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News: Facebook to target Nigerian learners with educational app Sabee, created by its R&D team

• June 28, 2021
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Last fall, Facebook announced it was opening an office in Lagos, Nigeria, which would provide the company with a hub in the region and the first office on the continent staffed with a team of engineers. We’ve now spotted one of the first products to emerge from this office: an education-focused mobile app called Sabee,

Last fall, Facebook announced it was opening an office in Lagos, Nigeria, which would provide the company with a hub in the region and the first office on the continent staffed with a team of engineers. We’ve now spotted one of the first products to emerge from this office: an education-focused mobile app called Sabee, which means “to know” in Nigerian Pidgin. The app aims to connect learners and educators in online communities to make educational opportunities more accessible.

The app was briefly published to Google Play by “NPE Team,” the internal R&D group at Facebook, which has typically focused on new social experiences in areas like dating, audio, music, video, messaging and more.

While the learnings from the NPE Team’s apps sometimes inform broader Facebook efforts, the group hasn’t yet produced an app that has graduated to become a standalone Facebook product. Many of its earlier apps have also shut down, including (somewhat sadly), the online zine creator Eg.g, video app Hobbi, calling app CatchUp, friend-finder Bump, podcast community app Venue, and several others.

Sabee, however, represents a new direction for the NPE Team, as it’s not about building yet another social experiment.

Instead, Sabee is tied to Facebook’s larger strategy of focusing more on serving the African continent, starting with Nigeria. This is a strategic move, informed by data that indicates a larger majority of the world’s population will be in urban centers by 2030, and much of that will be on the African continent and throughout the Middle East. By 2100, Africa’s population is expected to have tripled, with Nigeria becoming the second-most populated country in the world, behind China.

Image Credits: Facebook NPE Team

To address the need to connect these regions to the internet, Facebook teamed with telcos on 2Africa, a subsea cable project that aims to serve the over 1 billion people still offline in Africa and the Middle East. These aren’t altruistic investments, of course — Facebook knows its future growth will come from these demographics.

Facebook confirmed its plans for Sabee to TechCrunch after we discovered it, noting it was still a small test for the time being.

“There are 50 million learners, but only 2 million educators in Nigeria,” said Facebook Product Lead, Emeka Okafor. “With this small, early test, we’re hoping to understand how we can help educators build communities that make education available to everyone. We look forward to learning with our early testers, and deciding what to do from there.”

Image Credits: Facebook NPE Team

The disparity between learners and educators in Nigeria greatly impacts women and girls, which is another key focus for Sabee — and the NPE Team’s efforts in the region as a whole. The company also wants to explore how to better serve groups who are often left behind by technology. On this front, Sabee is working to create an experience that works with low connectivity, like 2G.

We understand the app is currently in early alpha testing with fewer than 100 testers who are under NDA agreements with Facebook. It’s not available for anyone else beyond that group at present, but the company hopes to scale Sabee to the next stage before the end of the year.

There is no way to sign up for a Sabee waitlist, and the app is no longer public on Google Play. It was available so briefly that it was never ranked on any charts, app store intelligence firm Sensor Tower confirmed to us.

We should note that “sabee” and “sabi/sabis” have other, less-polite meanings in different languages, per Urban Dictionary. But the team has no plans to change the name for now as it makes sense in the Nigerian market where the app is targeted.

News: How one founder navigated a highly personal product category and a major shift in focus

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ON this week’s episode of Found, we speak to Rob Schutz, co-founder and Chief Growth Officer at Ro. Ro recently raised $500 million, bringing its total raised to date to near $1 billion. The digital healthcare startup now does everything from telehealth primary care, to operating physical pharmacies, but it originally began life as Roman,

ON this week’s episode of Found, we speak to Rob Schutz, co-founder and Chief Growth Officer at Ro. Ro recently raised $500 million, bringing its total raised to date to near $1 billion. The digital healthcare startup now does everything from telehealth primary care, to operating physical pharmacies, but it originally began life as Roman, a startup addressing men’s health, and specifically, erectile dysfunction.

Rob told us how a windy path from founding a daily deals site in the heady times of Groupon, to teaching at General Assembly, and being an early employee at Bark Box (now just ‘Bark’) led him to meeting up with co-founders Zachariah Reitano and Saman Rahmanian and setting up Roman in the first place. He also detailed how the company evolved, first to address women’s health as well, and eventually to providing much more broad-reaching remote primary care.

