Tag: Technology Development

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Cana Technology raises glass to new capital as it readies beverage printer for market

Following nearly four years in the prototype phase, Cana Technology is unveiling what it calls the “world’s first molecular beverage printer” after securing $30 million in funding from venture foundry The Production Board.

If you’re wondering exactly what this might be, it’s basically a SodaStream meets a computer printer. The smart connected device is about the size of a toaster, sits on your kitchen counter and can produce an infinite variety of beverages, from juice to coffee to cocktails, by recombining it with water in your home, all from one “printer” cartridge, by using a touch screen.

Here’s where the “molecular” technology comes into play: Cana focused on identifying the basic set of ingredients, basically deconstructing beverages to figure out what makes it taste like a certain drink, Lance Kizer, Cana’s chief science officer, told TechCrunch.

Once you remove the water, there is a small volume of drink that you are actually consuming, around 5% to 10%, so Cana concentrated those ingredients and loaded them into a cartridge that can hold more than 100 different beverages. The company has partnered with certain brands for drinks and also created their own combinations.

“It is all of the same ingredients that you consume in drinks, so we are not recreating them,” Kizer said. “Quality is important, and we are focusing on making beverages in a novel way, and we have now created hundreds of them.”

Not only do you have hundreds of drinks at your fingertips, you also can customize them to your taste: add more sugar or less sugar, and for the alcoholic drinks, more or less alcohol. While learning about the device, I was able to try a few of the drinks — cold brew coffee, root beer and a black cherry mojito — and thought the flavors were more bold than their traditional counterparts and the overall taste had a smooth finish.

Each cartridge holds one to three months’ worth of beverages, and the device senses when the cartridge is low and automatically reorders. The cartridges are designed to be sent back for recycling, Kizer added

Cana’s goal is to rebuild the $2 trillion beverage industry while also saving waste from going into landfills and excessive water being used at the same time. CEO Matt Mahar explained that Cana’s prototype would save the typical American household roughly 100 beverage containers per month. At scale, Cana could reduce the use of plastic and glass containers, water waste and the CO2 emissions of the global beverage manufacturing complex by more than 80%.

The new funding is being heavily invested into the supply chain and continued technology development, Mahar said. The company currently has 35 employees, and he expects to double that this year.

Mahar said the company is still working on the device’s price point, but that it will be cheaper than retail prices per use. By the end of February, he expected to have full data on both pricing and when people will be able to begin purchasing the device.

Bharat Vasan, president and COO of The Production Board, said the venture foundry has invested in a number of companies in the food space, and says the Cana team was attractive due to their ambitious outlook on technology and the way they combined hardware, software and science in an entirely new way of making something.

To him, Cana’s device “feels like the Netflix of beverage experiences,” and the same concentration technology used for drinks could be used for a number of other products, like perfume and cosmetics.

“It’s about changing the way things are made and shipped out,” he said. “Distributed manufacturing is made in one place and then shipped out to retailers. Now there is a different system of delivery that is directly to your house that can bypass supply chain constraints. The beverage printer is one manifestation.”

IoT and data science will boost foodtech in the post-pandemic era

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Tado, the German smart home energy startup, plans to go public via a SPAC at a €450M valuation

Tado, the German smart home startup that specializes in thermostats and more recently moved into flexible “time of use” energy tariffs based on loadshifting technology, is today announcing the next step in its life as a business. It’s going public by way of a SPAC deal.

GFJ ESG Acquisition, a German SPAC entity focused specifically on sustainable technologies, said it will combine with tado and list the new company on the Frankfurt exchange. GFJ and tado are now working on the PIPE transaction, which when completed is expected to value tado at €450 million ($514 million at today’s rates). The new business will continue to trade as tado.

A spokesperson for tado said it is not disclosing how much it plans to raise in the listing, nor when the listing is expected to happen.

The move comes swiftly on the heels of two big developments for tado. Last week, tado acquired aWATTar (yes that is how the company styles its name…) to expand from energy consumption hardware inside the home, to software to better manage energy consumption and costs based both on how the customer uses energy, and how pricing varies depending on the fluctuations of that energy source (which can include renewable sources like solar and wind, as well as more traditional channels).

Also, in May, tado raised $46 million. At the time, the company said this would be its last round before a listing, and that’s what is playing out now. Altogether the company had raised just shy of $159 million, with an impressive list of investors, including Amazon, Siemens and Telefonica. Its valuation in those private rounds was considerably lower than the €450 million it expects to achieve with its market cap at listing: it was around $255 million according to PitchBook data.

