Ryan Easter couldn’t believe he was being asked to run a pandemic business continuity test.

It was late October, 2019 and Easter, IT Director and a principal at Johnson Investment Counsel, was being asked by regulators to ensure that their employees could work from home with the same capabilities they had in the office. In addition, the company needed to evaluate situations where up to 50% of personnel were impacted by a virus and unable to work, forcing others to pick up their internal functions and workload.

“I honestly thought that it was going to be a waste of time,” said Easter. “I never imagined that we would have had to put our pandemic plan into action. But because we had a tested strategy already in place, we didn’t miss a beat when COVID-19 struck.”

In the months leading up to the initial test, Johnson Investment Counsel developed a work anywhere blueprint with their technology partner Evolve IP. The plan covered a wide variety of integrated technologies including voice services, collaboration, virtual desktops, disaster recovery and remote office connectivity.

“Having a strategy where our work anywhere services were integrated together was one of the keys to our success,” said Easter. “We manage about $13 billion in assets for clients across the United States and provide comprehensive wealth and investment management to individual and institutional investors. We have our own line of mutual funds, a state-chartered trust company, a proprietary charitable gift fund, with research analysts and traders covering both equity and fixed income markets. Duct taping one-off solutions wasn’t going to cut it.”

Easter continued, “It was imperative that our advisors could communicate with clients, collaborate with each other and operate the business seamlessly. That included ensuring we could make real-time trades and provide all of our other client services.”

Five months later, the novel coronavirus hit the United States and Johnson Investment Counsel’s blueprint test got real.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | ‘One day we were in the office and the next we were working from home’

Adtech startup Admix is announcing that it has raised $7 million in Series A funding.

The London-based company was founded by CEO Samuel Huber (previously owner of an indie gaming studio) and COO Joe Bachle-Morris (who previously worked in the ad agency world). The company is working to bring ads to games, esports, virtual reality and augmented reality.

In-game advertising is already a huge market, but Admix says it’s differentiated by focusing on building a product that supports game advertising at scale, where advertisers can bid programmatically through traditional ad-buying platforms, rather than relying on an ad agency model.

For developers, Admix offers an SDK for the Unity and Unreal game engines, allowing them to drag and drop into their games ad formats like billboards, posters and 3D spaces. The startup says it’s working with more than 200 developers and is running campaigns from more than 500 advertisers each month, with past advertisers including National Geographic, Uber and State Farm.

“The concept of putting ads in games is obviously not new, but the scalability of our solution is what is revolutionary, delivering instant and consistent revenue to game makers, or streaming platforms,” Huber said in a statement. “This coupled with the fact that 1.5B people play games globally every day, means that gaming is becoming a truly mainstream advertising channel.”

Admix previously raised $2.1 million, according to Crunchbase. The Series A was led by U.K.-based Force Over Mass, with the participation from Speedinvest, Sure Valley Ventures and Nigel Morris (a former Dentsu Aegis executive), as well as other angel investors.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Admix raises M to bring more ads to games, VR and AR

It’s a busy week in the world of quantum computing, and today Tel Aviv-based Quantum Machines, a startup that is building a software and hardware stack for controlling and operating quantum computers, announced the launch of QUA, a new language that it calls the first “standard universal language for quantum computers.”

Quantum Machines CEO Itamar Sivan likened QUA to developments like Intel’s x86 and Nvidia’s CUDA, both of which provide the low-level tools for developers to get the most out of their hardware.

Quantum Machine’s own control hardware is essentially agnostic with regards to the underlying quantum technology that its customers want to use. The idea here is that if the company manages to make its own hardware the standard for controlling these systems, then its language will — almost by default — become the standard as well. And while it’s a “universal” language in the technical sense, it is — at least for now — meant to run on Quantum Machine’s own Quantum Orchestration Platform, which it announced earlier this year.

“QUA is basically the language of the Quantum Orchestration Platform,” Sivan told me. “But beyond that, QUA is what we believe the first candidate to become what we define as the ‘quantum computing software abstraction layer.’ ”

He argued that we are now at the right stage for the development of this layer because the underlying hardware has reached a matureness and because these systems are now fully programmable.

