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How corporations and startups can more effectively work with one another

Published August 23, 2018

Maria Palma
Contributor

Maria Palma is vice president of Business Development and head of Platform at RRE Ventures.

Build versus buy? Potential partner or potential disruptor?

The option set for corporations to collaborate with startups used to be simpler. Today, the options seem almost endless: build, partner, buy, integrate with their APIs, co-develop product together, white-label a part of their technology, share specific data sets, cross-sell each other’s products — and more. The notion of a straightforward “vendor” relationship doesn’t apply anymore.

The landscape has also changed. If the corporate posture of the past around innovation could be described as “not invented here” with a strong bias toward building internally, today’s corporate posture leans in a much different direction, with many thinking about how to disrupt themselves before an external party beats them to it.

Not surprisingly, this has created more corporate and startup partnerships. While getting this type of collaboration right is beneficial for both parties, if you speak to most startups selling into large enterprises or corporate executives looking to partner with startups today, you will find many justifiable frustrations on both sides.

As the vice president of Business Development at RRE Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm based in New York, a major part of my role is leading our business development initiatives, where we enable collaboration between corporations and startups. Before this role, I spent time on the corporate side and on the startup side, so I’ve gotten to see this dynamic from both angles throughout my career. While there is no silver bullet for this type of work, here are a few best practices I’ve learned, sometimes through painful mistakes, or observed along the way.

For startups looking to sell into large enterprises

Do your homework. Corporate executives expect you to be prepared. Spend the time to understand what their business might be going through. Do they need new growth opportunities? Do they need to cut costs? Given the size of these companies, it’s easy to find information on them.

Spend time reading recent press, analyst reports on the company or understanding more about the division you are speaking to. You want to walk in saying some version of “Here is how I think my product can be relevant to you and help you with one of your key objectives” instead of saying some version of “Here is my shiny object — don’t you want to buy it?”

Be realistic about where you are and where you are headed. The last thing you want to happen is for a corporation to agree to use or test your product only for you to tell them in the next sentence that you haven’t yet launched or built what you just showed them. Be realistic with the corporation about what you can do for them today, tomorrow and in the future. They will be more flexible than you might think if they understand your timelines and product road map.

Focus on ease of use and ease of integration. We might all be reading headlines about Mars exploration these days, but let’s ground ourselves in a different space reality. It’s not uncommon for major Fortune 500 companies today to still be operating tech or leveraging data models that were built before man was put on the moon. Your technology might be incredible, but if they can’t test it easily or seamlessly integrate it with their tech stack, you are unlikely to get real traction.

Understand the complexities of operating at scale. Think of your own trajectory as a company and how hard it has been to scale your company, from getting the right people to growing revenue and building the right product — and every detail in-between. Now multiply that by a million. Even though Fortune 500 corporations have more resources in absolute magnitude, they have all the same problems you do, often with more complexities, given their scale.

The option set for corporations to collaborate with startups used to be simpler.

If integrating your product has negative consequences for them, it will likely affect millions of customers, billions of dollars of revenue and have major brand and shareholder consequences, so have some empathy on why they want to properly vet your product and company first.

Learn to fly at 30,000 feet or 30 feet. Effective startup leadership requires one to zoom in and out on a daily basis, quickly and seamlessly. The ability to quickly shift gears and move between big picture and small details is crucial for operating early-stage companies. It’s also essential for working with corporations. Depending on the meeting, a prospective client might want you to go into the technical weeds or have a strategy discussion on a use case that’s not on your road map.

Be ready to fly at both levels, and also be deliberate about where you personally spend your time, as it’s your scarcest asset while running a resource-constrained startup.

For corporations looking to integrate new technologies

Optimize for quality, not quantity, and focus on real use cases. While it can be tempting to meet with every startup employing the right buzzword of the moment (artificial intelligence, blockchain, machine learning), you want to avoid going on a startup safari where you see a number of cool things in the wild and walk away without doing anything differently in your organization.

Instead of meeting with technology companies based on buzzwords, identify real problems your organization needs to solve and find companies that can help you solve those problems. What matters in the end is translating technology to real tangible use cases that are digestible internally in your organization.

Make fast decisions. As a corporate executive I know puts it, “Maybes kill startups. A fast No is the best thing after Yes.” If you know you are not going to leverage the company’s product, say no as quickly as possible. With fewer resources, startups don’t have the same meeting after meeting bandwidth as you. Remember, saying no now isn’t no forever.

