Nuvemshop, a Latin American answer to Shopify, raises $30 million

After several failed startup attempts and nine years spent building Nuvemshop into Latin America’s answer to Shopify, the four co-founders of the company have managed to raise $30 million in venture capital funding as they look to expand their business.

The new funding came from previous investor Kaszek Ventures and new lead investor Qualcomm, with participation from FJ Labs, IGNIA, Elevar Equity and Kevin Efrusy, from the longtime Accel Partners investor’s personal wealth.

It’s been a long road since Santiago Sosa, Alejandro Vazquez, Martin Palombo and Alejandro Alfonso first began working together in Buenos Aires. The quartet started on their entrepreneurial journey trying to develop a marketplace software product for Latin America, but when that didn’t take off, they turned their attention to a more basic problem — how to get small and medium-sized businesses selling online.

Now the company boasts 65,000 businesses that use its platform providing everything from billing and payment processing to logistics and shipping solutions transacting over $100 million per month in sales. Operating as Nuvemshop in Brazil and Tiendanube in the rest of the region, the company has offices in São Paulo, Buenos Aires and Mexico City, with plans to expand into Colombia and Peru in 2021.

Nuvemshop began as more of a consulting business and evolved into the suite of software tools that have managed to attract attention from investors like Qualcomm Ventures.

“Nuvemshop’s platform accelerates a company’s digital transformation and has enabled thousands of SMBs across Latin America to go digital by tapping into the company’s one-stop shop of seamlessly integrated solutions,” said Alexandre Villela, senior director of Qualcomm Technologies Inc. and managing director at Qualcomm Ventures Latin America. “We share their strong engineering focus and look forward to helping them scale their business with our investment.” 

Wind Ventures gears up to invest in startups looking at Latin America

Nuvemshop raised its first money in 2015 from Kaszek Ventures (a $5 million investment), and, as the business picked up steam, raised $7 million more from local investors.

It makes money by charging a subscription fee that begins at $3 per month and a transaction fee that decreases as customers buy more expensive subscription packages.

Now that the company has an established footprint in the region, it’s going to focus on three new areas of growth, according to chief executive, Santiago Sosa.

Nuvemshop chief executive, Santiago Sosa. Image credit: Nuvemshop

The company plans to launch a payment processing and logistics gateway of its own. That marketplace will give customers access to more robust shipping solutions thanks to the power of bundling lower demand into a single delivery and ordering system. Nuvemshop also pitches its customers an app store for connecting them to new developer tools.

Finally, the company intends to offer a broader array of financial services. It already offers payment processing, but will look to develop additional services around lending based on revenue.

Like Shopify, Nuvemshop provides a necessary ballast to the big e-commerce aggregation sites like MercadoLibre and Amazon. “Everything they do they try to optimize for the buyer,” Sosa said. That places incredible pricing pressure on retailers and Nuvemshop offers a direct sales alternative, with lower fees, according to Sosa.

The pent-up demand that Sosa sees, is fairly astonishing.

“People are talking about e-commerce penetration going from [roughly] 10% over total retail sales to [roughly] 20%, as it has happened in other countries. We see it differently, as we envision a massive disruption around commerce in the next 15 years, and are pretty confident that [roughly] 90% of retail will be somehow tech-enabled,” said Sosa, in a statement. 

Latin America’s digital transformation is making up for lost time

 

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Kegg, a connected fertility tracker and Kegel trainer for women, launches out of beta

Fertility tracking has seen an explosion of startup activity in recent years. Femtech startup Lady Technologies is adding to this rich mix with the full U.S. launch of a dual-purpose device, called kegg, that’s designed to measure hormonal changes in a woman’s cervical fluid to help her determine the chance of conception on a given day.

The egg-shaped gizmo, which features a gold-plated steel cap and band ringing its tip, as well as a silicone tail to house its Bluetooth radio (so it can chat to the companion app), doubles as a connected pelvic floor trainer (the “k” in kegg is for “Kegels”) — taking a leaf out of U.K. femtech pioneer Elvie’s playbook. Though the two-in-one function is a new twist.

Kegg relies on a technology called impedance to sense electrolyte levels in a woman’s cervical fluid in order to detect the hormonal switch from estrogen to progesterone dominance that accompanies ovulation — via a daily test that’s touted as taking just two minutes. (If you’re also using it for the optional Kegal exercises that would take a bit longer.)

It’s a new era for fertility tech

“A minute electrical impulse at a specific frequency is emitted from the gold-plated electrodes on the kegg and received by the other (this process is then reversed). By sensing the changing trends in the impedance, we’re able to detect the hormonal change and make a prediction to the user,” explains CEO and founder Kristina Cahojova. “Since every woman’s fluids are slightly different, kegg needs to record at least one fertile window to provide personalized predictions.”

“We have numerous patents on the underlying design of kegg and key aspects of how it operates,” she adds.

Kegg was unveiled on the TechCrunch Disrupt SF stage, back in 2018, as part of our startup battlefield competition (though it didn’t go on to win). Fast-forward two years and it’s now officially launching out of beta to offer the FDA-registered gizmo to the U.S. market — priced at $275.

It’s announcing a $1.5 million seed round too, with investors including Crescent Ridge Partners, SOSV, Texas Halo Fund, Fermata Fund and MegaForce, as well as some unnamed angel investors.

Kegg tracks your fertility by measuring vaginal mucus with a kegel ball

Commenting in a statement, Samina Hydery, kegg advisor and women’s health investor, said: “Investor interest in femtech and fertility has accelerated over the last few years. While I’ve seen an influx of ovulation prediction kits, at-home blood tests, menstrual tracking apps, and temperature monitors in the consumer market, kegg’s value proposition became clear once I spoke with women about their experiences trying to conceive and medical researchers in the field. It’s hard not to get excited by the various growth vectors that can expand kegg’s market in the future — from being used as a tool for natural family planning to helping monitor postpartum/perimenopausal health.”

“We pride ourselves in having almost half of our investors women,” notes Cahojova — whose inspiration for building kegg was personal, having suffered from irregular menstrual cycles herself.