We talked about everything from managing the dynamics in a a founder triumvirate (including declarations of love), to dealing with the ongoing complications of a rebrand, to operating a business in an industry with dense regulatory requirements that vary considerably state to state.

We loved our time chatting with Rob, and we hope you love yours listening to the episode. And of course, we’d love if you can subscribe to Found in Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, on Google Podcasts or in your podcast app of choice. Please leave us a review and let us know what you think, or send us direct feedback either on Twitter or via email at found@techcrunch.com. And please join us again next week for our next featured founder.

News: 3 data strategies for selling to developers

• June 28, 2021
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The only thing holding you back is your attitude toward leveraging data to sell to your core customers.

Yes, developers are a tough crowd. They hate being sold to, and it’s pretty easy for traditional marketing campaigns to fall flat with them because they’d much rather get a recommendation from a colleague. Failed campaign after failed campaign has led many software company executives to throw up their hands and declare all sales and marketing to be pointless.

And that’s just wrong. Selling to developers isn’t impossible — it’s just difficult. I cover why it’s difficult and offer examples of exceptional developer-focused marketing in my new playbook. Part of selling to developers involves balancing two things: building out a strong organic marketing function and targeting your audience with the right message at the right time throughout their buyer journey.

Easier said than done, right?

Yep. I see it all the time. Part of what’s blocking marketers from widening the top of the funnel (driving more developers to sign up for their free tools) for their developer-focused businesses is ensuring they have the right data and measurement capabilities in place to understand how much impact their activities have on the business.

That’s mostly because these marketers, community managers and developer relations experts have the most luck with organic marketing. In this industry, organic marketing is one of the most challenging to measure.

Organic marketing means investing in channels like referrals, organic search, organic social (community) and direct traffic to your website (brand). New users from paid marketing, banner ads, events or sales reps (the most measurable channels) don’t count as organic. We measure the fruits of these efforts with a new metric called Natural Rate of Growth.

In a digital, multi-touch-point world, it’s getting more challenging to measure which users hear about your brand from which channels. That’s why tools like Orbit, Tribe and Mighty have gained traction so quickly.

That’s all good, and it’ll be a huge boon for community managers in time, but these tools still don’t solve some of the core data strategy issues I see developer-focused software companies fighting. These quick tips should help your team align around what needs to be done and what’s just a “nice to have” so that selling to developers feels less like a battle.

1. Treat data like a product where a core end user is the go-to-market side of the team.
2. Map your customer’s journey from discovery to expansion and track it religiously.
3. Don’t overthink it.

Treat data like a product

News: Fleet software startup LocoNav raises $37 million to expand in developing markets

• June 28, 2021
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LocoNav, a startup that is helping drivers and fleet owners in over two-dozen nations run their vehicles more efficiently and save money, said on Monday it has raised $37 million in a new financing round. Five-year-old LocoNav’s new financing round, a Series B, was funded by Quiet Capital, Anthemis Group, Foundamental, Sequoia Capital India, RIT

LocoNav, a startup that is helping drivers and fleet owners in over two-dozen nations run their vehicles more efficiently and save money, said on Monday it has raised $37 million in a new financing round.

Five-year-old LocoNav’s new financing round, a Series B, was funded by Quiet Capital, Anthemis Group, Foundamental, Sequoia Capital India, RIT Capital Partners, Uncorrelated Ventures, Village Global and others. The new financing round brings the to-date raise of LocoNav, which has offices in San Francisco and Gurgaon, to $47 million.

Scores of high-profile tech executives including Anjali Joshi (ex-VP of Product at Google), Anand Chandrasekaran (ex-CPO at SnapDeal and ex-Director Facebook), Manik Gupta (ex-CPO at Uber), Jai Shekhawat, Mark Licht, Akhil Paul, Vas Bhandarkar, Ajay Agarwal (Partner at Bain Capital Ventures), Abhi Ingle (COO at Qualtrics), Aadil Mamujee also participated in the new round.

Over half a million vehicle and fleet owners in 25 nations use LocoNav’s platform today that uses AI to help them manage their fleet operations, keep a watch on performance, and improve efficiency, the startup’s founders Shridhar Gupta and Vidit Jain told TechCrunch in an interview.

