Browsing Tag: Startups

DoorDash prepares to go public, Roblox raises $150 million and Reddit’s CEO takes aim at TikTok. Here’s your Daily Crunch for February 27, 2020.

1. DoorDash, the $13B on-demand food delivery startup, says it has confidentially filed for an IPO

The company said that its Form S-1 (a draft registration statement) was filed with the SEC and is now being reviewed. It did not say how many shares it would potentially sell, nor the price range for the IPO, nor what the timing of its next steps would be.

The timing of the news underscores just how cash-intensive the on-demand food delivery business can be. DoorDash closed its latest round, for $700 million at a $13 billion valuation, in November of last year.

2. Roblox raises $150M Series G, led by Andreessen Horowitz, now valued at $4B

The funding comes at a period of significant growth for the gaming platform. Just last summer, it was being visited by 100 million users, topping Minecraft, and its developer community of over 2 million actives earned $110 million in 2019.

3. Reddit CEO: TikTok is ‘fundamentally parasitic’

At the Social 2030 conference, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman pushed back hard on the notion that Silicon Valley startups had something to learn from TikTok, saying, “Maybe I’m going to regret this, but I can’t even get to that level of thinking with them. Because I look at that app as so fundamentally parasitic, that it’s always listening, the fingerprinting technology they use is truly terrifying, and I could not bring myself to install an app like that on my phone.”

4. Apple to begin online sales in India this year, open first retail store in 2021

For a decade, Apple has solely relied on third-party sellers, stores and marketplaces to sell its products in India. That will begin to change this year.

5. What virtual worlds in the coming multiverse era will look like

In Part 3 of our virtual worlds series, we imagine what the experience of these new social environments will feel like. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. Dahmakan, a Malaysian ‘full-stack’ food delivery startup, raises $18M Series B

Launched by former executives from Foodpanda, Dahmakan was the first Malaysian startup to participate in Y Combinator’s startup accelerator program. Operational costs for food delivery companies are notoriously high, but Dahmakan is among several startups that use “cloud” kitchens, located closer to customers, to reduce delivery costs.

7. Vice President Mike Pence will lead the US response to the COVID-19 outbreak

In a press conference, President Donald Trump tapped Vice President Mike Pence to lead the U.S. response to the COVID-19 outbreak that has spread through Europe, Asia and Latin America. The new coronavirus strain has infected about 81,000 people around the world, killed 3,000 and wrought havoc on the global economy.

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Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Daily Crunch: DoorDash files to go public

Applied XLabs is a new startup building tools that can automate data-gathering for journalists — and eventually, for knowledge workers in other industries.

The company is emerging from Brooklyn-based Newlab, with The Boston Globe as its launch partner. It will be led by Francesco Marconi (pictured above), who was previously R&D chief at The Wall Street Journal and head of AI strategy at the Associated Press.

Marconi told me that there’s a tremendous amount of data out there that could be useful to journalists, whether that’s inside public company filings or academic climate change research. But data-driven journalism remains a sliver of the industry, because “only a handful of organizations have the internal resources to create these types of tools, these types of analyses.”

The plan is for Applied XLabs to develop products to help newsrooms, starting with The Globe, automatically pull data and generate insights.

Vinay Mehra, president of The Boston Globe, said the hope is to use AI to improve the information that Globe journalists provide to different communities.

For example, Mehra said that The Globe has been expanding its coverage in Rhode Island, partly in response to the disappearance of local newspapers and the resulting “news deserts.” When the team started talking to the community about what kind of coverage they wanted to see, they came up with a long list of ideas like restaurant openings and closings. (That’s something news startup Hoodline, co-founded by Extra Crunch Managing Editor Eric Eldon, has also tried to tackle with data and automation.)

But providing comprehensive coverage in these areas is tough with a small newsroom, Mehra said: “We can’t keep throwing journalists at this.” So the idea is to “mine that data” and make existing journalists more effective.

At the same time, he emphasized that he doesn’t see AI as a way to replace journalists or justify newsroom cuts, and he noted that The Globe continues to hire.

“We can’t sit back and ignore these technologies that are coming out every day,” Mehra said. “The opportunity here is to redefine what is possible with AI, to expand our own thinking and horizons around how we do journalism today and how we serve these communities.”

Marconi added that ultimately, these tools could also be sold to knowledge workers in a variety of industries.

