WholyMe, which makes natural products for chronic pain, closes Seed round

WholyMe, a London startup that makes and markets ‘natural relief’ products to manage chronic pain, has closed a £500,000 Seed round from investors Financière Saint James, V1 Capital, Guibor and business angels. The round also includes Joyance Partners, a New York-based VC concentrating on the new science emerging around ‘health and happiness’ which recently expanded to the UK and Europe.

The funding will be used to manufacture WholyMe’s first range of 100% organic supplements and topicals for muscle and joint health, starting with a cannabis-based ointment slated to launch Spring 2020. Formulated in-house and manufactured in Europe, WholyMe products will be sold online and the start-up also has plans to partner with gym clubs to support athletic millennials by preventing injuries.

Its direct competitors include natural health brands like Tiger Balm, BetterYou, Weleda but also adjacent competitors such as Voltarol and Deep Heat.

They say their differentiating factors are that, at the product level, their products “have no adverse effects as opposed to conventional pain killers”, while they say the ingredients are organic and contain no synthetics, petroleum, GMOs etc.

The market they are aiming at is certainly large. The natural medicine products market is now worth €16bn in Europe and has grown +7% CAGR from 2017-2023, according to the latest figures.

Co-Founders Celine Ivari and Quitterie de Rivoyre researched and developed of WholyMe’s first products while trying to solve chronic inflammation problems plaguing family members.

Ivari says: “When my mother suffered from severe inflammation, she was overloaded with painkillers and prescription drugs, which had terrible side effects. Having studied the genetics of human disease, I knew there were alternative solutions to manage her pain. I helped her improve her wellbeing through natural remedies.”

Paolo Pio, European managing director for Joyance Partners, said in a statement: “We’re thrilled to support WholyMe as they push the boundaries of health & pain management to bring greater happiness to the world.”

Equity Monday: A global selloff, MURAL snags $23M, and two unicorns that can’t raise

Good morning friends, and welcome back to TechCrunch’s Equity Monday, a short-form audio hit to kickstart your week. Regular Equity episodes still drop Friday morning, so if you’ve listened to the show over the years don’t worry — we’re not changing it in the slightest. (Here’s last week’s episode which took a look at The Athletic’s latest round, in case you missed it.)

This Monday was a bit of a bad news run. The weekend was stuffed with news, not much of it good.

Continued concerns relating to the spread of the coronavirus led to equity selloffs in Asia and Europe. In the United States, markets look set to follow suit. The concerns come as startups had already come under pressure from investors to show a quick path to profitability. Now, their public comps are taking fire as well.

Topping it off, today kicks off a huge, two-week earnings run from tech companies worth trillions of dollars. It’s not a great moment for it. (As we note on the show, the economic side of the outbreak is a small portion of the story; it feels a bit crass to cover the moment from a dollars-perspective, but that’s our particular lens.)

We also ran through three funding rounds, including MURAL’s $23 million Series A, Otter.ai’s $10 million Series B, and Sawee’s $2.3 million round focused on last-mile logistics. (As a product, I can’t recommend Otter highly enough.)

Wrapping, a Wall Street Journal story was stuck in my head all weekend. According to the Journal’s Eliot Brown, Lime and DoorDash have each been out in the markets trying to raise money lately. Neither has managed to pull it off. If stocks keep selling, what happens next for the infamous unicorns?

That’s what we have for you today. More on Friday morning.

Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple PodcastsOvercastSpotify and all the casts.

Teller raises $4M to take on Plaid in the U.S. by providing API access to bank accounts

“They’re idiots, they’re really naive,” is how Stevie Graham, the co-founder of fintech Teller, once described Open Banking Limited, the body charged with delivering open banking in the U.K.

His view back in 2017 — which now looks somewhat prophetic — was that open banking wouldn’t be the competition driver it was hyped up to be. Instead, incumbent banks were incapable of change and would act in a malevolent way to stop fintechs from walking through the front door and stealing their lunch.

He, along with co-founder Dan Palmer, had spent several years building an early version of Teller that reverse engineered the APIs used by U.K. banks for their own mobile apps, and offered access to developers that wanted to create apps using banking data. It was billed as a more robust and realtime alternative to either screenscraping or waiting haplessly for PSD2 — the European directive mandating open banking — to eventually come into existence.

But this inevitably meant playing a game of Whac-A-Mole as incumbent U.K. banks tried unsuccessfully to thwart the efforts of Graham and Palmer. It was also never entirely clear who was doing the whacking.

