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Where top VCs are investing in remote events

Published March 17, 2020

The novel coronavirus pandemic has rapidly moved companies into a remote-first world.

Nearly all of the world’s largest events have been canceled, put on pause or pivoted to online-only. In the tech world, event cancellations thus far have included SXSW, GDC, Mobile World Congress, Google I/O, Facebook F8, E3 and others.

As more and more hosts consider staging fully remote events as possible alternatives, we decided to take a deeper look into the venture-backed startups focused on supporting large-scale virtual gatherings, like Hopin and Run The World. To further understand the impact of COVID-19, we asked five leading VCs who have invested in or have knowledge of startups focused on remote events to update us on the state of the market and to share where they see opportunity in the sector:

Sarah Cannon, Index Ventures
Connie Chan, Andreessen Horowitz
Andrei Brasoveanu, Accel Partners
Ryan Kuder, Techstars Anywhere
Paul Murphy, Northzone

Sarah Cannon, Index Ventures

Which trends in remote events/conferencing excite you the most from an investing perspective?

Join TC tomorrow at 9 am PT for a chat about the latest YC startup batch

Published March 17, 2020

Hello TechCrunch friends and family, tomorrow morning at 9 am Pacific Time we’re gathering on Zoom for an in-depth chat about our favorite startups from the latest Y Combinator Demo Day. This year’s installment of the twice-yearly startup event happened yesterday, a week early and online only.

Like many other things, Demo Day was adapted to a new format in the face of COVID-19 disruptions. Despite that, TechCrunch wrote a host of posts on the companies that presented (you can see our notes here), dug into a number of the startups individually (here and here, for example), and sat down with Y Combinator’s CEO for an interview.

We’re wrapping all of that with a group chat about the entire affair. We’d host this from the office in more regular years, but, it’s 2020, and so we’re all gathering on Zoom which means that everyone is invited to listen in.

Here are the details:

What? TechCrunch team chat about YC 2020 and all the coolest companies
When? 9 am Pacific Time
How long? About 30 minutes, give or take
Where? Here, on Zoom
Should I not mute myself and annoy everyone tuned in? No, please mute yourself

We’re recording the chat, and plan to make it available to Extra Crunch subscribers shortly after we’re done. But the main call is open to everyone, so add it to your calendar and we’ll see you there.

Dear Sophie: How do I get visas for my team to work from home?

Published March 17, 2020

Sophie Alcorn
Contributor

Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneur Immigration Services.” She connects people with the businesses and opportunities that expand their lives.

CO2-based vodka startup Air Co. fully redirects its tech to making hand sanitizer for donation

Published March 17, 2020

A NYC-based startup that developed technology that extracts carbon dioxide from the air and combines it with water to create vodka has redirected its entire production capacity toward producing hand sanitizer, every bottle of which will be donated through collaboration with NYC officials, and potentially to local restaurants who employ delivery personnel providing critical service as social distancing and isolation measures continue.

Air Co. launched its vodka just last year, using a process it developed (which has received awards from NASA and XPrize) that is actually net carbon-negative. It involves pulling around one pound of carbon dioxide from the air which is then combined with water and turned into pure ethanol using solar-based renewable energy. Ethanol also happens to be the key active ingredient in hand sanitizer, which is generally between 60% and 95% alcohol in its most effective iterations.

Air Co.’s CEO and co-founder Gregory Constantine told me via email that because the company was founded on the basis of fulfilling a mission of social good, the startup wanted to find some way to help with community efforts to counter the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. It naturally turned to producing hand sanitizer made up 70% ethanol, its technology’s primary output.

The company isn’t looking to cash in on the current (ill-advised) panic-buying trends, which see supplies of hand sanitizer sold out or dwindling across major retailers and Amazon . Instead, even though it’s now directing 100% of its production capacity to making hand sanitizer, it’s also donating all of the volume it produces.

While Constantine says that initially they’ve been producing smaller volumes than they’d like, and are looking at ramping production by shifting their methods, they’ve still managed to put out more than 1,000 50mL bottles, and will “continue to make 1,000 bottles per week and push supply as much as our technology allows us to.”

