<h1>Archives</h1>
    Startups

    Kobalt’s edge in changing the music industry

    September 26, 2019

    Kobalt Music Group is driving the music industry to provide more transparency and faster royalty payments to musicians and challenging the traditional record labels and publishers with its own alternative service offerings that don’t take ownership of copyrights. Competition and market size are headwinds in its future growth, however, and the incumbents are thriving not dying. As I’ll outline in this final post of the Kobalt EC-1, its competitive edge rests in its administrative infrastructure and services for songwriters built on top of it.

    This is Part IV of the Kobalt Music Group EC-1. Catch up on the prior posts in the series: Part I (founding story and overview), Part II (an operating system for the music industry), and Part III (music’s middle class and DIY stars).

    Kobalt’s alternative to a record label, AWAL, is targeting a small but growing “middle class” of recording artists earning tens of thousands of dollars per year in royalties. But as I outlined in my last article, this business is sandwiched between the countless artists who make very little money, and the global superstars who are all owned by the big three labels. Revenue growth may be slow.

    Kobalt’s publishing division, Kobalt Music Publishing, is in a stronger competitive position by comparison. Unlike recording artists, songwriters aren’t concerned with building fan followings and marketing themselves to consumers. Since the high end of the earning spectrum is lower for songwriters and the dynamics of fame on social media aren’t relevant to their careers, professional songwriters can be categorized in just the two camps of middle class and stars.

    In each case, their core needs are:

    1. Administration of their royalties
    2. Matchmaking to find the right co-writers and to find the right recording artist to actually record (or “cut”) their song
    3. Pitching their songs for use in films, commercials, games, etc. (called sync licensing).

    Here’s a closer look at this market opportunity — perhaps one of the most interesting areas of growth in the music industry today.

    Songwriting’s middle class

    GettyImages 680618218

    Image via Getty Images / NoSystem images


    Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Kobalt’s edge in changing the music industry

    Startups

    Learn how to help build a sustainable gig economy at Disrupt SF

    September 26, 2019

    A handful of years ago, the on-demand or “gig” economy was seen as an innovative system of modern work that provided workers and consumers alike with flexibility, independence and convenience. It seems like every week a new on-demand or labor marketplace startup would stroll through Sand Hill Road with a slick logo and a new way to flip the nature of work on its head and walk out with seven-figure checks.  

    However, the gig economy ballooned — now permeating nearly every major industry — and its negative externalities have become inescapably evident. In the past year alone, whether it was new headline-grabbing regulations or new disclosures from the high-profile IPOs of Uber and Lyft, the issue of inequitable labor treatment for gig workers has risen to the forefront of public debate. Now, more activists, founders and companies are dedicated to figuring out how to create a more just and sustainable economic system for gig workers.

    This year at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, we’ll be joined on the Extra Crunch stage by a panel of gig-focused civic leaders and founders to break down how one can best be a positive force in the modern gig economy.

    From the activist side, we have Derecka Mehrens, an executive director at Working Partnerships USA and co-founder of Silicon Valley Rising — an advocacy campaign focused on fighting for tech worker rights and creating an inclusive tech economy. Though Silicon Valley Rising, Derecka has worked with some of the Valley’s largest and most influential tech giants (including Google and Apple) to invest in and improve labor and renter housing protections for local workers. With roughly two decades in civic advocacy, Derecka has helped and continues to help Bay Area workers organize, play more active roles in local policy and reach milestone victories in wage improvement.

    We’ll also dive into the founder’s perspective with Amanda de Cadenet, founder of Girlgaze, a platform that connects advertisers with a network of 200,000 female-identifying and non-binary creatives. Prior to founding Girlgaze, Amanda founded the website, online community and interview series known as “The Conversation,” which focuses on female empowerment and bringing to light key social issues that plague the female-identifying population. As a former photographer, author and TV host herself, Amanda continues to build companies determined to shift the lack of diverse and equal gender representation in media and creative industries. 

    We’ll be diving deep into all the roles to be played by the public sector, startups and the private sector, gig workers themselves and the broader community in ensuring we have an equitable future of work landscape. We couldn’t be more excited to tackle all these topics and we hope to see you there! Buy tickets to Disrupt SF here at an early-bird rate!

