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

Published April 30, 2020

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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Okta COVID-19 app usage report finds it’s not just collaboration seeing a huge uptick

Published April 30, 2020

Okta released a special COVID-19 edition of its app usage report today, and you don’t need a Ph. D. in statistics to guess what they found. Indeed, Zoom surged 110% on the Okta network, leading the way in usage growth just as you would expect, but another whole class of tools besides collaboration also saw huge increases in usage.

As Okta wrote in the report, “We see growth in two major areas: collaboration tools, especially video conferencing apps, and network security tools such as VPNs that extend secure access to remote workers.”

These plumbing tools might not be as sexy as the collaboration tools or boast triple digit growth like Zoom did, but they are seeing a substantial increase in usage as company IT departments try to bring some order to a widely distributed workforce.

As Okta pointed out in the report, bad actors have been looking to take advantage of the situation, as they tend to do, and these folks do love to sew some chaos.

Image Credit: Okta

The biggest winners here beyond collaboration tools were VPN businesses with Palo Alto Networks GlobalProtect and Cisco AnyConnect coming in at 94% and 86% usage increases respectively. But they weren’t the only tools growing, as Okta reported the Citrix ADC load balancing tool and ProofPoint’s security training apps also showed strong gains.

It’s probably not surprising that these kinds of tools are seeing an increase in usage with so many employees working from home, but it is interesting to see which vendors are benefiting from the move.

It’s also worth noting that Okta can point to a clear demarcation date when usage began to tick up. It’s easy to forget now, but March 6th was the last day of “normal” app usage before we started to see usage of these tools start to surge.

Image Credit: Okta

While reports of this kind are somewhat limited because of the focus on a particular set of customers and the tools they use, it does give you a sense of general trends in technology involving 8,000 Okta customers and 6,500 app integrations.

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7 VCs talk about today’s esports opportunities

Published April 30, 2020

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:

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 investigated the trend of “games as 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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Microsoft makes it easier to get started with Windows Virtual Desktops

Published April 30, 2020

Microsoft today announced a slew of updates to various parts of its Microsoft 365 ecosystem. A lot of these aren’t all that exciting (though that obviously depends on your level of enthusiasm for products like Microsoft Endpoint Manager), but the overall thrust behind this update is to make life easier for the IT admins that help provision and manage corporate Windows — and Mac — machines, something that’s even more important right now, given how many companies are trying to quickly adapt to this new work-from-home environment.

For them, the highlight of today’s set of announcements is surely an update to Windows Virtual Desktop, Microsoft’s service for giving employees access to a virtualized desktop environment on Azure and that allows IT departments to host multiple Windows 10 sessions on the same hardware. The company is launching a completely new management experience for this service that makes getting started significantly easier for admins.

Ahead of today’s announcement, Brad Anderson, Microsoft’s corporate VP for Microsoft 365, told me that it took a considerable amount of Azure expertise to get started with this service. With this update, you still need to know a bit about Azure, but the overall process of getting started is now significantly easier. And that, Anderson noted, is now more important than ever.

“Some organizations are telling me that they’re using on-prem [Virtual Desktop Infrastructure]. They had to go do work to basically free up capacity. In some cases, that means doing away with disaster recovery for some of their services in order to get the capacity,” Anderson said. “In some cases, I hear leaders say it’s going to take until the middle or the end of May to get the additional capacity to spin up the VDI sessions that are needed. In today’s world, that’s just unacceptable. Given what the cloud can do, people need to have the ability to spin up and spin down on demand. And that’s the unique thing that a Windows Virtual Desktop does relative to traditional VDI.”

Anderson also believes that remote work will remain much more common once things go back to normal — whenever that happens and whatever that will look like. “I think the usage of virtualization where you are virtualizing running an app in a data center in the cloud and then virtualizing it down will grow. This will introduce a secular trend and growth of cloud-based VDI,” he said.

In addition to making the management experience easier, Microsoft is now also making it possible to use Microsoft Teams for video meetings in these virtual desktop environments, using a feature called ‘A/V redirection’ that allows users to connect their local audio and video hardware and virtual machines with low latency. It’ll take another month or so for this feature to roll out, though.

Also new is the ability to keep service metadata about Windows Virtual Desktop usage within a certain Azure region for compliance and regulatory reasons.

For those of you interested in Microsoft Endpoint Manager, the big news here is better support for macOS-based machines. Using the new Intune MDM agent for macOS, admins can use the same tool for managing repetitive tasks on Windows 10 and macOS.

Productivity Score — a product only an enterprise manager would love — is also getting an update. You can now see how people in an organization are reading, authoring and collaborating around content in OneDrive and SharePoint, for example. And if they aren’t, you can write a memo and tell them they should collaborate more.

There are also new dashboards here for looking at how employees work across devices and how they communicate. It’s worth noting that this is aggregate data and not another way for corporate to look at what individual employees are doing.

The one feature here that does actually seem really useful, especially given the current situation, is a new Network Connectivity category that helps IT to figure out where there are networking challenges.

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

Published April 30, 2020

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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TikTok tops 2 billion downloads

Published April 29, 2020

TikTok, the widely popular video sharing app developed by one of the world’s most valued startups (ByteDance), continues to grow rapidly despite suspicion from the U.S. as more people look for ways to keep themselves entertained amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The global app and its Chinese version, called Douyin, have amassed over 2 billion downloads on Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store, mobile insight firm Sensor Tower said Wednesday.

TikTok is the first app after Facebook’s marquee app, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger to break past the 2 billion downloads figure since January 1 of 2014, a Sensor Tower official told TechCrunch. (Sensor Tower began its app analysis on that date.)

A number of apps from Google, the developer of Android, including Gmail and YouTube, have amassed over 5 billion downloads, but they ship pre-installed on most Android smartphones and tables.

TikTok’s 2 billion download milestone, a key metric to assess an app’s growth, comes five months after it surpassed 1.5 billion downloads.

In the quarter that ended on March 31, TikTok was downloaded 315 million times — the highest number of downloads for any app in a quarter and — surpassing its previous best of 205.7 million downloads in Q4 2018. Facebook’s WhatsApp, the second most popular app by volume of downloads, amassed nearly 250 million downloads in Q1 this year, Sensor Tower told TechCrunch.

As the app gains popularity, it is also clocking more revenue. Users have spent about $456.7 million on TikTok to date, up from $175 million five months ago. Much of this spending — about 72.3% — has happened in China. Users in the United States have spent about $86.5 million on the app, making the nation the second most important market for TikTok from the revenue standpoint.

Craig Chapple, a strategist at Sensor Tower, said that not all the downloads are as organic as TikTok, which launched outside of China in 2017 and has engaged in a “large user acquisition campaign.” But he attributed some of the surge in downloads to the COVID-19 outbreak that has driven more people than ever to look for new apps.

India, TikTok’s largest international market, accounts for 30.3% of the app’s downloads, according to Sensor Tower. The app has been downloaded 611 million times in the world’s second largest internet market.

From a platform’s standpoint, 75.5% of all of TikTok’s downloads have occurred through Google Play Store. But the vast majority of spending has come from users on Apple’s ecosystem ($435.3 million of $456 million).

TikTok’s parent firm ByteDance, which was valued at $75 billion two years ago, counts Bank of China, Bank of America, Barclays Bank, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, UBS, SoftBank Group, General Atlantic, and Sequoia Capital China among some of its investors.

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Digging for dollar signs amid edtech’s current momentum

Published April 29, 2020

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

Published April 29, 2020

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

Published April 29, 2020

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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When regulation presents a (rare) opportunity

Published April 29, 2020

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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