In his view, this is akin to what happened in classical computing, too. “The transition from having just specific circuits — physical circuits for specific algorithms — to the stage at which the system is programmable is the dramatic point. Basically, you have a software abstraction layer and then, you get to the era of software and everything accelerated.”

Image Credits: Quantum Machines

Sivan actually believes that for the time being, developers will want languages that give them a lot of direct control over the hardware because, for the foreseeable future, that’s what’s necessary to harness the advantages of quantum computing. “If you want to squeeze out everything quantum computers can give you, you better use low-level languages in the first place,” he argued,

For low-level developers, Sivan argues, QUA will represent a paradigm shift. “They shift from having to develop many, many things in an iterative way to actually having a language that can support even their wildest dreams — their wildest quantum algorithms dreams,” he said. “This is a real paradigm shift and these guys are experiencing in its full capacity — and it’s not only the accelerated process of programming and working, but also the capabilities themselves. Once everything is programmed in QUA and then compiled to the Quantum Orchestration Platform, then you also get the full benefit of the underlying hardware.”

Image Credits: Quantum Machines

The company argues that its QUA language is the first language to combine quantum operations at the pulse level and universal classical operations. Quantum Machines also built a compiler, XQP, which can then optimize the programs for the specific underlying hardware, in this case, Quantum Machine’s Pulse Processor assembly language.

It obviously needs to do all of this in order to create an ecosystem and a community around its language. Of course, if its Quantum Orchestration Platform becomes widely used — and it already has an impressive list of users today — then QUA will also see wide adoption.

“It’s one thing to build a beautiful language,” said Sivan. “But it’s another thing to develop it to be both beautiful and supported by an underlying hardware that is then adopted by itself. And then, the adoption of QUA is also led by the adoption of the Quantum Orchestration Platform, which is itself driven by the capabilities, nothing else.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Quantum Machines announces QUA, its universal language for quantum computing

Playbook, aiming to be the Patreon of fitness content, announced the close of a $3 million seed round from several notable angels today. The investor roster includes Giphy founder Alex Chung, StyleSeat founder Melody McCloskey, Eventbrite co-founder Renaud Visage, Seventh Generation founder John Replogle, former head of growth at Uber Ed Baker, former head of product at Uber Daniel Graf, Product Hunt founder Ryan Hoover, Bird head of growth Brendan O’Driscoll and Uphonest Capital.

In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and social distancing, the fitness space has gone through a transformation. Peloton has surged, ClassPass has pseudo-pivoted and traditional gyms have struggled to find their groove in this new world.

Playbook looked to these fitness ventures, as well as broader entertainment communities, to model its business. The company offers consumers an unlimited subscription for either $15/month or $99/year to consume as much fitness content as they’d like.

Playbook isn’t really built with a focus on the end user, but rather starts from the premise of giving creators the tools they need to foster their own community of users. The startup focuses the vast majority of its energy on offering creators a space where they can create and monetize their content on their own terms.

The startup, co-founded by Jeff Krahel, Michael Wojcieszek and Kasper Odegaard, takes a 20% cut of customer fees, with the rest going to creators in two different forms. The first is based on the creator’s own community that they bring to the platform via a custom link, in which case the creator owns the economics there. This means that, even if a user wanders from their original creator on the platform to another, the original creator still gets an 80% cut from that user. For users that are brought on to the platform by Playbook, and then select a creator’s content, Playbook pays out the creator based on seconds watched.

“Our focus is really on the creator and their community,” said Krahel. “Consumers don’t switch between creators very much. In fact, less than 50% of consumers switch. They’re often very dedicated to their creator. So we look at this more as a Patreon in terms of the business, where we want to give the best tools to the creator who is going to deeply engage with their community and monetize their content and social distribution.”

Interestingly, Playbook isn’t just focused on getting fit. The app, with more than 150 trainers on the platform, also has content around sports training, whether it be for conditioning or working on technique within various sports.

