Tag: funding

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Caliber, with $2.2 million in seed funding, launches a fitness coaching platform

The coronavirus pandemic has thrown the fitness space for a loop. Caliber, a startup that focuses on one-to-one personal training, is today launching a brand new digital coaching platform on the heels of a $2.2 million seed round led by Trinity Ventures.

Caliber launched in 2018 with a content model, offering an email newsletter and a library of instructional fitness content.

“My cofounders started testing the idea of coaching people individually and that’s where the light bulb really went off,” said cofounder and CEO Jared Cluff. “They saw that more than anything, people need expert guidance and a really genuinely personalized plan for their fitness routine.”

That was the origin of Caliber as it is known today.

When users join the platform they are matched with a Caliber coach. The company says that it brings on about five of every 100 applications for coaches on the platform, accepting only the very best trainers.

These coaches then take into account the goals of users and build out a personalized fitness plan in conjunction with the user, which begins with a video or phone consultation. Once the plan, which is comprised of strength training, cardio and nutrition, is finalized, the coach loads it into the app.

Users then follow the instructions from their instructor via the app and log their progress. Interestingly, these aren’t live video appointments with a trainer, but rather an asynchronous ongoing conversation with a coach that is facilitated by the app.

Users can also integrate their Apple Health app with Caliber to track nutrition and cardio, giving the coach a full 360-degree view of their progress.

Alongside providing feedback and encouragement, the coach ultimately provides a layer of accountability.

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This combination of real human coaching in a less synchronous, time intensive manner has allowed for Caliber to charge at a higher price than your standard workout generator apps but come in much lower than the average cost of an actual, in-person personal trainer.

Most Caliber users will pay between $200 and $400 per month to use the platform. Coaches, which are 1099 workers on Caliber, take home 60 percent of the revenue generated from users.

Pre-launch, Caliber has more than tripled its membership across the last six months and increased the number of workouts per member by 150 percent, according to the company. Cluff says the startup is doing north of $1 million in annual recurring revenue.

Of the 41 trainers on the platform, 37 percent are female and about a quarter are non-white. On the HQ team, which totals seven people, one is female and two-thirds of the founding team are LGBTQ.

“The biggest challenge is not dissimilar to the challenge we faced at Blue Apron, where I was most recently, in that we wanted to create the category around mealkits,” said Cluff. “We want to build a category around fitness training in a space that is super fragmented with no branded leader.”

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Armory nabs $40M Series C as commercial biz on top of open source Spinnaker project takes off

As companies continue to shift more quickly to the cloud, pushed by the pandemic, startups like Armory that work in the cloud native space are seeing an uptick in interest. Armory is a company built to be commercial layer on top of the open source continuous delivery project Spinnaker. Today, it announced a $40 million Series C.

B Capital led the round with help from new investors Lead Edge Capital and Marc Benioff along with previous investors Insight Partners, Crosslink Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, Mango Capital, Y Combinator and Javelin Venture Partners. Today’s investment brings the total raised to more than $82 million.

“Spinnaker is an open source project that came out of Netflix and Google, and it is a very sophisticated multi-cloud and software delivery platform,” company co-founder and CEO Daniel R. Odio told TechCrunch.

Odio points out that this project has the backing of industry leaders including the three leading public cloud infrastructure vendors Amazon, Microsoft and Google, as well as other cloud players like CloudFoundry and HashiCorp. “The fact that there is a lot of open source community support for this project means that it is becoming the new standard for cloud native software delivery,” he said.

Spinnaker is the next big open source project to watch

In the days before the notion of continuous delivery, companies moved forward slowly, releasing large updates over months or years. As software moved to the cloud, this approach no longer made sense and companies began delivering updates more incrementally adding features when they were ready. Adding a continuous delivery layer helped facilitate this move.

As Odio describes it, Armory extends the Spinnaker project to help implement complex use cases at large organizations including around compliance and governance and security. It is also in the early stages of implementing a SaaS version of the solution, which should be available next year.

