Author: Richard Dal Porto

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for June 25, 2021. We have a great block of startup news and Amazon coverage for you today. But before we get into all of that, a note that there are only two weeks left before our TechCrunch Early Stage 2021: Marketing & Fundraising event. It’s going to rock, so check it out and get prepped. — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Amazon buys encrypted messaging service Wickr: If you thought it was strange that an e-commerce company runs the world’s biggest public cloud service, it may feel even stranger that that same public cloud service just bought an encrypted messaging service. But in the platform era, tech companies want to do everything, so we should not be shocked. Amazon’s cloud team intends to “continue operating Wickr as is and offer its services to AWS customers” starting now. In related news, Amazon and Google are taking whacks in the U.K. over fake reviews.
• Virgin is a go: The American government has cleared Virgin Galactic for commercial spaceflight. The result of the news? Shares of the SPAC’d company rose by nearly 39% today. So, it’s a liftoff moment for the company and its market cap.
• Didi’s confusing value: Closing out our Top 3 today, TechCrunch took a look at the Chinese ride-hailing giant’s first IPO price range. We’re curious why it looks and feels so cheap compared to its erstwhile rival, Uber.

Startups/VC

TechCrunch stretched its legs today, giving us a lot to discuss past the usual funding round roll call. Here’s what you should read:

• What’s new in Deep Science: Behind the scenes of startup glitz and venture capital glamor is a bunch of scientific work, the stuff that powers the next generation of tech and the startups of tomorrow. Devin Coldewey has a digest of science work ranging from predicting liquid flow based on still images to AI systems faking confidence.
• The rapidly evolving early-stage market: If you care about how and when and why early-stage startups raise capital, TechCrunch has lots for you this week. Here’s a look at today’s early-stage venture capital market in the U.S., and here’s another focused on Latin America. More coming next week looking at what’s afoot in Europe.

And, of course, a host of startups raised more money. Here are a few highlights to keep you up to date:

• Mercuryo raises $7.5M for crypto-powered, cross-border payments: One key use of blockchain tech that was touted years ago was sending money around the world. Traditional banking is famously bad at this, leading to high fees and other issues. Mercuryo could be cracking the model and has crossed the $50 million ARR mark. Impressive.
• Edge Delta raises $15M to take on data analysis giants: The startup’s new Series A puts it into closer competition with Splunk, Datadog and other huge companies that sell cloud-based data monitoring services. The real story is somewhat technical, but happy we had Frederic Lardinois on hand to explain it to us.
• Fintual raises $15M for Latin American retail investing: The Robinhood-led boom in retail investing that the United States has seen in recent years is increasingly becoming a global phenomenon. And Fintual wants to take a bite out of the trend in the Latin American market. The Chilean startup now has a Series A under its belt to power its fight against both regulation and incumbent players.

Musculoskeletal medical startups race to enter personalized health tech market

With more than 50 million Americans suffering from chronic pain and musculoskeletal (MSK) medical problems, a number of startups are offering patients new products “that don’t resemble the cookie-cutter status quo,” reports Natasha Mascarenhas.

Startups hoping to enter this space have an uphill climb. Setting aside regulations that cover aspects like product packaging and marketing, they must compete with well-entrenched competition from Big Pharma as they try to partner with health insurance companies.

Natasha profiles three companies that are each taking a different approach to personalized health: Clear, Hinge Health and PeerWell.

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

Big Tech Inc.

From the world of Big Tech today we just have one more entry, as we covered Amazon’s big news up above. Natasha Lomas reported today that “Microsoft-owned LinkedIn has committed to doing more to quickly purge illegal hate speech from its platform in the European Union by formally signing up to a self-regulatory initiative that seeks to tackle the issue through a voluntary Code of Conduct.”

I wanted to raise this particular story because it somewhat underscores how internet regulation is shaping up around the world. You wouldn’t see this story, say, in the United States, or at least not in the same format. And in China, for example, another key internet market, it would also have a very different flavor. To some degree it feels like we’re dealing with three different — and increasingly distant — internets. Something for startups to chew on.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

TechCrunch wants you to recommend growth marketers who have expertise in SEO, social, content writing and more! If you’re a growth marketer, pass this survey along to your clients; we’d like to hear about why they loved working with you.

The results from this survey will help influence our editorial coverage of growth marketing. Today, we have a guest column on Extra Crunch from Mark Spera, “5 companies doing growth marketing right.”

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 24, 2021. There’s an ocean of tech news to get through today, but up top if you care about the advertising market, head here first. Google is pushing back cookiegeddon, and the decision could impact companies from the smallest startup to, well, Google. — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Instagram’s slow embrace of computers continues: After a long history of being a mobile-first, or mobile-only product, Instagram is now testing the “ability to create a Feed post on Instagram with [a] desktop browser,” the company told TechCrunch. As a PC user, huzzah.
• BuzzFeed is going public: Digital media company BuzzFeed is going public via a SPAC at a valuation of $1.5 billion. Want to know why it’s worth that much? We’ve got you covered. (Don’t forget that BuzzFeed raised hundreds of millions of dollars while private.)
• How some companies are working on vaccine passports despite the controversy: TechCrunch’s Ron Miller dove into the world of vaccine passports, the tech companies that are backing them and how they’re handling a dicey political environment. It’s a great read.

