Canva, the design platform for non-designers, has recently inked a partnership with FedEx Office to help businesses reopen amid the coronavirus pandemic with a design-to-print integration.

Canva declined to disclose the financial terms of the partnership.

With the new partnership, Canva and FedEx customers alike will be able to use Canva’s extensive libraries of templates, images and illustrations to design print materials for their businesses, like disposable restaurant menus, new hours of operation, information around new safety policies in the wake of the pandemic and more.

These customers can send their designs directly to FedEx for printing and pick up from over 2,000 FedEx Office locations across the U.S.

Canva’s target demographic is not hardcore, professional designers but rather non-designers, with a mission of democratizing design across professional organizations and more broadly to amateur designers.

As of October 2019, the Australia-based company was valued at $3.2 billion. At the time, Canva introduced enterprise collaboration software that allows sales teams, HR teams and other non-design teams to build out their own decks and materials with a simple drag-and-drop interface.

Since, Canva has complemented its design product with video editing software, as well.

The partnership with FedEx Office marks a big push into the U.S. market, with increased brand awareness and distribution via the established print and shipping giant.

Pricing around FedEx Office printing of Canva designs remains the same as FedEx’s usual pricing structure, but through August 31 FedEx is offering a 25% discount on orders of more than $50.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Canva design platform partners with FedEx Office as it pushes further into the US

UNest, a Los Angeles provider of financial planning and savings tools for parents, including college savings plans and other beneficial investment vehicles for various life events, has raised $9 million in a new round of funding, the company said. 

Its round will be used to speed up its growth through strategic hires and partnerships, according to UNest .

Ksenia Yudina initially founded the company to provide financial planning and services to lower- and middle-class families looking for ways to start saving for their children’s education, she said.

Over time, the company realized that tax-advantaged savings plans for college tuition weren’t providing the range of financial services these families needed, so UNest added Uniform Transfer to Minor Accounts  management services to its slate of offerings.

The business attracted interest from Northwestern Mutual Future Ventures, Artemis Fund, Draper Dragon and Unlock Ventures initially, and the company has now added Anthos Capital to its roster of investors.

Since its public launch in February, one month before the COVID-19 pandemic forced a major lockdown of U.S. cities and sent the economy into a tailspin, UNest has actually signed up more than 25,000 users.

The savings app is similar to other financial planning services available, but funnels users’ money into 529 accounts and UTMAs so that parents can begin to save for their children’s future.

“To me the investment in UNest is a great opportunity to help my community. It aligns with my vision that all kids deserve a chance to get an education and have equal opportunities in life regardless of their race or ethnicity. All kids should have access to the financial resources that make these goals achievable,” said Baron Davis, two-time NBA All-Star, current CEO and founder of Baron Davis Enterprises, in a statement. “As a father of two young boys, I care about their financial future and I know that other parents are feeling the same way. By making it easy for parents to step into saving plans, UNest is going to transform the future of the next generation and I’m excited to be a part of this journey.”

Users can open a savings account with as little as $25, according to Yudina. The company charges a $3 advisory fee per-user, per-month and on average customers are depositing around $250 per-month in the accounts, according to Yudina.

People who are more sophisticated and pick their own stocks themselves, according to a company executive, and see how their portfolio grows over 10 or 15 years.

“We have made it our priority to invest in minorities and exceptional female entrepreneurs that are transforming how individuals experience financial security,” said Craig Schedler, managing director, Northwestern Mutual Venture Fund, in a statement. “Our additional investment in UNest on top of our initial participation in the company’s Seed round is a testament to the tremendous progress UNest has demonstrated over the past several months. It also reflects the ongoing commitment to providing smart, practical financial solutions to people of all economic backgrounds. We are delighted to be part of UNest’s future in helping even more American families achieve financial stability.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Anthos Capital and NBA All-Star Baron Davis back LA-based college tuition savings service, UNest

COVID-19 has transformed the way Americans use their phones and the way they spend their time and money online. These shifts present both a number of challenges and a raft of opportunities for savvy growth marketers.