“The same way that you have Salesforce for managing the sales process, we are building the platform for knowledge workers,” he said. “The reason why it’s so important to start with news and why we’re working with journalists [is] the threshold is really, really high. If you are able to build products and seeds of information that editors can use and sign off on, then you can quickly expand into other industries.”

Applied XLabs is also the first startup to emerge from Newlab’s venture studio program. When we first visited Newlab back in 2016, it described itself as a workspace for companies in robotics, AI and other fields. Now it has created a studio model where it aims to bring together “diverse stakeholders” to create new companies in frontier tech.

“There is a substantial investment from Newlab, and in addition to capital, Newlab is providing all of the back-office services,” Marconi said. “I get the stability of an established company with the freedom, flexibility and creativity of a new venture.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Newlab and The Boston Globe team up to launch AI tools startup Applied XLabs

Coding and other computer science expertise remain some of the more important skills that a person can have in the working world today, but in the last few years, we have also seen a big rise in a new generation of tools providing an alternative way of reaping the fruits of technology: “no-code” software, which lets anyone — technical or non-technical — build apps, games, AI-based chatbots, and other products that used to be the exclusive terrain of engineers and computer scientists.

Today, one of the newer startups in the category — London-based Gyana, which lets non-technical people run data science analytics on any structured dataset — is announcing a round of £3 million to fuel its next stage of growth.

Led by U.K. firm Fuel Ventures, other investors in this round include Biz Stone of Twitter, Green Shores Capital and U+I , and it brings the total raised by the startup to $6.8 million since being founded in 2015.

Gyana (Sanskrit for “knowledge”) was co-founded by Joyeeta Das and David Kell, who were both pursuing post-graduate degrees at Oxford: Das, a former engineer, was getting an MBA, and Kell was doing a Ph. D. in physics.

Das said the idea of building this tool came out of the fact that the pair could see a big disconnect emerging not just in their studies, but also in the world at large — not so much a digital divide, as a digital light year in terms of the distance between the groups of who and who doesn’t know how to work in the realm of data science.

“Everyone talks about using data to inform decision making, and the world becoming data-driven, but actually that proposition is available to less than one percent of the world,” she said.

Out of that, the pair decided to work on building a platform that Das describes as a way to empower “citizen data scientists,” by letting users upload any structured data set (for example, a .CSV file) and running a series of queries on it to be able to visualise trends and other insights more easily.

While the longer term goal may be for any person to be able to produce an analytical insight out of a long list of numbers, the more practical and immediate application has been in enterprise services and building tools for non-technical knowledge workers to make better, data-driven decisions.

To prove out its software, the startup first built an app based on the platform that it calls Neera (Sanskrit for “water”), which specifically parses footfall and other “human movement” metrics, useful for applications in retail, real estate and civic planning — for example to determine well certain retail locations are performing, footfall in popular locations, decisions on where to place or remove stores, or how to price a piece of property.

Starting out with the aim of mid-market and smaller companies — those most likely not to have in-house data scientists to meet their business needs — startup has already picked up a series of customers that are actually quite a lot bigger than that. They include Vodafone, Barclays, EY, Pret a Manger, Knight Frank and the UK Ministry of Defense. It says it has some £1 million in contracts with these firms currently.

That, in turn, has served as the trigger to raise this latest round of funding and to launch Vayu (Sanskrit for “air”) — a more general purpose app that covers a wider set of parameters that can be applied to a dataset. So far, it has been adopted by academic researchers, financial services employees, and others that use analysis in their work, Das said.

With both Vayu and Neera, the aim — refreshingly — is to make the whole experience as privacy-friendly as possible, Das noted. Currently, you download an app if you want to use Gyana, and you keep your data local as you work on it. Gyana has no “anonymization” and no retention of data in its processes, except things like analytics around where your cursor hovers, so that Gyana knows how it can improve its product.

“There are always ways to reverse engineer these things,” Das said of anonymization. “We just wanted to make sure that we are not accidentally creating a situation where, despite learning from anaonyised materials, you can’t reverse engineer what people are analysing. We are just not convinced.”

While there is something commendable about building and shipping a tool with a lot of potential to it, Gyana runs the risk of facing what I think of as the “water, water everywhere” problem. Sometimes if a person really has no experience or specific aim, it can be hard to think of how to get started when you can do anything. Das said they have also identified this, and so while currently Gyana already offers some tutorials and helper tools within the app to nudge the user along, the plan is to eventually bring in a large variety of datasets for people to get started with, and also to develop a more intuitive way to “read” the basics of the files in order to figure out what kinds of data inquiries a person is most likely to want to make.