Fast-forward to today, and Graham, who was Twillio’s first European employee, has a different incumbent in his sights. In late 2018, Teller re-incorporated in the U.S. to take on Plaid, the financial services API provider recently acquired by Visa for a chunky $5.3 billion.

The fintech startup also quietly raised $4 million in seed capital from a slew of U.S. investors: Lightspeed Venture Partners, Founders Fund, and PayPal co-founder Max Levchin’s SciFi. Teller’s U.K. product has since been shut down, and the company launched a U.S. beta of Teller in September.

“The U.S. is a better opportunity for Teller because the market is far larger with more mature, large-scale customers to serve as well as startups being created every day, [and] an incumbent with an unreliable, unpopular product and not much competition,” Graham tells me.

“PSD2 was also a factor in our decision to withdraw from the U.K. Primarily because it made practically every use-case of banking APIs a regulated activity, meaning that it’s no longer possible to quickly build and test a product without first spending thousands of pounds and 3-6 months getting FCA approval. When we checked at the end of 2018 less than 100 entities had been granted approval. We can not build the business we want with a total addressable market of 100 customers”.

On Plaid, Graham is almost as scathing as he was about the major U.K. banks three years ago, even if he chooses his words a little more carefully. Unlike Plaid, Teller’s technology is not built using screenscraping, dubbed a “creaky technique” by the Teller co-founder,  and therefore is “more reliable and performant”.

“We are also better because we have the incentive to really care about our users and mean it. Plaid has rolled up the market by buying Quovo and is now effectively a monopoly. Speaking to users we found a lot of frustrated Plaid customers that didn’t feel as if Plaid was sympathetic when things went wrong. For example their Capital One integration has been down for months. Maybe the Plaid folks genuinely can’t fix it, maybe they don’t have truly enough competition to care. Either way, our Capital One integration works great”.

Suspicious of Visa’s ability to innovate and serve developers as customers, Graham says that if he was a Plaid customer he would be concerned about the future quality of the product now they are owned by legacy business “not exactly renowned for serving developers or shipping successful developer products”.

The deal is also substantially all-cash, he notes, suggesting that employees may have little incentive to stay.

“The top talent at Plaid has to now be sitting there in the morning thinking ‘do I really want to work at a stodgy public company that has barely 3x’d its stock price in 5 years? This is not what I signed up for’. This is why I fear for the future of Plaid’s product. A lot of their best people will be heading for the door, and we’d love to talk to them,” Graham says unabashedly.

N26 reaches 5 million customers including 250,000 in the US

Challenger bank N26 has reached 5 million customers. In 2019 alone, N26 managed to add over 2.5 million customers. And the company’s growth rate seems to be accelerating as N26 reached 3.5 million customers in June 2019.

That represents an addition of 1 million customers during the first half of 2019 and an addition of 1.5 million customers during the second half of 2019.

One reason why N26 is growing at a faster pace is that the company is still expanding to new market. N26 has been available all around the Eurozone for a while. People living in the U.K., Denmark, Norway, Poland, Sweden, Liechtenstein, Iceland and Switzerland can also open an N26 account.

But N26 also expanded to the U.S. during the summer of 2019. It represents a huge market opportunity, even though N26 faces competition from local players, such as Chime.

Over the past five months, N26 has managed to attract 250,000 customers in the U.S. The company operates under a sligthly different model in the U.S. N26 has partnered with Axos Bank, a white-label partner that manages your money, while N26 takes care of all the interactions between customers and their money.

Banking regulation is complicated in the U.S., which makes it difficult to launch a challenger bank across all 50 states without a banking partner.

There are now 1,500 people working for N26 across five offices — Berlin, New York, Barcelona, Vienna and São Paulo. Up next, as you might have guessed with the mention of São Paulo, N26 plans to expand to Brazil.

Indian B2B packaging marketplace Bizongo raises $30M

Bizongo, one of the largest business-to-business online marketplaces for packaging needs in India, has raised $30 million in fresh funding round as it looks to widen its footprint in the nation and serve more categories.

The new financing round, Series C, was led by Switzerland-based hedge fund Schroder Adveq, which manages assets worth $10 billion. Existing investors B Capital, Accel, Chiratae Ventures, and IFC also participated in the round, the startup said.

Mumbai-based Bizongo has raised about $56 million to date. It was valued at about $96 million in its Series B financing round in 2018, according to an analysis of its regulatory filings.