    Did you know Extra Crunch annual members get 20% off all TechCrunch event tickets? Head over here to get your annual pass, and then email extracrunch@techcrunch.com to get your 20% discount. Please note that it can take up to 24 hours to issue the discount code.


    Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Learn how to help build a sustainable gig economy at Disrupt SF

    Startups

    Beyond Pricing raises $42M to tell you what to charge on Airbnb

    September 26, 2019

    Most people just guess how to price their vacation rental based on minimal research, or take platforms like Airbnb’s suggestions that just want to maximize their own revenue. Beyond Pricing aligns itself with home owners, taking 1% of bookings to optimize their rates on a daily basis.

    As you might expect of a startup that costs 1% to often earn people 10% to 40% more on anything, it blew up. In the 4.5 years since I covered its $1.5 million seed round, it has grown from 26 to 7,000 cities and from four to 60 employees. Beyond Pricing now handles more than 150,000 listings. It stealthily raised $2 million more in 2016. But today it announces a mammoth $42.5 million Series A funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners.

    “We skipped a lot of intermediary funding,” Beyond Pricing CEO Ian McHenry tells me with a chuckle. “We wanted to have a capital partner that could help us take a few more risks and build out a bunch of new products and go after Europe in a big way since it’s over half of the whole market.” That cash could grow the startup’s total priced bookings past the $2 billion it’s handled so far, dive deeper into working with professional property managers and even see it build algorithms for today’s unique hotels with tons of different room types.

    Here’s how Beyond Pricing works. You connect your Airbnb and other vacation rental platforms or your own rental calendar. Beyond Pricing scours all the platforms for what similar homes charge, their vacancy rates, what hotels are charging, historic and current demand fluctuations, airline info, weather and more. You can look at charts of prices in your neighborhood or nearby hotels, and adjust the base and minimum rates. Then Beyond Pricing automatically applies its daily rates to your listing or lets you export them to start earning the most possible.

    It’s basically giving to ordinary people and property managers the technology big hotel chains use, or an Uber Surge Price algorithm for Airbnbs. Instead of haphazardly choosing a high-season and low-season rate or maybe an upcharge on weekends, Beyond Pricing does what no human would or could accurately: provide 365 uniquely optimized prices. While the platforms just want you renting your place out as much as possible to boost their take, even if it means more work and upkeep for you, Beyond Pricing wants you to earn as much as possible to grow its 1% cut.

    But next, McHenry wants to go bigger. Modern hotels don’t just have “King” or “Two Twins” rooms. They offer a wide range of suites, views, decors and amenities. Hotel pricing systems aren’t built for that, but Beyond Pricing is because it’s accustomed to assessing quirky individual homes. One area he’s not keen on: getting back into the risk of managing property. Beyond Pricing was once Beyond Stays, but saw a leaner business in pricing technology instead of cleaning bed sheets.

    The biggest threat? That Airbnb will completely conquer the vacation rental market, depriving Beyond Pricing of data and the ability to play platforms off each other. But McHenry knows it’s too lucrative of a market for VRBO, HomeAway and others to back down.

    For now, McHenry’s having a lot of fun with his spreadsheets. A former investment banker focused on airlines and an avid traveler, he wanted to see more awesome properties for rent and more people earning extra income or a living off of them. “I’m a huge data nerd. I love looking at numbers and trying to optimize things. If I had my druthers I’d end up just playing with the algorithms all day.”


    Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Beyond Pricing raises M to tell you what to charge on Airbnb

    Startups

    Terminal raises $17M led by 8VC to source and build remote teams of engineers

    September 26, 2019

    As LinkedIn announces the next stage of its own ambitions in the world of recruitment by bringing in more big data insights, another one of the startups indirectly chipping away at its position among knowledge workers by providing a way of hiring and building entire teams in remote locations is announcing another round of funding.

