Author: Richard Dal Porto

Posted on

Daily Crunch: In $8.45B deal, Amazon to buy MGM Studios

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 Wednesday, May 26. Yes, we’re going to get to the huge Amazon-MGM deal, but we have to chat about a startup first. Have you heard of Poparazzi? If you have kids you might have — it’s the latest social phenom. And it just ran its way up to the top of the App Store. (Too bad it’s not Puparazzi!)

Yes, I feel old as well. Take a look if you want to know what the kids are up to. Now, the rest of the news. — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

  • Amazon snaps up MGM: The biggest news out today is the giant Amazon-MGM deal worth more than $8 billion. Its studio purchase helps cement Amazon in the mix of tech companies with huge investments in the online video space. Observers believe the e-commerce giant plans to use MGM to bolster its Prime service, making consumers less likely to churn thanks to the inclusion of more services. Which rings hollow to us: Who is going to give up Prime, but be swayed by movies? The connection to shipping speed feels tenuous.
  • The global fintech boom: This morning, Clara announced a new round, mere months after it raised its preceding round of capital. The Mexican startup works in the corporate spend market, a startup niche that recently saw a $2.5 billion exit in the United States, and more capital for both Ramp and Brex. Our read here is that many nascent fintech formulas that work in the U.S. are going to have wide remit globally.
  • IPOs are back: The recent Flywire IPO pricing (strong) and first-day trading (even stronger) are indicative that the temporarily slowed public-offering market is back. So, Robinhood, let’s go?

Startups and VC

Here are five of the tastiest venture capital rounds that TechCrunch covered, showing off an array of niches and round sizes:

  • UK’s Paysend raises $125M for mobile B2B payments: You are excused for wondering if every fintech round these days involves both companies and payments. I feel the same way. But what matters in the case of Paysend is that its model to provide SMB online payment services is happening from a post-Brexit U.K. Not even a tectonic decoupling can stop U.K. fintech, it seems.
  • Yalo raises $50M for conversational commerce: Here’s a tech startup round that typifies the year. Did it raise less than a year ago? Yes. Did the company have funding find it, as opposed to the other way around? Yes. And did COVID accelerate its business? Yes. Yalo is a wager that the way we buy online is changing, a technology story if we’ve ever heard of one. And it’s one that venture capitalists are lining up to bet on.
  • Skiff raises $3.7M for encrypted Google Docs: That’s the pitch, per our own Zack Whittaker. Essentially, Skiff mimics the familiar features of Google Docs, but with end-to-end encryption. As a fan of privacy, I dig the project.
  • Treet raises $2.8M to help brands resell their own stuff: The online resale market is huge. ThreadUp is public now, as is Poshmark. But Treet is betting that there is still room in the market for more tech, namely its plan to get brands involved in their own resale market. It isn’t the richest startup around, but given the sheer number of brands out there, it has a pretty huge TAM to grow into.

Finally, African fintech OPay is in the process of raising a huge new round. The investment could help push the continent’s 2021 venture capital totals to new heights, based on data TechCrunch reported earlier in the week.

7 questions to ask before relocating your startup to Florida

Cities like Miami, Pittsburgh and Austin have been drawing talent and wealth from Silicon Valley for years, but the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the trend.

In recent months, many investors and entrepreneurs have noisily departed for Miami, citing the region’s favorable business climate and quality of life. It’s always good to consider one’s options, but before booking a moving van for the Sunshine State — or any emerging tech hub, for that matter — here are some basic questions entrepreneurs should ask themselves.

7 questions to ask before relocating your startup to Florida

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

Big Tech Inc.

We’re not going to touch on the Amazon-MGM deal more here in the Big Tech section, leaving us room for all sorts of other news:

  • Facebook is looking into allowing users of both the Big Blue App and Instagram to hide social like counts. Which is great for your mental health, we suspect, if awful for those of us with overdeveloped competitive urges.
  • Visa is rebounding from its pre-nuptial breakup with fintech unicorn Plaid by building a vetted list of fintech startups that its friends and other customers may want to leverage. In a sense, it’s a way for startups to get a stamp of approval from Visa, and possibly more clients in the process. What’s in it for Visa? More digital payments. That’s good for a company that does lots of payments work, we reckon.
  • GM and Lockheed are working on the next American lunar vehicle. It is very, very American to have the progenitors of the consumer Hummer and various weapons of death build our next extraplanetary go-kart. And it’s good that we may go back to the moon? It’s more than time.

To round out the Big Tech section today, OpenAI is out in the market with a $100 million fund to invest in startups. And Microsoft is partnering with the company and putting funds into the capital pool. It feels like ages ago that Microsoft told me that it wasn’t getting into the VC game because the returns would not prove material to its asset base. That wasn’t the point and the company seems to have figured that out.

TechCrunch reports that OpenAI’s Sam Altman of Y Combinator fame said that the fund “plan[s] to make big early bets on a relatively small number of companies, probably not more than 10.” Something to watch out for.

TechCrunch Experts: Email Marketing

Intellect illustration

Image Credits: Getty Images

Have you recently worked with an email marketer? We want to hear about your experience!
Fill out the survey here.

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.

The answers to this survey will help shape our editorial coverage as we begin to dive into email tools, privacy laws and more! Find more details at techcrunch.com/experts.

TC Eventful

TechCrunch’s virtual transportation event, TC Sessions: Mobility, is just two weeks away. Join us to discover crucial trends shaping this rapidly expanding sector and find out how technology including artificial intelligence and cloud-based services will define what’s possible. The fun starts on June 9, so grab your ticket before this Friday with code DAILYCRUNCH and save 50% on your ticket at TechCrunch.com/mobility.

Posted on

Daily Crunch: Before the pandemic, Expensify made remote work cool and profitable

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.

Welcome to Daily Crunch for May 25, 2021. Whether you are a developer, a startup fanatic or merely someone with wanderlust, we have something for everyone today. Well, except for disappointed investors in Lordstown Motors. They are stuck holding the bag today after the American electric vehicle company announced a pretty awful set of earnings.

But for the rest of us, there’s quite a lot of tech and startup news to enjoy. Let’s get to it! — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

  • TechCrunch’s deep dive into Expensify continues: Ahead of its IPO, TechCrunch is digging into Expensify’s growth from startup to unicorn, with our latest entry discussing how the company shed its “Silicon Valley arrogance” to go global.
  • $300M for vertical farming: Startups shaking up the agricultural world is no longer a surprising idea, but the recent Bowery Farms round did make us sit up and take note. The company is now worth $2.3 billion, and its “vertically farmed produce is now available in 850 grocery stores.”
  • Venture capital’s global march continues: New data from Africa indicates that the continent’s historically lagging venture capital results are making up for lost time. Tage Kene-Okafor reports that VC activity in Africa could reach “between $2.25 billion and $2.8 billion” this year. That would be a new record.

Startups and VC

$26M for Airbyte, which is working to better connect data to where it’s needed: Having data is one thing, but startups are starting to get into not only storing data, but also how it gets ingested (Monte Carlo is working on that), and making sure it’s moved to where it’s needed. That’s where Airbyte comes in. And the company’s latest round comes just months after it raised a $5.6 million seed deal.