I asked Constantine how they’re figuring out who receives the hand sanitizer they’re donating, given the many possible parties who would appreciate this kind of charitable action.

“We’re going to be directly supplying all donations at the advice of the city,” he said. “We are also looking to work with local restaurants to have them provide food delivery drivers with our sanitizer given that bars and restaurants have had to shut their doors to patrons, leaving delivery services at the forefront of food services here in New York City.”

Given that they have shifted production away from their revenue-generating business for this effort, I also asked Constantine how long they plan to keep this up. Despite uncertainty about how long the need will exist, he said, they’re going to try to continue producing the sanitizer “for as long as [they] can.”

“We have shifted our production and are running on a very limited team to ensure that we are not furthering the spread of the virus in our efforts,” he added. “Every small piece of help from any person or business goes a long way in a time of need like this, and we plan to help however we can.”

Lightspeed-backed WorkOS launches to help startup services become enterprise-ready

Published March 17, 2020

With the explosive popularity of B2B services startups, it was only natural that a B2B startup would come along that’s offering a service to help startups become enterprise services themselves.

WorkOS, which is launching out of stealth with seed funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners and others, is building a toolkit to help startups meet the requirements for bringing on enterprise clients. The company aims to get startups set up with an API for single sign-on, directory sync, audit trails, role-based access controls and other key services.

As more startups look to approach enterprise from a bottom-up capacity and focus on creating individual use cases, quickly meeting IT administrators’ expectations can become a shortcut to higher-margin customers. The inspiration for WorkOS came from its founder’s previous email startup, which tried to make a play for enterprise adoption and clients but couldn’t cross what he calls “the enterprise chasm.”

“The feedback I got was, this is a great app but we can’t buy this as a company because you’re not enterprise-ready,” CEO Michael Grinich told TechCrunch in an interview. “Even if you focus on the end user experience, there’s a different buyer at the end of that tunnel with a different set of needs.”

Becoming enterprise-ready means meeting the same compliance requirements that IT administrators need to adhere to, something that can obviously be an issue for a small startup that’s light on resources. On the security side, Grinich says that WorkOS is currently in its SOC-2 Type 2 observation period and should receive certification in Q2 of this year.

These are uncertain times to be a startup launching publicly, but Grinich’s description of his company as a “highway onramp to get into [enterprise] ecosystems,” seems apt for startups seeking to quickly build out new revenue streams. Right now, WorkOS operates across a few pricing structures, with a free tier that brings users single sign-on support, as well as a $99/mo developer tier and $499/mo corporate tier that scale up WorkOS’s offered functionality substantially.

First Round, SV Angel, Abstract Ventures, Tuesday Capital and Work Life Ventures are also backers.

All the companies from Y Combinator’s W20 Demo Day, Part IV: Healthcare, Biotech, Fintech and Nonprofits

Published March 17, 2020

Y Combinator’s Demo Day was a bit different this time around.

As concerns grew over the spread of COVID-19, Y Combinator shifted the event format away from the two-day gathering in San Francisco we’ve gotten used to, instead opting to have its entire class debut to invited investors and media via YC’s Demo Day website.

In a bit of a surprise twist, YC also moved Demo Day forward one week citing accelerated pacing from investors. Alas, this meant switching up its plan for each company to have a recorded pitch on the Demo Day website; instead, each company pitched via slides, a few paragraphs outlining what they’re doing and the traction they’re seeing, and team bios. It’s unclear so far how this new format — in combination with the rapidly evolving investment climate — will impact this class.

As we do with each class, we’ve collected our notes on each company based on information gathered from their pitches, websites and, in some cases, our earlier coverage of them.

To make things a bit easier to read, we’ve split things up by category rather than have it be one huge wall of text. These are the healthcare, biotech, fintech and nonprofit companies. You can find the other categories (such as B2B, consumer and robotics) here.

