Here comes the 4^th of July — the traditional time for fireworks, picnics and…low, low prices! But seriously folks, our kind of fireworks involves discounts to Disrupt San Francisco 2019 to the tune of an additional $300 off select passes. Founder passes start at $795 and, depending on which pass you purchase, you can save up to $1,600. Oooh, ahhh! That’s some star-spangled savings.

Go ahead and enjoy the hot dogs and apple pie, but this four-day sale disappears in a flash. Be sure to buy your passes to Disrupt SF before the deadline hits at 11:59 p.m. (PT) on July 5.

You also can score big savings on a Startup Alley Exhibitor Package with an additional $300 off and set up shop in the exhibition floor alongside 1,200 early-stage startups and sponsors. Talk about a networking opportunity. Demo your tech to thousands of Disrupt attendees, founders, investors and media types. You might even win a shot at the Startup Battlefield. TechCrunch editors will choose two Wild Card contenders from Startup Alley to join the chase for a $100,000 equity-free cash prize.

There’s still time to apply to be a TC Top Pick and exhibit in Startup Alley for free — the deadline is July 19. Your startup must fall into one of these categories: AI/Machine Learning, Biotech/Healthtech, Blockchain, Fintech, Mobility, Privacy/Security, Retail/E-commerce, Robotics/IoT/Hardware, SaaS and Social Impact & Education. TechCrunch editors will vet every application carefully and select up to five outstanding startups to represent each category. Top Picks receive VIP treatment and a lot of attention from investors and media. No cost. No catch. Nothing but a ton of opportunity.

Disrupt SF always delivers on the programming front. Four stages feature a wide variety of content — iconic speakers, founders and investors who’ve done the hard work will step onstage to share their insights. People like Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater investment firm (managing $150 billion in assets) and one of the most successful financial entrepreneurs of all time.

We’ll sit down with Dalio on the Extra Crunch stage to talk about the right way to build a culture at a startup. The man has strong opinions on the subject, and it’s hard to argue with his success.

Fintech phenom and Brex CEO Henrique Dubugras will also join us for a fireside chat. Not familiar with Brex? The startup’s valuation went from $0 to $1 billion in less than two years. We can’t wait to learn more about this company that’s currently valued at $2.6 billion.

There’s so much more to experience at Disrupt San Francisco 2019 and — for four days only — you can buy passes with an automatic $300 savings. Save up to $1,600, people. The savings expires at 11:59 p.m. (PT) on July 5. Get clicking and join us in October.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Disrupt SF 4-day flash sale: Save an additional 0 off passes

One of the top things that keeps a startup CEO up at night is the worry of running out of money. As a second-time founder and CEO of DocSend, I consider raising money and keeping my startup sufficiently funded a primary responsibility.

If “don’t run out of money” is a universally accepted warning, then the next question becomes when should you raise your next round of funding? There’s a lot to consider in coming up with an answer. If you start too soon before you have some wins to share, you might fail. If you wait too long you might put yourself in a bad negotiating position or worse, run out of money altogether!

DocSend has been used by over 20,000 founders and VCs for fundraising, and over the years we have published data-backed findings about pitch deck sharing and viewing. Recently, I contributed an article about the seasonality in fundraising and when VCs actually look at the decks.

The data included in this research came from companies that explicitly opted in to participate by responding to an automated email sent to them. We are incredibly appreciative to these founders for making this research possible. You can read more about our startup opt-in process and other aspects of our methodology here.

In this article, I’ll talk about how to apply some of the key takeaways from this research to inform your fundraising efforts.

There are really only two main fundraising seasons

I’ve often heard these anecdotes: “Don’t raise in August because VCs are on vacation,” and “VCs come back in January looking to do a deal.” But this is the first time there’s ever been data to support or disprove these statements. (See the analysis here). 

My first big takeaway is that there are two big spikes during the year when VCs review a ton of pitch decks: October and November, then March. The summer definitely flattens out a bit, but August is not as bad as people think and December is actually way worse than most anticipate.

Sure, you might be the exception to this data and you might have pulled off a fundraise over the summer or in December. But if you have control over your timing, why take that risk?

How to think about runway and when to raise

Image via Getty Images / runeer

A startup’s “runway” is how much time they have until they run out of money. The assumption here is that a startup isn’t profitable yet, and is using VC investment to grow their business more quickly at the expense of short-term profitability.

