Startup founders, set your sites on TC Sessions: Robotics+AI, which takes place on March 3, 2020. This annual day-long event draws the brightest minds and makers from these two industries — 1,500 attendees last year alone. And if you really want to make 2020 a game-changing year, grab yourself a demo table and showcase your early-stage robotics or AI startup in front of those big names and serious influencers.

Simply purchase an Early-Stage Startup Exhibitor Package — the price includes four tickets to the event, so bring your crew, flex your networking mojo and take in some of the many discussions throughout the day. Get yours before they’re gone — only eight left.

The day’s programming covers a wide range of crucial issues focused on robotics and AI. TC editors conduct in-depth interviews and moderate panel discussions and Q&As with the industries’ leading minds, makers, technologists, researchers and investors. You’ll enjoy workshops, demos and plenty of networking opportunities.

We’re talking topics that appeal to every hungry startup founder. Like a panel discussion on investing featuring Eric Migicovsky, Kelly Chen and Dror Berman — all top VCs in robotics and AI.

These folks have their fingers on the pulse of robotics, AI and automation. They’ll be on hand to share insights on future industry trends, talk about the most compelling startups and what they look for when it comes to funding.

We’ll be sharing details and the names of plenty more speakers in the coming weeks, so keep checking back. You can always check out last year’s program to get a sense of what to expect.

Did you know we have a new twist to this year’s Session? It’s a pitch competition — Pitch Night. It takes place the night before, it doesn’t cost a thing and it’s open to founders of early-stage startups focused on robotics and AI. There’s only one small hoop to jump through: apply here by February 1.

TC Sessions: Robotics+AI takes place on March 3, 2020 at UC Berkeley. Buy your Early-Stage Startup Exhibitor Package today, and come impress the top technologists, makers, thinkers, researchers and investors. Make 2020 your game-changing year.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Robotics+AI 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

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Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Going fast: Buy a demo table at TC Sessions: Robotics+AI 2020

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

Today we’re digging into seed-stage companies, the vanguard of the venture market. In particular, we’re trying to understand why the ratio of seed deals now favor enterprise startups over their consumer-focused brethren. The fact that seed investors recently inverted their preferences, cutting more checks to enterprise (B2B) startups in 2019 than consumer-oriented companies (B2C) was news.

We wrote about the trend here, as regular readers will recall.

To better understand what’s going on, I spoke with a number of early-stage venture investors who recently dropped by Equity, came highly recommended by peers, and several I know personally. The goal was to get a handful of inputs from different firms to get under the skin of the trend.

What in the hell is going on in seed? Let’s find out.

Why are enterprise seed deals on top?

This morning we’ll hear from Jenny Lefcourt at Freestyle Capital, Jomayra Herrera of Cowboy Ventures, Hunter Walk from Homebrew, Iris Choi of Floodgate, Sarah Guo from Greylock and Ajay Agarwal of Bain Capital Ventures. As you can see, we picked a list of investors form firms of different sizes, theses and focus. However, each investing group either focuses on early-stage investments that include seed deals or dabbles in them.

Here’s what we want to know: why did the the majority of seed deals swap from consumer-focused startups to enterprise-focused deals? 

Our investing group detailed a number of explanations, a handful of which echoed each other. To best convey their thinking, we’ll quote each investor at moderate length. If you are in a hurry, the most common point made against consumer-focused seed deals is go-to-market difficulty in the current market.

Other reasons include price, secular changes to the technology landscape, and the changing experience profile of the investing class themselves. (Minor edits made to select responses for clarity.)

Freestyle’s Jenny Lefcourt said via email that consumers are an increasingly difficult cohort to sell to, because they “became fickle with the proliferation of VC-backed, consumer-focused startups over the past few years.” As a result, consumers became “harder and more expensive to acquire and even harder to retain,” meaning higher customer acquisition costs (CAC) and lower lifetime value (LTV).