Healthcare and Biotech

Simple Stripes: Aims to make glucose testing cheaper and more accessible by making strips that can be read by any smartphone camera, rather than requiring a dedicated glucose meter. The company says it expects to submit its strips for FDA approval in June.

nplex biosciences: A faster, cheaper way to do the protein panels required in the development of new medications. The company says it has over $4 million in letters-of-intent in the works, including one from a major pharma company.

Healthlane: An app meant to help users in Africa communicate with their doctors, make appointments and track lab results. The company says it has already reached profitability, with a retention rate of 98%.

Breathe Well-being: A 16-week program meant to help users in India with chronic conditions (such as diabetes) in their efforts to lose weight. The company offers a one-on-one diabetes coach who helps the user with tracking things like weight/meals/activity and trains them in cognitive behavioral therapy techniques meant to reduce stress. Currently seeing an $11.2K MRR.

Dropprint Genomics: “Single cell genomics” software meant to reduce the time/financial cost of analyzing individual cell activity to enable better drug discovery. They’ve signed over $1 million in LOIs in two months.

Newman’s: A digital health clinic for men in Indonesia. They’re focusing on problems that are often seen as either embarrassing (hair loss, erectile dysfunction) or are often abandoned (quitting smoking) by making doctor visits easier, cheaper and more private by way of remote consultation. Find our previous coverage of Newman’s here.

Loop Health: Loop Health says that most health insurance in India covers “only hospital stays, not doctor visits.” They’re looking to improve this by offering unlimited access to their designated Loop Health clinics, along with app-based telemedicine.

Synapsica Healthcare: An “AI reporting assistant.” Currently focusing on spinal MRIs, the company says it saves radiologists 80% of their reporting time by automatically annotating measurements and characterizing disc degeneration. The company says it’s currently in a $100K pilot program with a radiology practice tapped by 250 chiropractic clinics.

Volumetric: Volumetric makes 3D bioprinters that create vascularized human tissue. Founded by two PhDs, Volumetric sells its photoactive tissue to pharmaceutical companies and scientists. It’s using the proceeds to move toward building bioprinters and bioinks that can generate functional tissue and even organs. Find our previous coverage of Volumetric here.

Ophelia: Ophelia replaces rehab with telemedicine for America’s 3 million opioid addicts. It lets patients do teleconferenced doctor visits, get prescribed and delivered medications like Buprenorphine and Naloxone, and access therapy without the stigma. The founder started the company after a longtime girlfriend died from opioid addiction, and Ophelia has now treated 40 patients.

Lilia: Claiming that “in the future, women will freeze their eggs upon graduation,” Lilia is an egg-freezing concierge service. The startup charges $500 for concierge, and gets another $500 when somebody is placed in a clinic. Lilia says its total addressable market is $33 billion.

Equator Therapeutics: Equator Therapeutics is developing a drug to help users burn calories without exercise. Founded by a duo of PhDs and a data scientist who worked at a company developing an anti-aging drug, Equator Therapeutics is targeting people dealing with obesity and type 2 diabetes.

Altay Therapeutics: Located inside the Bayer Collaborator in San Francisco, Altay Therapeutics has developed small molecule therapies that block disease-causing DNA-binding proteins (or transcriptional regulators). The company’s initial therapies are focused on arthritis, fibrosis, ulcerative colitis and liver cancer.

Tambua Health: Tambua Health uses an “acoustic” stethoscope and proprietary software to provide advanced imaging for lung imaging without the radiation of an x-ray.

Abalone Bio: Founded by serial life sciences entrepreneurs, Abalone Bio is using libraries of yeast cells expressing billions of antibody variants to grow specific antibodies that can activate or inhibit a drug target. Using gene sequencing, machine learning and synthetic biology, the company makes recombinant protein versions of its antibodies and confirms their efficacy in human cell assays. The company’s initial targets are drugs for pain, inflammatory diseases, rare cancer and rare kidney disease.

Felix Biotechnology: Founded by the famous Yale University researcher Paul Turner, Felix Biotechnologies is developing treatments to address antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria and fungi. These pathogens cause more than 2.8 million infections and 35,000 deaths in the United States alone each year, according to the company. On average, someone in the U.S. dies from an antibiotic-resistant infection every 15 minutes. Researchers have warned that more people will die from antibiotic resistance than from cancer by the year 2050.