Startups/VC

• Doubling down on crypto: The a16z investing house is redoubling its bet in the crypto economy with a new $2.2 billion fund. And the venture capital firm is going to do more than just write checks: It intends to take part in crypto projects and even help clear regulatory brush for the sector. It’s a big commitment.
• Visa tries again: After Visa’s deal to acquire fintech API provider Plaid died, you might have thought that the American payments giant would have thrown in the towel on big deals. Nope. Visa is dropping $2.15 billion to buy Tink, a company that TechCrunch described as “a leading fintech startup in Europe focused on open banking application programming interfaces,” or APIs.
• Don’t trip about Tripp’s (virtual) trips: Tripp, a startup that wants to provide mental-health services via VR that mimic psychedelic experiences sans drugs, has just raised $11 million. If that sounds far out, understand that some startups are flat-out working with psychedelic drugs for different therapeutic approaches to mental health. So, this is the less aggressive version of the idea. Because VR is pretty neat, we dig it.
• The intersection of no-code, automation and humans: That’s where Tonkean plays. The company’s software helps ops teams at startups build automated business logic across applications, allowing data to flow between them. And it allows for humans to be in the loop, separating its offerings from what UiPath and other RPA companies offer. Oh, and Tonkean just closed a $50 million round.
• The online video boom powers JW Player to $100M in new capital: While not quite yet a unicorn, JW Player’s nine-figure round caught TechCrunch’s attention. The company sells a video platform for publishers and others, and it had a good 2020. COVID led to a boom in video watching, so the company’s recent growth is not a huge surprise. And now it has a tower of new capital to fuel even more expansion.

Reform your startup’s meeting culture

Meetings should have a clear purpose, but at many startups, they’ve become a way to perform in front of a crowd instead of share information.

Workplace politics can make the matter even more complicated: How secure do you feel declining a meeting invitation from a co-worker, or worse yet, from a manager?

“Every time a recurring meeting is added to a calendar, a kitten dies,” says Chuck Phillips, co-founder of MeetWell. “Very few employees decline meetings, even when it’s obvious that the meeting is going to be a doozy.”

Changing your meeting culture is difficult, but given that 26% of workers plan to look for a new job when the pandemic ends, startups need to do all they can to retain talent. Here are four actionable steps that will help you boost productivity and say goodbye to poorly run, lazily planned meetings.

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

Big Tech Inc.

Today was a big day for Microsoft, so we’ll start there, yeah? Here are TechCrunch’s notes from the day’s Windows 11 event:

• Android apps are coming to Windows: Via the Amazon store, but still. Microsoft’s effort over time to make its operating system more open reached a new zenith today with the news that Windows 11 will support a host of Android apps. We want to play with it before we grade it, but the idea is super neat.
• We hope you like Teams: Microsoft is all-in on Teams, so much so that it’s getting the Windows treatment. TechCrunch reports that “Windows 11 will have Microsoft Teams built in, in a bid to compete more directly with communication platforms like Apple’s FaceTime.” Honestly, Teams is way better than Skype was, so that sounds fine. It does prickle our antitrust early warning system, however.
• It’ll be a Windows Christmas: Per Microsoft, Windows 11 should land later this year. In time for Christmas, it turns out. So if you are a gamer or a corporate drone or merely someone who prefers the Microsoft approach to computing, get hyped. The new build is coming your way, and quickly. If you can’t wait, there are leaks out there. But don’t install those on a computer with data you actually need.

Next up, a little from Google:

• Google and Jio team up for a budget smartphone: The JioPhone Next, a low-cost Android smartphone, could help the next few hundred million folks in India get online with faster service if the telco and American tech giant have their way. Jio wants more mobile subscribers, and Google wants more internet users, period. Call it a match made in heaven, provided that the hardware is good.

And to close out, one for the Zoomers:

• Ephemeral tunes? In today’s TikTok world, having access to popular music is a must for social networks. So it’s not a surprise to see Snap close a multiyear deal with Universal Music Group. Snapper, rejoice!

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

TechCrunch is building a shortlist of the top growth marketers in tech. If you’re a founder, we’d love to hear who you’ve worked with. Fill out the survey here.

Here’s one of the many excellent recommendations we’ve received:

Name of marketer: Dylan Max

Name of recommender: Kris Rudeegraap, Sendoso

Recommendation: “Dylan Max’s creativity is what sets him apart from 99% of those that practice growth marketing. One of his first campaigns went viral on LinkedIn. We ran a special campaign where we sent real cans of Spam to the best marketers and salespeople (our target demographic), with the idea that traditional spamming has become impersonal and we’re out to change that. Those that were nominated could “spam” other marketers or salespeople in their network, leading to a viral sensation that took over LinkedIn. We got a ton of business from it and our sales team still lists it as one of the most creative ways to leverage direct mail and gifting. Today it is still LinkedIn’s most viral grassroots campaign in the B2B space. Dylan is part of a rare breed of growth marketers, excelling in many different marketing channels including SEO, paid search, conversion rate optimization (CRO) and A/B testing. Dylan also spun up our first ever ABM campaign where we leveraged hypertargeted social media ads to earn seven-figure revenue on less than $20,000 of ad spend. I love his hackiness and he needs to be on this list.”

