Browsing Tag: Startups

Quibi, the short-form, mobile-focused video service that Hollywood executive Jeffrey Katzenberg first hinted at in 2017, officially launched on Monday.

After years of star-studded content announcements, not to mention $1.75 billion in funding, it might have been impossible for Quibi to live up to expectations. And indeed, it divided the hosts of the Original Content podcast.

None of us was totally won over, but Anthony and Jordan saw something to admire in Quibi’s ambition, and thought there was promise for the initial lineup of shows — particularly the reality programs like “Chrissy’s Court” and “Punk’d,” which actually seem to benefit from the constraints of the short episode format.

There are some interesting scripted titles too, but even the shows we liked — particularly the Liam Hemsworth thriller “Most Dangerous Game” — felt like they’d be better on a bigger screen, with a more traditional running time.

Darrell, meanwhile, enjoyed some of the content, but he was more convinced that the whole enterprise is a massive folly. In his view, the only way to make Quibi work is to take a looser approach to length and to bring the app to other devices.

You can listen to our review in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You can also send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)

And if you’d like to skip ahead, here’s how the episode breaks down:
0:00 Intro
0:27 “Star Trek: Picard” listener response
6:04 Quibi first impressions

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Original Content podcast: We have mixed feelings about Quibi

Startups big and small, across all industries, are affected by the novel coronavirus pandemic. From Etsy to MongoDB, from Twilio to Foursquare, these companies are looking for ways to capitalize and ultimately thrive in what has become a survivalist landscape.

These companies also happen to be portfolio companies of one Albert Wenger.

We’re excited to have Union Square Ventures’ Managing Director Albert Wenger join us for a live discussion on the impacts of COVID-19 on the firm, the advice he’s offering to his portfolio companies and adaptation strategies for the broader startup ecosystem.

Wenger has been vocal about how startups should approach PPP loans, and has an interesting perspective on this week’s news of Foursquare’s merger with Factual. We’re amped to hear more from him on both topics, and plenty more.

Before he began his investment career, Wenger was an entrepreneur himself, co-founding five (FIVE!) companies, including a management consulting firm, a hosted data analytics company, a technology subsidiary for Telebanc and DailyLit (a service for reading books by email or RSS). Wenger also served as president of Del.icio.us prior to and through its sale to Yahoo.

We have a handful of questions we’d like to ask, but Wenger has graciously offered to answer questions from the audience, as well. So come prepared!

The chat will begin tomorrow (Thursday, April 9) at 12pm EDT/9am PDT and go for about an hour.

We look forward to seeing you there! Sign up here to add the call details to your calendar.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | TechCrunch Live: Join USV Managing Director Albert Wenger for a live chat Thursday at 9am PDT

As more companies find their workflows upended by remote work in the pandemic crisis, there are plenty of SaaS startups aiming to sell them a new path to streamlining processes. Tonkean is an SF startup selling a no-code automation platform to do just that, and it’s in the fortunate position of just having closed a hefty Series A.

The company closed a $24 million round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Tonkean’s team tells TechCrunch. Lightspeed’s Raviraj Jain is joining Tonkean’s board. The company has raised just over $31 million to date.

Their software is a robotic automation and management platform catered toward ops that integrates with a bunch of data sources and allows customers to set up their own customizations. These customizations can help with routing tasks to the right person, automating follow-ups or moving data between systems. The software is meant to enable nearly endless customizations, but a big focus seems to be on stripping repeatable tasks from the workflows of ops teams or taking care of early steps in those processes.

“The future of enterprise software is adaptive and personalized,” CEO Sagi Eliyahu told TechCrunch in an interview.

The company frames its tech as “human-in-the-loop robotic process automation,” essentially using its no-code platform to allow the people completing tasks manually to create the automation processes for letting bots take over. The visual drag-and-drop workflow of creating these processes seems to be a big selling point. New customers can also shop around for functionality via templates added by other customers.

RPA has been a hot area in recent years, with players like Automation Anywhere and UIPath achieving sky-high private valuations. As the big players in the space focus on courting bigger and bigger clients, Tonkean’s tighter focus on streamlining workflows for operations teams could give them an inroad, even as they look to scale during uncertain times.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | No-code automation platform Tonkean raises M from Lightspeed

Motherly CEO Jill Koziol admits that it was a tough pitch when she and her co-founder Liz Tenety first tried to get investors on-board in 2015.

