Figma raises $50 million Series D led by Andreessen Horowitz

Figma, the design platform that lets folks work collaboratively and in the cloud, has today announced the close of a $50 million Series D financing. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with partner Peter Levine and cofounding partner Marc Andreessen managing the deal for the firm. New angel investors, including Henry Ellenbogen from Durable Capital, also participated in the round alongside existing investors Index, Greylock, KPCB, Sequoia and Founders Fund.

Forbes reports that the latest funding round values Figma at $2 billion.

Figma launched in 2015 after nearly six years of development in stealth. The premise was to create a collaborative, cloud-based design tool that would be the Google Docs of design.

Since, Figma has built out the platform to expand access and usability for individual designers, small firms and giant enterprise companies alike. For example, the company launched plug-ins in 2019, allowing developers to build in their own tools to the app, such as a plug-in for designers to automatically rename and organize their layers as they work (Rename.it) and one that gives users the ability to add placeholder text that they can automatically find and replace later (Content Buddy).

The company also launched an educational platform called Community, which gives designers the ability to share their work and let other users ‘remix’ that design, or simply check out how it was built, layer by layer.

A spokesperson told TechCrunch that this deal was “opportunistic,” and that the company was in a strong cash position pre-financing. The new funding expands Figma’s runway during these uncertain times, with coronavirus halting a lot of enterprise purchasing and ultimately slowing growth of some rising enterprise players.

Figma says that one interesting change they’ve seen in the COVID era is a significant jump in user engagement from teams to collaborate more in Figma. The firm has also seen an uptick in whiteboarding, note taking, slide deck creation and diagramming, as companies start using Figma as a collaborative tool across an entire organization rather than just within a team of designers.

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5 tips for starting a business with a stranger

Sam Pillar Contributor

Sam Pillar is the co-founder and CEO of Jobber, a business management platform for small home service businesses started in 2010 with his co-founder and CTO Forrest Zeisler.

When I first thought of the idea for what would become Jobber, I never could have imagined that I would one day be the CEO of a tech company with nearly 100,000 active customers in more than 45 countries. And that I would do this alongside a complete stranger who I met during a chance encounter at a coffee shop.

When you’re first thinking about starting a company, most people would either go at it alone or partner with someone they know, like a friend, family member, or former colleague. Few would consider pursuing their entrepreneurial dream with a stranger. Without proper due diligence, co-founding a company with a stranger can feel like putting a down payment on a new house without opening the front door. While this might not be the right path for everyone, it was absolutely the best move for me.

Jobber is proof that starting a company with a stranger isn’t just doable, it can even be an advantage.

Pursuing a business partnership without a prior relationship has allowed my co-founder Forrest Zeisler and I to be more honest and forthcoming with each other as we worked toward a clear, common objective from the start. The ability to arrive at big decisions and have productive debate without the baggage and bias of a preexisting relationship helped to establish Jobber’s feedback-oriented culture, which is ingrained in the DNA of the company. I attribute our company’s early success to our focus on building a strong and honest business partnership first.

For aspiring entrepreneurs looking to launch a company, I’ve identified five tips that really helped me build trust, camaraderie and mutual understanding with my co-founding partner — a partnership that can withstand intense competition and the test of time.

Start small and aim big

I didn’t know that Forrest would become my co-founder when we first met. As a self-taught developer, I was looking for more sophisticated development help on the project I was working on. During the early stages of our relationship, I would present a problem, such as technical aspects with code, and he would help me with it. Through these initial interactions, it became clear how Forrest’s mind works, and we learned that we worked really well together. At the time, I wasn’t thinking of these tasks as “tests” on compatibility, but in retrospect, they were. If you can’t overcome the small hurdles amicably and efficiently, then how do you expect to take on the big stuff? It’s not a good sign for a long-term business relationship.

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Dribbble, a bootstrapped ‘LinkedIn’ for designers, acquires Creative Market, grows to 12M users

Traditionally dominated by big players like Adobe and Autodesk, the world of design has been flush with a newer wave of startups that are creating collaboration spaces and new cloud-based tools designed to address the needs of creatives today. Today, two of those players are combining. Dribbble, an online community for designers that lets them post their work and look for work, is acquiring Creative Market, a marketplace for ready-to-use fonts, icons, illustrations, photos and other design assets.

Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed, Dribbble’s CEO Zack Onisko said in an interview. Prior to this, bootstrapped Dribbble was profitable — revenues come from its job boards, advertising and member subscriptions, kind of like a LinkedIn aimed at the design community — and it had 6 million monthly active users, with 3.5 million registered users. Adding in Creative Market will bring the total number of monthly active users across the two sites to 12 million.

The acquisition is happening at a time when we’re seeing some big growth among startups that speaks to how the balance of power is shifting in the world of software aimed at designers.

Just today, Figma announced a $50 million raise at a $2 billion valuation, money that it plans to use for its own spate of acquisitions and investments in more design tools. Canva last year raised funding at a $3.2 billion valuation. Smaller, younger startups like Frontify (which helps companies manage their design assets) have also been raising and Dyndrite have also been raising. Meanwhile, Adobe continues to work on ways to keep its legacy products, like the 30-year old Photoshop (look, it’s a millennial!) relevant.

Indeed, even the concept of who the target audience even is has shifted.

“We talk about designers but really it’s creatives,” Onisko said. “A lot of creatives are multi-skilled and they work in all sorts of different mediums. The historic focus is product and web design but we’ve seen it slide into motion graphics or 3D or photography.”

This is actually the second time Creative Market has been acquired. The startup was first purchased by Autodesk in 2014, at a time when the latter was looking to widen its range of products both to take on Adobe more squarely, and to target more casual and prosumer users as well as to address the wider needs of its core designer community.

That ultimately didn’t work out, and Creative Market was spun out as a startup again in 2017, with $7 million in funding led by Accomplice.

More than two years on from that, it seems that Creative Market saw the logic in coming together with another company for better economies of scale.

And perhaps this time, the acquirer is a better cultural fit. Both companies are pretty distributed and decentralised (making for a very easy transition to working under stay-at-home orders in recent weeks). And it might have helped, too, that Onisko had once previously been Creative Market’s chief growth officer before taking on the role as Dribbble’s CEO.

The plan will be to keep both companies’ brands and teams separate, with Chris Winn continuing to lead Creative Market as its CEO. Creative Market will continue to build out its marketplace of design assets, and Dribbble will continue to position itself as a place for those designers to set out their profiles and connect with those looking to hire them, as well as each other.

“We’re able to do our own thing and beat our own drums,” said Onisko, with the plan being to keep “marching on our own roadmaps.”

Over time, when the time is right, Onisko said there might be an opportunity to integrate the businesses, but that will be in the future.