The five-year-old startup serves as a marketplace for businesses to identify, buy, and sell material packing solutions across industries. It also offers packing design, development, and procurement solutions.

Sachin Agarwal, chief operating officer and co-founder of Bizongo, said the startup offers a unique value proposition of promising a “100% availability of packaging material and no-stock-outs at very low inventory.”

“This helps clients to reduce their packaging material procurement cost by 2-5% and at the same time ensures better production planning for our supply partners. This creates a strong value proposition for all stakeholders across the value chain,” he said in a statement.

Bizongo did not reveal how many customers it has, but said they span across some of the nation’s leading e-commerce, retail, FMCG, FMCD industries. On its website, it claims it works with over 750 manufacturers in India, and has delivered 290 million packaging units to date. It also claims to have served over 350 brands.

In a statement, Aniket Deb, chief executive and co-founder of Bizongo, said the startup has witnessed a “significant improvement in operating metrics since the last round of financing and the current round will further help us grow the business in a sustainable way.”

The fresh fund will be deployed to ramp up technology infrastructure and to expand to newer sectors such as pharma packaging. Deb said the startup also plans to work on expanding its presence in the country.

“We believe in the vision of the founders who are transforming and digitising the highly fragmented B2B packaging marketplace by leveraging technology and a unique supply chain efficiency solution. Bizongo has demonstrated strong momentum by continuing to add marquee clients and we have been impressed with the company’s rapid growth trajectory over the past year,” said Kabir Narang, General Partner at B Capital Group, in a statement.

Samasource CEO Leila Janah passes away at 37

The startup community has lost another moral leader today.

Leila Janah, a serial entrepreneur who was the CEO and founder of machine learning training data company Samasource, passed away at the age of 37 due to complications from Epithelioid Sarcoma, a form of cancer, according to a statement from the company.

She focused her career on social and ethical entrepreneurship with the goal of ending global poverty, founding three distinct organizations over her career spanning the for-profit and non-profit worlds. She was most well-known for Samasource, which was founded a little more than a decade ago to help machine learning specialists develop better ML models through more complete and ethical training datasets.

Janah and her company were well ahead of their time, as issues related to bias in ML models have become top-of-mind for many product leaders in Silicon Valley today. My TechCrunch colleague Jake Bright had just interviewed Janah a few weeks ago, after Samasource raised more than $15 million in venture capital, according to Crunchbase.

In its statement, the company said:

We are all committed to continuing Leila’s work, and to ensuring her legacy and vision is carried out for years to come. To accomplish this, Wendy Gonzalez, longtime business partner and friend to Leila, will take the helm as interim CEO of Samasource. Previously the organization’s COO, Wendy has spent the past five years working alongside Leila to craft Samasource’s vision and strategy.

In addition to Samasource, Janah founded SF-based Samaschool, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to helping low-income workers learn critical freelancing skills by helping them negotiate the changing dynamics in the freelance economy. The organization has built partnerships with groups like Goodwill to empower them to offer additional curricular resources within their own existing programs and initiatives.

Janah also founded LXMI, a skin-care brand that emphasized organic and fair-trade ingredients, with a focus on sourcing from low-income women’s cooperatives in East Africa. Founded three years ago, the company raised a seed round from the likes of NEA, Sherpa, and Reid Hoffman according to Crunchbase.

Across all of her initiatives, Janah consistently put the concerns of under-represented people at the forefront, and designed organizations to empower such people in their daily lives. Her entrepreneurial spirit, commitment, and integrity will be sorely missed in the startup community.

Our editor Josh Constine had this to say of Janah’s impact. “Leila was propulsive. Being around her, you’d swear there were suddenly more hours in the day just based on how much she could accomplish. Yet rather than conjuring that energy through ruthless efficiency, she carried on with grace and boundless empathy. Whether for her closest friends or a village of strangers on the other side of the world, she embraced others’ challenges as her own. Leila turned vulnerability into an advantage, making people feel so comfortable in her presence that they could unwind their personal and professional puzzles. Leila is the kind of founder we need more of, and she’ll remain an example of how to do business with heart.”

A founder’s guide to recession planning for startups

We are living through one of the nation’s longest periods of economic growth. Unfortunately, the good times can’t last forever. A recession is likely on the horizon, even if we can’t pinpoint exactly when. Founders can’t afford to wait until the midst of a downturn to figure out their game plans; that would be like initiating swim lessons only after getting dumped in the open ocean.