The company has locked in some high-powered creators, including Magnus Lygdback, trainer to Gal Gadot and Ben Affleck; Don Saladino, trainer to Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively; Boss Everline, trainer to Kevin Hart; Hannah Bower, trainer and well-known fit-mom; and yoga and meditation influencer Morgan Tyler.

Playbook says it has a waitlist of several thousand creators that want onto its platform. The company looks for a few things when onboarding a new creator, namely an existing community of followers (on Instagram or YouTube or wherever) and an existing library of content. That’s not to say that new trainers can’t join the platform, but these are two signals that could help close the deal.

Playbook says it’s seeing 140% new creator account growth in 2020.

Playbook also offers an onboarding guide for creators, similar to the Etsy Seller Handbook, to offer a variety of example videos, best practices and other tactics for success.

Of existing creators, women make up 60% of the pool and 15% of creators are people of color. Internally, around a quarter of employees for Playbook are women.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Playbook, a creator platform focused on fitness, raises million in seed

This morning Upgrade, a credit-focused fintech startup, announced that it has raised a $40 million Series D round that the company says gives it a $1 billion valuation. The Upgrade round slots neatly into a few trends TechCrunch has noted in recent quarters, including fintech startups raising at new, higher valuations, and some startups seeing sharp valuation growth on the back of comparatively modest raises.

Other startups that have steeply repriced on small investments, in percentage terms, include Notion more than doubling its valuation to $2 billion earlier this year off a $50 million investment.

In its Series D, Upgrade managed to, ahem, update its valuation from $500 million set during its 2018 Series C. Santander InnoVentures, the CVC associated with the banking giant Santander, led the latest investment.

Upgrades

Given the sheer deluge of fintech news in the last few years, you’re forgiven if Upgrade slipped through your nets. The company is a fintech startup with a credit-focus today, though it intends to add more neobank-like tooling — digital checking accounts, and so forth — in Q3. So, instead of starting with a checking-and-savings structure like so many neobanks, Upgrade kicked off with personal loans and credit cards.

The result of that focus, to hear Upgrade CEO Renaud Laplanche tell it, is that the company has managed to quickly scale its revenue base. This helps explain why the company raised so little money in its Series D; the company told TechCrunch it is currently on a $100 million run rate (month12, not quarter4) and is cash-flow positive.

On that note, how Upgrade managed to secure capital during the current, less certain era is somewhat clear from its growth story. (Growth, as we keep seeing, is still something VCs want to pour capital into.) According to Laplanche, Upgrade rang up $60 million in revenue in 2019 and expects $160 million this year. That’s nearly a tripling from an eight-figure base in a year — not bad at all.

If Laplanche’s name sounds familiar, it’s because he was the founder and former CEO of peer-to-peer fintech company LendingClub, which went public in December of 2014. Laplanche ran afoul of regulators during his tenure, leading to his ouster; he founded Upgrade after leaving LendingClub.

Upgrade has a different philosophy than some credit card providers, in the view of its CEO. “Banks have an incentive to keep customers in debt as long as possible,” Laplanche said during an interview with TechCrunch. Upgrade, in contrast, offers lower rates — cards starting at 6.9%, under what the CEO described as a market-normal entry rate of 12% to 13% — and set repayment periods for debts so that customers don’t wind up in a credit cycle that never ends, sapping them of financial health.

The model and Upgrade’s other products, like personal loans, have proved popular, by its own reckoning. The startup told TechCrunch that ten million individuals have applied for credit from the company. That demand has led to rising loan volume — Upgrade expects to do $3 billion in lending this year, including $2 billion in personal loans and $1 billion in credit card volume, it said — and a growing user base.

That user base is part of why the startup is targeting banking in the near future. And that move is why it needed money. Let’s explore.

Banking

The startup’s move into banking makes a bit of sense, given that it already has customers. One constant in the fintech world is the offering of more services to existing customers, helping drive up their lifetime value (LTV) and thus making their cost to acquire (CAC) more palatable.