We’ve seen COVID-19 affect a number of verticals. A number of industries have taken a hit (like music streaming and sports), while some are expanding due to the pandemic (groceries, media, video gaming). Others have found distinctive ways to adjust the way they position and sell their product, allowing them to take advantage of changes in buyer behavior.

The key to being able to read and react to changes in this still-tumultuous time and tailoring your growth marketing accordingly is to understand how public sentiment is reflected in new purchasing behaviors. Here’s an overview of the most important trends we’re seeing that will allow you to adjust your growth marketing effectively.

By the numbers: A sheltering-in-place economy

Virtually all of the data we’ve seen shows a marked difference in buyer behavior following the WHO’s declaration of a pandemic on March 11, 2020. With consumers encouraged to stay home to deter the spread of COVID-19, it’s no surprise that the biggest change is the spike in online activity.

Image Credits: Branch (opens in a new window)

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | How COVID-19 transformed the way Americans spend online

Square acquired Verse, a Spanish peer-to-peer payment app that works across Europe. Terms of the deal are undisclosed. According to Crunchbase, Verse had raised $37.6 million from Spark Capital, eVentures, Greycroft Partners and others.

Square has attracted a ton of users with Cash App, its peer-to-peer payment app that lets you easily send and receive money from your phone. But Cash App has only been available in the U.S. and the U.K.

Acquiring Verse seems like a good fit to expand Square’s presence in Europe. Verse’s team will join the Cash App division within Square.

There are many similarities between Cash App and Verse. Verse’s main feature is that it lets you send and receive money from a mobile app. Users don’t pay any fees and transfers occur in just a few seconds.

Verse users sign up with their phone numbers, which means that you can send money to other users as long as you have their phone numbers in your address book. If you don’t have enough money on your Verse account, the app can charge your debit card directly. And if you want to withdraw money from your Verse account, you can transfer your balance to your bank account.

You can also track group expenses from the app (like Splitwise), create money pots and organize events with a basic ticketing feature.

More recently, Verse launched a Visa debit card in Spain, which lets you spend money on your Verse account directly. You don’t pay any foreign exchange fees and you get two free ATM withdrawals per month. Verse uses Visa’s exchange rate.

While the startup hasn’t shared usage numbers for a while, according to App Annie, it is currently the No. 247 most downloaded app in the App Store in Spain across all categories. Peer-to-peer payment is a fragmented market. For instance, French startup Lydia has 3 million users in France.

“At this point, our main priority is enabling Verse to continue their successful growth in Europe. Verse will continue to operate as an independent business, working out of their offices with no immediate changes to their existing products, customers, or business operations,” Square wrote in the announcement.

The three most important words in this statement are “at this point.” Square doesn’t want to fix what isn’t broken. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Verse slowly evolves to become Cash App in Europe.

Image credits: Square

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Square acquires European peer-to-peer payment app Verse

When Bümo co-founders Joan Nguyen and Chriselle Lim began planning for the rollout of their business, a combination daycare and co-working space for professional parents, they never expected to be offering daycare services virtually.

But in the face of a global pandemic, every company has had to improvise, and in the few months since its launch in 2019, that’s just what Bümo did.

Both Nguyen and Lim are serial entrepreneurs. The two met in their early twenties when Nguyen was trying to launch a fashion business and Lim was solidifying her career as a social media celebrity and designer. 

Based in Los Angeles, Bümo had already managed to lock in a $2.4 million seed round, which the two founders began raising in November and closed in May.

The company said the money went to boost the development of new curriculum and hire educational and operational staff.

Participants in the round included G5 Capital — the investment arm of Zhejiang Jiangong Real Estate Development Group; Vivian Chou, the daughter of the Hong Kong billionaire textile magnate, Silas Chou; Honest Company founder Jessica Alba; Digital Brand Architects founder Raina Penchansky; the co-founders of JGU Ventures; Thrive former chief product officer, Yardley Pohl, and a clutch of social media celebrities, including Whitney Port and Cara Loren, and the singer, dancer and social media entertainer Jessi Malay.