You don’t want to spend months creating a partnership only to find out the technology isn’t what you expected.

Should you find yourself in a different situation a few months from now, you can always go back and revisit the company. In either case, please give startups real feedback, especially when you don’t move forward with them. In many cases these companies are early on in their growth trajectory, and providing honest feedback helps them build their own product and business.

Create better internal processes to partner with smaller companies. Unless you are one of the few corporations that have set this up well, most of your internal processes (IT Review, Procurement and Sourcing, Compliance, Security, Risk Analysis and Legal Review) for commercial vendor relationships are not set up with smaller companies in mind, which have limited HR and legal teams. To innovate more quickly, create a different set of processes for these types of partnerships that allow you to still assess risk but in a faster, more streamlined way. If your ability to partner is slower than the pace of change, you will never be ahead of the curve.

Short-term versus long-term change. Think about innovation along different time horizons. A good place to start is McKinsey’s three horizons of growth methodology. Consider how you will collaborate with companies along these different time horizons. The most senior level in your organization should take this view as this conflicts with focusing on real use cases today. Make sure that your company is not just integrating incremental changes at all levels.

Build a better sandbox. Find ways to test new technologies with your own existing systems and data in a way that replicates scale without affecting your existing business. You don’t want to spend months creating a partnership only to find out the technology isn’t what you expected. The more this sandbox can mimic your true environment, the more likely you are to have success with the real integration.

We think a lot about corporate and startup collaboration and welcome any dialogue on the topic; contact us at platform@rre.com.

Housing startup Bungalow raises $14 million Series A round led by Khosla Ventures

Published August 23, 2018

Moving to a new city can be tough for a number of reasons, but what’s arguably hardest about moving is a competitive and expensive housing market, and lack of a pre-existing social support network. That’s the problem startup Bungalow is trying to solve.

Bungalow, which just raised a $14 million Series A round led by Khosla Ventures with participation from Founders Fund, Atomic VC, Cherubic Ventures and Wing Ventures, offers people relatively affordable places to live with others who have been vetted by Bungalow’s platform. As part of the round, Keith Rabois of Khosla will join Bungalow’s board of directors. Bungalow also raised a $50 million debt facility to fuel its home growth costs. Bungalow had previously raised a $7 million seed round.

Bungalow, which joins the likes of WeLive, OpenDoor, Common, Roam and so many others, aims to be cheaper than getting your own studio or one-bedroom apartment, and offer a better experience than finding a roommate via Craigslist. Bungalow works with homeowners to lease their homes as the master tenant for three years at time. From there, Bungalow rents out the property on a room-by-room basis while guaranteeing occupancy to the homeowners.

“There aren’t as many families that are looking for these four, five, six-bedroom homes and so the incremental additional cost for those additional bedrooms is not commensurate with the individual rate at which we can lease out those individual bedrooms,” Bungalow co-founder and CEO Andrew Collins told me. “And so we were able to therefore basically create value out of that and then with scale that margin that we’re able to create within those given homes in an incredibly profitable and exciting coupling.”

For the renter, Bungalow says it’s about 30-40 percent cheaper than a studio. Depending on the market, of course, the prices can vary. Bungalow also furnishes shared common spaces, provides utilities, Wi-Fi and housekeeping in the monthly rental cost. In addition to what’s provided inside the space, Bungalow hosts monthly events for members in its properties to meet each other within a given market.

Bungalow currently operates 200 properties across seven markets, including the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York City, Portland, San Diego, Seattle and Washington, D.C. In total, there are 750 people residing in a Bungalow-leased property. All residents first must go through credit and background checks, as well as interviews with any existing residents before moving in. But that process can happen very fast, the company said. Some people have moved in same-day, but on average people look about 10 to 20 days ahead of when they’re trying to move.

While Bungalow’s current model is leasing assets from homeowners, it’s set up to operate any type of asset, Collins said, whether that’s a joint-venture or independently owned by Bungalow. Within the next six to 12 months, Bungalow is looking to launch in up to 12 new markets in the U.S. Next year, Bungalow hopes to expand its offering outside of the U.S.

Shared housing startups are taking off

Mixmax launches IFTTT-like rules to help you manage your inbox

Published August 23, 2018

Mixmax, a service that aims to make email and other outbound communications more usable and effective, today announced the official launch of its new IFTTT-like rules for automating many of the most repetitive aspects of your daily email workflow.