While he didn’t want to discuss customer numbers, he mentioned JPMorgan Chase and Autodesk as customers along with less specific allusions to a “a Fortune Five technology company, a Fortune 20 Bank, a Fortune 50 retailer and a Fortune 100 technology company.

The company currently has 75 employees, but Odio says business has been booming and he plans to double the team in the next year. As he does, he says that he is deeply committed to diversity and inclusion.

“There’s actually a really big difference between diversity and inclusion, and there’s a great Vernā Myers quote that diversity is being asked to the party and inclusion is being asked to dance, and so it’s actually important for us not only to focus on diversity, but also focus on inclusion because that’s how we win. By having a heterogeneous company, we will outperform a homogeneous company,” he said.

Armory lands $10M Series A to bring continuous delivery to enterprise masses

While the company has moved to remote work during COVID, Odio says they intend to remain that way, even after the current crisis is over. “Now obviously COVID been a real challenge for the world including us. We’ve gone to a fully remote-first model, and we are going to stay remote first even after COVID. And it’s really important for us to be taking care of our people, so there’s a lot of human empathy here,” he said.

But at the same time, he sees COVID opening up businesses to move to the cloud and that represents an opportunity for his business, one that he will focus on with new capital at his disposal. “In terms of the business opportunity, we exist to help power the transformation that these enterprises are undergoing right now, and there’s a lot of urgency for us to execute on our vision and mission because there is a lot of demand for this right now,” he said.

Mirantis bets on Spinnaker, Netflix’s open-source continuous delivery platform

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Thailand’s logistics startup Flash Express raises $200 million

Flash Express, a two-year-old logistics startup that works with e-commerce firms in Thailand, said on Monday it has raised $200 million in a new financing round as it looks to double down on a rapidly growing market spurred by demand due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The funding, a Series D, was led by PTT Oil and Retail Business Public Company Limited, the marquee oil and retail businesses of Thai conglomerate PTT. Durbell and Krungsri Finnovate, two other top conglomerates in the Southeast Asian country, also participated in the round, which brings Flash Express’ to-date raise to about $400 million.

Flash Express, which operates door-to-door pickup and delivery service, claims to be the second largest private player to operate in this space. The startup, which also counts Alibaba as an investor, entered the market with delivery fees as low as 60 cents per parcel, a move that allowed it to quickly win a significant market share.

The startup has also expanded aggressively in the past year. Flash Express had about 1,100 delivery points during this time last year. Now it has over 5,000, exceeding those of 138-year-old Thailand Post.

Flash Express currently delivers more than 1 million parcels a day, up from about 50,000 during the same time last year. The startup says it has also invested heavily in technology that has enabled it to handle over 100,000 parcels in a minute by fully automated sorting systems.

Komsan Lee, CEO of Flash Express, said the startup plans to deploy the fresh funds to introduce new services and expand to other Southeast Asian markets (names of which he did not identify). “We are also prepared to create and develop new technologies to achieve even greater delivery and logistics efficiency. More importantly we intend to assist SMEs in lowering their investment costs which we believe will provide long-term benefit for the overall Thai economy in the digital era,” he said.

Retail Business Public Company Limited plans to leverage Flash Express’ logistics network as it looks to meet the rising demand from consumers, said Rajsuda Rangsiyakull, Senior Executive Vice President for Corporate Strategy, Innovation and Sustainability at Retail Business Public Company Limited.

Flash Express competes with Best Express — which, like Flash, is also backed by Alibaba — and Kerry Express, which filed for an initial public offering in late August.

Even as online shopping and delivery has accelerated in recent months, some estimates suggest that the overall logistics market in Thailand will see its first contraction in the history this year. Chumpol Saichuer, president of the Thai Transportation and Logistics Association, said last month Thailand’s logistics business has already been hit hard by the slowing global economy.

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India’s Razorpay becomes unicorn after new $100 million funding round

Bangalore-headquartered Razorpay, one of the handful of Indian fintech startups that has demonstrated accelerated growth in recent years, has joined the coveted unicorn club after raising $100 million in a new financing round, the payments processing startup said on Monday.