    Terminal, a San Francisco-based startup and platform that lets companies build out remote engineering teams in international locations, and then helps with the wider practicalities that include finding workspace and sorting out benefits, is today announcing that it has raised $17 million in funding. Terminal’s hubs are currently in Guadalajara, Mexico and Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto and Kitchener-Waterloo in Canada, and the company is going to use some of the funding to expand to 10 other cities globally over the next two years.

    The round is being led by 8VC — the venture firm founded by Joe Lonsdale, who also happens to be a co-founder of Terminal (seems like co-founding while also funding is a pattern for Lonsdale, a prolific investor who also is famous for being a co-founder of Palantir Technologies).

    Others participating include Atomic (where two other Terminal co-founders, Jack Abraham and Dylan Serota, also work), Cathay Innovation, Cherubic Ventures, Craft Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners and other unnamed investors.

    Despite three of the four co-founders (the last is Luke Finney) being connected to the VC world, the startup has raised relatively little funding since being founded two years ago: prior to this it had only disclosed one raise, totaling $10 million, according to PitchBook data.

    LinkedIn has carved out a big swathe of the online recruitment market specifically in the area of knowledge workers, who also use the platform to provide public profiles of themselves, to brush up their skills and to network with other folk in their various industries. That business has racked up 4 million hires this year already, CEO Jeff Weiner noted earlier today at a company event.

    But within that, there are a lot of more specific use cases where the LinkedIn model is not a perfect fit, and that’s opened the door for a lot of other kinds of businesses to establish themselves and thrive.

    Terminal is an example of one of these. Its particular pain point has to do with the dearth of engineers in major tech centers, and beyond, with typically five job openings for every one engineer in the U.S. alone.

    While the technology world has coalesced around several key geographical areas — Silicon Valley at the epicentre and several major metropolitan areas like New York, London, Berlin and so on complementing that — the fact remains that the demand for engineers in those places, where the companies are based, still outstrips supply. On top of that, the biggest cities are overcrowded and expensive, and that turns off many people from wanting to live in them.

    Terminal’s solution is to source suitable engineers in other locales and use its platform to help a company build a team from them. This is not just about building a team “in the cloud” — although the idea is that, yes, the cloud is basically what makes all of this possible — but also covering office space, payroll and other HR specifics and more.

    “Terminal is taking aim at the biggest problem holding back innovation: access to top technical talent,” said Lonsdale in a statement. “The best engineers are no longer concentrated in the Bay Area. They exist all over the world. Terminal helps startups access these engineers. Many of our fast-growing companies at 8VC rely on Terminal to help them scale.” Customers currently include Bungalow, Chime, Dialpad, Earnin, Gusto, Hims/Hers and KeepTruckin.

    Other startups have emerged to redress the imbalance of talent in specific locations while also helping to support new ecosystems to emerge: Andela is taking a somewhat similar approach, but it focuses on emerging markets to source talent, and engineers on its platform work as full-time employees for Andela itself, similar to Terminal.

    While many companies are embracing the big swing in the direction of contractors, it’s interesting to see this alternative model emerging, which keeps the engineers off the clients’ books and on Terminal’s. In essence, it is taking a bet on the fact that it can successfully create teams remotely that might just remain for the long term at its clients’ businesses.

    “We’re providing life-changing opportunities for engineers,” said Terminal CEO, Clay Kellogg (not a founder but also a partner at Atomic), in a statement.

    “Developers and programmers love building their careers in an engineer-centric community working on world-changing products. We’re offering them a vibrant community with all of the HR resources, benefits and perks that they can get if they worked in Silicon Valley — without having to leave their hometown. This funding means we can provide exciting growth opportunities to even more engineers around the world.”

    The push to more flexible working environments — including allowing people to work from home, as well as working more flexible hours — has really disrupted the traditional idea of 9-5 and everyone working together in a big (or small) building in order to get things done. At best, the consequences of that have sometimes led to more productivity and employee satisfaction, but challenges also remain. Terminal’s aim at building whole full-time teams in remote locations is interesting in that it will once again put a new spin on the idea of workplace culture, but for many businesses, especially startups, it’s a leap that is worth taking.

