that it has raised an $8 million Series A. The round was led by Tribeca Venture Partners and featured Blackhorn Ventures, Point72 Ventures, New York State and Twenty Seven Ventures. It follows a $3 million seed round raised in late-2019. Robotics in general have been a massively

New York-based construction startup Toggle this morning announced that it has raised an $8 million Series A. The round was led by Tribeca Venture Partners and featured Blackhorn Ventures, Point72 Ventures, New York State and Twenty Seven Ventures. It follows a $3 million seed round raised in late-2019.

Robotics in general have been a massively popular investment target during the pandemic. Construction startups have also begun to heat up. Early this month, Dusty announced a $16.5 million raise for its Field Printer device.

Toggle automates an entirely different part of the construction process. The company’s robotics technology specifically targets rebar, using robotics to assemble the foundational building material at a fraction of the time.

“At a time when global construction is accelerating to an unprecedented pace, Toggle offers a way to add capacity while saving time and cost on some of the largest types of projects,” cofounder and CEO Daniel Blank said in a statement, “We are especially grateful for our partners who are helping us to bring new tools and approaches to the fundamental building block of our built environment with a focus on renewable energy and sustainable urban development.”

Toggle says the new round will go toward expanding production on the tech. That includes increasing headcount and upgrading the production space to a new 50,000 square foot facility.

News: SaaS-focused Acceleprise rebrands, raises $30M in new capital

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TechCrunch has covered Acceleprise several times over the years, including a look at its mid-2020 accelerator startup batch from its three accelerators. The firm has long focused on business-to-business SaaS startups, helping them get their start in a competitive global software market. As of today, Acceleprise is now Forum Ventures, according to the group’s CEO

TechCrunch has covered Acceleprise several times over the years, including a look at its mid-2020 accelerator startup batch from its three accelerators. The firm has long focused on business-to-business SaaS startups, helping them get their start in a competitive global software market.

As of today, Acceleprise is now Forum Ventures, according to the group’s CEO and managing partner, Michael Cardamone, and it has a bushel of funds to power its work. And befitting its new name, the company is now more than merely a collection of software-focused accelerators.

In addition to a new, larger $17 million fund for its pre-seed work, Forum Ventures has also raised its first seed fund. The new seed vehicle totals $13.2 billion, with Cardamone telling TechCrunch that the group intends to write checks ranging from $100,000 to $650,000 into rounds valued between $1 million and $4 million. It’s an actual seed fund, in other words.

While it’s interesting that Forum has put together a seed fund that will invest both in its accelerator graduates and other SaaS companies, the firm’s new pre-seed investing vehicle is noticeably larger than its preceding accelerator fund. Why is it so much bigger? Per Cardamone, the group added a third accelerator since its last fund, helping explain the size shift.

The technology market is also simply more expensive in every way than it was, and Forum has expanded its staff, so more capital under management makes sense.

There is synergy between the pre-seed and seed funds, of course. Forum can now better defend early ownership in standout companies from its accelerator batches. But why keep the door open to investing in other startups that it didn’t help incubate? It comes back to the company’s new name, it turns out. Cardamone and the team chose Forum Ventures because of the work it has done to build a SaaS community that from time to time spins up companies that didn’t go through Forum’s programs, he said, and it wants to invest in some of them.

Reasonable.

Undergirding Forum’s new raise are results from its earlier funds. Its first accelerator fund, deployed from the end of 2014 through the next two years, has returned “86% of committed capital to date and the rest of the fund is marked at 3.36X and growing with 18 companies still live at various stages,” the firm shared in an email.

Funds 2 and 3 are a bit nascent yet to have similarly concrete returns; we’ll have to wait a bit to see how they perform.

But TechCrunch did want to know, regardless, what impact COVID-19 had on Forum and its various funds and batches. Did they catch a COVID-induced wave? We wondered if some good recent results may have helped the firm raise not only larger funds, but two of them at the same time.