“I didn’t want to be treated with hormones. When I talked to fertility instructors or a specialized fertility doctor, all they wanted to know about was my patterns of cervical fluid. Why? Because the fertile window is defined only by the presence of fertile cervical fluid, having a positive LH [luteinizing hormone] test is nice but it won’t help you get information to fix your cycles. That’s why so many fertility doctors are interested in cervical fluid and that is why so many women are told to track it with their fingers,” she explains.

“How on earth are you supposed to be able to track objectively something so important, yet private, without the help of technology? I was frustrated and angry that every company that I talked to didn’t have a solution and didn’t want to make this so-needed product because it ‘would have to go into the vagina’. So I set out to make a product that would help me and women like me.”

Thus far kegg has been hitting a chord with U.S. women of reproductive age who are trying for a baby, according to Cahojova — who says her startup has built a 2,000-strong community of fertility-tracking women over kegg’s beta period.

“Our typical user is a woman in her reproductive age,” she says. “Our users are in long-term relationships or married and they likely have been actively trying to conceive for more than three months. Fifty percent are trying to conceive their first child, while the remaining are already mothers.

“Our customers have experience with BBT (body basal temperature charting) or LH tests (ovulation tests) and they are overall interested in holistic fertility and wellness, not in medication. They also prefer the convenience of kegg over other methods that either need to be worn throughout the night or used more frequently.”

Image credit: Lady Technologies

“Each woman is unique and so are her cycles,” she adds. “Unlike ovulation trackers, kegg helps women understand their fertile window and cyclical fertility and follow their own patterns. Usually women take up to six months to learn how to read cervical fluid patterns. Our customers report that kegg gives them confidence and they feel empowered. Many keggsters conceived with kegg after years of trying because kegg gave them trends beyond ovulation. Nothing makes me more happy than an email from a customer whose life changed thanks to my work and kegg.” (On that it says “several” women have reported successful pregnancies using kegg since the beta launch in 2018.)

The startup also has its eye on international expansion, including to Asia (with the support of its Japanese market-focused investor Fermata) — with a plan to launch kegg in Singapore in late October, and in Japan and Canada next year.

While the kegg has a core focus on fertility tracking (and a secondary feature as a connected pelvic floor trainer), Cahojova is excited about wider possibilities for women’s health that she hopes will be opened up as they’re able to take in and crunch more data.

Kegg users’ impedance readings are uploaded to the startup’s cloud for analysis, so its algorithms can make a personalized fertility prediction. But its website also notes it uses “anonymized/pseudonymized” data for research into women’s health. (Cahojova specifies users’ personal data is never shared outside the company. “Any data we offer to researchers we work with is completed anonymized,” is her privacy promise.)

Asked what areas of research she’s hoping kegg will help advance, she tells us: “Researchers have noted that health issues can affect typical electrolyte cycles. In many of our internal studies we’ve seen examples where readings were ‘out of norm’ for the user. In case after case we found evidence of underlying health issues (for example infections) were the cause. In the future our goal is to understand how kegg can help monitor overall cervical health.”

Cahojova also says the device is being used by fertility instructors and doctors to help with monitoring their patients. “The beauty of kegg is that by having a user-friendly and modern device that women like to use we can get data on changes of vaginal fluids on a large scale. With kegg data we also hope to help doctors finally answer their billion-dollar question — how can they improve the quality of cervical fluid.”

“We are supportive of science and are open for research collaborations,” she adds. “We provided kegg for independent peer-reviewed clinical study under Dr. Gabriela López Armas, MD, PhD, for her research on kegg and other fertility trackers. All the participants finished the protocols in summer of 2020 and the study is to be published independently in the near future.”

While the business model for kegg is currently fixed-price hardware sales, Cahojova says the startup is looking at offering subscription packages in the future. “In the future, we want to offer more to our users, e.g.: connecting them to specialists to review their cycles or view of additional layers of information. Once we have enhanced services ready, we’ll look at switching to a subscription model,” she adds.

Juno Bio launches a vaginal microbiome test kit — targeting the women’s health data gap

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Spendesk raises another $18 million for its corporate card and expense service

French startup Spendesk has added $18 million to its Series B round. The company already raised $38.4 million as part of its Series B last year, which means that it raised $56.4 million as part of this round. Eight Roads Ventures is investing in today’s extension round.

Spendesk, as the name suggests, focuses on all things related to spend management. The company issues virtual and physical cards for employees, lets you set up an approval workflow and manages expense reimbursements. It can also centralize all your invoices and receipts on the platform.

By centralizing everything on the same platform, it lets you control your spending in real time and save time on accounting tasks. Reconciliation is easier if you combine transactions and receipts on Spendesk. Clients can also export data to Xero, Datev, Netsuite or Sage.

Image Credits: Spendesk

For big expenses, you can send a request to your manager. If they approve your request, you receive a single-use virtual card for that expense.

Similarly, if your company gives you a physical debit card, you get a pre-defined budget. Your manager can top up your card for big expenses, block ATM withdrawals, block weekend transactions and more. Employees can check their payments from the mobile app, see their card balance and add receipts.

Spendesk is a software-as-a-service product with a monthly subscription fee. While transactions have probably slowed down due to the economic crisis, the company says that its subscription revenue has doubled year-over-year. In just a year, the company grew from 100 to 200 people.

It remains focused on small and medium companies across Europe. There are 40,000 people using Spendesk through their companies. Clients include Algolia, Curve, Doctolib, Raisin and Wefox. The company has hired Joseph Smith as Chief Revenue Officer, pictured left above with the company’s CEO Rodolphe Ardant (pictured right).

Image Credits: Spendesk

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Join Yext’s Howard Lerman for a live Q&A today at 2 pm EDT/11 am PDT

Today’s the day! This afternoon at 2 p.m. EDT/11 a.m. PDT, Yext CEO Howard Lerman will join TechCrunch for a live chat.

The conversation is part of our continuing Extra Crunch Live series, now in its second season. What are we up to in the second installment of the conversations? The same as before, bringing the most interesting founders and investors ’round for a chat that you can contribute to by bringing your own questions. (Make sure you’re signed up so you can jump right in.)

As we wrote last week, Lerman is not just another public company CEO: His company, Yext, has some old-fashioned history with TechCrunch, having pitched at one of our events back in 2009. It went well, with Yext quickly raising money afterward.