We asked our own Ron Miller what induced him to cover the round. Here’s what he had to say: “What attracted me to this round was the fact that the founders were using open source to drive the development of a community of users, then worrying about monetization down the road.”

Twilio opens wallet for Hyro: Whenever a company well known for leading a sea change in the tech world cuts a check, we tend to take notice. Recall when Salesforce was hip; its investments made waves. Today, Twilio is the BigCo in question, and Hyro the startup it is backing.

Per our own Jordan Crook, Hyro “calls itself an adaptive communications platform, which essentially means that customers use plug-and-play tools to get information to end users in a conversational way.” Very cool.

$50M for Whatnot, which wants to livestream e-commerce: Look, if you are not into buying things, Whatnot is not going to be your jam. But if you are, it has a neat take on e-commerce that is popular around the world, but has yet to take off in North America. Notably this round comes mere months after Whatnot raised $20 million.

Something something real-life NFTs?: What happens when you cross a startup that wants to bring blockchain to the real estate market and NFTs? You get this: Propy. The startup in question, is “auctioning a real apartment as an NFT.” I don’t get it! But maybe that’s the point.

$65M for social engineering-fighting Tessian: U.K.-based Tessian is a cybersecurity company, which means that of course it raised a huge new round. The cybersecurity market is hotter than all heck given waves arms around at all the breaches lately. But what makes Tessian neat is that it is taking on the human side of things by “flagging problematic [usage] patterns [that] could signify risky stuff is happening.”

Brian Chesky describes a faster, nimbler post-pandemic Airbnb

Managing Editor Jordan Crook interviewed Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky to discuss the future of travel and what it was like leading the world’s biggest hospitality startup during a global pandemic.

“Our business initially dropped 80% in eight weeks. I say it’s like driving a car. You can’t go 80 miles an hour, slam on the brakes and expect nothing really bad to happen.

“Now imagine you’re going 80 miles an hour, slam on the brakes, then rebuild the car kind of while still moving and then try to accelerate into an IPO, all on Zoom.”

Brian Chesky describes a faster, nimbler post-pandemic Airbnb

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

Big Tech Inc.

Today was Microsoft’s Build conference, the second time that the annual Redmond developer confab took place virtually. But before we get into that, a short note on autonomous deliveries.

Getting stuff brought to your house without human power is a long-running technology dream. Remember those Amazon drones that everyone got super stoked about and then we never heard from again (not once, but twice)? Or the cute Postmates robot? Well, there’s another set of players in the space, namely JD.com and Meituan. TechCrunch has the latest on their self-driving delivery efforts.

Back to Build — oh boy was there a lot of news. From top to bottom, Microsoft is bringing more Azure services to Kubernetes, new tools for developers building on top of Teams, updates to its Edge browser as Internet Explorer shuffles off this mortal coil, enterprise Azure support for PyTorch, and, my personal favorite, the company is leveraging GPT-3 (which I think is super cool) to help people code in natural language.

I used to be a Microsoft beat reporter. I kinda miss those days. It’s a huge company with a finger in nearly every pie, which makes covering it surprisingly horizontal. Regardless, enjoy Frederic’s coverage!

 

Community

Some of us have started traveling again … revenge travel, if you will. Our own Jordan Crook chatted with Airbnb’s CEO and we asked him if he thinks “the trends we’re seeing in travel right now, like more rural destinations and decreased business travel, are here to stay?” See what he had to say here and tell us what you think here.

Do you like data? How about BIG Data? Come hang out with us on Clubhouse and chat about our recent Extra Crunch article on the topic this Thursday at 9 a.m. PDT/12 p.m. EDT. Need a Clubhouse invite? We got you; just swing on by the Discord server and ask.

TechCrunch Experts: Email Marketing

Intellect illustration

Image Credits: Getty Images

Who do you turn to when you need to know how to lay out your content, how to improve your open rates or for general email marketing advice?

TechCrunch wants to find the top growth marketers in tech! We’re looking to founders for their recommendations on email marketers.

Fill out the survey here.

This feedback will help shape our editorial coverage moving forward, so make sure your voice is heard. Find more details at techcrunch.com/experts.

Posted on

Daily Crunch: Police search 2 Twitter offices in India after politician receives warning label

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.

Welcome back to Daily Crunch. It’s Monday, May 24, and all I can think about is how much I want a Surface Duo now that it can do two-screen gaming. And one of those new iMacs. I don’t need either, of course, but that doesn’t stop my coveting both of the gadgets. Alas.

Regardless, it was a super busy start to the week, with lots of startup funding rounds, more in the long-running saga of governments trying to control social media platforms, even more IPO news and the latest troubles with Tesla. Let’s cut the chatter and dive in. — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

  • Governments vs. Tech: Indian police tied to the central government showed up at two different Twitter offices today, in what appeared to be an intimidation effort following Twitter’s decision to not unlabel a tweet from a member of the current ruling party as manipulated media.

A few things here. First, India is not alone in trying to force social media companies to behave as local governments want them to. That said, what the current Indian government is doing is particularly egregious and doesn’t bode well for the country’s tech ecosystem as a whole.

  • Tesla owes Norway: American electric car darling Tesla appears to be in hot water with Norway after a “Norwegian conciliation council” ordered the company to pay $16,000 each to thousands of Model S owners after “it found that a software update led to longer charging times.” Ouch. Tesla will have to sell lots of American regulatory credits to cover that loss. Norway is a key market for EVs.
  • U.S. cities buy abuse-linked tech: From the “you should read this” files, the latest report from our own Zack Whittaker and IPVM states that “at least a hundred U.S. counties, towns and cities have bought Chinese-made surveillance systems that the U.S. government has linked to human rights abuses.” Not good.

Startups and VC

As always we’re picking and choosing the best rounds from the day, so feel free to scrounge around the blog if you need even more!

Solidus Labs raises $20M for crypto-snooping: As the value of cryptocurrencies rose in the past year, so too did business at Solidus Labs, which detects “volume and price manipulation” among bitcoin and its brethren. Per its CEO, Asaf Meir, his company saw a “400% increase in inbound demand over 2020.” That sounds about right. Also, Solidus should drop a monthly report on the level of manipulation on every exchange and crypto. That would rule.

Fireflies.ai raises $14M to record, transcribe and connect your meetings: Former Acceleprise company Fireflies is building software that will record and transcribe your meetings, and then connect the text — and perhaps the embedded tasks — to other bits of software. It’s interesting, and growing like a weed. So Khosla helped put $14 million into it.

Mono raises $2M to power African fintech: From building the Plaid for Africa to “power the internet economy in Africa,” Mono is not short on vision. And now it has had its accounts refreshed to pursue its plans to “[streamline] various financial data in a single API for companies and third-party developers.” APIs are cool. Fintech is cool. Fintech APIs are extra cool. That’s our take.

