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News: EU and Bill Gates make joint push for $1BN to accelerate clean tech

• June 2, 2021
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The European Commission has announced a partnership with Bill Gates’ sustainable energy funding vehicle with the goal of unlocking new investments for clean tech and sustainable energy projects totalling up to $1BN (€820M) over five years (2022-2026). EU-based projects the partnership will focus on initially fall into four sectors which are being prioritized for their

The European Commission has announced a partnership with Bill Gates’ sustainable energy funding vehicle with the goal of unlocking new investments for clean tech and sustainable energy projects totalling up to $1BN (€820M) over five years (2022-2026).

EU-based projects the partnership will focus on initially fall into four sectors which are being prioritized for their potential to deliver substantial reductions in regional emissions — namely:

• Green hydrogen;
• Sustainable aviation fuels;
• Direct air capture;
• Long-duration energy storage.

The goal is to scale technologies which are currently too expensive to compete with fossil fuel-based incumbent technologies.

The pair said they will continue to work on setting up the program over the coming months, with an eye on having something further to announce at the COP-26 conference in November.

It’s not the first time the Commission and Gates’ Breakthrough Energy organization have worked together on funding sustainable investment. But the scale of this latest partnership dwarfs the €100M fund the EU established back in 2019 with its venture investment funding arm.

Now the Commission has partnered with Breakthrough Energy Catalyst — a financing program within Gates’ organization that aims to accelerate the development and adoption of technologies needed to underpin a low-carbon economy — to mobilize up to 10x more than the earlier fund to build large-scale, commercial demonstration projects for clean technologies.

The overarching goal is of course to lower the costs and accelerate deployment of clean tech in order to deliver significant reductions in CO₂ emissions in line with the Paris Agreement.

The bloc is a major emitter of CO₂ but has committed to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, under the European Green Deal.

Gates’ philosophy with his 2015-founded Breakthrough Energy vehicle, meanwhile, is that renewables alone won’t be enough to avert catastrophic climate change — and investments in a range of high risk but potentially high reward technologies is also needed.

But given the lengthy time-scales needed for a return on these types of investments public-private partnerships look like a key piece of the financing puzzle.

Commenting on the partnership announcement in a statement, EU president Ursula von der Leyen, said: “With our European Green Deal, Europe wants to become the first climate-neutral continent by 2050. And Europe has also the great opportunity to become the continent of climate innovation. For this, the European Commission will mobilise massive investments in new and transforming industries over the next decade. This is why I’m glad to join forces with Breakthrough Energy. Our partnership will support EU businesses and innovators to reap the benefits of emission-reducing technologies and create the jobs of tomorrow.”

In another supporting statement, Gates, founder of Breakthrough Energy, added: “Decarbonising the global economy is the greatest opportunity for innovation the world has ever seen. Europe will play a critical role, having demonstrated an early and consistent commitment to climate and longstanding leadership in science, engineering, and technology. Through this partnership, Europe will lay solid ground for a net-zero future in which clean technologies are reliable, available, and affordable for all.”

On the EU side, funding for the partnership is expected to come from the bloc’s flagship R&D fund, Horizon Europe, and also via the low-carbon-focused Innovation Fund within the framework of the InvestEU program.

Breakthrough Energy Catalyst will mobilise equivalent private capital and philanthropic funds to finance selected projects.

The partnership will also be open to national investments by EU Member States through InvestEU or at project level, the Commission noted. It added that a call for expressions of interest for potential InvestEU implementing partners is currently open until June 30 2021.

Renewable energy and clean(er) transport were also key focus areas for the massive €750BN ‘Next Generation EU’ coronavirus recovery fund put together by the Commission last year — which said it would borrow money on the financial markets through the issuance of bonds for post-pandemic recovery — with that money pegged to be channelled through EU programs between 2021 and 2024.

The bloc’s lawmakers have also suggested that digitization and AI technologies — which are other areas it’s pegged for major investment — will play a key supporting role in Europe’s green transition.