Genecis Bioindustries: Genecis Bioindustries is turning food waste into compostable plastics. Find our previous coverage on Genecis here.

Candid Health: Candid Health has developed automated billing software for the healthcare industry that follows up with insurance companies and automatically appeals denied claims. It takes a 5% cut of each payment.

Ochre Bio: Ochre says that most donated livers are discarded — despite there being a shortage — due to them containing too much fat for a successful transplant. They’re aiming to “rejuvenate livers outside the body” by finding ways to treat them prior to transplant.

Fintech

Facio: Brazil has a banking problem. An oligarchy of five banks manage the Brazilian market, and they’re slow, have terrible customer service, high APR and don’t serve SMBs. Facio wants to keep workers from falling victim to predatory debt and instead gain financial freedom with a low-priced payroll loan to employees. It integrates with the employer, deducting loans right from their payroll.

delt.ai: Delt.ai is a digital bank that handles payments, invoicing and corporate cards for poorly served SMEs and freelancers in Mexico. The startup is targeting the $50 billion+ market of business deposits in Latin America. Think of Delt.ai is a Brex or a Mercury, but focused on Latin America.

Nexu: Like many other personal financing operations in Latin America, car financing is an expensive, low-tech, arduous process. Nexu, a financing platform for Latin American car dealerships, uses dynamic credit scoring to give car buyers an approval with a turnaround of a few seconds. The founding team met as Wharton MBA candidates.

Fondeadora: Fondeadora is joining Mexico’s saturated fintech scene, with its alternative neobanking debit card. The company offers a fully mobile digital savings account run within its app. Fondeadora says it has 65,000 users and $6.5 million monthly transactions. Albo, another Mexico-focused debit card, currently owns the market share with 200,000 monthly active customers who are spending and making transactions in its platform and $26 million in capital raised. But the banking problem in Mexico is big enough that multiple startups can thrive. Out of the 130 million population of Mexico, 45% are underbanked, meaning they lack deep financial products designed to help them compound wealth through lending and savings features.

Jenfi: Loans money to small businesses in Asia — typically about $10,000 to $100,000 — based on the business’ revenue. We wrote about Jenfi previously here.

yBANQ: A collections and reconciliation system for large B2B companies in India. The company says it has found 18 customers since launching in late January, reaching a GMV of around $18K.

ZeFi: A savings account that converts USD deposits to/from “stablecoin” cryptocurrencies behind the scenes, with ZeFi lending these funds out to borrowers to gain interest.

Grain: Grain hooks your existing debit card to a “responsible” amount of credit (currently capped at $500, and based on your income/cash low), hopefully helping those with minimal/bad credit build up their credit report over time. In the three months since launch, the company says it has signed up 1,000 customers, and expects to make around $80 per customer per year.

CrowdForce: Lets local merchants in Africa act as bank branches, serving as an intermediary on transactions when a bank is too far away. The company says it made $70K in net revenue last month, making an average of $20 per year per customer.

Stark Bank: A banking API to handle B2B transactions for tech companies in Brazil. A little over a year after launch, the company says it’s seeing $12 million in monthly gross volume.

Bamboo: An online brokerage for high-wealth individuals in Africa to buy securities from around the world. The company says it already has over 2,100 investors who have traded over $1.6 million on the platform since launching roughly five months ago, currently accounting for over $10,000 in monthly revenue.

Swipe: Pitching itself as “Brex for Africa,” Swipe gives African SMBs a credit card to help cover payroll and expenses. They onboard businesses by providing them with free expensing/billing tools, then offer credit accordingly. The company says it’s currently working with 30 companies, with $200K in credit deployed.

goDutch: A payments card for splitting costs amongst groups that often share bills, such as roommates. Focusing on India. Charges are put onto one card and deducted from each group member’s account automatically.

Paymobil: Uses stablecoin cryptocurrencies to transfer money across the globe through a Venmo-style app. The founder, Daniel Nordh, notes that he previously led consumer design at Coinbase.