The new financing round, a Series D, was co-led by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC, and Sequoia India, the six-year-old Indian startup said. The new round valued the startup at “a little more than $1 billion,” co-founder and chief executive Harshil Mathur told TechCrunch in an interview.

Existing investors Ribbit Capital, Tiger Global, Y Combinator, and Matrix Partners also participated in the round, which brings Razorpay’s total to-date raise to $206.5 billion.

Razorpay accepts, processes, and disburses money online for small businesses and enterprises. In recent years, Razorpay has expanded its offerings to provide loans to businesses and also launched a neo-banking platform to issue corporate credit cards, among other products.

Mathur and Shashank Kumar (pictured above), who met each other at IIT Roorkee, started Razorpay in 2014. They began to explore opportunities around payments processing business after realizing just how difficult it was for small businesses such as young startups to accept money online less than a decade ago. There were very few payment processing firms in India then and startups needed to produce a long-list of documents.

The early team of about 11 people at Razorpay shared a single apartment as the co-founders rushed to meet with over 100 bankers to convince banks to work with them. The conversations were slow and stuck in a deadlock for so long that the co-founders felt helpless explaining the same challenge to investors numerous times, they recalled in an interview last year.

To say things have changed for Razorpay would be an understatement. It’s become the largest payments provider for business in India, said Mathur. Razorpay accepts a wide-range of payment options including credit cards, debit cards, mobile wallets, and UPI.

“Razorpay has established itself as a clear leader, with its strong focus on customer experience and product innovation,” said Choo Yong Cheen, Chief Investment Officer for Private Equity at GIC, in a statement. “GIC has a long track record of partnering with leading fintech companies globally and is delighted to partner with Razorpay in its journey to transform payments and banking.”

Some of Razorpay’s clients include budget lodging decacorn Oyo, e-commerce giant Tokopedia, top food delivery startups Zomato and Swiggy, online learning platform Byju’s, ride-hailing giant Gojek, supply chain platform Zilingo, caller ID service Truecaller, travel ticketing firms Yatra and Goibibo, and telecom giant Airtel.

The startup expects to process about $25 billion for nearly 10 million of its customers this year, said Mathur.

He attributed some of the growth to the coronavirus pandemic, which he said has accelerated the digital adoption among many businesses.

On the neo-banking and capital side, Mathur said, Razorpay expects RazorpayX and Razorpay Capital to account for about 35% of the startup’s revenue by the end of March next year.

Mathur said the startup’s payment processing service continues to be its fastest growing business and does not need much capital to grow, so the startup will be deploying the fresh funds to expand its neo-banking offerings to include vendor payment, and expense and tax management and other features.

The startup, which aims to work with over 50 million businesses by 2025, may also acquire a few firms as it explores opportunities around inorganic expansion in the neo-banking category, said Mathur.

“We will continue to make an impactful contribution to the growth of the industry, aid adoption in the under-served markets and drive new practices and a new thinking for the industry to follow. And this investment fits perfectly with our growth strategy,” he said.

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High-profile startup execs back Indian influencers platform CreatorOS

The advent of low-cost Android smartphones and the world’s cheapest mobile data has paved the way for millions of social media influencers in India to amass a following of tens of millions of users in recent years.

These influencers, also known as creators, share their daily vlogs, thoughts on a wide range of issues, and some engage with big brands to help sell their products to niche, loyal audiences. E-commerce giant Flipkart and scores of several other businesses today work with these influencers.

But India’s ban on TikTok, the Chinese short-video app that reached more than 200 million users in the country, in late June unearthed some of the biggest problems these creators face today: They are too reliant on a handful of platforms, and their work structure is not well organized.

A new startup believes it has built the platform to help creators assume more control over their work. And a number of high-profile entrepreneurs agree.

On Friday, Madhavan Malolan announced CreatorOS, a platform that enables creators to build, manage and grow their businesses. About 1,000 creators including a number of short-film makers, teachers, consultants have already joined the platform, Madhavan, who co-founded the startup, formerly known as Socionity, in January this year. Prior to CreatorOS, he worked at a number of firms including Microsoft.