The startup’s platform delivers assistance and recommendations to drivers to make better choices. LocoNav also enables customers to track fuel usage, and any potential theft. Its platform supports over a thousand devices and sensors, enabling it onboard new customers very quickly.

The founders said that the market in which they operate has become very large over the past decade as many drivers and fleet owners begin to engage with tech platforms. Some of the players operating in this space include unicorns and decacorns Fleetcor, Trimble, and A16z-backed Samsara.

But these players are largely operating in developed markets, which has allowed LocoNav to win customers in emerging nations, the founders said. “In global developing markets, no one has ambitiously built a large player and we see ourselves as the first mover there,” said Gupta. The founders added that the biggest roadblock in the industry remains drivers and fleet owners who are not using any tech.

“LocoNav has built an end-to-end product that becomes deeply embedded in how fleet owners and operators run their business. As a result, LocoNav has been able to scale rapidly through word of mouth, allowing the company to become a hyper growth market leader while also being very capital efficient,” said David Greenbaum, Partner at Quiet Capital, in a statement.

By having such deep visibility into a vehicle, LocoNav has also become very attractive to a range of firms — from app-based cab aggregators, car vendors to fintech startups and sensor manufacturers, said Jain. The startup is also using its data insights to develop customer-relevant services and bringing them to a single platform, he added.

LocoNav plans to deploy the fresh capital to hire data science teams across San Francisco, Gurgaon and Bangalore. In the next two years, the startup aims to broaden its product offerings to help fleet owners cut their costs by up to 50%, the founders said.

“Shridhar and Vidit have found the ideal playbook for delivering world-class value-added services and products to fleet owners across the globe through the use of AI and software solutions. We are thrilled at how rapidly the firm has been able to expand its global footprint by replicating its own model and suite of offerings for fleet owners,” said Shubhankar Bhattacharya, General Partner at Foundamental, in a statement.

News: Samsung and Google preview wearable platform ahead of next Galaxy Watch launch

• June 28, 2021
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Samsung’s Mobile World Congress presser was, once again, all about wearables. The big news at this evening’s (or afternoon’s, timezone dependent) event was our best look yet at a redesigned interface for the company’s line of Galaxy Watches. One UI Watch – which takes its name from the Galaxy mobile interface — will share a

Samsung’s Mobile World Congress presser was, once again, all about wearables. The big news at this evening’s (or afternoon’s, timezone dependent) event was our best look yet at a redesigned interface for the company’s line of Galaxy Watches.

One UI Watch – which takes its name from the Galaxy mobile interface — will share a design language with the one found on the company’s line of Galaxy phones. The upcoming One UI Watch will debut at an upcoming Unpacked event later this summer, sporting the new UI, as well as the forthcoming joint Samsung/Google platform.

Image Credits: Samsung/Google

It was first teased at I/O last month that the two technology powerhouses would be teaming up on a wearables project. We still have little in the way of information about it, however, – including what it will actually be called.

The partnership was initially announced as a “unified platform” that would allow developers to create a single app for both Google’s Wear OS and Tizen, the open-source operating system Samsung has long relied on for its own smartwatches. As we noted at the time, third-party app development has proven a considerable hurdle for both companies as they look to take on Apple’s dominance of the space.

Among the benefits of the partnerships is that once a watch-compatible app has been downloaded on a connected smartphone, it will also be downloaded to the app. Along with first-party Google apps like Maps and YouTube Music, the list includes Spotify (naturally), Calm, Strava, Adidas Running and Sleep Cycle.

Image Credits: Samsung/Google

“Samsung and Google have a long history of collaboration, and whenever we’ve worked together, the experience for our consumers has been dramatically better for everyone,” Google SVP Sameer Samat said in a release tied to the news. “That certainly holds true for this new, unified platform, which will be rolling out for the first time on Samsung’s new Galaxy Watch. In collaboration with Samsung, we’re thrilled to bring longer battery life, faster performance, and a wide range of apps, including many from Google to a whole new wearable experience.”

Such a partnership seems odd at first blush – Samsung long ago eschewed Google’s wearable operating system in favor of its own heavily customized version of Tizen. Ultimately, however, it seems the two are united against the monolith that is Apple – which currently enjoys somewhere in the neighborhood of 40% of the global market. Samsung is in second, but even with Fitbit under its wing, Google’s still got a ways to go.

