Manifold, a startup known for providing all of the tools developers need in a single marketplace, has decided to make its core product available as a service, so that other companies can build a catalog of related services without a fuss.

Everyone wants to be a platform these days, but creating the infrastructure to offer a set of related services often might not be worth the effort. Beyond developing the actual catalog of services, it requires skills like collecting money and distributing revenue. Most companies don’t have the skill set or resources to set all of that up, and Manifold decided to use its expertise to help out.

Jevon MacDonald, co-founder and CEO, says they set out to build a complete management solution when they released their initial product last year. “The way we do that is by bringing things like billing, a single transaction for a developer, account management, teams and all the sort of things you have to do every time you use a cloud-based service or API.”

They felt the next logical step was to help their customers do something similar within their own ecosystems. “Now we’re here to talk about a Marketplace as a Service, which brings that power to these developer ecosystems directly by integrating with their existing products and platforms to make all the services the developers love to use available no matter where they run the code,” MacDonald explained.

He says that today, companies are really struggling to create marketplaces themselves, and this gives them the ability to do that in a fairly straightforward fashion. “There’s a lot more companies attempting to launch marketplaces, and what we’re hearing from customers is that they’re going back to the drawing board on a lot of these fundamental pieces every time, and this is our bread and butter.”

Manifold’s plan is to make that capability available as an out-of-the-box service to allow anyone who wants to launch a marketplace to do it. The company launched in 2016 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and has raised more than $13 million (18.5 million Canadian).

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Manifold’s Marketplace as a Service puts app marketplaces in reach of any developer

Customers have described Ampush as the “McKinsey of growth marketing,” and in many ways, it’s apt. Ampush has a relentlessly quantitative, full-funnel approach to growth marketing, and they’ve built proprietary software to back it up. Co-founder and CEO Jesse Pujji explains why Ampush exclusively works with direct to consumer companies, and why they went from serving 100 companies in 2015 to forming deeper partnerships with less than 20 companies today.

On Ampush’s evolution

“From 2011 to 2015, we were one of a handful of companies that could do Facebook really well, although that’s all we did.  As a result, we ended up working with a ton of growth brands and Fortune 1000 brands, like Dollar Shave Club, Uber, Stitch Fix, and all of these direct to consumer brands and businesses.

By 2015, we realized, “what got us here won’t get us there,” and so we started to question how we would evolve our offering and our company. Just doing Facebook would be okay, it would be good, but it wouldn’t be great, and we always said, “We want to be really great.”

Advice to early-stage founders

“It’s important for a founder to understand the right metrics and what levers can be pulled because they’re going to need to understand it to keep growing their business. I typically recommend that one of the founders spend 50% of their time for 90 to 180 days with one or two contractors who really know the technicalities of Facebook and Google you don’t have to learn those if you’re a founder, but you do want to understand which copy is resonating, which creative, which audience, etc.  It takes a founders’ level of depth to crack the nut, and then Ampush can come in.”

Below, you’ll find the rest of the founder reviews, the full interview, and more details like pricing and fee structures. This profile is part of our ongoing series covering startup growth marketing agencies with whom founders love to work, based on this survey and our own research. The survey is open indefinitely, so please fill it out if you haven’t already.

Interview with Ampush CEO & Co-Founder Jesse Pujji

Yvonne Leow: Tell us about your journey. How did you find yourself working in growth?

Jesse Pujji: I was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. My dad was an immigrant so I learned early on how to also be a small business entrepreneur. I was always running a snow-shoveling business, a lemonade stand business, a DJ-ing company. We cornered the Indian DJ-ing market in St. Louis. It turns out there weren’t a lot of Indian DJs in Missouri!

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Verified Expert Growth Marketing Agency: Ampush

The City of Paris has had enough. There are currently 12 (yes, twelve) scooter startups in Paris. As reported by Le Monde, the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, announced in a press conference a series of restrictions to regulate the space.

First, there are just too many scooter startups — Bird, Bolt, Bolt by Usain Bolt, Circ, Dott, Hive, Jump, Lime, Tier, Voi, Ufo and Wind. They all have funny-sounding names and there are even two different companies with the same name (Bolt).