One area where the two will be coming together right away is in cross-pollinating membership. Up to now, people joined Dribbble by invitation from previous members, which Onisko said was a good way of keeping growth in check and applying a kind of peer-reviewed quality control layer. Now, the idea will be that Dribbble will open up to all new users, and those who are already registered on Creative Market can automatically become members on the sister site.

“The big opportunity is that we can do in 2-3 years what we would have done in 3-5 years as separate companies,” Onisko added.

“We’re so excited to bring together two fully-distributed teams who work everyday to serve the design community,” said Winn, in a statement. “The opportunity for both companies is that much larger thanks to this partnership and I’m so excited to join forces.”

For its part, Onisko said that Dribbble has no intention of changing from its growth course when it comes to finances. The company has always been bootstrapped — that is, surviving with no outside investors — and is profitable. And there are no plans to use this moment to seek outside funding, he added. The company has been approached by interested parties — “all the usual suspects,” he said — for acquisition, Onisko said, but for now that’s also not been something the company has wanted to explore.

“We feel that we’re very much in our infancy,” Onisko said. “We have pretty big ambitions and want to march forward. We’ve talked to all the usual suspects, and we are on friendly terms and keep all the conversations going, but we will continue to stay independent and operate in our contrarian way.”

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Early stage investor The Fund expands beyond NYC with new partners in LA and London

The Fund, an early-stage investment firm with a memorably straightforward name, is looking beyond New York City as it starts investing its second fund.

Founders Jenny Fielding (who’s also managing director at Techstars New York) and Scott Hartley (also co-founder and partner at Two Culture Capital) told me that in the past two years, they’ve already backed 52 New York City startups.

“The seed funds in New York have all gone upstream,” Fielding argued, making it harder for founders to get the smaller checks they need when they’re getting started. So The Fund is aiming to participate in those “first check” rounds of between $500,000 and $1.2 million.

To find those investments, Fielding and Hartley said rely on a “crowdsourced” approach, taking recommendations from the startup founders that they’ve recruited as limited partners in The Fund — a group that includes names like General Assembly founder Matthew Brimer, One Medical founder Tom Lee, Handy co-founder Oisin Hanrahan, SoundCloud founder Alex Ljung and ClassPass co-founder Sanjiv Sanghavi.

At the same time, rather than relying on a “voting and consensus” process, the decisions are ultimately made by the investment committee, a smaller group that initially included Brimer, Fielding, Hartley and Katie Hunt.

The firm is targeting $9 million for the second fund, with one-third deployed in New York, another third in Los Angeles and the final third in London.

Hartley said The Fund is taking a “modular approach” to this expansion, with an independent investment committee in each city: In New York, it will be Josh Hix, Katie Shea and Becky Yang, along with Fielding and Hartley; in Los Angeles, the committee includes Raina Kumra, Josh Jones, Anna Barber and Austin Murray; and in London, it’s Carmen Alfonso Rico, Eamonn Carey and Marina Gorey.

“The big vision is, we’ve literally written the playbook,” Fielding said. “Fund one was an experiment, and now fund two is an experiment: Does this scale? After we have about a year’s worth of data about deals under our belt, we want to take it to the next level. Why shouldn’t The Funds be popping up in every city?”

And even though COVID-19 has brought a halt to large sectors of the global and domestic economy, Hartley said the firm has continued to write checks at the same pace.

“We had such conviction in the [founding] teams that it hasn’t really slowed down the cadence of our investing,” he said. “We take a long-term approach with pre-seed investing. We see this as a multi-year journey.”

Fielding added that it’s been “inspiring” and “phenomenal” to see how their existing portfolio companies have adapted to this new reality. As an example, she pointed to how rowing class startup CityRow has shifted to virtual classes.

And if you’re wondering about that name, Fielding said they were perfectly aware that calling themselves The Fund could prompt some  “Who’s on first?”-style confusion.

“We wanted to make fun of ourselves a little bit,” she said. And besides, most of the good tree names were taken.

Digging for dollar signs amid edtech’s current momentum

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Freada Kapor Klein warns of ‘vulture capitalists’ during pandemic

The tech industry experienced turmoil before during the dot-com bust and again during the 2008 economic downturn. But this time it’s a bit different, according to Kapor Capital founding partners Freada Kapor Klein and Mitch Kapor.

“What’s different this time is that it is society-wide,” Kapor Klein said during an Extra Crunch Live appearance this week. “It’s not just the dot-com bust or its not just financial services. It is much more widespread. But again, as you point out, tech is in a much better position because tech is related to the things that are thriving.”

For Kapor, formerly a partner at a Sand Hill Road VC firm during the dot-com bust, said it’s similar in that it’s an “enormous disruption with great uncertainty about what will be on the other side of it.”

The details, however, are very different. Assuming there will eventually be a vaccine, Kapor said he believes things will be able to get back to some sort of normal, “notwithstanding the irrecoverable disruptions of permanently-closed small businesses.”

In the two previous downturns, there was something inherently wrong with the economy, but that’s not the case right now, he added.

“The good news is that, to the extent to which the pandemic gets under control, the economy should restart,” said Kapor. “The question, though, is on what basis and do we use this as an opportunity to rethink some fundamentals. Are we actually serious about treating essential workers better, really having a safety net and paid sick leave and universal health benefits and childcare — where we can see and feel now the absence of that is hurting the people we depend on four our lives. But it is not a certainty. This is the other thing about these great disruptions. We have some agency about what happens next. And so it’s almost a cliché now, but it’s terrible to waste, you know, a crisis. Our hope is that coming out of this, as a society, we make some different decisions about how we allocate resources and what we think the baseline is that everybody is entitled to.”

But while we’re all still knee-deep in the pandemic, there are ways to ensure employers treat workers fairly and VC firms treat founders with respect and don’t take advantage of them during these vulnerable times.

Below you’ll find some more stellar insights from the duo that touch on making tough decisions to layoff or furlough employees and how to do it in an equitable way, as well as the rise of what Kapor Klein refers to as “vulture capitalists.”

Equitable layoffs

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Material Bank, a logistics platform for sourcing architectural and design samples, raises $28M

Material Bank, a logistics platform for the architectural and design industry, has announced the close of a $28 million Series B financing today, led by Bain Capital Ventures. Bain’s Merritt Hummer led the round on behalf of the firm and will join the board of directors at Material Bank, along with Jeff Sine, cofounder and partner at The Raine Group.

Existing investors Raine Ventures and Starwood Capital Group cofounder, Chairman and CEO Barry Sternlicht also participated in the round.

Material Bank launched in January 2019, founded by Adam I. Sandow. Its platform is meant to serve designers, architects and others who source and purchase the very building blocks of our physical world: materials.