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 23, 2021. The value of leading cryptocurrencies has rebounded some in the last day or so. Congrats to the hodlrs out there. If you are a nocoiner, don’t worry; stocks are also up. If you want more on the topic, the TechCrunch crew held a Twitter Space recently on the current state of crypto. Now, the news. — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Robotaxis are coming (slowly): Alphabet’s self-driving unit, Waymo, has been busy lately, but it’s not the only company in its market generating headlines. Chinese robotaxi player WeRide bagged $600 million in less than half a year, TechCrunch reports. The company is now worth $3.3 billion. Let’s hope that all the capital and activity in this particular market works out when the rubber hits the road.
• Soon, even regular folks can get in on the autonomous action: Love the idea of self-driving cars, but don’t have $100 million or more to pour into one of the industry’s leading private players? Good news! You can put your $100 into Embark soon, as the self-driving truck company is going public via a SPAC. You are welcome for this PSA.
• Tech’s cultural discussion continues: If you follow the tech industry, you’ve seen news about its evolving cultural discussion. From banning “politics” to public culture memos to private missives that became public, there’s a lot going on at both startups and public companies alike. A new document from the edtech sector takes a rather pointed stand in the larger conversation in favor of not backing down from controversial topics, Natasha wrote for the site. It won’t be the last memo we see on the matter.

Startups

• The exit market for growth-focused startups is still hot: That’s the lesson from recent IPO filings in the tech space. If you are an investor or startup employee, it’s good news. If you are a wealthy tech company looking to buy smaller firms, the news is less good because you will probably have to pay a large premium to snag startups.
• Snackpass scoops up $70M: You may have seen Snackpass signs at food spots in your city. The startup focuses on pickup orders inside of restaurants rather than delivery, and, per our reporting, has seen its growth explode in recent months as people have gone back outside. It’s now worth more than $400 million.
• PairTree raises $2.25M to make adoption easier: There are lots of tech deals with business problems. Sometimes startups build businesses to solve human problems. PairTree is one such company. Per Devin, it wants to make part of the adoption process easier with an “online matching platform where expectant mothers and hopeful adopters can find each other without the facilitation of an agency or other organization.” I love it.
• Drata raises $25M to make security compliance easier: If you run a company, you have to deal with security compliance. Drata wants to make securing SOC 2 compliance easier. That way, your startup won’t lose a deal over lack of compliance certification, a situation that might lead to you exclaiming “drata!” while smacking your own forehead.
• Vercel raises $102M for its next.js service: You’ve probably heard of next.js, a React framework for front-end development work. Vercel built it with Facebook and Google. Now the company has $102 million more in the bank thanks to a Series C that valued the company at more than $1 billion. Per TechCrunch, traffic to apps and websites on Vercel’s network doubled since October of last year. That’s the sort of usage growth that investors love to see.

Why Amazon should pay attention to Shein

In the last year, online apparel shopping app Shein grew active daily users by 130%, reports Apptopia.

Each day, thousands of new products arrive on the app’s virtual shelves. Items are rapidly designed and prototyped before Shein’s contractors put them into production in Guangzhou factories — two weeks later, those SKUs arrive in fulfillment centers around the globe.

TechCrunch reporter Rita Liao examined how the company’s agile supply chain has become hot talk among e-commerce experts, but beyond a strong logistics game and data-driven product development, Shein’s close relationships with suppliers are integral to its success.

She also tried to answer a question many are asking: Is Shein a Chinese company?

“It’s hard to pin down where Shein is from,” answered Richard Xu from Grand View Capital, a Chinese venture capital firm.

“It’s a company with operations and supply chains in China targeting the global market, with nearly no business in China.”

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

Big Tech Inc.

We’re taking a break from politics today, so if you wanted even more updates about how India is taking on one American tech company or another, we are sorry. A lot of other stuff happened, however, that is pretty neat:

• Ford is keeping scooter dreams alive: Remember when Ford bought Spin? It was a great moment for the micromobility space. Today, Spin launched its first in-house scooter. So, if you need two small wheels and a battery pack, Ford has you covered. Recall that Ford is investing heavily in electric cars and trucks as well.
• Amazon and Salesforce buddy up even more: The growing partnership between Amazon and Salesforce took a new step today, with the two major American tech companies announcing “a new set of integration capabilities to make it easier to share data and build applications that cross the two platforms.” Amazon competes with Microsoft in the public cloud world, and Salesforce competes with Microsoft in the CRM space. So to see the pair of them hold hands is not a huge surprise.
• TikTok has real competition: TikTok’s chief rival in China just hit the 1 billion monthly active user (MAU) mark. That’s a real accomplishment, given that the world only has 8 billion or so folks in it. Kuaishou, the app in question, has only 150 million non-Chinese MAUs, for what it’s worth, making it more of a giant domestic player in China than an international heavyweight. That may change, of course, if it keeps growing as it has been.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

We’re reaching out to startup founders to tell us who they turn to when they want the most up-to-date growth marketing practices.

Fill out the survey here.

Here’s one of the recommendations we received:

Name of marketer: Karl Hughes, draft.dev.

Name of recommender: Joshua Shulman, Bitmovin.com.

Recommendation: “Karl is incredibly knowledgeable in the field of content and growth marketing to a large (and equally niche) target audience of developers. He and his team at Draft.dev are some of the best at ‘developer marketing,’ which is a greatly underrated target audience.”

Community

Yo dawg, we heard you liked audio … so we put audio in your audio!

Yesterday, we had a super fun Twitter Spaces chat (with a few hundred of our closest friends) about Bitcoin and crypto in general. It was led by the Equity Podcast crew, but a few of our other writers joined in on the fun. Some of it even made its way into the latest episode of Equity, so have a listen (and keep an eye out for our next live chats).