According to Cardamone, the answer is somewhat. In its most recent pre-seed fund, the CEO said that its accelerator cohorts are seeing more startups raise faster seed and Series A rounds. And, as TechCrunch has written lately, they are, at times, raising Series A deals at lower ARR thresholds than we might have expected. So, it’s a good time to be putting pre-seed dollars to work, we reckon, provided that you have the deal flow.

Forum is now 11 people, including six women and one nonbinary individual. That’s about as diverse in gender terms as we’ve seen in the SaaS venture capital world. From its new seed fund, 53% of Forum’s investments have had a woman or otherwise underrepresented founder. Not bad.

Now let’s see if Forum can replicate its early accelerator returns with more capital, more financial vehicles and more people.

News: Orum raises $56M to help speed up intrabank transfers

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Orum, which aims to speed up the amount of time it takes to transfer money between banks, announced today it has raised $56 million in a Series B round of funding. Accel and Canapi Ventures co-led the round, which also included participation from existing backers Bain Capital Ventures, Inspired Capital, Homebrew, Acrew, Primary, Clocktower and

Orum, which aims to speed up the amount of time it takes to transfer money between banks, announced today it has raised $56 million in a Series B round of funding.

Accel and Canapi Ventures co-led the round, which also included participation from existing backers Bain Capital Ventures, Inspired Capital, Homebrew, Acrew, Primary, Clocktower and Box Group. The financing comes barely three months after Orum announced a $21 Series A, and brings its total raised to over $82 million.

Orum CEO Stephany Kirkpatrick launched the company in 2019 after working for several years at LearnVest, a personal finance site founded by Alexa von Tobel that was acquired by Northwestern Mutual in 2015 for an estimated $375 million. Tobel went on to form Inspired Capital, a venture capital firm that put money in Orum’s $5.2 million seed round last August. Prior to that, the firm also provided Orum with an “inspiration check” that was the first money into the business.

“Most Americans are not familiar with the intricacies of ACH [automated clearing house) or why it takes multiple business days to move money between accounts,” Kirkpatrick said. “But none of us can allow money to wait 5-7 days to hit our accounts. It needs to be instant.”

Her mission with Orum is straightforward even if the technology behind it is complex. Put simply, Orum aims to use machine learning-backed APIs to “move money smartly across all payment rails, and in doing so, provide universal financial access.”

Orum’s first embeddable product, Foresight, launched in September of 2020. It’s an automated programming interface designed to give financial institutions a way to move money in real time. The platform uses machine learning and data science to predict when funds are available and to identify any potential risks. Its Momentum product “intelligently” routes funds across payments rails and is powered by banking providers JPMorgan Chase and Silicon Valley Bank.

“They power the back end of our Momentum platform that allows the money to move on a multirail basis,” Kirkpatrick told TechCrunch. “They power our access to real-time payments.”

Orum says it serves a range of enterprise partners, including Alloy, HM Bradley, First Horizon Bank and Zero Financial (which was recently acquired by Avant).

The volume of transactions being conducted with Orum is growing 100% month over month, Kirkpatrick said. Most of its early growth has come from word of mouth. 

The remote-first company prides itself on diversity — in both its employee and investor base. For one, 48% of its 55-person headcount are female, and 48% are “nonwhite,” according to Kirkpatrick. Orum also recently joined the Cap Table Coalition — a partnership between high-growth startups and emerging investors who want to work to close the racial wealth gap — to allocate over 10% of its Series B round to underrepresented founders. For example, the financing includes investors such as the Neythri Features Fund, a group of South Asian women investing in the next generation of female founders and diverse teams.

Jeffrey Reitman, partner at Canapi Ventures (a firm whose LPs mostly consist of banks), told TechCrunch that those bank LPs conduct hundreds of millions of ACH transactions annually, 

“They need a path to achieving a state where funds can be transferred instantly,” he said. “Orum’s product paves the path for many players in financial services and fintech — and beyond — to partake in faster money movement without compromising key risk principles.”

To Reitman, the company’s major differentiators are its team, which he describes as consisting of “the best group of data scientists and engineers in the space.”