Most architectural firms and designers have their own physical library of materials in their office, like carpet swatches, wall covering samples, tiles, and hardwoods for flooring. These libraries are nearly impossible to keep up to date — not only do styles change over time (just like clothes or anything else) but architects pull this or that binder of wall coverings or carpets and there’s no telling if or when that binder returns to the library, or if the binder will still be complete when it does return.

The other big obstacle for designers and architects is that there’s no real aggregation across the many, many manufacturers of these materials.

Sandow likens it to searching for a flight in the old days.

“We all used to book airline travel through an agent, and then the airlines offered websites,” said Sandow. “We thought ‘this is great! I can just go to AA.com or Delta.com to book my flights.’ Until we wanted to price shop. Then you had to search four or five different websites and write down all the prices and by the time you found the price you wanted, it may be gone.”

Then came Expedia and Hotwire.

That’s how Sandow thinks of Material Bank for the architectural industry.

Material Bank aggregates materials across hundreds of vendors, giving users the ability to filter around multiple parameters to find a selection of materials in minutes instead of hours.

But aggregation and powerful search are only half the battle. Designers and architects are also burdened by the time it takes to get their samples. One package may arrive tomorrow, with two others in the next three days, and still more coming in one week.

This leads to a confusing experience of getting all these samples together to show a client, and is a huge environmental waste with dozens of boxes arriving at the same exact location over several days.

To combat this waste, Material Bank built a facility in Memphis directly next door to FedEx’s sorting center. This facility is the very last stop that FedEx makes each night before sorting and sending off its overnight packages by plane.

That means that Material Bank users can place an order by midnight EST and get their samples, from any vendor on Material Bank, by 10am ET the next morning. These samples come in a single box with a tray that can be repurposed into a return package to send back unneeded samples.

Obviously, Material Bank’s facility would require hundreds of workers to turn around orders that come in late to be picked up by FedEx if it weren’t for advancements in robotics. Material Bank partners with Locus Robotics in its facility, and is thus able to pay $17.50 an hour to its human workers in the building.

Sandow says that coronavirus has not hampered the business at all, with the company seeing record revenues in March and with expectations to beat that record in April. That is partially due to the fact that those physical sample libraries in architectural and design firms are no longer accessible to employees who have had to shift to working from home.

Material Bank doesn’t charge architects or designers for the service, but does have a hybrid SaaS model in place for manufacturers and vendors on the platform. Manufacturers pay a monthly fee to access and use the platform, listing their SKUs, as well as a transactional fee to get access to the architects and designers placing orders for samples of their materials. Essentially, the manufacturers pay for the lead generation and hand-off to potential customers.

Sandow spent the last two decades growing a media network of architectural and design-focused magazines and knew early on that a reliance on advertising wouldn’t cut it as media moved online, with plans to build tools and services instead.

Material Bank was born out of that effort, and spun out of Sandow group relatively early on in its life.

The company has raised a total of $55 million since inception.

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7 VCs talk about today’s esports opportunities

Even before the COVID-19 shutdown, venture funding rounds and total deal volume of VC funding for esports were down noticeably from the year prior. The space received a lot of attention in 2017 and 2018 as leagues formed, teams raised money and surging popularity fostered a whole ecosystem of new companies. Last year featured some big fundraises, but esports wasn’t the hot new thing in the tech world anymore.

This unexpected, compulsory work-from-home era may drive renewed interest in the space, however, as a larger market of consumers discover esports and more potential entrepreneurs identify pain points in their experience.

To track where new startups could arise this year, I asked seven VCs who pay close attention to the esports market where they see opportunities at the moment:

• Peter Levin, Griffin Gaming Partners
• Beth Ferriera, Firstmark
• Ethan Kurzweil, Bessemer Venture Partners
• Jens Hilgers, BitKraft Ventures
• Doug Higgins, Sapphire Sport
• Rick Yang, NEA
• Kevin Baxpehler, Remagine Ventures

Their responses are below.

This is the second investor survey I’ve conducted to better understand VCs’ views on gaming startups amid the pandemic; they complement my broader gaming survey from October 2019 and an eight-article series on virtual worlds I wrote last month. If you missed it, read the previous survey, which is based on my theory that games are the new social networks.

Peter Levin, Griffin Gaming Partners

Which specific areas within esports are most interesting to you right now as a VC looking for deals? Which areas are the least interesting territory for new deals?

Everything around competitive gaming is of interest to us. With Twitch streaming north of two BILLION hours of game play thus far during the pandemic, this continues to be an area of great interest to us. Fantasy, real-time wagering, match-making, backend infrastructure and other areas of ‘picks and shovels’-like plays remain front burner for us relative to competitive gaming.

What challenges does the esports ecosystem now need solutions to that didn’t exist (or weren’t a focus) 2 years ago?

As competitive gaming is still so very new with respect to the greater competitive landscape of content, teams and events, the Industry should be nimble enough to better respond to dramatic market shifts relative to its analog, linear brethren. A native digital industry, getting back “online’”will be orders of magnitude more straightforward than in so many other areas.

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VC appetite for AI startups holds up in Q1 despite lackluster exit volume

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

Today we’re taking our final look back at Q1 venture capital through the lens of AI-focused startups. New data out this week paints a mixed picture of the AI startup landscape. Venture dollar volume in Q1 was pretty good, though there was weakness in certain startup stages. Exit data was weak, however, and some Q1 numbers were juiced by a single deal.

AI-focused startups have grown past their history as the hot new thing (remember when every new tech company was doing AI for 45 minutes?) into a more mature niche; TechCrunch has spent a reasonable amount of time digging into their economics, and just this week a new, $180 million AI-focused fund caught our attention.

In the post-hype days, then, let’s check in on what global AI startups got done with investors in Q1. We’re leaning on this report from CB Insights, which breaks down the quarter’s numbers for us. Let’s pick them apart and see what we can divine concerning the future.

AI Q1 2020

To set the stage, venture capital investment into AI-focused startups has generally risen on a global basis for years. Indeed, deal and dollar totals have risen year-over-year from 2015 through 2019. Indeed, 2019’s Q2 and Q3 saw record AI startup venture dollar volume ($8.45 and $8.47 billion, respectively), per CB Insights.

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Biloba lets you chat with a doctor if you have questions about your children

Meet Biloba, a French startup that wants to leverage tech to make it easier to keep your children healthy. The company recently launched a new mobile app that lets you chat with a doctor whenever you want between 8 AM and 8 PM. This way, if you have questions about your kids, you can get a quick answer.

Of course, a text conversation will never replace a visit to the pediatrician. But chances are you have a ton of questions, especially if you’re a first-time parent. Instead of browsing obscure discussion forums, you can go straight to a doctor.

Biloba isn’t working with pediatricians specifically. The company is also partnering with nurses and general practitioners. Eventually, the service is going to cost €10 per month but the company is waving fees during the lockdown.