The deal is notable because it will be one of the first big green tech startups in Europe to go public. Tado’s bigger goal is to build services to help manage energy use in and end-to-end system, starting at the power grid and terminating with consumers, in their homes. That business has taken two different turns so far. It first started as a maker of smart thermostats, and business that has now sold some 2 million devices. Then, tado diversified into energy tariff and managing use is catapulting the company into a wider business based on big data, predictive analytics and harnessing the wider and very fragmented markets of renewable energy and energy hardware systems.

The company today says that it has sold more than 2 million smart thermostats, and its energy-management technology connects some 400,000 buildings and households in 20 countries, with more than 7 gigawatts of energy capacity under management. Its works with some 18,000 systems from 900 OEMs, and claims that customers using its load-balancing technology save an average of 22% on heating costs annually.

As concerns about climate change continue to become ever-more urgent, and services for consumers to make choices to reduce greenhouse emissions become more readily available and affordable, a new window of opportunity has opened up for green tech and clean tech companies. This listing underscores how one of them feels now confident enough in that traction to make the leap into being publicly traded to grow further.

“The entire team at tado is extremely proud to partner up with GFJ,” said Toon Bouten, CEO of tado, in a statement. “We share the same convictions and the same passion for environmental technologies. And we are determined to jointly help our customers save money and reduce their ecological footprint. Together, we are in a great position to create a more sustainable energy future.”

When the deal is closed, Bouten will step down as the head of the company, with Oliver Kaltner (who lists his current role as President of office solutions provider Room) will be taking on a role as CEO, with Christian Deilmann as CPO and Johannes Schwarz as CTO. Emanuel Eibach will remain CFO. Gisbert Rühl shall become chairman of the supervisory board. Josef Brunner, Petr Míkovec, Toon Bouten and Maximilian Mayer shall also join the supervisory board.

“Both GFJ and tado are determined to turn up the heat on fighting against climate change in a smart way. tado already is a market leader in the very spirit of a new wave of green tech companies,” added Gisbert Rühl, CEO of GFJ. “We are excited to bring in capital and expertise to help them grow even stronger and foster their technology development. Around 21% of energy consumption in the EU is used for heating and cooling private housing alone. If the EU and Germany want to fulfil their commitment to becoming the world’s first climate-neutral economy by 2050, there is no alternative to decarbonising the housing sector.”

tado, as a public business, will gain a new level of transparency to the market, which will be good for the wider green tech industry as a whole. For now, the company is projecting that it will be making more than €500 million in annual revenues in three years, by 2025.

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Daasity investing $15M in data so consumer brands can do more with it

Daasity, an e-commerce analytics and data company, secured $15 million in Series A funding as it continues developing its approach to helping consumer brands better leverage their customer data to make smarter decisions.

VMG Catalyst led the oversubscribed round and was joined by existing investors Cove Fund, Exeter Capital, 1855 Capital, Mooring Ventures, Okapi Venture Capital and Serra Ventures. This gives the company $20.7 million in total funding to date, CEO Dan LeBlanc told TechCrunch via email.

The company’s technology enables brands to pull in all of their data from different places, like Shopify, Amazon, Facebook and Klaviyo, analyze it and push it to marketing channels to optimize customer experiences based on insights from a historical performance.

“There have never been more consumer product brands, and competition among them is at an all-time high,” LeBlanc said. “Brands win by having access to the right data, which leads to faster and more confident decision-making. Data demands have never been higher, and we are investing in the data infrastructure to get brands the access to the data they need.”

Daasity is working with more than 1,600 brands, including Manscaped, Vuori and Caraway Home, and in the past year grew its annual recurring revenue by 300%, while also growing its headcount by 100%.

The new funding will enable further employee growth, with LeBlanc expecting to grow another 160% by the end of 2022. The company is also investing in technology development for better data accessibility, data sources and educational resources for better insight into results. It will also be working on more personalized customer data.

Next up, the company will be heads down in making brands’ data infrastructure modular by allowing the ability to configure components of their data infrastructure — as easily as they select food from a menu, LeBlanc said. It is also adding 35 integrations, like data sources, warehousing options, transformation capabilities and visualization tools.

Brooke Kiley, partner at VMG Catalyst, said in a written statement that the firm was “thrilled to continue our partnership with Dan and the Daasity team as they enter their next phase of growth. We consistently see how difficult it is for brands to act on their data, yet there is a greater need than ever. It is vital to utilize data to succeed in today’s competitive e-commerce environment. Daasity makes data accessible to all brands, empowering them with actionable insights and the ability to enrich their marketing channels with essential customer data.”