TC Eventful

It’s pretty simple — In a few short weeks, startup founders from around the world will join our bootcamp series TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing & Fundraising, happening on July 8 and 9. You’ll choose from a wide range of presentations that span the fundamentals of launching and growing your business, whether you are bootstrapping or have just secured your first investment funds. Register before this Friday and get 50% off with promo code DAILYCRUNCH50.

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 22, 2021. We have startup product news, funding rounds and a roster of Big Tech updates for you today. But before we get into all of that do not forget to sign up for TechCrunch Spotlight: Pittsburgh startup Pitch-Off. Also the Equity podcast crew are hosting a live taping this Thursday that should be a lot of fun. I’ll be there! — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Twitter starts rolling out Super Follows and ticketed Spaces: The great product push at Twitter continued today with an early rollout of its Super Follow feature. If you have 10,000 followers and tweet about once per day, you could be eligible to charge people from $2.99 to $9.99 per month for bonus tweets. The company is also rolling out ticketed Twitter Spaces, its live-audio product.
• Another startup taking on Google: While we await the launch of Neeva’s subscription search alternative, Brave has put its own search offering into the market. You can give it a test here, if you’d like. The short gist is that it’s a “nontracking search engine built on top of an independent index and touted as a privacy-safe alternative to surveillance tech products like Google search,” TechCrunch wrote.
• The early-stage startup funding market in focus: TechCrunch dug into the world of seed and early-stage venture capital rounds that startups are raising today. After a VC tipped us off to the concept of Series As coming late and Series Bs coming early, we asked a host of other investors about the idea. What did we learn? That some startups can start raising the moment they close their last round. Wild.

Startups

Everyone and their favorite pup raised money today, so we’re breaking our startup coverage into two chunks. The first is focused on product news. The second on funding rounds. Let’s go:

• Airbank is building a small and midsized fintech service to help aggregate all of a company’s bank accounts and financial data. Read the story here.
• Racial Inequity Drawdown is a framework that aims to “address racial inequity in startup investing and in the broader world,” TechCrunch reports.
• Squad launched a new mobile app that connects groups of friends through time-gated audio messages. You have 24 hours to hear what your friends said now that Squad has completed its focus-shift to more intimate collections of friends from interest groups.

Turning to the money world, there are more rounds than we can get to today. But here’s a selection of favorites:

• Mollie raises $800 million for its payment-integration service: Dutch startup Mollie is now worth $6.5 billion after raising nearly $1 billion in a single round. The startup “provides a way for businesses to integrate payments into sites, documents and other services by way of an API,” TechCrunch wrote. Its new round and valuation implies that there’s room yet in the payments space for more mega-unicorns. Still.
• Speaking of fintech, Australian startup Zeller just raised AUD$50 million at a AUD$400 million valuation. It provides POS and card services for SMBs.
• Lidar-focused Quanergy Systems is going public: Via a SPAC, of course. You can peruse its investor deck if you want all the gritty projections. What matters here is that the SPAC boom is not done, even if it appears to be slowing. And we’re hearing from Series-B-level founders that SPACs are already hitting them up. Expect more and weirder SPAC deals over time.
• Oyster is now a half-unicorn: That’s what we learned when the startup focused on supporting employees outside of a company’s home country raised a $50 million Series B that valued it at nearly $500 million.
• Vantage raises $4M to help folks manage their AWS spend: All that growth that Amazon’s AWS cloud service has managed in recent years was built on rising customer spend. And some AWS customers want to spend less. And Vantage is going to help.
• G2 raises $157 million to help companies choose software: Software is such a huge category that even niches can support a host of competitors. But all that spend means lots of companies making choices about what software to leverage. G2 wants to help. And it is now a unicorn after its investors poured nine-figures of capital into its coffers at a valuation of more than $1 billion.
• Transmit raises $543 million in a Series A to help kill passwords: The company is now worth $2.2 billion, with plans to use its new money to “expand its reach and investing in key global areas to grow the organization.” Any move to kill passwords is TechCrunch-approved.

How much to pay yourself as a SaaS founder

Anna Heim interviewed SaaS entrepreneurs and investors to find out how much early-stage founders should pay themselves.

Startups run by CEOs who take home a small salary tend to do better over the long run, but there are other points to consider, such as geography, marital status, and frankly, what quality of life you desire.

Waterly founder Chris Sosnowski raised his own pay to $14/hour last year; at his prior job, his salary topped $100,000.

“We had saved money up for over a year before we cut out my pay,” he told Anna. “I can live my life without entertainment … so that’s what we did for 2020.”

How much are you willing to sacrifice?

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

Big Tech Inc.

Another day, another slew of headlines discussing the latest tech and government scrap. Today we learned that the U.S. government may review Amazon’s plan to buy a huge movie studio. There was also more from India today, with news breaking that the country is digging into Google over its smart TV market. On the same theme, the EU is now investigating Google’s adtech software from an antitrust perspective.

In related news, the push to unionize Amazon employees is not stopping in its home market.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

Today we’re featuring one of the recommendations that was submitted to our survey. Stay tuned throughout the week as we highlight more responses!

Name of Marketer: Ladder

Recommendation: “They really get what I need. By testing different messaging on different personas, we discover what works and what doesn’t to better understand our users and prospects. This is gold for a company at our stage. Showing those results to our investors blew their minds.”

Submit your own recommendation here.

Community

Natasha Mascarenhas wondered out loud “what makes a great investor?” We asked you for your thoughts, and a lot of you have weighed in. Still time to vote and share your two cents.