After just three weeks, the startup managed to attract 4,000 users with around 200 conversations per day. Compared to other telemedicine services in France, such as Doctolib, Biloba doesn’t rely on video consultation. This way, it’ll be easier to deal with a large influx of new patients even with a small group of partner doctors.

The subscription business model is interesting for multiple reasons. First, Biloba isn’t covered by the French national healthcare system. In France, patients only get reimbursed if the doctor knows you already. That restriction has been lifted during the lockdown but it’s probably just a temporary lift.

Many parents probably don’t want to pay €120 per year to chat with a doctor when they could pay €0 through the national healthcare system. But if you can afford it, the barrier to medical advice becomes much lower.

Biloba previously released a vaccine reminder app that lets you enter information about your child’s vaccines and get reminders when the next scheduled vaccine is due.

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Index and Credo lead a $2.75M seed in anti-fraud tech, Resistant AI

Prague based Resistant AI has nabbed a $2.75M seed round. The security startup’s machine learning technology is designed to be deployed on top of AI systems used for financial decision making to protect customers in markets such as financial services and ecommerce from attacks such as targeted manipulation, adversarial machine learning and advanced fraud.

The seed round was co-led by Index Ventures (Jan Hammer) and Credo Ventures (Ondrej Bartos and Vladislav Jez). Seedcamp also participating, along with Daniel Dines, CEO of UiPath; Michal Pechoucek, CTO of Avast and other unnamed angel investors. Bartos joins the board of directors on behalf of the investors.

The startup sells an additional layer of protection that’s specifically designed for tightening security around automated functions such as credit risk scoring and anti-money laundering by using tech to detect fake documents that feed such systems. Its tech is also aimed at uncovering suspicious patterns of transactions which might indicate a strategic attack on the model itself or an attempt to copy sensitive data.

“Historically, all systems that make high-value financial decisions become targeted. This is already happening with the automated systems deployed by our fintech and financial customers and we are here to protect them,” said Martin Rehak, founder and CEO, in a statement.

The seed round is Resistant AI’s first tranche of external funding, with the founders bootstrapping the company since starting up in February 2019.

“We have onboarded the first customers in 2019 and the funding will help us scale our sales organisation to meet the rising demand from banks and fintechs,” Rehak told us. “We are protecting the AI&ML systems used in financial automation from manipulation or misuse by smart attackers.”

Resistant AI has two products it offers its customers at this stage: First, document inspection. It offers a machine learning system that’s designed to flag and reject “malicious documents” submitted for automated processing. “Bank statements, payslips, invoices, purchase orders and KYC documents submitted to fintechs and banks are frequently manipulated or completely falsified,” explained Rehak. “Resistant Documents, our first service, identifies and rejects the suspicious or malicious inputs.”

A second offering — Resistant Transactions — applies AI to spot problematic transaction patterns.

“We work with the fact that most attacks on AI systems require extensive interaction to discover the vulnerability,” he said. “Our system is unique by inspecting all the customer queries (which can take form or payments, money transfers or credit applications assessed by the system we protect) in context of similar queries. By looking at the stream of queries statistically, we can recognise and block the attacks that seek to steal the information embodied in the model (information stealing) or, worse, aim to nudge the system into making the wrong decision by exploiting an existing bias in the system.”

Resistant AI isn’t breaking out customer numbers yet but Rehak said it onboarded its first customers last year. “The funding will help us scale our sales organisation to meet the rising demand from banks and fintechs,” he added, saying also that it will be spending on building out product features and extending functionality, as well as on beefing up the sales and go-to-market team.

“Right now, our target customers are financial and fintech startups, as well as other companies deploying the automated process (both software and RPA) in their financial processes,” he added. “The financial systems are our current focus, but the attacks on machine learning are relevant in many other areas: process automation, e-commerce, manipulation of ‘trend detection’ algorithms in social media and other opportunities.”

It’s using a SaaS model — preferring a value approach to pricing, per Rehak. “Our problem and approach is new, and we feel that the value pricing model aligns the incentives between us and the customer in the optimal way,” he said on that.

Asked who he sees as the main competitors for the business, he cited Google Brain plus the tech giant’s activities in adversarial machine learning.

The majority of work in this area is currently done in-house by the large tech companies building their own proprietary systems — such as Google and Microsoft, he added.

Other competitors he mentioned were Inpher, which is enabling machine learning on encrypted data; Sentilink, which is doing detection of synthetic identities in the US; and Bullwall (Denmark) and YC-backed Inscribe (US/Ireland) which are focused on document forgery.

Resistant AI’s founders have a background in machine learning applied to cyber security problems having founded Cognitive Security, an earlier startup which they subsequently sold to Cisco in 2013. Over some 12 years working in the security industry Rehak said they saw how attackers targeting AI systems were getting increasingly sophisticated in avoiding detection — which gave them the idea for their latest business.

Commenting on the seed funding in a statement, Jan Hammer, general partner at Index Ventures, added: “Automation, efficiency and reliability are cornerstones of financial innovation. As machine learning takes more and more nuanced financial decisions, it needs to be protected. And this is not true only in finance, but the attacks will rapidly spread to other domains as well. More of our activity today takes place online, a trend accelerated by COVID-19, and one we believe will last. With criminals ready to take advantage of every vulnerability, the need for solutions such as those from Resistant AI has never been greater.”

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Digging for dollar signs amid edtech’s current momentum

Edtech was long defined by stodgy sales cycles, sluggish adoption and splashy pitches to K-12 districts with tight budgets, but the COVID-19 pandemic turned that reputation on its head in short order.

Now, companies in the space are entering Q2 — traditionally a slower time reserved for product development and extra focus on existing clients — busier than ever. In this piece, we’ll unpack some of the dollar signs indicating that edtech may be entering a new era.

Broader investor interest

A number of edtech founders who are not seeking venture capital have recently told me their inboxes are cluttered with notes from investors looking to chat.

It’s a refreshing break from the usual fundraising doom-and-gloom we’ve been hearing about during this pandemic, but I want to note the nuance: We’re seeing investors who have never been interested in edtech become bullish on the category as a whole. If these investors put their money where their mouths are, we’ll start to see an uptick of venture funding sector-wide.

For EdSights, co-founded by sister duo Claudia and Carolina Recchi, doors are opening. Before COVID-19, they say they mainly attracted interest from opportunity investors and edtech investors. Now, they’re talking to a number of VCs, none solely from edtech-focused funds.

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Wise locks down $5.7 million to scale its challenger bank designed for small businesses

Stripe and Shopify have transformed the face of commerce for small business users, yet when it comes to putting that cash somewhere, SMBs have found that the banking options aren’t quite as transformative.