Paris plans to hand out two or three licenses to operate. The French government is currently working on a mobility law. The City of Paris plans to select companies after the parliament approves the law. As part of the selection process, they want to make sure that companies have a sustainable approach when it comes to fixing broken scooters and not dumping them after a few weeks. Companies will also be selected based on how they pay workers charging scooters overnight.

Paris had already taken some actions against scooter startups before today. You can’t ride a scooter on the pavement and scooter operators have to pay €50 per scooter per year.

And yet, there are already 20,000 scooters in the streets of Paris. That’s why the city is going one step further and banning scooters from parks. You also won’t be able to park a scooter on the pavement.

You have to find a parking spot for cars and put your scooter there. That sounds like a mess, and I’m not sure how it’s going to work, but it’s clear that there are too many scooters and not enough areas to park them in Paris right now.

While electric scooters aren’t as fast in Europe as in the U.S., Paris wants to limit top speed even more. The maximum speed will be 20kmph instead of 25kmph (12mph, down from 16mph).

Let’s see if Paris can implement those restrictions quickly and if scooter startups are going to comply with this new set of rules.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Paris clamps down on scooter startups

The smartphone revolution has well and truly disrupted the world of banking. A wide range of startups have cropped up that have completely removed the need to make visits to physical branches to open accounts, make deposits, pay for things, and ask for loans: you can now do all of these on the go by way of a simple tap on an app.

Now, in the latest development, a new startup is leveraging that progress to create a new service targeting one of the most avid demographics when it comes to smartphone usage. Step, which builds mobile-based banking services for teenagers, is today announcing a round of $22.5 million led by Stripe.

“Schools don’t teach kids about money,” CJ MacDonald, the CEO and co-founder, said in an interview. “We want to be their first bank accounts with spending cards, but we also want to teach financial literacy and responsibility. Banks don’t tailor to this, and we want to be a solution teaching the next generation of adults to be more responsible with money in the cashless era. It was easy with cash to go to the mall but now everyone is using their phone for Uber and more.” (MacDonald has a track record in mobile commerce applications: his previous startup, mobile loyalty card app Gyft, got acquired by First Data.)

Step’s first market will be the US, where it’s estimated that there are just under 50 million teenagers in the population.

MacDonald said the aim with the funding will be to use it to bring Step’s first product — banking accounts with payment cards attached — to market, in partnership with Mastercard and Evolve.

Step actually launched in January this year (when its card partner was actually Visa) but only to unveil a waitlist. Since then, it has amassed 500,000 names of interested would-be users — likely one reason why it attracted this funding, and the attention of a pretty high-profile set of investors, including several who know a thing or two about the youth market.

In addition to Stripe, the round includes Will Smith’s Dreamers fund, Nas, Jeffrey Katzenberg’s Wndrco, Ronnie Lott, Matt Rutler, Kevin Gould, and Moat founders Noah and Jonah Goodhart. Previous investors Crosslink Capital, Collaborative Fund and Sesame Ventures also participated. (It’s raised just under $30 million to date. Valuation is not being disclosed.)

Step is not wading into unchartered territory by building a banking service targeting teens. Banks have been offering people the ability to open accounts for their kids under the umbrella of their accounts for many years. And other startups that have built banking services for this age group, who already have products out in the market, include teen debit card and bank app Current, and Greenlight, which makes a debit card for kids. (And that’s before you consider the likes of Chime, which don’t target teens specifically but might be used by them.)

And nor will Step be the last: there have also been rumors that Amazon has been working on its own service offering bank accounts to teens.

MacDonald said there are differences between what Step and these others are offering. First and foremost, its primary point of engagement is the teenager him/herself, with the aim being to give the account holder full autonomy (or at least the feeling of it: parents can still monitor and put controls on an under-18 account, as well as pay funds into it).

To that end, Step has been marketing directly to its future users, doing viral things like incentivizing sign-ups by giving users a dollar towards their bank accounts (when they come online) for each person that gets referred and also signs up using a person’s code. Teenagers under 18 will even be able to sign up for accounts without parental or guardian consent — although these accounts with be very limited in their functionality.

Another key difference will be the business model around which Step is built. As with any company that provides card services, Step gets a cut from card transactions, but unlike others in this space (and unlike most banks), Step is launching with a no-fee model for the basic account. This is because the idea will be to grow with the users, and over time to offer them services that will collect fees, when they are needed.