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | 6 VCs explain why seed investors now favor enterprise startups

If you haven’t scored a ticket yet to our 3rd Annual Winter Party at Galvanize, now’s your chance. We just released another batch of tickets to the best Silicon Valley soiree. Shake off your post-holiday doldrums and join the movers and shakers of the startup community at Galvanize in San Francisco on February 7.

Last year, nearly 1,000 of you joined us for luscious libations, fantastic food, world-class networking and some crazy karaoke . No one does karaoke like TechCrunch does karaoke.

Tickets are limited — and we’re rolling them out in batches. Grab yours now ($85 a pop, right here). If you miss out, keep checking back for the next ticket release.

What’s on tap this year? Well, craft beer for one thing, and wine for another. Plus delicious apps (just eat them — no coding required), party games and activities, plenty of photo ops and giveaways. We even have a few surprises for you.

Between the food and the fun, be sure to check out a select few early-stage startups exhibiting their products. Interested in doing just that? You can buy demo tables here for $1,500 each — and the price includes four tickets to the party. Remember, we said a “select few,” so get yours before we sell out (only four tables left!).

Here’s the party 4-1-1.

• When: Friday, February 7, 6:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
• Where: Galvanize, 44 Tehama St., San Francisco, CA 94105
• Ticket price: $85
• Demo tables: $1,500 (buy tickets and tables here)

You never know who you’ll meet at a TechCrunch party — potential investors, the perfect co-founder or maybe a coding wizard. But they have a history of being a place where startup magic happens.

Here’s a classic “but wait, there’s more” moment. We’ll also give away some awesome door prizes, like TC swag and tickets to Disrupt SF, our flagship event coming in September 2020.

Don’t miss the food, the fun, the community and the opportunity. Join us for the TechCrunch 3rd Annual Winter Party at Galvanize in San Francisco on February 7. We can’t wait to see you!

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at the 3rd Annual Winter Party at Galvanize? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

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Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Don’t wait – First ticket release of 2020 for 3rd Annual Winter Party at Galvanize

The hardest challenges to tackle are usually the most nebulous. Culture, for example, is hard to define, implement, cultivate and evolve… How do you structure culture within a business or organization? Are there steps to follow? Is there a manual?

Interestingly enough, there is. “What You Do Is Who You Are” is the latest book from legendary investor, entrepreneur and founding partner at Andreessen Horowitz, Ben Horowitz. We are absolutely thrilled to announce that he’ll be joining us on April 28th at our brand new TC Early Stage event in San Francisco to discuss his new book and the lessons within it.

From the sleeve:

To Horowitz, culture is how a company makes decisions, and he explains how to make your culture purposeful by examining four intriguing models of leadership and culture-building well outside the usual business case studies: Haiti’s Toussaint Louverture, who was the leader of the only successful slave revolt in history; the Samurai, who ruled Japan for seven hundred years and shaped modern Japanese culture; Genghis Khan, who built the world’s largest empire; and Shaka Senghor, an American ex-con who created the most formidable prison gang in the yard and ultimately transformed prison culture.

Horowitz also authored The New York Times Bestseller “The Hard Thing About Hard Things,” which is one of the past decade’s most practical guides to entrepreneurialism and the challenges that come with it. The 2014 book speaks to founders in a way that business schools can’t, offering empathy and solutions to real-world, human problems that founders face.

And let’s not forget the wealth of wisdom and experience that comes with helming Andreessen Horowitz since its inception in 2009. The firm has more than $10 billion under management, with portfolio companies that include Box, Facebook, Lyft, Slack, GitHub, Instagram and Skype. And those are just the exits.

Horowitz himself sits on the boards of 14 portfolio companies, including Okta, Lyft, Foursquare, Genius, Medium and Databricks.

Suffice it to say, there is plenty to learn from Horowitz at TC Early Stage come April 28 in San Francisco.

TC Early Stage is meant to give founders a place to learn directly from the experts who have come before. All day long, seasoned VCs and operators will be holding breakout sessions where they identify the biggest challenges in their fields, and tangible, actionable insights on how to take on those challenges. These experts will cover a wide range of core startup disciplines, including but not limited to growth, legal, product management, tech stack, recruiting, design and company culture.