“Many of their customers consider the team to be instrumental in helping to set the risk dials on how they fund transactions by teasing out key data and insights from historical transaction data,” he said. “Second, Orum is building one of the densest and most comprehensive data sets around the risks of money movement. Better data means better risk models, and it will be hard for other offerings to match Orum’s approach to building this rich data set.”

Accel Partner Sameer Gandhi, who joined Orum’s board as part of the latest financing, agrees. He believes that in an 18-month period, Orum has built “game-changing technology and an exceptional team.”

“Orum is tackling financial infrastructure from its foundation,” he said.

News: Visier raises $125M at a $1B valuation for its big-data approach to HR analytics and planning

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The world of work has changed massively in the last year, and with it a rush of startups have emerged with new technology and approaches to improve how it is shaped, and specifically how human resources departments do their jobs. In the latest chapter, Visier, a Canadian startup that has built a big-data engine to

The world of work has changed massively in the last year, and with it a rush of startups have emerged with new technology and approaches to improve how it is shaped, and specifically how human resources departments do their jobs. In the latest chapter, Visier, a Canadian startup that has built a big-data engine to ingest and analyze information from disparate human resources and related applications to develop more accurate profiles of people and departments — useful when considering remuneration, promotions, and wider hiring budgets — has raised $125 million (USD), a Series E that the company confirms now values it at $1 billion.

The funding comes on the heels of the company seeing massive growth in particular in the last year, with companies scrambling more than ever before, in a new world of more hybrid and remote work, to get a better grip on how and what teams and individuals are doing. Visier said it now processes employee records for 8,000 customers, large and high-profile enterprises like Adobe, BASF, Bridgestone, Electronic Arts, McKesson, Merck KGaA and Uber that collectively represent some 12 million individual users across 75 countries.

New backer Goldman Sachs Asset Management is leading the round, with previous investors Sorenson Capital, Foundation Capital, Summit Partners, and Adams Street Partners also participating. Visier — pronounced “busier,” which co-founder and chairman John Schwarz joked you are not supposed to be when using its product — has now raised just under $220 million.

As Schwarz described it to me, the challenge that Visier is addressing is that while everyone uses HR management tools like Workday, Success Factors, any number of payroll applications and more — on average 20 applications per department, he said — to chart a lot of basics of how an employee works day to day or month to month, a lot of that data remains in silos and so it’s hard to get a “360” view based on all of it, and that’s before considering how to take that information and benchmark it against other information outside the business.

The solution that Visier provides to address that is a big-data engine that it has built that can connect to any and all of those apps, ingest the data contained in it, match it up to provide visualizations of the current state of things, and increasingly also predictive insights. Today, this is done typically for HR departments, but this has applicability to managers, finance departments and really the employees themselves.

“In the future we want to help everyone understand the policy today, which impacts the outcome tomorrow,” he said in an interview.

The move to build big data analytics targeting particular areas of an organization has been an interesting trend that has played out in other departments too such as sales, finance, risk analysis and other areas. The idea here is not unlike what data scientists have been working on for years with wider analytics questions: tapping troves of data from disparate sources to order it better, match it up with each other, to provide insight into wider trends and activities within an organization.

As data science becomes more democratized — and thanks to advances in no-code and low-code tooling, turned into tools that even non-technical people can implement and use — we will likely see many more use cases where this idea gets applied. After all, data is the new oil, but unlike actual oil, we seem to be supplied with an endless amount of it these days.

And yes, we’ve seen a real rush of HR tools come to the market in recent years — and see a lot of funding in the current climate as their businesses see customer interest rise — they include HR platforms like Hibob, HR aimed at particular verticals like Personio or Factorial, or for distributed workforces like Oyster or Remote, or those that are building supercharged org-charts like ChartHop.

But Visier believes that there are no big-data players looking not to be primary-source repositories of information but big data integrators from other platforms. Schwarz notes that in most cases, the “competition” will be custom-made implementations built by systems integrators using Tableau or something similar but not the same as what it provides in terms of real-time analytics.

