TechCrunch |
- Danish startups Responsibly raises $2M to benchmark supply chains on climate, diversity
- PayEm comes out of stealth with $27M and its answer to the expense report
- “Autonomous accounting” platform Vic.ai raises $50M round led by ICONIQ Growth
- Vector design tool Vectornator raises $20M round led by EQT Ventures
- CoachHub raises $80M in Series “B2” round, as coaching goes digital in the pandemic
- Trustshare runs escrow infrastructure as a service to facilitate online sales
- Oviva grabs $80M for app-delivered healthy eating programs
- VanMoof raises $128 million to become the world’s leading e-bike brand
- Reframe your Metaphors, and other lessons from Y Combinator S21 Day 1
- Sanas aims to convert one accent to another in real time for smoother customer service calls
- Our favorite startups from YC’s Summer 21 Demo Day, Part 1
- Olsam raises $165M to buy up and scale consumer and B2B Amazon Marketplace sellers
- Tribe and Arkam back Jar app to help millions in India start their savings journey
- Here are all the companies from Y Combinator’s Summer 2021 Demo Day, Part 1
- Daily Crunch: Databricks reaches $38B billion valuation with $1.6B Series H
- Yandex buys out Uber’s stake in Yandex Self-Driving Group, Eats, Lavka and Delivery for $1B
- CryptoPunks creator inks representation deal with major Hollywood talent agency
- LinkedIn is scrapping its Stories feature to work on short-form video
- Cheeterz Club wants to make reading glasses hip
- A popular smart home security system can be remotely disarmed, researchers say
| Danish startups Responsibly raises $2M to benchmark supply chains on climate, diversity Posted: 01 Sep 2021 04:26 AM PDT If the world is to reach NetZero, and avoid climate disaster it needs to make every product sustainable and that means every purchase. But to do that you need a lot more transparency, so that means more data on suppliers to improve sourcing and benchmarking companies. While companies are often doing their best, the problem with issues like CO2 emissions lies in the supply chain. Danish startup Responsibly, reckons it has the answers in providing retailers, builders, and others with a supply network a scorecard against this supply chain of providers. Thus, a company can check if any level of its supply chain is involved in deforestation, water pollution, as well as human rights violations or gender pay gap issues. It's now raised a $2 million pre-seed investment round led by Flash Ventures. Also participating is Pirate Impact (the family-office of Fabian & Ferry Heilemann) and Michael Wax, Founder and CEO of Planetly Benedikt Franke. The startup will now soft-launch the first version of its platform which will look at the supplier data of more than 10,000 suppliers for pilot customers. Responsibly's co-Founder and CEO Thomas Buch Andersson said: “If we can make it as easy for purchasers to evaluate how their suppliers compare on a planetary agenda, as it is to compare them on price, then we think we can unlock the huge force for change that’s sitting in the world’s procurement departments." Being developed with Google's Startup Advisor: Sustainable Development Goals Program, Responsibly Johann Nordhus Westarp, Founding Partner at Flash Ventures said: "The timing is perfect, and companies will fundamentally change the way they procure in the next couple of years. Price- or value-driven procurement will give way to impact-driven procurement. Companies are acting somewhat blindly today, treading-water to solve the 'problem of the day'. Responsibly helps them finally get visibility into their procurement footprints and make forward-thinking decisions for all the right reasons." According to CDP, some 40% of global GHG emissions are driven or influenced companies through their purchases and the products they sell. Meanwhile, Gartner found that 23% of supply chain leaders expect to have a digital ecosystem by 2025, up from only 1% today. Speaking to me over a call Buch Andersson said: “The space for responsible sourcing has really evolved quite a lot over the past 20 years. We are building a layer on top of all of the different data providers to essentially allow the procurement team to flexibly read any information, interpret it and then use it for sourcing decision making." Responsibly competes with EcoVadis and Integrity Next.  |
| PayEm comes out of stealth with $27M and its answer to the expense report Posted: 01 Sep 2021 04:00 AM PDT Itamar Jobani was a software developer working for a medical company and "hated that time of the month" when he had to use the company's chosen reimbursement tool. "It was full of friction and as part of the company's wellness team, I felt an urge to take care of the employee experience and find a better tool," Jobani told TechCrunch. "I looked for something, but didn't find it, so I tried to build it myself." What resulted was PayEm, an Israeli company he founded with Omer Rimoch in 2019 to be a spend and procurement platform for high-growth and multinational organizations. Today, it announced $27 million in funding that includes $7 million in seed funding, led by Pitango First and NFX, with participation by LocalGlobe and Fresh Fund, as well as $20 million in Series A funding led by Glilot+. The company's technology automates the reimbursement, procurement, accounts payable and credit card workflows to manage all of the requests and invoices, while also creating bills and sending payments to over 200 territories in 130 currencies. It gives company finance teams a real-time look at what items employees are asking for funds to buy, and what is actually being spent. For example, teams can submit a request and go through an approval flow that can be customized with purchasing codes tied to a description of the transaction. At the same time, all transactions are continuously reconciled versus having to spend hours at the end of the month going through paperwork. "Organizations are running in a more democratized way with teams buying things on behalf of the organization," Jobani said. "We built a platform to cater to those needs, so it's like a disbursement platform instead of a finance team always being in charge." The global B2B payments market is valued at $120 trillion annually and is expected to reach $200 trillion by 2028, according to payment industry newsletter Nilson Report. PayEm is among many B2B payments startups attracting venture capital — for example, last month, Nium announced a $200 million in Series D funding at a $1 billion valuation. Paystand raised $50 million in Series C funding to make B2B payments cashless, while Dwolla raised $21 million for its API that allows companies to build and facilitate fast payments. Meanwhile, PayEm itself saw accelerated growth in the second quarter of 2021, including increasing its transaction volume by four times over the previous quarter and generating millions of dollars in revenue. It now boasts a list of hundreds of customers like Fiverr, JFrog and Next Insurance. It also launched new features like the ability to create corporate cards. The company, which also has an office in New York, has 40 employees currently, and the new funds will enable the company to triple its headcount, focusing on hiring in the United States, and to bring additional features and payment capabilities to market. "Each person can have a budget and a time frame for making the purchase, while accounting still feels in control," Jobani added. "Everyone now has the full context and the right budget line item."  |
| “Autonomous accounting” platform Vic.ai raises $50M round led by ICONIQ Growth Posted: 01 Sep 2021 03:35 AM PDT Vic.ai, a startup that has built an AI-based platform it claims can 'automate’ enterprise accounting, has raised a $50M Series B round led by ICONIQ Growth, with participation from existing investors GGV Capital, Cowboy Ventures and Costanoa Ventures, bringing total capital raised to $63 million. The company's customers include HSB (Sweden's largest real-estate management company), Intercom Inc. and HireQuest Inc., as well as accounting firms KPMG, PwC, BDO, and Armanino LLP. Vic.ai says its platform has processed more than 535 million invoices with 95 percent accuracy. Vic.ai says it can do this by learning from historical data and existing processes to deliver more automation in accounting processes thus saving time, reducing errors and duplicates. Alexander Hagerup, CEO of Vic.ai (launched in 2017) said: "It's 2021, and it's high time for finance and accounting teams to embrace AI technology. Accounting work is tedious and repetitive, but it no longer needs to be. Our AI platform delivers both autonomy and intelligence for finance and accounting teams." Will Griffith, founding partner at ICONIQ Growth said Vic.ai team "demonstrates the same passion, product focus and customer-first mentality that we see in other exceptional founders."  |
| Vector design tool Vectornator raises $20M round led by EQT Ventures Posted: 01 Sep 2021 03:05 AM PDT It's an age-old tech industry story: company comes up with a tool to solve its own problem, then realizes the tool is actually worth more than the existing company. Something similar happened to Linearity. Its 17-year-old founder, Vladimir Danila, came up with the Vectornator tool to make vector design easier in 2017. It's now used by Apple, Disney, Wacom and Microsoft. Disney uses Vectornator to create artwork for hotels in Disneyland, in fact. The vector-focused platform has now raised a $20 million funding round led by EQT Ventures together with 468 Capital. It's been joined by Angels including Bradley Horowitz (VP Product, Google), Jonathan Rochelle (Co-Founder Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets, Google Slides, Google Drive), Charles Songhurst (Ex. Corporate Strategy, Microsoft) and Lutz Finger (Group Product Manager, Google). Ted Persson, Partner at EQT Ventures commented: "For me, there were two clear sides to joining forces with the Linearity team. Vladimir is a very clear-cut founder who has built an outstanding product. Design tools are some of the hardest tools to build, but Vladimir and his team have shown that anything is possible." Investor interest in design tools has exploded since the success of Canva, which is now valued at $15 billion.  |
| CoachHub raises $80M in Series “B2” round, as coaching goes digital in the pandemic Posted: 01 Sep 2021 02:24 AM PDT The world of professional coaching has grown over the years as coaches realised they could easily counsel people remotely and clients realized digital coaching was far more efficient. But, equally, a problem arose in how to sift the wheat from the chaff. At the same time corporates realised that their own staff could benefit – but faced the same sifting problem. In a classic Internet play, CoachHub came along three years ago and applied AI to a marketplace to do the sifting. All well and good, but with training and personal development going almost completely digital due to the pandemic, the market has exploded. Berlin-based CoachHub has now raised $80m in a Series “B2” funding, increasing its total Series B capital to $110m. Investors Draper Esprit, RTP Global, HV Capital, Signals Venture Capital, Partech, and Speedinvest all participated bringing the total funds raised to $130m, since 2019. Last year it raised a $30 million Series B round, also led by Draper Esprit, alongside existing investors HV Capital, Partech, Speedinvest, signals Venture Capital, and RTP Global. The startup competes with other aggregators such as AceUp out of Boston, which has raised $2.3M.  |
| Trustshare runs escrow infrastructure as a service to facilitate online sales Posted: 01 Sep 2021 12:43 AM PDT Meet Trustshare, a London-based startup that is working on escrow infrastructure for online classified, B2B marketplaces, trade directories and more. It's a white-label platform that can be integrated with online marketplaces in just a few lines of code. If you've ever tried to sell something expensive on the web, you know that it's hard to know for sure that you're not getting scammed. For instance, that person that is trying to buy your old phone from you — should you send the phone first or ask the buyer to send the money first? If a marketplace relies on Trustshare for payments, buyers first have to checkout and leave money into a dedicated transaction-based account. Trustshare can also handle identity verification steps, such as KYC and AML checks (Know Your Customer and Anti-Money Laundering). The seller can check the status of the funds. Once the buyer has received the product, they can release funds to the seller. Behind the scenes, Trustshare generates a dedicated IBAN per transaction. Customers can deposit money using bank transfers or cards. In the U.K. and Europe, Trustshare takes advantage of open banking regulation so that users can connect to their bank account from the checkout flow. If you don't want to tweak your site's code, you can also use Trustshare for offline sales and transactions that happen over email or messaging apps. The company lets you generate QR codes or payment links to initiate a payment. The startup has raised an angel round from several business angels, such as Cazoo and Zoopla founder Alex Chesterman and Carwow founder James Hind. After that, Trustshare raised a $3.2 million seed round (£2.3 million) led by Nauta Capital. Many companies could leverage Trustshare to launch their own marketplace as escrow payment is one of the biggest pain points. For instance, you can imagine luxury brands launching their own marketplaces of handbags and watches, new car marketplaces focused on one type of cars in particular, etc. "Our 5 lines of code branded escrow checkout is taking many marketplaces, brands that consumers know and trust, transactional. Really, this is just the start. Our borderless escrow infrastructure is incredibly powerful, and we plan to launch new products including instant pay-throughs, baskets and projects to make payments as quick and easy as sending an email," co-founder and CEO Nick Fulton said in a statement. Trustshare is built on top of existing payment infrastructure. That's why it supports 180 countries and 30 currencies already. The company's initial clients include Watchcollecting, Bookabuilder and U.K. trade body FENSA's Deposit Protection service.  |