“We believe that these creators will become an entrepreneur in the coming decade. So we are creating tools, connections and infrastructure that they will need to run their digital businesses. Currently, there is a lot of spray and pray happening on the creator’s part. They are producing videos in hopes that they go viral so more people in the industry discover them,” said Madhavan in an interview with TechCrunch.

The marquee tool on CreatorOS today is an app-builder that allows creators to build their own apps, push and sell their content in it, and build their own communities. Madhavan said CreatorOS has overly reduced the efforts that need to go into building an app to simply drag and drop.

The startup said today it has also raised $500,000 from a clutch of high-profile names. Some of the angel investors include Phanindra Sama (founder and former chief executive of online ticket booking platform RedBus.in), Gaurav Munjal (co-founder and chief executive of online learning platform Unacademy), Kalyan Krishnamurthy (chief executive of Flipkart Group), Sujeet Kumar (co-founder of business-to-business marketplace Udaan), Vidit Aatrey (co-founder and chief executive of social e-commerce Meesho), Vivekananda Hallekere (co-founder and chief executive of mobility firm Bounce), and Alvin Tse (GM of Xiaomi Indonesia).

Madhavan said that the trust that so many established entrepreneurs showed in CreatorOS convinced him that he did not need to engage with VC firms yet and instead put the entire focus on serving creators. He said the ban on TikTok and how so many startups are trying to scale their short-video apps has created an immense opportunity for CreatorOS.

The startup expects to have more than 5,000 creators on its platform by the end of the year. It is working with creators to understand and build more features that would benefit them, said Madhavan.

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Greycroft, Lerer Hippeau and Audible back audio measurement startup Veritonic

Veritonic is announcing that it has raised $3.2 million in Series A funding led by Greycroft, with participation from Lerer Hippeau and Amazon-owned audiobook service Audible.

CEO Scott Simonelli, who founded the New York startup with COO Andrew Eisner and CTO Kevin Marshall, told me that his goal is to create a new category of “audio intelligence” — namely, measuring and predicting the effectiveness of any pie of audio content or advertising.

The company is focused on marketing initially, with its first product, Creative Measurement, analyzing any audio ad and showing marketers how it scores compared to similar content, as well as identifying which parts of the audio are most effective. And Veritonic is launching a new product, Competitive Intelligence, which helps businesses see how and where their competitors are spending on advertising and provides alerts when those competitors launch a new ad.

Simonelli said that until now, audio measurement has been limited to things like creating audience panels with a few hundred people, which simply doesn’t scale given the enormous growth in the audio market.

Veritonic, on the other hand, has analyzed thousands of audio files, correlating the content with data about how people responded and using that analysis to predict how people will respond to new audio. Simonelli said the company can add more “fuel” by going out gathering more human response data, but even without additional data, it can provide an instant prediction on an ad or campaign’s effectiveness.

Veritonic

Image Credits: Veritonic

Simonelli also noted that Veritonic has spent the past five years developing technology that’s specifically attuned to the challenges of measuring audio effectiveness — like the fact that audio is experienced over time and, even more than other media, needs to be memorable.

“We can look at a sonic profile and predict and evaluate how somebody is going to respond,” he said.

The ultimate goal, he added, is to create the “benchmark for audio advertising,” which means working with a variety of players in the industry. For example, he said that when you look at other audio investments in Greycroft’s portfolio (such as podcast network Wondery or podcast analytics company Podsights): “Veritonic makes every one of those audio investments more valuable.”

Veritonic’s made pretty good progress on that goal already, with partners including Pandora, SiriusXM and NPR, and brand clients like Pepsi, Visa and Subway. It was previously backed by Newark Venture Partners (whose founder Don Katz previously founded Audible).