We’ll spend a little bit of time in the past talking about Yext’s history as a startup. I want to know at what stage did Howard begin to consciously prep Yext for an IPO — the company went public in 2017 — and how long until he felt the company was ready? Given that we just came off one of the most active quarters in recent history for technology companies going public, it’s a good time to dig into the matter.

2020 IPO report card: Are tech’s newest public companies meeting expectations?

We’ll also get Howard’s take on the public markets in 2020 and whether he was happy with Yext’s IPO timing.

For the early-stage founders in the crowd, we have stuff prepped for you as well. Yext has moved from a business best-known for building a system that helps companies keep their diverse online listings up to date with their most pertinent information, to a search-first company that is leading its customer acquisition cycles with its “Answers” product.

How did the company manage to build the latter while eating off the former, and how has the company balanced its continued development since? What can startups learn from the choices that Yext has made?

And, TechCrunch recently reviewed Howard’s social media posts regarding Black Lives Matter: “As CEO, I will see to it that our company continues to be advocates for equality and justice.” So, how does he view the role of politics inside of tech companies, and what advice does he have for founders who are looking to build a lasting culture?

It’s going to be a great chat. Make sure you’ve signed up for Extra Crunch and I’ll see you in a few hours.

Bring your best questions. Howard is a good chat, so he’ll have something to say if you ask something great. Details after the jump.

Details

Below are links to add the event to your calendar and to save the Zoom link. We’ll share the YouTube link shortly before the discussion:

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Caliber, with $2.2 million in seed funding, launches a fitness coaching platform

The coronavirus pandemic has thrown the fitness space for a loop. Caliber, a startup that focuses on one-to-one personal training, is today launching a brand new digital coaching platform on the heels of a $2.2 million seed round led by Trinity Ventures.

Caliber launched in 2018 with a content model, offering an email newsletter and a library of instructional fitness content.

“My cofounders started testing the idea of coaching people individually and that’s where the light bulb really went off,” said cofounder and CEO Jared Cluff. “They saw that more than anything, people need expert guidance and a really genuinely personalized plan for their fitness routine.”

That was the origin of Caliber as it is known today.

When users join the platform they are matched with a Caliber coach. The company says that it brings on about five of every 100 applications for coaches on the platform, accepting only the very best trainers.

These coaches then take into account the goals of users and build out a personalized fitness plan in conjunction with the user, which begins with a video or phone consultation. Once the plan, which is comprised of strength training, cardio and nutrition, is finalized, the coach loads it into the app.

Users then follow the instructions from their instructor via the app and log their progress. Interestingly, these aren’t live video appointments with a trainer, but rather an asynchronous ongoing conversation with a coach that is facilitated by the app.

Users can also integrate their Apple Health app with Caliber to track nutrition and cardio, giving the coach a full 360-degree view of their progress.

Alongside providing feedback and encouragement, the coach ultimately provides a layer of accountability.

[gallery ids="2059748,2059750,2059751,2059752"]

This combination of real human coaching in a less synchronous, time intensive manner has allowed for Caliber to charge at a higher price than your standard workout generator apps but come in much lower than the average cost of an actual, in-person personal trainer.

Most Caliber users will pay between $200 and $400 per month to use the platform. Coaches, which are 1099 workers on Caliber, take home 60 percent of the revenue generated from users.

Pre-launch, Caliber has more than tripled its membership across the last six months and increased the number of workouts per member by 150 percent, according to the company. Cluff says the startup is doing north of $1 million in annual recurring revenue.

Of the 41 trainers on the platform, 37 percent are female and about a quarter are non-white. On the HQ team, which totals seven people, one is female and two-thirds of the founding team are LGBTQ.

“The biggest challenge is not dissimilar to the challenge we faced at Blue Apron, where I was most recently, in that we wanted to create the category around mealkits,” said Cluff. “We want to build a category around fitness training in a space that is super fragmented with no branded leader.”

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India’s Razorpay becomes unicorn after new $100 million funding round

Bangalore-headquartered Razorpay, one of a handful of Indian fintech startups that has demonstrated accelerated growth in recent years, has joined the coveted unicorn club after raising $100 million in a new financing round, the payments processing startup said on Monday.

The new financing round, a Series D, was co-led by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC and Sequoia India, the six-year-old Indian startup said. The new round valued the startup at “a little more than $1 billion,” co-founder and chief executive Harshil Mathur told TechCrunch in an interview.

Existing investors Ribbit Capital, Tiger Global, Y Combinator and Matrix Partners also participated in the round, which brings Razorpay’s total to-date raise to $206.5 million.

Razorpay accepts, processes and disburses money online for small businesses and enterprises. In recent years, the startup has expanded its offerings to provide loans to businesses and also launched a neo-banking platform to issue corporate credit cards, among other products.

India’s Razorpay nabs $20M led by Tiger Global for its Stripe-like payment gateway

Mathur and Shashank Kumar (pictured above), who met each other at IIT Roorkee, started Razorpay in 2014. They began to explore opportunities around a payments processing business after realizing just how difficult it was for small businesses such as young startups to accept money online less than a decade ago. There were very few payment processing firms in India then, and startups needed to produce a long list of documents.

The early team of about 11 people at Razorpay shared a single apartment as the co-founders rushed to meet with over 100 bankers to convince banks to work with them. The conversations were slow and remained in a deadlock for so long that the co-founders felt helpless explaining the same challenge to investors numerous times, they recalled in an interview last year.

To say things have changed for Razorpay would be an understatement. It’s become the largest payments provider for business in India, said Mathur. Razorpay, which competes with Prosus Ventures’ PayU, accepts a wide-range of payment options, including credit cards, debit cards, mobile wallets and UPI.

“Razorpay has established itself as a clear leader, with its strong focus on customer experience and product innovation,” said Choo Yong Cheen, chief investment officer for Private Equity at GIC, in a statement. “GIC has a long track record of partnering with leading fintech companies globally and is delighted to partner with Razorpay in its journey to transform payments and banking.”

India’s Razorpay launches corporate credit cards, current accounts support in major neo banking push

Some of Razorpay’s clients include budget lodging decacorn Oyo, fintech firm Cred, social giant Facebook, e-commerce Flipkart, top food delivery startups Zomato and Swiggy, online learning platform Byju’s, supply chain platform Zilingo, travel ticketing firms Yatra and Goibibo, and telecom giant Airtel.