When recession inevitably strikes, it will be many founders’ — and even many VCs’ — first experiences navigating a downturn. Every startup executive needs a recession playbook. The time to start building it is now.

While recessions make running any business tough, they don’t necessitate doom. I co-founded two separate startups just before downturns struck, yet I successfully navigated one through the 2000 dot-com bust and the second through the 2008 financial crisis. Both companies not only survived but thrived. One went public and the second was acquired by Mastercard.

I hope my lessons learned prove helpful to building your own recession game plan.

Recession is an opportunity to leapfrog the competition

In entrepreneurship, the goal isn’t just to survive; it’s to win. Some founders think that surviving recession amounts to hoarding cash and sitting out the financial winter. While there’s wisdom in hoarding cash (see below), I strongly recommend against sitting idly when that time could be actively leveraged to strengthen competitive advantage.

I founded my first startup, Yodlee, in a strong economy with almost 20 competitors. Ten years and a painful recession later, we were the only game in town. Critical to our success was acquiring our largest competitor, something we never could have done in a strong economy because they never would have been willing to sell. The recession made it untenable for them to fundraise, enabling us not only to buy them, but to do so without cash in an all-equity deal. I recommend thinking ahead of time about which companies you would want to buy if the opportunity arose, and your goals for doing so, such as consolidating competition, acquiring customers or engineering talent, entering new markets or strengthening product offerings or distribution channels.

Recession is also an opportunity to improve

You can’t rebuild a plane when you’re traveling 500 miles per hour. During a strong economy, companies spend most of their energy on sales and growth. During a weaker economy, it’s easier to justify the investment in infrastructure and technical debt. Yodlee was built on PERL, which we knew would eventually need upgrading. Once the downturn hit, we took advantage of the slower sales cycles to totally retool in Java, an enterprise-class programming language capable of scale. And we didn’t stop there — we created six new products during the downturn.

Make yourself indispensable to customers and partners

The precipice of a recession is not the time to over-index on top-line revenue. You never want to be on your customers’ top five lists of easiest-to-cut products and services. Instead, take the time to understand your customers’ needs, embed yourself deeply in their operations or customer experience and invest significantly in top-notch customer success.

At my second startup, Truaxis, once recession struck, we pivoted from credit card customer acquisition for banks (which requires no help during a recession) to helping banks address churn. Our revised offering yielded a tremendous ROI for banks — a 10X increase in profit. Our product also became the cornerstone to their online consumer banking experience. If you figure out how to make your product indispensable or core to the customer experience, it won’t get cut, even during a recession.

Lock-in long-term customer contracts

Both of my companies started out with B2C business models. After each recession hit, I quickly pivoted to B2B2C. Here’s why: While consumers can react immediately to economic jitters, businesses must keep spending in order to keep operating. Plus, they work on annual budget cycles. Even when businesses want to reduce their costs, they typically can’t react very quickly because they have to wait out their contracts.

In a bull economy, short-term contracts are popular because they enable companies to keep raising prices. Don’t be tempted by short-term cash. B2B and B2B2C firms should take the potential revenue hit by locking in long-term contracts now while budgets and buyers are flush.

Consider diversifying revenue streams and customer segments

While the economy is still healthy, explore options for diversifying your revenue streams and customer bases to more recession-resistant segments. If your business is consumer-focused, consider a different distribution model via businesses or new consumer segments like affluent populations, which are less sensitive to economic fluctuations. If you have an enterprise-focused business, transition more of your revenue to larger enterprises, which are more financially resilient than smaller ones, or to enterprises that need your service for survival, especially in a down market.

Key to the diversification strategy is plotting your axis ahead of time. You don’t want to start your exploration when the market has already turned and you’re burning cash faster than you can get it. Upon exploration, you may find that no pivot is necessary — perhaps only the need to slow down. Now is the time to look for and deeply understand the signals in your business, though you may not need to act on them for a while — or perhaps even ever.

Raise a lot of money — and stash away more than you think you’ll need

It’s obviously a lot easier to raise money in a healthy economy than a weak one. If your coffers aren’t full going into a downturn, it doesn’t matter what you do; you’ve lost the game right there. Having enough cash can make the difference between emerging as the market leader (i.e. the only one still with cash in the bank) and going out of business — even if your company would have thrived in a strong economy. Be conservative when projecting how much money you’ll need to stay afloat. Many leaders underestimate how much elongated sales cycles, diminished average deal sizes and dwindling total sales transactions weaken total revenue.