Speaking of sharing, we put out our last call for startups to be included in our Pittsburgh Spotlight Pitch-Off. If you know of a great startup in the Pittsburgh ecosystem, share this far and wide and encourage folks to submit their company. While you’re at it, make sure you’re registered to attend on June 29th!

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 21, 2021. The tech industry is skipping any sort of a summer slowdown. Facebook is taking on Clubhouse and Spotify, India is still figuring out how to manage its burgeoning technology industry, and everyone is raising money. Plus, we have notes on a new VC fund that has quite a twist. Let’s get into it! — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Facebook wants your voice: Facebook’s live-audio service is out, putting Big Blue in competition with Clubhouse, a buzzy startup, and Spotify. In the wake of Clubhouse’s super-active early 2021, a host of Big Tech companies are looking to capture the magic that the startup managed to bottle. How successful Facebook will be at cutting in on Clubhouse’s game is not clear; so far, Facebook has yet to dominate the dating world, for example, making its entrance into the live-audio space more potential than promise of domination.
• Consumer fintech is looking good: New numbers from European fintech unicorn Revolut dropped today, with TechCrunch’s Romain Dillet taking a look at the company for our publication. The gist is that Revolut had a deeply unprofitable 2020, but one that showed a real ramp toward smaller losses as it went on. I doodled on the company’s numbers here, if that’s your thing.
• IPOs keep coming: Sure, we’re still waiting for Robinhood to file to go public, but after WalkMe’s public debut last week, there are new tech companies approaching the public markets. Couchbase filed today, kicking off the process of floating the database software company backed by Accel, Mayfield and Ignition Partners. Expect more filings in the coming weeks.

Startups

To keep proper tabs on both sides of the startup fundraising marketplace, we’re stripping VC news into its own section on occasion. Today is one such day. First, however, some startup news:

• $10M for e-bikes: Ubco, a New Zealand-based electric utility bike startup, announced a $10 million raise today. The company is best known for its Ubco 2X2, an “all-wheel-drive electric motorbike that looks like a dirt bike but rides like a moped” — and looks rather fetching. Urban transit is changing as cities look to limit their car — and carbon — footprints. If trends hold, startups like Ubco could find themselves selling into a market that is moving in their direction.
• Consumers love debt: TechCrunch covered news today that Kredivo, an Indonesian buy now, pay later (BNPL) startup, added $100 million to its credit facilities. The new capital access doubles the amount of debt that Kredivo can access. The news illustrates both the global consumer appetite for rejiggered debt products that transcend traditional credit cards, as well as the willingness of investors around the world to provide BNPL companies with ever more capital access. More on the subject here.
• Music licensing remains complicated, lucrative: When Ludacris rapped that up-and-coming artists should “get a entertainment lawyer in the music profession,” he wasn’t kidding. The musical world is complicated. Mechanical licenses, platform cuts — it’s a lot. And where there’s complexity, there’s opportunity. Songtradr just raised $50 million to help license music to “high-profile names for advertising, films, TV, gaming and the like,” TechCrunch wrote in covering its latest round. Songtradr has now raised more than $100 million to fund its efforts.
• Are shoes still hot? Backers of SoleSavy think so. They just put $12.5 million into the company’s Series A round. Unlike StockX — which is big business these days — SoleSavy isn’t a retail marketplace. Instead, it’s a company looking to build a sneaker head community. A community is like a subreddit, but on a different CMS and hosting provider, in case you’d forgotten.

Venture Capital News

What educational background generates the best entrepreneurs? Every university will tell you that they are the best. Many founders manage without a degree at all. The Academy Investor Network is betting that graduates of American military academies will prove lucrative. The fund just announced a $2.5 million anchor LP for its first fund, adding to capital from Scout Ventures, where co-founder Emily McMahan is a venture partner. She’s partnering with Sherman Williams in targeting a $50 million first raise.

Let’s see how far their thesis carries them. At least they will be able to brag with confidence that when it comes to rucking they will have the highest founder quality in the world.

Seed is not the new Series A

Usually, a teacher who grades students on a curve is boosting the efforts of those who didn’t perform well on the test. In the case of cloud companies, however, it’s the other way around.

As of Q1 2021, startups in this sector have a median Series A around $8 million, reports PitchBook. With $100+ million rounds becoming more common, company valuations are regularly boosted into the billions.

Andy Stinnes, general partner at Cloud Apps Capital Partners, says founders who are between angel and Series A should seek out investors who are satisfied with $200,000 to $500,000 in ARR. Usually a specialist firm, these VCs are open to betting on startups that haven’t yet found product-market fit.

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

Big Tech Inc.

India’s tech scene deals with more government oversight: The Indian e-commerce industry is huge, with Amazon and Walmart battling with domestic companies — or buying them, in the case of Flipkart and Walmart — for market share in a growing market. All the activity is attracting complaints and possible government intervention. TechCrunch reported today that India “proposed … banning flash sales on e-commerce platforms and preventing their affiliate entities from being listed as sellers as the South Asian market looks to further tighten rules.”

India’s government is also busy battling with Twitter, as we’ve reported at length.

Germany is not enthused with Apple: With a fourth investigation opened, this time involving Apple, Germany’s oversight of competition in the tech world ratcheted up another few degrees today. In the case of Big Phone, the governmental body will “determine whether or not the iPhone maker meets the threshold of Germany’s updated competition law.” If Apple does, it would allow the country’s government to “intervene proactively” regarding the company’s activity.