“As teens grow up we want to grow with them,” MacDonald said. “We will start offering products when they go to college, for example lending money to get books or computers.”

Stripe’s investment for now appears to be mainly a financial one in terms of the services that will be coming in the first wave of Step’s rollout this year. Behind the scenes, it’s actually strategic, too: the company has been quietly building interesting inroads into developing services for card issuers, alongside the services for merchants that you might already know. That’s included the acquisition of Touchtech earlier this year.

Step’s service will be very dependent on building out, and using, robust APIs to let parents and companies pay into their accounts, and for people to be able to use their Step accounts to pay for things, and part of that will involve using and implementing card issuing APIs.

“We are working with Stripe on its issuing API and on developing the issuing side of its business,” MacDonald said. “That is something that we are excited about.” More generally, he said their goals are aligned. “They want to grow the GDP of the internet and grow businesses online. Part of what we are trying to do is to make young people participate responsibly in the online economy, and I think that mission is in line with Stripe’s.” 

Stripe’s head of corporate development, Jordan Angelos, is joining the board of Step with this round.

“Stripe is committed to searching for new ways to remove barriers to commerce and broaden economic access to more people,” Angelos said in a statement. “Step will help teenagers responsibly participate in a financial system that’s moving online, and teach money management skills through direct experience. We’re thrilled to support their efforts.”

The bigger opportunity also seems to be that much larger and more incumbent organizations will tap into what Step is building so that it can make sure to remain relevant and a part of whatever shape financial services take for so-called “generation alpha.”

“Today’s young people are digitally savvy, having grown up with technology as a mainstay in their day-to-day lives. As a result, we also need to ensure that they become familiar with the unique aspects of digital payments including providing education about the various finance and payment products available,” said Sherri Haymond, EVP Digital Partnerships, North America for Mastercard, in a statement. “Step has taken a thoughtful approach to developing an offering for teens and families that provides that first step in educating and acclimating today’s youth to help them gain confidence and awareness around their finances.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Step raises .5M led by Stripe to build no-fee banking services for teens

Google made a big splash this morning when it announced it’s going to acquire Looker, a hot analytics startup that’s raised more than $280 million. It’s paying $2.6 billion for the privilege and adding the company to Google Cloud.

Thomas Kurian, the man who was handed the reins to Google Cloud at the end of last year, sees the two companies bringing together a complete data analytics solution for customers. “The combination provides an end-to-end analytics platform to connect, collect, analyze and visualize data across Google Cloud, Azure, AWS, on-premises databases and ISV applications,” Kurian explained at a media event this morning.

Google Cloud has been mired in third place in the cloud infrastructure market, and grabbing Looker gives it an analytics company with a solid track record. The last time I spoke to Looker, it was announcing a hefty $103 million in funding on a $1.6 billion valuation. Today’s price is a nice even billion over that.

As I wrote at the time, Looker’s CEO Frank Bien wasn’t all that interested in bragging about valuations; he wanted to talk about what he considered more important numbers:

He reported that the company has 1,600 customers now and just crossed the $100 million revenue run rate, a significant milestone for any enterprise SaaS company. What’s more, Bien reports revenue is still growing 70 percent year over year, so there’s plenty of room to keep this going.

Today, in a media briefing on the deal, he said that from the start, his company was really trying to disrupt the business intelligence and analytics market. “What we wanted to do was disrupt this pretty staid ecosystem of data visualization tools and data prep tools that companies were being forced to build solutions. We thought it was time to rationalize a new platform for data, a single place where we could really reconstitute a single view of information and make it available in the enterprise for business purposes,” he said.

Diagram: Google & Looker

Slide: Google & Looker

Bien saw today’s deal as a chance to gain the scale of the Google cloud platform, and as successful as the company has been, it’s never going to have the reach of Google Cloud. “What we’re really leveraging here, and I think the synergy with Google Cloud, is that this data infrastructure revolution and what really emerged out of the Big Data trend was very fast, scalable — and now in the cloud — easy to deploy data infrastructure,” he said.

Kurian also emphasized that the company will intend to support multiple databases and multiple deployment strategies, whether multi-cloud, hybrid or on premises.

