Browsing Tag: Startups

Novameat, a Spanish startup looking to accelerate the development of alternative proteins across the meat aisle, has gotten a boost in the form of new investment capital from the leading foodtech investment firm, New Crop Capital.

Founded by biomedical engineering expert Giuseppe Scionti, Novameat builds on Scionti’s decade of research as an assistant professor in bioengineering at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, the University College of London, Chalmers University and Polytechnic University of Milan.

The company first came to fame with the production of the world’s first 3D-printed plant-based beefsteak in 2018 and will use the new funds from New Crop Capital to further develop its platform for accelerating the development of meats like steak, chicken breasts and other fibrous textured meat replacements.

The company has developed a new scaffolding technology that mimics the texture, appearance, nutritional and sensorial properties of fibrous meats like beefsteaks, chicken breasts and fish filets.

Scionti sees the technology as the next step in the development of plant-based and lab-cultured alternatives to traditional proteins. While many clean meat and plant-based food companies have managed to take ground meat replacements to market with similar taste and textural qualities to the real thing, steaks and cuts of muscle meat have proven harder to replicate.

Novameat potentially solves that problem.

“While I was researching on regenerating animal tissues through bioprinting technologies for biomedical and veterinary applications, I discovered a way to bio-hack the structure of the native 3D matrix of a variety of plant-based proteins to achieve a meaty texture,” said Scionti, in a statement.

The core of Novameat’s technology is a customized printer that enables companies to create the kinds of fibrous tissues needed to make a steak. “We are providing the equipment, the machinery, under a licensing agreement to these companies,” says Scionti. “Plant-based meat manufacturers have access to something that creates the texture and taste of a steak.”

Traditional extrusion technologies are not capable of using the ingredients from Beyond Meat or Impossible Foods to print a steak, but Novameat’s founder argues that his technology can.

The technology was promising enough to attract the attention of New Crop Capital, arguably one of the most seasoned investors in the expanding market of meat replacement. The venture firm’s portfolio includes Memphis Meat, Beyond Meat, Kite Hill, Geltor, Good Dot, Aleph Farms, Supermeat, Mosa Meat, New Wave and Zero Egg.

“We think the global food supply chain is broken and we are focused on fixing one of those challenges, which is animal protein,” says New Crop Capital’s Dan Altschuler Malek. “We see that there is an opportunity to shift consumer behavior to reduce their consumption of animal protein products to products that are at the price point that people will pay.”

Novameat can help reduce costs, Malek thinks, because it speeds up the time to create meat substitutes.

Scionti says the company’s micro-extrusion technology enables companies to get a three-dimensional structure without having to go through an incubation period that can take a significant amount of time and increase costs.

“Novameat’s bioprinting-based technology provides a flexible and tunable method of producing plant-based meat, with the utility to create different textures from a wide variety of ingredients, all within a single piece of meat,” he said. “Low and high-moisture extruders are the primary method currently used to restructure plant proteins to create the texture of meat. While extrusion works well for some applications, this method may not be ideal for mimicking all types of animal meat. Alternative technologies like Novameat’s give plant-based meat manufacturers a wider array of tools to mimic all types of meat and seafood,” said Good Food Institute Director of Science and Technology David Welch, in a statement.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Novameat has a platform for 3D-printing steaks and has new money to take it to market

Superside, a startup aiming to create a premium alternative to the existing crowdsourced design platforms, is announcing that it has raised $3.5 million in new funding.

It’s also adding new features like the ability to work on user interfaces, interaction design and motion graphics. Co-founder and CEO Fredrik Thomassen said this allows the company to offer “a full-service design solution.”

You may have heard about Superside under its old name Konsus . In a blog post, Thomassen explained the recent change in name and branding, writing, “We changed our name and look to align with what we had become: The world’s top team of international designers and creatives.”

He told me Superside was created to address his own frustrations after trying to use marketplaces like 99designs and Fiverr. He argued that there’s a problem with “adverse selection on those platforms.” In other words, “The best people … don’t remain, because they don’t have a career path — they’re fighting with other freelancers to get the jobs.”

Superside, on the other hand, is picky about the designers it works with — it claims to select 100 designers from the more than 50,000 applications it receives each year. But if they are accepted, they’re guaranteed full-time work.

Thomassen said the platform is built for large enterprises that have their own design and marketing teams but still need additional support. Customers include Uber, LinkedIn, L’Oreal, Cisco, Santander, Amazon, Walmart Tiffany & Co. Hewlett Packard and Airbus

In addition to choosing good designers, Superside also built a broader project management platform.