On the one hand, this new feature is a bit like your standard email filter on steroids (and with connections to third-party tools like Slack, Salesforce, DocuSign, Greenhouse and Pipedrive). Thanks to this, you can now receive an SMS when a customer who spends more than $5,000 a month emails you, for example.

But rules also can be triggered by any of the third-party services the company currently supports. Maybe you want to send out a meeting reminder based on your calendar entries, for example. You can then set up a rule that always emails a reminder a day before the meeting, together with all the standard info you’d want to send in that email.

“One way we think about Mixmax is that we want to do for externally facing teams and people who talk a lot of customers what GitHub did for engineering and what Slack did for internal team communication,” Mixmax co-founder and CEO Olof Mathé told me. “That’s what we do for external communication.”

While the service started out as a basic Chrome extension for Gmail, it’s now a full-blown email automation system that offers everything from easy calendar sharing to tracking when recipients open an email and, now, building rules around that. Mathé likened it to an executive assistant, but he stressed that he doesn’t think Mixmax is taking anybody’s jobs away. “We’re not here to replace other people,” he said. “We amplify what you are able to do as an individual and give you superpowers so you can become your own personal chief of staff so you get more time.”

The new rules feature takes this to the next level and Mathé and his team plan to build this out more over time. He teased a new feature called “beast mode” that’s coming in the near future and that will see Mixmax propose actions you can take across different applications, for example.

Many of the new rules and connectors will be available to all paying users, though some features, like access to your Salesforce account, will only be available to those on higher-tier plans.

Mixmax raises $10.35M to improve email

Twitch will livestream Pokémon TV series and movies, while viewers ‘catch’ badges

Published August 23, 2018

Twitch has teamed up with The Pokémon Company to allow viewers to binge watch the Pokémon: The Series TV show and related movies on its site, and “catch” Pokémon badges along the way. While the former is one of Twitch’s many retro binge watch fests – it’s previously streamed old shows like Bob Ross, Julia Child, Mister Rogers, SNL, and most recently, Knight Rider – the interactive feature it’s debuting is something new.

According to the company, Twitch will launch its own Pokémon extension to accompany the broadcast. This overlay, called “Twitch Presents: Pokémon Badge Collector,” will encourage viewers to collect Pokémon badges that appear on the screen for points, which places them on a leaderboard.

This is only the second time Twitch has added an interactive element like this to one of its viewing events, and its addition could see users watching for longer periods of time, as a result. The first was a “watch and win” extension during a Doctor Who broadcast, but it was different as it focused on collecting contest entries.

Twitch also notes this will be the longest viewing event it’s ever held.

The binge will see 16 movies and 19 TV seasons with 932 episodes streamed across Twitch’s network, starting on August 27, 2018, and spanning until 2019. This will kick off with the first season, Pokémon: Indigo League at 10 AM PDT on the 27ths for audiences in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Latin America, and Australia. The content will air on TwitchPresents and on its companion channels in French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Brazilian Portuguese.

“The Twitch community has a passion for Pokémon based on the warm embrace the series received when we celebrated the brand’s 20th anniversary, as well as the cultural milestone that was set when over a hundred thousand Twitch members played Pokémon together,” said Jane Weedon, Director of Business Development at Twitch, in a statement about the launch.

The viewing event comes at a time when reports claim Twitch is going after a wider audience than just gamers. The company has been wooing creatives like vloggers, cooks, artists, and others to come to its site, instead of only broadcasting on YouTube. And it’s been airing non-esports content through marathon events like this new one with Pokémon. According to Bloomberg, TV show livestreams are one of the two fastest-growing genres on the site, the other being “IRL” (in real life) content.

The Pokémon viewing event, in particular, is aimed at a younger audience who may not have the level of nostalgia for the classic TV shows Twitch previously aired. Instead, Twitch says the livestream is appropriate for fans 13 and up – which means it could attract those whose first real exposure to Pokémon was the mobile game that went viral following its launch in 2016.

The dates and times of the Pokémon series and movies will be on Twitch Presents. The binge fest won’t include newer series, like the Sun & Moon or Sun & Moon Ultra Adventures, however.

Carmera, the mapping startup for autonomous vehicles, raises $20 million

Published August 23, 2018

Autonomous vehicles need more than a brain to operate safely in a world filled with obstacles. They need maps. Or more specifically, self-driving vehicles need maps that constantly refresh and can deliver important information — like that sudden lane closure due to construction or a double-parked vehicle — so they can take the safest and most efficient route possible.