Data collection isn’t the problem: It’s what companies are doing with it

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MycoWorks, making leather from fungi, closes $125M to scale production

MycoWorks, a company making a fungal-based biomaterial that can replace leather, brought in a fresh round of funding — $125 million in Series C financing — to fund a production plant for scaling the manufacture of its flagship product Reishi.

CEO Matt Scullin says what his company is doing in terms of fabrics is different from its competitors, touting the company’s Fine Mycelium process as “a biotechnology platform that engineers mycelium to grow the only made-to-order, made-to-specification luxury material.”

“A lot is happening in this space,” he added. “Mycelium is a tunable material, and a lot of folks are entering the space because they see opportunity for it. However, their main approach is taking fibers and embedding them in plastic, which results in a low-quality material like ‘pleather.’”

Indeed, the California-based company, founded in 2013 by Philip Ross and Sophia Wang, is among a hot trend of companies working with fungus and other plant-based materials to make fabrics for fashion. When we previously profiled MycoWorks in 2020 for its $45 million raise, we pointed to companies like Bolt Threads (mushrooms), Ananas Anam (pineapple fibers) and Desserto (cactus leather) doing similar things.

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In addition to using plant-based materials for fashion, other companies are finding success with fungi-based technology. Nature’s Fynd, which raised $350 million in a Series C round in 2021, created Fy, a vegan protein that can be used as a solid, liquid or powder to make sustainable foods, like meat and cheese. Atlast Food is doing something similar, making meat alternatives from gourmet mushroom mycelium. Meanwhile, MycoTechnology, which is using a fermenting process to make — among other things — a mushroom extract that blocks the undesirable flavors of other foods, closed on a Series D round of over $120 million in 2020.

Meanwhile, the Series C was led by Prime Movers Lab, with participation from new investors, notably SK Capital Partners, Mirabaud Lifestyle Impact and Innovation Fund, which joined a group of other new and existing investors. To date, the company raised $187 million in total.

MycoWorks launched its first partnership with Hermès in early 2021 and now has contracts in place with a range of major global luxury brands. Scullin told me that if it is a luxury brand you have heard of, the company is probably partnering with them.

Despite its initial workings in the luxury space, MycoWorks also aims to move toward mass scale production that would enable products at a range of price points. The funding will enable the company to do this, Scullin said.

MycoWorks

Blue rack trays of MycoWorks’ fungi. Image Credits: Lindsey Filowitz

The company’s new production plant will be built in Union, S.C. and comes on the heels of a successful pilot plant in Emeryville, California. That’s where MycoWorks was able to validate its tray-based process and demonstrate scalability of the Fine Mycelium process when it met a production milestone of 10,000 trays processed. Scullin expects the plant to be operational in the next 12 months and will initially be able to produce volumes of several million square feet of Fine Mycelium per year.

To meet the demand for sustainable goods driven by consumers, Scullin also plans to invest the financing into expanding the team, R&D and technology development. The company received thousands of inbound requests from brands to be selected to be the first to use Fine Mycelium.

He estimates that $150 billion of leather products are sold each year, which means the opportunity is big, especially as that consumer tailwind continues to be “one of the powerful forces in the economy right now,” he added.

When choosing Prime Movers Lab and others to invest in the round, Scullin said that all of them had a common expertise in biotechnology and manufacturing scale-up, which was needed by the company right now.

“What MycoWorks has achieved with its Fine Mycelium platform is not just a breakthrough, it is a revolution for industries that are ripe for change,” said David Siminoff, general partner at Prime Movers Lab, in a written statement. “This opportunity is massive and we believe that unrivaled product quality combined with a proprietary scalable manufacturing process has MycoWorks poised to serve as the backbone of the new materials revolution.”

Meet retail’s new sustainability strategy: Personalization

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Meez keeps recipes in one place so chefs can continue whipping up culinary delights

Meez, a company creating professional recipe software and a culinary operating system, brought in its first-ever funding round of $6.5 million to continue developing its tools to help chefs manage their recipes.

Josh Sharkey,, Meez

Josh Sharkey, CEO of Meez. Image Credits: Evan Sung

CEO Josh Sharkey, a chef himself for most of his career, incorporated the New York-based technology company back in 2015. However, what touched off the search for a place to keep his recipes and processes came more like 15 years ago when he lost the notebook where he kept recipes and how to prepare dishes. Colleagues were using everything from the standard Google or Word documents to spreadsheets, but Sharkey wanted a more digital approach.

“The idea of how to digitize everything stuck with me,” he told TechCrunch. “There are tools for things like inventory management or financial software, but there wasn’t anything built for the things we do in the kitchen or related to what we actually do.”