“We wanted to create a brand first and foremost,” Koziol told me. “We did not want to go and build a media company or a [direct-to-consumer] company or Facebook for moms — because, spoiler alert, it’s called Facebook.”

Instead, she described Motherly as a company that sits at the “intersection” of all three approaches. It started out by publishing motherhood-themed content on its website and on social media (and more recently in podcast form), which in turn encouraged the audience of 30 million unique users to start “engaging with us and with each other.”

Now that there’s a big audience and a real community, the company is getting ready to launch the Motherly Store. And it’s announcing that it has raised $5.4 million in Series A funding.

Koziol described her approach as building a trusted brand “that’s woman-centered — not baby-centered — and expert-driven,” then using that brand to sell products. She said Motherly has reversed the strategy of direct-to-consumer startups that sell products, then add content and community to support those commerce goals.

“Everyone says we did all the hard stuff first,” Koziol said. “We’re showing the world that motherhood is not niche, that you can build a brand through content and then create the natural extensions out of that.”

Image Credits: Motherly

The Series A funding was led by 8VC, with participation from Founders Fund, Muse Capital, AET and AmplifyHer Ventures.

“We’re long on millennial moms, and Motherly has demonstrated a unique ability to be at the center of this hyper-engaged market already,” AmplifyHer’s Meghan Cross told me via email. “Its content has organically sparked a vibrant conversation, and commerce is the logical extension.”

Koziol, meanwhile, said that Motherly was able to build this audience with “virtually” no marketing spend. That sounds particularly difficult given all the other parenting and motherhood-themed content already online, but Koziol said that she and Tenety (a former Washington Post editor) are both millennial mothers themselves, and they realized that “in media brands across the board, motherhood was treated as cartoonish … everything was very baby-centered.”

She argued Motherly has succeeded so far because it’s aimed at a more educated and more diverse group of women, who are more likely to continue working after they have children.

And as Motherly moves into commerce, she said that will include both company-branded products (Sounds True is publishing the startup’s second book, “The Motherly Guide to Becoming Mama: Redefining the Pregnancy, Birth, and Postpartum Journey”), as well as a Motherly Store, which will offer a curated selection of products for moms, largely from smaller, direct-to-consumer brands.

Koziol suggested that these brands will benefit from access to Motherly’s audience (particularly as advertising costs have grown to unsustainable heights for many D2C brands), while moms will benefit from having a “credible” source that can help “narrow down those choices.”

Of course, the landscape for media, commerce and parenting have all changed dramatically in the past few weeks thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. But Koziol noted that as a “100% work from home company,” Motherly was better-prepared for this shift.

More broadly, she suggested that moms are going to need more help and support than ever — which Motherly is trying to provide, for example by offering its online birth class for free.

“This woman in our audience has been layering roles on for years,” Koziol said. “And what we are now seeing, in addition to carrying the mental load of parenthood disproportionately and being a full-time bread winner, you’re layering full-time child-care and homeschooling. These are three different jobs.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Mom-focused content startup Motherly raises .4M as it expands into commerce

Public markets around the world have been tanking for the past few weeks, and many companies simply can’t operate during a lockdown. Sheltering in place has had some terrible economic consequences, with a record number of Americans getting laid off, including many startup employees.

But what is happening in Europe? You might also be wondering whether European tech startups have to lay off a significant chunk of their workforce and whether financial capital has become scarce.

That’s why I interviewed Jean de La Rochebrochard, a partner for Kima Ventures, backed by French telco and media entrepreneur Xavier Niel. They focus on seed and Series A investments and invest in dozens of startups each year. He oversees hundreds of startup investments at any given time, which means he has his finger on the pulse of the tech ecosystem in France and across Europe.

The interview was translated from French and edited for clarity and brevity.

TechCrunch: At Kima Ventures, have you seen any change when it comes to investment pace?

Jean de La Rochebrochard: There has been a big change at the deal-flow level. But we already committed to some deals before the lockdown. We’re currently closing all the deals that we were looking at. Over the past 15 days, we’ve closed 15 deals, I think.

So it might slow down in the next 15 or 30 days…

Yes, it’s going to slow down, that’s for sure. But we’ll only know for sure in a month when we’re done with our backlog.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | How one European VC firm is reacting to the economic crisis

Earlier this week, the Equity crew caught up with Work-Bench investor Jon Lehr to get his take on the current market, and how his firm goes about making investment decisions.

The conversation was a treat, so we cut a piece of it off for everyone to listen to. The full audio and a loose transcript are also available after the jump.