This specific need has provided an opening for startups in what once looked like a locked-up mapping market dominated by a few giants.

Carmera, a New York-based mapping and data analytics startup, is one of them. The company, which came out of stealth two years ago, has now raised $20 million in a Series B funding round led by GV, formerly known as Google Ventures. Carmera previously raised $6.5 million.

The company announced the funding raise Thursday along with a few other updates, including a new feature on its autonomous mapping product and a partnership with New York City. The capital will be used to hire more talent and expand.

“We’ll be doing the most aggressive hiring we’ve ever done this next year,” Carmera co-founder and CEO Ro Gupta told TechCrunch, adding that the company will mostly focus on building out its New York and Seattle offices. Carmera, which has about 25 employees, plans to have more than 50 by the end of next year.

“The money also allows us to be more prospective than simply reacting to customer needs,” Gupta added.

In other words, Carmera can move into new markets where it suspects there will be a need in the future, not just wait for a call from their customers. One of those customers is Voyage, the autonomous driving startup that currently operates self-driving cars in retirement communities.

Carmera has an interesting business model, and one that’s likely attractive to investors looking for startups with a present-day revenue stream. The company describes itself as a street intelligence platform for autonomy. Its main product is the Carmera autonomous map, a high-definition map for autonomous vehicle customers like automakers, suppliers and robotaxis.

The twist here is that the company uses data gleaned from its other product — a fleet-monitoring service used by commercial customers with vehicles driven by humans — to keep those AV maps fresh. The fleet product is a telematics and video monitoring service used by professional fleets that want to manage risk with their vehicles and drivers.

These fleets of camera-equipped human-driven vehicles deliver new information to the autonomous map as they go about their daily business in cities. Carmera calls this a “pro-sourcing” swarm.

The startup has now added a real-time events and change-management engine to its autonomous map that Gupta contends is a major leap forward because it not only provides more detailed information to self-driving vehicles, it gives these driverless vehicles a suggested path.

In some mapping products, there’s generally a base map and then a dynamic overlay. The problem, Gupta explains, is that when things change, like a lane closure, the dynamic map only flags it, leaving it up to the vehicle to figure out what to do next.

“That works fine when humans are driving, it just doesn’t go far enough for AVs,” Gupta said. “What they need to know is how do I path plan around it?”

Carmera’s real-time events and change-management feature

The map will detect a change in milliseconds, classify it within seconds and then validate and redraw the base map within minutes, according to Carmera. The company is giving companies deploying autonomous vehicles API access to this data at every stage.

Carmera also has a “site intelligence product,” a jargon term that means the company provides spatial data and street analytics (like how pedestrians move within a particular intersection) to urban planners.

Carmera announced Thursday it will begin sharing data such as historical pedestrian analytics and real-time construction detection with New York City’s Department of Transportation. Carmera will get access to key city data sets in return. The partnership with NYC DOT follows an earlier-data sharing initiative with the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership.

Shadow announces a new box for its cloud gaming service

Published August 23, 2018

French startup Blade, the company behind Shadow, is updating its physical box that lets you connect to your cloud computer instance. Shadow Ghost is a tiny device that provides all the ports and wireless technologies that you need to plug in to a TV or a monitor and start playing.

Shadow has been building a cloud computing service for gamers. For $35 per month, you get a gaming PC in a data center near you. Shadow gives you 8 threads on an Intel Xeon 2620 processor, an Nvidia Quadro P5000 GPU that performs more or less as well as an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080, 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. It’s a full Windows 10 instance and you can do whatever you want with it.

The company started with a dedicated box from day one. The first Shadow box was an oddly-shaped black box with a few USB ports and DisplayPorts. This way, you could replace your PC at home with this box and use the same peripherals.

When you turn it on, it feels like you’re booting up your gaming PC, but you’re actually just starting a computer with a low-powered CPU that connects to your gaming PC in the cloud.

Over the past few months, Shadow has slowly decorrelated the service from the physical device in your home. When you subscribe, you don’t get a box by default. You can install the Shadow app on your existing computer, phone or tablet and start playing.

If you still want the box to connect to your Shadow instance without an existing PC, you can rent it for $10 per month or purchase it for $140. It could be particularly useful for a TV for instance.

Compared to the previous generation, Shadow Ghost is completely silent as the fan is gone — that was my main complaint with the first Shadow box. You won’t need as many dongles either as there’s an HDMI port by default (instead of a DisplayPort) and it supports both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. It’s also much more energy-efficient as it should consume three times less power than the existing Shadow device.