Samsung will also be showing off improved development tools that make it easier to create things like watch faces for the platform.

News: The first preview of Windows 11 is now available

• June 28, 2021
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Microsoft today released the first preview build of Windows 11 to those in the Dev Channel of the company’s Windows Insider program. If you have joined the Insider program and meet Microsoft’s new — and somewhat complicated — system requirements for the new operating system, you should see the update soon. This first preview includes

Microsoft today released the first preview build of Windows 11 to those in the Dev Channel of the company’s Windows Insider program. If you have joined the Insider program and meet Microsoft’s new — and somewhat complicated — system requirements for the new operating system, you should see the update soon.

This first preview includes most of the new features Microsoft has promised for Windows 11, including the new look and feel, themes, widgets, the new snap layouts and the updated File Explorer. But there are also some features that didn’t yet make the cut for this first release. Support for Android apps and the new built-in Teams integration, for example, are coming in a later release, but a preview of the new Windows Store is already available today.

Otherwise, though, you’ll get to try out the new Start menu for example (and fret not, you will be able to move the start button to the bottom-left if you don’t like the centered look — but you won’t be able to move the entire taskbar to another side of the screen). And while the Start menu is an iconic part of the Windows experience, most power users probably never use it and instead use their keyboard or the taskbar to start 99% of their applications. Still, Microsoft is trying to do something different here with its new “recommended” section that highlights newly installed apps and recently used files.

Image Credits: Microsoft

Another new feature you’ll likely spot right away is the new File Explorer, which now does away with the ribbon-style menu in favor of a flatter look (Microsoft calls it a ‘command bar’) and new, more modern icons across the board. It looks good, but we’ll have to give it a try to see if it hasn’t lost a lot of functionality in the process.

The File Explorer, just like every other app in WIndows 11, will also feature support for Microsoft’s new Snap layouts, which take the existing ‘snapping’ gesture or keyboard shortcuts in Windows that let you snap windows to any side of the screen and brings it to the maximize button. While the overall functionality isn’t new here, I’m pretty sure that a lot of Windows users never knew it existed, so this new feature will introduce window snapping to a lot more users.

Image Credits: Microsoft

The new widgets, too, are now prominently highlighted in the taskbar. Right now, there are calendar, weather, local traffic, Microsoft To Do and stocks widgets, as well widgets that show you recent photos from OneDrive and sports and esports news if that’s your thing. There’s also a personalized news feed.

The last new feature worth mentioning here is the new Settings menu. Ever since the ill-fated Windows 8, Windows essentially had two settings menus (the Control Panel and Settings). It looks like those confusing days aren’t over just yet, but the new Settings menu at least looks a lot cleaner than the existing one in Windows 10.

There are, of course, plenty of other changes in Windows 11. This is definitely more than just another bi-annual Windows 10 update with a few minor UI changes. Now we’ll just have to see how all of this works in the real world — though keep in mind that this is still an early release. The preview is now rolling out to Insiders, so we’ll likely hear more about how it performs soon. We’ll also put it through its paces in the coming days.

News: How Carnegie Mellon is helping build its own startups and keeping them in Pittsburgh

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The math is simple: Great research universities beget great startups. Pittsburgh certainly has little want for the former, with two world-class research schools — Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh – located in the city. The latter historically presented a challenge for Pittsburgh, as local startups often left for the greener (in the

The math is simple: Great research universities beget great startups. Pittsburgh certainly has little want for the former, with two world-class research schools — Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh – located in the city.

The latter historically presented a challenge for Pittsburgh, as local startups often left for the greener (in the sense of dollars) pastures of vibrant ecosystems like New York and San Francisco.

After speaking to current mayor Bill Peduto about how Pittsburgh is working to build its own startup community, I hopped on a call with Dave Mawhinney, the executive director of CMU’s Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship. The Center – named for Accel founder Jim Swartz – is tasked with helping grow the student body’s entrepreneurial ambitions.

This interview is part of TechCrunch’s City Spotlight on Pittsburgh. Join us on Tuesday, June 29 for the free online event where we will be joined by Mayor Peduto, Karin Tsai, director of engineering at Duolingo, and Carnegie Mellon University President Farnam Jahanian. Register for the free event here.