News: Tier banks $60 million in debt from Goldman Sachs to expand scooter fleet

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Berlin-based Tier Mobility has raised $60 million to help the e-scooter company expand its fleet and its network of battery charging stations in 2021. The funds, which come from investment banking firm Goldman Sachs, come just weeks after Tier was awarded the London e-scooter pilot permit, alongside Lime and Dott. With a major new city

Berlin-based Tier Mobility has raised $60 million to help the e-scooter company expand its fleet and its network of battery charging stations in 2021.

The funds, which come from investment banking firm Goldman Sachs, come just weeks after Tier was awarded the London e-scooter pilot permit, alongside Lime and Dott. With a major new city on the horizon and hints of further expansion plans, Tier will need a significant upfront investment to cover everything from fleet orders to local warehouses to new teams.

In November, Tier also closed a $250 million Series C funding round, led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. The latest funds are asset-backed financing, meaning Goldman Sachs is essentially providing Tier with a loan that is secured by one of the company’s assets, probably its scooters. Tier did not respond to a request for specifics on the loan.

“The size of this highly scalable asset-backed debt facility is a game-changing first in micro-mobility, accelerating our expansion and cementing our market leadership in Europe,” said Alex Gayer, Tier’s chief financial officer, in a statement. “This facility leverages our recent equity raise and will enhance our capital-efficient growth.”

In addition to London, over the past year, Tier has added the coveted cities of Dubai and Paris to its list. It’s available in over 100 cities across 12 countries in Europe and the Middle East. With the fresh capital, Tier plans to extend its international coverage and invest in its multi-modal fleet, adding bicycles and mopeds to the mix.

The Tier Energy Network is Tier Mobility’s plan to place charging stations in retail stores to incentivize riders to swap scooter batteries.

The Goldman Sachs-backed funding will also enable Tier to expand its Tier Energy Network, a venture to place battery charging stations in retail stores across its coverage area. The energy network would provide an incentive structure for riders to take a minute at the end of their ride to swap the scooter’s battery and earn free credit, while shops can enjoy the extra foot traffic.

“Even amid a global pandemic, TIER has established a proven track record of profitable unit economics and asset longevity,” said Ben Payne, managing director at Goldman Tier, in a statement. “We are excited to help the European leader extend sustainable mobility to more people across the world.”

News: Home services platform Urban Company raises $255 million at $2.1 billion valuation

• June 2, 2021
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Home services marketplace Urban Company said on Wednesday it has raised $255 million in a new financing round and confirmed a valuation of $2.1 billion, joining over a dozen other startups in India that have earned the unicorn status this year. The new financing round — a Series F — was led by Prosus Ventures,

Home services marketplace Urban Company said on Wednesday it has raised $255 million in a new financing round and confirmed a valuation of $2.1 billion, joining over a dozen other startups in India that have earned the unicorn status this year.

The new financing round — a Series F — was led by Prosus Ventures, Dragoneer and Wellington Management, while Vy Capital, Tiger Global and Steadview participated in it. The Gurgaon-headquartered startup said* the new round features a primary capital infusion of $188 million while the rest is a secondary sale by some angel and other early investors. The startup has raised about $470 million to date.

Formerly known as UrbanClap, the seven-year-old startup offers a range of home services on its platform. Does your AC need maintenance work? Is the TV not working? The house needs a fresh coat of paint? Plumbing issues? Need your cleaned and disinfected? How about a haircut done at a place of your choosing?

These are just some of the services Urban Company offers to its customers, who can place an order using the startup’s app or the website and pick a good time and venue.

The idea of the startup came from its three co-founders, who in their early 20s were puzzled why nobody else was trying to take a stab at the industry, which remains largely unorganized, said Raghav Chandra, a founder of Urban Company, in an interview with TechCrunch.

What started as an idea is now a unicorn. The startup today operates in 35 cities in India, Singapore, Australia, the UAE, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. More than 35,000 service partners are active on the platform, said Chandra, who serves as Urban Company’s Chief Technology Officer.