Apple is also taking fire in its domestic market for what some perceive as heavy-handed tactics regarding its mobile app ecosystem, a market that the Cupertino-based company both moderates and extracts rents from.

Uber buys Cornershop: Today is a notable day for Latin American tech startups as the U.S. ride-hailing giant agreed to buy the 47% of Cornershop that it doesn’t own. The price? 29 million Uber shares. That’s about $1.3 billion worth of Uber equity.

The car service and delivery magnate bought Postmates last year, adding to its ability to deliver more than merely rides. The Cornershop buy fits into the thesis because the smaller company is also in the delivery market.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

TechCrunch wants to help startups find the right expert for their needs. To do this, we’re building a shortlist of the top growth marketers. We’ve received great recommendations for growth marketers in the startup industry since we launched our survey.

We’re excited to read more responses as they come in! Fill out the survey here.

Our editorial coverage about growth marketing includes articles from the TechCrunch team, guest columns and posts like “5 tips for brands that want to succeed in the new era of influencer marketing” by Eric Dahan on Extra Crunch. If you’re interested in writing a column, learn more here.

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 11, 2021. As a small note I am off next week, so my dear friend and TechCrunch lifer Henry Pickavet will be taking over. He’s more fun and a better writer than I am, so consider him a temporary upgrade. See you in a week or so! — Alex

p.s. Cheap tickets to TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing & Fundraising are nearly gone. Flagging in case you needed a ticket and also like saving money. 

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Technology companies are trying to figure out post-pandemic work: Minor tech CEOs look to major tech companies for signals about what to do. Google, for example, is a famous cultural bellwether for other tech firms. But when it comes to post-pandemic work every tech company — big and small — is scrambling to come up with a plan that will keep control-oriented managers happy and staff from quitting en masse. TechCrunch has the rundown you need on what the majors are deciding.
• Didi’s going public! If you thought that the Uber and Lyft IPOs were fun, oh boy is this good news for you. TechCrunch has notes on the venture capital winners’ list and more on the company’s economics for your reading pleasure.
• The tech labor market is brutal: So brutal, in fact, two companies that help their customers find remote, freelance technology talent are now in a legal fight. Toptal is taking Andela to court over “the theft of trade secrets in pursuit of a perfect clone of its business,’” TechCrunch reports.

Startups and VC

• Vertical SaaS is still hot: How do we know? Fresha just raised $100 million. The company provides software for hair and nail salons, yoga instructors, and other health, beauty, and wellness SMBs. Vertical SaaS companies can often have both attractive software incomes and strong payments revenues.
• More money for neobanks: My general philosophy that there is infinite money available for neobanking startups around the world is holding up as TechCrunch broke news that “Bangalore-based neobank Open is in advanced stages of talks to raise about $100 million” from possibly Temasek and General Atlantic. The neobank could be worth $600 million after the deal, TechCrunch reported.
• The edtech boom is not over: Sure, COVID-19 is receding in some countries, and economic activity is rebounding globally, but that’s not stopping edtech companies that got a pandemic bump from raising more cash. This week it’s Indian edtech company Classplus, which could raise $30 million from Tiger Global we reported, at a valuation of up to $250 million. That’s real money.
• Neither is global interest in funding more insurtech startups: That’s what TechCrunch learned chatting up a bunch of EU-based VCs, who said that the European insurtech market is super busy, if perhaps not quite as frenetic as the market for insurance technology startups in America.

Insurtech is hot on both sides of the Atlantic

This morning, The Exchange dug into the EU insurtech market, interviewing European VCs and collating the biggest recent rounds to get a temperature of the waters across the pond:

• Alex Timm, CEO, Root
• Dan Preston, CEO, Metromile
• Luca Bocchio, partner, Accel
• Florian Graillot, investor, Astorya.vc
• Stephen Brittain, director and founder, Insurtech Gateway

Several European-based insurtech startups entered unicorn territory this year, such as Bought By Many, which offers pet insurance, London-based Zego and Alan, a French startup that raised a $220 million round.

According to Brittain, EU startups in this sector are “still at the very early stages of innovation,” having only shown “a fraction of what’s possible” in a market that is “as large as banking.”

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

Big Tech Inc.

• Everyone sucks at cybersecurity: This week’s its Volkswagen, via a third-party vendor. The vendor in question exposed 3.3 million customers’ data. At some point the fines for this sort of error have to rise to the level of pain that will force corporations to stop fucking up. Enough is enough.
• Apple hires from Canoo for car can-do: This week Apple confirmed that it hired “former co-founder and CEO [Ulrich Kranz] of electric vehicle company Canoo. Though the company declined to say what he’s working on. It’s 1,000% a new cube-shaped, six-screen iBloc, right? Without wheels?
• Sticking to the Apple beat, the company announced its “Design Award” winners. TechCrunch has the run-down you need here.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

TechCrunch wants you to recommend growth marketers who have expertise in SEO, social, content writing and more! If you’re a growth marketer, pass this survey along to your clients; we’d like to hear about why they loved working with you.

The results from this survey will help influence our editorial coverage of growth marketing. Today, we have a guest column from Fuel Capital CMO Jamie Viggiano: 5 questions startups should consider before making their first marketing hire.