The rise of “no-code” software has been a swift one in the world of tech spanning the proliferation of startups, big acquisitions, and large funding rounds. Companies like Airtable and DashDash are aimed at building analytics leaning on interfaces that follow the basic design of a spreadsheet; AppSheet, which is a no-code mobile app building platform, was recently acquired by Google; and Roblox (for building games without needing to code) and Uncorq (for app development) have both raised significant funding just this week. In the area of no-code data analytics and visualisation, there are biggies like Tableau, as well as Trifacta, RapidMiner and more.

Gartner predicts that by 2024, some 65% of all app development will be made on low- or no-code platforms, and Forrester estimates that the no- and low-code market will be worth some $10 billion this year, rising to $21.2 billion by 2024.

That represents a big business opportunity for the likes of Gyana, which has been unique in using the no-code approach specifically to tackle the area of data science.

However, in the spirit of citizen data scientists, the intention is to keep a consumer version of the apps free to use as it works on signing up enterprise users with more enhanced paid products, which will be priced on an annual license basis (currently clients are paying between $6,000 and $12,000 depending on usage, she said).

“We want to do free for as long as we can,” Das said, both in relation to the data tools and the datasets that it will offer to users. “The biggest value add is not about accessing premium data that is hard to get. We are not a data marketplace but we want to provide data that makes sense to access,” adding that even with business users, “we’d like you to do 90% of what you want to do without paying for anything.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | London-based Gyana raises .9M for a no-code approach to data science

The on-demand food delivery wars continue to heat up in the U.S. DoorDash announced today that it has filed confidentially to go public. The company noted that its Form S-1, a draft registration statement, was filed with the SEC and is now being reviewed. It did not say how many shares it would potentially sell, the share price range for the IPO or what the timing of its next steps would be.

A public listing would be another way for the company to pick up a significant injection of capital at a key time in the on-demand delivery industry, where competition is fierce and we’re seeing a lot of consolidation globally. The timing of the news also underscores just how cash-intensive this business can be. DoorDash — which by some estimates currently leads the food delivery market in the U.S. — closed its latest round only in November last year, just over three months ago. That was for $700 million at a $13 billion valuation.

In the U.S. — which is DoorDash’s main market, alongside Canada, Puerto Rico and Australia — the company is understood to have 38% of the market. It operates in heated, and subsequently expensive, rivalry with the likes of Postmates (10% share) and Uber Eats (20%), and more legacy players like Grubhub (31%). That fierce competition is very capital-intensive and has led to rumors over the few years that the company has explored mergers with Uber Eats and Postmates.

But DoorDash has also had its share of controversy, specifically around labour issues and how it interfaces with and pays its thousands-strong workforce of contractors. It also faced a data breach last year that affected nearly 5 million consumers, workers and merchants. It also has been quietly building up its technology stack, with acquisitions like Scotty Labs to explore autonomous driving systems (to complement or potentially replace human delivery drivers).

Confidential IPO filings allow startups that are still in “growth” mode (and often unprofitable) to explore the early stages of setting themselves up for a public listing without the public scrutiny that comes with the process. Although it has been popularised by companies like Spotify and Slack — both of which went public — it doesn’t always lead to an IPO. Witness WeWork’s filing and subsequent U-turn after it disclosed more details about how the company worked. And Postmates, which filed for an IPO a year ago, has subsequently raised money and is said to be delaying any public moves.

More to come.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | DoorDash, the B on-demand food delivery startup, says it has confidentially filed for an IPO

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

Today we’re starting on a somber topic, so I’ll hold off on our usual jokes and attempts at puns. The impact of the coronavirus known as COVID-19 is starting to show up in U.S.-based technology earnings, and it’s something we need to discuss. We’ll get back to SaaS multiples, the IPO market, and riffing on startups later today, but first, some bad news from the public markets.

Let’s examine the latest from Microsoft, Nutanix, and Booking Holdings (parent company of Bookings.com), OpenTable, and Kayak. Afterwards, we’ll talk about what types of companies might be impacted, given what we’ve learned. And finally, we’ll link this all back to startups, younger technology shops sensitive to changes in market sentiment and repricing due to public market gyrations.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | The coronavirus begins to impact US tech earnings

Cioplenu, an Augsburg-based startup that is building what it dubs an “operating system” for the production floor, has raised €4.2M in seed financing. Berlin-based Cherry Ventures led the round, and Munich’s 42Cap, which led Cioplenu’s pre-seed round in 2018, joined three fairly high-profile angels in the round.