Often a founder will raise a Series Seed and plan to “burn through” all that money in 18 months either investing in product or growing the team. To raise a round successfully at a good valuation you need to be growing at a crazy high rate (which is what you’re burning money on).

YC says you should be growing 7% a week, although that applies to very early stage pre-funding. Once you’ve gotten a bit of traction, the conventional wisdom is that you need to be on the “triple triple double double” path (see the detailed overview here).

So if you raise a Series Seed or A at $2m in ARR, you need to get to $6m in ARR in twelve months (that’s a 9.6% compounding monthly growth rate). If you’re only on track to double in a year, you are likely not VC-fundable and need to go the bridge round route and steer the business towards profitability.

In other research from DocSend we’ve found that the median time spent to fundraise is about three months. If as a CEO you can’t raise capital at the right price, the responsible thing to do is to leave a bit of buffer so you can either reduce your burn rate to extend your runway or find a buyer for your business. Again, the CEO’s main goal is to not run out of money.

This means that ideally you begin to fundraise no less than six months before you anticipate running out of cash. So if you raise capital for 18 months of runway, you need to be back out in the market a short 12 months after popping the champagne to celebrate your last round.

The Q4 fundraising trap you need to avoid

The fundraising data at the end of each year tells a fascinating tale of hope and then a rising fervor of activity before falling off a cliff in December. The lesson in this is that if you can’t get your round closed by the end of November, you run the risk of losing momentum during the holidays and having to reset your process or deal with worse terms by having fewer potential investors at the table. As a VC, you also run the risk of missing out on a hot deal if you can’t get it closed before the holiday.

The story the data shows is that VC visits start low in August at the end of the summer low season and steadily build to their annual peak in November before falling off sharply in December. Entrepreneurs sending decks starts low and steadily builds to a peak in October, which makes sense because you need to send your decks in advance of VCs being able to view them.

So if you are scrambling to get your deck out to VCs in October, realize that you are behind the ball and are at risk of missing the window which means you might be better off waiting until the new year (if you have that luxury).

The secret window

Another surprising discovery in the data was when pitch decks get the most attention. It’s a time of year when relatively few pitch decks are sent, but the viewing of those pitch decks by VCs is incredibly high. This means if you do go out to fundraise in this window, you’ll get significantly more attention than you would at other times of the year. To see the data deep dive on this as well as the overall monthly sending and viewing stats, check out the deep dive in Extra Crunch.

Smart windows to raise capital

This research highlights the need for CEOs to pay closer attention to timing their fundraising activities. Let’s say you raise your Series Seed round in March. You might assume that you should go out to the market again in 12 months.

However, knowing what we do, it could be more advantageous to start raising money a couple months earlier, in January. You’ll get a whole lot more attention and will beat the entrepreneur rush in March. Plus, you don’t want to be caught fundraising in summer.

If there are four things you should take away from this research, they are:

• Peak fundraising times are in October/November and in March.
• Don’t spend too much time celebrating after raising; you’ll like need to go out for your next round in just 12 months.
• Budget a minimum of 6 months to go out and fundraise and try to time to your advantage.
• If you’re raising at the end of the year, you should get started in September at the latest unless you think you’re in a very strong position to raise your round quickly.

Good luck and happy fundraising!

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Data says there are only two seasons for fundraising and one secret window

A compelling pitch deck that quickly and clearly presents your startup as an exceptional investment opportunity is a clear edge when raising a round.

But could fundraising be more effective if you knew when to send your pitch deck – the times of year when it’s more likely to be reviewed and when it’s likely to be viewed more often?

If we all had a magical algorithm that could predict exactly which investors would review your deck and when, we’d be fundraising geniuses — closing our round faster and with far less effort.

No such algorithm exists (at least not yet), but I can share some useful data that offers insights into some of these seasonal fundraising trends, with a few that seem to defy conventional wisdom.

The data included in this research came from companies that explicitly opted in to participate by responding to an automated email sent to them. We are incredibly appreciative to these founders for making this research possible. You can read more about our startup opt-in process and other aspects of our methodology here.

What are the best times of year to share your pitch deck with VCs?

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | When is the right time to pitch VCs for funding?

San Francisco is a city of extremes, with multibillion-dollar glass-cladded obelisks piercing the SoMa sky while thousands of the city’s long-term residents fail to find even the basic rudiments of housing and other social services.