“Urban Company is disrupting a large, fragmented industry that has seen low digital adoption until now,” said Ashutosh Sharma, Head of Investment for India at Prosus Ventures.

Through their technology-enabled platform and keen focus on providing high-quality, trained service partners, Urban Company has been able to achieve the very difficult task of productizing services. In addition, the initial traction with international expansion in geographies we know well is encouraging and presents an opportunity for significant growth into the future,” he added.

The startup’s fast-growth was abruptly punctuated last year after New Delhi enforced a nationwide lockdown to contain the spread of the coronavirus. Chandra said the startup began seeing recovery last year after the nation started to open up again and had its best month to date in March this year.

Chandra said the startup will deploy the fresh capital to further expand in the markets where it operates, and work on ways to supercharge onboarding, training, and safety of service workers on the platform. It is also looking to expand its technology team. The startup plans to file for an IPO within the next 24 months, it said.

Urban Company spends weeks on training and upskilling the workers that join its platform, said Chandra. The startup today also enables workers with expertise in one category to learn about other categories, hence increasing their odds of getting more work and earning more. Chandra said offering upskilling courses to the workers will remain one of the key areas as the startup expands.

*The startup had disclosed the new fundraise in a filing with local regulator in April, but co-founder and chief executive Abhiraj Singh Bhal declined to comment at the time, citing the rising coronavirus cases in the country.

News: Amazon confirms Prime Day will run June 21-22, an earlier than usual start

• June 2, 2021
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Amazon confirmed its annual sales event known as Prime Day will be held on Monday, June 21 and Tuesday, June 22. Bloomberg had previously reported these same dates, citing leaked records. The once-a-year mega sale had typically been held in July, when the shopping season goes through its usual lull. But due to the COVID-19

Amazon confirmed its annual sales event known as Prime Day will be held on Monday, June 21 and Tuesday, June 22. Bloomberg had previously reported these same dates, citing leaked records. The once-a-year mega sale had typically been held in July, when the shopping season goes through its usual lull. But due to the COVID-19 pandemic, last year’s Prime Day was delayed until October in most markets, including the U.S.

Despite the changes, Amazon said small and midsize businesses generated mo0re than $3.5 billion during the Prime Day event, Amazon said, up 60% from the year prior. However, it didn’t disclose its total Prime Day figures.

This year, Amazon will kick off Prime Day early with a new promotion aimed at supporting small businesses. Starting June 7 and running up until Prime day’s start, when Prime members spend $10 on items sold by a participating small business, they’ll receive a $10 credit they can later spend during the Prime Day event.

This deal will run in select markets, including the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Japan, and is the big promotion for small businesses in Amazon’s history, the company noted. More than 300,000 selling partners are participating.

Prime Day was originally conceived as a way to push more Amazon shoppers to convert to paying Amazon Prime subscribers by luring them with deep discounts across categories — including Amazon’s own consumer hardware devices, like Echo smart speakers or Fire TV devices, which have been regular best sellers.

This will again be the case, as Amazon promises savings and discounts across home, electronics, beauty, fashion and Amazon devices. And it will again extend sales to other areas of Amazon’s business, like Prime Video, Amazon Music, Prime Gaming and others.

One of those deals is live now, as Prime members are offered a four-month free trial for its on-demand music streaming service, Amazon Music Unlimited, which offers up to 70 million songs. The company recently added lossless streaming support as a free upgrade, following Apple’s move to do the same for its own Music subscribers.

While Prime Day has been running since 2015, Amazon has more recently begun using the event to put a stronger spotlight on how it helps small businesses in light of increased regulatory scrutiny and antitrust investigations over its business practices.

In addition to Congressional hearings which saw Amazon founder and (soon to be former) CEO Jeff Bezos hauled in to testify, DC’s Attorney General Karl Racine last month filed an antitrust suit against Amazon, accusing the retailer of stifling competition by exerting control over third-party sellers. The suit alleges Amazon fixed prices on its retail platform by prohibiting sellers from selling products for less elsewhere, creating an artificially high price floor across the online retail market.