“We’re basically automating everything: Finding people, screening people, on-boarding, on-the-job learning, invoicing of customers, project management, all of the nitty gritty,” Thomassen said. “The only thing not automated is design — that’s where the human element and the creativity come in.”

Plus, Thomassen said Superside can turn around a standard piece of artwork in 12 hours: “Nobody else can do what we’re doing in terms of speed.”

The new funding comes from Freestyle Capital, with participation from High Alpha Ventures, Y Combinator and Alliance Ventures.

“We’re very much a mission-driven company,” Thomassen added. “For me, the reason to go to work in the morning is to help build an online labor market and create equal economic opportunity for everyone in the world.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Newly renamed Superside raises .5M for its outsourced design platform

It is a commonly held belief that startups can measure their way to success. And while there are always exceptions, early-stage companies often can’t leverage data easily, at least not in the way that later stage companies can. It’s imperative that startups recognize this early on — it makes all the difference.

In this piece, I draw on my experiences using data to take Framer from seed round to Series B. More concretely, I’ll describe what to (not) focus on, and then, how to get real results.

There are good and bad ways for startups to use data. In my opinion, the bad way unfortunately is often preached on saas blogs, a/b test tool marketing pages, and especially growth hacker conferences: that by simply measuring and looking at data you’ll find simple things to do that will drive explosive growth. Silver bullets, if you will.

The good way is comparable to first principles thinking. Below the surface of your day to day results, your startup can be described by a set of numbers. It takes some work to discover these numbers, but once you have them you can use them to make predictions and spot underlying trends. If everyone in your company knows these numbers by heart, they will inevitably make better decisions.

But most importantly, using data the right way will help answer the single most important – but complex – question at any moment for a startup: how are we really doing?

Let’s start with looking at what not to do as a startup.

Table of Contents

• Common pitfalls
  • Don’t measure too much
  • A/B tests are anti-startup
  • Understand your calculations
  • Don’t just use quantitative data
  • Use the real numbers
• Make a plan
  • Define a high-level product funnel
  • Define a metrics plan per stage and implement it
  • Get your whole team on board
• Perfect setup
  • Decide on infrastructure
  • What to build, ideally
• Typical problems
  • Non-measurable data
  • Defining what results are “good”
  • Turning data observations into actionable learnings
• Discovering data
  • Visualization
  • What to look for
  • Analyzing your splashes
  • Look for trends that are growing structurally
  • Look for trends that are growing exponentially
  • Look for trends that are dropping of cliffs
  • Look for predictors: correlations
  • Deciding what to work on

Common pitfalls

Don’t measure too much

Technically, it’s easy to measure everything, so most startups start out that way. But when you measure everything, you learn nothing. Just the sheer noise makes it hard to discover anything useful and it can be demotivating to look at piles of numbers in general.

My advice is to carefully plan what you want to measure upfront, then implement and conclude. You should only expand your set of measurements once you’ve made the most important ones actionable. Later in this article, I provide a clear set of ways to plan what you measure.

A/B tests are anti-startup

To make decisions based on data you need volume. Without volume, the data itself is not statistically significant and is basically just noise. To detect a 3% difference with 95% confidence you would need a sample size of 12,000 visitors, signups, or sales. That sample size is generally too high for most early-stage startups and forces your product development into long cycles.

While on the subject of shipping fast and iterating later, let’s talk about A/B testing. To get reliable measurements, you should only be changing one variable at a time. During the early stages of Framer, we changed our homepage in the middle of a checkout A/B test, which skewed our results. But as a startup, it was the right decision to adjust the way we marketed our product. What you’ll find is that those two factors are often incompatible. In general, constant improvements should trump tests that block quick reactionary changes.

Understand your calculations

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | How early-stage startups can use data effectively

Last year at this time, Forethought won the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield competition. A $9 million Series A investment followed last December. Today at TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise in San Francisco, the company introduced the latest addition to its platform, called Agatha Predictions.

Forethought CEO and co-founder Deon Nicholas said that after launching its original product, Agatha Answers (to provide suggested answers to customer queries), customers were asking for help with the routing part of the process, as well. “We learned that there’s a whole front end of that problem before the ticket even gets to the agent,” he said. Forethought developed Agatha Predictions to help sort the tickets and get them to the most qualified agent to solve the problem.

“It’s effectively an entire tool that helps triage and route tickets. So when a ticket is coming in, it can predict whether it’s a high-priority or low-priority ticket and which agent is best qualified to handle this question. And this all happens before the agent even touches the ticket. This really helps drive efficiencies across the organization by helping to reduce triage time,” Nicholas explained.