The three angels include Fabian Heinrich, co-founder of Scoutbee (which recently announced a $60 million Series B), Christian Heinrich, founder and professor for digital transformation, and Moritz Zimmermann, co-founder of Hybris (which exited to SAP for $1.5 billion in 2013).

Billed as a SaaS for “deskless” workers, Cioplenu aims to digitize an array of production floor processes like maintenance, on-boarding, assembly, and inspection. The software works on any device and can connect to existing IT infrastructure used by production companies. It is already being used in more than 10 countries by large corporates such as Bosch, Stabilo and Hirschvogel.

“If you walk into a typical industrial company today you will find 10 meters of cabinets full of folders with paper protocols, documents, instructions etc.,” explains Cioplenu co-founder and CEO Benjamin Brockmann.

“Most maintenance and inspection is not done digitally today and assembly instructions are simply printed out. Finding or sharing documents is a nightmare and there is also no real-time communication or any kind of analytics, which creates a huge blindspot for companies”.

To help solve this, Brockmann says Cioplenu is building an intuitive “operating system” for the production floor that acts as an all-in-one platform for maintenance, inspection, work assembly and other processes.

“We provide an easy editor with which multimedia documents, protocols, and questionnaires can be created as well as an operator software for the deskless worker that works on any device,” he explains. “Our easy ERP integration allows [production companies] to pull in and organize data quickly, while our analytics platform helps companies to optimize their processes. Sounds easy, but to make it enterprise-ready, we also built in many other features, like, for example, complex access rights management”.

Cioplenu customers are described as SMBs and enterprises in the industrial market, such as Bosch or Stabilo, while its user base spans across different departments and organisational levels.

For example, a quality manager might use the software for documentation by completing the respective protocol checklists digitally while walking across the production floor with a tablet.

“When something is broken, she can snap a photo, annotate it and log it. When she wants to share her protocol with her foreign co-worker, she can send it in a click and it gets automatically translated,” says Cioplenu.

The team leader then receives all the consolidated reports with anomalies highlighted, and the facility head gets a real-time overview and analytics on whether or not everything is running according to plan.

“The beauty is that because of its modular format, inspection is really just one use case of many,” adds Cioplenu’s CEO. “[Our software] is also being used for teaching workers how to assemble plants, how to troubleshoot machines and much more”.

Meanwhile, Cioplenu says that strong demand for its product will see it open a second office in Frankfurt. “We plan to triple our team this year with big hiring plans for our new office in Frankfurt. Key will be the expansion of our marketing and sales team,” says the startup’s other co-founder Daniel Grobe.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Cioplenu, the SaaS for ‘deskless’ workers on the production floor, raises €4.2M seed

SparkLabs Group announced today that it has launched SparkLabs Connex, the latest program in its network of startup accelerators and venture funds. Focused on real estate technology (proptech) and the Internet of Things, SparkLabs Connex will tap into startup ecosystems in Silicon Valley, Seoul, Shenzhen, Taipei and Singapore.

The program will support startups working with tech, like artificial intelligence, 5G, low-power wide area networks, eSIMS and security, essential to green building and smart city programs. Charles Reed Anderson, the founder of Singapore-based IoT, mobility and smart city advisory firm CRA & Associates, will lead SparkLabs Connex as its managing partner.

The program’s partners include Nokia, True Digital, Beca and Skyroam, as well as the cities of Taipei, Taiwan, Songdo, South Korea and Darwin, Australia, which will be working with its portfolio startups to test and deploy their technology. SparkLabs Connex is also working with Go Smart, the Taipei City initiative to create a global network of smart cities, and the Urban Technology Alliance, which tests smart city tech in France, Spain, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

In a press statement, Anderson said, “My ambition for SparkLabs Connex is to become the innovation hub for the IoT, smart city and prop tech ecosystems, and I’m excited with the quality and variety of partnerships we have signed at launch-and will sign in the future. SparkLabs Connex is more than an accelerator, it’s an ecosystem play, and we believe it creates a unique value proposition for startups, partners and investors.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | SparkLabs Group launches Connex, an accelerator program for smart city technology

Dahmakan, a full-stack food delivery startup based in Malaysia, announced today that it has closed a $18 million Series B. Investors include Rakuten Capital, White Star Capital, JAFCO Asia and GEC-KIP Fund, along with participation from South Korean food delivery app Woowa Brothers, and returning investors Partech Partners and Y Combinator.