The company is also facing antitrust investigations abroad, including in the E.U. The retailer has been accused of harming small businesses by leveraging nonpublic data from its third-party sellers who use its marketplace in order to copy the best-selling products and undercut its selling partners.

This reality stands in sharp contrast as to how Amazon presented itself during an upbeat press briefing, where it had leveraged actress Kristen Bell’s (“The Good Place”) likeability factor to promote how well small businesses were doing on Amazon. During the event, she “interviewed” favorite sellers, like dog food seller Pawstruck and artisanal self-care product maker Live by Being, who had nothing but great things to say about working with Amazon.

Bell, along with Karamo Brown and Mindy Kaling, will also be highlighting some of their favorite sellers on Amazon’s video shopping service, Amazon Live.

Amazon also gave a broader update on its small business sellers and related efforts. The retailer noted that, last year, it delivered more than 250 new tools and services to help its selling partners reach 300 million customers globally.

“It’s pretty incredible to think in the past year in the U.S. alone, our small and medium-sized selling partners sold more than 3.7 billion products as more than 7,200 products, every minute,” said Keri Cusick, head of Small Business Empowerment at Amazon, in a press briefing. “Overall, they average $200,000 in sales, up from about $150,000, and more than 27,000 American sellers had over half a million dollars in sales,” she added.

Amazon didn’t offer specifics about its upcoming Prime Day deals, but said that it will host hundreds of thousands of deals leading up to Prime Day from companies including Le Creuset, Tommy Hilfiger, Lego, Mattel and Black & Decker.

Alexa device owners can also shop early, starting on Friday June 18, by asking “Alexa, what are my deals?”

Prime Day will be available on Amazon.com or regional websites, on Amazon.com/espanol for Spanish-language speakers and in Amazon’s physical retail stores.

News: Tesla files trademark, hinting at Elon Musk’s restaurant concept plans

• June 2, 2021
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Tesla has recently filed a new trademark for its brand under restaurant services, a sign the company might be finally gearing up to deliver on an idea that CEO Elon Musk and other company executives have discussed publicly since at least 2017. The company applied for three new trademarks that will cover the categories of:

Tesla has recently filed a new trademark for its brand under restaurant services, a sign the company might be finally gearing up to deliver on an idea that CEO Elon Musk and other company executives have discussed publicly since at least 2017.

The company applied for three new trademarks that will cover the categories of: “Restaurant services, pop-up restaurant services, self-service restaurant services, take-out restaurant services, according to the May 27 filing with the United States Patent and Trademark Office that was first reported by Electrek. The application is awaiting examination and will be reviewed by an attorney around August 27.

You might be thinking, how does the restaurant industry fit in with the world’s most influential luxury electric car company? Let’s take it back to 2017, when then-CTO JB Straubel said at a FSTEC restaurant-technology conference that the company might move into the restaurant business. The idea was to turn EV charging stations into full-service convenience stores that also serve food. Tesla has tried out a scaled down version of that idea by creating lounges like the one at its Kettleman City, California Supercharger station.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk then expanded upon the convenience store idea and tossed out on Twitter — as he does — a restaurant concept. “Gonna put an old school drive-in, roller skates & rock restaurant at one of the new Tesla Supercharger locations in LA.”

A few months later, Tesla did in fact apply for a restaurant and supercharger station, but has been relatively quiet about the potential business venture since. The company, which recently dissolved its communications team, did not respond to requests for more information on Tesla’s plans to open a restaurant charging station, or whether other restaurants would be able to use the logo to create a similar business model.

Tesla’s iconic ‘T’ logo is featured on the USTPO application to be trademarked for use by restaurants. The company also applied for trademarks for the word ‘Tesla’ itself, as well as a stylized version of the word.

Tesla applied for a trademark under restaurant services for a stylized version of the company name.