| Oviva grabs $80M for app-delivered healthy eating programs Posted: 31 Aug 2021 11:15 PM PDT UK startup Oviva, which sells a digital support offering, including for Type 2 diabetes treatment, dispensing personalized diet and lifestyle advice via apps to allow more people to be able to access support, has closed $80 million in Series C funding — bringing its total raised to date to $115M. The raise, which Oviva says will be used to scale up after a “fantastic year” of growth for the health tech business, is co-led by Sofina and Temasek, alongside existing investors AlbionVC, Earlybird, Eight Roads Ventures, F-Prime Capital, MTIP, plus several angels. Underpinning that growth is the fact wealthy Western nations continue to see rising rates of obesity and other health conditions like Type 2 diabetes (which can be linked to poor diet and lack of exercise). While more attention is generally being paid to the notion of preventative — rather than reactive — healthcare, to manage the rising costs of service delivery. Lifestyle management to help control weight and linked health conditions (like diabetes) is where Oviva comes in: It’s built a blended support offering that combines personalized care (provided by healthcare professionals) with digital tools for patients that help them do things like track what they’re eating, access support and chart their progress towards individual health goals. It can point to 23 peer-reviewed publications to back up its approach — saying key results show an average of 6.8% weight loss at 6 months for those living with obesity; while, in its specialist programs, it says 53% of patients achieve remission of their type 2 diabetes at 12 months. Oviva typically sells its digitally delivered support programs direct to health insurance companies (or publicly funded health services) — who then provide (or refer) the service to their customers/patients. Its programs are currently available in the UK, Germany, Switzerland and France — but expanding access is one of the goals for the Series C. “We will expand to European markets where the health system reimburses the diet and lifestyle change we offer, especially those with specific pathways for digital reimbursement,” Oviva tells TechCrunch. “Encouragingly, more healthcare systems have been opening up specific routes for such digital reimbursement, e.g., Germany for DiGAs or Belgium just in the last months.” So far, the startup has treated 200,000 people but the addressable market is clearly huge — not least as European populations age — with Oviva suggesting more than 300 million people live with “health challenges” that are either triggered by poor diet or can be optimised through personalised dietary changes. Moreover, it suggests, only “a small fraction” is currently being offered digital care. To date, Oviva has built up 5,000+ partnerships with health systems, insurers and doctors as it looks to push for further scale by making its technology more accessible to a wider range of people. In the past year it says it’s “more than doubled” both people treated and revenue earned. Its goal is for the Series C funding is to reach “millions” of people across Europe who need support because they’re suffering from poor health linked to diet and lifestyle. As part of the scale up plan it will also be growing its team to 800 by the end of 2022, it adds. On digital vs face-to-face care — setting aside the potential cost savings associated with digital delivery — it says studies show the “most striking outcome benefits” are around uptake and completion rates, noting: “We have consistently shown uptake rates above 70% and high completion rates of around 80%, even in groups considered harder to reach such as working age populations or minority ethnic groups. This compares to uptake and completion rates of less than 50% for most face-to-face services.” Asked about competition, Oviva names Liva Healthcare and Second Nature as its closest competitors in the region. “WW (formally Weight Watchers) also competes with a digital solution in some markets where they can access reimbursement,” it adds. “There are many others that try to access this group with new methods, but are not reimbursed or are wellness solutions. Noom competes as a solution for self-paying consumers in Europe, as many other apps. But, in our view, that is a separate market from the reimbursed medical one.” As well as using the Series C funding to bolster its presence in existing markets and target and scale into new ones, Oviva says it may look to further grow the business via M&A opportunities. “In expanding to new countries, we are open to both building new organisations from the ground up or acquiring existing businesses with a strong medical network where we see that our technology can be leveraged for better patient care and value creation,” it told us on that.
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| VanMoof raises $128 million to become the world’s leading e-bike brand Posted: 31 Aug 2021 09:00 PM PDT Amsterdam-based startup VanMoof has raised a $128 million Series C funding round. The company designs and sells electric bikes that are quite popular in some markets. It now wants to become the world's leading e-bike brand by iterating at a faster pace. Asia-based private equity firm Hillhouse Investment is leading the round, with Gillian Tans, the former CEO of Booking.com, also participating. Some existing investors also put some more money on the table, such as Norwest Venture Partners, Felix Capital, Balderton Capital and TriplePoint Capital. Today's Series C represents a big jump compared to the company's Series B. Last year, VanMoof raised a $40 million Series B. Overall, if you add it all up, the startup has raised $182 million in total. If you're not familiar with VanMoof's e-bikes, TechCrunch reviewed both the most recent S3 and X3 models. On paper, they are identical. The VanMoof X3 features a smaller frame and smaller wheels. What makes VanMoof different from your average e-bike manufacturer is that the company tries to control everything from the supply chain to the customer experience. VanMoof e-bikes are premium e-bikes that are primarily designed for city rides. The most recent models currently cost $2,298 or €2,198. They feature an electric motor paired with an electronic gear shifting system. It has four gears and you don't have to change gears yourself. All you have to do is jump on the bike and start pedaling. Recognizable by their iconic triangular-shaped futuristic-looking frames, the S3 and X3 also come with hydraulic brakes, integrated lights and some smart features. There's an integrated motion detector combined with an alarm, a GPS chip and cellular connectivity. If you declare your bike as stolen, the GPS and cellular chips go live and you can track your bike in the VanMoof app. The company's bikes are now also compatible with Apple's Find My app. Instead of relying exclusively on off-the-shelf parts, the company works with a small set of suppliers to manufacture custom components. This way, it can cut out as many middleperson as possible to bring costs down. It's also a good competitive advantage. Growing a company like VanMoof is a capital-intensive business. The company has opened retail stores and service hubs in 50 different cities around the world. While the company started in Europe, the U.S. is now the fastest growth market for VanMoof. With today's funding round, the startup plans to double-down on its current strategy. You can expect updated bikes with refined designs and more custom parts. You can expect more stores and service hubs around the world. And you can probably expect more online sales as well. "It will help us get 10 million people on our bikes in the next five years," co-founder and CEO Taco Carlier said in a statement. So far, there are 150,000 people using VanMoof bikes. Today's investment shouldn't come as a surprise. The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated plans to transform European cities — and prioritize bikes over cars. Last year, TechCrunch's Natasha Lomas and I wrote a comprehensive overview of key policy developments in four major cities — Paris, Barcelona, London and Milan. VanMoof is now benefiting from these policy shifts.  |
| Reframe your Metaphors, and other lessons from Y Combinator S21 Day 1 Posted: 31 Aug 2021 04:47 PM PDT After a 17-hour marathon through nearly 200 startup pitches, the Equity team was fired up to get back on Twitter and chat through some early trends and favorites from the first day of Y Combinator’s demo party. We’ll be back on the air tomorrow, so make sure you’re following the show on Twitter so you don’t miss out. What did Natasha and Alex chat about? The following:
TechCrunch has extensive coverage of the day on the site, so there’s lots to dig into if you are in the mood. More tomorrow! Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PDT, Wednesday, and Friday at 6:00 a.m. PDT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts!  |
| Sanas aims to convert one accent to another in real time for smoother customer service calls Posted: 31 Aug 2021 04:23 PM PDT In the customer service industry, your accent dictates many aspects of your job. It shouldn’t be the case that there’s a “better” or “worse” accent, but in today’s global economy (though who knows about tomorrow’s) it’s valuable to sound American or British. While many undergo accent neutralization training, Sanas is a startup with another approach (and a $5.5 million seed round): using speech recognition and synthesis to change the speaker’s accent in near real time. The company has trained a machine learning algorithm to quickly and locally (that is, without using the cloud) recognize a person’s speech on one end and, on the other, output the same words with an accent chosen from a list or automatically detected from the other person’s speech.  Image Credits: Sanas.ai It slots right into the OS’s sound stack so it works out of the box with pretty much any audio or video calling tool. Right now the company is operating a pilot program with thousands of people in locations from the U.S. and U.K. to the Philippines, India, Latin America and others. Accents supported will include American, Spanish, British, Indian, Filipino and Australian by the end of the year. To tell the truth, the idea of Sanas kind of bothered me at first. It felt like a concession to bigoted people who consider their accent superior and think others below them. Tech will fix it … by accommodating the bigots. Great! But while I still have a little bit of that feeling, I can see there’s more to it than this. Fundamentally speaking, it is easier to understand someone when they speak in an accent similar to your own. But customer service and tech support is a huge industry and one primarily performed by people outside the countries where the customers are. This basic disconnect can be remedied in a way that puts the onus of responsibility on the entry-level worker, or one that puts it on technology. Either way the difficulty of making oneself understood remains and must be addressed — an automated system just lets it be done more easily and allows more people to do their job. It’s not magic — as you can tell in this clip, the character and cadence of the person’s voice is only partly retained and the result is considerably more artificial sounding: But the technology is improving and like any speech engine, the more it’s used, the better it gets. And for someone not used to the original speaker’s accent, the American-accented version may very well be more easily understood. For the person in the support role, this likely means better outcomes for their calls — everyone wins. Sanas told me that the pilots are just starting so there are no numbers available from this deployment yet, but testing has suggested a considerable reduction of error rates and increase in call efficiency. It’s good enough at any rate to attract a $5.5 million seed round, with participation from Human Capital, General Catalyst, Quiet Capital and DN Capital. “Sanas is striving to make communication easy and free from friction, so people can speak confidently and understand each other, wherever they are and whoever they are trying to communicate with,” CEO Maxim Serebryakov said in the press release announcing the funding. It’s hard to disagree with that mission. While the cultural and ethical questions of accents and power differentials are unlikely to ever go away, Sanas is trying something new that may be a powerful tool for the many people who must communicate professionally and find their speech patterns are an obstacle to that. It’s an approach worth exploring and discussing even if in a perfect world we would simply understand one another better.  |