He and his team built Meez to be a collaboration tool, recipe keeper and progression, training and prep tool all rolled into one — Sharkey referred to it as a “Google Drive for chefs.”

The technology has two components, the first being how users put their recipes into the system and then how to make them scalable and usable by both the user and their kitchen colleagues. It also includes resources that chefs tap into daily, like ingredient yields and unit conversion, a menu cost calculator and automated allergen tagging and nutrition analysis.

The software was launched in 2020, and Meez already counts as clients major restaurateurs, like Jose Andres and Jean-Georges Vongerichten, as well as culinary schools, including the Institute of Culinary Education.

Struck Capital led the funding round and was joined by Craft Ventures, Relish Works, Aurify Brands, Food Tech Angels and Branded Strategic Ventures. Angel investors backing the company include Snap’s former head of product Bobby Lo, Shef founders and Bento Box founder and CEO Krystle Mobayeni.

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Meez, kitchen

Meez software. Image Credits: Meez

Meez started in December 2020 with 20 paying customers and has grown to more than 750 today among a diverse mix of restaurants, from fine dining to fast casual and culinary schools, an area that Sharkey plans to dig into in the next year. Also during that time, the company’s revenue grew steadily 22% month over month, which he attributed to the company’s unique approach and digital adoption making its way into the kitchen.

“The adoption curve hit the infancy stages of the food world,” Sharkey added. “Culinary professionals are starting to realize how to do more with less, and they can’t rely on their labor all the time. Things that worked before the pandemic don’t work now. This is a helpful tool and necessity because you can’t just rely on the recipe anymore, there are other things you have to do to it to be able to operationalize your content, and there was not a place to do that before.”

Sharkey intends to deploy the new capital into developing an iOS app and technology development, including menu planning, self-onboarding automation and to launch and test direct-to-consumer recipe engagement.

In addition, the company plans on attracting new restaurants this year and growing the team. Meez has 17 employees now, and Sharkey expects to add another 10 this year.

“Culinary professionals are some of the most creative and inventive people on the planet. But due to the physical nature of their work, very little attention has been paid to how digital technology can be leveraged to improve their workflows and systems for collaboration,” said Adam Struck, CEO of Struck Capital, in a written statement. “Josh is a unique founder in that he’s a professional chef, restaurant industry operator, and technology expert. He’s been able to synthesize the pain points that plague almost all kitchens into a platform that’s intuitive, beautifully designed and addresses major pain points for one of the world’s largest and oldest industries.”

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Visual collaboration company Miro valued at $17.5B following $400M in new funding

Miro is indeed still in the right place at the right time. With remote work continuing to rise, or a hybrid of that and in-person, the online workspace company finds itself with 30 million users and counts nearly all of the Fortune 100 companies as clients.

And now today, the company announced its largest round to date, $400 million in a Series C that propels its valuation to $17.5 billion. The new capital infusion gives Miro $476 million in total funding since the company was founded in 2011 by Andrey Khusid and Oleg Shardin.

CEO Khusid told TechCrunch he considers the company a “pioneer of visual collaboration,” with its early days as a digital whiteboard.

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Andrey Khusid, Miro

Andrey Khusid, co-founder and CEO of Miro. Image Credits: Andrey Khusid

“We’ve seen the market evolving over the last 10 years, and what started as an idea to bring a whiteboard into a browser has enabled us to understand the kind of value we can bring to organizations of all sizes,” he added. “Visual collaboration is something that allows teams in companies to better be on the same page. It’s a great opportunity to better explain ideas, problems and design solutions.”

Today, the company’s tools integrate with over 100 apps — including new partnerships with the likes of Atlassian, Cisco, Google Workspace, Microsoft Teams and Zoom — and offer nearly 1,000 templates designed to get users and their teams quickly working together no matter where they are.

The last time we checked in with Miro, co-headquartered in San Francisco and Amsterdam, was in 2020 when the company raised a $50 million Series B round led by Iconiq Capital. Since then, Khusid said the company grew its user base by 500%, from 5 million to 30 million users, and also its paying customer base by 550%. Among its Fortune 100 clients, 20 have more than $1 million in annual recurring revenue contract value, he added.

Iconiq Growth is back for the Series C round and is joined by Accel, Atlassian, Dragoneer, GIC, Salesforce Ventures and TCV. Individual investors involved include Airtable co-founders Howie Liu and Andrew Ofstad, Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman and DocuSign CEO Dan Springer.