Be thoughtful about valuations for your employees’ sake

I’m supportive of founders seeking aggressive valuations, but it’s important to realize the potential downside. Valuations soften during recessions, which can lead to corrections or recapitalizations. Recapitalizations create new companies in which the old stock is worth nearly nothing, leaving many employees’ options under water.

I learned this the hard way at Yodlee after raising a lot of money at a high valuation in 1999. We banked enough money that we could have lasted through most downturns without fundraising. Alas, while the average recession lasts 11 months, the dot-com crash lasted several years. Even though we were strong enough to fundraise during the recession, our high valuation forced us to recapitalize. This was crushing for the employees whose equity was suddenly worthless.

In a weak economy, startups struggle to retain their strongest employees who often retreat for safer work environments and more predictable incomes. Recapitalizations deliver an unwanted shove out the door to demoralized employees who feel they have no reason to stay. Inevitably after recapitalizations the people who are strong enough to get hired elsewhere do so. Surviving a downturn is challenging enough. Doing so without a strong, motivated team is nearly impossible.

While times are strong, choose the board you’ll want when things go bad

When my Yodlee board members suggested we pivot from B2C to B2B2C, I thought they were crazy. We had acquired 1 million users through word of mouth in only two-three months. I couldn’t believe they advocated such a significant pivot when things were going so well. I eventually came to understand that these seasoned board members were actually saving my business.

As my colleague Karan Mehandru said, “investors are your war partners, not your beer buddies.” When fundraising, think carefully about who you want around the table if the economy goes south. I recommend asking potential investors if they’ve weathered downturns before and how they’d help you navigate one. I’d ask the same questions of the firm’s other partners to look for consistency of answers and to gauge your investors’ standing and seniority within the partnership. All too many board members are lovely when companies grow rapidly, but challenging when speed bumps arise. Will your board members actively help you address these challenges or stand in passive judgment?

Being a founder is hard enough, but leading a startup through a recession catapults an already challenging job to a whole different level. Whether the recession begins tomorrow or in four years, I hope you’ll learn from my experience and be prepared either way.

As SaaS stocks set new records, Atlassian’s earnings show there’s still room to grow

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

SaaS stocks had a good run in late 2019. TechCrunch covered their ascent, a recovery from early-year doldrums and a summer slowdown. In 2020 so far, SaaS and cloud stocks have surged to all-time highs. The latest records are only a hair higher than what the same companies saw in July of last year, but they represent a return to form all the same.

Given that public SaaS companies have now managed to crest their prior highs and have been rewarded for doing so with several days of flat trading, you might think that there isn’t much room left for them to rise. Not so, at least according to Atlassian . The well-known software company reported earnings after-hours yesterday and the market quickly pushed its shares up by more than 10%.

Why? It’s worth understanding, because if we know why Atlassian is suddenly worth lots more, we’ll better grok what investors — public and private — are hunting for in SaaS companies and how much more room they may have to rise.

Meet the b2b videoconferencing startup that’s gone crazy for online dating

Founder Andreas Kröpfl has spent almost a decade hard-grafting in the b2b unified communications space, building a videoconferencing business with a patented single-stream system and a claim of no ‘drop-offs’ thanks to “unique low-bandwidth technology”.

His Austria-based startup’s current web-based videoconferencing system, eyeson (née Visocon), which launched in 2018, has had some nice traction since launch, as he tells it, garnering a few million customers and getting a nomination nod as a Gartner Cool Vendor last year.

Eyeson’s website touts ‘no hassle, no, lag, no downloads’ video calls. Pricing options for the target b2b users run the gamut from freelance pro to full-blown enterprise. While the business itself has pulled in a smidge less than $7M in investor funding over the years.

But when TechCrunch came across Kröpfl last December, pitching hard in startup alley at Disrupt Berlin, he was most keen to talk about something else entirely: Video dating.

That’s because last summer the team decided to branch out by building their own video dating app, reusing their core streaming tech for a consumer-focused social experiment. And after a period of internal beta testing — which hopefully wasn’t too awkward within a small (up-til-then) b2b-focused team — they launched an experimental dating app in November in India.

The app, called Ahoi, is now generating 100,000 video calls and 250,000 swipes per day, says Kröpfl.

This is where he breaks into a giggle. The traction has been crazy, he says. 

In the staid world of business videoconferencing you can imagine eyeson’s team eyeing the booming growth of certain consumer-focused video products rather enviously.