“It’s all about using data from other sources,” he said, pointing out that it’s telling that Workday tried to build something like what Visier provides, but that more than half of Visier’s customers also use Workday (meaning whatever is there is not quite doing the trick).

“Access to information about employees and the health of an organization has never been more critical,” said Holger Staude, managing director within Goldman Sachs Asset Management. “We’re excited to partner with Visier at this pivotal moment and support the company’s continued growth.”

News: Gympass, the corporate wellness unicorn, raises a $220M series E

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Gympass, the exercise and corporate wellness unicorn that originated in Brazil, today announced a $220 million Series E. The company has seen tremendous growth in the last few months, as more and more people are vaccinated and flocking back to the gym. Gympass is like ClassPass, but on steroids. However, unlike ClassPass’ BTC model, Gympass

Gympass, the exercise and corporate wellness unicorn that originated in Brazil, today announced a $220 million Series E. The company has seen tremendous growth in the last few months, as more and more people are vaccinated and flocking back to the gym.

Gympass is like ClassPass, but on steroids. However, unlike ClassPass’ BTC model, Gympass partners with employers who then pay a flat fee for the platform (an app) which then allows their employees to choose from several wellbeing plans that give them access to myriad in-person gyms and studios, and a directory of health apps, such as Calm. The offerings are broken up into the following categories: physical health, emotional health, nutrition and sleep.

According to the company, in May, Gympass saw a record 4 million monthly check-ins across its network of more than 50,000 global partners. In fact, for some of the partners, usage hit above pre-COVID levels. 

Between increased anxiety rates and documented weight gain during the pandemic, it’s clear that people are eager to get active again with the hopes of improving their mental health and their waistlines.

GymPass is the brainchild of Cesar Carvalho, a former McKinsey & Company consultant in Brazil who was always on the road and yearned for a corporate wellness product that would comply with his hectic work schedule.

“Some days I worked from home, other days I worked from the office, and then there was the time I was traveling. I could never go to the gym in one place,” Carvalho told TechCrunch. “I realized that my needs were the same as others,” he said.

He decided to pursue his business idea while he was at Harvard Business School.

“I’m one of those crazy entrepreneurs that drops out of their MBA to start a company, but looking back now, it worked out okay,” he said, later telling TechCrunch that Gympass is now in Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, the U.S., Germany, Spain, Italy, Ireland, and the U.K. 

Since its launch in São Paulo in 2012, the company achieved product-market fit fairly quickly, and its growth and expansion have been largely organic.

Originally, Gympass was a BTC concept, and one of its first clients was an executive at PricewaterhouseCoopers in Brazil. He liked the product so much that he eventually said to Carvalho, “Can’t I communicate this to my 5000 employees in all the cities where we have offices in Brazil?” With that question – and offer – Carvalho saw the need to pivot and build a B2B company.

After only three years in Brazil, one of his biggest Brazilian clients asked Carvalho to expand to Mexico, because his company had a large presence there and he wanted to offer Gympass to its employees. And so follows most of the expansion stories.

“We expanded to Spain, because we worked with a Spanish bank in Mexico, and they wanted their employees in Spain to have access to our product,” he said.

This round, which doubles the company’s valuation to $2.2 billion, includes participation from SoftBank, General Atlantic, More Strategic Ventures, Kaszek Ventures and Valor. Carvalho plans to use the money to grow the company in the U.S., expand its offerings, and work on making the tech smarter. 

“We want [the app] to be able to recommend the best partners for your complete well-being journey based on your workout patterns, for example: ‘This is the best meditation app for you to use with your workout profile,’” Carvalho said.

News: 4G Clinical’s clinical trial management software attracts over $200M in new funding

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The pandemic significantly changed how we do medical research, and now companies are trying to figure out what trends will stay and which ones will go. One that 4G Clinical is hoping will survive the pandemic is a need for speed and flexibility in therapeutics trials.  4G Clinical creates software to run the back-end of

The pandemic significantly changed how we do medical research, and now companies are trying to figure out what trends will stay and which ones will go. One that 4G Clinical is hoping will survive the pandemic is a need for speed and flexibility in therapeutics trials. 