TechCrunch: Can you give me a bit of a brief history on how CMU has developed startups over the years?

Dave Mawhinney: First of all, I’m a CMU alum – and I’m not your typical academic. I had a 30-year entrepreneurial and venture capital career before I came back to Carnegie Mellon a decade ago to make it on-par with Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, Harvard and other great entrepreneurial universities[…] When I came back to CMU in 2011, 2012, there were several different activities across campus that were rather siloed.

There was an effort in the computer science department, there was an effort in the engineering department, there was an effort in the business school and they were all doing their own things and not necessarily getting the economies of scale of working together. When the university asked me to come back and run the Don Jones Center at the business school, I said I would only do so if you give me the agency to try to pull together all of our entrepreneurial activities under one rough.

You can create a really breakthrough technology, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve got the ability to market it yourself to create an effective business plan. How much is that built into the curriculum at CMU? And how much cross pollination is there between the various departments?

We have a sign at our front door that says, “the ideal startup team is hacker, hustler, designer.” The hackers are the technical people, the hustlers are the people that are willing to do business, to talk to partners. And I think designers are absolutely key because they are the glue that holds everything together. They make the products and services useable. It’s truly in our DNA and as we do our education in the four-credit classes, or as we do our workshops that are outside the classroom, that concept of design thinking, really getting to know your customer and solving real world problems that they’re willing to pay for now, is critical to getting the company off to the right start.

We also very much believe in the model of mentorship, so all of our startups get assigned mentors that are from the generalized background of the business that they’re going into. And then we have a roster of several hundred experts, from legal experts, accounting experts, marketing experts, manufacturing experts — any type of expertise that you can imagine that our teams can reach out to and tap into, to get questions answered and to get set on the right direction.

What kind of vetting happens on the university side? Does a startup have to pass a certain threshold to gain access to all of these opportunities?

Everybody’s welcome. Our doors are open to everybody, but there are some steps. When you come and sign up to work at the Swartz Center, you get to go to a first come, first serve table. There’s typically 20 of these tables available at any given time. The teams that show dedication, they participate in our programs, they’re showing up on a daily and weekly basis and they’re making progress, they’ll get a dedicated table, where they get to put their branding on the table and keep their equipment there. And the, ultimately, the teams that are making the most progress have customers and perhaps have raised a pre-seed or seed round, they get their own office. We have ten of those called “Startup Garages.” We do have that bit of meritocracy built in, as you go forward, but it is open to everybody. The truth is the founding teams, the entrepreneurs, they have to make it happen. We’re not going to spoon feed you.

Like a lot of other schools located outside of major metropolitan areas, I assume there’s a lot of bleed when it comes to leaving for different markets.

That has been true historically, but it’s changed. Really, the seminal event was when Google put an office in Pittsburgh in 2006. They have over 1,000 employees. Every major tech company — Amazon, Facebook, Apple — have all embedded hundreds of engineers in our community, so we’re growing really, really rapidly. Artificial intelligence was invented at Carnegie Mellon – and that sort of set off the robot revolution […] Now we’re the center of the automated vehicle community. Aurora is co-located here, Argo is here, Aptiv is here. We have a very vibrant community and we do want to continue to grow it.

But one of the challenges is getting that capital to come into the community. If you look at how much Uber ATG brought in, how much Argo AI and Aurora – collectively, those three companies, which have all licensed CMU technologies, they’ve all got over $7 billion in collective capital. Not all of it will be spent here, but a lot of it will be spent here. But that doesn’t necessarily trickle down to the next AI startup raising their first $3 million. So we do need to keep that connectivity to the money centers in the Bay Area and New York to ensure that our startups will get funded.

News: Consumer spending on apps hit record $64.9B in first half of 2021, but install growth slowed to 1.7%

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Consumer spending in mobile apps hit a record $64.9 billion during the first half of 2021, according to preliminary data from app store intelligence firm Sensor Tower. This figure represents a 24.8% increase in spending seen across both the App Store and Google Play, compared with the year-ago period. But while industry experts believe the

Consumer spending in mobile apps hit a record $64.9 billion during the first half of 2021, according to preliminary data from app store intelligence firm Sensor Tower. This figure represents a 24.8% increase in spending seen across both the App Store and Google Play, compared with the year-ago period. But while industry experts believe the accelerated shift to mobile fueled by the pandemic is a trend that will continue, it’s worth noting that — despite the new record — the growth rate for consumer spending has slightly slowed, and the download growth slowed more dramatically.