    “KeepTruckin has built a modern technology platform to usher the fragmented trucking industry into the digital age, and our engineers have been at the center of creating a customer-centric experience since day one,” said Shoaib Makani, CEO and co-founder, KeepTruckin, in a statement. “As a fast-growing company, being able to attract and retain top tech talent is critical to our success. Terminal has been a key partner in helping us build our engineering team in Vancouver and tapping into Terminal’s extensive network has reduced the time it takes to scale our team.”


    Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Terminal raises M led by 8VC to source and build remote teams of engineers

    Tech News

    OnePlus 7T arrives with Android 10 in October for $599

    September 26, 2019

    For the past few years, OnePlus has happily pushed into a six-month product refresh cycle. It’s a model that’s worked well for the plucky smartphone maker, and another way it’s managed to buck some of the prevailing industry trends as competitors struggle to maintain sales amid a global slowdown.

    As tends to be the case, the year’s second flagship seems to mostly be about refining its predecessor — and keeping the company competitive. The OnePlus 7T adopts the 90Hz AMOLED screen offered on the 7 Pro, coupled with a three-camera set up on the rear.

    That last bit keeps with the company’s solid design language, with a large, circular configuration that’s an aesthetic improvement over Apple’s square situation. The lenses are a 48 megapixel main, 2x telephoto and ultra-wide-angle with a 117-degree field of view.

    The speakers have been upgraded to include Dolby Atmos and fast charging has been amped up, promising a full charge in an hour. That’s nearly 25% faster than OnePlus’s previous version of Warp Charge.

    Perhaps most interesting is that the company gets the jump on the competition by being the first to ship with Android 10 preloaded. How far the company has come from the CyanogenMod days. Of course, it continues to offer a customized experience through the “bespoke” OxygenOS.

    I’m usually resistant to Android add-ons, but OnePlus has generally done a good job augmenting and, in some cases, improving the stock Android experience. In addition to design choices, the company says the latest version of the software includes “370 rigorous optimizations.”

    The best bit continues to be the pricing. The OnePlus 7T will run $599 when it starts shipping on October 18. It’s a nice price for a solid piece of hardware in an era when flagships routinely run in excess of $1,000.

    Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | OnePlus 7T arrives with Android 10 in October for 9

    Startups

    Battlefield vets StrongSalt (formerly OverNest) announces $3M seed round

    September 26, 2019

    StrongSalt, then known as OverNest, appeared at the TechCrunch Disrupt NYC Battlefield in 2016, and announced a product for searching encrypted code, which remains unusual to this day. Today, the company announced a $3 million seed round led by Valley Capital Partners.

    StrongSalt founder and CEO Ed Yu says encryption remains a difficult proposition, and that when you look at the majority of breaches, encryption wasn’t used. He said that his company wants to simplify adding encryption to applications, and came up with a new service to let developers add encryption in the form of an API. “We decided to come up with what we call an API platform. It’s like infrastructure that allows you to integrate our solution into any existing or any new applications,” he said.

    The company’s original idea was to create a product to search encrypted code, but Yu says the tech has much more utility as an API that’s applicable across applications, and that’s why they decided to package it as a service. It’s not unlike Twilio for communications or Stripe for payments, except in this case you can build in searchable encryption.

    The searchable part is actually a pretty big deal because, as Yu points out, when you encrypt data it is no longer searchable. “If you encrypt all your data, you cannot search within it, and if you cannot search within it, you cannot find the data you’re looking for, and obviously you can’t really use the data. So we actually solved that problem,” he said.

    Developers can add searchable encryption as part of their applications. For customers already using a commercial product, the company’s API actually integrates with popular services, enabling customers to encrypt the data stored there, while keeping it searchable.

    “We will offer a storage API on top of Box, AWS S3, Google Cloud, Azure — depending on what the customer has or wants. If the customer already has AWS S3 storage, for example, then when they use our API, and after encrypting the data, it will be stored in their AWS repository,” Yu explained.

    For those companies that don’t have a storage service, the company is offering one. What’s more, they are using the blockchain to provide a mechanism for sharing, auditing and managing encrypted data. “We also use the blockchain for sharing data by recording the authorization by the sender, so the receiver can retrieve the information needed to reconstruct the keys in order to retrieve the data. This simplifies key management in the case of sharing and ensures auditability and revocability of the sharing by the sender,” Yu said.