The startup expects to process about $25 billion in transactions — up five times from last year — for nearly 10 million of its customers this year, said Mathur.

He attributed some of the growth to the coronavirus pandemic, which he said has accelerated the digital adoption among many businesses.

On the neo-banking and capital side, Mathur said, Razorpay expects RazorpayX and Razorpay Capital to account for about 35% of the startup’s revenue by the end of March next year.

Mathur said the startup’s payment processing service continues to be its fastest-growing business and does not need much capital to grow, so the startup will be deploying the fresh funds to expand its neo-banking offerings to include vendor payment, and expense and tax management and other features.

The startup, which aims to work with more than 50 million businesses by 2025, may also acquire a few firms as it explores opportunities around inorganic expansion in the neo-banking category, said Mathur.

“We will continue to make an impactful contribution to the growth of the industry, aid adoption in the under-served markets and drive new practices and a new thinking for the industry to follow. And this investment fits perfectly with our growth strategy,” he said.

While the coronavirus pandemic has slowed down deal-makings in India, about half a dozen startups in the country, including online learning platform Unacademy, and Pine Labs, have secured the unicorn status.

India’s online learning platform Unacademy raises $150 million at $1.45 billion valuation

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With thousands of subscribers, The Juggernaut raises $2 million for a South Asian-focused news outlet

As paid newsletters grow in popularity, Snigdha Sur, the founder of South Asian-focused media company The Juggernaut, has no qualms about avoiding the approach entirely. In October 2017, Sur started The Juggernaut as a free newsletter, called InkMango. As she searched for news on the South Asian diaspora, she found that articles lacked original reporting, aggregation was becoming repetitive and mainstream news organizations weren’t answering big questions.

Then InkMango crossed 700 free readers, and Sur saw an opportunity for a full-bodied media company, not just a newsletter.

One year and a Y Combinator graduation later, The Juggernaut has worked with more than 100 contributors (both journalists and illustrators) to provide analysis on South Asian news. Recent headlines on The Juggernaut include: The Evolution of Padma Lakshmi; How Ancestry Test Results Became Browner; and How the Death of a Bollywood Actor Became a Political Proxy War. The network approach, instead of a single newesletter approach,aggreff is working so far: Sur says that The Juggernaut has garnered “thousands of subscribers.” During COVID-19, The Juggernaut’s net subscribers have grown 20% to 30% month over month, she said.

The Juggernaut is a subscription media company for the South Asian diaspora

On the heels of this growth, The Juggernaut announced today that it has raised a $2 million seed round led by Precursor Ventures to hire editors and a full-time growth engineer, and expand new editorial projects. Other investors in the round include Unpopular Ventures, Backstage Capital, New Media Ventures and Old Town Media. Angels include former Andreessen Horowitz general partner Balaji Srinivasan; co-founder of Kabam, Holly Liu; and co-founder of sports-focused publication The Athletic, Adam Hansmann.

Currently, The Juggernaut charges $3.99 a month for an annual subscription, $9.99 a month for a monthly subscription and $249.99 for a lifetime subscription to the news outlet. It also offers a seven-day free trial (with a conversation rate to paid at over 80%) and has a free newsletter, which Sur says will remain free to bring in top-of-the-funnel customers.

The Juggernaut is part of a growing number of media companies trying to directly monetize off of subscriptions instead of advertisements, such as The Information, The Athletic, and even our very own Extra Crunch. If successful, the hope is that paid subscriptions will prove more sustainable and lucrative than advertising, which still dominates in media.

But Sur is purposely pacing herself when it comes to expenses in the early days. The team currently has only three full-time staff, including Sur, culture editor Imaan Sheikh and one full-time writer, Michaela Stone Cross.

Snigdha Sur, the founder of The Juggernaut.

“Sometimes at media companies people over-hire and over-promise, and then don’t deliver on the profitability or return,” she said. For this reason, The Juggernaut largely works with “freelancers who would probably never join any specific publication,” Sur said. While The Juggernaut hopes to have full-time staff writers eventually, the contributor approach helps temper spending.

Beyond pace, The Juggernaut is looking to build up its subscriber base by writing stories that require deep, creative thinking. The publication intentionally does not cover commoditized breaking news, which could have the potential to bring in more inbound traffic, or anything that doesn’t have a South Asian connection.

Sur is living the stories that she is working to tell. Born in Chhattisgarh, India, she grew up in the Bronx and Queens in New York City, and spent time living and working in Mumbai, India. Since founding The Juggernaut, her goal for the publication has been to be a place for not just South Asians, but for “anyone who has a form of curiosity and appreciation” for South Asian culture.

“We try not to translate words we don’t have to do, we’re not trying to dumb this down, we’re not trying to write for the white teen,” she said. “We’re trying to write for the smart, curious person. And we’re going to assume you know stuff.”

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Thailand’s logistics startup Flash Express raises $200 million

Flash Express, a two-year-old logistics startup that works with e-commerce firms in Thailand, said on Monday it has raised $200 million in a new financing round as it looks to double down on a rapidly growing market spurred by demand due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The funding, a Series D, was led by PTT Oil and Retail Business Public Company Limited, the marquee oil and retail businesses of Thai conglomerate PTT. Durbell and Krungsri Finnovate, two other top conglomerates in the Southeast Asian country, also participated in the round, which brings Flash Express’ to-date raise to about $400 million.

Flash Express, which operates door-to-door pickup and delivery service, claims to be the second largest private player to operate in this space. The startup, which also counts Alibaba as an investor, entered the market with delivery fees as low as 60 cents per parcel, a move that allowed it to quickly win a significant market share.

The startup has also expanded aggressively in the past year. Flash Express had about 1,100 delivery points during this time last year. Now it has more than 5,000, exceeding those of 138-year-old Thailand Post.

Flash Express currently delivers more than 1 million parcels a day, up from about 50,000 during the same time last year. The startup says it has also invested heavily in technology that has enabled it to handle over 100,000 parcels in a minute by fully automated sorting systems.