Wise is a new challenger bank built specifically for small businesses. The startup is aiming to insert itself as an essential service in the small business repertoire by bundling banking with payment services powered by Stripe. Customers can receive payments, manage their cash and pay employees all via Wise’s app.

CEO Arjun Thyagarajan tells TechCrunch that his company has closed a $5.7 million seed round led by Base10 Partners. Abstract Ventures, Backend Capital, The Fund and Two Culture Capital also participated in the round.

While the advent of challenger banks has helped drive plenty of innovation on the consumer banking side, says Rexhi Dollaku, a principal at Base10 who led the Wise deal, “very little of that innovation has happened in the business banking context.”

Thyagarajan and his investors hope that the startup can keep churn low by embedding a wider scope of financial services products inside its core product, expanding beyond the traditional scope of banking features by offering functionality to power things like payroll and accounting.

Rather than plunging into direct customer sales, Wise is partnering with behemoth platforms like Shopify to onboard small businesses where they already are. “If you look at other [banking] options out there, they’re going direct to the customer; what we’ve learned is that it is better to partner,” Thyagarajan says. “They’re signing up inside these ecosystems so we want to partner with these ecosystems.”

The small team has already built up a customer base of 1,000 businesses. The average Wise customer has between 2-10 employees and is pulling in somewhere between $500,000 and $5 million in ARR, the company tells us. Bank accounts on Wise’s platform are FDIC-insured up to $250,000 through the startup’s partnership with banking partner BBVA USA.

While Thyagarajan says they’ve seen online spend increasing, the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted plenty of Wise’s potential customers, and has pushed the company to stay flexible in the businesses they cater to. “I think a lot of industries are going to get accelerated and fast-forwarded,” he says. “The customers we want to cater to are rapidly modernizing.”

Alongside the funding announcement, the startup shared that Raghav Lal, a former general manager of Small Business at Visa, will be joining the startup as its president.

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Arm is offering early-stage startups free access to its chip designs

The year’s already off to a rocky start for hardware companies, and we’re only beginning to see the true impact COVID-19 will ultimately have on the market. Arm — the U.K. company behind the designs of chips for everyone from Apple to Qualcomm to Samsung — is hoping to kickstart developing by offering up access to around 75% of its chip portfolio for free to qualified startups.

The move marks an expansion of the company’s Flexible Access program. With it, Arm will open access to its IP for early-stage startups. While some of the biggest companies pay the chip designer big bucks for that information, the cost can be prohibitive for those just starting out.

“In today’s challenging business landscape, enabling innovation is critical – now more than ever, startups with brilliant ideas need the fastest, most trusted route to success and scale,” SVP Dipti Vachani, said in a statement. “Arm Flexible Access for Startups offers new silicon entrants a faster, more cost-efficient path to working prototypes, resulting in strengthened investor confidence for future funding.”

It’s a nice bit of access for up and coming startups. Of course, Arm’s not simply doing this out of the goodness of its heart. The company certainly has a vested interest in helping foster hardware startups amid what could shape up to be an unprecedented slowdown for the industry after a few years of rapid funding and growth.

Interested parties can access the full list of available IP here. Arm believes the launch of Flexible Access for Startups could help companies accelerate time to market by up to a year.

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EV startup Nio secures $1 billion investment from China entities

Chinese electric vehicle startup Nio has secured a $1 billion investment from several state-owned companies in Hefei in return for agreeing to establish headquarters in the city’s economic development hotspot and giving up a stake in one of its business units.

The injection of capital comes from several investors, including Hefei City Construction and Investment Holding Group, CMG-SDIC Capital and Anhui Provincial Emerging Industry Investment Co.

Nio’s factory is already in Hefei, which it operates with Anhui Jianghuai Automobile Group. However, the company’s headquarters and other operations are in Shanghai about 300 miles from the Anhui provincial city. Under this agreement, Nio will locate all of its Chinese operations, including R&D, sales, service and supply chain, in the Hefei Economic and Technological Development Area.

The investment is another important milestone of Nio for its long-term growth, Nio said in a statement Wednesday.

“After receiving the investments from the strategic investors, Nio will have more sufficient funds to support its business development, to enhance its leadership in the products and technologies of smart electric vehicles and to offer services exceeding users’ expectation,” the company said, adding that the launch of Nio China headquarters in Hefei enables Nio to improve its operational efficiency and to sustain its growth and competitiveness in the long run.

Despite the new capital, Nio faces a series of challenges, including a downturn in the Chinese automotive market. Electric vehicle sales in China declined 4%, to 1.21 million vehicles in 2019, from the previous year. The company’s ES8 and ES6 vehicles haven’t generated the same demand as Tesla’s Model 3. Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic is dampening demand further as customers stayed home.

Structuring the deal requires some asset shuffling. The investment is targeted toward Nio China, a recently established business unit under Nio Inc.

Investors will put 7 billion yuan, or $1 billion, into Nio’s holding company. Nio will put its core China businesses and assets — which include vehicle research and development, supply chain and its power division — into Nio China, a subsidiary of the holding company. Nio’s parent company will also invest into Nio China.

At the end, investors will hold a 24.1% stake in Nio China while Nio will have a 75.9% controlling equity interesting into the unit.

The company expects the closing of the investments to take place in the second quarter of 2020, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions.

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When regulation presents a (rare) opportunity

Bradley Tusk Contributor

Bradley Tusk is the founder and CEO of Tusk Ventures.

More posts by this contributor

• In London, Uber has won the battle but risks losing the war
• Shockingly, Congress acted responsibly in regulating autonomous cars… So what’s next?

Every time we realize something new about the coronavirus, it’s always worse than we thought: maybe we don’t develop immunity to it; maybe six feet of social distancing isn’t far enough; maybe the spread won’t wane in warmer weather.

Every time we realize something new about the economy, it’s equally bleak: maybe we can’t safely reopen for months (Georgia and South Carolina notwithstanding), maybe unemployment will top Great Depression levels, maybe travel won’t resume till mid-2021, maybe most of the businesses who have shuttered their doors will never return.

But like everything in life, within all of the bad, there’s usually some good too. And for businesses who have to deal with regulation, this may be an unusually good time to get what you need.

The federal government does not have to balance its budget, which is why multi-trillion dollar legislation like the CARES Act is possible. But cities and states have to produce a budget every fiscal year that at least looks balanced on paper. In good times, that leads to lots of new spending. But in bad times, it requires a painful series of cuts, tax and fee increases and tough decisions that are normally avoided by politicians at all costs. All of that creates opportunity for startups.