“Since our initial investment, Miro has scaled with tremendous momentum, strong market leadership, and incredible product velocity,” said Matthew Jacobson, general partner at Iconiq Growth and Miro board member, in a written statement. “We believe Miro sits at a powerful intersection between asynchronous and synchronous work that captures and ignites creative processes everywhere. In our view, Miro’s culture of customer centricity makes it well-positioned to address a myriad of use cases across hybrid work for more than a billion knowledge workers globally. We are thrilled to continue our partnership with Andrey and the entire Miro team.”

Prior to the raise, Miro was already profitable and growing three times year over year before the global pandemic. However, with statistics showing that 53% of the U.S. workforce is expected to be remote by the end of this year, and with what Khusid expected to happen in 2022 actually happening in 2020, it created awareness around the problem of connectivity and collaboration in this new way of work.

In addition, with the venture capital market “favorable” right now, and given Miro’s vision of building a generational company, it made sense to go after additional funding to have the resources in place to build a strong brand for customers, he said.

Khusid plans to invest the new capital into product and technology development, getting its tools in front of more enterprise clients and expanding its global footprint. He is also looking at M&A opportunities.

Over the past 12 months, the company doubled its headcount to just over 1,200 employees in 11 hubs around the world, including new ones opened in Berlin, Munich, London, Sydney and Tokyo.

“We need to make sure all of our people are in place in all functions from customer support to product engineering,” Khusid said. “We’ve tried to serve the demand and make sure every experience is good. We aim to increase the pace of innovation, and that will be a big area of investment. It’s a big challenge to scale at that pace, especially being fully remote. I call it ‘building a plane while flying.’”

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Next-day package delivery startup Veho valued at $1B following $125M Series A

Veho, a startup applying technology to next-day package delivery, aims to solve the last mile of delivery — how packages get from fulfillment centers to the customer’s door. It also wants to do it with a unique flair: providing transparency into deliveries that starts with the option of when, where and how customers want their packages delivered and then real-time communication throughout the whole process.

Since raising its seed round in the summer of 2020, New York-based Veho has grown 40 times in revenue, while also increasing its employee count from 15 to 400, Veho co-founder and CEO Itamar Zur told TechCrunch.

It is already working in 14 U.S. markets, but plans to grow to 50 markets by the end of 2022. To do that, and invest in technology development, growing the team and introducing and scaling its doorstep returns program, the company announced $125 million in Series A funding that valued the company at $1 billion.

General Catalyst led the round and was joined by Construct Capital, led by Rachel Holt, Bling Capital, Industry Ventures, Fontinalis Partners and Origin Ventures. The latest funding round gives Veho a total of $130 million raised to date, Zur said.

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You might be asking yourself why in the world a young company would take on so much capital up front like that, but Zur responded that Veho is “a substantial platform, not a small operation at this point, and we want to maintain fast growth.”

“We have an opportunity in the midst of the biggest e-commerce revolution, and after growing fast through the pandemic, that is not going away,” he added. “Customer experience is changing in front of our eyes, and other than speed and communication, what brands want to provide is visibility and data. We think it is the perfect time to take in more capital to continue to grow at a phenomenal rate.”

Sure, Amazon has a bear hug on about 50% of the last-mile market, and there is no debate that they are doing well here. Zur doesn’t deny it either, but he does see an opportunity to offer the same kind of delivery service for the 50% of e-commerce businesses that want to offer something faster than seven to 10 business days.

Veho’s technology matches package delivery demand with qualified driver partners and can then let customers know the actual time of day when they will receive their package and even when the driver is headed their way. It is also making it possible to reschedule a delivery in real time, change an address or provide personal delivery instructions.

Veho

The Veho team. Image Credits: Veho

The idea for the company stems from Zur’s own experience. While in business school, he bought a subscription for meal delivery, but his first package never arrived. Zur recalls trying to get in touch with the delivery company, and after waiting for 40 minutes, the call was disconnected. As a result, he canceled the subscription, which is not unlike what other consumers do as they become more intolerant of receiving packages late or not at all.

“In an increasingly competitive e-commerce space, there are tons of companies looking for similarly fast delivery as Amazon, but lack the scale to do it,” Zur said. “Veho levels the playing field for these brands. The biggest missed opportunities are connecting the dots between the pre-packaged experience and delivery to help brands build more loyalty and for people to stay with them longer, to buy more and buy more frequently.”

Veho is not alone in trying to solve the last-mile problem, and is among companies around the world also raising capital for their approaches. For example, in the past six months, we saw Zoomo, Cargamos, Coco, Deliverr and Bringg announce new rounds. Walmart also introduced its Walmart GoLocal program in the summer for other retailers to tap into the retail giant’s delivery network.