As the pandemic began to spread across the U.S. and infection rates were rising in Los Angeles, the two founders realized that the cash they’d raised to open their first site at a Westfield mall in LA wouldn’t happen. “We were planning on opening in June,” said Nguyen.

In April the company shifted its attention to virtual classes. The new idea is to replace the online preschool with targeted sessions twice per-week. These classes won’t so much replace kindergarten as provide a two-hour supplement to it.

The company offers two thirty-minute classes for two-to-five students twice per week. So far, about 100 students have enrolled in the program. The initial cost for the two-hour classes is $199 per month and there’s a supplemental program that offers additional à la carte skills-based language and learning classes for $599, Nguyen said.

The financing that the company raised will be used to build out that more robust — and expensive — suite of educational offerings, according to Bümo.

For Lim and Nguyen the business is the culmination of a 14-year relationship, which began in Newport Beach when Nguyen was trying to start her fashion line and Lim was working at a boutique in Newport Beach.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Los Angeles-based childcare and co-working startup Bümo adds more virtual classes for kids at home

DeepSource, a member of the Winter 2020 Y Combinator cohort, announced a $2.6 million seed investment today. The company is building a solution to help developers automate static code analysis to find certain errors before going through human code review.

645 Ventures led the round with help from Y Combinator, FundersClub, Pioneer Fund, Liquid 2 Ventures and a slew of individual investors. The company had previously raised $140,000 in pre-seed capital.

DeepSource is taking advantage of a process called static analysis. Company co-founders Jai Pradeesh and Sanket Saurav are software engineers, and saw the static analysis tools that ship with language packages like Python and Go as overly complex and hard to use. Pradeesh said that as a result, most developers have not embraced them.

“What we’re trying to do is use static analysis to figure out if we can automate the objective parts of the code review. […] Whenever a software developer makes a commit or introduces any change in code, DeepSource automatically runs analysis on that code. It then flags issues like security issues, anti-patterns, progress performance issues and things like that,” Pradeesh explained.

By automating parts of the review process, it allows the human code reviewers to concentrate on the less objective parts of the review and find myriad issues before it even goes to human review. DeepSource gives the developer a report with the error and an explanation of how to fix it.

But the founders recognized the drudgery of constantly repairing the same sorts of errors over and over. So they created an automated repair tool called Autofix that goes through and fix a set of common errors automatically for the developer.

Autofix in action. Image Credit: DeepSource

While Pradeesh says the automation tool only covers around 12% of errors so far, part of the investment will go toward helping build out additional coverage. For now, the company supports Python and Go programming languages, but plans to add additional languages over time. It already released a Ruby on Rails version a couple of months ago in beta, and support for JavaScript is on the way, he said.

The company currently has 12 people, including the two co-founders, based in Bangalore in India, but has plans to eventually move to the U.S. when the pandemic allows. It also plans to hire another 10-15 people over the next 12-18 months, primarily in engineering. The startup is working with YC advisors on building a diversity plan now, understanding that it is at a pivotal point in its evolution.

He says that the YC experience taught him and his co-founder about building more refined user personas for design and marketing purposes. Instead of broadly looking at the market as all developers, they could begin to focus on different aspects of that pool, like a large team versus an engineering manager. He said they also learned to explore usage data to understand things like what kinds of errors were most common, which helped inform the creation of the Autofix feature.

Being part of YC also helped them when they had to leave the office and go remote earlier this year due to the pandemic. Pradeesh admitted he had no experience running a remote team and his YC advisors helped him get comfortable with the process to the point they have good systems in place now.