Flat6Labs raises $13.2M to fund Egyptian startups: This is fund news, but it’s small enough that it fits inside the startup section today. In short, since 2011 Flat6Labs has been an accelerator in Egypt and Tunisia. And now it has a new checkbook to play with.

Inside Zeta Global’s IPO: Finally from the startup world today, Zeta Global is going public. It’s an offering that could set the tone for the martech world for some time to come. So, we dug into its numbers a bit tardily to figure out just what Zeta has that public investors might want.

When to walk away from a VC who wants to invest in your startup

Ofri Ben-Porat flew from London to NYC to meet potential investors, but at the last minute, one canceled, claiming illness. Moments later, he received a DocSend push notification informing him that said VC had just opened the pitch deck he’d sent days before.

Undeterred, he showed up anyway and pretended he hadn’t received their email. The discussion went well; after he flew home, the VCs offered pre-terms and due diligence, “but ultimately, I didn’t feel right taking money from them,” says Ben-Porat.

Securing the right amount of funding at the right moment can make or break a startup, but founders who can’t identify red flags — or worse, ignore them — will live to regret it.

When to walk away from a VC who wants to invest in your startup

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

Big Tech Inc.

What has a zillion hands and likes to copy its friends? Facebook! This time, however, Facebook could be doing something interesting. TechCrunch dug through some creator-friendly feature work that Big Blue is putting into its TikTok clone. So it’s still running the copy machine at full tilt, just with a few upgrades.

Turning back to Apple, not everything is M1 chips and purple iPhones. Some things are less good at the Cupertino-based technology leviathan. Today TechCrunch reported on a few different macOS vulnerabilities that, frankly, don’t sound good. What’s the old adage? Buy a PC; they just work?

In happier Apple news, the company has a pile of new software updates for your enjoyment, especially if you are an iPhone or iPad user.

Don’t fret, Microsoft fans, we have something for you as well. Namely a review of the new Surface Laptop 4. It’s pretty darn good, keeping all its predecessor’s weaknesses and strengths, with new guts.

Wrapping, ByteDance has another chart-topping app; Airbnb is doubling down on guest flexibility, though we have questions; SiriusXM is partnering with TikTok on a new channel; and SensorTower is making sure that there is at least some M&A to report on.

TechCrunch Experts: Email Marketing

Intellect illustration

Image Credits: Getty Images

TechCrunch Experts is still collecting survey responses to help us identify the top email marketers in tech!

At this time, we’re not looking for self-nominations — we’re only seeking nominations from clients. We want to hear all about your experience and how you found the right expert for your needs. Fill out the survey here.

We’re excited to move this project forward. Visit techcrunch.com/experts to find out more!

TC Eventful

Last year, we held our first dedicated space startup event, TC Sessions: Space, featuring some of the industry’s top founders and leaders, including Rocket Lab’s Peter Beck, Lockheed Martin’s Lisa Callahan, Amazon’s Dave Limp, NASA’s Kathy Lueders and many more. This year, we’re excited to announce we’re doing it again with TC Sessions: Space 2021, happening virtually December 14-15.

TC: Sessions Space is returning in December

TC Sessions: Mobility 2021 is right around the corner of your calendar (June 9). If you want to place your ground-breaking, edge-cutting, envelope-pushing (no extra charge for clichés) early-stage startup in front of the world’s leading mobility movers, shakers and makers you gotta hustle. You have just one week left to buy one of our remaining three Startup Exhibitor Packages.

Only 3 startup demo booths left at TC Sessions: Mobility 2021

Posted on

Watching startups eat markets is good fun

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.

Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors.

The huge sale of Utah-based startup Divvy to Bill.com is still bouncing around my head this week, not only because the $2.5 billion exit was huge for both the company and its local scene, but also because its target market is exciting to watch.

Divvy competes in what we call the corporate spend market with a few other unicorns, including Ramp and Brex. Now with Divvy taken off the table, the pair of competitors are differentiating in a few ways that matter.

And Brex is getting back on its billboard game.

This week Brex announced that it is rolling out IRL advertising in a few American cities. Residents of San Francisco back when Brex was a baby will recall how the startup plastered its brand all over the city. Essentially, it was a cheap way to get a lot of impressions.

Now the startup is taking the strategy to Houston and Miami and D.C. Why? The Exchange caught up with Brex CEO Henrique Dubugras this week to chat about the matter. Per the executive, his company has two goals for its renewed meatspace marketing push. First, Brex wants to talk up its software game over its initial branding as a corporate card for startups. And, second, it wants business owners to know that it works with all types of companies now, not merely those with Sand Hill Road on speed dial.

The push to get the Brex name out in markets less known for their startup activity than overall business climate makes sense, if the unicorn wants to attract more nonstartup customers. But it’s the software element of its efforts that unsurprisingly caught our attention.

That’s because Brex recently rolled out Brex Premium, a package of software services that it charges around $600 per year for. Brex and rivals like Ramp and Divvy have spent lots of energy and money in recent quarters building out increasingly sophisticated software around their traditional corporate card products. The result thus far are codebases more and more able to supplant other pieces of enterprise software, like expense software.

But as Brex looks to double down via an advertising push on its decision to charge for Brex Premium — which Dubugras says is performing better than his company had initially anticipated — competitor Ramp is pushing its free software as an edge.

Ramp CEO and co-founder Eric Glyman pointed The Exchange to his company’s refreshed pricing page, which highlights its zero-cost software. And, he said in an email, the new page was “powering the fastest growth month we’ve ever had.”

Broadly, what we’re seeing with Ramp and Brex and Divvy — along with Airbase and others that also compete in the space — is a cohort of startups attacking an aged corporate issue with more nimble, lower-cost products. And proving while doing so that there was huge untapped demand for something different and better. The various players competing for the startup crown in the corporate spend world wouldn’t all be growing as rapidly as they are if that weren’t the case.

If you want more, here’s our dig into the Divvy-Bill.com deal.

More from startup-land

The Exchange was lathered up in SPACs this week, which means that we missed a host of interesting news that we otherwise would have loved to poke into. For example, here are some very neat venture rounds that it would have been fun to dig into more deeply:

  • ProducePay raised a $43M Series C: LA-based ProducePay helps food growers access capital, software and market data, linking them to food demanders (importers, etc.). Per its website, ProducePay funded a Bajío, Mexico-based asparagus growing operation to the tune of a half million dollars to hire labor and invest in its growing operation. Repayment, again per the company, starts when product ships.
  • Farming is hard, fickle, expensive and not always aligned with traditional banking requirements. Throw in an increasingly global production/consumption food network, and you can see why G2VP and IFC co-led the round.
  • Oh, and The Exchange learned that ProducePay’s reported 2020 doubling was measured in GAAP revenue terms. The startup’s gross margins “grew by over 75% from 2019 to 2020, thanks to improved underwriting policies and a more attractive cost of funds as volume scaled,” per its PR team. That’s super cool.

Another neat company that raised this week was Panther, which put together a $2.5 million round. Panther wants to help companies hire in 160 different countries. Our read of the company and its round is that, as more companies go remote-first, this sort of service is going to become a must-have. Gusto also competes in the market, so it should be an active one to watch from both VC and M&A perspectives.