The tech industry has created the world’s greatest inequality machine, solving every one of our problems except the ones like housing affordability, education access and healthcare availability that might lead to greater agency and equality.

Now though, a growing list of the Valley’s leading companies are engaging with the issues in their own neighborhoods and globally — as are their employees.

Fast Forward, an accelerator of tech nonprofits based in SF, announced today that it has raised $5 million in new philanthropic funding from leading companies like Google.org, Twilio.org, Blackrock, the Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Foundation, Okta, PagerDuty, AWS, GitHub and many more.

Like traditional accelerators such as Y Combinator, Fast Forward selects a batch of very early-stage startups working on large social challenges and helps them scale their products, culminating in a series of three demo days in SF, Silicon Valley and New York City. Fast Forward invests an unrestricted $25,000 in each startup.

We’ve covered the accelerator before, but in addition to raising more cash than the last time we checked in, co-founders Shannon Farley and Kevin Barenblat explained to me that an emerging pattern is the depth of engagement from tech workers. “We have doubled the number of partners that support” us, said Farley. She said that when they started, they only had support from a couple of groups like Google and Blackrock, but that the list now includes more than 40 tech companies.

As those companies have invested more resources into Fast Forward, company employees are also engaging more fervently in the program. More than 100 mentors — many drawn from funders — now act as mentors in the program. In addition, working through Fast Forward, HPE’s 60,000 employees were given $1 million in gift cards to invest in tech nonprofits as part of a company-wide philanthropic initiative; 31 tech nonprofits received funding as part of the HPE Accelerating Impact program.

Barenblat explained that as a nonprofit accelerator, they can take a much broader role in building out this particular niche. “Compared to a for-profit accelerator that is interested in growing their portfolio … we actually do quite a bit to support [the ecosystem] beyond just the organizations that come through our program,” he explained.

The accelerator has now worked with 41 startups. This summer’s batch includes 10 startups, like Almost Fun SAT, which is helping under-resourced students get access to better college test prep exercises; FreeFrom, which helps domestic violence survivors get access to compensation; and Hikma Health, a health management platform for refugees.

Founders in Fast Forward’s summer 2019 batch (Photo courtesy of Fast Forward)

As the tech nonprofit sector garners more attention, Farley and Barenblat believe there is an opportunity to “10x” the number of startups and the level of capital heading into them. They said that this new funding would help to create a “tech nonprofit playbook,” which they hope will help guide entrepreneurs interested in targeting hard challenges to get started.

As these startups grow, Barenblat hopes that more tech employees will get personally involved in philanthropy because the startups will look and feel familiar but are solving tough social challenges. We expect to “see more and more leaders in the tech community” standing up for these issues, he said.

Ultimately, the two hope to make the next batch of startups into household names. “Most of your readers know Wikipedia, and Mozilla, and Khan Academy,” Barenblat said. Fast Forward wants the next generation of tech nonprofits to reach that level of stature.

With some effort, the tech and product thinking that made books and taxis arrive at our doorstep in minutes can be transferred to other challenges — building a more equal world in the process.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Fast Forward raises new war chest to fight Silicon Valley’s inequality machine

In enterprise security, there’s been a slow but steady move toward implementing zero trust security models and moving away from trusting anybody solely based on the fact that they have access to the company VPN, for example. That, to some degree, shifts the line of defense to the authentication service, which has to ensure that the users who try to log on are really who they say they are.

Tel Aviv-based Polyrize, which is coming out of stealth today, is tackling this problem by providing enterprises with a secure, proxyless authorization platform that gives enterprises the ability to better manage how its employees can access third-party SaaS services. The company also today announced that it has raised a $4 million seed round led by Glilot Capital Partners .

“Today’s enterprise security teams fly blind post-login,” said Kobi Samboursky, co-founder and managing partner at Glilot Capital Partners. “They simply lack the tools to understand who has access to what, and why. As emphasis is moving toward cloud and Zero Trust, access becomes the last defense line. When we first met Nati and the team, we were immediately aligned with their vision and mission of securing authorization. We are thrilled to have the company join our portfolio and to play a role in its growth and success for years to come.”

The service continuously authorizes identities across SaaS and IaaS platforms ranging from Google’s G Suite and Office 365 to Box, Slack and GitHub .