    If you’re wondering how the company has been surviving since 2016, while only getting its seed round today, it had a couple of small seed rounds prior to this, and a contract with the U.S. Department of Defense, which replaced the need for substantial earlier funding.

    “The DOD was looking for a solution to have secure communication between computers, and they needed to have a way to securely store data, and so we were providing a solution for them,” he said. In fact, this work was what led them to build the commercial API platform they are offering today.

    The company, which was founded in 2015, currently has 12 employees spread across the globe.


    Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Battlefield vets StrongSalt (formerly OverNest) announces M seed round

    Startups

    Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator introduces 14 new startups at demo day

    September 26, 2019

    The Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, based in New York, is ready to once again unveil its latest class of startups. Thus far, ERA has produced 190 startup which have raised more than $450 imllion in capital and exceed $2 billion in valuation collectively, according to the accelerator.

    So without any further ado, let’s take a look at these new startups:

    CoolR is tackling the CPG retail and beverage industries with a machine learning platform that’s meant to not only track inventory and shelf performance but also detect planogram non-compliance, foreign products and pricing inconsistencies. The company does this by combining its machine learning platform with hardware such as wireless cameras and sensors.

    Everybody loves online shopping, but no one likes dealing with returning unwanted products. Cricket Returns is looking to solve that by allowing retailers to optimize their online return policies based on the product, category, place and/or time. Cricket Returns is easily integrated with Shopify merchants and the company says it delivers a measurable ROI improvement for managing and accepting returns.

    FoodFul is bringing tech to the dairy farm with the DairyX product. It uses sensors and cloud-based software to monitor cow health and measure feed efficiency, saving the farmers from making extra on-farm visual inspections and giving them the tools to make data-driven decisions.

    Intenseye is focused on improving workplace safety through a machine-learning video analytics platform. The company allows manufacturing facilities to link their existing video infrastructure to the Intenseye cloud platform that analyzes worker body posture, protective equipment and danger zone violations in real time.

    Maia is an employment platform that allows employers to capture and engage with the 92 percent of people that visit a job application site but don’t apply. The system integrates with an employer’s career site and offers exit forms for folks leaving without applying, giving them the opportunity to be on tap for future employment options, as well.

    Much like ZocDoc connects patients to the right doctor, My Wellbeing is looking to connect therapists and mental health professionals with their clients. Therapists get new client leads and access to a professional community of other vetted therapists, and clients can find the right therapist using the My Wellbeing matching technology.

    Navimize is a platform that will help healthcare professionals minimize wait times for their patients. The software integrates with electronic medical records systems to detect, and even predict, delays in real times and notify upcoming patients of those delays, allowing them to show up at the exact right time.

    Polymer wants to bring the power of big data analytics and data science to small data, like raw spreadsheets in Excel, Google Drive or Salesforce. Polymer search users can visualize their small data, ask complex questions, and automatically receive insights about their data with absolutely no coding whatsoever.

    Recapped is a communication platform for enterprise deals that consolidates the communication between salespeople and clients. Salespeople can simply create an action plan to close the deal and share a link with clients. Rather than hopping between tools like Zoom, Dropbox, Docusign, email, etc, Recapped allows both parties to collaborate on next steps for a deal much more efficiently by simply integrating with those tools in a single place.

    She’s Well is a concierge service for women and couples seeking professional fertility services. The platform connects users to a wide variety of service providers, including IVF, egg freezing, and wellness coaching. She’s Well tries to bring pricing transparency to the industry by aggregating the nation’s largest network of fertility centers, labs, and financing partners.

    Sigo is looking to offer insurance in a new way. The company offers mobile-first non-standard auto insurance to Spanish-speaking drivers. The demographic may have limited insurance histories, and Sigo uses data to provide non-standard, lower-cost policies offering quotes that are bilingual, clear, and compliant without charging extra to drivers.