| Our favorite startups from YC’s Summer 21 Demo Day, Part 1 Posted: 31 Aug 2021 04:11 PM PDT Y Combinator kicked off its fourth-ever virtual Demo Day today, revealing the first half of its nearly 400-company batch. The presentation, YC's biggest yet, offers a snapshot into where innovation is heading, from not-so-simple seaweed to a Clearco for creators. The TechCrunch team stuck to its tradition of covering every single company live (but, you know, from home) so you'll find all of the Day One companies here. For those who want a sampling of standouts, however, we're also bringing you a host of our favorites from today's one-minute pitch-off extravaganza. As reporters, we're constantly inundated with hundreds of pitches on a daily basis. The startups below caught our picky attention for a whole host of reasons, but that doesn't mean other startups weren't compelling or potential unicorns as well. Instead, consider the below to be a data point on which startups made us do a double take, be it due to the size of the market opportunity, the ambition exhibited by the founding team or an idea that was just too clever to pass up. GeneiGenei is, dare I say, a refreshing mashup between robots and writers. The startup has a simple goal: Automatically summarize background reading so content creators can grab the top facts, attribute and move onto the next graf. Writing is innately an art, so I find Genei’s positioning as a tool for writers instead of a replacement out to take their jobs as smart. Better yet, it’s launching by targeting some of the hardest workers in our industry: freelance writers. These folks often have to balance consistent pitches, diverse assignments and tight deadlines for their livelihood, so I’d presume a sidekick can’t hurt. Down the road, I could totally see this startup playing the same role as a Grammarly: a helpful extension of workflows that optimizes the way people who write for a living, write. — Natasha  |
| Olsam raises $165M to buy up and scale consumer and B2B Amazon Marketplace sellers Posted: 31 Aug 2021 04:00 PM PDT On the heels of Heroes announcing a $200 million raise earlier today, to double down on buying and scaling third-party Amazon Marketplace sellers, another startup out of London aiming to do the same is announcing some significant funding of its own. Olsam, a roll-up play that is buying up both consumer and B2B merchants selling on Amazon by way of Amazon’s FBA fulfillment program, has closed $165 million — a combination of equity and debt that it will be using to fuel its M&A strategy, as well as continue building out its tech platform and to hire more talent. Apeiron Investment Group — an investment firm started by German entrepreneur Christian Angermayer (known first for biopharmaceuticals, then investing and crypto, including playing a role in SoftBank investing in Wirecard) — led the Series A equity round, with Elevat3 Capital (another Angermayer firm that has a strategic partnership with Founders Fund and Peter Thiel) also participating. North Wall Capital was behind the debt portion of the deal. This appears to be the first significant funding of any kind announced by the company since it launched in October 2020. We have asked for more details about how the $165 million breaks down between equity and debt, and Olsam said it is only disclosing the full amount raised. Valuation is also not being disclosed. Being an Amazon roll-up startup from London that happens to be announcing a fundraise today are not the only two things that Olsam has in common with Heroes. Like Heroes, Olsam is also founded by brothers with track records that lend themselves to diving into becoming Marketplace consolidators. Sam Horbye previously spent years working at Amazon, including building and managing the company’s Business Marketplace in the UK (the B2B version of the consumer Marketplace). Co-founder Ollie Horbye had years of experience in strategic consulting and financial services. Between them, they had also quietly built and sold previous marketplace businesses, and they believe that this collective experience gives Olsam — a portmanteau of their names, “Ollie” and “Sam” — a leg up in areas like building relationships with merchants; identifying quality products amid the vast sea of search results that often feel like they are selling the same inexpensive junk as each other; understanding merchants’ challenges and opportunities; and critically building relationships with Amazon and understanding how the merchant ecosystem fits into the e-commerce giant’s wider strategy. Olsam is also taking a slightly different approach when it comes to target companies. Yes, it is focusing on the usual consumer play you hear about from consolidators — home & garden, sporting, baby and children products, and beauty are typical categories. But alongside that, it is also building out a strategy to sell those products, and others, on Amazon’s B2B portal — the one Sam helped build when he worked at Amazon. B2B selling includes items like office furniture and office supplies, but also electronics, automotive parts and accessories, kitchenware, and, actually, anything that is potentially sold on the consumer marketplace. The exception is that with business customers — as you get with members’ only stores in the physical retail world — they may get discounts for bulk purchases, tax breaks, and perhaps a slightly different mix of products more tailored to running their enterprises. B2B is currently one of the fastest-growing segments in Amazon’s Marketplace, and it is also one of the most overlooked.”It’s flying under the radar,” Ollie said. “The B2B opportunity is very exciting,” Sam added. “A growing number of merchants are selling office supplies or more random products to the B2B customer.” Estimates vary pretty wildly when it comes to how many merchants there are selling on Amazon’s Marketplace globally. I’ve seen estimates of 6 million and nearly 10 million. But altogether, those merchants generated $300 million in sales (gross merchandise value) last year, and that figure is growing by 50% each year at the moment. Amazon itself notes that online B2B sales as a category — beyond, but also including, on Amazon itself — is about 2.3 times bigger than its B2C counterpart. Combined with that opportunity, consolidating sellers — in order to achieve better economies of scale around supply chains, marketing tools and analytics, and more — is also big business. Olsam estimates that some $7 billion has been spent cumulatively on acquiring these businesses, and there are more out there: Olsam estimates that there are some 3,000 businesses in the UK alone making more than $1 million each in sales on Amazon’s platform. And to be clear, there are a number of other roll-up startups beyond Heroes also eyeing up that opportunity. Raising hundreds of millions of dollars in aggregate, others have made moves this year include Suma Brands ($150 million); Elevate Brands ($250 million); Perch ($775 million); factory14 ($200 million); Thrasio (currently probably the biggest of them all in terms of reach and money raised and ambitions), Heyday, The Razor Group, Branded, SellerX, Berlin Brands Group (X2), Benitago, Latin America's Valoreo and Rainforest and Una Brands out of Asia. Sure, there may be room for all of these, and many more, to move into the roll-up opportunity, but it’s a more complicated equation in the longer run. That is one reason why so many of these companies also emphasize their organizational, M&A, and marketplace expertise: at the end of the day, the technology these well-capitalized startups build will only be as good as the merchants they manage to buy, and the business plans they subsequently execute around their conglomerations. “The senior team behind Olsam is what makes this business truly unique,” said Angermayer in a statement. "Having all been successful in building and selling their own brands within the market and having worked for Amazon in their marketplace team – their understanding of this space is exceptional.”  |
| Tribe and Arkam back Jar app to help millions in India start their savings journey Posted: 31 Aug 2021 03:51 PM PDT Even as hundreds of millions of people in India have a bank account, only a tiny fraction of this population invests in any financial instrument. Fewer than 30 million people invest in mutual funds or stocks, for instance. In recent years, a handful of startups have made it easier for users — especially the millennials — to invest, but the figure has largely remained stagnant. Now, an Indian startup believes that it has found the solution to tackle this challenge — and is already seeing good early traction. Nishchay AG, former director of mobility startup Bounce, and Misbah Ashraf, co-founder of Marsplay (sold to Foxy), founded Jar earlier this year. The startup's eponymous three-month-old Android app enables users to start their savings journey for as little as 1 Indian rupee. Users on Jar can invest in multiple ways and get started within seconds. The app works with Paytm (PhonePe support is in the works) to set up a recurring payment. (The startup is the first to use UPI 2.0's recurring payment support.) They can set up any amount between 1 Indian rupee to 500 for daily investments. The Jar app can also glean users' text messages and save a tiny amount based on each monetary transaction they do. So, for instance, if a user has spent 31 rupees in a transaction, the Jar app rounds that up to the nearest tenth figure (40, in this case) and saves nine rupees. Users can also manually open the app and spend any amount they wish to invest. Once users have saved some money in Jar, the app then invests that into digital gold. The startup is using gold investment because people in the South Asian market already have an immense trust in this asset class. India has a unique fascination for gold. From rural farmers to urban working class, nearly everyone stashes the yellow metal and flaunts jewelry at weddings. Indian households are estimated to have a stash of over 25,000 tons of the precious metal whose value today is about half of the country's nominal GDP. Such is the demand for gold in India that the South Asian nation is also one of the world's largest importers of this precious metal.  Jar’s Android app (Image Credits: Jar) "When you're thinking about bringing the next 500 million people to institutional savings and investments, the onus is on us to educate them on the efficacies of the other instruments that are in the market," said Nishchay. "We want to give them the instrument they trust the most, which is gold," he said. The startup plans to eventually offer several more investment opportunities, he said. The founders met several years ago when they were exploring if MarsPlay and Bounce could have any synergies. They stayed in touch and, last year during one of their many conversations, realized that neither of them knew much about investments. “That’s when the dots started to connect,” said Misbah, drawing stories from his childhood. “I come from a small town in Bihar called Bihar Sharif. During my childhood days, I saw my family deeply troubled with debt because of poor financial decisions and no savings,” he said. “We both understand what a typical middle class family goes through. Someone who comes from this background never had any means in the past but their aspirations are never-ending. So when you start earning, you immediately start to spend it all,” said Nishchay. “The market needs products that will help them get started,” he said. That idea, which is similar to Acorn and Stash’s play in the U.S. market, is beginning to make inroads. The app has already amassed about half a million downloads, the founders said. Investors have taken notice, too. On Wednesday, Jar announced it has raised $4.5 million from a clutch of high-profile investors, including Arkam Ventures, Tribe Capital, WEH Ventures, and angels including Kunal Shah (founder of CRED), Shaan Puri (formerly with Twitch), Ali Moiz (founder of Stonks), Howard Lindzon (founder of Social Leverage), Vivekananda Hallekere (co-founder of Bounce), Alvin Tse (of Xiaomi) and Kunal Khattar (managing partner at AdvantEdge). “Over 400 million Indians are about to embrace digital financial services for the first time in their lives. Jar has built an app that is poised to help them — with several intuitive ways including gamification — start their investment journey. We love the speed at which the team has been executing and how fast they are growing each week,” said Arjun Sethi, co-founder of Tribe Capital, in a statement. Transactions and AUM on the Jar app are surging 350% each month, said Nishchay. The startup plans to broaden its product offerings in the coming days, he said.  |