Zur doesn’t see Veho competing against the likes of Deliverr or some of those others, but does see the company competing with the national shipping companies. He believes their technology was designed for “an older world” that didn’t include e-commerce, and that is what separates Veho from them — that it was built “entirely around the needs of e-commerce customers” with a vision of how that sector will grow over the next decade.

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The global last-mile delivery market was valued at around $108 billion in 2020 and is set to grow by $146.96 billion in the next four years, with North America contributing to 39% of that growth, according to technology and research company Technavio.

With purchases shifting to e-commerce, the logistics and parcel delivery sectors are racing to keep up with demands. They’ve also been met with major setbacks in the past few years. From the aptly dubbed “shipaggedon” during the holiday season in 2020, to manufacturing and shipping delays for everything from semiconductors to getting a ship into the port.

Veho wants to make the delivery experience so awesome that it facilitates trust between the consumer and e-commerce company so that consumers return to order again. Zur notes this is already happening, citing that its customers, which range from selling apparel and accessories to food and packaged goods, saw a 20% increase in customer repurchase, 40% increase in customer lifetime value and an eight-point increase in net promoter score compared to customers who received their box from a traditional shipping company.

Meanwhile, Kyle Doherty, managing director at General Catalyst, said there is room for more companies going after an $800 billion e-commerce market, of which half stems from the U.S., and that is forecasted overall to grow around $100 billion each year.

Like Zur, Doherty had his own frustrations receiving packages at his home in San Francisco, which he said is notorious for having problems with package thefts.

“You feel helpless and that you’ve lost control of the situation,” he added. “We have had a front-row seat to the dramatic acceleration in the use of e-commerce and a stressed supply chain. We had a belief that computer technology would enable logistics providers to provide a better experience. When I was introduced to Ita, I got it instantly. He also has empathy for merchants and consumers about the consumer experience, and that stood out on many fronts.”

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New capital positions luxury goods reseller Rebag for next round of innovation

Rebag, which buys, sells and trades luxury items like handbags and accessories, raised a $33 million Series E round following a year of technology development and category expansion.

We profiled Rebag back in 2015, when its name included two “g’s,” (gotta love URL availability) and had raised $4 million in seed funding to go after incumbents like The RealReal.

Novator led the latest round, with participation from existing investors, including General Catalyst, to bring the company’s total funding to date to $101 million.

Charles Gorra, founder and CEO of Rebag, declined to talk about valuation, but did say it was “a steep evolution from the last time.” The “last time” was a $15 million Series D round in 2020, also led by Novator.

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At that time, Rebag’s path was uncertain, with the global pandemic, Gorra explained. He took the $15 million to have some buffer as the company weighed its options. What happened was that the company ended up with two strong years of revenue growth — 50% in 2020 and 70% estimation for 2021 — basically close to triple the amount of growth over the two-year period, he said.

“It was a function of COVID generating digitization of underpenetrated industries, in particular luxury,” Gorra added. “Before COVID, purchases of luxury goods was 8% in the U.S. and now it is closer to 20%. Luxury stores can be uncomfortable, so our goal was how to make that experience more approachable.”

The company has since seen a trend of owning fewer items, but of those that are purchased, they are of higher quality, are made better, are longer lasting and retain some resale value. That’s important in the luxury space because Rebag’s average ticket is $2,000, so when you spend that kind of money, you want to build trust, Gorra said.

In the past 12 months, new categories, like fine jewelry and watches, grew four times. Gorra cites the company’s ability to triple its sourcing capabilities after launching its Clair AI and Clair Trade technology in 2020. The marketplace now has more than 30,000 items.

Rebag’s Clair technology suite includes proprietary software that can instantly recognize and price bags from the top 50 luxury brands, through an app or by uploading an image, and an offer from Rebag to buy it. The other software tool is an instant trade-in program for the buying and selling of items in one transaction.

Gorra intends to use the new capital to continue technology development on those tools, to add to Rebag’s workforce of 150 people and expand its marketing. The company currently has seven brick-and-mortar stores across New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Beverly Hills and Greenwich, Connecticut, with plans to add more in 2022.

“The market for venture capital is active and favorable, and we seized on that opportunity to accelerate funding,” he added. “There is a massive opportunity for the resale market — it is booming, and we believe we have created something special.”

Also over the past year, the company modified its retail model, adding high-tech touch points throughout the store, including the “Clair Corner,” a self-service kiosk where customers can receive an instant price quote on the item they are selling. In addition, its “Rebag Bar” in New York offers a personalized digital shopping experience, including being able to purchase and pay for resale items within an hour.