Komsan Lee, CEO of Flash Express, said the startup plans to deploy the fresh funds to introduce new services and expand to other Southeast Asian markets (names of which he did not identify). “We are also prepared to create and develop new technologies to achieve even greater delivery and logistics efficiency. More importantly we intend to assist SMEs in lowering their investment costs which we believe will provide long-term benefit for the overall Thai economy in the digital era,” he said.

Retail Business Public Company Limited plans to leverage Flash Express’ logistics network as it looks to meet the rising demand from consumers, said Rajsuda Rangsiyakull, senior executive vice president for Corporate Strategy, Innovation and Sustainability at Retail Business Public Company Limited.

Flash Express competes with Best Express — which, like Flash, is also backed by Alibaba — and Kerry Express, which filed for an initial public offering in late August.

Even as online shopping and delivery has accelerated in recent months, some estimates suggest that the overall logistics market in Thailand will see its first contraction in the history this year. Chumpol Saichuer, president of the Thai Transportation and Logistics Association, said last month Thailand’s logistics business has already been hit hard by the slowing global economy.

Delivery Hero CEO shares what he’s learned about managing logistics during a pandemic

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How startups should budget in uncertain times

Isaac Roth Contributor

Issac Roth is a seasoned entrepreneur who advises founders on open source technology and keeping communities engaged. Over this career, he’s created and sold multiple enterprise software companies and stays active as an advisor and investor.

More posts by this contributor

• The ‘right’ way to downsize

I was the archetypal startup CEO: I paused my degree at Stanford to start a company, and after it failed I found myself needing to preserve cash to make student loan payments.

With an old Nissan Sentra and roommates in Menlo Park, my biggest variable cost was food. So it was ramen every night. On a good week, I might have had some sushi on Friday night and if I’d managed to come in under budget somehow (someone’s parents bought dinner) I could maybe splurge again on Saturday with friends.

My guiding principle at this time is surely familiar: Control burn until income streams are more predictable. Many startups find themselves in a similar position these days: ramen or sushi?

Some businesses are thriving during COVID-19 times, but will it last? Take online learning tools: Everybody needs online learning at the moment. When in-person reopens, probably some amount of learning will stay online since we all learned how to do it, but likely not 100%. Worse than not knowing what the percentage will be is the constant variation across geography, segment and vertical. It’s not that different from the current situation for me in San Francisco: If I want to find somewhere to buy ramen or sushi, I first have to check which spots are even open before navigating their constantly changing hours and menus.

Startup budgeting looks a bit like that now. Key assumptions we used for planning — already prone to some variation in a startup — are more volatile. Conversion rate from MQL to SQL, how many decision-makers need to approve a contract, leads generated per event (and what is an event these days), net renewal rates — these factors are all changing and they’re changing differently by customer segment, by geography and by product category. The new normal is highly dynamic.

Navigate through the uncertainty (and reevaluate quarterly)

How can we budget through this? Everyone replanned in April. Plan for a similar cycle every quarter. “Are we at a new normal? How do we know? Do we feel confident about that?”

In addition to the usual factors companies use to make predictions on metrics — things like growth rate and conversion rate — now we also have to consider a variety of outside factors: How the current cycle has impacted customers and prospects, how they’re readjusting budgets and their approach to unpredictability over the coming months. It might look like a new normal is establishing, but COVID flare-ups could happen again causing lockdowns, the U.S. is in an election cycle and there are prospects of further government intervention.

Here’s a recipe for deciding what to cook or whether you can go out:

Set assumptions and analyze, then reset on a regular and irregular cadence

Visit your budget each quarter. AND any month that burn falls outside of expectations, make adjustments.

We recommend quarterly because sales cycles tend to be longer than a few weeks so it’s hard to get data back and make adjustments after only two to three weeks. Here are the key inputs you should monitor:

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4-year founder vesting is dead

Jake Jolis Contributor

Jake Jolis is a partner at Matrix Partners and invests in seed and Series A technology companies including marketplaces and software.

More posts by this contributor

• 2019 saw a stampede of fintech unicorns

We recently invested in a team of co-founders who had voluntarily made their own vesting longer than four years. Four-year vesting is the industry standard. Why would someone voluntarily make it longer for themselves?

Their answer: “These days, with companies taking seven to 10 years to reach exit, it would make sense for founders to be on a similar schedule.”

This matters because the four-year co-founder vesting schedule frequently harms startup founders’ interests. Sometimes it damages their startup irreparably.

A growing number of founders are starting to realize this. I talked to quite a few about this over the last two years. Mostly, the “longer-than-four-years-vesting” founders share a similar story as well as logic. Almost always they are repeat, experienced founders. Often scarred by a co-founder separation in their prior startup, they are determined to set things up smarter in their next company.

Importantly, this group of founders assumes they are going to be the ones actually building the company. They created the company. They are the company. Nobody is forcing them out. I suspect founders who already believe this about their own startup will find this post most helpful.

Given the massive implications of co-founder vesting schedules, all startup founders should consider co-founder vesting lengths more carefully and then choose what makes sense for them. You make this decision around the time of incorporation but feel the effects over the lifetime of your company.

4-year vesting schedules are anachronistic

As far back as the 1980s, the standard startup vesting schedule was four or five years, with five being more prevalent on the East Coast. Nobody seems to remember a time it was anything different. The closest I’ve gotten to a logical answer on why it’s four years today stretches back to a pre-401(k) era, from before Reagan’s tax reforms in the ’80s. Prior to then, tax rules incentivized big company pension plans to have vesting periods of at least five years.

Startups didn’t offer traditional pension plans. Instead, startups offered employees stock, vesting over four years instead of five as a competitive move. That is all moot today. It has no relevance for startup founders in 2020.

More relevantly, time from founding to exit has gone from four years in 1999 to eight years in 2020. Yet founder vesting remains stuck at four. This is dangerous.

Exit data from U.S. startups with minimum $1 million in venture funding. Image Credits: PitchBook

Hedging against the crash of ineptitude

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Free-to-play gaming giant Roblox confidentially files to go public

The gaming company Roblox announced today that it had confidentially filed paperwork with the SEC to make its public debut.

In February, the company, which operates a free-to-play gaming empire with tens of million of users, was valued at $4 billion after a Series G funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. The company has raised more than $335 million in venture capital funding, according to Crunchbase.