| Here are all the companies from Y Combinator’s Summer 2021 Demo Day, Part 1 Posted: 31 Aug 2021 03:41 PM PDT Today Y Combinator kicked off the Demo Day cycle for its Summer 2021 cohort. The collection of early-stage startups on day one-of-two alone numbered in the hundreds, meaning that we had to assemble a team here at TechCrunch just to cover it all. But before we get into notes on each company that presented, a few notes on the cohort itself. Per Y Combinator leadership, the 377 (!) startups in this cohort have founders from 47 different countries, and 37% of the founders in this cohort were from underrepresented groups (which YC’s Michael Seibel says the accelerator defines as Black, Latinx or female.) The international breakdown of the batch parallels that of this past winter. Nearly 50% of YC startups are based outside of the United States, with India, U.K. and Mexico making up the largest part of that percentage. What follows is a list of the 180+ companies in the order that they pitched, and our notes on each pitch. TechCrunch will follow up this post with a list of our favorites. So, enjoy the below and happy hunting to all the founders and investors! (Oh, and if you’re somehow hungry for more, don’t worry: another equally huge batch is scheduled to present tomorrow.) Day One companiesEndla: Software meant to increase production and reduce costs associated with oil/gas wells. The company says it can save about $40,000 per well per year. Phykos: Autonomously grows seaweed to capture carbon, selling offsets to companies to uphold their climate commitments. Built by GoogleX mechanical and software engineers. MadEats: MadEats is an online ghost kitchen food delivery service in the Philippines. It has built several major local restaurant concepts and is building affordable, high-margin brands to serve direct to consumers. Financial Choice: Financial Choice wants to boost the yields that consumers can earn from their checking accounts. In today's market, cash earns incredibly low yields at rest. So, Financial Choice wants to invest checking account funds, while preserving access for users for when they need their money. The startup claims to have reached $4.4 million AUM thus far. We're curious about the tax implications of the model, but the concept of earning more yield from liquid holdings is attractive. Atlas: This startup is building software to let restaurants in Southeast Asia move more operations online, aiming to help restaurants create a closer bond with consumers that food delivery platforms have pulled away. Apollo: A debit card that rewards users with stocks. Making purchases with the card earns the user a fractional share of a stock, plus “a chance to win” full shares. Strive Education: With 3.7 million students in Asia, Strive Education uses 1:1 live classes to teach high school math through coding games. The company has $20,000 monthly recurring revenue and is growing 30% monthly.  Image Credits: Brex PlusIdentity: A password manager for startups, focused first on a Slack app that hits the high points of enterprise-level options (Okta) and consumer apps (LastPass). Only one month old, they already have 10 startups signed up and aim to be the next identity management platform for the startup world. HitPay: HitPay brings together two startup trends that have captured investor interest in recent quarters, namely no-code tooling and payments. The company wants to help SMBs in the South East Asian market accept payments from what it describes as a market that is fragmented. So far the company has reached $5.4 million in total payment volume (TPV) per month, a figure that yields $35,000 in monthly revenue. AOA Dx Inc.: AOA is building blood tests that help detect ovarian cancer early when survival rates are much higher. The founding team has two successful exits in the health startup space behind them and their product has already shown early success in a 600-person patient study. Cococart: An online store builder that claims to have a setup process 10x faster than Shopify. The team says they’re currently working with over 2,000 active merchants. Metaphor: What's the metaphor for taking on Google? Metaphor is a language-model-based search engine. With this technology, users can search by ideas; think queries like "one of the most promising startups in the health tech space is" or "a smart essay about love is" instead of relying solely on keywords. Tinai: Ninety percent of small businesses in Vietnam still keep at least some of their financial records using pen and paper. Tinai aims to help modernize this with a digital bookkeeping service — and after only six weeks they have 1,200 active merchants and are handling USD$1.8 million worth of transactions.  Image Credits: Turion Space Turion Space: Space trash removal! It's a well-known issue that the orbit around Earth is littered with crap of all sorts, junk that is circling the planet at high speeds. Turion Space wants to build spacecraft that can get that shit out of orbit, and it also wants to service satellites and mine asteroids. You have to start somewhere, we suppose. Space companies are hard to judge at this stage, but we can say that the TAM Turion is pursuing is, well, as big as the planet. Cero: The team at Cero is building software to help hospitals automate communications with patients over WhatsApp. The team has banked $95,000 in monthly revenue helping their customers communicate with more than 600,000 patients. Aqua: Investment platform to allow individuals to invest in private equity funds without requiring them to have a ridiculously high net worth. Warpfy: Built by the founders of Wayfair Asia, Warpfy is on a mission to acquire and grow e-commerce stores into global brands. It will help brands bring distribution multichannel, breaking out of a tradition of Amazon roll-ups as a key way to grow. Momo Medical: With a growing elderly population worldwide, nurses in hospitals and long-term care facilities are stretched thin. Momo Medical has made an IoT-equipped bed sensor that tells nurses who is sleeping, who is rising, and who may be having trouble, all in one interface. The increase in productivity could help offset the worldwide nursing shortage. They’re already signing contracts and have $250,000 ARR.  Image Credits: Milky Way AI Milky Way AI: No, Milky Way AI is not building computer intelligence to scan the stars. Instead, it's building computer intelligence to scan the shelves. Perhaps Milky Way refers to the candy bar, instead of the interstellar body. The startup has built a mobile app that allows CPG companies to scan shelves and check what goods are in stock. Per the startup, it has four brands working with it today wirth $11,000 in monthly revenue. And two new contracts that could push its revenues into the seven figures. Slip: Slip is building a marketplace for top developers to create and monetize courses helping young coders hone their skills. The team is looking to get their product into the corporate learning space and get major tech companies providing their courses to employees. MindFi: A corporate wellness/mental health platform for companies in Asia, offering employees “microclasses,” guided exercises and assessments meant to help with mental well-being. Opkit: Founded by early members of Brex's engineering team, Opkit helps surgery centers optimize how they buy medical devices. The tech plugs into health electronic systems and then provides dashboards that illustrate which surgeries are the most expensive for the center. Then, the purchasing software gives recommendations on what customers should buy to limit costs. Deskimo: With employees fluidly moving from home to office to shared workspaces, hybrid work is a global trend. Deskimo aims to embrace that flexibility by aggregating managed office space into a single app and renting it out by the minute. They’re launching in southeast Asia first but hope to become a global hybrid work platform.  Image Credits: Lumify Lumify: We're all familiar with the concept of super apps for consumers. First popularized in Asia, they may bring together ride-hailing, food delivery, e-commerce and chat. But what about a super app for nurses? Lumify thinks the idea has legs. Its app can help nurses find whatever they need, from scrubs to shifts it claims. The company has generated $275,000 in revenue so far this year from a user base of 15,000 nurses. The concept makes sense. Nurses are busy, in demand and earn good wages; why not sell to them? Crew: Crew is building a recruiting-centric CRM designed to make it easier to reach out to candidates. The company’s software is designed to help recruiters tackle proactive outreach with tooling designed for each part of the hiring process, keeping things streamlined and personalized. Akute Health: Akute makes a medical records management system for the ever-increasing number of digital health companies, so each one doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel. Founder Sharud Agarwal says Akute has 40 customers accounting for a total of 20,000 patients. Writesonic: AI-powered copywriting tool for marketing material. Launched in February, Writesonic hit $36,000 in monthly ARR through 100% organic user acquisition. REPROSENT: Cancer patients’ daily symptoms could be crucial to understanding their needs and the effectiveness of treatment, but it can be hard to collect them regularly. Reprosent is an app for patient self-reported data that has seen over 80% daily use, providing a steady stream of helpful data for caregivers. They’re already signing up major care centers. Pinglend: This is an interesting company. Pinglend wants to let people pledge items and, in return, offer credit based on those assets. Per the company, its model will allow it to loan money to users at around 20% of the rate that pawn shops or payday lenders charge. The company has yet to launch, but as it is playing in a space rife with consumer abuse, it will have questions over its head as it proves out its model. The company wants to "graduate" its users to unsecured credit cards in time. AppX: AppX has built a platform that helps social media creators build their own apps that play to their strengths and monetize their audiences better than personal websites do. The company started with educational creators and is looking to expand with gaming and fitness creators.  Image Credits: Caire Health Caire Health: AI meant to help “diagnose brain bleeds in seconds.” Co-founder Anmol Warman says he expects FDA approval within six months, and the company is currently running trials with multiple hospitals. Membo: A premium way to grocery shop. Membo is a next-day grocery delivery service in Europe that optimizes for freshness and quality, instead of 15-minute speed. The startup does $30,000 monthly GMV and makes money through a per-order commission fee. Soraban: Accounting firms aren't the most futuristic office environments, and Soraban aims to modernize them with a back-office platform that brings them into the 21st century. Abatable: Robo-advising is old hat by this point, technology that has become table stakes for consumer investing services that focus on long-term holding. But Abatable wants to bring robo-advising into the carbon-removal game, creating portfolios that "focus on carbon removal." Given the rising focus on more socially and environmentally conscious investing around the world, it's a neat idea. Varos: Varos helps companies understand how their performance stacks up against the competition by creating anonymized databases of customer data. The startup is tackling the $21 billion planning software market with a specific focus on marketing, product and finance teams. Friz: A bank specifically tailored for freelancers (focusing on South Asia and Southeast Asia), making it easier to get loans for those without fixed monthly paychecks. Zensors Inc: Google analytics for the physical world. The startup is a software-only AI solution that connects to security cameras dispersed around airports, transit hubs and stores — helping companies offer actionable advice to better the customer experience. Its software footprint currently impacts over 1 million people a week. Kodda: Getting insurance in LatAm is a dated process, and Kodda aims to bring a Lemonade-like experience to the millions of people there. Users can sign up in 90 seconds and make claims in minutes; so far the company has 250 paying customers and it says not one has left. Cache: Gopuff is a big deal these days, having raised roughly eighty zillion dollars. But the Cache team thinks that there is still room in the on-demand market for convenience goods. The startup operates so-called "dark" stores to give goods to on-demand drivers. Dark stores in general are a hot commodity these days, thanks to rising delivery needs. Akudo: A neobanking startup in India geared toward providing teenagers with credit cards, hoping to help young people in the country manage their money in a smart way. The company combines a credit card, savings account and rewards with tools to help increase financial literacy.  Image Credits: SenpAI.GG SenpAI.GG: AI-powered video game coach. They’re building a tool that uses overlays and a voice assistant to help you figure out the best move to make, or the best character to pick. Olcay Yilmazçoban says they currently have over 450,000+ monthly active users and are seeing 20% growth month over month. See our previous coverage of SenpAI here. Iona Mind: Iona Mind is a mental health app that wants to teach people how to overcome anxiety and depression. The company's content is derived from evidence-based protocols and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). The platform is sold directly to employers that are growing their benefit programs and searching for ways to boost engagement. Storylane: Selling a digital product or service is a lot easier when the customer can try it for themselves. Storylane lets marketing teams deploy personalized product demos to prospective customers, which they have found increases conversions considerably. Ivy Homes: Opendoor is worth more than $10 billion as a public company today, so it is not a huge surprise to see a startup working on bringing the model to other countries. Ivy is taking the concept to India, where it claims the real estate market is obscured by a lack of information. The company has secured a $500,000 credit line and has bought its first property. So, it's early days for Ivy, but given the scale of the market they are taking on, that's no sin. Liv Labs Inc.: The startup is building fitness programs that help women deal with incontinence, building exercise programs that help women strengthen their pelvic floor muscles and decrease risks of pee leaks, an issue the startup says 27 million American women struggle with. Sitenna: Helps wireless carriers speed up the process of finding new sites to put up towers — a particularly well-timed idea, as 5G requires considerably more towers to work well. The company says it can shorten the process of finding a location from 24 months to six months. Read our past coverage of Sitenna here. Ferveret: Ferveret, inspired by nuclear plants, has created a liquid-cooling technology for data centers. The startup helps reduce costs and carbon footprint while improving server performance. So far, Ferveret has landed two paid pilot contracts with Enel and Crusoe Energy. Coulomb AI: Electric vehicles run on batteries, and batteries degrade with use — but exactly how much? When should companies replace theirs? What’s the cost of preventative maintenance? Couloumb AI aims to provide battery analytics for any and all EV companies (focusing first on fleets in India and government applications) and hopes to become the standard analytics platform worldwide. Arengu: If the startup market can support a host of companies just working to improve checkout flows, there may be room for tech upstarts just focused on sign-up flows, right? That is the bet at Aregenu, which is building signup flow for other companies. Its pitch noted that a host of major companies devote whole teams to this work, something it points out that smaller firms can't afford. If the fundraising history of checkout companies is any indicator, we expect Arengu to raise a mountain of money by Thursday. Yemaachi Biotechnology: The biotech startup is aiming to diversify the cancer diagnostics and therapeutics testing pipeline by collecting and sequencing samples across Africa, an effort to help Africa’s genetically diverse population get more accurate treatment. The founding team has decades of experience in the health research field. q&ai: Analyzes company sales calls to provide insights for the sales team to help them tune messaging.  