“We are excited to be a part of Veritonic’s continued growth and success,” said Greycroft’s Alan Patricof in a statement. “I’m personally very passionate about the future of voice, and the team at Veritonic deeply understands how to use audio to drive recall, stickiness and brand awareness — which is hugely important in a highly-competitive consumer brand landscape.”

Simonelli added that Veritonic will use the new funding to expand its data science and sales teams. Eventually, he hopes to start analyzing non-advertising content as well — for example, since Audible is an investor, he said, “Analyzing every audiobook on the planet is something we’re ready for and excited to do.”

Will podcast ad revenue bounce back after COVID-19?

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Delivery startup goPuff raises $380M at a $3.9B valuation

GoPuff is a Philadelphia-headquartered startup that delivers products like over-the-counter medicine, baby food and alcohol (basically, the stuff you’d buy at a convenience store) in 30 minutes or less.

Yakir Gola, who serves as co-CEO with his co-founder Rafael Ilishayev, told me that their goal is to create “the go-to platform for over-the-counter medicine or household products or baby food or ice cream or even alcohol — goPuff will deliver all these products in under 30 minutes, 24/7.”

While the startup has kept a relatively low profile in the media, it’s already available in more than 500 U.S. cities (recent launches include Dallas, Miami, Detroit, Minneapolis and Houston). And it’s raised $1.35 billion in total funding, including a just-announced $380 million round that values the company at $3.9 billion.

The new round was led by Accel and D1 Capital Partners, with participation from Luxor Capital and Softbank Vision Fund. (Accel and Softbank were both invested previously as well.)

“Accel first invested in goPuff in 2018 because of the team’s visionary approach to on-demand delivery and its commitment to building the infrastructure needed to create its unique, vertically integrated model,” said Accel partner Ryan Sweeney in a statement. “Because of goPuff’s focused approach, they have consistently delivered some of the best unit economics we’ve seen, while growing nationwide. We’re thrilled to remain a committed partner to Yakir, Rafael and the rest of the goPuff team on their journey.

goPuff

Image Credits: goPuff

Gola said that he and Ilishayev created the company in 2013 when they were attending Drexel University together and thought, “There has to be a better way to get convenience products delivered.”

Despite the company’s impressive war chest, Gola said goPuff has had “a huge focus on fiscal responsibility” from the start. At first, the founders were the ones making the deliveries, and they funded their initial expansion with cashflow and profits.

“What was importnat for us from day one was to start a business that makes money, that has real margins,” he said.

To achieve that, Gola touted the startup’s “vertically integrated model,” where it buys products directly from manufacturers, then gets those products to consumers through a network of 200 “micro-fulfillment” centers (staffed with goPuff employees) and a network of independent drivers.

Besides meaning that goPuff “makes money off the products we sell” (rather than simply charging a fee on deliveries), Gola said this model allows  to mix products from national and local brands, and it’s “constantly introducing new products and discontinuing things that don’t sell.”

Quarantine drives interest in autonomous delivery, but it’s still miles from mainstream

As you’d expect, demand increased significantly during the pandemic, but Gola said the company also made sure to provide protective equipment to all its employees and drivers, and it created an emergency fund to provide financial assistance for any employees or drivers who got sick.

In addition to the funding, goPuff is announcing that it has hired former Lowe’s CMO Jocelyn Wong as its first chief customer officer, former Uber global head of fintech and U.S. business development Jonathan DiOrio as its first chief business officer and former former TripAdvisor engineering executive Rekha Singh as vice president of engineering.

Looking ahead, as companies like Amazon and Uber are also looking to deliver more and more products in less and less time, Gola said goPuff will continue to differentiate itself in a few key ways.

“There’s nothing like goPuff, so we had to build everything from scratch,” he said. “Whether it’s our location-based inventory system or many things related to our technology, that’s all ours. And then when you talk about differentiation from customer side, we control the inventory and can make sure that the customers get exactly what they ordered. That focus on our customer is how wer’e going to win long-term, and it’s how we got to the point of where we are today.”