With this filing, it looks like Tesla might be taking the necessary steps to move forwards with Musk’s plans to create a Sonic-meets-fueling station. This is not the first time the restaurant industry and the auto industry have collided. The Michelin Guide, in which the loss or acquisition of a star might make or break a restaurant, was originally compiled in 1900 by brothers Andre and Edouard Michelin who wanted to create demand for automobiles, and therefore, the tires they manufactured. So they created an extensive guide of restaurants and hotels, as well as mechanics and gas stations along the way, so people might be encouraged to use their newfound mobility to explore their taste buds and the world.

Tesla’s supercharger restaurant isn’t quite as revolutionary as that, but it does invite creativity to the EV game by providing people with another incentive structure to purchase a new vehicle – even if that incentive is only to appear trendy while basking in the nostalgic glow of the past. And who knows, maybe the waiters will serve up burgers on electric roller skates, too.

News: Cognigy raises $44M to scale its enterprise-focused conversational AI platform

• June 1, 2021
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Artificial intelligence is becoming an increasingly common part of how customer service works — a trend that was accelerated in this past year as so many other services went virtual and digital — and today a startup that has built a set of low-code tools to help enterprises integrate more AI into their customer service

Artificial intelligence is becoming an increasingly common part of how customer service works — a trend that was accelerated in this past year as so many other services went virtual and digital — and today a startup that has built a set of low-code tools to help enterprises integrate more AI into their customer service processes is announcing some funding to fuel its growth.

Cognigy, which provides a low-code conversational AI platform that notably can be used flexibly across a range of applications and geographies — it supports 120 languages; it can be used in external or internal service applications; it can support voice services but also chatbots; it provides real-time assistance for human agents and usage analytics or fully-automated responses; it can integrate with standard call center software, and also with RPA packages; and it can be run in the cloud or on-premise — has closed a round of $44 million, funding that it will be using to continue scaling its business internationally.

Insight Partners is leading the Series B investment, with previous backers DN Capital, Global Brain, Nordic Makers, Inventures and Digital Innovation and Growth also participating. The Dusseldorf-based company had previously only raised $11 million and spent the first several years of business bootstrapped.

Cognigy is not disclosing its valuation but it has up to now built up a concentration of customers in areas like transportation, e-commerce and insurance and counts a number of big multinational companies among its customer list, including Lufthansa, Mobily, BioNTech, Vueling Airlines, Bosch, and Daimler, with “thousands” of virtual assistants now powered by Cognigy live in the market.

With 25% of Cognigy’s business already coming from the U.S., the plan now is to use some funding to invest in building out its service deeper into the U.S., Asia and across more of Europe, CEO and founder Philipp Heltewig said in an interview.

“Conversational AI” these days appears in many guises: it can be a chatbot you come across on a website when you’re searching for something, or it can be prompts provided to agents or salespeople, information and real-time feedback to help them do their jobs better. Conversational AI can also be a personal assistant on your company’s HR application to help you book time off or deal with any number of other administrative jobs, or a personal assistant that helps you use your phone or set your house alarm.

There are a number of companies in the tech world that have built tools to address these various use cases. Specifically in the area of services aimed at enterprises, some of them, like Gong, are raising huge money right now. What is notable about Cognigy is that it has built a platform that is attempting to address a wide swathe of applications: one platform, many uses, in other words.

Cognigy’s other selling point is that it is playing into the new interest in low- and no-code tools, which in Cognigy’s case makes the integration of AI into a customer assistance process a relatively easy task, something that can be built not just by developers, but data scientists, those working directly on conversation design, and non-technical business users using the tools themselves.

“The low-code platform helps enterprises adopt what is otherwise complex technology in an easy and flexible way, whether it is customer or employee contact center,” said Heltewig. As you might expect, there are some direct competitors in the low- and no-code conversational AI space, too, including Ada, Talkie, Snaps and more.