Horowitz joins Cyan Banister (How to get your first yes), Asher Abramson (How to create great growth assets for paid channels), Lior Zorea (What VCs want in a term sheet and how you can get what you want), and Dalton Caldwell (How to get into Y Combinator). We’ll be announcing many, many more speakers over the coming weeks, totaling more than 50 breakouts for the entire day.

Here’s the fine print. Each of the breakout sessions is limited to around 100 attendees. We expect a lot more attendees, of course, so signups for each session are on a first-come, first-serve basis. Buy your ticket today and you can sign up for the breakouts we are announcing today. Pass holders will also receive 24-hour advance notice before we announce the next batch. (And yes, you can “drop” a breakout session in favor of a new one, in the event there is a schedule conflict.)

TC Early Stage SF 2020 goes down on April 28. You can pick up your ticket and start registering for breakout sessions right now.

Interested in sponsoring TC Early Stage SF? Contact us here and we’ll send you more information.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Ben Horowitz will explain how to create and sustain culture at TC Early Stage SF

Perch, the vertically integrated platform for buying and selling homes, has today announced the close of a $36 million equity round led by Navitas, with participation from existing investor FirstMark Capital, Juxtapose and Accomplice. The company is also announcing that it is rebranding from Perch to Orchard.

Orchard launched in September of 2017 with a plan to bring the full home selling and buying experience under one roof. Most home buyers are what the industry calls “dual trackers,” which means they are in the process of selling their house and buying a new one at the same time.

This usually forces those buyers to either take on a huge financial risk by buying a new home before they’ve sold their last home, or to place an offer on their new home contingent on the sale of their old home, which is unattractive to most sellers.

Orchard solves this by making an offer on buyers’ old houses that is guaranteed for 90 days. Orchard co-founder Court Cunningham says that more than 85% of those homes sell at a market price before the 90-day period.

Cunningham believes that Orchard’s advantage comes not only in the fact that it has products to serve each part of the process — search, title and mortgage — but that it’s iterated on each of those pieces of the puzzle.

For example, Orchard has improved its search functionality to allow users to choose which photo they’re searching for. Let’s say the master bathroom or the kitchen is the most important room in the home to you. Orchard lets you search by pictures of that room as you browse homes. Orchard is also working on a new machine learning-powered search system that would allow users to select five homes they love to help the search algorithm find homes similar to them.

With a team of data scientists, Orchard works to price homes as “close to the pin as possible,” according to Cunningham. It’s also worth noting that Orchard compensates its realtors via salary and benefits as opposed to the usual commission framework most real estate agents live off.

Cunningham believes this is what makes Orchard a more human tech real estate platform, fully aligning the interests of the real estate agent with the buyer/seller.

When a home doesn’t sell before the 90-day period, Orchard buys the home a few points below market value through that guaranteed offer, and then makes small improvements to the home to help it sell. Orchard underwrites the home again and puts it back on the market in a process Cunningham describes as “much more capital efficient than you think.”

This is thanks in large part to the $200 million+ debt financing Orchard secured alongside its Series A funding round, and the fact that Orchard’s data scientists can help recycle those homes (and with it, the capital) relatively quickly on the market. Cunningham says the company is only using a fraction of its debt financing.

Orchard also offers a title business, letting buyers close the transaction via their phone from the comfort of their home. And Orchard shows no signs of slowing. The company currently has a mortgage product in beta.

On the heels of this new funding round, Orchard wants to double the size of its team from 150 people to 300 by the end of 2020. Cunningham also expects to see more than 100% revenue growth over the next year.