This brings Dahmakan’s total funding to about $28 million. Its previous round of financing was announced last May.

Launched by former executives from FoodPanda, Dahmakan was the first Malaysian startup to participate in Y Combinator’s startup accelerator program. Operational costs for food delivery companies are notoriously high, and eat away at their profitability, but Dahmakan is among several startups that use “cloud” kitchens, located closer to customers, in order to reduce delivery costs.

The foundation of the startup’s full-stack platform is an operating system that controls nearly every step of its operations, from recipe development to last-mile delivery, and its cloud kitchens are part of “satellite” hubs placed around different cities to be closer to customers.

Instead of delivering from restaurants, Dahmakan creates its own meals, offering about 40 options each week from a database of 2,000 dishes. It selects its weekly menu based on customer data, including food preferences and spending habits, along with market research.

Then customers are given a menu and pick from a schedule of delivery times. Other startups trying to make food delivery more efficient in Southeast Asia by using a vertically-integrated model and cloud kitchens include Grain, which s backed by investors including Openspace Ventures, First Gourmet and Singha Ventures.

In a press statement about Dahmakan’s funding, White Star Capital managing partner Eric Martineau-Fortin said “Dahmakan is well-positioned to serve the growing demand for food delivery services in Southeast Asia with its unique, technology-forward approach of taking control of the entire value chain to provide affordable delivery options to SEA’s rising middle class.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Dahmakan, a Malaysian “full-stack” food delivery startup, raises million Series B

In an early-evening press conference, President Donald Trump tapped Vice President Mike Pence to lead the U.S. response to the COVID-19 outbreak that has spread through Europe, Asia and Latin America.

The new coronavirus strain, which has infected about 81,000 people around the world and killed 3,000, has already wrought havoc on the global economy. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned yesterday that the U.S. will likely not be able to escape the spread of the virus.

“It’s not a question of if this will happen but when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illnesses,” said Dr. Nancy Messonier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, in a press conference given by the Centers for Disease Control on Tuesday. “Disruption to everyday life might be severe.”

Earlier this evening, California reported its first case of community transmission, which was confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control, according to The New York Times. That’s a case where an infected person was not exposed to anyone known to be infected with the virus and had not traveled to countries where the virus had spread.

Speaking alongside Pence; Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar; National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases head Dr. Anthony Fauci; and principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control Dr. Anne Schuchat, the President stressed that the U.S. government was “very, very ready” to respond to the disease.

Vice President Pence said that the White House would continue to work closely with state and local officials, add additional personnel and work with Congress to ensure that the necessary resources are available. “The threat to the American public remains low,” Pence said.

The White House is asking Congress for $2.5 billion to support efforts to stop the spread of the virus in the U.S. while Senate Democrats led by Chuck Schumer have put an $8.5 billion price tag on the coronavirus fight.

Secretary Azar outlined five areas where the government would look to spend money including: monitor the spread of the virus, cooperate with local governments, develop therapeutics, develop vaccines, and manufacture and purchase personal protective equipment.

Diagnosing the illness has been a particular problem for the U.S. According to multiple reports, the CDC isn’t prepared to test for a potentially rapidly expanding number of cases in the U.S.

Only 12 of the 100 public health labs in the U.S. are able to diagnose the coronavirus because of problems with a test developed by the CDC, according to a Politico report.

Better diagnostics tools are going to be one of the critical areas where startups could play a role in combating the spread of the virus.

“Where startups are going to make contributions is in detection, monitoring, epidemiological predictions, sequencing, supply chain [and] distribution logistics,” wrote James Birch, an entrepreneur and former researcher with the American College of Surgeons.

Scott Gottlieb, the former Food and Drug Administration chief and an investor with New Enterprise Associates, has advocated for the expansion of Emergency Use Authorizations from the organization he used to lead as a way to respond to the need for more, better diagnostic tests.

The lack of effective tests available to public health facilities calls into question exactly how prepared the government is for the potential health crisis. In fact, the White House got rid of the pandemic response group in the Administration in a cost-cutting measure in 2018.