How Roblox avoided the gaming graveyard and grew into a $2.5B company

The company has not detailed the number of shares it plans to offer and furthermore notes in standard legalese that their timely debut is “subject to market and other conditions.” After a slow 2019 for tech IPOs the rebound of public markets in mid-pandemic 2020 has provided an awfully wide window for tech startups reaching for their debuts.

In the games space, we recently saw the debut of Unity Technologies, which makes a popular game engine that developers use to build and monetize gaming titles.

Roblox offers an interesting sell to both consumers and developers, shipping a free-to-play vision of the future which pushes developers away from graphics-intense game design toward building content that can be played on a wide variety of devices. The games company has been more successful than most in translating a first-party experience’s success into a robust developer network. Roblox’s platform has been particularly successful with young audiences.

How Roblox completely transformed its tech stack

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Yotascale raises a $13M Series B to help companies track and manage their cloud spends

These days when you found a startup, you don’t go out and buy a rack of servers. And you don’t build an in-house datacenter team. Instead, you farm out your infrastructure needs to the major cloud platforms, namely Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

That’s all well and good, but over time any startup’s cloud setup will become more complex, varied and perhaps multi-provider. Throw in microservices and one can wind up with a big muddle, and an even bigger bill. That’s the problem that Yotascale wants to attack.

And there’s money backing the startup’s progress, including $13 million in new capital. The round, a Series B, was led by Aydin Senkut at Felicis with participation from other capital pools, including Engineering Capital, Pelion Ventures and Crosslink Capital. Yotascale has now raised $25 million in total.

The funding event caught my eye, as I’ve heard startup CEOs discuss their public cloud spends in somewhat bitter terms; it’s hard for most startups to change infrastructure direction after they get off the ground, which means that as they grow, so too does their outflow of dollars to the major tech companies. The same megacaps that might turn around and compete with the very same startups that are pumping up their revenues and margins.

So spending less on AWS or Azure would be nice for startups. Yotascale wants to be the helper for lots of companies to better understand and attribute that spend the correct part of their platform or service, perhaps lowering aggregate spend at the same time.

Let’s talk about how Yotascale got to where it is today.

The startup’s CEO, Asim Razzaq, talked TechCrunch through his company’s history, which didn’t get started until after he had wrapped up tenure at both another startup, and PayPal.

When he set out to found Yotascale, Razzaq didn’t fire up a deck, raise capital and then get right to building. Instead, he first went out to do customer discovery work. That effort led him to the perspective that current solutions aimed at understanding cloud spend were insufficient and led to data being used against infrastructure teams in arguments for lower spend when it wasn’t a good idea (cutting backup expenses, for example).

During that time he also determined who Yotascale’s target customer is, namely the head of platform engineering at a company.

The startup self-funded for a while, with Razzaq telling TechCrunch that he wanted to be completely sure that he had conviction concerning the project before moving ahead.

After starting to work on Yotascale in mid 2015, the company raised some capital in 2016. It set out to solve the spend attribution problem that companies with public cloud contracts deal with — including having to contend with modern architecture and its related issues — while earning the trust of engineers, according to Razzaq.

From its period of customer discovery to working on product market fit after raising funds from Engineering Capital, Yotascale raised a Series A in mid-2018. Why? Because, Razzaq, told TechCrunch, as ones gains conviction, one must scale their team. And thus more capital was required.

During our chat with the CEO, it was notable how sequential his company-building process has proven. From talking to potential customers, to working to understand who his buyer is, to waiting on scaling the startup’s go-to-market efforts until he was confident in product-market fit, Yotascale seems to follow the inverse of the “raise lots and spend fast and try to win right away” model that became quite popular during the unicorn era.

How did Yotascale know when it found product market fit? According to its CEO, when companies started pulling the startup into their operations and not the other way around.

Yotascale reported 4x year-over-year annual recurring revenue (ARR) growth at some point this year, though Razzaq was diffident about sharing specifics concerning the metric.

Sticking to the theme of reasonableness and caution, when asked about why his Series B is modest in size, Razzaq said that he was not interested in raising big rounds, and that $13 million is an amount of money that can move his company forward. What’s coming from the company? Yotascale wants to add support for Azure and Google Cloud in addition to its AWS work of today, to pick an example.

(You can find other hints that Yotascale is perhaps more mature than its peers at its current age. For example, in 2018 the company hired a new chief revenue officer, even putting out a release on the matter.)

That’s enough on this particular round. What will prove interesting is how far Yotascale can push its ARR up by the end of Q3 2021. And if it raises again before then.

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Seraphim Capital’s space tech accelerator releases details of its newest Space Camp cohort

The U.K.’s Seraphim Capital, the country’s only space tech accelerator, has released details of its newest cohort as part of its Space Camp programme, timed with the end of World Space Week last week.

4pi Lab
Raised so far: Undisclosed amount / Non-Equity Assistance from Creative Destruction Lab
Description: “4pi Lab is developing a Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellation providing real-time, wildfire detection, monitoring and reporting. Their unique sensor gives them the ability to detect wildfires at a 10m resolution globally helping to eradicate major catastrophic wildfire events.”

Clutch Space Systems
Raised so far: £300,000 from FSE Group Enterprise M3 Expansion Loan
Description: “Clutch Space Systems provides software-defined radio (SDR) ground stations for satellite communications. SDR ground station technology improves downlink communications, provides significant cost savings and is far more dynamic, acting as an enabler for the exponentially growing Satcoms market.”

Xona Space Systems raises $1 million to improve satellite-based navigation services

Helix Technologies
Raised so far: N/A
Description: “Helix Technologies – enables precision GPS antennas, providing 10cm level accuracy. Through breakthroughs in manufacturing and RF technology, Helix has developed a new GNSS antenna with a ceramic core capable of precision dynamic position accuracy whilst being space efficient for demanding tel and navigation applications. The design also enables the antenna to be highly immune to reflection off infrastructure and jamming.”

Kinnami
Raised so far: Undisclosed amount / seed from ICE71 Accelerate, 25 June 2020
Description: “Kinnami uniquely secures and optimises data sharing, ongoing data migration and management across distributed systems. Kinnami has created a unique storage and security system, ‘AmiShare’, which fragments and encrypts data. By storing these encrypted fragments across a distributed network of devices, it can secure data collected on the edge and have application within Satcoms, Defence and Enterprise.”