From the first half of 2019 to the first half of 2020, consumer spending on mobile apps grew 28.4% from $40.5 billion to $52 billion, for comparison — slower than the 24.8% seen in the current period.

Image Credits: Sensor Tower

Apple’s App Store accounted for $41.5 billion in global consumer spending during the first half of 2021, or 1.8x the $23.4 billion seen by Google Play.

However, Google Play continues to outpace on growth, having jumped 30% from the $18 billion in the first half of 2020 compared with the 22.1% growth from the $34 billion the App Store had seen. This is due, in part, to demand from markets like the Philippines, where the Covid-19 pandemic has forced business closures and quarantines, Sensor Tower noted.

Consumer spend outside of games was driven by sports, finance, business, book and entertainment apps. Subscription-based apps in the top 100 apps (excluding games) were a large part of this spend, too, contributing $8.3 billion during the period. TikTok remained a top grossing app during the first half of 2021, followed by YouTube and regular top earner Tinder.

Image Credits: Sensor Tower

Of course, mobile game spending continues to contribute to the largest part of the overall consumer spend, reaching $44.7 billion during the first half of the year. The App Store accounted for $26 billion of that figure, but growth slowed from 26.5% in the year-ago period to 13.5% from the first half of 2020 to the first half of 2021.

Image Credits: Sensor Tower

Top grossing games in the first half of 2021 were, in order, Tencent’s Honor of Kings ($15B+), PUBG Mobile (including its localized version for China, reached nearly $1.5B), Genshin Impact ($848M+), Roblox and Coin Master.

Mobile app download growth also significantly slowed in the first half of this year, the firm found.

Last year, the Covid-19 pandemic contributed to a surge of new mobile app installs around the world, as consumer looked to apps for work, school, shopping, heath, grocery, and more. During the first half of 2020, app installs had jumped 25.7% year-over-year to reach 71.3 billion downloads. But in the first half of 2021, downloads only grew 1.7% to reach 72.5 billion installs.

The App Store even saw a year-over-year decline in non-game installs in the first half of 2021, dropping 10.9% to 16.3 billion from 18.3 billion in the first half of 2020. Sensor Tower believes this is reflective of the increased competition for consumer attention in markets with a high number of iOS users, like the U.S., where businesses have been reopening and in-person activities are resuming.

Meanwhile, Google Play (non-game) installs climbed 6% in the first half of this year to 56.2 billion from the 53 billion in the first half of 2020. This could be tied to the demand for apps in markets where Android is dominant, like India, which has continued to be impacted by the pandemic. As a result, app adoption on Google Play was 3.5 times higher than on the App Store during the first half of 2021.

Image Credits: Sensor Tower

The (non-game) app with the most downloads was TikTok, which gained 384.6 million new installs during the first half of this year. But this is down by around 38% from the 619 million installs it saw during the year-ago period — a change that can be attributed to its ban from the Indian market last year. The rest of the top 5 most-downloaded app chart was dominated by Facebook, which scored the No. 2, No. 3, and No 4 positions, with Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, respectively. Telegram was No. 5 followed by Messenger, Zoom, Snapchat, CapCut and Google Meet.

Mobile game downloads, meanwhile, fell 22.8% to 4.4 billion on the App Store but grew 3.9% on Google Play to 23.7 billion in the first half of 2021.

The app data presented is a preliminary analysis that may become more precise over time. It’s also worth comparing it to related reports from other firms for a fuller picture.

News: VCs discuss the opportunities – and challenges – in Pittsburgh’s startup ecosystem

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“What we need is more capital – angel funds, venture funds so that entrepreneurs have a variety of funding sources to go to locally.”

Ahead of our TechCrunch City Spotlight: Pittsburgh event tomorrow, I spoke to current Mayor Bill Peduto and Dave Mawhinney, the executive director of Carnegie Mellon University’s Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship. Like many in the Steel City startup community, both share a focus on the historically difficult task of keeping startups in town.

For more on investing in Pittsburgh, be sure to tune in to our City Spotlight on Tuesday, June 29, where we will be joined by Peduto, Duolingo director of engineering Karin Tsai, and Carnegie Mellon University President Farnam Jahanian. Register for the free event here.