“We put in these separate processes so that we do these bi-weekly sprints, and have learned ways to make sure everybody in the team communicates. Now that we have started putting these processes in place, the team is getting more and more used to it,” he said.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | DeepSource announces .6M seed round to automate static code analysis

During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, concern was high, public markets were suffering and it wasn’t hard to find wags on Twitter declaring that the world had changed and startup valuations were now off 40% — if you could put a round together.

But last night, we reported that more startups than expected were raising new capital at a higher valuations than prior rounds, an event often called an “up round.”

The Exchange is a daily look at startups and the private markets for Extra Crunch subscribers; use code EXCHANGE to get full access and take 25% off your subscription.

The data looked remarkably steady. As Connie Loizos wrote, “so-called ‘up rounds’ only declined modestly, from 72% [of Silicon Valley financings] in March to 70% in April.” Hardly doom and gloom.

The notion that the funding environment is not as bad as it was anticipated has been borne out in other data, including what appears to be a falling pace of startup layoffs. Perhaps the sky is not falling for private, growth-oriented companies that we tend to call startups?

More data helps fill in the picture. Surveys from NFX, a San Francisco-based seed fund, and DocSend, a platform that some founders use to distribute pitch decks, detail how sentiment has changed amongst founders and investors alike. There’s some good news in the collected sentiments, albeit with a few warning signs as well.

What seems clear from the reports is that the purported startup apocalypse hasn’t come, provided that they weren’t serving or working in a sector of the economy that zeroed-out due to COVID-19.

Let’s dig into the numbers to better ground our understanding of how entrepreneurs and venture capitalists really view — and disagree on — today’s private markets.

Concerns and realities

TechCrunch covered the first NFX COVID-19 survey back in April, writing at the time that founders seemed a little more optimistic than venture capitalists when it came to the economy’s rebound and their short-term fortunes.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Bearish VCs, bullish founders and changing investing trends

Shopping cart abandonment — when a person shopping online moves away from a site or mobile app before completing a sale — remains one of the biggest hurdles to e-commerce, with some 70% of all visits with an intention to buy never resulting in actual transactions.

Now, a startup called Zycada is emerging from stealth to help address that, with bot-based technology that speeds up how quickly the interactive elements load up on e-commerce sites. In turn, online retailers — which number somewhere between 12 million and 24 million sites globally — can have sites that work as well or even faster than Amazon, the quintessential bull in the e-commerce shop.

In addition to coming out of stealth today, it’s announcing $19 million in funding and a new CEO, James Brear, to grow the business.

The round is being led by Kholsa Ventures, with Cervin Venturers and Nordic Eye Venture Capital also participating. Prior to today, according to PitchBook data, it looks like the company had raised just under $11 million in early stage funding, and it’s not disclosing its valuation.

But as is the case with a lot of B2B companies, Zycada has not been sitting idle while in stealth: the company has already picked up a number of very large customers, including one of the world’s very biggest retailers (which wishes to keep its name out of this story). These businesses are using the technology to speed up their sites, and specifically the interactive elements on their pages such as “buy” buttons. Those large customers are likely one reason it’s raised so much money while still in stealth.

The issue that Zycada is tackling is one particular niche of web content delivery called Time to Interactive (TTI).

The idea is that a typical webpage involves a complicated mix of activities and purposes being handled and loaded by content delivery networks, and each of those don’t necessarily work in concert with the others.

They range from images, advertisements and interactive buttons through to cookies, analytics and many things that a consumer doesn’t “see” but are used by the company to improve what they are providing and to amass data for future activities.

Obviously, in an ideal world all of this would be coming online in the blink of an eye, but realistically what is more often the case is that some of the most critical elements find themselves “queuing” behind others to appear and work for a typical user.

And it turns out that typical users have very little patience online. “Buy Now” really does mean “now“. So when something critical like interactive buttons don’t appear or don’t work for a moment or more, shoppers move on and the site loses a sale. The worry is that losing a sale really is losing: Zycada estimates that e-commerce sales will be worth some $7 trillion by 2024, from $3.5 trillion in 2018. But with world events like global health pandemics pushing people to shop virtually, if one site doesn’t work well, a shopper will simply navigate to another that works better.