4G Clinical creates software to run the back-end of a clinical trial. That means randomizing patients into treatment and placebo groups, locating medicines and placebos, keeping the supply of those medicines stocked, and, at least during the pandemic, delivering those medicines to patients. All of these tasks fall under the umbrella of Randomized Trial Supply Management, or RTSM for short. 

Specifically, 4G Clinical’s software, called Prancer, uses natural language processing to take specific requirements needed to manage a clinical trial, which are often written in long, complex documents, and configures them into a platform.

The fastest the company has been able to move from a phone call to the first dose in a clinical trial was 6 days – a sprint that created the software needed for a COVID-19 study during the pandemic. That was an exceptionally fast case, but in general, 4G Clinical says it can beat standard timelines by considerable margins.

“Most vendors in the world would say that they are probably, you know, between 10 and 16 weeks from, you know, from the kicking off a study until they can dose a patient,” says Dave Kelleher, a company co-founder. “Our typical timeline is generally four to six weeks post spec signature.” 

Generally, large pharmaceutical companies are capable of creating these trial management systems internally. Small companies, however, may not have the capability to do so. 4G Clinical goal is to provide a service that can be of use to both. 4G Clinical has currently designed systems for over 230 companies – though the company would not disclose the specific trials in which its systems are being used. 

4G clinical is also announcing over $200 million in a growth equity round led by Goldman Sachs. Before Goldman, the primary investment came from Boston-based Schooner Capital and First Analysis, a VC firm out of Chicago. 

Kelleher declined to say what the plans for the round were, other than company has plans to pursue more go-to-market strategies and R&D, and ultimately aims to “take up as much air” in the eClinical and RTSM space as possible. 

The eClinical market is expected to reach about $14.7 billion by 2027. RTSM made up about 17 percent of market share in 2020. With the complexity of clinical trials increasing, and the number of trials growing – even after COVID-19 related issues shut many trials down in 2020 – there may be room for more growth. 

Before COVID-19, there was evidence that the amount of clinical trials had steadily been increasing. In 2000, there were 2,119 clinical trials registered at Clinicaltrials.gov. By 2010, 100,208, and by 2020, 362,532 registered by the end of the year (that includes massive slowdowns created by the pandemic for non-COVID research). 

Within that landscape, there is some evidence that sponsors of clinical trials are using more external applications to manage those clinical trials. Of 500 clinical operations professionals respondents surveyed by Veeva (another eClinical company, keep in mind) found that 63 percent were using an RTSM system, up from about 43 percent in 2017. 

4G Clinical, generally, is looking to benefit from the increased public attention to the clinical trials process, and the flexibility that the pandemic has created for sponsors to get creative with clinical trial designs. 

The pandemic did encourage some innovation in this regard. Take, for example, the World Health Organization’s SOLIDARITY trial, which used an adaptive trial design in which multiple drugs could be tested at once. Drugs that showed no promise mid-way through the trial could be dropped (as hydroxychloroquine was in June 2020). The adaptive part, in short, allows for mid-trial tweaks. 

It’s not the traditional design of the gold-standard randomized controlled clinical trial, but it did glean a significant amount of knowledge in a short period of time. After seven months, three of four drugs tested showed no effect on mortality, whereas the fifth remdesivir, showed some limited promise. 

Adaptive trial designs weren’t unheard of before the pandemic – the FDA had actually released guidance on adaptive clinical trials in 2019. But the post-pandemic landscape might encourage more flexibility in this regard, and with it, increase a need for software that can be tweaked to accommodate such changes. 

“I think that we saw some regulatory hurdles reduced as part of this process that allows for more creativity in study design,” says Kelleher. “Probably the most important thing for us is our flexibility, we can make changes to studies very rapidly – to live studies.” 

4G Clinical and other RTSM software like it, are looking to hone tools that already exist within clinical trials – specifically software used to actually run them. It’s an area of research that the team itself has both a personal stake in, and strong industry knowledge. 