Using its own proprietary engine, augmented by machine learning, the service constantly watches for unusual behavior. What’s maybe just as important, though, is that it also provides security teams with the ability to provide granular access privileges — and instantly revoke those of users who leave the company.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Polyrize raises M for its next-gen authorization platform

Kabbage, the AI-based small business loans platform backed by SoftBank and others, is adding more firepower to its lending machine: the Atlanta-based startup has secured an additional $200 million in the form of a revolving credit facility from an unnamed subsidiary of a large life insurance company, managed and administered by 20 Gates Management, and Atalaya Capital Management.

The money comes on the heels of a $700 million securitization Kabbage secured just three months ago and it is notable not just for its size but its terms: it’s a four-year facility, a length of time that underscores a level of confidence in the company’s performance.

Kabbage, which loans up to $250,000 in a single deal to small and medium businesses, has built a platform that harnesses the long tail of big data from across the web. It uses not just indicators from a company’s own public activities, but also sources comparative information from across a wider group of similar companies, with “2 million live data connections” currently helping to feed its algorithm.

Together, these help Kabbage determine whether to provide the loans, and at what rates. Notably, the whole process takes mere minutes, making Kabbage disruptive to the traditional route of applying for loans from banks, which can come at higher rates, often take longer to close and may never get approved.

The company was last valued at $1.2 billion in its most recent equity round from the Vision Fund in 2017, with about $500 million raised in equity to date from it and other investors, including BlueRun Ventures and Mohr Davidow Ventures. Rob Frohwein, the co-founder and CEO, confirmed to me via email that there are “no plans on the equity side right now.” We’ve asked about IPO plans and will update if we learn anything more on that front.

More importantly, alongside its equity story is the company’s business story: Kabbage has to date loaned out $7 billion in capital — amassed through securitizations and other facilities alongside that — to 185,000 businesses, and the company has seen an acceleration of business activity over the last two years. Nearly $700 million was loaned out in Q2 of this year, passing the record in Q1 of $600 million. This puts Kabbage on track to loan out between $2.4 billion and $3 billion this year.

“This transaction further diversifies Kabbage’s committed sources of funding and prepares us to meet the escalating demand for capital access among small businesses,” said Kabbage head of Capital Markets, Deepesh Jain, in a statement. “2019 has proven to be a tide-shifting year as customers accessed more than $670 million from Kabbage in Q2 2019, well surpassing our previously set record last quarter.”

While a lot of Kabbage’s business has come out of its direct consumer relationships, it’s also been expanding by way of more third-party relationships. It has white-label partnerships with banks to power their own loan offerings for SMBs, and earlier this year it was also tapped by e-commerce giant Alibaba to provide loans to its small business customers of up to $150,000 to help finance purchases, part of the latter company’s redoubled efforts to build out its business in the U.S. by way of its quiet acquisition of OpenSky.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Kabbage secures 0M to fuel its AI-based loans platform for small businesses

Currencycloud, the provider of an API and service for cross-border payments that is used by a host of fintechs and larger companies, including most recently Visa, has closed the first part in a round of Series E funding.

According to sources, the over 10 year old London headquartered company announced internally that it was closing in on new funding a few weeks ago, while a recent regulatory filing reveals that the Series E totals just shy of £32 million in news shares issued so far. However, I understand that this is just tranche one, and that additional Series E funding will follow within the next 2-3 months when the round will be officially announced. Tranche one also consists of two slightly different share prices as it sees earlier debt financing converted into equity.

With regards to who is backing Currencycloud’s Series E, one source tells me Goldman Sachs is in the running and is possibly leading the round. Existing investor GV (previously Google Ventures) is said to me following on. I’m also hearing that another new investor could be Spanish bank Santander, via its venture arm Santander Ventures, in what would signal a significant strategic investment and/or partnership. Currencycloud declined to comment.

Launched more broadly in 2012 after raising a Series A in 2011 — and long considered a mainstay of the London fintech ecosystem (the company was even used heavily by TransferWise in its early days) — Currencycloud has built out payments infrastructure for cross-border payments and money transfer. Specifically, the company offers an API for businesses that need to offer their customers international money transfers.

Now operating across Europe, along with the U.S. and Canada, the company has to date processed more than $50bn in transfers, sending money to over 180 countries. The banks and fintechs that Currencycloud works with globally include Starling Bank, Standard Bank South Africa, Visa, Travelex and Klarna. The company’s team now sits at over 200 employees (see photo above) across multiple international offices, including London, Amsterdam and New York.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Sources: Currencycloud, the API for cross-border payments, has raised ~£32M in first part of a Series E round