Kroger, one of America’s largest grocery chains, experiments with ghost kitchens and delivery in the Midwest

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Betaworks and Betalab unveil their first four startups working to ‘fix the internet’

Back in March, startup studio Betaworks announced that was partnering with James Murdoch’s Lupa Systems to create a new program called Betalab, which would fund and mentor early-stage startups that would try to “Fix the Internet.”

In the initial announcement, Betaworks CEO John Borthwick, “While migrating our social lives to the internet allowed us to share our lives and interact with people we never could have before, we are also fragmenting our experiences and relationships as data-driven businesses and governments are tracking almost every inch of our existence.” He also noted that online technologies are being “weaponized to target, fragment, tribalize and disenfranchise citizens, to overwhelm us and our society with disinformation.”

Now Betaworks is unveiling the first four startups selected. Danika Laszuk, general manager of the Betalab program, said that this will be the firm’s first virtual startup program — and for that reason, they deliberately kept it smaller than a standard Betaworks Camp cohort.

“This is the first itme we’ve done this, so I want to see everyone’s face on one Zoom screen,” Laszuk told me.

At the same time, Betalab has kept its applications open and plans to welcome a new cohort of startups in the new year.

Here are the six startups in Betaworks’ new Audiocamp

There’s an obvious sense of worry in the Betalab mission — a hard-to-dispute belief that the internet has eroded privacy and spread misinformation — but Laszuk argued that the team is looking to tackle these problems with “the optimism of technologists” and the belief there are “a lot of people with great ideas and the wherewithal to build them and fix things in the world.”

How can a startup hope to solve these big problems? Laszuk said that p the Betalab approach focuses, in part, on properly aligning incentives: “We are biased towards the product being the thing that technologist are building. We’re not excited about businesses collecting data to figure out what to do with it later.”

In addition, it sounds like she’s interested in a more pragmatic view towards the big internet platforms.

“We’re looking to invest in a generation of companies that acknowledges Google’s not going anywhere, Facebook’s not going anywhere,” Laszuk said. “People get tons of benefits out of those products. I don’t think we stand in the camp where if we could, we’d snap our fingers and destroy them all tomorrow.”

The goal, she continued, is to support “the internet as it exists today and get all the benefit of the internet” while also providing “a way to safeguard our privacy, to try to incentivize civil discourse as opposed to clickbait and incendiary behavior.”

With all of that said, here are the startups:

    • Savepoint is a mobile games company that uses game mechanics improve players’ lives. (Laszuk acknowledged that the is a bit vague description, and she promised more details once the startup leaves stealth.)
    • International Persuasion Machines is a cybersecurity company building tools to assess and, when necessary, combat algorithmic manipulation and other forms of platform abuse.
    • Synthetaic is a data company trying to eliminate edge cases by “growing” high quality data for machine learning.
    • Nth Party allows customers to exchange encrypted data sets without decrypting them, with the goal of enabling collaboration and personalization without sacrificing privacy.

    WeWork backs New York tech clubhouse Betaworks Studios

     

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YC grad DigitalBrain snags $3.4M seed to streamline customer service tasks

Most startup founders have a tough road to their first round of funding, but the founders of Digital Brain had it a bit tougher than most. The two young founders survived by entering and winning hackathons to pay their rent and put on food on the table. One of the ideas they came up with at those hackathons was DigitalBrain, a layer that sits on top of customer service software like Zendesk to streamline tasks and ease the job of customer service agents.

They ended up in Y Combinator in the Summer 2020 class, and today the company announced a $3.4 million seed investment. This total includes $3 million raised this round, which closed in August, and previously unannounced investments of $250,000 in March from Unshackled Ventures and $150,000 from Y Combinator in May.

The round was led by Moxxie Ventures with help from Caffeinated Capital, Unshackled Ventures, Shrug Capital, Weekend Fund, Underscore VC and Scribble Ventures along with a slew of individual investors.

Here are the 98 companies from Y Combinator’s Summer 2020 Demo Day 1

Company co-founder Kesava Kirupa Dinakaran says that after he and his partner Dmitry Dolgopolov met at hackathon in May 2019, they moved into a community house in San Francisco full of startup founders. They kept hearing from their housemates about the issues their companies faced with customer service as they began scaling. Like any good entrepreneur, they decided to build something to solve that problem.