    Stix is a new d2c brand looking to offer products in the women’s health category, starting with pregnancy tests. The company delivers the product discreetly and conveniently at an affordable price point. The hope is to make awkward pharmacy visits a thing of the past.

    Techmate offers on-demand technical support to businesses with remote workers and satellite offices. The company matches customers with a vetted, qualified technician within two hours by factoring in office location, appointment time and job scope.

    Tembo Health is a telemedicine company serving retirement homes, senior care centers and skilled nursing facilities to connect patients with specialty services like psychiatry and cardiology. The platform connects the specialists to patient data and collaborates with the nursing staff to provide better care plans.


    Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator introduces 14 new startups at demo day

    Startups

    Honeycomb.io raises $11.4M to help developers observe and debug their apps

    September 26, 2019

    As companies continue to expand the number of cloud-based tools and apps that are used to run their businesses, DevOps continues to grow as a field of IT to help developers meet those demands. In one of the more recent moves, Honeycomb.io, which developers use to observe code on live apps, microservices and other processes in order to identify where something is not working, is today announcing that it has raised a Series A of $11.4 million to expand its sales and support efforts for existing customers.

    The funding is being led by Scale Venture Partners, with Storm Ventures, eVentures, NextWorld Capital, and Merian Ventures also participating. Honeycomb has now raised $26.9 million.

    Paul Graham, the co-founder of Y Combinator, once famously described how a startup (Stripe) grew in part by building a tool (in payments) that was useful and needed by other startups. Honeycomb itself is embodiment of that model, too: the story is one of engineers building tools that engineers need. Charity Majors and Christine Yen came to Facebook by way of Parse, where they were both engineers, and in the bigger environment, they found that the coexistence of apps and other services both built in-house and those interacting with Facebook’s platform created a minefield when it came to things working harmoniously.

    “Things were just going down, or [even worse] looked like they were going down, all the time,” Majors said, noting that one of the big issues was that “you couldn’t look at things at a finer level” to figure out what was going wrong, and to identify issues behind why things were not working.

    “Testing platforms can only cover the things you predict in advance, things you know might go wrong,” Yen noted. “Observability is about capturing what is going wrong,” a critical piece of data that will subsequently help an engineer figure out how to best fix it, rather than spending time trying to identify where the actual problem is.

    Without a performance monitoring product on the market that was able to provide insight into real-time activity and interactivity between apps — and with a large part of the process requiring yet more code to be deployed to search for and fix problems — Majors (who is now the CTO of Honeycomb) mapped out a way to do this by observing the overall environment. When she decided to leave Facebook and work further on the idea, she teamed up with Yen (now the CEO) to build Honeycomb. (The internal tool that Majors built as an infrastructure engineer, she said, is also still being used, and you can see more on the structure behind how Honeycomb works here.)

    Honeycomb has resonated with developers at both smaller and very giant tech companies (that prefer not to be named), with the high correlation between those who trial and those who end up buying the product speaking both to the demand for Honeycomb’s solution and its impact on developers’ work.

    The company says that it has doubled ARR in the last six months, doubling the number of six-figure contracts, and is on track to triple ARR by the end of 2019.

    “Honeycomb is enabling a long-overdue shift in the way developers interact with and operate the software they build,” said Ariel Tseitlin, Partner at Scale Venture Partners, who is also joining the board with this round. “As production systems become more complex and distributed, the company is taking advantage of the massive market opportunity and establishing itself as a leader in real-time observability. It’s no wonder developers say they can’t live without it after they try it.”


    Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Honeycomb.io raises .4M to help developers observe and debug their apps

    Startups

    Package Free picks up $4.5 million to scale sustainable CPG products

    September 26, 2019

    The climate crisis continues to be just that… a crisis. And it’s spurring people across the country (and globe) to take action, particularly when it comes to their own lifestyle.

    Lauren Singer is one such person. After studying Environmental Science and Politics at NYU, she started a blog called Trash Is For Tossers to make a zero-waste lifestyle more accessible and comprehensible to everyone. But there’s still an issue. Even with a steep rise in sustainable CPG products, these brands rarely have the scale to compete with traditional CPG products in price, and lack the distribution to be accessible to everyone.