Panther is based in Florida, and raised funds from, per its release, “Tribe Capital, Eric Ries, Naval Ravikant and Carta Ventures.”

One more round: Lance, a freelancer-focused neobank, raised $2.8 million this week. The round was led by, per the company, “Barclays, BDMI, Great Oaks Capital, Imagination Capital, Techstars, DFJ Frontier, New York Venture Partners” along with some angels.

Now that the fintech world has created Chime and other broad-remit neobanks, it’s not surprising to see more targeted efforts get put together. And Lance CEO Oona Rokyta is betting that the freelance world is set to grow further. Given how the labor market has evolved in the last few years, I’d hazard she’s making an intelligent bet.

To close out today, a quick note on Alpaca. It’s a startup that TechCrunch has dug into here and there, as it fits into both our general focus on API-delivered services (on-demand pricing is hot), and it exists in the consumer fintech world (powering other companies’ equities trading services). We caught up with CEO Yoshi Yokokawa this week to chat about what’s been going on at his company since we last tracked its growth rates.

After all, whatever we can learn about the world of consumer investing — and Robinhood told us quite a lot this week — is useful given the somewhat global savings/investing boom that we’ve seen in the last year or so.

Per Yokokawa, Alpaca has global plans, including rolling out with new partners on a few continents in the coming months. The company is handling 1,000 new accounts daily outside the United States, which Yokokawa expects to rise sharply in the coming months. And the company recently built out a broker API to make onboarding users simpler for its partners.

Sounds like growth to us. More when we can milk it out of, er, the alpaca.

Alex

Posted on

Daily Crunch: Snap spends more than $500M to acquire AR display startup WaveOptics

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.

Welcome to Daily Crunch for May 21, 2021. Closing out the week, bitcoin dropped sharply today on (more?) news from China about possible restrictions on cryptocurrencies more broadly. Depending on your priors, the most recent news is purely FUD, or it’s indication that Bitcoin and friends are terrible inflation hedges. Pick your poison! Regardless, we have a grip of startup news to get to, so off we go! — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

  • Snap spends a half billion on AR: Yesterday’s news from consumer photo giant Snap didn’t stop with the company plunking down $500 million for WaveOptics, which we reported “makes the waveguides and projectors used in AR glasses.” That sure sounds like Snap gearing up for eventual mass production? Right?
  • Startups heart farming: TechCrunch covered a huge $65.5 million Series B for Indonesian startup TaniHub Group today. Part of what it does is loan capital to farmers ahead of their harvests. In related news, ProducePay raised $43 million earlier this week to do something similar in Latin America. There’s notable startup activity, then, at the intersection of agtech and fintech.
  • Mobile gaming is bigger than you thought: Did you know that former gaming darling Zynga is in the midst of a comeback? Mobile gaming, its core focus, had a huge 2020, leading to the company posting record Q1 results. Riding the same way is Jam City, another mobile gaming shop is going public. More here.

Startups and VC

To round out the week, how about a few smaller venture capital rounds? We have a number from today that are well worth our time:

Secai Marche raises $1.4M for farm-to-table food distribution: We don’t cover enough Japanese startups, frankly, but here’s to doing better. Tokyo-based Secai Marche is building a B2B “logistics platform for farmers that sell to restaurants, hotels and other” food and beverage companies, and we think it’s neat. Rakuten and Beyond Next supplied the capital.

Mio raises $1M to bring social commerce to rural Vietnam: Quickly growing e-commerce market Vietnam is seeing rising penetration in major cities. Mio wants to bring e-commerce to smaller cities and rural areas. Per our reporting, it is “building a reseller network and logistics infrastructure that can offer next-day delivery to Tier 2 and 3 cities.” Our present may be someone else’s future, so it’s swell to see startups bring the latest to more folks.

To round out our round coverage today, a slightly larger deal for a mental-health focused service:

Wysa raises $5.5M for AI-powered mental health: This is at a minimum cool on paper. We’ll have to get some time with the service as it evolves through time, but TechCrunch reports that “Jo Aggarwal, the founder and CEO of Wysa, is hoping you’ll find it easier to confide in a robot. Or, put more specifically, “‘emotionally intelligent’ artificial intelligence.” I, for one, welcome our robot mental-health overlords. Jokes aside, there is a therapist shortage in the world, and if Wysa can help more folks handle their mental health better, we’re all for it.

5 predictions for the future of e-commerce

The United States is one of the world’s most advanced economies, but until quite recently, South Korea and China had much higher e-commerce penetration.

American consumers and companies are closing that gap. In 2016, the percentage of total retail spend where the goods were bought and sold online in the U.S. was about 8%. Today, that figure is closer to 17%.

Despite the last two decades of disruption, we’re still in the early days of e-commerce. But as more merchants of every size start making their goods and services available online, we’ve reached an inflection point.

In an exclusive report for Extra Crunch, Ethan Choi, a partner at Accel, offers five well-researched predictions about where e-commerce is heading in terms of D2C and the overall enablement landscape.

“We’re entering what we at Accel believe is ‘the golden age of D2C e-commerce,'” says Choi.

5 predictions for the future of e-commerce

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

Big Tech Inc.

Today we have to stretch the Big Tech portion of this newsletter to include entities even larger than the largest technology companies, namely governments.

The Indian government is mad at tech companies yet again. This time it’s Twitter’s turn. Per TechCrunch, New Delhi “has expressed strong objection to Twitter for classifying tweets by Indian politicians as ‘manipulated media,’ and separately asked social media firms to remove posts that refer to an ‘Indian variant’ of the coronavirus.”

A few thoughts here: One, Twitter is going to have to navigate an increasingly complicated global climate for free speech in general. And figure out how to handle governments’ reactions to its decisions on labeling content. That’s going to be hard. And asking a social service to blanket-ban a particular phrase is going to be essentially impossible. After all, even in China, where banned phrases on social media are common, individuals have found myriad ways around the restrictions. So, good luck, Indian government.

On a related note, if you are interested in privacy more generally, what’s going on in the European Union regarding data protection is fascinating.

Moving back to the world of corporate news, Spotify is finally bringing offline listening to the Apple Watch. For runners, this is big news. Our own Brian Heater is hype about the update.

To close us out today, the Equity podcast team has thoughts on the growth in corporate “media” and what it means for unicorns and other large technology companies.

Community

Two quick things heading into the weekend: Ford’s new electric truck looks cool, but you, our readers, are hodling out for Tesla’s Cyber Truck. If you’re a founder of a startup of any stage and want to try your pitch out on some really cool investors … then Extra Crunch Live is the place to go. Check out this week’s pitch by Capri Money. From the audience to the stage, just like that! See you there next week.

TechCrunch Experts: Email Marketing

Intellect illustration

Image Credits: Getty Images

We’re thrilled with the responses to our survey about the top email marketers. It’s not too late to weigh in: Fill out the survey here.

In addition to giving founders who respond to the survey a discount to a new Extra Crunch subscription, we’ll be featuring a couple of nominations in Daily Crunch starting next week!