Image Credits: GamerPay GamerPay: An escrow-style system for selling digital items and skins in games (starting with CS:GO) to hopefully reduce the rampant scams. BluumBio: Companies are under pressure to reduce their environmental impact, and BluumBio allows them to do this simply by seeding bioengineered plants and bacteria at sites polluted by microplastics, heavy metals or petroleum byproducts. These engineered organisms have regulatory approval and are heading to their first field trial this fall, and the company already has lucrative partnerships lined up. Goodkind: I hate being called on the phone, so I am not exactly sure if promising me that in the future more companies will video call me than ring me up is a great idea, but Goodkind thinks its vision of the future is going to be big business. Powering video messaging for "B2C teams," the company has racked up $375,000 in ARR, a figure it claims is growing by 28% on a month-over-month basis. That figure could rise if its pipeline comes through by a factor of more than two. Matidor: Matidor is a project management platform combining geospatial data with team collaboration software. The startup has $80,000 in ARR and is chasing the $4 billion natural resources market. Promakhos Therapeutics: Promakhos is a therapeutics platform focused on curing inflammatory diseases using bacteria. The company’s first drug is focused on reversing symptoms in Crohn’s disease patients. They’re also looking to help patients suffering from multiple sclerosis and Type I diabetes. Whaly: A no-code platform for modeling your business data, automatically imported from tools like Hubspot, Google Ads, Google Analytics, etc. Vital: An API for collecting at-home health data. Using at-home lab tests and fitness wearables like Oura or Fitbit, Vital aggregates data without requiring one to step foot into a doctor's office. The developer-designed API is currently in closed beta. Moving Parts: Rebuilding your UI to accommodate new features or migrate to a new code base can be costly and time consuming. Moving Parts is a component library from former Apple and SoundCloud designers full of “Apple-quality” UI bits and pieces that companies can drop in and customize to cover common needs like sign-up and log-in processes. Monet: The concept of getting workers access to their earnings ahead of traditional paydays is heading to Latin America thanks to Monet, which claims its service will work with any worker in the region who has both a bank account and a salary. No employer buy-in required. That's frankly pretty cool. Monet claims to have 6,000 users waiting to use its service. That should be enough early demand to prove its model. Let's see how it scales. Enerjazz: A battery-swapping network for the 2 million electric vehicles in India. The company is hoping to build out a sizable network that’s well positioned to cater toward the electrifications of India’s 8 million rickshaws and 187 million scooters.  Image Credits: Ivella Ivella: A bank for couples, beginning with a debit card that automatically splits expenses between two users. Malloc: A mobile app that prevents other mobile apps from recording and sharing data without the user’s approval. It notifies users when a mobile app uses their camera or microphone and offers a monitoring console to understand how long those features are being used. Malloc's spyware tracker has 80,000 active users and over 100,000 users to date. Flowbo Inc.: Flowbo wants to help creators access funding, fast. Instead of forcing creators to rely on payment from traditional brand deals or sponsors, they can upload proof of those income streams to get a loan upfront. Then, creators are invited to pay money back over time through a percentage fee based on total monthly revenue. Synth: Synth is building software to help knowledge workers better recall the information that they consume, be it in video format or text. The founder said that current software products like Roam just don't cut it. We'll need to play with this to truly understand it, but the concept is neat. Humane Genomics: The startup is building a development platform for making artificial viruses focused on cancer therapeutics. The team has helped design hundreds of unique oncolytic viruses and was previously working on a COVID-19 vaccine candidate that it recently discontinued efforts on. Mailmodo: A no-code platform for easily building forms and widgets to embed within emails. SafeBeat Rx: SafeBeat Rx wants to replace hospitalization for new arrhythmia patients through its take-home kit that combines EKG software with FDA-cleared hardware. While the concept of software replacing a hospital stay may seem like a moonshot, the startup recently completed a 103 patient pilot to test out its hypothesis. It estimates that the take-home kit will be on the market within one year. Karbon Card: It's Brex for India. With $110,000 already coming in monthly and 1,100 companies already signed up, this is about as sure a thing as you're going to find in this list. Expect a trillion dollar valuation by the end of the week. Digistain: One of several startups in this cohort taking on the cancer market, Digistain wants to use infrared scanning to better understand which breast cancer patients are truly a fit for chemotherapy. Its view is that more folks than needed get chemotherapy, which is not only expensive but can actually kill you. I am not an expert on regulatory approval, but using tech to avoid taking poison juice to the jugular sounds pretty great. Odwen: Odwen is building a massive warehouse network in India, aiming to leverage underutilized space at existing warehouses with a tech-enabled platform that helps users with storage needs find their own solution across a wide network. Rinse: Pitched as “One Medical for dental,” Rinse is looking to make it easier to book same-day dental cleanings and exams — because more checkups = less drilling. Swipe: A billing and payments solution for Indian small and medium-sized businesses. The over 1,000 businesses that use Swipe today are able to create easy invoices, WhatsApp-friendly payment links and more. Swipe has hit over $1 million in monthly transaction volume. As my colleague Alex Wilhelm put it, Swipe is Stripe, with a W.  Image Credits: Nasdisc Nasdisc: The market for vinyl records has exploded over the last couple decades as these collectibles have reentered the vogue. Nasdisc thinks it’s time for a modern, dedicated vinyl marketplace like those that exist for sneakers and other hot C2C goods. They’re live now and doing $1,000/week in sales, so maybe it’s time to pull out those old records and make a buck or two. PropReturns: Working against a similar problem set as Ivy Homes, PropReturns wants to bring more data to the Indian real estate market, which it also views as somewhat poor today. But instead of buying homes, PropReturns wants to facilitate transactions. It has facilitated some $3.9 million in property value. That generated $74,000 in revenue. Let the Make India's Property Market Better Startup War begin! DiveHealth: Dive helps migraine sufferers find the right treatment among the dozens of migraine drugs on the market today. Users take a genetic test, fill out a questionnaire and receive a custom treatment plan. Twenty million Americans currently suffer from migraines, so it’s a huge opportunity. Zinite: This team wants to help companies build better performing chips within the same product real estate with what it says is “only high-performance transistor which can be built along the z-axis.” Kiwi Biosciences: Built by an IBS patient and former IBS digital health founder, Kiwi has created an enzyme that helps customers digest food better by breaking down common dietary triggers. It charges $50 a month for the patent-pending enzymes — and as of last pull, Kiwi has $23,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Algen Biotechnologies: Born out of CRISPR co-inventor Jennifer Doudna’s lab, Algen aims to treat cancers with no known effective drugs by applying machine learning to RNA messaging and finding ways to change it. They’ve already found one oral inhibitor for one such cancer and aim to enter clinical trials within 18 months — and of course Big Pharma is already sniffing around.  Image Credits: Kalam Labs Kalam Labs: Kalam Labs wants to use games to help kids from 6 to 14 years old learn STEM. Targeting the Indian middle class, the company has racked up 1,500 paying customers and has reached $15,000 in MRR. The company won't expand north to China, however, as that country is cracking down on paid edtech services. And cutting back on gaming hours for minors. Whatever. The edtech market in India is hot, and this could fit into it neatly. Pillar: Pillar is building a health coaching platform to help Americans live healthier lifestyles and minimize costs associated with lifestyle-based diseases. The startup is aiming to build a solution that easily plugs into corporate health platforms, allowing clients to easily access health coaches. SalaryBook: Pitched as “Gusto for India,” SalaryBook helps SMBs in India handle payroll, employee attendance and expenses. The company says it has 80,000 employers on the platform already. Coinfeeds: Former Robinhood and Uber machine learning specialists are building a Bloomberg for crypto. The startup tracks and aggregates news, as well as social sentiment, for crypto enthusiasts. Users can customize their news feed to get specific information about their portfolio coins and also track broader trends such as upcoming tokens and legal developments. Gobillion: Gobillion is taking the highly successful Pinduoduo model of group purchasing and applying it to India’s daily grocery buyers. Customers can band together and save 25%-40% by purchasing in bulk — and the team, vets of India’s e-commerce world, know how to get the retail giants on board. Commery: An interesting flip on the commercial real estate marketplace. Commery lets tenants submit an ask for real estate, which brokers work to match. Brokers pay the startup. So far it has snagged 25 listings. The timing of this company is interesting thanks to a shift in the world away from IRL work, but as Commery also works with industrial spaces it could still have a market to sell into. Neodocs: Neodocs is building a platform for instant lab tests that users in India can complete with their smartphone. The company has created a test helping track parameters with insights on liver health, kidney health, digestion, hydration and more. Mentum: An API for fintech companies in Latin America to offer investment services. Currently available in 13 Latin American countries. Nino Foods: With over $165,000 in monthly revenue, Nino Foods is building a cloud kitchens service for premium brands in India. Brands using Nino include Francesco’s Pizzeria and Nino Burgers. The startup is already profitable in three Mumbai locations. Banner: Commercial real estate managers are handling billion-dollar projects in Excel, where a transposed digit or errant click can lead to a multimillion-dollar error. Why not have an OS for commercial real estate that makes it safer and more convenient? Oh, that’s what Banner is? Great! Pideaky: A Square for Latin America. The startup helps neighborhood corner stores digitize payments, billing and internet operations, ultimately increasing revenue for these customers. It has $42,000 in monthly recurring revenue and is growing 30% monthly. Talus Bio: Talus Bio is a drug discovery biotech startup focused on studying gene regulatory proteins in their natural cell environments. The company hopes this new platform will help further grasp the role of these proteins in various diseases and facilitate therapeutics that tackle them. Freterium: A collaborative platform for managing shipments and transports, aiming to replace the complicated spreadsheets the industry uses today. Nabla Bio: The startup co-develops antibody drugs "that are more likely to get approved" with pharmaceutical companies. The company has partnered with three top-tier companies resulting in $800,000 in revenue. Clear: Skin care is super important to a whole lot of people, and they happen to also spend quite a bit on it. Clear is a debit card just for cosmetics and skin care, giving cash back on numerous brands. But it also grants access to a social media community of skin care enthusiasts who can share their routines … full of useful data for cosmetics companies, too!  