The original product (Agatha Answers) is designed to help agents get answers more quickly and reduce the amount of time it takes to resolve an issue. “It’s a tool that integrates into your Help Desk software, indexes your past support tickets, knowledge base articles and other [related content]. Then we give agents suggested answers to help them close questions with reduced handle time,” Nicholas said.

He says that Agatha Predictions is based on the same underlying AI engine as Agatha Answers. Both use Natural Language Understanding (NLU) developed by the company. “We’ve been building out our product, and the Natural Language Understanding engine, the engine behind the system, works in a very similar manner [across our products]. So as a ticket comes in the AI reads it, understands what the customer is asking about, and understands the semantics, the words being used,” he explained. This enables them to automate the routing and supply a likely answer for the issue involved.

Nicholas maintains that winning Battlefield gave his company a jump start and a certain legitimacy it lacked as an early-stage startup. Lots of customers came knocking after the event, as did investors. The company has grown from five employees when it launched last year at TechCrunch Disrupt to 20 today.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Battlefield winner Forethought adds tool to automate support ticket routing

Adam Draper, the son of that Draper, is changing things up a bit at his accelerator.

Boost VC has been living life on the fringe of Bay Area accelerators, chasing trends like VR and crypto (and sometimes a combo of the two) hard while courting outliers, including a “robot fish platform” and a “cold metal fusion printer.”

While Boost VC’s investments have varied in feasibility, Draper says most of them fit into his particular vision of emerging tech that he calls “sci-fi tech,” something he says is more about finding technologies that give humans “superpowers,” a term he seems to be giving a pretty broad definition with a sci-fi portfolio that includes a jetpack startup and a hotel booking site.

Canvassing frothy sectors hasn’t always been a particularly strong recipe for sustained success; both VR/AR and blockchain startups have endured bear markets in the past couple of years. Draper encourages his bets to stay lean and low-profile; the accelerator’s official slogan was, at one point, “be the cockroach.”

Adam Draper isn’t planning to shift away from longshots, but he is turning the seven-year-old Boost VC into a more codified accelerator in an aim to provide a more compelling pitch to savvy entrepreneurs that need more money early on.

The headline changes are that Boost VC is halving the number of companies in its accelerator classes to 7-10 companies, and is increasing the checks that it’s writing to $500K while taking a bigger slice of its portfolio startups (15%). The accelerator is still giving the same perks and is hoping to up the programming to make the smaller group more close-knit.

The numbers may be shifting, but the biggest change is that there are hard numbers to begin with. Boost VC has at times looked like a club for Draper’s early angel investments, largely because the check sizes and valuations varied so heavily — investments ranged from $50K to $500K.

“Standardizing everything just makes it all way, way better,” Draper told TechCrunch. “YC is awesome, and that’s why I forked their model. I think programming-based VC is the best model in venture capital.”

With this change toward deal uniformity, Draper may be stripping some of the volume, but also focusing more on quality, rather than breadth. This is undoubtedly a necessary step as accelerator behemoth Y Combinator continues to surge in size, now betting on nearly 400 companies per year while sucking up a pretty sizable pool of accelerator applicants from other institutions.

Last year, Draper announced the close of Boost’s third fund, which clocked in at $38.6 million. The team is about to take applications for its 13th “tribe” of accelerator startups.

“If you are a consumer or enterprise-based business, YC is fantastic and they have repeated success. If you are in this ‘sci-fi’ category than I think specialization is very important and it’s also slightly more expensive,” he says.

A major question will be whether the higher valuations and check sizes will shift Boost away from some of the riskier and stranger “Hogwarts-inspired” VR and crypto investments that it’s been making. At the same time, 15% is a pretty sizable portion of equity for founders to offload so early in their life cycle, though Draper believes plenty of teams will be interested in landing a $500K investment.

“Boost isn’t going to be for everyone, and I’m okay with that,” Draper says.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Adam Draper gives his oddball accelerator a makeover

Front, the company that lets you manage your inboxes as a team, is adding one more channel: WhatsApp. Starting today, you can read and reply to people contacting you through WhatsApp.

This feature is specifically targeted at users of WhatsApp Business. You can get a business phone number through Twilio and then hand out that number to your customers.

After that, you can see the messages coming in Front and treat them like any Front message. In particular, you can assign conversations to specific team members so that your customers get a relevant answer as quickly as possible. If you need more information, Front integrates with popular CRMs, such as Salesforce, Pipedrive and HubSpot.