Flexibility seems to be the order of the day for enterprises, and also the companies building tools for them: it means that a company can grow into a larger customer, and that in theory Cognigy will also evolve the platform based on what its customers need. As one example, Heltewig pointed out that a number of its customers are — contrary to the beating drum and march you see every day towards cloud services — running a fair number of applications on-premises, since this appears to be a key way to ensure the security of the customer data that they handle.

“Lufthansa could never run its customer services in the cloud because they handle a lot of sensitive data and they want full ownership of it,” he noted. “We can run cloud services and have a full offering for those who want it, but many large enterprises prefer to run their services on premises.”

Teddie Wardi, an MD at Insight, is joining the board with this round. “We are thrilled to be leading Cognigy’s Series B as the company continues on their ScaleUp journey,” he said in a statement. “Evident by their strong customer retention, Cognigy has created an essential product for global businesses to improve their customer experience in an efficient and effortless manner. With the new funding, Cognigy will be able to expand their leadership position to reach new markets and acquire more customers.”

News: SoftBank-backed construction giant Katerra said to be shutting down after raising billions

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After burning through more than $2 billion in funding, SoftBank-backed construction startup Katerra has told employees that it will be shutting down operations, according to a report in The Information. Last year, the company claimed it had more than 8,000 employees globally. Menlo Park-based Katerra had already been struggling to find a viable business in

After burning through more than $2 billion in funding, SoftBank-backed construction startup Katerra has told employees that it will be shutting down operations, according to a report in The Information.

Last year, the company claimed it had more than 8,000 employees globally.

Menlo Park-based Katerra had already been struggling to find a viable business in cheaply building apartments properties for real estate developers when it was pushed to the edge of bankruptcy late last year, with the company blaming its latest struggles on climbing labor and material costs associated with the pandemic. The company was given one last chance after receiving a $200 million bailout from SoftBank, which reportedly bought up a majority stake after already having invested billions in the effort.

Katerra’s fall marks the most high-profile failure for SoftBank since the failed 2019 WeWork IPO. The firm has largely been seeing gains among its Vision Fund portfolio in the past year amid a larger tech stock rally, though some of those gains have receded in recent months.

In an interview with Barron’s last month, CEO Masayoshi Son highlighted Katerra as well as SoftBank’s investment in Greensill as “regrets” of his. Katerra’s other backers included Khosla Ventures, DFJ Growth, Greenoaks Capital and Celesta Capital.

TechCrunch has reached out to Katerra for comment.

News: Daily Crunch: Wefox CEO says $650M Series C was ‘much more than we wanted to raise initially’

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Hello friends and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here.

Hello, and welcome to Daily Crunch for June 1, 2021. We’re back from a long weekend here in the United States, which means that the blog has been humming all day. Today’s tech and startup news had a fun mix of the old going new (7-Eleven adding EV charging points), and new going old (check out this new diaper startup), but mostly we had funding rounds. Lots of them. So let’s get to work! — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• European tech is hot: EU-based insurtech startup Wefox announced a $650 million round today. The huge round will surely help burnish Europe’s Q2 venture capital results, while also underscoring how the neoinsurance provider boom that we’ve seen in America is hardly a domestic affair. Expect more investment and startup activity in this space during the rest of 2021.
• Hadoop is not: Cloudera and Hortonworks were once hot startups. They both went public. And then they struggled. So they teamed up in a $5.2 billion merger. And then they struggled. And now their combined entity is being taken off the public markets by a pair of private equity companies for $5.3 billion, a modest premium on their pre-deal value. Thus concludes Hadoop’s startup run.
• The IPO boom continues: But while The Artist Formerly Known As Hortonworks takes its leave, many companies are looking to join the public markets. Sprinklr, for example. The New York-based customer experience startup is looking to list on the back of modest revenue gains and possibly improving profitability.