What did Danny and Alex learn while talking to Lehr? A few things, including what Seed II-level investments need these days to be attractive (Hint: It’s not a raw ARR threshold), and what’s going on in SaaS today (deals slowing, but not for select founders; relationships are key to doing deals today), and why being a VC is actually work.

But what stood out the most was how Lehr thinks about finding investment opportunities. While some VCs like to cultivate images of being gut-investors, cutting checks based on first meetings and the like, Lehr told TechCrunch about how he researches the market to find pain-points, and then the startups that might solve those issues.

You can listen to that bit of the chat in the clip below:

Extra Crunch subscribers, the rest of the goodies are below. (A big thanks to Danny for cleaning up the written transcript.)

The audio

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Talking venture, B2B and thesis-driven investment with Work-Bench’s Jon Lehr

A new startup called twine wants to help people feel less isolated and alone. Though the project has been in the works for around six months, it’s launching at a time when people are struggling with being cut off from family, friends, neighbors, co-workers and others due to the COVID-19 outbreak and the resulting government lockdowns and self-quarantines. Described simply as a “Zoom for meeting new people,” twine is a group video chat experience where people are encouraged to have meaningful discussions that spark new friendships.

In twine, users are matched with four other partners who they’ll then have 1-to-1 conversations with for eight minutes apiece. The full gathering lasts for a total of 40 minutes, including the virtual guide portion where the ground rules are set.

Participants choose from a library of more than 250 “deep” questions, then get matched with partners who want to explore the same topics. They then RSVP for twine’s digital gatherings in their time zone and check in when it’s time to start.

The overall experience is meant to help people find connections by skipping the small talk and going straight to what matters. But the focus is on friendships, not dating. Afterward, users are encouraged to set reminders to get back in touch and meet again in future gatherings.

There’s a hint of Chatroulette to this idea, given that users could be matched to people who are only there to disrupt the experience, in theory at least. But the company aims to reduce the potential for this sort of shock trolling by permanently banning members who are flagged for making others uncomfortable in any sort of way. We also noticed the app asks for your email, phone and ZIP code during its onboarding process, so it’s not entirely an anonymous experience.

In addition, twine requires users to rate each conversation when it ends, and members have to be pre-approved before joining a chat. The company says it’s looking to move toward “real ID only” in the future to further reduce the potential for trolling.

That said, there’s still a bit of a risk in chatting openly with strangers about highly personal topics. Twine’s guidelines say that conversations are not to be discussed with others, but this is not a doctor-patient relationship with legal protections for confidentiality. It’s just a group chat app with people who may or may not be there to follow the rules.

That said, the internet is currently experiencing a rebirth of sorts, due to COVID-19. People are coming online to look for connections. Social media is actually becoming social. This is an ideal environment to test something as optimistic as twine, which at its core believes people are largely good and will use the technology appropriately.

The idea for twine comes from serial entrepreneurs Lawrence Coburn and Diana Rau. Coburn spent the last nine years as founder and CEO of mobile events technology provider DoubleDutch, which was acquired by Cvent in 2019. Rau, meanwhile, was co-founder and CEO of Veterati, a digital mentoring platform for veterans that had also leveraged 1-to-1 conversations as part of its community-building experience.

The founders already knew each other from the Georgetown entrepreneurship ecosystem. And Coburn was an advisor to Veterati, and Rau had worked at DoubeDutch, as well.

Coburn describes his vision for twine as something in between a new social network and a substitute for those who are spiritual, but not religious, in terms of helping people who want to “be better humans.” Rau says she wanted to work on twine to help end loneliness by giving people a place to explore humanity on a one-on-one basis.

The app was originally intended to connect people who would meet up in real-life gatherings, but the coronavirus outbreak shifted those plans and accelerated launch plans.

“Launching a new company during the best of times is really, really hard. During a global pandemic? Yikes!,” wrote Coburn, in a blog post about the launch. “But as the new reality settles in, it has become clear to me that the world needs twine or something like it more than ever. The macro forces that inspired Diana and I to start twine – loneliness, polarization, isolation – will only be exacerbated by social distancing. A societal loneliness that was already classified as an epidemic pre coronavirus, is about to get way, way worse,” he added.