Kelleher was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis at the age of 23 (a disease to which there is still no definitive cure), and previously founded the Portland-based ACME business consulting. His co-founder Ed Tourtellotte, lost his wife to breast cancer around the same time. Neither have a background in pharmacology, but rather, the team is tackling drug development through streamlining clinical trial software. 

By contrast, other companies aim to streamline clinical trial processes through A.I-based drug target identification, an especially hype-induced area of the space in which investment quadrupled to $13.9 billion between 2019 and 2020. Clinical trial management software may seem more mundane, but it’s still an essential part of running Phase III and most Phase II studies. 

Tourtellotte has designed bespoke software systems for major drug developers, including Pfizer’s Impala system (used in 80 percent of Pfizer’s clinical trials for the past 20 years, says Kelleher) and another system Trident, which was sold to Bioclinica in 2009 (along with Tourtoulette’s company, Tourtellotte Solutions). Trident was utilized by GlaxoSmithKlein for clinical trials in 2010. 

At this point, the company has declined to confirm a total amount of funding, but in 2020, revenue grew 110 percent with just ten percent of its portfolio focused on COVID-19 related projects. 

News: Alphabet’s Wing launches OpenSky drone airspace authorization app in US

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I love testing drones. It’s a lot of fun, and a nice way to mix up my standard review cycle. But I’ve altogether given up on testing them around here. Granted, living in Queens, NY presents a unique combination of obstacles, including population density, two major international airports and a prison – but restrictions have

I love testing drones. It’s a lot of fun, and a nice way to mix up my standard review cycle. But I’ve altogether given up on testing them around here. Granted, living in Queens, NY presents a unique combination of obstacles, including population density, two major international airports and a prison – but restrictions have made it next to impossible to fly around here.

Knowing precisely where the nearest open airspace is can get tricky, particularly in large cities like New York. Today, Alphabet’s drone-delivery subsidiary Wing announced that it’s launching its OpenSky app in the U.S. on Google Play and the iOS App Store.

Image Credits: Wing

The app was launched in Australia back in 2019 for both hobbyist and commercial drone pilots, with help from the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA). The U.S. version was created with input from the FAA for operation in Low Altitude Authorization and Notification Capability (LAANC) airspaces.

Using the app, drone operators can request approval to operate in spaces like those around areas, expediting a process that would traditionally take days or weeks to go through.

“Why is a drone delivery company investing in an operator app?” Wing asks rhetorically in a blog post. “Because with nearly two million registered drones in the U.S. already, regulatory compliance of all drones will allow them to share the sky safely. Moreover, compliance will ultimately expand the uses and benefits of drones — among them emergency response, commercial inspections and contactless delivery — to more people.”

The app is available for users in the U.S. starting today.

News: Artisan home decor retailer The Citizenry raises $20M in Series B funding

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The Citizenry announced today that it raised $20 million in Series B funding in partnership with NextWorld Evergreen. A direct-to-consumer home decor retailer, The Citizenry works with artisans from around the world to produce limited-edition runs of handcrafted, hand-numbered home goods. In October, The Citizenry opened its first brick-and-mortar store in New York City, and

The Citizenry announced today that it raised $20 million in Series B funding in partnership with NextWorld Evergreen. A direct-to-consumer home decor retailer, The Citizenry works with artisans from around the world to produce limited-edition runs of handcrafted, hand-numbered home goods. In October, The Citizenry opened its first brick-and-mortar store in New York City, and with this round of funding, The Citizenry hopes to accelerate its development into a whole-home brand.

Co-Founder Rachel Bentley got her start at Bain & Company, where she worked in strategy consulting in global supply chains.

“I saw a lot of the challenges that were coming as a result of that, tied to income inequality, human rights, and the environment,” Bentley told TechCrunch. “But I also saw the tremendous opportunity that connections of global supply chains can create to hopefully move communities forward.”

Bentley and fellow co-founder Carly Nance, a brand strategist, noticed that there was a gap in the market for premium, thoughtfully crafted home goods. They took the leap to leave their corporate jobs to start The Citizenry with the aim to make a positive global impact and set more socially conscious standards for the home decor industry.