Image Credits: Playhouse Playhouse: Playing on the trend of browsing Zillow “for fun,” Playhouse is a mobile app for quickly perusing video listings of homes for sale. Co-founder Alex Perelman says the company’s most engaged users are watching 50+ videos on their first day alone. Genuity: Genuity is building a SaaS platform that helps enterprises manage their IT and source business software. It’s a space with plenty of entrenched players, but Genuity is hoping to win over customers with an inexpensive offering that helps IT professionals get done what they need to. InstaKin: Helps immigrants in the U.S. manage projects and tasks back in their home countries, connecting them with verified vendors from afar and handling payments securely. Odiggo: The services platform helps Middle East/North Africa (MENA) consumers get car services within minutes. Some cities demand car owners have brand new tires or even limit dustiness of the vehicles, so Odiggo is in the business of completing those requests. In July, the company had $500,000 in GMV and $44,000 in revenue. Covie: If you have an app or service that needs to check or track a customer’s insurance coverage to work, Covie wants to make it easy to do that right in the app. Most rental and car insurance policies are supported and they’re signing up providers and aggregators to simplify this process for everyone. ShipBlu: Promising “Amazon level logistics” for companies in MENA, ShipBlu does 24-hour delivery with live tracking. Co-founder Ali Nasser says that 47 merchants have signed on so far. Dime: Dime is building an NFT marketplace that’s more accessible to users looking to buy digital collectibles with USD not crypto. Crypto wallets are notoriously complicated, and Dime is hoping that they can combine the benefits of the blockchain with easier user onboarding. Nomod: Helps international merchants process payments on their phone, minus the need for Square-style hardware. Verano Health: Flagged as the nonprofit of the batch, Verano Health wants to help Medicaid patients access telehealth services. The startup uses SMS and digital coaching to help diabetic, underserved patients navigate their condition. Verano Health is raising $2 million in donations and, per the founder, expects to be profitable by 2023. Pluggy: Pluggy is Plaid for Brazil: a simple way for developers to access users' financial data, like bank accounts and investments, within an app or service. They're totally focused on Brazil and already cover 90% of the banks there. With thousands of users already signed up they seem to be well on their way. Algofi: A lending market built on the Algorand blockchain. Algofi’s Owen Colegrove says they hit over 2,000 users a week after launching. Scispot.io: Scispot is building a project management platform for bio companies leveraging automation to help track projects, samples and inventory while collaborating with team members.  Image Credits: Muse Muse: A no-code editor for building immersive 3D websites, charging $12 per site per month. Co-founder Benjamin Ha says users have built 300+ websites so far. FloatPays: Payday lending can be one way to bring financial inclusion and access to underserved communities, and FloatPays wants to make it on-demand. The startup is building a wage access service built for African businesses and has landed 34 customers so far. It has also engaged with financial institutions, landing distribution partnerships with two African banks. Zeit Medical: Zeit has created a wearable headband that warns users and caregivers of early signs of stroke while sleeping, preventing damage to the brain from progressing too far before treatment. I wrote them up here! Kurios: Online courses for professionals in Latin America. Co-founder Carlos Lau says the company is currently seeing $60,000 revenue and 25% growth per month, with 90% of users completing their courses. Buoyant Aero: Buoyant is using electric blimps to move air freight over medium-range distances, which the startup says is 4x more efficient than using small aircraft. The company has built four airships and is aiming to tackle the $6 billion rural U.S. middle-mile freight market. We wrote about them here! Infiuss Health: Many clinical trials lack African participants, resulting in side effects/shortcomings that go undiscovered for far too long. Infiuss is a platform meant to allow U.S. and EU pharma companies to more efficiently run clinical trials in Africa. KaiPod Learning: The Boston-based startup wants to be the go-to place for online learners and learning pod families to get in-person interactions into their curriculum. KaiPod learning grows through launching centers, reminiscent of Kumon and WeWork, that welcome children to swing by during the school day — either for a refresh in existing curriculum, or for some social activities with peers. Read more about Kaipod here. SolarMente: SolarMente is a marketplace for solar rooftops focusing on Europe. They’re bringing in $120,000/month already for installations and financing, at about $10,000 per home. Spain is their first market because electricity costs are high — so SolarMente takes over the whole process, soup to nuts, and hopes to do so for millions more. idemeum: Helps small/medium-sized businesses manage employee access to their ever-growing collection of SaaS apps, aiming to replace manual password-sharing with biometrics. Revolve Surgical: Revolve is building surgical robots for operating rooms, aiming to create a device that’s much smaller (and cheaper!) than the incumbent solution. Hotswap: Helps you onboard companies when they’re looking to switch from another vendor, breaking vendor lock-in and automating the import of complex data from one platform to another.  Image Credits: Luminate / Wild Island Pictures Luminate Medical: Hair loss from chemotherapy is one of the medical world's most recognizable side effects, and Luminate may have a solution: a compression therapy helmet that prevents the drug cocktail from reaching and damaging the hair follicles. It's on its way to clinical trials and FDA approval — you can read more about the company's tech here. Filta: Face filters are hugely popular on Snapchat and other apps, and Filta aims to monetize them with an NFT market for limited edition filters that creators can sell to their fans. Look for them on the app store in November. Coinrule: Helps individual/retail investors automate their crypto trading. The team says it’s currently seeing $80,000 monthly recurring revenue, with an average of 30% MoM growth over the last 12 months. Customily: A design tool for helping online stores sell more personalized products. Companies can use Customily to design, sell and print customizable products, letting users take control with their embeddable tool. Union54: An API to help companies (think banks, fintechs and large retailers) issue debit cards in Africa. HeyCharge: Patent-pending technology for customer-friendly indoor EV charging. HeyCharge wants to bring low-cost EV charging to offices and apartment buildings. Two unique bits of the startup's tech: It claims to work offline and underground, a rarity for the industry. Clarity: Clarity is a workspace for teams that focuses on simplicity without losing too much in capability. With document collaboration, project management and task tracking built in, it’s meant to reduce your tab load, organize and centralize. QOA: Cocoa-free chocolate developed through precision fermentation, with the goal of making chocolate “10x more sustainable and 20% cheaper.” Careerist: Edtech meets SaaS in Careerist's job placement learning platform. The startup trains job seekers through live and self-paced training taught by third-party tutors. The adaptive learning software is meant to help candidates prep for tech interviews. Once a candidate is well equipped, Careerists uses automation to help them apply for jobs. The startup doesn't require tuition until candidates are placed. Abstra: A Figma-inspired no-code app builder meant for designers. Bruno Vieira Costa says the product, currently in beta, is seeing $2,000 in monthly recurring revenue with seven customers. 2Cents: 2Cents is building an Ethereum protocol for communities, basically bringing web3 dynamics to users wanting to create a Reddit-like community, turning active members into “owners” of the community. Lago: Growth teams need to segment and sync customer data across lots of channels, like marketing, sales and more, but the existing tools for this are expensive, require engineering work and are generally enterprise-oriented. Lago does it no-code style so smaller teams can onboard quickly and simply with no extra hires or second mortgages. Matrubials Inc.: Another startup in the health tech space, Matrubials is creating milk-derived therapeutics to target bacterial infections. It's starting with a product that targets recurrent bacterial vaginosis with an antimicrobial peptide that attacks the bad bacteria, but not the healthy biome it is attacking. The company plans to target other infections in the future. Encuadrado: Encuadrado is a payments and booking provider that helps entrepreneurs in the service industry in Latin America manage customer onboarding and logistics while minimizing unnecessary administrative work. Reframe: An app that aims to use psych concepts to help users drink less and provides them with a private/anonymous support community. Co-founder Vedant Pradeep says 80% of their users see a “significant reduction” in alcohol consumption within two months. Hypercore: Helps lenders automate workflows and access real-time analytics through software. The team estimates that more than 90% of private lenders use Excel or antiquated systems to manage processes, so Hypercore would be a welcome, albeit late, addition amid the broader landscape of digitization. The startup has $3,500 in monthly recurring revenue and launched officially during the accelerator. Safer Management: Safer Management helps public schools track attendance, an important metric for funding — and, of course, education. It’s a modern system of QR codes and facial recognition that reliably tracks who’s in class. They’re already in 75 schools and two colleges and pulling in $621,000 yearly. Fluke: Google Fi is a MVNO, or mobile virtual network operator here in the United States. Fluke is building something similar, but for Brazil. The company says that Brazilian mobile carriers offer poor service, which they want to take on. The startup also won our heart for talking about its CAC and LTV results, both of which it claims are better than its in-market competition. Pipekit: Pipekit is looking to help enterprise customers scale their data pipelines quickly, with a control panel for Argo workflows, allowing for speedy implementation.  Image Credits: Zen Zen: Webcam-based posture correction software that alerts the user when they’re slouching. Meant to be offered as a perk to employees to reduce a company’s workers' comp costs. Meticulous: A tool to catch bugs in web applications. The startup reduces the need for manual/integration testing, freeing up developer time to work on more complicated issues. The startup has two pilots and one secured deal for its software. Fingo Africa: Fingo Africa has a simple proposition: a pan-African neobank backed by the biggest traditional bank on the continent. It plans to cut fees from 10% of payments to 1% and make money anyway with volume. Sounds like it's going to work to me. SliceQ: Sure, some startups are building delivery robots and ordering systems that include new tech. But SliceQ wants to take a very old tech and refurbish it for the modern world. The service lets restaurants take orders over the phone using automation technology. The startup claims that its service helps its customers boost sales by 10%, and it helped process $200,000 in GMV last month. Carbonfact: The sustainability startup is creating a carbon footprint database for consumer products, helping certify companies that have low-carbon-output product offerings and providing a tool for comparing a company’s sustainability efforts to industry averages. In the past 10 weeks, the company has onboarded 20 brands to the platform. Cloudthread: Analytics meant to help engineers build for the cloud more cost-efficiently, and incorporate cost into engineering decision-making. Pabio: This startup wants to make furnishing your apartment a light lift, metaphorically speaking. For a monthly subscription, Pabio creates a 3D scan of your apartment, has it professionally furnished by an interior designer, and then offers rent-to-own furniture that matches your aesthetic. The service is currently available in Switzerland but is soon expanding to other countries. Plai: Plai is an ad tool for microbusinesses that lets people like Etsy sellers and YouTubers launch targeted ads from their phones in seconds. It’s a simple, low-risk way to get your brand out there, and with more people than ever working for themselves, that’s an attractive proposition. ContraForce: ContraForce wants to bring security alerts and other related incidents into a single place. The company claims five customers and $75,000 in current ARR. Security breaches plague businesses of all sizes, with ContraForce pitching itself as more of a product for the SMB market. Inspector Cloud: Inspector Cloud is building computer vision software that helps consumer brands track how their products are being displayed at physical retailers. The analytics software help brands audit their network and analyze the effectiveness of stores selling their products.  