If you’re a growth marketer, pass the survey on to your clients — we’d love to hear from them!

To find out more details about this project and how we plan to use it to shape our editorial coverage, visit techcrunch.com/experts.

TC Eventful

The Extra Crunch Live party carries on into June, with new episodes connecting you with some of tech’s biggest names.

Check out the top-notch founders and investors joining us on Extra Crunch Live in June

Posted on

Daily Crunch: Ford’s powerhouse F-150 Lightning pickup can actually power your house

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.

It’s Thursday, everyone, and the technology and startup worlds were a mixed bag today. We learned about the final death of Internet Explorer (RIP), new AR glasses from Snap, fresh cryptocurrency rules for the United States, and even took the time to look into all the pizza-robot startups. Hell, Ford even made the cut with its new electric truck that I secretly covet (it can power your house if the grid goes down!).

As always, we’ve collected the three key stories for the day below and then have a rapid-fire breakdown of startup and Big Tech news to follow. Let’s go! — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

  • Consumer financial technology is so hot: With Berlin-based investing app Trade Republic raising $900 million and Robinhood’s partial, first-quarter results looking strong, your Twitter feed may feel all fintech, all the time. And with good reason, as startups in the niche are seeing huge customer demand, which is, in turn, making investors both public and private salivate.
  • E-commerce roll-ups are raising jillions: The world is moving toward e-commerce at a rapid clip, which is leading to a host of startups raising piles of cash to buy, and consolidate brands that sell on popular digital platforms. It’s an arms race to own your wallet, and Factory14 just put together $200 million for its own effort. (More here, and here.)
  • Governments are not thrilled with cryptocurrencies: On the heels of news concerning fresh crackdowns on Bitcoin and friends in China, the United States is looking “to put new requirements in place that would make it easier for the government to see how money is moving around, including digital currencies,” Taylor reports.

Startups and VC

The startup world is awash in capital these days, so we cannot get to all the latest venture capital rounds in one bloc. Here, however, are a few favorites from the day:

Eano raises $6M for its home renovation software: Home renovations are hard because most of us are not trained project managers. Eano wants to make the process simpler for both homeowners and the folks hired to do the renovation work. Thank god.

Workrise raises $300M for its workforce management platform: With Procore’s IPO going well today, and Workrise raising $300 million at roughly the same time, it appears to be a great time to build products for less sexy markets. Workrise, for example, “connects skilled laborers with infrastructure and energy companies looking to staff and manage projects efficiently.” With Franklin Templeton now an investor, it looks like it’s headed for an IPO in not too much time.

Pitch raises $85M to help folks build shareable presentations: The push to build and fund software that may fit neatly into a remote or hybrid-work world continues today, with Pitch announcing a huge round at a $600 million valuation for what Ingrid describes as the “ability for people to create, collaborate on and share presentations with each other through an online-based interface.” Frankly that sounds cool.

Maven raises $20M for its cohort-based professional classes: The education technology VC rush continues, with Andreessen Horowitz leading a $20 million round into Maven, which Natasha reports “helps professionals teach cohort-based classes.” Notably Maven raised money via equity crowdfunding earlier in its life.

Kredito raises $4M to get loans for LatAm small businesses: The fintech lending boom that has impacted consumers (BNPL and the like) and business is not stopping at the borders of the United States. Kredito is testament to that fact, putting together a new round to help get SMBs in Latin America access to credit.

Chasing hype is human nature: The tyranny of startup trends

The fear of missing out (FOMO) spreads faster than wildfire and often overwhelms rational decision-making.

In the VC community, investors look for lessons from disruptive startups they can use to identify other potential winners. But hype leads to bad decision-making, rushed due diligence and wishful thinking.

When and if those startups actually do well, “irrational FOMO takes over” because the initial assessment was based on bad information, says Victor Echevarria, a partner at Jackson Square Ventures. “Trends are addictive; to remain disciplined and avoid hype is to deny our innate instincts.”

It’s natural for investors to follow the crowd, but in the race to the bottom, FOMO can be high-octane fuel.

Chasing hype is human nature: The tyranny of startup trends

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

Big Tech Inc.

Today’s Big Tech news comes from Microsoft, Google, Twitter and Snap. And TikTok. Enjoy:

Twitter’s epic product run continues: The product news parade from Twitter continued today, with the social media company announcing a revamp to user profiles and the restarting of its verification process. Between a rapid-fire rollout of its Clubhouse-competing Spaces product, or its media push with Revue and subscriptions, Twitter has been on a roll.

Google didn’t learn from Microsoft’s retail experiment: Big Search is following Redmond into the IRL retail game that the latter company already gave up on. Which is a bummer as I kinda dug Microsoft stores. Regardless, read all about Google’s impending meatspace storefront here.

Microsoft lays Internet Explorer to rest: The death date of Internet Explorer has been fixed for June, 2022. So you have that long to fool around with the venerable, if comedically aged internet browser. Few will miss Internet Explorer, but it was a pretty key product in the rise of the web. Kinda like Yahoo. Even if Yahoo will ride again (again). Again.

TikTok builds out way-late anti-bullying tooling: As the founder of its parent company steps down amidst a Chinese government crackdown on that country’s tech industry, TikTok is rolling out some long-awaited features that should make its service a bit better to use. At long last.

TechCrunch Experts: Email Marketing

Intellect illustration

Image Credits: Getty Images

Have you recently worked with an email marketer? We want to hear about your experience!

Fill out the survey here.

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.

The answers to this survey will help shape our editorial coverage as we begin to dive into email tools, privacy laws and more! Find more details at techcrunch.com/experts.

TC Eventful

We’re excited to announce that Mate Rimac will be joining us at TC Sessions: Mobility 2021, a one-day virtual event that is scheduled June 9. We have a lot of ground to cover, from how he started a company outside of a traditional incubator or VC network to his upcoming 1,914 hp electric hypercar and plans for the company’s future.

TC Sessions: Mobility 2021

Posted on

Daily Crunch: India gives WhatsApp one week to revoke its updated privacy policy

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.

Happy Wednesday, friends! It was another super-busy day in the tech world. I had my sights on Squarespace’s public debut, as well as the value of Coinbase’s stock, which may be tracking the price of bitcoin a bit more literally than some folks expected. And if you are a long-term crypto holder, congrats on the buying opportunity. If you are a short-term crypto holder, yes, you can have a drink now regardless of what time it is. — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

  • Whatsapp v. India: The scrap between Facebook’s Whatsapp service and the Indian government continued today as the nation-state “once again directed the Facebook-owned company to withdraw the planned update.”
  • Telehealth + fertility: Famous for its initial men’s health products, Ro (née Roman) purchased Modern Fertility today, a fertility-focused startup founded in 2017. Our question is how Ro’s telehealth approach will fit with reproductive health.
  • Squarespace flops: Squarespace’s direct listing set a reference price of $50, valuing the company sharply lower than its final private price ($10 billion, set earlier this year). Then its stock fell further.