Upgrade is just doing this normal move in reverse. Instead of starting with checking accounts and debit cards, which yield regular interchange incomes, it started in higher-margin credit and is moving into the lower-profit consumer banking world next. Q3, according to Laplanche, is when we should expect to see more from the company on this front.

Which brings us to why Upgrade raised at all. Per its CEO, the company might run cash-flow negative for six to nine months after the launch of its banking tools. Upgrade could roll out the new services slowly, he said, but decided instead to raise external capital and be more aggressive.

Fair enough.

Upgrade is an interesting startup story and a comeback tale of sorts for Laplanche. More as we have it.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Credit-focused fintech startup Upgrade raises M after reaching 0M run rate

Headless CMS company Contentful today announced that it has raised an $80 million Series E funding round led by Sapphire Ventures, with participation from General Catalyst, Salesforce Ventures and a number of other new and existing investors. With this, the company has now raised a total of $158.3 million and a Contentful spokesperson tells me that it is approaching a $1 billion valuation.

In addition, the company also today announced that it has hired Bridget Perry as its CMO. She previously led Adobe’s marketing efforts across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Currently, 28% of the Fortune 500 use Contentful to manage their content across platforms. The company says it has a total of 2,200 paying customers right now and these include the likes of Spotify, ITV, the British Museum, Telus and Urban Outfitters.

Steve Sloan, the company’s CEO who joined the company late last year, attributes its success to the fact that virtually every business today is in the process of figuring out how to become digital and serve its customers across platforms — and that’s a process that has only been accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic.

“Ten or 15 years ago, when these content platforms or content management systems were created, they were a) really built for a web-only world and b) where the website was a complement to some other business,” he said. “Today, the mobile app, the mobile web experience is the front door to every business on the planet. And that’s never been any more clear than in this recent COVID crisis, where we’ve seen many, many businesses — even those that are very traditional businesses — realize that the dominant and, in some cases, only way their customers can interact with them is through that digital experience.”

But as they are looking at their options, many decide that they don’t just want to take an off-the-shelf product, Sloan argues, because it doesn’t allow them to build a differentiated offering.

Image Credits: Contentful

Perry also noted that this is something she saw at Adobe, too, as it built its digital experience business. “Leading marketing at Adobe, we used it ourselves,” she said. “And so the challenge that we heard from customers in the market was how complex it was in some cases to implement, to organize around it, to build those experiences fast and see value and impact on the business. And part of that challenge, I think, stemmed from the kind of monolithic, all-in-one type of suite that Adobe offered. Even as a marketer at Adobe, we had challenges with that kind of time to market and agility. And so what’s really interesting to me — and one of the reasons why I joined Contentful — is that Contentful approaches this in a very different way.”

Sloan noted that putting the round together was a bit of an adventure. Contentful’s existing investors approached the company around the holidays because they wanted to make a bigger investment in the company to fuel its long-term growth. But at the time, the company wasn’t ready to raise new capital yet.

“And then in January and February, we had inbound interest from people who weren’t yet investors, who came to us and said, ‘hey, we really want to invest in this company, we’ve seen the trend and we really believe in it.’ So we went back to our insiders and said, ‘hey, we’re going to think about actually moving in our timeline for raising capital,” Sloan told me. “And then, right about that time is when COVID really broke out, particularly in Western Europe in North America.”

That didn’t faze Contentful’s investors, though.

“One of the things that really stood out about our investors — and particularly our lead investor for this round Sapphire — is that when everybody else was really, really frightened, they were really clear about the opportunity, about their belief in the team and about their understanding of the progress we had already made. And they were really unflinching in terms of their support,” Sloan said.

Unsurprisingly, the company plans to use the new funding to expand its go-to-market efforts (that’s why it hired Perry, after all), but Sloan also noted that Contentful plans to invest quite a bit into R&D, as well, as it looks to help its customers solve more adjacent problems.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Contentful raises M Series E round for its headless CMS