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Though Gorra believes the luxury goods resale market is still in its infancy, citing that one out of 10 luxury items are transacted in the resale market, there are dozens of secondhand marketplaces for handbags and other items, also those not necessarily luxury goods.

The secondhand market is expected to double and reach $77 billion by 2025, according to ThredUp, which went public earlier this year after raising over $300 million in venture-backed funding.

Gorra sees The RealReal and Poshmark being the closest competitors to Rebag. Even so, he says that the average ticket purchases are vastly different: The RealReal is $500 and Poshmark is $30 compared to Rebag’s $2,000, he noted.

Another differentiator is that Rebag controls the purchases and sales versus some of the other platforms that are peer-to-peer sales, sometimes causing those transactions to take days as each party manages their own sides.

“We believe our value prop is on the high-end goods market and want to be the trusted place for premium resale,” Gorra said. “We want to be a leader in this space, where we believe there will eventually be a large resale ecosystem, and we want to be a part of it.”

Update 12/15, 8:42 a.m.: The company amended its funding round size to $33 million from $35 million.

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Superside nabs $30M to connect and manage freelance creatives working with in-house marketing and design teams

As advertising and marketing become increasingly automated and thus commoditized, design has emerged as a savior to help brands stand out. And today, a startup that’s helping companies connect with a wider range of designers and other creatives to meet that demand is announcing a round of funding to fuel its business growth. Superside, which operates a network of freelance creatives that are tapped by companies to work on logos, display ads, packaging, bigger marketing campaigns and other design-based efforts, has picked up $30 million, money that it will be investing in further international expansion and growing its team of people, both in-house staff and the creatives network.

Prosus Ventures and Lugard Road Capital are co-leading the round, with previous investors Slack Fund and Acequia Capital also participating. Investors and company would not confirm but I understand from sources to be just over $400 million.

The round is the first sizable funding that Oslo-based, but very distributed, Superside has raised — it was founded as Konsus back in 2015 and had picked up only $5.5 million up to now — and it comes on the heels of some impressive growth in its nearly-bootstrapped state.

Its customers include the likes of Amazon, Facebook, Salesforce, Cisco, Shopify and Coinbase, “Really any hot company in the Valley,” Fredrik Thomassen, Superside’s co-founder and CEO, told me in his understated, Norwegian-accented clip the other day. (This helps downplay the words, which come off as matter-of-fact rather than boastful as a result.) You’d think that a company like Amazon or Facebook would have no end of people on in-house teams to handle whatever design need might arise, but in fact, no matter how big or small an organization is, there is always something that will need an extra pair of creative hands, especially these days. Superside provides them.

Those hands, meanwhile, are set to multiply. Thomassen tells me that the company currently has 500 on its “team” — his word to include both those working on staff (150 people) and the wider creatives network (350).

“It’s important for us to think of us all in the same boat and creating equal opportunities globally,” he said. Creatives are freelancers technically, though, and thus free to do whatever they want, although the idea, he said, is that Superside provides them with enough engagement, interesting work, and non-frustrating tools to manage it all to make it less likely that they would turn to 99designs, Fiverr, Upwork, or any of the other platforms that might provide them with gigs elsewhere.

The plan will be to expand that network in earnest in the coming months. “We want to go from 350 to 1,000 creatives,” he said, “and then maybe 10,000, or 100,000.” (Again, you have to read this thinking of Thomassen’s understated clip, which makes all this sound perfectly reasonable.)

Design — and in this case branding, advertising and other fields that have been described traditionally in the industry as “creative” work done by creatives — has faced a massive evolution in the digital age: most if not all work is carried out on software; more often than not, it is intended to be consumed on digital screens; and the nature of global, localized campaigns created by virtue of digital mediums mean that there is simply a lot more creative work needing to be done.

Added to this, even before the Covid-19 pandemic, designers long ago cut their tether to the office, working remotely, putting in extra hours at home even when they do not, picking up side-hustles where they never meet clients in person, and so on.

All of this has played neatly into the creation of really excellent design software, designed to be used, edited, shared and consumed in the cloud, and it’s played neatly too into the hand of companies like Superside to build platforms to help connect creatives to opportunities.

Superside itself has focused its technology development on making that engagement and following through on work as seamless as possible, with very specific project management software that it has designed itself to manage the processes, including remuneration and related accounting alongside the steps around seeking people, engaging them and working through projects. It has not built design tools up to now, and it has no plans to.

“We are using exclusively established tools,” said Thomassen. “It’s much more difficult to built competitors to companies like Figma and Adobe. We are incredibly bullish on Figma especially, since it’s a less closed system than Adobe’s.”