Startups and VC

The last 24 hours have brought a steady deluge of startup rounds. We can’t fit them all in the newsletter. But here are some of our favorites all the same:

• Molecule.one raises $4.6M for computational chemistry: Former TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield participant Molecule.one wants to “bring theoretical drug molecules to reality,” we reported, creating workflows to help labs figure out how to make exotic molecules from known materials and methods.
• project44 raises $202M for supply chain APIs: project44 uses APIs to provide “connective tissue” between the myriad players in the supply chain world. The company is now worth $1.2 billion, a rapid-fire doubling of its prior valuation. That’s thanks to money from Goldman Sachs and rapid growth. TechCrunch reports that the company has “crossed $50 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), which is up 100% year over year.”
• Redacted raises $60M for proactive cybersecurity: Most cybersecurity software feels defensive. Redacted, fresh out of stealth, wants to flip that narrative and, instead, “proactively [go] after the hackers to recover data loss and disrupt their activities.” There are probably fun legal questions at play here, but it’s a nice mental image at least.
• Truebill raises $45M for its personal finance app: Early in life Truebill was a neat way to cancel subscriptions. But like all consumer fintech products in 2021, it has become a broad service that offers a host of features and capabilities. Savings? Sure. Credit information? Why not. You get the idea.
• Belvo raises $43M for fintech APIs: Since Belvo first took part in Y Combinator, we’ve been pretty positive about the company’s chances. Building a sort of Plaid for the Latin American market, it seemed like a pretty darn good bet. And today’s news that the company has put together a fresh $43 million in funding somewhat backs up our early read.

 4 proven approaches to CX strategy that make customers feel loved

People have been working to optimize customer experiences (CX) since we began selling things to each other.

A famous San Francisco bakery has an exhaust fan at street level; each morning, its neighbors awake to the scent of orange-cinnamon morning buns wafting down the block. Similarly, savvy hair stylists know to greet returning customers by asking if they want a repeat or something new.

Online, CX may encompass anything from recommending the right shoes to AI that knows when to send a frustrated traveler an upgrade for a delayed flight.

In light of Qualtrics’ spinout and IPO and Sprinklr’s recent S-1, Rebecca Liu-Doyle, principal at Insight Partners, describes four key attributes shared by “companies that have upped their CX game.”

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

Big Tech news on the blog was somewhat light today thanks to the pace of startup happenings. But we still found time to discuss how Twitter is making room for more ads on its service. But don’t worry — unless you use its Fleets service, you probably won’t see them.

While Daily Crunch has been positive concerning Twitter’s general product work of late, this is one update that we’d be happy to skip.

Then from Line, news that the messaging app best known for its market share in certain Asian markets is now a bank. Basically. TechCrunch wrote that the well-known tech company “launched a digital banking platform in Indonesia today” that will include “deposit accounts, microcredit products, and remittance and payment services.”

It’s a joke in tech that every messaging app is really a dating service. That’s so old-fashioned. Now every app is simply a service that exists somewhere on the evolutionary continuum of becoming — slowly or quickly — a horizontal fintech offering.

Community

Another IPO, but will it be a successful public offering? Tell us what you think will happen with Sprinklr.

You’ve probably heard about our upcoming field trip to Pittsburgh, which even the mayor is excited about. Have friends building companies in the Steel City? Ask them to sign up to pitch during the event.

And while you’re clicking around, come visit us on Discord.

TC Eventful

You’re invited to tomorrow’s Extra Crunch Live event, where Coda CEO Shishir Mehrotra and Madrona investor S. Somasegar will break down how Coda managed to rise above the noise in the collaborative software space and raise $140 million in funding. You’ll even get your chance to show off your pitching skills during the pitch-off. Grab your seat tomorrow at 11:30 a.m. PDT/2:30 p.m. EDT by registering here!

News: Extra Crunch roundup: Inside Sprinklr’s IPO filing, how digital transformation is reshaping markets

• June 1, 2021
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Since we were off yesterday for Memorial Day, today’s roundup is brief, but we’ll have much more to recap on Friday.

Despite a recent history of uneven cash flow and moderate growth, SaaS customer experience management platform Sprinklr has filed to go public.