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 10, 2021. A short note from TechCrunch to start, namely that it’s the last few hours to get an early-bird pass to TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing & Fundraising, coming in early July. It’s going to be pretty much amazing, so get on that, early-stage founders. — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Microsoft thinks it can get cloud gaming to work: Microsoft has big plans to make cloud gaming more than whatever is left of Stadia today. Per TechCrunch, the company is preparing to “launch a dedicated device for game streaming” and wants to integrate related tech into TVs. Gamers, it’s a good time to be one of us. So long as you don’t need a new GPU.
• Klarna raises $639M: The craze to stuff capital into successful buy-now-pay-later startups continued this week, with Klarna raising a huge stack of funds at a new, greater valuation. For more on the space and its rapid growth, read this.
• Tech culture is changing: Recent unrest at Medium after related issues at Coinbase and Basecamp are bringing to light changing cultural expectations at startups and at the well-known Y Combinator accelerator. Inside these debates, it’s not hard to see growing recognition among some tech employees of the leverage that they have over their employers.

Startups and VC

Today we’re looking at a few key funding rounds from startupland, then some fund news and a roundup of recent unicorn IPOs.

• AI-powered recruiting is valuable: That’s the lesson from Eightfold AI’s recent funding round. The company just put together a fresh $220 million round at a $2.1 billion valuation, more than double what it was worth late last year. Notably, this valuation doubling was not born from Tiger Global’s largesse, but SoftBank’s second Vision Fund. The company, TechCrunch writes, “uses deep learning and artificial intelligence to help companies find, recruit and retain workers.”
• Say hello to analytics for how you spend your workday: There’s a fine line between keeping tabs on your workers and looking over their shoulders too frequently. Time is Ltd just raised $5.6 million for what we described as the Google Analytics for company time. For example, if a company wanted to know how much time its staff was spending in Slack versus, say, Teams, TiL could help. So long as the startup respects individual privacy, we’re fine with this.
• Everyone needs fintech: Including Indonesia’s micro, small and medium businesses. Evidence of that fact is evinced by a huge $60 million Series A raised by BukuWarung, a fintech company focused on just that market. Valar Ventures and Goodwater Capital led the investment. The startup has now raised $80 million, per Crunchbase.

Over on the venture capital beat itself, here’s some recent fun fund fundraising featured facts:

• Lots more capital for European startups: Perhaps to avoid having Tiger Global eat every round the world ‘round, Balderton Capital has put together a $680 million “early-growth” fund that will drop $25 million to $50 million checks into startups. That’s big coin for a growing scene.
• Serena Williams’ husband raises new fund: Well-known investor Alexis Ohanian’s new firm, Seven Seven Six, has raised a $150 million fund. And it’s involved in the latest round at Nuggs.

To round out the day’s startup news, Marqeta, Monday.com, Zeta Global and 1stDibs went public. Here’s our dig into their debuts and what they mean for the IPO market — and the value of startups more generally.

The fintech endgame: New supercompanies combine the best of software and financials

Now that we can transact from anywhere, a new, hybrid class of software companies with embedded financial services are scooping up consumers — and investors are following the action.

Using data from a Battery Ventures report about “the intersection of software and financial services,” this post examines why these companies can be so hard to value and offers a framework for better understanding their business models and investor appeal.

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

Big Tech Inc.

• Waymo’s self-driving push continues: Alphabet’s huge running bet on self-driving technology is partnering with J.B. Hunt Transport Services to test self-driving trucks in the busy Texas market. It’s long been thought that freight vehicles that don’t spend much time on side streets could make good early targets for self-driving tech. Let’s see. While we’re on the subject of autonomous transit, Scale has news on the data side of the equation.
• Stripe brings sales tax to its payments platform: Stripe, while still private, is worth 84.2 zillion dollars, so it counts as Big Tech. The payments unicorn announced a new piece of tech today, namely the ability for its payments stack to handle sales tax both internationally and domestically. Sales tax is a huge problem, and handling it could provide Stripe with a nice edge over some of its competition.
• Apple to (probably) kill Dark Sky: After Cupertino bought weather service Dark Sky, it was presumed to be on its way to the wood chipper. Thus ends many a technology exit to a bigco; the larger entity really wants the tech and team, but doesn’t want to keep the company’s app alive. Apple, to its credit, won’t axe Dark Sky until 2022. After that, it’s all bets off.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

TechCrunch wants to help startups find the right expert for their needs. To do this, we’re building a shortlist of the top growth marketers. We’ve received great recommendations for growth marketers in the startup industry since we launched the survey yesterday, and we’re excited to read more responses as they come in!

Fill out the survey here.

We look forward to publishing more about growth marketing. Check out our most recent offering, Growth marketing amid the pandemic: An interview with Right Side Up’s Tyler Elliston.

We’re excited to continue our editorial coverage about growth marketing with posts from the TechCrunch team and guests. If you’re interested in writing a guest column, read more here.

Community

Come chat with us about Pittsburgh on Twitter Spaces tomorrow 6/11 at 1 p.m. PDT/4 p.m. EDT ahead of our upcoming TC City Spotlight series event.