You also can discuss with other teammates before sending a reply to your customer. It works like any chat interface — you can at-mention your co-workers and start an in-line chat in the middle of a WhatsApp thread. When you’re ready to answer, you can hit reply and send a WhatsApp message.

Front started with generic email addresses, such as sales@yourcompany or jobs@yourcompany. But the company has added more channels over time, such as Facebook, Twitter, website chat and text messages.

If you’ve already been using Front with text messages, you can now easily add WhatsApp and use the same service for that new channel.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Shared inbox startup Front adds WhatsApp support

French startup Upflow has raised a $2.7 million funding round (€2.5 million) from Kima Ventures, eFounders and various business angels. The company tracks your outstanding invoices and makes sure you get paid on time.

If you’re running a small company, chances are you’re using Excel spreadsheets to enter invoice information, check your company’s bank account every day and manually tag invoices that have been paid.

Microsoft Excel has been such a powerful tool for so many different use cases that plenty of startups are trying to replace it — I call this phenomenon The Great Unbundling of Excel. And Upflow is one of those startups.

If you want to replace a system that works well, you need to make it radically better. In order to do that, Upflow has created a payment brick that sits between your bank account and your customers.

Every time you send an invoice, you can write an email from the Upflow interface so that the entire sales team is on the same page. Making this experience collaborative with a software-as-a-service approach is already a big improvement over Excel spreadsheets.

Your invoice features banking information for your Upflow account. When your customer transfers the money, Upflow can instantly mark an invoice as paid. The startup transfers money back to your company’s bank account every day.

Over time, you get insights about your recurring customers, you can see how much money your clients collectively owe you and you can send reminders to late clients.

If you want to read more about Upflow, you can read my profile of the company.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Upflow grabs .7 million to streamline payment processes

Parallel Markets is a new startup aiming to make it as easy to buy and sell private company shares as it is to buy public company stock.

COO Nicholas Goss said this is becoming an issue for startups as they stay private longer, which means early employees can find their equity locked up for longer periods of time — and that’s assuming they can even afford to exercise their stock options.

“This is the type of thing that’s really changing the game when it comes to attracting talent,” Goss said.

CTO Brian Muller added, “There’s a pent-up demand, both for the ability to sell and the ability to buy … We’re bringing our platform into the mix to work directly with issuers to support that liquidity in a structured way.”

That idea of working with issuers (in other words, the companies whose stock is being sold) is a big part of what the Parallel Markets team said distinguishes them from other secondary marketplaces, which they described as focused primarily on targeting employees and investors with private stock. Co-founder and CEO Tony Peccatiello said that while these sales usually happen without involving the company throughout the process, Parallel Markets is taking a different approach, one that “puts the control over these transactions in the hands of a CFO.”

In other words, Parallel Markets will work with company executives to create what Peccatiello described as “structured liquidity events,” where employees can sell their stock to designated buyers at a given time. The platform also gives the companies additional controls, like setting floors and ceilings on the price per share.

Meanwhile, all the employees get notified when there’s an opportunity to sell their stock. And the sales are handled by Parallel Markets’ subsidiary broker dealer in a way that’s compliant with the various regulations.

Peccatiello said the startup — which has raised $1.4 million itself from friends and family — is already working with some initial partners, although it hasn’t actually powered any stock purchases yet: “We expect to be doing those in Q4 of this year.”

Goss (who previously worked as an IPO lawyer at Latham & Watkins, as well as on the investment banking team at Credit Suisse) predicted that over time, startups will make this a bigger part of their compensation packages, where it “almost mimics in reverse the vesting cliff,” so there’s not just a schedule for receiving stock, but also “when you can start selling into these liquidity events.”

Today, Parallel Markets is officially launching a new tool called Passport that Muller said was created for its own needs — namely, verifying accredited investors.

He explained that equity crowdfunding sites, plus other platforms that work with accredited investors, currently need to subject those investors to “a lengthy and arduous on-boarding process” that involves uploading a variety of documents to confirm their accredited status.

With Passport, on the other hand, investors can go through the verification process just one time. After that, when they’re looking to invest through a platform that uses Passport, they can simply click a button to give Passport permission to share their information.

“We looked for partners who could provide this, but we did not find anyone who could provide an ongoing identity verification tool that worked across multiple platforms,” Peccatiello told me in a follow-up email. “We want identity to be truly portable — not only on other third-party websites but also places like the blockchain, which provides an interesting use case with smart contracts.”