Starfish Space
Raised so far: Undisclosed amount / seed, 1 December 2019
Description: “Starfish Space aims to create an on-demand, in-space transportation and maintenance service for orbiting satellites. Their proximity Operations software uses a combination of breakthrough orbital mechanics, Machine Vision AI, and a low-thrust electric propulsion system to enable them to use smaller and cheaper space tugs that can operate across orbits. This addresses Counter-space and Mission opportunities.”

Seraphim Space Camp launches its latest mission, with 7 spacetech startups

Sust Global
Raised so far: N/A
Description: “Sust Global provides real-time geospatial monitoring at an asset-level for analyzing Climate Risk. Their platform uses data from multiple satellites and ground sources to create full-stack ‘Asset-Level Geospatial Analytics’. Sust combines this data with the latest Climate Models and Standardised Risk Assessments to analyze risk and gain quantitative actionable insights for the Financial Services sector.”

Vector Photonics
Raised so far: 2018 secured undisclosed funding from ICURe; 2019 £70,000 of funding from Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and £30,000 from a Glasgow company to support that award
Description: “Vector Photonics’ disruptive and revolutionary photonic crystal lasers push the boundaries of what is possible with conventional semiconductor lasers providing comparable costs and flexibility with edge-emitting laser performance. Its unique beam steering capability is industry-changing in Datacoms and aligned markets like LIDAR.”

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2020 IPO report card: Are tech’s newest public companies meeting expectations?

As the American election looms and the IPO cycle slows some, it’s a good time to review how well the public offerings we have seen thus far have performed.

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The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

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Welcome to a Monday morning data rundown discussing how well the latest-stage startups that went public this year have performed after their first day. We’ll be awarding letter grades for post-IPO performance as well, because we can.

So, how did Snowflake do compared to Vroom, both stacked next to JFrog and One Medical? Let’s find out.

Ranking 2020’s IPOs

The fine folks at my former publication Crunchbase News have a running list of 2020 IPOs, which will help us not miss any names. Of course, we’re not going to include every possible deal; there have been some marginal debuts that we can leave behind.

But, the majors matter. So let’s get into them now:

• Snowflake: It priced above its raised range. Then it went up sharply. From an IPO price of $120 per share, Snowflake is worth $250 per share today. That’s so expensive, compared to the data-focused Snowflake’s revenue, that I can hardly figure out what the hell its price means. The company’s valuation got so rich that we wrote that all tech companies should go public to take advantage of the rich market. This year’s standout IPO. A+.
• Unity: Unity’s IPO was a source of wonder for those curious about the economics of the gaming world. For us finance dorks, it was also a right corker. We were impressed. So were investors. After setting a $34 and $42 per share IPO range, Unity raised it to $44 and $48 per share. Then it went public at $52 per share. Today it’s worth $94.50 per share, or around $25 billion. It was priced at $6 billion, give or take, in its final private round. A huge win of an IPO. A.

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Snapdocs raises $60M to manage the mortgage process in the cloud

The U.S. economy may be in a precarious state right now, with a presidential election looming on the horizon and the country still in the grips of the coronavirus pandemic. But partly thanks to lower interest rates, the housing market continues to rise, and today a startup that has built technology to help it run more efficiently is announcing a major growth round of funding. 

Snapdocs, which is used by some 130,000 real estate professionals to digitally manage the mortgage process and other paperwork and stages related to buying a home, has raised $60 million in new equity funding on the heels of a few bullish months of business.

In August 2020 — a peak in home sales in the U.S., reaching their highest level in 14 years — the startup saw 170,000 home sales, totaling some $50 million in transactions, closed on its platform. This accounted for almost 15% of all deals done that month in the U.S. Snapdocs is now on track to close 1.5 million deals this year, double its 2019 volume.

On top of this, the startup’s platform is being used by more than 70% of settlement agents nationally, with customers including Bell Bank, LeaderOne Financial Corporation, Googain and Georgia United Credit Union among its customers.

The Series C is being led by YC Continuity (Snapdocs was part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2014 cohort), with existing investors Sequoia Capital, F-Prime Capital and Founders Fund, and new backers Lachy Groom (formerly of Stripe and now a prolific investor) and DocuSign, a strategic backer, also participating.

“Like us they are on a mission to defragment an ecosystem,” King said, referring to it as a “perfect complement” to Snapdocs’ own efforts.

Snapdocs is not talking about its valuation. Aaron King, the founder and CEO, said in an interview that he believes disclosing it is nothing more than “grandstanding” — which is interesting considering that the industry he focuses on, real estate, is all about public disclosures of valuation — but he noted that most of the $103 million that the startup has raised to date is still in the bank, which says something about the company’s overall financial health.

Zumper raises $60M to double down on tech to grow its apartment rentals platform

And for some further context, according to PitchBook data estimates, Snapdocs was valued at $200 million in its last round, in October 2019.

Snapdocs’ central premise is that buying a house requires not just a lot of paperwork but also a lot of different parties to be on the same page, so to speak, to set the wheels in motion and get a deal done. There is not just the mortgage (with its multiple parties) to settle; you also have real estate brokers and agents, the home sellers, inspectors and appraisers, the insurance company, the title company and more — some 15 parties in all.

The complexity of all of them working together in a quick and efficient way often means the process of buying and selling a house can be long and costly. And that’s before the pandemic — with the problems associated with social distancing and remote working — hit us.

Snapdocs’ solution has been to build one platform in the cloud that helps to manage the documents needed by all of these different parties, providing access to data and the ability to flag or approve things remotely, to speed the process along. It also has built a number of features, using AI technology and analytics, to also help identify what might be potential issues early on and get them fixed.

King is not your typical tech startup entrepreneur. He began working in mortgages as a notary when he was still in high school — he’s effectively been in the industry for 23 years, he said — and his earliest startup efforts were focused on one aspect of the complexities that he knew first-hand: he saw an opportunity to lean on technology to get notarized signatures sorted out in a legal, orderly and quicker way.