In today’s edition of The Exchange, Alex Wilhelm pores over the New York-based unicorn’s S-1 to better understand exactly what Sprinklr offers: “Marketing and comms software, with some machine learning built in.”

Despite 19% growth in revenue over the last fiscal year, its deficits increased during the same period. But with more than $250 million in cash available, “Sprinklr is not going public because it needs the money,” says Alex.

Since we were off yesterday for Memorial Day, today’s roundup is brief, but we’ll have much more to recap on Friday. Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch!

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

Full Extra Crunch articles are only available to members.
Use discount code ECFriday to save 20% off a one- or two-year subscription.

Once a buzzword, digital transformation is reshaping markets

Image Credits: metamorworks / Getty Images

The changes brought by a global shift to remote work and schooling are myriad, but in the business realm, they have yielded a change in corporate behavior and consumer expectations — changes that showed up in a bushel of earnings reports last week.

Startups have told us for several quarters that their markets are picking up momentum as customers shake up buying behavior with a distinct advantage for companies helping users move into the digital realm.

Public company results are now confirming the startups’ perspective. The accelerating digital transformation is real, and we have the data to prove it.

3 views on the future of meetings

Image Credits: Yann Maignan (opens in a new window) / Unsplash (opens in a new window)

In a recent episode of TechCrunch Equity, hosts Danny Crichton, Natasha Mascarenhas and Alex Wilhelm connected the dots between multiple funding rounds to sketch out three perspectives on the future of workplace meetings.

Each agreed that the traditional meeting is broken, so we gathered their perspectives about where the industry is heading and which aspects are ripe for disruption:

• Alex Wilhelm: Faster information throughput, please.
• Natasha Mascarenhas: Meetings should be ongoing, not in calendar invites.
• Danny Crichton: Redesign meetings for flow.

News: Twitter’s acquisition strategy: eat the public conversation

• June 1, 2021
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Twitter is trying to revitalize itself by adding more contexts for discourse to its repertoire. The result, if everything goes right, will be an influence superapp that hasn’t existed before.

The last few months have been interesting for Twitter.

After years of no innovation at all, Twitter is making big product changes. It has acquired Breaker and Revue, and presumably has more M&A coming. It’s coming out with Spaces. The only thing it clearly isn’t working on is an edit button.

Strategically, though, what is a microblogging service doing buying a social podcasting company and a newsletter tool while also building a live broadcasting sub-app? Is there even a strategy at all?

I humbly propose this: There is a strategy. Twitter is trying to revitalize itself by adding more contexts for discourse to its repertoire. The result, if everything goes right, will be an influence superapp that hasn’t existed anywhere before. The alternative is nothing less than the destruction of Twitter into a link-forwarding service.

Let’s talk about how Twitter is trying to eat the public conversation.

Why now?

Twitter’s problem is pretty simple. It’s this.

Twitter revenue quarterly growth 2013-21. Image Credits: Macrotrends

Another way of putting it is: Twitter is not generating as much money from ads as it used to. Ad revenue has failed to grow because Twitter is generally considered to have a poorly performing product for marketers. As a result, its stock price has been flat for years.

The irony, though, is that Twitter became more socially important during this period of financial stagnation to the point that the president of the United States nearly launched several wars on the platform!

The core reason is that since becoming a public company, Twitter has been considered by most to be one of the most boring tech companies productwise. Yes, people joke about the lack of an edit button, but the platform really has been slow to innovate in any real way.

Twitter was one of the most dynamic companies around, going from the fail whale company to being the company that invented the hashtag and acquiring some of the hottest companies, from Periscope to Vine.

But it all failed. Twitter rarely used acquisitions successfully. It stopped putting out new features and barely even managed simple improvements. Despite describing itself as “what’s happening now,” it missed every boat. Until this year.

What changed?

1. Twitter started to face its first real competition in years due to the social media renaissance. Twitter’s strength has always come from being where the news happens. Podcasts, Clubhouse, newsletters and other new channels are true competitive threats.