Karat: Karat offers banking, loans and credit cards to influencers. By using data on their popularity to manage risk, Karat has achieved 40% APR on its loans with an average repayment time of 45 days. Thanks to its founders’ experience building influencer tools at Instagram and structuring debt at Goldman Sachs, it’s already signing up stars with over 10 million followers.

Homestead: Homestead helps home owners convert their garages into rental properties at no upfront cost. Homestead pays for all the construction, tenant search and management, and then splits the rent income with the home owner. A new California law allows the state’s 8 million garages to be rented out as living spaces, creating an enormous market opportunity. Homestead’s founders met at MIT’s graduate school of architecture and city planning, and the startup has already done $1 million in sales.

Benepass: Benepass offers a benefits card for startups and small businesses. Using the Benepass debit card, employees can pay for tax-advantaged benefits and wellness perks like flexible spending accounts, childcare, commuting, fitness and education while an app tracks their buying. Free for employers, Benepass has a 6% take rate but can save thousands on income and payroll taxes. With startups desperate to compete with tech giants for top talent, Benepass could ensure employees feel supported.

GAS POS: U.S. gas station owners are racing to upgrade outside pumps with EMV technology, a global standard for credit cards equipped with computer chips. GAS POS was founded to deliver a modern point-of-sale system that will help North America’s 180,000 gas stations comply with EMV and make transactions more secure. The company has several sources of revenue, a 3% fee on processed payments, SaaS free for equipment and an offer to customers to provide next-day funding.

YearEnd: YearEnd is building tax software for the paper rich, helping startup employees file their taxes while optimizing for their equity. The startup charges $330 per year for individual users and is hoping to sell to businesses that can add YearEnd as an employee benefit.

GIGI Benefits: India’s GIGI Benefits is looking to be the benefits provider for the nation’s gig economy workers. The business takes a page from companies like last year’s hottest Y Combinator startup, Catch, or the venture-backed Trupo, to provide things like health insurance and retirement investment accounts to gig economy workers.

Easyplan: Easyplan is the Qapital or Digit for India, allowing users to seamlessly save money for certain specific goals.

Haven: Haven is a next-gen platform for servicing home mortgages, offering more modern customer interfaces, better payment modeling for lenders and more.

WorkPay: WorkPay describes itself as “Gusto for Africa” — next-gen payroll and related services targeting small and medium businesses in the region.

Spenny: Spenny is a savings tool for Indian consumers that lets customers start banking money away by rounding up their purchases.

Kosh: Kosh is an algorithmically enhanced savings and investment platform for India, allowing those with good credit to effectively vouch for friends with limited credit to help them borrow.

Nonprofit

Potential: Potential is a nonprofit that wants to connect the formerly incarcerated to jobs and resources. The company works with detention centers and employment organizations to make a more friendly hiring environment.

All the companies from Y Combinator’s W20 Demo Day, Part III: Hardware, Robots, AI and Developer Tools

Published March 17, 2020

Y Combinator’s Demo Day was a bit different this time around.

In a bit of a surprise twist, YC also moved Demo Day forward one week, citing accelerated pacing from investors. Alas, this meant switching up its plan for each company to have a recorded pitch on the Demo Day website; instead, each company pitched via slides, a few paragraphs outlining what they’re doing and the traction they’re seeing, and team bios. It’s unclear so far how this new format — in combination with the rapidly evolving investment climate — will impact this class.

As we do with each class, we’ve collected our notes on each company based on information gathered from their pitches, websites and, in some cases, our earlier coverage of them.

To make things a bit easier to read, we’ve split things up by category rather than have it be one huge wall of text. These are the companies that are working on hardware, robotics, AI, machine learning or tools for developers. You can find the other categories (such as biotech, consumer, and fintech) here.

AI and Machine Learning

Datasaur: A tool meant to help humans label machine data data sets more accurately and efficiently through things like auto-correct, auto-suggest and keyboard hotkeys. It’s free for individual labelers, $100 per month for teams of up to 20 labelers, with custom pricing for larger teams.