Local government will desperately need new sources of revenue. Figuring out what a politician is going to do isn’t that difficult: identify the choice with the least political downside and that’s almost always the answer. That’s why controversial policy issues like legalizing mobile sports betting or recreational marijuana often stall in state legislatures when the budget is flush (disclosure, we’re investors in FanDuel). But now, lawmakers face a very different situation: to balance the budget, they will either need to enact deep spending cuts, raise fees and taxes, or find new sources of revenue. All of a sudden, legalizing gambling and drugs doesn’t seem so risky, politically or substantively.

Any company that can offer material new tax revenues can now see their product or service legalized and permitted in a fraction of the time it would normally take. Companies who can offer direct savings to government can now secure contracts and win procurements at a rapidly faster clip. A broke government is a friendly government. This is the moment to be aggressive.
It was less than a year ago when Amazon tried to build its second headquarters in New York City.

Despite strong support from Governor Andrew Cuomo and tepid support from Mayor Bill de Blasio, the project was widely derided as an unfair corporate boondoggle and Amazon was swiftly run out of town. In good economic times, voters have the luxury of focusing on issues that aren’t critical to their own day-to-day survival and politicians have the luxury of saying no to new jobs and tax revenue to try to score points with the base.

Not anymore. Startups in blue cities and states up and down both coasts have vastly more political leverage than they’ve had in years. Issues like privacy, worker classification reform and fears of AI are all about to take a back seat to pocketbook issues like jobs, crime and access to health care. Startups who can promise to retain jobs can now drive meaningful changes on policy, regulation, permitting, zoning, licensing and everything else they need to operate.

Startups that can offer solutions to living in a pandemic (digital payments, D2C, telemedicine, teleconferencing, tele-anything) will become shiny new toys that lawmakers want to be seen with. Delivery drones, autonomous cars, at home medical testing and other concepts that seem a little edgy will now become ideas that lawmakers have to seriously consider – if a new technology could potentially save lives during a pandemic, you really don’t want to be the politician who killed the idea.

Proposals to screw with startups won’t automatically become the top priority for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Facebook even now has a much stronger argument to lobby for Libra (no one in this climate wants to use cash if they can help it). The power dynamic just flipped on its head. But that only works if you understand it and take advantage of it.

In the continual debate over whether tech startups should ask government for permission or beg for forgiveness over the last few years, the zeitgeist has shifted significantly towards asking for permission. The tech-lash against Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple and Twitter created regulatory headaches for virtually every tech company, even some early stage startups.

All of that just changed. Regulators and lawmakers now have far bigger things to worry about than whether an electric scooter needs a particular type of permit. And if saying no to new ideas from new companies means turning away desperately needed jobs and tax revenue, for all of the same reasons that it was politically salient for lawmakers to reclassify all California sharing economy workers as full time employees or reject Amazon’s overtures or limit the spread of homesharing, the opposite is now true.

Now you get points for creating jobs and avoiding spending cuts. Now you’re far more reticent to tell a constituent that they can’t make a few extra bucks by renting out a room (assuming anyone ever travels again). The label of job killer will start to become politically toxic, even in the most progressive wards, districts and neighborhoods in the bluest cities on each coast. The dynamic is clearly shifting back to begging for forgiveness (don’t be stupid and do things that are clearly illegal but interpreting gray areas of regulation as friendly is now a lot easier).

Unlike the financial crisis in 2008, businesses are not the culprit here. Tech companies are actually even some of the heroes of fighting the coronavirus. But most important, being punitive towards startups is no longer a clear political winner, even in the most liberal cities and states. Even if it seems counterintuitive, now is exactly the time for startups to aggressively seek policy change and regulatory relief.

Politics is about leverage. Startups now have it. They should take advantage of it before things change again.

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Determined AI makes its machine learning infrastructure free and open source

Machine learning has quickly gone from niche field to crucial component of innumerable software stacks, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. The tools needed to create and manage it are enterprise-grade and often enterprise-only — but Determined AI aims to make them more accessible than ever by open-sourcing its entire AI infrastructure product.

The company created its Determined Training Platform for developing AI in an organized, reliable way — the kind of thing that large companies have created (and kept) for themselves, the team explained when they raised a $11 million Series A last year.

Determined AI nabs $11M Series A to democratize AI development

“Machine learning is going to be a big part of how software is developed going forward. But in order for companies like Google and Amazon to be productive, they had to build all this software infrastructure,” said CEO Evan Sparks. “One company we worked for had 70 people building their internal tools for AI. There just aren’t that many companies on the planet that can withstand an effort like that.”

At smaller companies, ML is being experimented with by small teams using tools intended for academic work and individual research. To scale that up to dozens of engineers developing a real product… there aren’t a lot of options.

“They’re using things like TensorFlow and Pytorch,” said Chief Scientist Ameet Talwalkar. “A lot of the way that work is done is just conventions: how do the models get trained? Where do I write down the data on which is best? How do I transform data to a good format? All these are bread and butter tasks. There’s tech to do it, but it’s really the wild west. And the amount of work you have to do to get it set up… there’s a reason big tech companies build out these internal infrastructures.”

Determined AI, whose founders started out at UC Berkeley’s AmpLab (home of Apache Spark), has been developing its platform for a few years, with feedback and validation from some paying customers. Now, they say, it’s ready for its open source debut — with an Apache 2.0 license, of course.

“We have confidence people can pick it up and use it on their own without a lot of hand holding,” said Sparks.

You can spin up your own self-hosted installation of the platform using local or cloud hardware, but the easiest way to go about it is probably the cloud-managed version that automatically provisions resources from AWS or wherever you prefer and tears them down when they’re no longer needed.

The hope is that the Determined AI platform becomes something of a base layer that lots of small companies can agree on, providing portability to results and standards so you’re not starting from scratch at every company or project.

With machine learning development expected to expand by orders of magnitude in the coming years, even a small piece of the pie is worth claiming, but with luck Determined AI may grow to be the new de facto standard for AI development in small and medium businesses.

You can check out the platform on GitHub or at Determined AI’s developer site.

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Atlassian cofounder and co-CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes is coming to Disrupt SF 2020

Atlassian is about as ubiquitous to software engineers as Google is to the rest of us. The Sydney-based company, which launched in 2002, develops tools and services for enterprise collaboration and marched efficiently to a public offering in 2015.

So it goes without saying that we’re thrilled to have Atlassian cofounder and co-CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes join us at Disrupt SF 2020, which runs September 14 to September 16.

As far as entrepreneurship goes, Cannon-Brookes is on a very short list of founders who have led a company from founding to public offering, and all the steps in between.

Atlassian was one of the early players in enterprise collaboration, particularly for engineering and development teams, and has over the years introduced a robust product suite including Jira, Confluence, and Hipchat.

Cannon-Brookes has been at the helm for the entire journey, from raising early funding to product development to acquisitions (including Trello) to public offering and beyond. All the while, Cannon-Brookes kept the company’s HQ, and all invoicing, in its home country of Australia, becoming the most successful tech startup to ever launch out of the nation down under.