Shadow Ghost will be available for the same price at some point during the last quarter of 2018. The service itself is currently available in France, Germany, the U.K., Belgium, Switzerland and Luxembourg. In the U.S., the company has a data center near San Francisco and another one on the East Coast.

Armory lands $10M Series A to bring continuous delivery to enterprise masses

Published August 23, 2018

Armory, a startup that has built a CI/CD platform on top the open source Spinnaker project, announced a $10 million Series A today led by Crosslink Capital. Other investors included Bain Capital Ventures, Javelin Venture Partners, Y Combinator and Robin Vasan.

Software development certainly has changed over the last several years, going from long cycles between updates to a continuous delivery model. The concept is actually called CI/CD or continuous integration/continuous delivery. Armory’s product is designed to eliminate some of the complexity associated with deploying this kind of solution.

When they started the company, the founders made a decision to hitch their wagon to Spinnaker, a project that had the backing of industry heavyweights like Google and Netflix. “Spinnaker would become an emerging standard for enabling truly multi-cloud deployments at scale. Instead of re-creating the wheel and building another in-house continuous delivery platform, we made a big bet on having Spinnaker at the core of Armory’s Platform,” company CEO and co-founder Daniel R. Odio wrote in a blog post announcing the funding.

The bet apparently paid off and the company’s version of Spinnaker is widely deployed enterprise solution (at least according to them). The startup’s ultimate goal is to help Fortune 2000 companies deploy software much faster — and accessing and understanding CI/CD is a big part of that.

As every company out there becomes a software company, they find themselves outside their comfort zones. While Google and Netflix and other hyper-scale organizations have learned to deploy software at startling speed using state of the art methodologies, it’s not so easy for most companies with much smaller engineering teams to pull off.

That’s where a company like Armory could come into play. It takes this open source project and it packages it in such a way that it simplifies (to an extent) the complex world that these larger companies operate in on a regular basis, putting Spinnaker and CI/CD concepts in reach of organizations whose core competency might not involve sophisticated software deployment.

All of this relates to multi-cloud and cloud-native approaches to software development, which lets you manage your applications and infrastructure wherever they live across any cloud vendor or even on-prem in consistent way. Being able to manage continuous deployment is part of that.

Armory launched in 2016 and is based in the Bay area. It has raised a total of $14 million with a $4 million seed round coming last year. They were also a member of the Y Combinator Winter 2017 class and count Y Combinator as an investor in this round.

ServiceNow-Box integration brings together two enterprise cloud stalwarts

Published August 23, 2018

It used to be a one-vendor, stack-driven world in the enterprise. Today, the cloud has changed that and best of breed and interoperability are the watchwords of the day. Two enterprise cloud stalwarts have announced a new integration that brings Box content directly into ServiceNow.

For ServiceNow customers, it means that they can access Box content without leaving a ServiceNow application and changing focus. Company CTO Allan Leinwand says the two share a lot of common customers, and it made sense to bring them together.

“When you’re inside of a ServiceNow record, for example, you’re looking at an incident or problem or a knowledge base article, you are going to link to directly with a Box document or save files directly to Box from ServiceNow. There’s a lot of very practical things that help people get their work done faster,” he explained.

Jeetu Patel, Box’s Chief Strategy and Chief Product officer says the two companies are working to drive innovation inside organizations and that means working with multiple products to solve organizational issues.

“Our goal has been to be a neutral central content layer for every business process. Part of that ambition is to be able to plug into best of breed applications like ServiceNow. Companies already use these tools, and use Box, and they want to be sure they work seamlessly with each other,” Patel said.

On a practical level, customers can grab the Box plug-in from the ServiceNow Store. It comes with some prebuilt workflows for typical ServiceNow product usage scenarios, but the integration is flexible and allows customization. As an example, in an HR scenario, the ServiceNow administrator might build a workflow for onboarding a new employee in ServiceNow’s HR application. Using the company’s Flow Designer workflow-building tool, they can pull in all the documents a new employee needs to sign with other tasks into a single workflow.

Contract workflow with Box content in ServiceNow Flow Designer. Screenshot: ServiceNow

It comes down to helping customers work more efficiently. “We’re both cloud companies, and we’re both driving digital transformation for our customers. And we’ve really seen a lot of synergy between the way people work in Box, and how people are working in ServiceNow. We think we can integrate together and make work get done better,” Leinwand said.