1build: Automatic, data-driven job cost estimates for construction companies. You upload your plans, and 1build says it can prepare accurate bids “in minutes.” The company projects a revenue run rate of over $600,000, and says it has completed estimates for mega companies like Amazon, Starbucks and 7-Eleven.

Handl: An API for turning paper documents — including handwritten ones — into structured data ready to be plunked into a database or CRM. While the company says that around 85% of its processing is handled by their AI, it’s backed by humans to validate data when the AI’s confidence is low. Nine months after launch, the company is seeing an ARR of $0.9 million.

Zumo Labs: Uses game engines to generate pre-labeled training data for computer vision systems. By synthesizing the data rather than collecting it from photos/videos of the real world, the company says it can create massive data sets faster, cheaper and without privacy issues.

Teleo: Retrofits existing construction equipment to allow operators to control them remotely. The company says it has built a “fully functional teleoperated loader” since being founded three months ago, and plans to charge construction companies a flat monthly fee per vehicle. The company’s co-founders were previously head of Hardware Engineering and director of Product Manager at Lyft, with both having worked on Google’s Street View team.

Menten AI: Menten AI says it’s using “quantum computing and machine learning” combined with synthetic biology to design new protein-based drugs.

Turing Labs Inc.: Automated, simulated testing of different formulas for consumer goods like soaps and deodorant. Home products and cosmetics can be months of work for R&D labs. Turing has built an AI engine that helps with this process — much like the AI engines used in drug discovery — cutting down the time to days. It’s already working with some of the biggest CPG companies in the world. You can find our previous coverage on Turing here.

Segmed: Segmed is building data sets for AI-driven medical research. Rather than requiring each and every researcher to individually partner with hospitals and imaging facilities, Segmed partners with these organizations (currently over 50) and standardizes, labels and anonymizes the data.

Ardis AI: Ardis AI wants to build the foundation of artificial general intelligence — technology that read and comprehend text like a human. By combining neural networks, symbolic reasoning and new natural language processing techniques, Ardis AI can serve companies that don’t want to hire teams to do data extraction and labeling.

Agnoris: Agnoris analyzes a restaurant’s point-of-sale data to recommend changes to pricing, delivery menus and staffing. For $3,600 per year per restaurant location, Agnoris claims to be able to raise profits by 20%. The company started after the founder opened a restaurant that was packed yet losing money, so it built machine learning tools to improve margins and now it’s selling that software to all eateries.

Froglabs: Froglabs provides weather forecasting AI to businesses for predicting solar and wind energy production, delivery delays, staffing shortages, sales demand and food availability. By ingesting petabytes of weather data, it can save companies money by ensuring their logistics aren’t disrupted. Founded by a long-time Googler who started its Project Loon internet-beaming weather balloons, it’s now signing up e-commerce, retail, rideshare, restaurant and event businesses.

PillarPlus: PillarPlus is a platform that automates the blueprint-designing phase of a building project. It takes a design from an architect or contractor and maps out mechanical, fire, electrical and plumbing details, and estimates the bill of materials and project cost, steps that otherwise take months of work.

Glisten: Glisten uses computer vision and machine learning technologies to develop better, more consistent data sets for e-commerce companies. Its first product is an AI-based tool to populate and enrich sparse product data. Find our previous coverage of Glisten here.

nextmv: Nextmv gives its customers the ability to create their own logistics algorithms automatically — allowing businesses to optimize fleets and manage routes internally.

Visual One: Movement-detecting security cameras can bring up a lot of false positives: there’s motion, yes, but not necessarily anything harmful. Visual One has built an AI platform that integrates with home security cameras to “read” the specific movements that they detect. Owners can create customised alerts so they get notifications only for what they care about. The company’s software can check for furniture-destroying pets, package-lifting thieves, the death-defying antics of toddlers and more. Find our previous coverage of Visual One here.

PostEra: “Medicinal chemistry-as-a-service” is the idea here: PostEra’s platform can design and synthesize molecules faster and at a lower cost than the typical R&D lab, speeding up the research time it takes to test new combinations in the drug discovery process.