It will be interesting to see whether Superside sticks to that, or whether it becomes an attractive company to tap for those big firms that are taking on Adobe and building more bridges to creatives alongside the creative tools themselves. (Adobe’s ownership of Behance, which gives it a kind of link into those networks of creatives already, implies it might not be in the running if that were the case.)

In the meantime, what sets the company apart is how well it has identified the shortcomings of working with alternatives — Thomassen himself comes from a marketing background and said he built Superside specifically out of his own frustrations in trying to find, engage and work with creatives — and built a platform to solve that.

“What sets Superside apart from all the other players in the creative economy is their long-term approach to solving the underlying problems of marketing and creative teams,” said Mats Diedrichsen, the former CMO of Delivery Hero, who is joining the board with this round. “I believe Superside has the potential to become the ‘agency-killer’ while truly levelling the playing field for creatives all over the world.”

Superside has seen significant growth in the last few years, working with reputable brands, including Amazon, Salesforce and Cisco, who have consistently praised Superside’s fast turnaround times, creative diversity, high-quality content, and impressive access to global top talent.

Long-time customer Amir Jaffari, Growth lead at Shopify summarized: “Superside makes it easy for Shopify’s Growth team to get design done quickly without impacting the quality. Their platform is intuitive and enables speed, and the dedicated team model ensures everyone thoroughly understands our brand and day-to-day needs, allowing for scale.”

“As the need for high-quality, fast-turnaround digital content continues to rise, and companies look for increasing brand distinction, Superside is fulfilling the demand by offering a unique subscription that provides fast, flexible and diverse design from some of the world’s top creative talent,” added Sandeep Bakshi, head of European investments at Prosus Ventures, in a statement. “In addition, as the the pandemic has accelerated the momentum of flexible and independent work, Superside is highly attractive for creative team members, offering remote, flexible, and high paying jobs, allowing them to work with top brands globally. We believe Superside can usher in a new era of creative solutions for top companies globally, and are excited to partner with them on this vision.”

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LiveKit co-founder believes the metaverse needs open infrastructure

When the global pandemic hit, Russell d’Sa was running product at Medium and recognized early on that with everyone working from home, the company’s culture was impacted, affecting a lot of the interaction between employees.

“What disappeared was the collegial conversations, the drinks on Friday evenings or making coffee together,” he told TechCrunch. “So much about becoming friends at work underpins how you ultimately collaborate.”

When Clubhouse was launched in its alpha form last year, it was discussed as being a new form of participatory media “that would change everything,” d’Sa said, and he wanted something like that for his work colleagues.

He dug into how the app was being powered by Agora and began developing a desktop app for his idea. He launched it and almost immediately accrued a 1,300-company waitlist. D’Sa ultimately shelved the app, but found that companies were “desperate in this new environment to try anything.”

In fact, one large social media company approached him about using his app for its 1,000-person company, but was concerned about security using Agora. He began looking at alternatives, but found that many were focused on conferencing and didn’t provide for the flexibility for native mobile.

That’s how LiveKit was born. D’Sa and his team, which includes co-founder David Zhao, developed a free, open source infrastructure for building and scaling real-time audio and video experiences, aka WebRTC, in applications.

It launched in July, and today the company announced $7 million in seed funding that includes backing from Redpoint Ventures and a group of individual investors, including Justin Kan, Robin Chan and Elad Gil.

Only five months old, the tool did trend on GitHub, going from zero to almost 2,000 stars, d’Sa said. It is also proving product market fit, especially as more talk revolved around the metaverse.

“COVID changed the world to where we are living online, even going to weddings over the internet,” he added. “We are already living in the metaverse and have been for over two years.”

He believes the conference call is not the future and that virtual and augmented reality will make calls feel more like real life. However, the challenge is how to move the data around quickly over the internet and have an infrastructure that works for cameras, microphones and 3D objects.

Initial use cases for LiveKit’s live audio and video experiences have been cameras at events, but a drone company is even using the technology. As the company saw more adoption, including over 100 projects utilizing LiveKit, d’Sa decided to go after venture capital backing to scale the team, which grew from three to 15 since the launch.

The company isn’t generating revenue right now, but they will be as new tools come online, like services offered beyond the baseline features, including analytics, telemetry, spam and abuse monitoring, transcription, translations or voice and face features.

Next up, the LiveKit team will be focused on technology development so the tools are more reliable, flexible and accessible to developers and the kinds of use cases they are building.

“The goal is to figure out a way to work, even with a bad network,” d’Sa said. “We talk to companies big and small, and the largest companies want massive scale to make million-person events all interactive.”

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