Image Credits: Deed Deed: A modern, super pretty take on the backend powering your employee’s charity/donation/volunteering system. Handles donation matching, volunteer hours, etc. Already working with companies like Airbnb, Stripe, Doordash and Adidas. We wrote about Deed here. Genei: Too long, didn't read? Good, meet Genei. This startup has created a way for content writers to get cliff notes on background reading to boost productivity, and speed up the time it takes to comprehend a complicated topic. Automatic summarization may be the use case that robots and writing can actually pull off, versus the controversial world of article generation. It's starting by selling to freelance writers and has $9,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Orderli: It's Square, but for Europe! Easy to explain, probably super hard to build. Orderli works as a point-of-sale system and is already in 57 bars and pubs and pulling in over $600,000 in receipts. Portão 3: The market for products to make corporate travel and expenses is never-ending, as most existing products are awful. Portão 3 (Gate 3) wants to make better travel and expense software for the Latin American market. The company is notable in that expense management and travel management are sometimes distinct products. Brex is not Travelocity, for example. But by bringing both together the company could offer a more cohesive solution than other products. Pactima: Pactima is building an e-signature platform that reaches the use cases that DocuSign can’t, letting users tap real-time video-signing when a witness is required as well as in-person digital signing. Shopscribe: Subscriptions for local shops! Think coffee shops pre-selling a weekly coffee at a discount, or nail salons selling regular manicures. Shopscribe takes a 10% cut of each subscription. Preki: A way to help LatAm businesses create cheap, easy-to-use websites. In July, Preki hit $4,000 in GMV, and its Shopify-competitive software currently services 208 merchants. Aleph Solutions: A tool for offline businesses to bring their services online. Aleph Solutions is building an online marketplace for resellers, which it monetizes through a SaaS and transaction fee whenever a sale occurs. It revealed 18% month-over-month growth, with $115,000 monthly recurring revenue. Datlo: Datlo is building a data analysis service for Latin American companies. It wants to help customers' sales and marketing teams import large datasets, sort them and visualize the results. So far it has landed two large Brazilian banks as customers and reached $20,000 MRR. Our question is how the product is tuned for the Latin American market as opposed to the larger world. Regardless, it sounds cool. TrackChain: TrackChain is an online freight marketplace for Latin America that’s looking to streamline logistics for shippers and carriers moving freight through the region. The company currently has 600 carrier companies onboard. Chari: Next-day item procurement for small retailers in North Africa. The company says it’s seeing a monthly GMV of $1.4 million after launching 18 months ago. Palenca: Palenca lets employers in LatAm share and check employment records, do background checks and identity verification, then offer financial services based on that data. You know they’re going to be a success because, as the founder noted, they’re literally the only option for this! Hopefully this kind of accountability benefits the workers as well as the employers. Flow Club: A virtual coworking space modeled on group fitness classes and social clubs intended to motivate people to work in sprints. Join for a few hours when you need that push to stop procrastinating — and who doesn’t every once in a while in this day and age? Onfolk: The success of Gusto in the United States in terms of both securing capital and customers is drawing startups into creating similar companies targeted for their home markets. Onfolk is building a Gusto-like service for Europe. Given the number of companies in the larger EU, it won't lack for TAM. And since it intends to monetize through B2B SaaS, investors shouldn't struggle to understand how it intends to scale. Pide Directo: The startup is building a white-labeled solution for local businesses in Latin America to sell and deliver to their customers, teaming an online storefront, marketing service and delivery network. Codex: Deeper collaboration for programmers, built especially for remote/async teams. Lets you, for example, highlight code in your editor, determine who wrote it and request information without switching screens.  Image Credits: Tablevibe Tablevibe: Customer loyalty is an important objective for restaurants, so Tablevibe wants to find ways to better track and engage folks while they're chowing down. The startup helps capture feedback through QR-code-based surveys, exchanging loyalty incentives for insights. So far, the early-stage startup has landed 100 paying customers, tracked 25,000 experiences and positioned itself ahead of the industry's digitization beyond Toast. Lernit: Lernit is a corporate learning platform aimed at the LatAm market. Companies can train their employees and track their performance gains, simply and with plenty of built-in features. Café: The remote work boom is now so entrenched that startups are being built to make remote work better. Cafe is one of them. The company wants to help remote and hybrid workers figure out where to work from each day. Apparently the answer is not, well, in your home office. The company has $8,000 in MRR and sees a future where offices are optional and not mandatory. Búho Contable: The startup is building a TurboTax for Mexico, building out a tech-enabled tax filing and accounting firm geared toward helping small businesses in the country navigate the process. Payflow: A mobile app that allows employees in Spain and Latin America to “get paid whenever they want,” rather than waiting for their paycheck to come in monthly bursts. Free for employees, it’s sold to companies as a perk. The company says there are currently 40,000 employees on the platform. Argus: A compliance tool for employees with investment restrictions. Personal trading can be complicated for employees at banks, law firms and crypto exchanges due to potential conflicts of interests and various other restrictions. Eventually, Argus wants to become an investment adviser for these employees — right now, it's just starting by helping them not screw up. Cabal: Cabal is a private workspace for founders, investors and advisers to update one another and organize things like equity distributions. Sure, you could do it in Slack or something, but this one is built with the startup and stakeholder crew in mind. Plus it’s cool to be able to say “join our Cabal.” Hedgehog: Back to the robo-adviser theme, Hedgehog is an SEC-approved service that helps consumers buy crypto products. It claims to offer trades at the best possible price, and $70 million in AUM. Personalized crypto advice is a neat idea, given that mostly what we're told on Twitter is either "hodl" or "go fuck yourself." If Hedgehog can scale its AUM, Coinbase might swoop in with its checkbook. Examedi: Examedi is a home healthcare marketplace for Latin America helping consumers match with healthcare providers and take at-home medical exams on their own schedule. The company grew 160% in August. Potion: AI to help R&D teams (starting with beauty companies) formulate their products, replacing processes that generally require lengthy trial-and-error with simulation. Trii: Launched six months ago, Trii is a U.S. and local stock investment platform for retail investors in LatAm. Across its 30,000 users, the startup has processed more than $60,000 in transactions and has $10 million in assets under management. Trii looks to circumvent local brokers, who have high fees and required minimums, with $2 per trade fee and no required minimum. Synder: E-commerce companies need to do accounting too, but as we’ve seen suggested by other companies, it’s not particularly easy or simple. Synder aims to automate as much as possible, looping in all the major sales platforms and doing the bean-counting magic every company needs to do to make sure they’re actually making money. With 3,900 customers already, it seems plenty of folks were waiting for something like this. OneSchema: CSV imports can be a bit of a mess, and cleaning up data is a huge pain in the backside. OneSchema wants to hammer on both issues at the same time with a spreadsheet UI that can correct CSV data, in theory allowing customers to upload data with fewer errors. Excel holds up much of the modern world, and lots of folks stuck making Microsoft's spreadsheet tool work for their needs could use some help. Let's see if OneSchema can help.  Image Credits: Onebrief Onebrief: Talk about purpose built. Onebrief is a tool built to help military headquarters with their joint planning needs, while keeping things presentation-ready in order to boot out PowerPoint. The company says it recently signed a $350,000 deal with a four-star military HQ. CostCertified: CostCertified is building a marketplace for players in the residential construction world, allowing suppliers, contractors and consumers to connect inside a single platform, ensuring that estimates stay accurate and minimizing surprises. Legion Health: A B2B marketplace that helps psychiatrists and therapists sell their time by the hour — which, as the company points out, lets these professionals take on extra hours while allowing hospitals and telehealth companies to scale considerably without more full-time headcount. Co-founder Yash Patel says that five weeks post-launch the company has already signed contracts (with groups like Sesame and Billings Clinic) worth $3 million in annual value. Ahazou: A SaaS-platform for local businesses in LatAm bring businesses online through services such as payment processing, digital marketing and reviews. It is the latest startup aimed at helping local shops, from nail salons to painters, prepare for a post-COVID landscape. Over 16,000 companies pay for Ahazou's software, resulting in $1.2 million in annual recurring revenue. Still, it's just a drop in the bucket for what the team estimates will be a $4 billion market of local business in LatAm. Dots: If you’re a seller or service provider, the platform you sell on may very well not want to pay you in the way you want to be paid, whether that’s old-school ACH or instant transfer via Venmo or CashApp. Dots provides a single API to marketplaces that lets them pay out via any of those methods and more, simplifying the finances of everyone involved. PaletteHQ: If you haven't worked in a sales team, you might not be aware of how the commission process works. It varies company to company, and can change based on evolving corporate goals and product releases. So managing a commission setup that sales folks can understand — and therefore find motivating — is complex. Palette wants to shake up the issue with software and has reached $10,000 in MRR thus far. Twist: Sales people selling sales-focused software to sales team leaders? Surely that's an advantageous market perch. Inai: A no-code platform for handling payments globally. It hooks into your payment providers (like Stripe, Paypal), fraud tools (like Sift) and tax tools and wraps them all up in a easy to configure dashboard. Artillery: Pitched as a “modern load testing” platform, Artillery hammers your product with traffic (millions of requests per second originating across 13+ different regions) so there are no surprises later. Breadcrumbs.io: Analyzes customer and prospect data to help companies identify hidden revenue opportunities. The no-code scoring engine has attracted $185,000 in annual recurring revenue to help startups make sure they don't leave any lucrative breadcrumbs behind. Non-obvious revenue may just pique investor interest, especially when it comes to serving their portfolio companies. Protex AI: Protex AI is a computer vision company that identifies dangers in industrial workplaces before they become a problem. Maybe that’s workers too close to dangerous processes, or a machine starting to fail or something catastrophic — catching them even a second or two earlier might avoid disaster. Their first install caught 60% more safety violations than human monitoring, an increase that might alone justify the company’s $25,000 per site fee. ContainIQ: An easy to install platform for monitoring Kubernetes events and metrics over time, with hooks like Slack support for alerting your team when things break. Epsilon3, Inc.: Built by a team with hundreds of rocket launches under their belt, Epsilon3 is an “operating system” for spacecraft launches (and other complex operations) — effectively taking the ridiculously complicated but too often still paper-based procedures/workflows and making them digital. Hotglue: A developer tool designed to help create native SaaS integrations with data sources in minutes, aiming to help users sidestep jumping through development and maintenance hoops.  |
| Daily Crunch: Databricks reaches $38B billion valuation with $1.6B Series H Posted: 31 Aug 2021 03:10 PM PDT To get a roundup of TechCrunch's biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for August 31, 2021. Today the TechCrunch machine was busy covering the first day of Y Combinator's Demo Day event, so expect to see all sorts of coverage on the site after this hits your inbox. We'll bring you a recap in tomorrow's edition, though we do have a first taste down below. In Disrupt news, TechCrunch is bringing an AI investor and a science-fiction author together and will have lots on deck for startups currently raising external capital. — Alex The TechCrunch Top 3
Startups/VCBecause this is the last day of August, we presume that the summer lull in funding events has come and gone. Not that we really noticed a downtick in volume, frankly, but all the same, expect things to get even crazier in the coming weeks. Here's a sampling of the rounds that we covered today:
6 tips for establishing your startup's global supply chainThe barrier to entry for launching hardware startups has fallen; if you can pull off a successful crowdfunding campaign, you’re likely savvy enough to find a factory overseas that can build your widgets to spec. But global supply chains are fragile: No one expected an off-course container ship to block the Suez Canal for six days. Due to the pandemic, importers are paying almost $18,000 for shipping containers from China today that cost $3,300 a year ago. After spending a career spinning up supply chains on three continents, Liteboxer CEO Jeff Morin authored a guide for Extra Crunch for hardware founders. “If you're clear-eyed about the challenges and apply some rigor and forethought to the process, the end result can be hard to match,” Morin says. (Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.) Big Tech Inc.
TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL (opens in a new window) / Getty Images TechCrunch Disrupt is in less than a month, and we're excited to share that we're giving away one free ticket through the Experts survey. Check out the schedule for Disrupt, and read on to learn about the giveaway details:
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| Yandex buys out Uber’s stake in Yandex Self-Driving Group, Eats, Lavka and Delivery for $1B Posted: 31 Aug 2021 01:59 PM PDT Russian internet and ride-hail giant Yandex has acquired Uber’s stake in its Self-Driving Group (SDG), as well as Uber’s indirect interest in Yandex.Eats, Yandex.Lavka and Yandex.Delivery. The total cost of the deal came to $1 billion, giving the Russian company 100% ownership over all four businesses. Yandex SDG is an autonomous technology spinout from MLU B.V., the ride-hailing and food delivery joint venture Yandex formed with Uber in 2018 by merging Yandex.Taxi and Uber’s Russian operations. At the time, Uber had a 36.6% stake in the new company. Last year, when SDG was spun out into a separate business, Uber was left with an 18.2% stake in the company, which has just been bought out by Yandex. Yandex also purchased Uber’s 33.5% collective interest in Yandex’s food delivery service, last-mile logistics service and 15-minute convenience store delivery service. Back in 2019, Yandex and Uber were reportedly considering an IPO for their JV, which Morgan Stanley estimated to be valued at around $7.7 billion. Yandex says autonomous driving technology is “highly synergistic to the Yandex ecosystem, which includes ride-hailing, e-commerce and food-tech businesses.” It makes sense that the company would want to control all of that potential growth. Uber, which reported a Q2 loss of $509 million before EBITDA this year, might be looking to make a lucrative exit and refocus its priorities closer to home. “This acquisition will enable Yandex to further increase its capacity for strategic management and flexibility when it comes to self-driving technology,” a Yandex spokesperson told TechCrunch. “It will unlock further growth potential for both Yandex and Yandex SDG, creating new sources of value for shareholders.” The acquisitions are part of a larger restructuring of the MLU B.V. and Yandex SDG joint ventures, according to Uber’s SEC filing on Monday. They will happen in two stages. Stage 1, which is expected to close by the end of Q3 this year, will give Yandex a 4.5% interest in the newly restructured MLU, which will focus on mobility businesses like ride-hailing and car-sharing. This gives Yandex a total of 71% ownership in the JV, 2.8% of which is reserved for an employee equity incentive program. Uber’s total 18.2% stake in SDG is also expected to be sold during the first stage. Stage 2, which is expected to close by the end of this year, includes the demerger of Yandex.Eats, Yandex.Lavka and Yandex.Delivery from MLU and subsequent acquisition of Uber's interest in these businesses. Yandex will also receive a two-year American call option to acquire the rest of Uber’s interest in MLU at a more or less fixed price of $1.8 billion, depending on agreed increases over the option period. This number will increase to $2 billion if exercised in 2023. The Russian company will also continue to use the Uber brand exclusively in Russia and other countries until August 2030. Yandex will also get an extension of the current license for the exclusive right to use the Uber brand in Russia and certain other countries until August 2030, assuming the exercise of the option. Yandex’s stock was up 5.16% on Tuesday at market close.  |
| CryptoPunks creator inks representation deal with major Hollywood talent agency Posted: 31 Aug 2021 12:52 PM PDT One of Hollywood’s biggest talent agencies is getting into the NFT game. Larva Labs, the creator of CryptoPunks, just signed with United Talent Agency (UTA) in a representation deal that will bring one of the earliest and most iconic NFT projects into the entertainment and branding worlds. “I would say that it is one of the first opportunities for an IP that fully originated in crypto-world to enter a broader entertainment space, and they earned it,” head of UTA Digital Assets Lesley Silverman told The Hollywood Reporter. “They really have hit the zeitgeist in a tremendous way.” The deal could see CryptoPunks popping up across film, TV, video games and other licensing areas. Larva Labs’ other art projects, Meebits and Autoglyphs, will also be represented by UTA moving forward. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. As speculative investment in NFTs explodes, CryptoPunks remain one of the most recognizable — and valuable — pioneers in the space. Larva Labs launched 10,000 of the individual algorithmically generated pixelated figures on the Ethereum blockchain back in 2017. To the untrained eye, and arguably to the trained eye too, CryptoPunks are just little pixelated portraits of different characters, some wearing pirate hats, others in aviator glasses smoking pipes. But to the crypto world, punks are a social signifier, communicating early investment into NFTs, personal style and, importantly, wealth. The value of CryptoPunks skyrocketed from zero (they were initially given away for free) and now even the least expensive collectible punks run for hundreds of thousands of dollars, with the most valuable selling for millions. In May, a bundle of nine CryptoPunks sold for just under $17 million in an auction run by Christie’s. And last week, even Visa got in the game, spending $150,000 on CryptoPunk #7610, a digital illustration sporting a mohawk and green face makeup. It’s noteworthy that a traditional talent agency best known for representing A-list celebrities is getting into the NFT game, but it’s not the group’s first time getting its feet wet in the wild world of crypto. Earlier this month, UTA signed a company called Rally that runs a platform that helps creators issue branded social tokens that fans can spend on merch and exclusive content.  |
| LinkedIn is scrapping its Stories feature to work on short-form video Posted: 31 Aug 2021 12:34 PM PDT What do LinkedIn and Twitter have in common? They both introduced ephemeral story features that were pretty fleeting. LinkedIn announced today that it will suspend its Stories feature on September 30 and begin working on a different way to add short-form videos to the platform. LinkedIn announced the upcoming change to warn advertisers who might have already purchased ads that would run in between Stories. Those will instead be shared on the LinkedIn feed, but users who promoted or sponsored Stores directly from their page will need to remake them. LinkedIn introduced Stories in September, around the same time that Twitter rolled out Fleets to all users before doing away with the feature. This was part of a larger web and mobile redesign, which also added integrations with Zoom, BlueJeans and Teams to help professionals stay connected while working from home. But according to LinkedIn, these temporary posts didn’t quite work on the platform. “In developing Stories, we assumed people wouldn't want informal videos attached to their profile, and that ephemerality would reduce barriers that people feel about posting,” wrote LinkedIn’s Senior Director of Product Liz Li in a blog post today. “Turns out, you want to create lasting videos that tell your professional story in a more personal way and that showcase both your personality and expertise.” Li also noted that users want “more creative tools to make engaging videos.” While Stories included stickers and prompts, users wanted more creative functionality. If LinkedIn is successful in its plans to create a short-form video feature, it would join platforms like Snapchat and Instagram that have built their own TikTok-like feeds. Sure, most users probably don’t post the same content on LinkedIn and their personal social media accounts, but there actually are some prominent TikTokers sharing career advice, interview tips and resume guidance, so LinkedIn’s pivot to video might not be as weird as it seems.  |
| Cheeterz Club wants to make reading glasses hip Posted: 31 Aug 2021 12:19 PM PDT Can reading glasses actually be cool? A new eyewear company called Cheeterz Club thinks so. The startup is working to change the perception of reading glasses from being just cheap, disposable items you pick up from a rotating display rack at your local drug store to being something you’d actually be proud to wear. To do so, the company is designing its glasses with quality lenses and frames in a range of styles, while still keeping the pricing affordable. The startup — whose name is a reference to the slang term for glasses, “cheaters” — was founded by Jennifer Farrelly, whose background includes work in advertising and sales at companies like Uber and Virool. She said the idea to make a better set of readers came to her because she found herself frustrated by the current options on the market. “It all started a few years ago. My friends were posting on social media these really depressing comments and posts like: ‘I’m old and turning into my parents, this is awful.’ And I [thought to myself] why does it have to be like that? I feel just as young today as I did 10 years ago,” Farrelly explains. “Why are my friends and I feeling forced to feel old because of something that happens overnight?,” she says, of what felt like the sudden onset of middle age and the hardships it brings. What’s worse, Farrelly says, is that when you finally make your way to the drugstore to pick out some reading glasses, all you’ll find are bad, plastic pairs that both look and feel cheap. “That’s even more demoralizing,” she adds.  Image Credits: Cheeterz Club So Farrelly teamed up with a former Warby Parker and Pair Eyewear head of Product, Lee Zaro, to design a new line of more fashion-forward eyewear. Zaro, who is based in the LA area, immediately saw the opportunity. “Drugstore reading glasses are typically poor in quality, and can feel like they are designed with our parents in mind, leaving a huge unmet need for sophisticated eyewear options,” he said. “When Jennifer approached me to help design her first line of eyewear, I knew it was a brilliant idea.” To differentiate itself from lower-end readers, Cheeterz Club glasses are made with 100% acetate and feature spring hinges and stainless steel. The lenses, meanwhile, offer more clarity than is often found in reading glasses.  Image Credits: Cheeterz Club Typically, ophthalmic plastic lens materials have an Abbe value — a measure of the degree at which light is dispersed or separated — between 30 and 58. The higher number offers better optical performance. Crown glass can have an Abbe value as high as 59, but polycarbonate readers (like those from Warby Parker, Farrelly notes) would have an Abbe value of 30. Cheeterz Club lenses, which are CR-39 lenses, are at at 58. This is a difference you can tell when trying the glasses on alongside your drugstore readers. Cheeterz’ lenses also offer 100% UVA/UVB protection, and are oil and water repellent. They can optionally be bought in one of eight fashion tints, from pink to blue, or in two sun shades. Consumers can also opt to add Blue Light coating to help with screen-induced eye fatigue or they can choose Progressive lenses, which combine distance vision with a reading lens. Tints are an extra $10, Blue Light protection is $25 and Progressive lenses are $40.99 — lower than market rates. At launch, Cheeterz Club offers 42 different styles ranging from traditional to the more modern, starting at $28.99. Farrelly says finding the right price was key, because unlike regular glasses, consumers often buy multiple pairs of readers to leave around the house or car, pack in purses and bags, and so on. “If I break something that costs me a couple hundred dollars, I’d be really upset about it,” she says. “But at a drugstore price of under $30, I can have them in all sorts of colors and different tints.” For Farrelly, making the startup a success goes beyond bringing higher-quality reading glasses to market. It’s also about serving a demographic that often gets overlooked. “Founders in their forties do not get representation, and it’s unfortunate. And there are also people in their forties and fifties that have disposable income and are looking for cute things. They’re spending so much money on facial creams and Botox,” she says, “but then you’re forced to put this really ugly pair of glasses on your face that make you feel bad about yourself.” While Cheeterz Club today is selling direct to the consumer, the company is talking to eye doctors, boutiques and others who may eventually resell for them, as more of a B2B model. It’s also testing selling on Amazon with one pair of Blue Light glasses. Cheeterz Club plans to start discussing fundraising with seed investors later this fall. Update, 8/31/21, 5:30 PM ET: Cheeterz Club incorrectly shared the number of frames available at launch. An earlier version of this article said it was 14, it’s actually 42, they said. We’ve updated with the new information.  |
| A popular smart home security system can be remotely disarmed, researchers say Posted: 31 Aug 2021 12:00 PM PDT A cybersecurity company says a popular smart home security system has a pair of vulnerabilities that can be exploited to disarm the system altogether. Rapid7 found the vulnerabilities in the Fortress S03, a home security system that relies on Wi-Fi to connect cameras, motion sensors and sirens to the internet, allowing owners to remotely monitor their home anywhere with a mobile app. The security system also uses a radio-controlled key fob to let homeowners arm or disarm their house from outside their front door. But the cybersecurity company said the vulnerabilities include an unauthenticated API and an unencrypted radio signal that can be easily intercepted. Rapid7 revealed details of the two vulnerabilities on Tuesday after not hearing from Fortress in three months, the standard window of time that security researchers give companies to fix bugs before details are made public. Rapid7 said its only acknowledgment of its email was when Fortress closed its support ticket a week later without commenting. Fortress owner Michael Hofeditz opened but did not respond to several emails sent by TechCrunch with an email open tracker. An email from Bottone Reiling, a Massachusetts law firm representing Fortress, called the claims “false, purposely misleading and defamatory,” but did not provide specifics that it claims are false, or if Fortress has mitigated the vulnerabilities. Rapid7 said that Fortress’ unauthenticated API can be remotely queried over the internet without the server checking if the request is legitimate. The researchers said by knowing a homeowner’s email address, the server would return the device’s unique IMEI, which in turn could be used to remotely disarm the system. The other flaw takes advantage of the unencrypted radio signals sent between the security system and the homeowner’s key fob. That allowed Rapid7 to capture and replay the signals for “arm” and “disarm” because the radio waves weren’t scrambled properly. Arvind Vishwakarma from Rapid7 said homeowners could add a plus-tagged email address with a long, unique string of letters and numbers in place of a password as a stand-in for a password. But there was little for homeowners to do for the radio signal bug until Fortress addresses it. Fortress has not said if it has fixed or plans to fix the vulnerabilities. It’s not clear if Fortress is able to fix the vulnerabilities without replacing the hardware. It’s not known if Fortress builds the device itself or buys the hardware from another manufacturer. Read more:
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