“DigitalBrain is an external layer that sits on top of existing help desk software to actually help the support agents get through their tickets twice as fast, and we’re doing that by automating a lot of internal workflows, and giving them all the context and information they need to respond to each ticket making the experience of responding to these tickets significantly faster,” Dinakaran told TechCrunch.

What this means in practice is that customer service reps work in DigitalBrain to process their tickets, and as they come upon a problem such as canceling an order or reporting a bug, instead of traversing several systems to fix it, they chose the appropriate action in DigitalBrain, enter the required information, and the problem is resolved for them automatically.  In the case of a bug, it would file a Jira ticket with engineering. In the case of canceling an order, it would take all of the actions and update all of the records required by this request.

As Dinakaran points out they aren’t typical Silicon Valley startup founders. They are 20 year old immigrants from India and Russia respectively, who came to the U.S. with coding skills and a dream of building a company. “We are both outsiders to Silicon Valley. We didn’t go to college. We don’t come from families of means. We wanted to come here and build our initial network from ground up,” he said.

Eventually they met some folks through their housemates, who suggested that they apply to Y Combinator. “As we started to meet people that we met through our community house here, some of them were YC founders and they kept saying I think you guys will love the YC community, not just in terms of your ethos, but also just purely from a perspective of meeting new people and where you are,” he said.

He said while he and his co-founder have trouble wrapping their arms around a number like the amount they have in the bank now, considering it wasn’t that long ago that they struggling to meet expenses every month, they recognize this money buys them an opportunity to help start building a more substantial company.

“What we’re trying to do is really accelerate the development and building of what we’re doing. And we think if we push the gas pedal with the resources we’ve gotten, we’ll be able to accelerate bringing on the next couple of customers, and start onboarding some of the larger companies we’re interested in,” he said.

Here are the 94 companies from Y Combinator’s Summer 2020 Demo Day 2

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To fill funding gaps, VCs boost efforts to find India’s standout early-stage startups

After demonstrating scale, growth and financial improvement, one founder of a two-year-old agritech startup based in India told me that he’s now confronting a new challenge: Unlike his peers in edtech, fintech or e-commerce, there are very few investors he could approach for raising funds, he told TechCrunch, requesting anonymity. He suggested that a startup of a similar scale solving a similar problem would have little issue raising more than $50 million. But for his startup, seeking a $10 million financing round has proven very elusive in recent quarters, he said.

The story of this startup counters the narrative that fundraising for Indian startups has become easier than ever and that young firms have access to abundant capital from the market. India’s startup ecosystem raised about $14.5 billion in fundraises last year, beating its previous best of $10.6 billion in 2018, according to research firm Tracxn. But a closer look reveals that much of the capital went to a handful of late-stage startups, a trend that continues today.

In the first half of 2020, early-stage startups participated in 577 rounds to secure $1.84 billion, Tracxn told TechCrunch. That figure is the lowest the Indian startup ecosystem has seen in years. In the second half of last year, early-stage startups participated in 752 rounds to raise $3.03 billion, and in the first half of 2019, they raised $2.7 billion from 856 rounds. Series A and Series B startups are not immune to this trend either: In Q1 and Q2 2020, these startups raised $1.55 billion from 186 rounds, down from $2.69 billion from 254 rounds in the second half of last year and $2.37 billion from 279 rounds in the first half of last year, according to Tracxn. Once again, the first half of 2020 was the slowest in years for this segment.

Funding received by startups in India. Image Credits: Tracxn

Extra Crunch spoke with several VCs to understand how they were tackling this gap. We granted some of them the freedom to speak anonymously. At TechCrunch Disrupt 2020, Karthik Reddy, co-founder of Blume Ventures, India’s largest VC firm, acknowledged the gap, adding that, “There’s an artificial skew toward unicorns and chasing the unicorns.”