The startup is backed by $1.4 million in seed funding, closed on March 12, led by DoubleDutch investor, Hinge Capital. Other investors from DoubleDutch have also returned to fund twine, including FJ Labs, Brand Foundry and Bragiel Brothers. Angels in the round include April Underwood (Slack), Jay Hoffmann (Rocketmiles), Scott Heiferman (Meetup) and Vishal Kapur (Screenhero).

In the future, twine aims to be subscription-based and launch real-life gatherings, as originally planned, when it’s safe to do so.

The app is currently in private beta on iOS and web. Currently, it has a waitlist of around 1,000 users, mainly from New York City and San Francisco, but twine will be available worldwide.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Twine aims to end social isolation with its video chat app for deep conversations

France’s health minister Olivier Véran and digital minister Cédric O have officially announced that the French government is working on a smartphone app to slow the spread of COVID-19. The government is putting a stamp of approval on the Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT) project but remains cautious about what to expect from an app.

Using mobile apps to track the coronavirus is a sensitive issue in Europe. Dozens of nonprofit organizations have written a common statement urging governments to respect human rights.

They fear that governments could use this opportunity to enforce far-reaching surveillance measures that don’t comply with the regulatory framework and that remain in place after the coronavirus crisis. The European Commission reminded governments that they should implement “appropriate safeguards” as EU citizens are not going to trust contact-tracing apps if they don’t treat personal information appropriately.

That’s probably why the government is preventively trying to reassure people before releasing the Stop Covid app. According to a statement, the Ministry for the Digital Sector says that it is working with the Health Ministry, the Justice Ministry and the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation to coordinate tech-based initiatives.

Led by Germany’s Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute for telecoms (HHI), the PEPP-PT project that was unveiled last week is a coalition of dozens of research institutions across multiple countries. France’s INRIA is a member of the PEPP-PT and the French government is willing to collaborate with the INRIA as part of the PEPP-PT effort.

They’re working on an open standard to develop contact-tracing apps. Those apps would rely on Bluetooth Low Energy to identify other phones running the same app. If, at some point, you are near an infected person, you would be notified.

And the French government says that there will be an app specifically designed to track people living in France. That app will leverage the PEPP-PT protocol.

People in favor of contact-tracing apps say that it would help break infection chains if you combine those apps with proactive tests and self-isolations.

In an interview with Le Monde, Cédric O and Olivier Véran detailed the effort. France isn’t going to force you to install the app and “Stop Covid” is only going to use Bluetooth. A prototype is in the works, but it’s going to take three to six weeks to develop.

Even then, the French government might not even release the app. “We’re not sure that we can overcome all the technical difficulties because Bluetooth hasn’t been designed to measure the distance between individuals. We will decide later if it would be useful to roll out such an application or not,” Cédric O told Le Monde .

When it comes to privacy, Cédric O says the app will be open-source and France’s privacy watchdog the CNIL will have a say. We’ve reached out to the CNIL for comment but the agency said it was too early to comment.

More importantly, details are still thin on the implementation of the PEPP-PT protocol in France. Privacy experts are debating the design of the system. Some argue that it should be as decentralized as possible. Smartphones should keep a log of your social interactions (via ephemeral Bluetooth identifiers). Your phone would regularly fetch a list of infected ephemeral Bluetooth identifiers and do the heavy lifting.

The PEPP-PT project currently supports centralized and decentralized approaches, which means that governments have to decide on an implementation. In a centralized system, a server would assign each user an anonymized identifier and collect data about your social interactions. Each user would be able to fetch the status of its identifier to check whether they’ve been potentially infected or not. It creates a single point of failure and presents risks if someone is able to match anonymized identifiers with real names.

The Ministry for the Digital Sector also detailed how France is leveraging tech in general to understand the coronavirus outbreak, improve COVID-19 treatments and plan the end of the lockdown in France.

In addition to the app that is currently in the works, the French government has rolled out an official website to inform people, is encouraging telemedicine services to treat patients (such as Covidom from public hospitals in Paris), is mining aggregated data from telecom companies to understand how people move around the country and is leveraging machine learning on big data to forecast the coronavirus outbreak.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | France is officially working on ‘Stop Covid’ contact-tracing app

Fintech startups were hot news before the COVID-19 era, but the pandemic hasn’t bumped the sector out of the headlines.

Companies that were pitching optimistic news a few weeks ago are now cutting staff. Others are facing a surge of users trying to find their financial footing in the face of uncertainty. Some fintech shops are sharing data by the heap, while others refuse to disburse even a morsel. 

And what about all those credit card startups?