One of the more interesting features of the company? Unlike Microsoft and IBM and other big enterprise software companies, Atlassian has always operated without a proper sales team, using a fraction of spend on sales and marketing compared to other enterprise software giants.

“We had a hunch early on that salespeople break software companies,” Cannon-Brookes told the Australian Financial Review in 2015. “But convincing people this model would work has probably been the biggest struggle we’ve had. We’ve had a lot of smart people who wouldn’t join the company or give us money or advise us because it made no sense to them.”

The company developed an enormously successful distribution flywheel built on the back of one necessary ingredient: remarkable products. Great products at low prices mean that you can sell to everyone, and if you sell to everyone you have to do it online and with transparent pricing and a great free trial. But if you offer a free trial, you better have a remarkable product, and the flywheel spins on and on.

It’s worked.

Atlassian products are used by more than 160,000 large and small organizations across the globe, including Spotify, NASA, Sotheby’s and Visa.

Cannon-Brookes is also a tech investor across sectors like software, fintech, agriculture and energy, with a seat on the board of Zoox.

We’re excited to sit down with Cannon-Brookes and hear more about the company’s trajectory over the last two decades and hear what comes next for the behemoth.

Disrupt SF 2020 runs September 14 to September 16 at the Moscone Center right in the heart of San Francisco. For folks who can’t make it in person, we have several Digital Pass options to be part of the action or to exhibit virtually which you can check out here.

We’ll be announcing more speakers over the coming weeks so stay tuned.

(Editor’s Note: We’re watching the developing situation around the novel coronavirus very closely and will adapt as we go. You can find out the latest on our event schedule plans here.)

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Extra Crunch Live: Join Roelof Botha for a live Q&A on May 6 at 2pm ET/11am PT

23andMe. MongoDB. Eventbrite. Evernote. Bird. Square. Tumblr. Unity. YouTube. Xoom.

Roelof Botha has had a seat on each of these companies’ boards, but his list of investments is much, much longer.

The Sequoia partner and managing director is legendary in Silicon Valley and the broader tech world, and we’re very excited that he’s joining us for an upcoming episode of Extra Crunch Live that will air on Wednesday, May 6th at 2pm ET/11am PT. Extra Crunch members may join the Zoom call or view the broadcast live (or on demand) on YouTube. If you’re not already a member, you can join here.

Before Botha graduated from Stanford, he had joined the ranks of the PayPal mafia, serving as the fintech startup’s director of corporate development. He climbed the ranks to vice president of finance and was eventually named CFO in 2001. He was just 28 went PayPal went public in 2002.

Following PayPal’s sale to eBay, Botha left the company to join Sequoia Capital in January of 2003; since then, he has been investing in some of the world’s fastest-rising startups.

Botha has been on Forbes’ Midas List every year since 2008 and was ranked third in 2020. He led Sequoia’s investments in companies like Instagram, YouTube and Square and is one of the most respected voices in tech and venture capital alike.

With the coronavirus thrashing the economy and forcing quick adaptation from the tech sector and beyond, Botha can provide a unique look at what comes next for tech and offer advice to startups that are trying to chart a course through a storm that has no end in sight.

We’ll ask Botha how he’s advising his own portfolio companies, any decision-making frameworks he suggests for business leaders who find themselves between a rock and a hard place and his general outlook on VC appetite over the next six to twelve months. There will also be plenty of time for questions from the audience, so come prepared.

You can find the Zoom info below.

Botha joins an incredible list of speakers joining us on Extra Crunch Live, including Kirsten Green, Mark Cuban and Hunter Walk. We’ll be announcing new speakers soon, so stay tuned!

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Utah-based seed fund Kickstart closes fifth fund worth $110M

Continuing our week’s coverage of new venture funds, this morning let’s dig into Kickstart’s latest capital pool.

Kickstart Seed Fund, based in Utah’s Salt Lake City, has raised a $110 million Fund V it announced this morning, its largest to date. The firm’s rise to investing prominence has largely coincided with Utah’s own emergence as a technology hub, with the pair’s success intertwined since the financial crisis when the fund was put together.

Founded in 2008, when Utah was far from known as a technology hub—let alone a printing press for billion-dollar startups—the firm has invested in over 100 companies and has seen 20 exits, Kickstart told TechCrunch in an interview.

The seed fund has backed firms like Podium, which recently raised $125 million at a unicorn valuation, and Lucid, which recently raised a $52 round itself and is also a unicorn. Those rounds come to mind as they were both announced this year, and each saw the firm in question announce that it had crested $100 million ARR.

Utah, COVID-19 and the future

Any idea that the mega-exit of Utah’s Qualtrics to SAP was a fluke, or perhaps an echo to some prior success that the state had seen, is now moot. And that means that Kickstart has a fresh bloc of funds to invest in a startup scene that has been hot for some time.

To get a handle on what’s changing, however, in the COVID-19 era for the state’s startups and investing scene, TechCrunch spoke with a number of investors from the fund before their new fund was announced.

Checking on Utah’s startup scene as the economy slips

Kickstart’s funds have grown as its local tech scene expanded. From just a few million in Fund I back in 2008 to a $26 million Fund II, the firm has added capital with each raise. Its third fund clocked in at $39 million bested by its Fund IV tally of $74 million. Now flush with $110 million, you might think that the firm is prepped to shake up its strategy.

Not really, as it turns out. Kickstart’s Curt Roberts told TechCrunch during a call that the firm has stuck close to the stage that it invests at over time. The market has changed the size of seed rounds some, however, leading to the firm taking on a bit more capital over time. “It is very fair to say that your average seed round has gone up in size slightly,” Roberts said, noting that “companies are just getting more done before they raise [a] seed round.”

As you can imagine, if startups are doing more before raising seed money, they can command a higher valuation. Curt agrees, telling TechCrunch that startups can “justify a little more valuation [at] a similar level of dilution” now when they raise.

Toss in some pre-seed investing, and the fact that Kickstart wants to protect its percentage in investments over time, and the larger funds make sense. The firm isn’t big on SPVs, as it turns out, so having more duckets in the till should help it maintain ownership a bit more easily over time.

Most importantly perhaps for Utah itself is that one if its best-known funds now has nine-figures of capital to disburse right when the economy is falling apart. If you are a startup ecosystem, having new buckets of capital land in your region is good news, especially when the business climate is worsening.

Per the group, the COVID-19 crisis isn’t causing endless mayhem in their scene. Yet, at least. The firm stressed Utah’s community cohesion as helping limit public unrest, in addition to the fact that as many of the state’s startups are B2B SaaS shops, making them less likely to get the legs kicked out from underneath them by a drop in consumer spending. TechCrunch has reported on the Utah startup world, and while its scene hasn’t been immune to layoffs it hasn’t seen as many other, similarly-sized ecosystems.