Per Kröpfl, they had certainly noticed different desires among their existing users — which pushed them to experiment. “We saw that private people like the simple fun features (GIF reactions, …) and that business meetings were more focused on ‘drop-off’ [rates] and business features,” he tells us. “To improve both in one product was not working any more. So eyeson goes business plus SaaS.”

“Cloning eyeson but make it social,” is how he sums up the experiment. 

Ahoi is very evidently an MVP at this stage. It also looks like a pretty brave and/or foolish (depending on your view) full-bore plunge into video dating, with nothing so sophisticated as a privacy screen to prevent any, er, unwanted blushes… (Whereas safety screening is an element we’ve recently seen elsewhere in the category — see: Blindlee.)

There’s also seemingly no way for users to specify the gender they wish to talk to.

Instead, Ahoi users state interests by selecting emoji stickers — such as a car, cat, tennis racket, games console or globetrotter. And, well, it goes without saying that even if you like cars a lot you’re unlikely to change your sexual orientation over the category.

There are no generic emoji that could be used to specify a sexual interest in men or women. But, er, there’s a horse…

Such limits may explain why Ahoi is generating so many early swipes — and rather fewer actual calls — in that the activity sums to (mostly) men looking for women to videochat with and being matched with, er, men.

And frustration, sexual or otherwise, probably isn’t the greatest service to try and sell.

Still, Kröpfl reckons they’ve landed on a winning formula that makes handy reuse of their core videoconferencing tech — letting them growth hack in a totally new category. Swipe right to video date.

“People are disappointed by perfect profiles on Tinder and the reality when meeting people,” he posits. “Wasted time. Especially women do not want to be stalked by men pretending to be someone else. We solve both by a real live conversation where only after a call both can decide to be connected or never see each other again.”

Notably, marketing around the app does talk rather fuzzily about it being a way to “find new pals”.

So while Kröpfl frames the experiment as dating, the reality of the product is more ‘open to options’. Think of it as a bit like Chatroulette — just with slightly more control (in that you have a few seconds to decide if you don’t want to talk to the next in-app match).

The very short countdown timer (you get just five seconds to opt out of a matched video chat) is very likely generating a fair number of unintended calls. Though such high velocity matching might appeal to a certain kind of speed dating addict.

Kröpfl says Ahoi has been seeing up to 20,000 new users added daily. They’re bullishly targeting 3M+ users this year, and already toying with ideas for turning video dates into a money spinner by offering stuff like premium subscriptions and/or video ads. He says the plan is to turn Ahoi into a business “step by step”.

“Everyone loves to make his profile better,” he suggests, floating monetization options down the line. Quality filtering for a fee is another possibility (“everyone is annoyed by being connected to the wrong people”).

They picked India for the test launch because it has a lot of people on the same timezone, a large active mobile user-base and cheap marketing is still “easily possible”. He also says that dating apps seemed popular there, in their experience. (Albeit, the team presumably didn’t have a great deal of relevant experience in this category — given Ahoi is an experiment.)

The intent is also to open Ahoi up to other markets in time too, once they get more accustomed to dealing with all the traffic. Kröpfl notes they had to briefly take the app off the store last month, as they worked on adding more server capability.

“It is very early and we were not prepared for this usage,” he says, admitting they’ve been “struggling to work on early feedbacks”. “We had to make it invisible temporarily — to improve server capacity and stability.”

The contrast in pace of uptake between the stolid (but revenue-generating) world of business meeting-fuelled videoconferencing and catnip consumer dating — which is money-sucking unless or until you can hit a critical mass of usage and get the chance to try applying monetization strategies — does sound like it’s been rather irresistible to Kröpfl.

Asked what it feels like to go from one category to the other he says “crazy, surprised and thrilling”, adding: “It is somehow also frustrating when all the intense b2b work is not as closely interesting to people as Ahoi is. But amazing that it is possible thanks to an extremely focused and experienced team. I love it.” 

TechCrunch’s Manish Singh agreed to brave the local video dating app waters in India to check Ahoi out for us.

He reported back not having seen any women using the app. Which we imagine might be a problem for Ahoi’s longer term prospects — at least in that market.

“I spoke with one guy, who said his friend told him about the app. He said he joined to talk to girls but so far, he is only getting matched with boys,” said Singh. “I saw several names appear on the app, but all of them were boys, too.”

He told us he was left wondering “why people are on these apps, and why they have so much free time on a weekday”.