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 9, 2021. Today was TC Sessions: Mobility, a rollicking good time and one that we hoped you enjoyed. Looking ahead, we’re starting to announce some speakers for Disrupt — including Accel’s Arun Mathew. Mark your calendars, Disrupt is going to be epic this year. — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Biden tears down Trump’s Chinese app wall: After a very confusing episode in which the former U.S. president demanded that TikTok sell to an American company and that the U.S. government get a cut, things are mostly back to normal today after President Biden “signed an executive order revoking actions targeting TikTok and WeChat,” TechCrunch reports. Biden also signed a “new order requiring the Commerce Department to review apps with ties to ‘jurisdiction of foreign adversaries,’” so this story is not yet finished.
• Billions for battery tech: Northvolt has raised a $2.75 billion round to build its in-Europe battery manufacturing capacity to 150 GWh by 2030. While 2030 may sound far away, it’s under a decade from now. The news of Northvolt’s round underscores how many regions want to ensure that they can build core technology products like batteries, chips and AI on their own as a way to limit geopolitical risk.
• Everyone wants to fund AI startups: The era in which every startup claimed to be an AI company is behind us, leaving us with the era in which every VC wants to fund AI startups. That’s the gist of a recent TechCrunch dig into the hot and busy fundraising market for startups leveraging artificial intelligence.

Startups and VC

• Branch finds more backers for its insurtech service: Bundled home-and-auto insurtech startup Branch has raised a $50 million round led by Anthemis Group. The company’s pitch is that it starts customers off with a bundle, meaning that it doesn’t have to cross-sell them later on. VCs are still more than willing to pour capital into neo-insurance providers, despite some struggles from unicorns in the space after they went public.
• ShelfLife wants to help you source raw materials: Ever wanted to produce and sell your own version of White Claw? Lillian Cartwright and some fellow Harvard Business School folks had that idea, but ran into supply issues. Cartwright built ShelfLife, which helps brands by providing “a directory and marketplace of raw material suppliers based on what brands actually, specifically need, allowing them to secure quotes quickly.”
• If you are tired of insurtech rounds, how about an NFT round? Mythical Games announced a $75 million round despite fading near-term momentum in the market for blockchain-specific digital ownership writs. Regardless of what you think about NFTs, it’s clear that VCs are bullish and are willing to pay up to not miss a possible trend.
• American political luminary Stacey Abrams’ Now raises $9.5M: Now is a fintech company that buys corporate invoices for a fee, allowing companies to unlock revenue before they get paid. Provided that it can properly assess nonpayment risk, it’s a pretty business-friendly model.
• Behead your CMS: If you are not hip to headless CMS tools, imagine WordPress but without the bits that make it render in your browser. The headless model has attracted backers in a more fractured end-user device world, where users might access content on everything from smartwatches to tablets to desktops to VR helmets. And now Contentstack’s headless CMS service is $57.5 million richer after an investment led by Insight Partners.

To round out our startup news today, two things: The first is that Superhuman CEO Rahul Vohra and his buddy Todd Goldberg, the founder of Eventjoy, have formalized their investing partnership in a new fund called Todd and Rahul’s Angel Fund. That name has big “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” vibes, albeit with a larger, $24 million budget.

And fresh on the heels of the Equity Podcast diving into hormonal health and the huge startup opportunity that it presents, there’s a new startup working on PCOS on the market. Check out our look at its early form.

Don’t panic: ‘Algorithm updates’ aren’t the end of the world for SEO managers

SEO expert and consultant Eli Schwartz will join Managing Editor Danny Crichton tomorrow to share his advice for everyone who gets nervous each time Google updates its algorithm.

To set a foundation for tomorrow’s chat on Twitter Spaces, Eli shared a guest post that should deflate some myths. For starters: A drop in search traffic isn’t necessarily hurting you.

Instead of chasing the algorithm, he advises companies that rely on organic search results to focus on the user experience instead: “If you are helpful to the user, you have nothing to fear.”

Just like you release product updates based on feedback and analytics, Google’s improving its products to offer a better user experience.

“If you see a drop, in many cases, your site might not have even lost real traffic,” says Eli. “Often, the losses represent only lost impressions already not converting into clicks.”

Tomorrow’s discussion is the latest in a series of chats with top Extra Crunch guest contributors. If you’ve worked with a talented growth marketer, please share a brief recommendation.

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

Big Tech Inc.

• Google is building a huge fiber trunk to Argentina: Imagine you were a megacorp. And the internet was a bit slow between your headquarters, and, say, Argentina. Do you curse your luck? Stamp your feet? Or do you announce that you are going to “build a new subsea cable that will connect the East Coast of the U.S. and Las Toninas, Argentina — with additional landings in Brazil and Uruguay” as Google did? We hope it’s the final option.
• Did you know that it’s Facebook’s creator week? It is, as it turns out. Big Blue announced a “native affiliate tool” for Instagram that will allow “creators to recommend products available on checkout, share them with followers and earn commissions for sales their posts drive.” The idea may prove annoying for non-influencers, but for the folks with large followings it could be a boon.
• $270M for end-point security shop 1E: Rising acceptance of remote work means more and more end points for companies to secure. To see Carlyle pick up 1E for a quarter-billion, then, is not a surprise in substance. Crunchbase has no funding data from the London-based company, so perhaps this was a pretty big exit for its team.

Introducing TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

TechCrunch is back with our next category for our Experts project: We’re reaching out to startup founders to tell us who they turn to when they want the most up-to-date growth marketing practices.

Fill out the survey here.

We’re excited to share the results we collect in the form of a database. The more responses we receive from our readers, the more robust our editorial coverage will be moving forward. To learn more, visit techcrunch.com/experts.

Community

Join us for a conversation tomorrow at 12:30 p.m. PDT / 3:30 p.m. EDT on Twitter Spaces. Our own Danny Crichton will be discussing growth marketer Eli Schwartz’s guest column Don’t panic: ‘Algorithm updates’ aren’t the end of the world for SEO managers. Bring your questions and comments!