He then got deeper into identifying the possibilities of how tech could be used to improve the larger process, and that is how Snapdocs came into existence.

Given how big the real estate market is — it’s the largest asset class in the world, by many estimates — and how many other industries tech has “disrupted” over the years, it’s interesting that there have been so few attempting to solve it. One of the reasons, it seems, is that there hasn’t been enough of a crossover between tech experts and mortgage experts, and Snapdocs is a testament to the virtues of building a startup specifically around a hard problem that you happen to know really well.

“Most people have identified this as a tech problem, and a lot of the tech — such as e-signatures — has existed for 20 years, but the fragmentation of real estate is the issue,” he said. “We’re talking about a mass constellation of companies and workflow. But we’re obsessed about the workflow of all of these constituents.”

That’s a position that has helped Snapdocs build its standing with the industry, as well as with investors.

“I’ve known the Snapdocs team for many years and have always been amazed by their focus and execution toward bringing each stakeholder in the mortgage process online,” said Anu Hariharan, partner at YC Continuity, in a statement. “In 2013, Snapdocs began as a notary marketplace before expanding horizontally to service title companies and, more recently, lenders. By connecting the numerous parties involved in a mortgage on a single platform, Snapdocs is quickly becoming the “operating system” for mortgage closings. Mortgages, much like commerce, will shift online, bringing improved efficiency and a far better customer experience to the outdated home-closing process.” Hariharan has real estate experience herself and is joining the board with this round.

There have been a number of companies taking new, tech-based approaches to the market to find new and faster ways of doing things, and to open up new kinds of value in the market.

Opendoor, for example, has rethought the whole process of selling and buying houses, taking on a role as a middleman in the process both to take on a lot of the harder work of fixing up a home, and handling all of the difficult stages in the sales process: it’s a role that has recently seen the company catapult to a valuation of $4.8 billion by way of a SPAC-based public listing. An interesting idea, King said, but still only accounting for a small sliver of house sales.

Opendoor to go public by way of Chamath Palihapitiya SPAC

Others, like Orchard, Reonomy and Zumper, have all also raised large rounds on the back of a lot of promise of the market continuing to grow and the opportunity to take part in that process through new approaches. It’s a sign that “safe as houses” still has a place in the market, even with all the other unknowns in play.

“Over the next five years the real estate industry will be completely digitized, so a lot of companies are trying to figure out what their place are, and how to provide value,” King said.

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Quince launches out of beta with new ‘manufacturer-to-customer’ model

The retail landscape is shifting rapidly. While D2C brands have changed the way we shop, Quince is looking to change retail even more dramatically.

The brand, which raised $8.5 million in seed funding last year (and only revealed as much today), is looking to rethink the supply chain with its own line of 700 items including men’s and women’s apparel, accessories, jewelry and home goods.

After beta testing for a year as ‘Last Brand,’ Quince is launching with a new model called ‘M2C,’ or manufacturer to consumer.

The idea is that Quince goes directly to factories with designs for essentials — not overly patterned or branded items — with an order that can dynamically adjust each week based on demand. As orders start coming in, Quince can work alongside manufacturers to ensure they aren’t over or under producing on a specific SKU. The factory then ships directly to the customer, rather than shipping to a distribution center or store and then again to the final destination.

You might think that factories wouldn’t be as amenable to this model, as they have little to lose when a brand overestimates demand for a SKU and doesn’t sell it through to the customer. But cofounder and CEO Sid Gupta says that this new model is being presented at a pivotal time in retail. Bigger brands, the ones that place orders for 100,000 units, are struggling during the pandemic and shrinking their SKU portfolio.

This leaves the factories with two options: turning to D2C brands or selling through a marketplace like Amazon.

“D2C demand is really fragmented, and most b2c companies are really sub-scale,” said Gupta. “It’s hard to get the efficiency gains out of it. The issue with selling on a marketplace, like Amazon, is you’ve got to compete with hundreds, if not thousands, of other sellers for the same exact good. If you’re a factory that actually makes high quality goods, and you pay your workers fairly, and you don’t damage the environment, your cost might be 3% or 5%, higher.”

He added that it’s difficult for a factory to have those factors shine through to the customer on Amazon, and more difficult still to learn how to play the advertising game.

This environment has made manufacturers slightly more open to a new way of doing things.

By working directly with factories, Quince says it’s able to bring the cost of luxury items down significantly, selling a cashmere sweater for approximately $50 instead of $150+, as you’ll often find with other brands. Quince works with more than 30 different factories across the world.

Cofounder and CEO Sid Gupta says the company has also thought very deeply about sustainability, setting standards around the materials used (are they organic or recycled?), the manufacturing process (is it ecologically sound?), worker pay, and more. The company is also looking into giveback programs to share in the profits with the factories and the workers.

The funding from last fall has allowed Quince to beta test last year and grow the team to 16, including cofounders Becky Mortimer and Sourabh Mahajan. Thirty-five percent of employees are female, and 65 percent of employees are minorities.

The company’s investors include Founders Fund, 8VC and Basis Set Ventures.

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Equity Monday: Twilio buys Segment, and Airkit raises $28M for its low-code platform

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest big news, chats about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here — and don’t forget to check out last Friday’s episode.

So, what was on our minds this morning?

• Headlines: The Twilio-Segment deal is real, happening, and is priced about where we expected. Big names in the ex-China Internet want to make encryption worse. And, how the United States government would break up Google is becoming clearer by the week.
• On the Twilio Segment deal, as TechCrunch and Forbes anticipated, the transaction came in around $3.2 billion, forming something of a API monster from their combined form. As we noted on the show, a lot of investors made a mint from the transaction.
• Airkit has raised $28 million while in stealth since 2017. What does it do? Per Forbes, it’s a “low-code platform” that wants to “improve customer engagement.” That’s notably similar to what Segment does.
• Flash Express raised $200 million, as the on-demand and delivery spaces stay hot.
• And Razorpay raised $100 million at a valuation of $1 billion, meaning that we have just witnessed the birth of yet another fintech unicorn.
• And, finally, warm public markets mean that the startup and VC game will stay afoot, even if we see a pre-election dip in IPOs.

We hope that you are well and warm and fully of good spirits. Back soon!

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PT and Thursday afternoon as fast as we can get it out, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

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