From the TechCrunch Events side of things, Tess Hatch, a vice president and partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, is coming to Disrupt. Which is very hype.

Startups and VC

We’re shaking things up today and talking about product first and venture capital rounds second. Sound good?

First up is Otter.ai’s new product: Otter Assistant. It can transcribe your Zoom calls. For reporters, this is huge as a note-taking tool. But it will likely find even broader remit in the business world. Don’t forget that Otter raised $50 million just a few months ago. (For more on the voice transcription space, check out Deepgram’s 2020-era funding round.)

Second in the product category, Liquid Instruments has raised $13.7 million to bring its Moku:Go product to classrooms and labs everywhere. What does the Go do? It “combines several commonly used tools into one compact package, saving room on your workbench or classroom while also providing a modern, software-configurable interface,” TechCrunch reported.

Moving onto some purely financial coverage from startup-land, here are four neat rounds we dug into more deeply:

$20M for Assignar: Construction tech is a busy sector, not merely because the construction sector is itself rather active; the digital transformation push that we’ve seen around the business is also touching down in the world of mortar and bricks. Its software helps contractors and subcontractors “connect to the field and vice versa,” according to its CEO Sean McCreanor.

  • Why do we care? Fellow construction tech player Procore is going public as we speak. So the market that Assignar is playing in is active in both early- and late-stage terms.

$150M for Formlabs: 3D printing has come of age, it appears, as Massachusetts-based Formlabs closed a nine-figure round for its printing tech. SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2 led the round, which values the company at around $2 billion.

  • Why do we care? Formlabs wants to improve 3D printing machines while also making them cheaper. If it can pull that off, whole sectors could be shaken up.

$50M for Super: If you own a home, you are familiar with how rapidly entropy will ensure that you have a regular stream of repair bills. Why not convert those into a monthly subscription? That’s what Super is working to do, and now it has cash to pursue its vision after growing 7x since last April.

  • Why do we care? The subscription push is far more than merely an enterprise-software affair, or something related to consumer entertainment. Anything as a service is where we are in 2021.

$250M for Pipe: Pipe is a platform that allows companies to sell their future, predictable revenue streams to investors. It’s best known for working with SaaS companies, but is expanding into other business types as well.

  • Why do we care? Pipe has been growing at a torrid pace, and raising capital at a similar clip. It’s either onto something super huge, or the market for financial products is just bonkers for now. Either way, it’s an interesting option for software startups hunting for cash.

5 innovative fundraising methods for emerging VCs and PEs

According to David Teten, founder of Versatile VC, five new strategies are gaining traction among fund managers looking to raise capital from family offices and high-net-worth individuals:

  • Online communities and virtual events.
  • Platforms that help other investors access your fund.
  • Soliciting under the 506(c) designation.
  • Launching a rolling fund.
  • Crowdfunding from retail investors into a general partnership.

In a summary of a class he taught for the Oper8r VC fund accelerator, Teten offers actionable advice for anyone who wants to connect with pre-qualified investors.

5 innovative fundraising methods for emerging VCs and PEs

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

TechCrunch Experts: Email Marketing

Intellect illustration

Image Credits: Getty Images

Extra Crunch is looking to founders for recommendations on email marketers to help us build a short list of top growth marketers in tech!

If you’re a founder and have an email marketer you enjoyed working with, we want to hear from you! If you’re a growth marketer, please pass this along to your clients.

Fill out the survey here.

We’ll share great recommendations publicly so more startups can find the help they need. Find more details at techcrunch.com/experts.

Big Tech Inc.

Today from the world of Big Tech, we’re pausing to listen to our own Editor in Chief Matthew Panzarino discuss the new iPad Pro, which he thinks has amazing hardware:

  • Screen: “The mini-LED-driven Liquid Retina XDR display is probably the best display that’s ever shipped on a mobile computer. It’s just fantastic.”
  • Speed: “The M1 chip is absolutely blistering.”
  • Imaging: “The new iPad Pro cameras are pretty fantastic; both front and back are now very usable and the new front camera especially benefits from an increase in resolution and new wide-angle optics.”
  • Keyboard: “The overall feel of the keyboard is still great, a really nice typing experience.”

But then there’s the software. Which Panzarino is not stoked about. It’s aging, he argues:

The other side of this coin that isn’t so shiny is the iPad’s aging software. It’s just as good as it was when I wrote my review of the iPad Pro in 2020 — at which point my conclusions were “you can adapt to it but it could be better.” That was a year ago. As someone who has used it as my only portable machine for the last two and a half years, I can tell you that this is a very long time to wait for a big leap forward in capability.

I have a very simple ask for the iPad’s software: I want to feel the same energy, vivacity and pure performance for the sake of peak performance that the hardware side exhibits.

Apple has now come to the crossroad that Microsoft tried to meet with Windows 8 and failed; how do you build an OS that serves either two form factors (touch and mobile, and desktop) well, or two OSs that can share enough third-party software so that neither is neglected? We’ll know more at WWDC.

Community

Turns out nothing announced this week will get you to move over to Android from iOS. Fair enough. Now we ask … what do you think is going on with cryptocurrency?

Have some thoughts to share? A story idea? Looking for a new gig? Come hang out with us on the Discord server.

Posted on

Daily Crunch: How Expensify maintained its early-stage startup culture after 13 years

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.

As summer kicks into gear, the IPO market is mimicking the season by cranking up its temperature. Today, TechCrunch explored the IPO filings from venture-backed Marqeta and software startup WalkMe. Squarespace direct lists later this week, along with public debuts from Oatly and Procore on Thursday. All this is great news for late-stage startups and their backers. Not to mention lots of tech workers around the world.

Also today, the fine folks at the Webbys announced that TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, Equity, is the best of its kind in the technology category. We’re stoked! — Alex

TechCrunch Top 3

Google hosts its yearly developer event: The advertising search company kicked off its yearly developer confab today, with the remote event showing off new tech including the ability to have a conversation with Pluto. Or a paper airplane. In more serious terms, Google has new AI chips that look pretty darn cool.

Our deep-dive into Expensify continues: As Expensify gets closer and closer to its public offering, TechCrunch’s coverage of the company’s history and growth continues. In today’s entry we also got to feature my favorite quote in years. Per CEO David Barrett, “Basically everyone is wrong about basically everything.” Agreed.

Piano shows there’s big money in subscription tech: We have a sheaf of funding round below, but the Piano deal stood out as it’s actually tech we use at TechCrunch. So, we’re super familiar with it. The news is that Piano has just closed an $88 million round, a deal that includes LinkedIn as an investor. Both the dollar amount and the investor list that the transaction sports are notable.

Startups and VC

TechCrunch covered our usual daily delivery of funding rounds today, a list that skewed later-stage today. So, from the land of big dollars:

Explorium scores $75M Series C: This new deal comes less than a year after Explorium closed its Series B round, so something is happening at the company that has investors taking note. In short, Explorium helps “data pros find the best data for a given model” according to our own Ron Miller. And it’s apparently big business.