    That’s where Package Free comes into play. Today, Package Free is announcing that it has raised its very first capital since launch in 2017, with a fresh $4.5 million in seed funding led by Primary Ventures. Scooter Braun’s TQ Ventures, Day One Ventures, Ryan Engel of Peleton, Brooke Wall of The Wall Group, and Casper founder Neil Parikh also participated in the round, alongside others.

    Package Free started as a little pop-up shop for sustainable CPG brands to show off their wares in a brick-and-mortar environment. The brands themselves paid between $1000 and $3000 to participate, and were given 100 percent of the profit from the pop-up.

    By the end of month one, says Singer, every brand had been paid back for their investment. By the end of month three, Package Free had become the primary revenue driver for those brands. At that point, they switched over to a traditional retail model to generate revenue to launch an ecommerce site.

    Today, Package Free is a full-fledged reseller. The pop-up shop now has a permanent status in the trendy neighborhood of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, NY, with its own warehouse in Greenpoint. The company buys their inventory wholesale and enforces incredibly strict guidelines for the vendors they work with, not least of which is a no-exceptions no-plastic policy.

    Brands that sell through Package Free not only have to use all natural ingredients and be plastic-free, but must also ship to the Package Free warehouse without using any plastic. The company actually charges vendors a percentage of the shipment if the shipment arrives with plastic, and increases that percentage on the second infraction. Three strikes, and that vendor is out for good.

    “We know it’s completely possible to do these things without plastic, it’s just not the norm now,” said Singer. “So we’re trying to change the foundational benchmarks of what it means to package sustainably. I truly believe that the burden of waste should never fall on the consumer. It should fall on the manufacturer first, and then the reseller.”

    Once products are at the warehouse, Package Free reuses the dunnage (packaging materials) that the original shipment came with, meaning the company never uses ‘virgin dunnage’. The boxes that Package Free ships to consumers are 100 percent recycled, and shipping labels are also 100 percent recyclable. In fact, every Package Free box is printed with the words “I’m not trash” with further facts about trash.

    With the funding, Package Free wants to expand to creating its own sustainable CPG products, first tackling the ‘white space’ of products that aren’t currently available via vendor partners. Singer declined to share any more details around what Package Free’s first products might be.

    Package Free is also looking to hire, with a specific focus on the marketing vertical as the company has yet to do any formal marketing or paid marketing up until this point.

    The ultimate goal is to put sustainable CPG on the same playing field as traditional CPG products simply by way of economies of scale. Price is the primary obstacle between everyday consumers and accessible sustainable products, and Singer’s goal is to scale up the sustainable CPG category as a whole to the point where it can reasonably compete with the Unilevers and P&Gs of the world.


    Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Package Free picks up .5 million to scale sustainable CPG products

    Startups

    Mercury banks $20M for its banking service aimed at startups

    September 26, 2019

    Online-only banks have become a viable option for many people who would have traditionally used a brick-and-mortar bank but are now looking for more flexible, potentially cheaper ways to handle their monthly incoming and outgoing finances, their savings and loans, and their payment cards. That maxim has also extended to the world of business, and today a startup that has built a business-focused challenger bank, specifically for startups like itself, is announcing a round of funding as starts its growth in earnest.

    Mercury, which describes itself as a bank for startups, has banked $20 million of its own in funding, a Series A that is being led by CRV with support also from Andreessen Horowitz, the VC that led its investor-heavy $6 million seed round earlier this year. The company, I understand, has a post-money valuation now of $100 million.

    And by investor-heavy, I mean that on two counts: it featured a lot of heavyweights, and there were nearly 40 individuals and firms chipping in. Others in this latest round include Kevin Hartz, CEO of Eventbrite; Scott Belsky, co-founder of Behance; Ryan Petersen, CEO of Flexport; Kevin Durant of the Brooklyn Nets; and Andre Iguodala of the Memphis Grizzlies. Its bigger list of backers now totals over 100 and also includes the founder of Silicon Valley Bank Roger Smith, Bill Clerico of WePay, and Naval Ravikant, among many others.