Wickr teams up with Psiphon to ensure your packets arrive safely no matter where you are

Published August 23, 2018

Encrypted collaboration app Wickr has added a feather to its cap with a partnership with Psiphon, provider of smart VPN tools. Wickr will use Psiphon’s tech to guarantee your packets get where they need to go regardless of whether you’re at home, at a cafe with bad Wi-Fi or at a cafe with bad Wi-Fi in China.

The idea is that the user shouldn’t have to be auditing their own connection to be sure their apps will work properly. That can be a matter of safety, such as a poorly secured access point; connectivity, such as one where certain ports or apps are inoperable; or censorship, like requesting data from a service banned in the country you’re visiting.

Wickr already encrypts all your traffic, so there are no worries on that account, but if the connection you’re using were to block video calls or certain traffic patterns, there’s not much the company can do about that.

Psiphon, however, is in the business of circumventing deliberate or accidental blockages with a suite of tools that analyze the network and attempt to find a way to patch you through. Whether that’s anonymizing your traffic, bouncing it off non-blocked servers, doing automatic port forwarding or some other method, the idea is the packets get through one way or another.

There’s a cost in latency and throughput, of course, but while that may matter for online gaming or video streaming, it’s far less important for something like uploading an image, chatting with colleagues and the other functions Wickr provides. At all events you can turn the feature on or off at will.

There will be a monetary cost too, of course, in the form of premiums added to paid plans. Enterprise customers will be the first to receive the Psiphon-powered traffic handling, today in fact, and the feature will then trickle its way down to other paid users and free users over the next few weeks.

Simple Feast raises $12M from Balderton and 14W to expand its weekly meat-free meal-box deliveries

Published August 23, 2018

The vast majority of environmental experts say that avoiding meat and dairy is the single most important, and most impactful action, you can take to reduce your personal impact on Earth. Why? Because of the sheer amount of carbon pumped into the atmosphere from the process of meat production. Many would agree it’s also pretty good for your health. But when most of us have been brought up with animal protein in the middle of our plates, it often feels pretty hard to achieve. At the same time, fast food delivery has been taking off, but we’re still eating the same thing: meat.

So a Danish startup has come along to try to solve this. Simple Feast delivers sustainable food to people’s homes in biodegradable boxes, and it’s now raised a $12 million series A funding round led by Balderton Capital in London, with participation from 14W in New York. Existing investors Sweet Capital and ByFounders are also re-investing the round.

Simple Feast offers what it describes as ready-to-eat plant-based food that is “sustainably produced, organic, and delivered straight to the doorstep” in biodegradable boxes every week. The meal solution delivers weekly boxes with three prepared plant-based and 100 percent organic meals ready to serve in 10 minutes.

In this respect it’s not unlike other startups, such as HelloFresh, with the main difference being that all the food is plant-based.

Jakob Jønck, CEO and co-founder of Simple Feast, says: “Climate change is real. There is no Planet B and we are facing what is arguably the biggest challenge in human history. This is a big investment for a small company, but it’s a drop in the ocean considering the challenge at hand, the politicians and industries we are up against.”

He and Thomas Ambus, co-founder/CTO, started thinking more deeply about Simple Feast when Under Armour acquired Endomondo and MyFitnessPal, their previous startups, in the spring of 2015 and got serious about it in 2016. “Ever since founding Endomondo and heading up International Operations for MyFitnessPal, I always felt a missing link when trying to move towards a healthy, sustainable diet — an actual product that didn’t compromise on taste, nor convenience, but solved the huge challenges involved with embarking on this journey towards eating plants first and foremost,” says Jønck.

Daniel Waterhouse, a partner at Balderton Capital, says: “With a global transition towards plant-based food, we believe Simple Feast is uniquely positioned to change the way we eat and create awareness about the impact of our food choices.”

The main target is families, with the parents in their 30s and 40s. “We find that women are still predominantly the decision maker when it comes to food for the family. Our most typical customers are women in a relationship in their 30s with one or two kids. Our customers are also politically interested, above the average,” says Jønck.

They are competing with restaurants, meal kits and take-away. “We are disrupting both the restaurant and the meal kit industry. Nobody has ever taken the challenge of creating climate-friendly, plant-based food seriously while serving it directly to consumers. We don´t make compromises on taste, nor convenience, and we don´t believe that we have seen that before,” he told me.