Extend raises $260M at a $1.6B valuation: The warranty space is pretty hot at the moment. Just days after M25-backed Upsie raised an $18.2 million round, Extend picked up just over 14x as much capital to help retailers and brands offer warranties more efficiently, and, as Ingrid Lunden reports, help “consumers buy and file claims against them.”

Vise raises $65M Series C: The fintech world is hot, but not only when it comes to backend-infra services like Plaid, or shiny consumer plays like Chime. Vise provides portfolio-crunching services to indie financial advisors (hence its name, we presume), and has made enough process since its last round to entice Ribbit Capital to lead its latest private cash infusion.

Klayvio raises $320M at a $9.5B valuation: Recent EC-1 subject Klayvio’s latest round is proof that email is far, far from dead. The email marketing company told TechCrunch that its customer count “doubled over the past 12 months and [that it] now serves over 70,000 paying customers, a more than 110% increase from 2019.” That explains the new raise, and its nearly decacorn valuation.

In the honorable mention category, Styra raised $40 million (it’s best known for Open Policy Agent), commission-free trading startup Stake raised $30 million to expand in Europe, and Beta Technologies raised $368 million to keep working on electric airplanes.

Want to double your rate of return? Seek counsel from experienced executives

As a rule of thumb, it takes 7-8 years for a successful startup to achieve an exit. But there’s a simple way to speed up the clock: Bring in one or more founders who have previous executive experience.

According to data gathered by Rob Olson, partner and head of data strategy at venture engine M13, startups that have two or more experienced founders tend to exit 33% faster and raise 34% less capital.

“Combined, these two improvements can nearly double an investor’s rate of return,” says Olson.

Want to double your rate of return? Seek counsel from experienced executives

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

Introducing TechCrunch Experts: Email Marketing

Image Credits: Getty Images

Who do you turn to when you need to know how to lay out your content, how to improve your open rates, or for general email marketing advice?

TechCrunch wants to find the top growth marketers in tech! We’re looking to founders for their recommendations on email marketers.

Fill out the survey here.

As the recommendations come in, we’ll begin sharing them publicly so that startups can find the right expert for what they need. This feedback will also help shape our editorial coverage moving forward, so make sure your voice is heard. Find more details at techcrunch.com/experts.

Big Tech Inc.

Today’s Big Tech news is all about Google and its I/O event. If you are super busy and just want the highlights, here you go:

  • AI: Google has new AI chips that it is super proud of, and announced Vertex AI, a “new managed machine learning platform that is meant to make it easier for developers to deploy and maintain their AI models.” Keep in mind how competitive and cutthroat the public cloud world is. Here’s Google taking a stand from third place in that particular scrap.
  • Android: We all knew that Android was popular, but I have to admit that I did not expect the software service to have found a home in some 3,000,000,000 devices. That’s nearly one device for every two humans and Google is keeping the ball rolling by teasing Android’s 12 iteration at I/O.
  • Smart Canvas: Google’s various productivity apps are getting needed love, the company announced. In the mix is the news about Smart canvas, which we described as a “set of new collaborative workspace tools.” What matters more than any single point of news about Docs and friends is that Google is not giving up on them. Which means that, for those of us like myself who live in Google’s productivity suite, we have goodies coming. Good.

 

Community

As you pour through the news out of Google I/O, we wondered … does the latest Android 12 preview make you want to switch from an iPhone? Let us know.

Come chat with us about Google and more on our shiny new Discord server.

Posted on

Daily Crunch: AT&T’s $43B WarnerMedia spinoff will create a new content colossus

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.

Welcome to Daily Crunch for Monday, May 17. We have a lot to get to, so we’ll keep our introduction incredibly curt and simply note that early-stage founders can still apply to the upcoming TechCrunch Battlefield event for another week or so. Neesha has the details here. — Alex

TechCrunch Top 3

Today the biggest stories concern the never-ending flow of cash to insurtech, the ability of software companies to post accelerating revenue growth, and the market leverage of major tech platforms:

Jerry raises $28M: Adding another name to the list of startups working on building insurance marketplaces, Jerry has a twist on the model and a huge new infusion of cash. The startup wants to help consumers do more than just find insurance, pursuing the superapp concept, but in a new direction. For more on insurtech marketplaces and their growth, head here. (Insurtech is super hot in aggregate, it’s worth remembering.)

Monday.com is going public: We’ve long known that corporate communications and planning startup Monday.com was north of $100 million in annual recurring revenue. Now, at last, it has filed to go public. So we ripped into the numbers, which show accelerating revenue adds. More importantly than the raw math, however, was the implicit point from the news that the IPO markets remain open, and for more than just the latest SPAC deals. That’s good news for late-stage startups everywhere.

Apple adds lossless for no cost: Spotify wants to charge for higher-quality streaming. Apple has decided not to. And that’s not great news for the smaller company because it needs to boost its revenue per user over time. Apple, which has infinite money, does not. The Spotify-Apple war is a notable one to watch because it pits an incumbent upstart against an upstart incumbent in the music streaming space. Let’s see how Spotify fires back.

Startups and VC

It appears that every startup in the world just raised more money, so here’s a rundown of the latest deals in quick-fire fashion, ordered by size:

Fave raises $2.2M to connect fans and creators: Founder Jacquelle Amankonah Horton wants to close the space between fans and the creators they love. Given the general market focus in recent quarters on creators, the company makes sense.

Merge raises $4.5M for its HR and finance API: Merge offers a single API to connect products to all sorts of finance and HR products. It’s akin to a super API. And with what we presume is a developer-led sales motion and on-demand pricing, it’s right in the middle of the current startup business model zeitgeist.

Telda raises $5M for Egyptian neobanking: The Telda round is cool not only because we don’t cover Egyptian tech enough, but also because there’s Sequoia money in it. American VCs are looking farther and farther afield for their next deal.

Houm raises $8M for LatAm home sales: TechCrunch described Houm as “an all-in-one platform that helps homeowners rent and sell their properties in” Latin America. The recent Y Combinator grad took part in the accelerator’s winter 2021 batch.

Code Ocean raises $21M for collaborative data science: In short, Code Ocean provides data jockeys with a “small-scale container platform that lets you wrap up all the necessary components of your data and analysis in an easily shared format,” Devin Coldewey reports. And now it has a lot more money to chase that vision.

Ankorstore raises $102M to supply indie stores: Hailing from France, Ankorstore provides wholesale items to smaller retailers. And Tiger just poured capital into the company, meaning that the startup has some of the most intriguing financial backing out there today.

One more hardware SPAC: Bright Machines is going public via a SPAC. Our own Ron Miller helped us dig into the company and its accounting results.

The battle for voice recognition inside vehicles is heating up

Until recently, integrating affordable voice-recognition software into an automobile was something from science fiction.

But last year, the percentage of vehicles offering in-car connected services reached 45%. By 2024, analysts predict cars with voice recognition will comprise 60% of the market.

Considering how much time many of us spend behind the wheel, there’s an infinite number of applications for the technology. For our latest Extra Crunch market map, we sized up the general market opportunity before creating a roster of major players and reaching out to investors to see where they’re placing bets.