Hardware and Robotics

Cyberdontics: Robotics have already revolutionized surgery, courtesy of companies like da Vinci-maker, Intuitive. Cyberdontics is aimed at doing the same for oral surgery, beginning with crowns — one of the more expensive and time-intensive procedures. The company says its robot is capable of performing the generally two-hour procedure in 15 minutes, charging a mere $140 for the job.

Avion: Focused on inhabitants of difficult to reach areas in Africa, Avion is building a drone-based delivery system. The plans consist of medium and long-range medical drones tied to a centralized hub. The drones are hybrid and autonomous with vertical take-off capabilities, able to take 5-kg payloads as far as 150 kms.

SOMATIC: Industrial bathroom cleaning is a prime “dull”/“dirty” candidate to be replaced by automation. Somatic builds large robots that are trained to clean restrooms via VR. The system sprays and wipes down surfaces and is capable of opening doors and riding up and down in the elevator. Find our previous coverage of SOMATIC here.

RoboTire: Anyone who’s ever sat in a service shop waiting room knows how time-intensive the process can be. RoboTire promises to cut the wait time from 60 minutes down to 10 for a set of four tires. The company has begun piloting the technology in locations around the U.S. Find our previous coverage of RoboTire here.

Morphle: Designed to replace outdated analog microscopes, Morphle’s system uses robotic automation to improve imaging. The startup processes higher-resolution images than far pricier systems and with a much smaller failure rate. Morphle has begun selling its system to labs in India.

Daedalus: Founded by an early engineer at OpenAI, Daedalus is building autonomous software to allow industrial robots to operate without human programming, beginning with CNC machines. The company projects that it can improve productivity in the metal machining market by 5x.

Exosonic, Inc.: Exosonic makes supersonic commercial aircraft that don’t have to produce a loud sonic boom, so they can be flown over land. Its goal is a plane that can fly from SF to NYC in three hours. The CEO worked on NASA’s low-boom X-59 aircraft while at Lockheed Martin. Exosonic now has letters of intent from a major airline and two Department of Defense groups, plus a $300,000 U.S. Air Force contract.

Nimbus: Founded by a serial entrepreneur and based in Ann Arbor, Mich., Nimbus is developing the next-generation vehicle platform for urban transportation. Founder Lihang Nong previously launched the fuel-injection systems developer PicoSpray and is now looking to answer the question, “Can a vehicle be several times more space and energy efficient than today’s cars while actually being more comfortable to ride in?”

UrbanKisaan: UrbanKisaan is a vertical farming operation based in India that delivers fresh produce subscriptions to households. Its farms of stacked-up hydroponic tables can be located near cities with just 1% of the land usage of traditional agriculture, and there are no pesticides necessary. In a market with a growing middle class seeking healthy foods, delivering from farm-to-door could let UrbanKisaan control quality and its margins.

Talyn Air: Two former SpaceX engineers have developed a long-range electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft for passengers and cargo. The startup has created an electric fixed-wing aircraft that is caught mid-air with a custom winged drone during take offs and landings, an approach that its founders say give this aircraft three times the range of its competitors, at 350 miles.

Developer Tools

BuildBuddy: Two ex-Googlers want to provide a “Google-style development environment” to all by building an open-source UI/feature set on top of Google’s Bazel software. The company says that their solution speeds up build times by up to 10x. It’s free for independent developers, with the price scaling from $4 per user to $49 per user depending on the size of the team and the features required.

Dataline: Meant to let websites gather analytics data from users who are using ad-blocking tools. Claiming that most ad-blocker users care mostly about display ads or cross-site tracking, the company says that first-party analytics gets hit as “collateral damage.” By acting as a “smart proxy” that runs on a sub-domain, Dataline avoids most ad-blocking systems (for now, presumably.)