As a startup category, fintech is in a complex spot as the global markets shed value. Small businesses hampered by shelter-in-place orders are scrambling for alternate capital sources and individuals are eager to secure their financial health.

It’s a time of utmost use — or uselessness — for fintech solutions.

To make sense of all the changes, we dug our teeth into several news stories. We also collected and peppered in fresh data from a host of startups in the space and mixed in commentary from investor Kyle Lui of DCM, a venture firm that invested in the recent (and successful) fintech IPO of Bill.com.

So here’s a brief, contentedly complete look at the world of fintech. We’ll start with who we know is struggling, move on to companies that are either quiet or unclear in their recent performance and we’ll close with some companies that are performing well in the odd world we find ourselves in.

Who is struggling?

The snap from rapid growth and layoffs was rapid for many players in the space. A number of firms that we’ve covered recently have rapidly seen their fortunes change.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Fintech’s uneven new reality has helped some startups, harmed others

Thrive, founded by Twitter alumni Deepak Rao and Siddharth Batra, wants to fund student expenses by looking at job offer letters as a way to evaluate loans. Today, it launched its loan platform and is accessible to students on over 400 campuses across 31 states.

The San Francisco company helps underfunded students, a group that isn’t typically accounted for by traditional financial institutions that issue loans based on credit score. According to co-founder Rao, Thrive is for people like “first-generation Americans, people who come from low-income families, or first-generation students.”

Before launching broadly, Thrive secured $10.25 million in funding and $5 million in venture debt. Today, the company also announced that it has picked up a $200 million credit line from Credit Suisse.

Investors include Max Levchin, founder of PayPal and Affirm; Adam Bain, former COO of Twitter; and David Sacks, a general partner at Craft Ventures.

“We started the company with the mission to invest in human potential,” Rao said. “We basically built a product that empowers underfunded students and gives them access to funds for whatever things they need in order to transition into their professional lives.”

The cash can be used flexibly for items like new laptops or flights home.

Students can sign up on the platform and upload an offer letter for an upcoming summer internship or full-time college postgraduate offer. Thrive validates the document, then offers a loan to the students.

For an internship, Thrive unlocks 25% of the student’s total internship salary for a loan. For a full-time job, Thrive will offer 25% of an individual’s first three months’ salary.

Thrive charges students between $7 to $15 per every $1,000 they receive per month, and they’re allowed to take as much as they need from the dollar amount that Thrive offers them. If you take $1,000 and your internship starts in three months, and if you want to pay it back in one go, you have to pay between $21 to $45 above the $1,000 when you pay it back.

Once students prove they’re soon going to be employed, they can access the funds within one business day and then start paying back Thrive once they start their new job.

Thrive’s payback structure is similar to the income-sharing format that a company like Lambda School uses. Lambda School says it gives students the option to pay zero dollars for tuition, and then pay 17% of their salary they earn from a job that pays a minimum of $50,000 annually for two years.

So while it’s not new to bet on salary, Thrive is looking at turning the concept of incoming sharing on its head and applying it to loan financing.

When they founded  the company in 2017, Rao and Batra were both classmates at Stanford and then co-workers at Twitter. Rao comes from a low-income family, so he personally felt the blow of costs that come with being a grad student in the United States, from flying home to paying for your laptop. Or just even dinner.

Thrive declined to share specific financials or comment on profitability. Rao did say that the company is growing “5 times year over year” and has enough funds to avoid raising venture capital until the end of 2021.

“Our biggest expense is the ability to fund loans, and we are not funding loans through equity money,” Rao said. “At the end of the day, it’s like a software business, our biggest cost is the cost of goods, which is capital, and someone else is funding the capital.”

Not needing more venture capital might be especially helpful as we enter a time of economic uncertainty due to COVID-19. Unlike other fintech companies, which have had to tighten their underwriting standards to prepare for risk due to the uncertain economy, Rao tells TechCrunch that Thrive will not change how willing they are to write loans.

Some tech internships have been canceled due to COVID-19, he noted, and if students have had an offer rescinded, Thrive “updates the payment plan accordingly.”

“As long as your internship is still active, your offer is still issued,” he said. That doesn’t matter whether the intern will be remote or in-person.

Thrive is expanding its business as undergraduate and graduate students are entering a job market with historically high unemployment. We’ll see how a tough job market impacts a company that depends on offer letters for loans, and whether their bet on alternative financing pays off.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Thrive gives loans to students based on summer internships and job offers