Perhaps, it’s not a coincidence that Google went after Looker as the two companies had a strong existing partnership and 350 common customers, according to Google. “We have many common customers we’ve worked with. One of the great things about this acquisition is that the two companies have known each other for a long time, we share very common culture,” Kurian said.

This is a huge deal for Google Cloud, easily topping the $625 million it paid for Apigee in 2016. It marks the first major deal in the Kurian era as Google tries to beef up its market share. While the two companies share common customers, the addition of Looker should bring a net gain that could help them upsell to other parts of the Looker customer base.

Per usual, this deal is going to be subject to regulatory approval, but it is expected to close later this year if all goes well.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Google to acquire analytics startup Looker for .6 billion

Femtech is having a banner year, largely as a result of a massive uptick in venture capital financings for women’s fertility businesses. Men’s health companies, however, are having a moment too.

Legacy, a male fertility startup that won TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield competition at Disrupt Berlin 2018, is today announcing a $1.5 million seed round led by Bain Capital Ventures. The news follows an announcement from Dadi, a sperm storage business that closed on $2 million in capital commitments from London-based seed fund firstminute capital and New York-based Third Kind Venture Capital four months ago.

Founder and chief executive officer Khaled Kteily tells TechCrunch that Legacy, which is based out of the Harvard Innovation Labs in Boston, will use the capital to expand its sperm analysis, improvement and cryogenic storage services.

Like the genetic testing business 23andMe, Legacy sends a collection kit directly to the homes of its customers, allowing them to masturbate and collect a sperm sample in the comfort of their own homes. Once the sample is mailed back to Legacy, the company tests the sperm collection’s motility and morphology (the size and shape of the sperm), to identify the highest-quality sperm to freeze. Legacy also sends men a sperm report, with an overall assessment of sperm health and lifestyle recommendations included.

“If it literally just entails masturbating at home to be able to preserve your ability to have a child for the rest of your life, we think that’s something everyone is going to be doing,” Kteily said. “What we are doing really comes down to changing the way people think about fertility. We have this view that fertility is a women’s issue, but that’s just biologically wrong.”

Founded in January 2018, the company was created as a result of personal experience, as is often the case with fertility startups and healthtech companies more generally. Kteily, a former healthcare consultant, was dealing with a friend who was looking for sperm storage solutions while facing a cancer diagnosis and he himself had personally gone through the process of freezing his sperm only to realize how terrible it is.

“It was the singular most awkward experience of my life and I just kept thinking there’s got to be a better way to do this,” he said.

The long-term goal is to leverage its growing collection of data, which is end-to-end encrypted and HIPAA-compliant, to become a research center for male fertility. That, Kteily admits, will take many years and more capital (they are expecting to begin fundraising again very soon), but they aren’t in a rush.

“You can’t start a fertility company with the intention of just getting a profit in the next few years, you can’t cut corners or risk shutting down in the next few years,” he said. “We aren’t in it for a quick break. It’s not about moving fast and breaking things. It’s about moving as fast as possible without breaking anything.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Legacy, a sperm testing and freezing service, raises .5M

Apple is potentially seeking to acquire Silicon Valley autonomous driving startup Drive.ai, according to a new report from The Information. The report describes the acquisition as in process, and says it will be an “acqui-hire,” which means its primary goal is to bring in the talent of Drive.ai — with presumably special focus on the engineering talent of the self-driving tech company.

Drive.ai got its start in 2016, founded by a crack team of graduates from Stanford’s AI lab. It focused originally on building out not only the functional autonomy of driving systems, but also intelligent communications systems that would help self-driving vehicles better integrate with existing human drivers and pedestrians.

The company later raised more money with a business model shift focused on retrofitting existing fleets of commercial vehicles, and last year began testing its own self-driving pick-up and drop-off service in Frisco, Texas.

The Information reported earlier this year that Drive.ai started seeking potential buyers for the company after finding fewer options in terms of continued funding and independent operation. Apple, for its part, has had a spotty history with its own efforts around autonomous driving, with some high-profile leadership shifts on its so-called “Titan” car project. It’s still actively testing vehicles on roads, but the scope and shape of its approach aren’t entirely clear.

We’ve reached out to both Apple and Drive.ai, which declined to comment to The Information regarding the original report, and will update if we hear back.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Apple reportedly exploring acqui-hire of self-driving startup Drive.ai