As Subbu Varadarajan, the CPO (who served as CEO before Brear came on board) who co-founded the company with Roy Antonyraj (who is the CTO), describes it, Zycada’s bot technology essentially acts as a way to prioritise interactive elements, with the understanding that these are the first that a user will want to have appear and working when typically visiting a site.

He claims that using Zycada’s bots can speed up the TTI to 10 times faster than Amazon typically offers on its pages. (Amazon is a huge benchmark in this area for all online retailers, but especially the biggest in the world, which see it as their key rival and disruptor.) In terms of actual numbers, he said that Amazon typically takes 1.35 seconds to load its interactive content, while Zycada shortens that to milliseconds. The “long” wait typical e-commerce sites have without this kind of acceleration, of more than three seconds, can result in 57% of shoppers abandoning a purchase. “And that’s not all,” he added. “The get frustrated and tell their friends.”

Of course, TTI is only one part of the mix for why one site will “work” and convert sales. Others include what stock a company has, how long it takes to deliver something, how much the product costs, how easy it is to pay for it, and more — all problems that underscore just how fragmented the e-commerce market is, and how complicated it can be.

So it’s interesting that longer term the plan will be to apply this technology to more than just e-commerce, according to Brear, who noted that other sectors like media could also benefit from Zycada bots to speed up how users can respond and click around a page.

It’s an interesting problem and while today the focus is on “how to be better than Amazon,” when and if Zycada expands to other areas like online news, for example, it will throw up other kinds of rivals. Google, for example, has been trying to “fix” load times for news and other kinds of sites with an approach it developed called AMP, but many in the industry don’t like the idea of working with it and essentially handing over traffic to the search giant in exchange for faster performance.

In that regard, Zycada could potentially one day offer an alternative.

“Modern consumers and mobile app users are sophisticated and demand experiences that are responsive, regardless of the content,” said Preetish Nijhawan, Managing Partner at Cervin Ventures and co-Founder of Akamai Technologies, in a statement. “Zycada is changing the game, and creating a new standard for high performance delivery of rich, dynamic experiences.” Nijhawan is joining the board of the startup with this round.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Zycada emerges from stealth with M and a bot that speeds up e-commerce and other interactive services

An email app with a waitlist? No, this isn’t 2004 and I’m not talking about Gmail. Superhuman has managed to attract and maintain constant interest for its subscription email product, with a wait list at over 275,000 people long at last count – all while asking users to pay $30 per month to gain access to the service. Founder and CEO Rahul Vohra will join us on Tuesday, June 26 at 2pm ET/11am PT for an Extra Crunch Live Q&A.

We have plenty of questions of our own, but we bet you do, too! Extra Crunch members can ask their own questions directly to Vohra during the chat.

We’re thrilled to be able to sit down with Vohra for a discussion about email, why it was in need of change, and what’s bringing so much attention and interest to Superhuman on a sustained basis. We’ll talk about the current prevailing market climate and what that’s meant for the business, as well as how you manage to create not one, but two companies (Vohra previously founded and sold Rapportive) that have adapted email to more modern needs – and struck a chord with users as a result.

Meanwhile, SaaS seems to be one of the bright spots in an otherwise fairly gloomy global economic situation, and Superhuman’s $30 per month subscription model definitely qualifies. We’ll ask Vohra what it means to build a successful SaaS startup in 2020, and how there might be plenty of opportunity even in so-called ‘solved’ problems like email and other aspects of our digital lives that have become virtually invisible thanks to habit.

Audience members can also ask their own questions, so come prepared with yours if you’re already an Extra Crunch member. And if you aren’t yet – now’s a great time to sign up.

We hope to see you there!

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Extra Crunch Live: Join Superhuman’s Rahul Vohra for a live discussion of email, SaaS and buzzy businesses