I asked Peduto and Mawhinney what the single biggest obstacle has been in building out Pittsburgh’s startup ecosystem. Both responded the same way: venture capital. Raising funding is, of course, a hurdle regardless of location, but many VCs have been reluctant to invest in startups outside of traditional hubs like San Francisco and New York.

“But one of the challenges is getting that capital to come into the community,” said Mawhinney, who leads CMU’s startup efforts. “If you look at how much Uber ATG brought in, how much Argo AI and Aurora  — collectively, those three companies, which have all licensed CMU technologies, they’ve all got over $7 billion in collective capital. Not all of it will be spent here, but a lot of it will be spent here. But that doesn’t necessarily trickle down to the next AI startup raising their first $3 million.”

Image Credits: Eilis Garvey/Unsplash

Peduto said growing the VC pipeline has been a focus during his time as mayor.

“I think we’ve been able to convince investors from the coast that the companies don’t need to leave Pittsburgh in order to be highly successful and see their investment pay off,” he told TechCrunch. “However, I believe if we had more venture capital arriving here to help to take early-stage companies into that critical next stage of expansion, it would build off itself and it would excel growth in all of the industry cluster, significantly.”

News: Real estate tech startup Side raises $50M more at a $2B valuation as it preps for an IPO

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Side, a real estate technology company that works to turn agents and independent brokerages into boutique brands and businesses, has raised “$50 million-plus” in a funding round that doubles its valuation to $2 billion. The latest financing comes just three months after the San Francisco-based startup raised $150 million in a Series D funding round

Side, a real estate technology company that works to turn agents and independent brokerages into boutique brands and businesses, has raised “$50 million-plus” in a funding round that doubles its valuation to $2 billion.

The latest financing comes just three months after the San Francisco-based startup raised $150 million in a Series D funding round led by Coatue Management at a $1 billion valuation. Tiger Global Management led the latest investment, which also included participation from ICONIQ Capital and D1 Capital Partners. With the latest capital infusion, Side’s total raised since its 2017 inception now totals over $250 million. Matrix Partners, Sapphire Ventures, Trinity Ventures and 8VC led its earlier rounds.

Side says that it is now “backed by the three top technology initial public offering (IPO) underwriters” and that the latest funding “sets the stage for a future IPO.”

The startup pulled in between “$30 million and $50 million in revenue” in 2020 (a wide range, we know), and expects to double revenue this year. In 2019, Side represented over $5 billion in annual home sales across all of its partners. Today, the company’s community of agent partners represents over $15 billion in annual production volume. And it’s predicting that by the end of 2021, it will have closed over $20 billion in home sales, positioning the company “as a top 10 national brokerage by volume.”

Today, Side supports more than 1,800 partner agents across California, Texas and Florida. It says it’s seen a 200% year-over-year increase in agent-represented home sales across its three operating markets of California, Texas and Florida. The company plans to enter 15 new states by year’s end.

Guy Gal, Edward Wu and Hilary Saunders founded Side on the premise that most real estate agents are “underserved and under-appreciated” by traditional brokerage models.

CEO Gal said existing brokerages are designed to support “average” agents and, as such, the top-producing agents end up having to do “all of the heavy lifting.”

Side’s white label model works with agents and teams by exclusively marketing their boutique brand, while also providing the required technology and support needed on the back end. The goal is to help partner agents “predictably grow” their businesses and improve their productivity.

“The way to think about Side is the way you think about what Shopify does for e-commerce […] When partnering with Side, top-producing agents, teams and independent brokerages, for the first time in history, gain full ownership of their own brand and business without having to operate a brokerage,” Gal told me at the time of the company’s last raise. “When you spend years solving the problems of this very specific community of agents, you are able to use software to drive enormous efficiency for them in a way that has never been done before.”

Existing brokerages, he argues, actively discourage agents from becoming top producers and teams, because agents who serve fewer clients can be forced into paying much higher commission fees on every transaction, which means the incentives between brokerages and top agents and teams are misaligned.

“Top producers want to grow and differentiate, and brokerages want them to do less business at higher fees and be one more of the same under the same brand,” Gal said. “Side, rather than discouraging and competing with top-producing agents and teams, enables them to grow and scale their own business and brand.”