“The greatest challenge is to grow rapidly and build the tech around this that allows us to deliver in a repeatable way,” said Cunningham. “Buying a home is the biggest financial transaction of someone’s life and the human element is really important. So we need to grow quickly but in a way that is highly human and highly consistent.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Perch, now called Orchard, raises M to simplify home buying and selling

Quantum computers are, by default, hybrid machines that combine the exotic properties of the quantum world with a classical computer that, essentially, manages it. A lot of the focus in the industry has gone into the actual quantum processors, but as those machines get more powerful, the classical part — and the process of converting those digital commands for use in the analog world of quantum computing — is becoming a bottleneck. That’s what Quantum Machines, an Israeli startup that’s coming out of stealth today, is tackling.

The company’s Quantum Orchestration Platform is a full hardware and software solution for controlling quantum systems. The company built its own custom pulse processor that can handle multi-qubit manipulation while being independent of the quantum processor with which it interacts (assuming it’s supported, of course).

“The classical layers of the quantum computer are the real unmet need. They are the bottleneck,” Quantum Machines co-founder Itamar Sivan told me. “We were really looking into what is holding the industry back. What are the things that we can do today to drive this industry forward, but that will also enable faster progress in the future. Since most of the focus in the last years has been devoted to quantum processors, it was only natural that you know we take on this challenge.”

The problem, he explained, is that in order to run complex algorithms on quantum processors, you also need extremely powerful classical computers. But with Moore’s Law at its end, it takes specialized hardware to do that effectively. And Quantum Machines’ hardware also offers very fast calibration, which in turn yields better, more precise results from the quantum processors it controls. What the company isn’t sharing, of course, is how exactly it is solving this problem. That is, after all, the secret sauce the team developed.

Sivan co-founded the company with Yonatan Cohen and Nissim Ofek; all three have doctorates from top universities with a lot of experience working on quantum computing problems. “We have an unfair advantage in this, given our experience,” Sivan quipped.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Quantum Machines launches its Quantum Orchestration Platform

Cloudflare announced that it has acquired S2 Systems, a browser isolation startup founded by former Microsoft execs. The two companies did not reveal the acquisition price.

Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO at Cloudflare, says that this acquisition is part of a new suite of products called Cloudflare for Teams, which has been designed to protect an organization from threats on the internet. S2 developed a solution specifically to help prevent browser-based code attacks.

Prince said the company had been thinking for some time about how to incorporate this kind of technology into the Cloudflare family of products. As with many companies, it had to decide if it should partner, build or acquire a company. Prince says that when he met the founding team from S2 and tested its technology, he was impressed with the speed and execution.

The team felt like a good fit, so Cloudflare made an offer. It had to bid against some other companies (which he did not name), but in the end S2 chose Cloudflare. He sees technology like this helping to even the playing field for internet users around the world.

“We’re super excited to have them on board, and we think that combining their better browser isolation technology with our ubiquitous network, we can really redefine how enterprises protect their employees, and over the long term how people generally browse the internet, where we can make it so that a low-end phone can have a similar experience as a brand new modern iPhone,” Prince said. He says that’s due to the tremendous processing power that can take place on its network across 200 cities worldwide, taking that processing burden off of the phone or other device.

The acquisition does not stand in isolation though. It’s part of a broader announcement around a new product category called Cloudflare for Teams. This is designed to provide a set of protections that includes S2 browser isolation as well as VPN and identity protection.

There are two main pieces to Cloudflare for Teams: Cloudflare Access and Cloudflare Gateway. Access is a Zero Trust identity and access management tool designed to help companies ensure their employees are using the most up-to-date software on their devices.

Gateway is designed to protect companies and individuals from threats on the internet, which is where S2 fits in. The company offers three versions: Gateway, which includes DNS-based filtering and audit logging; Gateway Pro, which secures all internet-bound traffic; and Gateway Enterprise, which helps prevent data loss and includes the browser isolation tech from S2.

The S2 acquisition closed on December 31st. S2’s 10 employees are now part of the Cloudflare team, and will remain in Kirkland, Wash. to establish a Cloudflare office there. The company was in stealth prior to the acquisition.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Cloudflare acquires stealthy startup S2 Systems, announces Cloudflare for Teams