The battle for voice recognition inside vehicles is heating up

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

Big Tech Inc.

Akin to the startup market, Big Tech was incredibly busy in the last few days, so here’s your run-through:

JD.com’s logistics subsidiary is going public: Good news from the Chinese startup market has been somewhat rare lately. Here’s some, which not only helps change the narrative a bit about the country’s tech scene, but also underscores how bonkers the global e-commerce market is.

SpaceX sent out 52 more Starlink satellites: Bring on rural, high-speed internet. So we can all move to Montana. (Please.)

GoJek and Tokopedia are GoTo Group: The expected combination of “Indonesia’s two biggest startups” is done, TechCrunch reports. GoJek, of course, is in the ride-hailing business, while Tokopedia is a marketplace. Now it’s a single, massive entity.

Microsoft makes Teams better for your parents: What happens when your Discord deal dies? Well, you make your current chat-video-groups service better for regular folks, it turns out. Aside from gaming, Teams may be Microsoft’s best shot at a consumer play that works out for some time.

Finally, BigTelco companies ditching media assets to de-lever ahead of higher infrastructure spend? Say no more, AT&T, we’re already hip to it. (Or they could just limit some shareholder return programs for a bit. You know?)

Posted on

Maybe SPACs were a bad idea after all

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.

Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors.

Hello friends, I was out yesterday with what I’m calling Moderna Syndrome. Basically I got whacked by my second vaccine dose, and instead of enjoying a day off eating candy and spoiling my dogs I spent the entire day on the couch unable to move. All that’s to say that I missed Coinbase and DoorDash earnings when they came out.

Catching us up, Coinbase met its forecasts that it had previously released (more here), and today its stock is flat. DoorDash, in contrast, beat market expectations and is currently up just over 25% as I write to you.

But despite huge quarters from each, both companies are far below their recently set all-time highs. Coinbase is worth around $265 per share today, off from an all-time high of $429.54, which it set recently. And DoorDash is worth $145 this afternoon, far below its $256.09 52-week high.

They are not alone amongst recent public offerings that have lost steam. Many SPAC-led combinations are tanking. But while Coinbase and DoorDash are still richly valued at current levels and worth far more than they were as private companies, some startups that took SPAC money to float are not doing well, let alone as well.

As Bloomberg notes, five electric vehicle companies that SPAC’d their way to the public markets were worth $60 billion at one point. Now the collection of mostly revenue-free public EV companies have shed “more than $40 billion of market capitalization combined from their respective peaks.” Youch.

And SPAC hype-man and general investing bon vivant Chamath Palihapitiya is taking some stick for his deal’s returns as well. It’s all a bit messy. Which, to be fair, is pretty much what we’ve expected all along.

Not that there aren’t some SPAC-combinations that make sense. There are. But mostly it’s been more speculative hype than business substance. Perhaps that’s why Coinbase and DoorDash didn’t need to lean on crutches to get public. Sure, the market is still figuring out what they are actually worth, but that doesn’t mean that they are in any real trouble. But consider, for a moment, the companies that have agreed to go public via a SPAC before the correction and are still waiting for their deal to complete.

TFW ur forecast is conservative

The Exchange has been on the horn recently with a few public company CEOs after their earnings report. After those conversations, we have to talk a bit about guidance. Why? Because it’s a game that I find slightly annoying.

Some public companies simply don’t provide forecasts. Cool. Root doesn’t, for example, provide quarterly guidance. Fine. Other companies provide guidance, but only in a super-conservative format. This is in effect no guidance at all, in my view. Not that we’re being rude to companies per se, but they often wind up in a weird dance between telling the market something and telling it something useful.

Picking on Appian’s CEO as he’s someone I like, when discussing his own company’s forecasts Matt Calkins said that its guidance is “unfailingly conservative” — so much so that he said it was nearly frustrating. But he went on to argue that Appian is not short-run focused (good), and that if a company puts up big estimates it is more judged on the expectation of those results versus the realization of said results. That line of thinking immediately makes ultra-prudent guidance seem reasonable.

This is a philosophical argument more than anything, as Wall Street comes up with its own expectations. The financial rubber hits the road when companies guide under Wall Street’s own expectations or deliver results that don’t match those of external bettors. So guidance matters some, just not as much as people think.

BigCommerce’s CEO Brent Bellm helped provide some more guidance as to why public companies can guide a bit more conservatively than we might expect during our recent call. It helps them not overspend. He noted that if BigCommerce — which had a super solid quarter, by the by — is conservative in its planning (the font from which guidance flows, to some degree) it can’t deploy too much near-term capital.

In the case of BigCommerce, Bellm continued, he wants the company to overperform on revenue, but not adjusted profits. So, if revenue comes in ahead of expectations, it can spend more, but won’t work to maximize their near-term profitability. And he said that he’s told analysts just that. So keeping guidance low means that it won’t overspend and blast its adjusted profitability, while any upside allows for more aggressive spend?

Harumph, is my general take on all of the above. It’s very fine to have public company CEOs play the public game well, but what I’d greatly prefer is if they did something more akin to what startups do. High-growth tech companies often have a board-approved plan and an internal plan that is more aggressive. For public companies this would be akin to a base case and a stretch case. Let’s have both, please? I am tired of parsing sandbagged numbers for the truth.

Sure, by reporting a guidance range, public companies are doing some of that. But not nearly enough. I hate coyness for coyness’s sake!

That’s enough of a rant for today, more on BigCommerce earnings next week if we can fit it in. You can read more from The Exchange on Appian and the larger low-code movement here, if that’s your jam.

Never going back

We’re running a bit long today, so let me demount with some predictions.

Nearly every startup I’ve spoken to in the last year that had 20 or fewer staff at the time of the chat is a remote-first team. That’s due to their often being born during the pandemic, but also because many very early-stage startups are simply finding it easier to recruit globally because often the talent they need, can afford or can attract, is not in their immediate vicinity.

Startups are simply finding it critical to have relaxed work location rules to snag and, we presume, retain the talent that they need. And they are not alone. Big Tech is in similar straits. As The Information reported recently:

An internal Google employee message board lit up last Wednesday morning as news of what many staff perceived as a more relaxed policy for working remotely circulated. One meme shared on the board showed a person crying, labeled “Facebook recruiters.” Another showed a sad person labeled “San Francisco landlords.”

If you aren’t laughing, maybe you have a life. But I do this for a living, and I am dying at that quote.

Look, it’s clear that lots of people can do lots of work outside of an office, and even though labor purchasers (employers) want to run 1984-style operations on their employees (labor sellers) to ensure that they are Doing Precisely Enough, the actual denizens writing code are like, naw. And that’s just too much for Big Tech to handle as they are literally just cash flows held up by people who type for a living.

What this means is that tech is not going back to 100% in-office work or anything close to. At least not at companies that want to actually ensure that they have top-tier talent.

It’s a bit like when you see a company comprising only white men; you know that it doesn’t have nearly the best team that it could. Firms that enforce full-office policies are going to overindex on a particular demographic. And it won’t be to their benefit.

Alex