For ‘people’ it seems safe to conclude that most of Ahoi’s early adopters are men. As the Wall Street Journal reported back in 2018, India’s women are famously cool on dating apps — in that they’re mostly not on them. (We asked Kröpfl about Ahoi’s gender breakdown but he didn’t immediately get back to us on that.)

That market quirk means those female users who are on dating apps tend to get bombarded with messages from all the lonely heart guys with not much to swipe. Which, in turn, could make a video dating app like Ahoi an unattractive prospect to female users — if there’s any risk at all of being inundated with video chats.

And even if there are enough in-app controls to prevent unwelcome inundation by default, women also might not feel like they want their profile to be seen by scores of men simply by merit of being signed up to an app — as seems inevitable if the gender balance is so skewed.

Add to that, if the local perception among single women is that men on dating apps are generally a turn-off — because they’re too eager/forward — then jumping into any unmoderated video chat is probably not the kind of safe space these women are looking for.

No matter, Kröpfl and his team are clearly having far too much fun growth hacking in an unfamiliar, high velocity consumer category to sweat the detail. 

What’s driving Ahoi’s growth right now? “Performance marketing mainly,” he says, pointing also to “viral engagement by sharing and liking profiles”.

Notably, there are a lot of reviews of Ahoi on Google Play already — an unusual amount for such an early app. Many of them appear to be five star write-ups from accounts with European-sounding names and a sometimes robotic grasp of language.

“Eventhough Ahoi has been developed recently, it had high quality for user about calling, making friends and widing your knowlegde [sic],” writes one reviewer with atrocious spelling whose account is attached to the name ‘Dustin Stephens.’

“Talking with like minded people and same favor will creat a fun and interesting atmosphere. Ahoi will manage for you to call like condition above,” says another apparently happy but not entirely clear user, going by the name ‘Elisa Herring’.

There’s also a ‘Madeleine Mcghin’, whose profile uses a photo of the similarly named child who infamously disappeared during a holiday in Portugal in 2007. “My experience with this app was awesome,” this individual writes. “It gives me the option to find new people in every country.”

Another less instantly tasteless five-star reviewer, ‘Stefania Lucchini’, leaves a more surreal form of praise. “A good app and it will bring you extra income, I would say it’s a great opportunity to have AHOI and be a part of it but it’s that it will automatically ban you even if you don’t show it. Marketing. body part, there are still 5 stars for me,” she (or, well, ‘it’) writes.

Among the plethora of dubious five-star reviews a couple of one-star dunks stand out — not least because they come from accounts with names that sound like they might actually come from India. “Waste u r time,” says one of these, who uses the name Prajal Pradhan.

This pithy drop-kick has been given a full 72 thumbs-up by other Play Store users.

Here are all 21 companies from Alchemist Accelerator’s latest batch

We’re down in Sunnyvale, CA today, where Alchemist Accelerator is hosting a demo day for its most recent batch of companies. This is the 23rd class to graduate from Alchemist, with notable alums including LaunchDarkly, MightyHive, Matternet, and Rigetti Computing. As an enterprise accelerator, Alchemist focuses on companies that make their money from other businesses, rather than consumers.

21 companies presented in all, each getting five minutes to explain their mission to a room full of investors, media, and other founders.

Here are our notes on all 21 companies, in the order in which they presented:

i-50: Uses AI to monitor human actions on production lines, using computer vision to look for errors or abnormalities along the way. Founder Albert Kao says that 68% of manufacturing issues are caused by human error. The company currently has 3 paid pilots, totalling $190k in contracts.

Perimeter: A data visualization platform for firefighters and other first responders, allowing them to more quickly input and share information (such as how a fire is spreading) with each other and the public. Projecting $1.7M in revenue within 18 months.

Einsite: Computer vision-based analytics for mining and construction. Sensors and cameras are mounted on heavy machines (like dump trucks and excavators). Footage is analyzed in the cloud, with the data ultimately presented to job site managers to help monitor progress and identify issues. Founder Anirudh Reddy says the company will have $1.2M in bookings and be up and running on 2100 machines this year.

Mall IQ: A location-based marketing/analytics SDK for retail stores and malls to tie into their apps. Co-founder Batu Sat says they’ve built an “accurate and scalable” method of determining a customer’s indoor position without GPS or additional hardware like Bluetooth beacons.

Ipsum Analytics: Machine learning system meant to predict the outcome of a company’s ongoing legal cases by analyzing the relevant historical cases of a given jurisdiction, judge, etc. First target customer is hedge funds, helping them project how legal outcomes will impact the market.