California’s recently diagnosed new case also casts doubt on the government’s ability to effectively respond to the emerging illness. As the University of California Davis Medical Center wrote in an internal document:

“Upon admission, our team asked public health officials if this case could be COVID-19. We requested COVID-19 testing by the CDC, since neither Sacramento County nor (the California Department of Public Health) is doing testing for coronavirus at this time. Since the patient did not fit the existing CDC criteria for COVID-19, a test was not immediately administered…”

On Sunday, the CDC ordered COVID-19 testing of the patient and the patient was put on airborne precautions and strict contact precautions. The positive test results were announced on Wednesday.

Also troubling to some healthcare observers is Pence’s own track record when it comes to healthcare crises.

As governor of Indiana, Pence’s inaction led to an outbreak of HIV in one of the state’s more rural counties, according to a report in HuffPost. As drug use soared in the state during the opioid crisis, addicts in the county were also becoming infected with the virus because they were sharing needles. Pence opposed a needle-sharing program, which could have limited the spread of the virus.

Fears about how the new coronavirus would impact the economy rattled stock markets earlier this week as news of the disease’s spread to Europe were confirmed. The market’s slide and the political response in Washington played a role in the president’s decision to hold a press conference today, judging by the president’s own Twitter account.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Vice President Mike Pence will lead the US response to the COVID-19 outbreak

Made Renovation, a new, San Francisco-based company, thinks it has found a profitable way to help homeowners get done something that busy general contractors in the Bay Area won’t otherwise make time for, which is bathroom remodels.

Why they typically pass on these: they have too many entire homes, or, at least, entire floors, to build for affluent regional homeowners who’ve kept the construction industry buzzing for years.

It’s a problem that founders Roger Dickey, who previously co-founded Gigster, and Sagar Shah, who previously founded Quad, think they can solve through technology, naturally. Their big idea: create bathroom templates that customers can customize but whose scope and costs are generally understood, line up these customers, then hire general contractors who are willing to focus only on these bathrooms.

It’s an idea that’s picking up traction with these GCs, says Dickey, who explains it this way: “General contractors generally see net margin of 3%” no matter the size of the job, owing to unforeseen hurdles, like pipes that suddenly need to be rebuilt, drains that need to be dug and materials that don’t ship on schedule.

In addition to timing issues, GCs are also often dealing with frustrated building owners who might underestimate a project’s costs, particularly in California, where construction bills often cause sticker shock.

Made Renovation sees an opportunity to make both the lives of GCs and homeowners easier. Through pre-negotiated pricing, volume and materials handling (it right now rents part of a warehouse where it receives goods), it’s promising GCs a “reasonable margin” so they can not only pay their crews but live a higher quality of life themselves.

Meanwhile, per the plan, customers need only choose from the company’s “modern” collection, its more traditional “heritage”design or its “artisan” collection — all of which can be customized — then sit back while their long-neglected bathrooms are remade.

Whether Made Renovation can pull off its grand vision is a giant question mark. The construction industry is nothing if not messy, and in addition to convincing GCs of its merits, Made Renovation — like any marketplace company — has to strike the right balance between customer demand and supply as it gets off the ground.

In the meantime, investors clearly think it has promise. Led by Base10 Partners and with participation from Felicis Ventures, Founders Fund and some individual investors, the company has already raised $9 million in seed funding across two tranches.

Part of that capital is on display right now in San Francisco, where Made Renovation today opened its doors to customers who want to check out its design ideas and, if all goes as planned, will begin lining up their own home improvement projects. Customers simply pick a collection, Made Renovation then puts together a “mood board” of materials from that collection, sends out a 3D rendering of what to expect, then goes into build mode with its GC partners.

As for what happens when that build goes awry, Dickey says Made Renovation has it covered. Most notably, while it guarantees the work to its own customers, the GCs with whom it works guarantee their work to Made Renovation.

Dickey also notes that while the startup “may lose money on some projects,” he stresses there are caveats that customers agree to at the outset. Among these, he says, “We can’t X-ray their walls and see if they don’t have wiring up to code. We don’t cover dry rot in walls.” Technology, suggests Dickey, can only do so much.

If you’re in the Bay Area and want to check out its new storefront, it’s on Chestnut Street in SF, in the city’s Marina district. The company hopes to perfect its model in the Bay Area, says Dickey, then expand into other regions. As for why Made Renovation decided to tackle one of the most challenging U.S. markets first, he suggests it’s the best way to test its mettle. “I like the idea of starting a company here, because if we can make it work here, I think we can succeed anywhere.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | A look at Made Renovation, which just raised million in seed funding to zero in on bathroom remodels