Updated to clarify Peccatiello’s comparison with other secondary markets.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Parallel Markets is trying to make it easy to buy and sell private stock

Tyson Foods is getting into the seafood business.

Through the company’s venture capital arm, Tyson is investing in New Wave Foods, a San Francisco-based startup that’s making a plant-based shrimp substitute.

The company, founded by marine biologist Dominique Barnes and chief technology officer Michelle Wolf, who studied biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon, is helmed by longtime consumer goods executive Mary McGovern.

There’s a multibillion-dollar opportunity in the seafood market as consumers turn away from beef as a source of protein, and several startups are out in the market pursuing either plant-based or cultured protein alternatives to traditional seafood.

Indeed, Shiok Meats is a company that’s pursuing the development of a lab-grown alternative to farmed shellfish.

For Tyson, the investment is the latest foray into the increasingly competitive market for alternative meats.

The company was also an investor in Beyond Meat prior to its public offering and is backing the lab-grown meat company Memphis Meats, as well.

“We’re excited about this investment in the fast-growing segment of the plant-based protein market,” said Amy Tu, president of Tyson Ventures, in a statement. “This continues our focus of identifying and investing in companies with disruptive products and breakthrough technologies related to our core business so we can continue to serve a growing global population.”

Culling together a development team of food scientists, academics and chefs under the direction of co-founder Michelle Wolf, the company has produced a seaweed and plant-protein alternative to shrimp that contains the eight amino acids that are found in meat and seafood, the company says. New Wave Foods claims that its product is also lower in calories and salt than real shrimp and has zero cholesterol and no allergens.

“Our product is a delicious, one-for-one direct swap for the real thing, and interchangeable in a wide range of recipes,” McGovern said in a statement. “It gives chefs and food service operators great menu options while addressing consumers’ growing demand for sustainable choices.”

Tyson already has a line of alternative protein products that it launched earlier this year under the Raised & Rooted brand.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Tyson Ventures has invested in New Wave Foods, a startup making a plant-based shrimp substitute

Holy price hike, startuppers — you have just 48 hours left to save up to $1,300 on passes to Disrupt San Francisco 2019 on October 2-4. Don’t let time stand in your way of saving serious dough. Release your inner savvy shopper and beat the deadline. Early-bird savings disappear at 11:59 p.m. (PST) on September 6. Avoid the price hike — buy your early-bird passes today.

More than 10,000 attendees will be on hand to experience the very best of startup culture. Whether you come to be inspired by today’s leaders and tomorrow’s most promising startups or to gain business insight from industry analysts, you’ll find it all at Disrupt SF 2019.

Let’s look at just some of the leading experts who will grace our various stages and discuss new innovations and game-changing technologies (you can see the full agenda here):

• The Ethics of Snipping DNA with CRISPR — Rachel Haurwitz is the founder of Caribou Biosciences, a startup on the cutting edge of gene editing technologies — including animal and human DNA. She will chat with us about the ethical and scientific questions surrounding CRISPRing human embryos and what that could mean for the future of humanity.
• How to Take a Digital Brand Offline — E-commerce has fundamentally changed the way we browse and buy physical goods. But even though online sales have taken a huge bite out of brick-and-mortar, it doesn’t mean that digital brands aren’t interested in the prospect of offline channels. Hear from Rich Fulop (Brooklinen), James Reinhart (thredUP) and Susan Tynan (Framebridge) — three founders who have taken their own unique approach to launching a store.
• The Fourth Big Wave: Talking Crypto — If you care about understanding crypto and the ways it may well impact you sooner than you might imagine, you won’t want to miss this fireside chat with Andreessen Horowitz general partner Chris Dixon.
• How to Raise My First Dollars — Venture funding may have boomed over the last decade, but the decisions around your initial funding are as tricky as ever. Hear how to take advantage of the current landscape from top Silicon Valley early-stage thinkers, including pre-seed investor Charles Hudson of Precursor Ventures, early-stage investor Annie Kadavy of Redpoint Ventures and Russ Heddleston, CEO of DocSend.

You’ll find plenty of networking opportunities in Startup Alley, where 1,200 early-stage startups and sponsors — including our TC Top Picks — showcase their latest innovations. Don’t miss out on the Startup Battlefield to watch an impressive group of startups launch on a world stage and compete for $100,000.

Be a savvy shopper and save big bucks. Buy your early-bird passes to Disrupt San Francisco 2019 by 11:59 p.m. (PST) on September 6.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt San Francisco 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Only 48 hours left on early-bird pricing to Disrupt SF 2019