These are lofty goals, but Bentley’s experience in global supply chain strategy helped her develop a business model that prioritizes the fair treatment of workers.

Image Credits: The Citizenry

“One of the biggest challenges in working with artisan communities is that companies are there for one season, they place a large order, and their goal is to get a really high volume at a very low price,” Bentley says. “We came in and took the opposite approach. We tried to identify groups we saw a long term potential with, that we could partner with for the next ten, twenty, fifty years, to really help grow their businesses. Having sustainable income day in and day out, not just seasonally, is where you really start to see change happen.”

The Citizenry is a member of the World Fair Trade Organization (WFTO), and for over eighteen months, they’ve been going through the process to become fully verified through the WFTO’s Guarantee System. This means that the WFTO reviews every partner and conducts several day, in-person examinations of the artisans’ working conditions. On average, The Citizenry pays its artisans double the local minimum wage.

Image Credits: The Citizenry

“Social responsibility is much more important to our generation than previous generations,” Bentley said. “We want to feel good about the way a product was made, because we know we’re going to be living with the ramifications of how it was made, whether that’s environmentally or in terms of human rights.”

Bentley says that the rise in farm-to-table food shopping is indicative of consumers’ transition in values. But spending an extra few dollars on organic produce isn’t quite the same as shelling out $695 for a Portuguese leather headboard. So, The Citizenry may not undercut retailers like IKEA, but their price points are often cheaper than luxury home competitors like Williams-Sonoma, for example. The fact that The Citizenry can even compete with larger retailers while paying livable wages to artisans is a testament to their business model.

Since closing its Series A in 2019, The Citizenry has grown sales over 200%, with repeat customers driving 45% of sales. Over the same period, the company has supported 3,000 global artisan jobs. With its Series B funding, The Citizenry hopes to expand its furniture section — the most shopped category on its website — and invest in expanding its brick-and-mortar business after its SoHo store’s successful launch.

News: SpaceX plans to use its Starlink internet on Starship orbital launch to demonstrate connection quality

• June 29, 2021
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SpaceX’s upcoming Starship orbital test flight could end up being a veritable smorgasbord of its technological capabilities, as the company has filed with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to request approval to fly Starlink terminals on the spacecraft in order to “demonstrate high data rate communications” between the new launch system and the ground throughout

SpaceX’s upcoming Starship orbital test flight could end up being a veritable smorgasbord of its technological capabilities, as the company has filed with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to request approval to fly Starlink terminals on the spacecraft in order to “demonstrate high data rate communications” between the new launch system and the ground throughout the course of the trip to space and back.

SpaceX plans to show that its network of Starlink low-Earth orbit satellites can provide “unprecedented volumes of telemetry and enable communications during atmospheric reentry” even during the parts of the launch where communications signals are typically lost due to the presence of “ionized plasma” in the atmosphere during the re-entry phase (via Michael Baylor on Twitter). If it works, it could provide better than ever live data for SpaceX during its test flight, which should help with the Starship and Super Heavy launch system’s development — and it could mean better, more spectacular views for those of us just watching from home via livestream, too.

Including Starlink as the communications method for telemetry and other communications during the launch is definitely a functional improvement for SpaceX if it works as described, but it’s even more of a flex for the company in terms of showing off Starlink’s capabilities. The FCC filing ones that the terminals to be installed on the spacecraft are basically just its existing consumer terminals with new exterior housings, so if it performs well that could attract the attention of more consumer broadband customers.

Plus, SpaceX is also talking a lot about the capabilities of Starlink as a system to replace older, more distant geostationary satellites networks to provide things like connectivity on airplanes, on ships and in other in other transportation modals. Showing that it offers solid performance during a rocket launch is definitely going to encourage partners in those areas.

The filing does specific that its license to operate Starlink on Starship begin on August 1, which means either it’s planned for a launch after the one SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said the company is hoping to fly sometime in July, or the date has already likely slipped to the following month.