It’s still early days, however.

Kickstart’s investors also told TechCrunch that companies in its area do not run as heavy a burn rate as some other region’s startups, meaning that they are perhaps less exposed to economic hardship if their growth slows.

Utah’s first tech successes like Omniture have been overshadowed by its second wave of breakouts (Qualtrics most of all). And now with Galileo’s exit (a Kickstart company, it turns out), and Podium and Lucid’s latest raises, it’s clear that the third generation of firms in the region are going to be alright. Kickstart now has the capital to make sure that a forth and fifth can get off their feet and follow them.

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Latin American startup deals see major drop in COVID-19 era

Brian Walsh Contributor

Brian Walsh is the head of WIND Ventures, the venture capital arm of COPEC, a leading energy company in Central and South America and the U.S. WIND Ventures provides mobility, energy and retail startups and scaleups with access to Latin America.

Over the last number of years, Latin America has emerged as a significant growth market for big tech, including Uber, Airbnb, Amazon, Facebook, Coursera and others.

It has also become a growing and vibrant homegrown startup ecosystem. The region has sprouted 19-plus unicorns, several exits and even a billion-dollar, single-round financing. The coronavirus pandemic, however, is having an outsized impact on Latin America’s startup activity compared to other regions, judging by Q1 2020 activity numbers — and this is just the beginning.

When including the U.S., Western Europe (WEU), U.K., China and Latin America, the global startup innovation landscape experienced a 27% drop in Q1 2020 in terms of the number of deals completed compared to the previous quarter. Giving some comfort to venture capitalists and startup founders alike is that the amount of invested capital remained essentially constant. The average deal size increased across these regions — up a matching 27%. So, from a global perspective, the venture capital community did fewer but larger deals, on average, during the quarter where COVID-19 started wreaking major havoc in the economy.

Looking at each of these innovation hubs individually, we see different levels of impact from, presumably, COVID-19 between Q4 2019 and Q1 2020. Deal count for the U.S., WEU and U.K. each went down approximately 20% each. Fairly modest, all things considered. China’s deal count, however, suffered almost a 50% drop while Latin America’s deal count went down almost 60%.

We also see a stark difference between these regions from an invested capital perspective. The U.S., WEU and U.K. each invested approximately 28% more capital in Q1 2020 as compared to Q4 2019, while China’s and Latin America’s invested capital both went significantly down. China deployed a bit over one-third less capital and Latin America deployed a very significant two-thirds less.

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Niche’s one-stop shop for college searchers raises a $35M Series C

Despite the implications of its name, edtech platform Niche took nearly a decade-and-a-half to find its place within the world of the college search process.

The company started as College Prowler, selling informational books, which looked like a hybrid between CliffsNotes and a Zagat guide, about colleges. It sold hundreds of thousands of copies and amassed millions in revenue, but then had to face the economic crisis of 2008 and figure out a new go-to-market strategy.

Today, and a few pivots later, Niche partners with college campuses and schools to provide information to prospective students. The focus is the same as in 2002, according to founder Luke Skurman, as it tries to make the college search process more clear and student-focused.

Think of Niche as a focused platform for students to review their college options without having to track multiple browser tabs and messy spreadsheets. It allows users to compare metrics like historic acceptance rate, cost and post-graduate earnings for each school, as well as topics like majors and campus life. Niche uses the data to grade each school, and it lists reviews and similar schools. Beyond a college by college look, Niche has ranking lists spanning topics like best dorms and most diverse colleges.

Skurman noted that, historically, April is a month when students make decisions about where to commit for college and squeeze in a visit before they put down their deposit.

“In the world we’re living in right now, that’s not possible,” he said. “Many colleges are trying to find new vendors and new solutions to help them for the fall 2021 to help them market.”

Beyond coronavirus’s impact, the founder noted that colleges should consider digital tours as a way to be “equitable and inclusive, because we recognize that a lot of families don’t have the means to be able to visit all these campuses across the country.”

Despite rocky days in the past, Niche went from zero to 1,400 clients in the past three years. In 2019, Niche increased its ARR more than 100% and client base by more than 60% year-over-year. Niche was cash-flow positive for the majority of the year.

The digitization of the college admissions experience brought similar growth to CampusReel, a startup that virtualizes tours for colleges through student-generated videos.

“Traditional visit days are essentially no longer options,” said Nick Freud, founder of CampusReel. “So colleges are scrambling to find a solution even if they can’t completely replace how you capture the look and the feel and the culture of a campus in a virtual setting.” Freud said that he’s seeing colleges start to supplement their marketing materials with video and student-generated content. He claims that CampusReel has tools to allow a college to post a profile in less than 15 minutes.

Optimal, another college rankings and review company, similarly offers information to students about schools. The platform has less of a data focus than Niche, and focuses more on reviews and lists. Optimal also connects students to coding schools and online bootcamps.

It’s this broad growth amid consumer-facing platforms for college searchers, coupled with a potential market of 40,000 schools, that led Niche to raise a $35 million Series C, it announced today. The round was led by Radian Capital, with additional participation from Salesforce Ventures. Existing investors Allen & Company LLC and Tim Armstrong participated, as well.

Niche’s new capital comes as the way schools do business changes by the day. With new cash in the bank, we’ll see see how a company born from adaptation fares in the coming months.

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Smart contact lens startup Mojo Vision raises $51M

Mojo Vision’s technology still felt early-stage when we met with them back at CES. But the demos we did see were enough to convince us that there really could be something to the California startup’s smart content lens technology.

Clearly we weren’t alone in that. The company just announced that it has raised more than $51 million as part of a Series B-1, led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), along with Gradient Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Liberty Global, Struck Capital, Dolby Family Ventures, Motorola Solutions Venture Capital and others. The lofty raise puts its total funding at north of $159 million. The move also finds NEA’s venture partner Greg Papadopoulos joining Mojo’s board.

Mojo Vision’s AR contact lenses are very cool, but many questions remain

As expected, Mojo’s using the large raise to help productize its technology. The company says it is currently working with the FDA’s Breakthrough device Program to introduce early applications for the technology focused on the visually impaired.

“The unveiling of the details of our product development earlier this year has generated increased excitement and momentum around the potential of Mojo Lens,” Mojo CEO and co-founder Drew Perkins said in a statement. “This new round of funding brings more support and capital from strategic investors and companies to help us continue our breakthrough technology development. It gets us closer to bringing the benefits of Mojo Lens to people with vision impairments, to enterprises and eventually, consumers.”

Timing for the product is still an open question. For now it remains little more than a cool technology. But taking it for a test drive gives you a notion of how revolutionary if could be if the company makes it across the finish line. And now it’s got significantly more financial support to help it get there.

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