    This latest funding comes on the heels of Mercury having launched only in April 2019, and is a result of what appears to be very strong demand for what it has to offer. In the first week of its launch it had 1,500 signups, and it has been growing at 40% each month since.

    To be sure, there are already a number of options on the market for a startup looking for a bank. Aside from traditional institutions that all offer special accounts for small businesses (which essentially is what a startup is), there is Silicon Valley Bank), and other challengers like Revolut and N26 that started first with consumers but are now increasingly also targeting smaller SMBs.

    That’s before you consider the wave of other fintech juggernauts out there, like Stripe, that are slowly building a suite of services that could be a natural complement (and, thus, potential precursors) to basic banking, too. (No plans from Stripe to build something like this at the moment, co-founder John Collison told me earlier this month when I asked about it.)

    Immad Akhund, the CEO and co-founder of Mercury, is aware of what the shortcomings are today in the market from a couple of perspectives. His previous startup, mobile ad network Heyzap, regularly “was constrained by cashflow” that inhibited growth and operations and needed to do run of the paying out processes of the business (which included a programmatic ad network) manually.

    After he and his co-founders sold Heyzap in 2016, Akhund used some of the proceeds to become an investor in early-stage startups (120 in all), he saw the same challenge continue to persist. “Nothing had really changed,” he said, “and I thought a bank could do a better job. With Mercury I saw that I had the opportunity to build something that was needed.”

    Inspired by the proliferation of challenger banks that have sprung up across Europe that were mostly targeting consumers (and now potentially stand to be competitors with newer business services), he set out to build Mercury with a lot of services that are very specific to the kinds of things that a startup might need to be managing when it comes to its money.

    In addition to checking and savings accounts (FDIC-insured, by way of Mercury’s white-label partnership with Evolve) that come with up to 1.75% interest, the service features clean, modern dashboards; easy interfaces for setting up payments; an online sign-up that Mercury says takes only 10 minutes to go through, with the account ready to use within 24 hours; and a facility to manage and monitor activities of different employees that have access to the account.

    These are just the basics, however. The service integrates with a company’s existing accounting software or any software that already manages recurring payments. And on the horizon are a number of new features that Mercury is building, along with an API, that will let its clients manage the money in their accounts and all of the places where it might typically be getting paid in and paid out.

    “We are talking to customers and building what they need,” Akhund said. 

    This will including lending, but also a number of other features around payments, with an API that will let users access who paid the company, without logging into Mercury’s actual dashboard to do that. This could be useful, for example, for integrating this into another piece of accounting software. He also noted that in marketplace-style business, you are not only receiving money from many places but also needing to pay people out, so having a way of being able to do that more easily and immediately could be a big boost to a business.

    The aim is to automate and speed up the way money moves, or “to pay out programmatically,” as Akhund describes it.  Much further down the line, you could imagine this to also include interesting insights and other services based on all the data Mercury amasses about a business.

    This idea has resonated with founders — who are both signing up to the service and also coming in as backers. Despite the work that having a huge investor pool might entail for the business (many ideas, many voices to be heard) Akhund said that having a big pool of them involved financially was important to him, given his target market.

    “Any founder that’s worked with a bank before knows the experience as it has been is fundamentally broken. Banking has been the crucial missing piece of the startup stack that hasn’t yet been modernized. I think entrepreneurs know something special is being built right now,” said Justin Kan, the repeat entrepreneur who is now the CEO of Atrium, said in a statement.

    Mercury’s current customers include​ ​YC startup Tandem​, Remote​, and​ ​Linear​. “​Using Mercury was a no-brainer for me,” said Rajiv Ayyangar, CEO and co-founder of Tandem, in a statement. “After decades of dealing with terrible banking systems, it’s been amazing to use Mercury, where things just work. I’m never worried I did something wrong nor am I frustrated because I can’t find a piece of information I need. The delta is so large that I actually look forward to the odd finance task!​” Given what a headache working with banks can be, I’m not there could be a better endorsement, so the ball’s in Mercury’s court now to deliver and be more than a short-lived startup to these startups.


    Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Mercury banks M for its banking service aimed at startups