Vincere Health: Works with insurance companies to pay people to stop smoking. They’ve built an app with companion breathalyzer hardware; each time a user checks in with the breathalyzer to prove they’re smoking less, the user gets paid. They’ve raised $400k so far.

Harmonize: A chat bot system for automating HR tasks, built to work with existing platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams. An employee could, for example, message the bot to request time off — the request is automatically forwarded to their manager, presenting them with one-click approve/deny buttons which handle everything behind the scenes. The company says it currently has 400 paying customers and is seeing $500k in ARR, projecting $2M ARR in 2020.

Coreshell Technologies: Working on a coating for lithium-Ion batteries which the company says makes them 25% cheaper and 50% faster to produce. The company’s co-founder says they have 11 patents filed, with 2 paid agreements signed and 12 more in the pipeline.

in3D: An SDK for 3D body scanning via smartphone, meant to help apps do things like gather body measurements for custom clothing, allow for virtual clothing try-ons, or create accurate digital avatars for games.

Domatic: “Intelligent power” for new building construction. Pushes both data and low-voltage power over a single “Class 2” wire , making it easier/cheaper for builders to make a building “smart”. Co-founder Jim Baldwin helped build Firewire at Apple, and co-founder Gladys Wong was previously a hardware engineer at Cisco.

MeToo Kit: a kit meant to allow victims of sexual assault or rape to gather evidence through an at-home, self-administered process. Co-founder Madison Campbell says that they’ve seen 100k kits ordered by universities, corporations, non-profits, and military organizations. The company garnered significant controversy in September of 2019 after multiple states issued cease-and-desist letters, with Michigan’s Attorney General arguing that such a kit would not be admissible in court. Campbell told Buzzfeed last year that she would “never stop fighting” for the concept.

AiChemist Metal: Building a thin, lightweight battery made of copper and cellulose “nanofibers”. Co-founder Sergey Lopatin says the company’s solution is 2-3 lighter, stronger, and cheaper than alternatives, and that the company is projecting profitability in 2021. Focusing first on batteries for robotics, flexible displays, and electric vehicles.

Delightree: A task management system for franchises, meant to help owners create and audit to-dos across locations. Monitors online customer reviews, automatically generating potential tasks accordingly. In pilot tests with 3 brands with 16 brands on a waitlist, which the company says translates to about $400k in potential ARR.

DigiFabster: A ML-powered “smart quoting” tool for manufacturing shops doing things like CNC machining to make custom parts and components. Currently working with 125 customers, they’re seeing $500k in ARR.

NachoNacho: Helps small/medium businesses monitor and manage software subscriptions their employees sign up for. Issues virtual credit cards which small businesses use to sign up for services; you can place budgets on each card, cancel cards, and quickly determine where your money is going. Launched 9 months ago, NachoNacho says it’s currently working with over 1600 businesses.

Zapiens: a virtual assistant-style tool for sharing knowledge within a company, tied into tools like Slack/Salesforce/Microsoft 365. Answers employee questions, or uses its understanding of each employee’s expertise to find someone within the company who can answer the question.

Onebrief: A tool aiming to make military planning more efficient. Co-founder/Army officer Grant Demaree says that much of the military’s planning is buried in Word/Powerpoint documents, with inefficiencies leading to ballooning team sizes. By modernizing the planning approach with a focus on visualization, automation and data re-usability, he says planning teams could be smaller yet more agile.

Perceive: Spatial analytics for retail stores. Builds a sensor that hooks into existing in-store lighting wiring to create a 3D map of stores, analyzing customer movement/behavior (without face recognition or WiFi/beacon tracking) to identify weak spots in store layout or staffing.

Acoustic Wells: IoT devices for monitoring and controlling production from oil fields. Analyzes sound from pipes “ten thousand feet underground” to regulate how a machine is running, optimizing production while minimizing waste. Charges monthly fee per oil well. Currently has letters of intent to roll out their solution in over 1,000 wells.

SocialGlass: A marketplace for government procurement. Lets governments buy goods/services valued under $10,000 without going through a bidding process, with SocialGlass guaranteeing they’ve found the cheapest price. Currently working with 50+ suppliers offering 10,000 SKUs.

Applied Particle Technology: Continuous, realtime worker health/safety tracking for industrial environments. Working on wireless, wearable monitors that stream environmental data to identify potential exposure risks. Focusing first on mining and metals industries, later moving into construction, firefighting, and utilities environments.