Cortex: Many modern online software applications are powered by countless independent, purpose-focused tools — or “microservices.” Cortex monitors your app’s microservices to automatically flag the right person (hooking into Datadog/Slack/PagerDuty/etc.) when one breaks.

apitracker: Even if your website seems to be loading fine, the APIs you use to make it work might be having trouble, breaking things in not so obvious ways. Apitracker… tracks your APIs. It monitors the APIs you use, alerting you when one of them starts to fail and providing insights into their overall performance.

Freshpaint: Freshpaint’s “autotrack” system collects all pageviews/clicks/etc. across your site, allowing you to push it into tools like Google Analytics/Facebook Pixel etc. retroactively without requiring your dev team to make manual trackers for each event. The base plan is free for sites with fewer than 3,000 users and $300 for sites with up to 50,000 monthly users, after which point the pricing shifts to custom packaging.

Datree: Datree allows companies to set up rules and security policies for their codebase, and ensures those rules are followed before any code is merged. Charging $28 per developer (noting that it’s free for independent/open source projects), they’ve pulled in ~$230K in revenue to date. Find our previous coverage of Datree here.

fly.io: Deploys your app on servers that are physically closer to your users, decreasing latency and improving the user experience. If your app grows more popular in a certain city, Fly detects that and scales resources accordingly.

Sweeps: Sweeps claims that they can make your website 40% faster with one line of code, by more intelligently loading all of the third-party tools that a website is using. The team says that their tech not only improves speed but does so while improving SEO.

Orbiter: Orbiter is an automatic real-time monitoring and alert system integrated with Slack to ensure better customer service and revenue management.

Release: Product releases can be tricky. Release provides a staging management toolkit — it builds a staging environment each time there’s a pull request, allowing for faster/more collaborative development cycles.

Signadot: Signadot is monitoring and management software for the microservices that modern startups rely on to power their own applications and services, hopefully flagging issues before they become apparent to the end user.

Raycast: Raycast is a universal command bar for developers and many of the tools they use. Users can integrate apps including Jira, GitHub or Slack and take a Superhuman-like approach to completing forms and tasks. The team is pitching the tool as a way to help engineers get their non-engineering work done quickly.

Cotter: Cotter is building a phone number-based login platform that authenticates a user’s device in a workflow that the company’s founders say has the convenience of SMS-based OTP without the security issues. The startup is aiming to target customers in developing countries where email is less utilized and less convenient as a login.

ditto: Ditto’s founders are hoping to create the Figma for words, helping teams plan out more thoughtfully the copy they use to describe their products and workflows. The collaboration tool created by Stanford roommates Jolena Ma and Jessica Ouyang currently has 80+ different companies represented among their users.

Scout: A continuous integration and deployment toolkit for machine learning experiments inside a GitHub workflow.

ToDesktop: ToDesktop has designed a service to automate all of your desktop application publishing needs. It works with Windows, Mac and Linux and provides native installers, auto-updates, code signing and crash reports without the need for any infrastructure or configurations for developers.

DeepSource: DeepSource is a code review tool that allows developers to check for bug risks, anti-patterns, performance issues and security flaws in Python and Go.

Flowbot: Flowbot is a natural language, autocomplete search tool for coding in Python. It lets Python developers type in plain English when they can’t remember the exact function they’re thinking of, with Flowbot digging through documentation and considering the context to find the code it thinks you’re looking for.

PostHog: PostHog is a software service that lets developers understand how their users are actually working with their products. It’s a product analytics toolkit for open-source programmers.

All the companies from Y Combinator’s W20 Demo Day, Part I: B2B Companies

Published March 17, 2020

Y Combinator’s Demo Day was a bit different this time around.

As we do with each class, we’ve collected our notes on each company based on information gathered from their pitches, websites, and, in some cases, our earlier coverage of them.

To make things a bit easier to read, we’ve split things up by category rather than have it be one huge wall of text. These are the B2B companies — those that primarily focus on selling to other businesses. You can find the other categories (such as hardware, AI, and consumer) here.

B2B Companies:

Alude: Property tech in Brazil is a hot market, with startups like Loft and unicorn QuintoAndar raising mega growth stage rounds. Alude wants to control the distribution channel with its simplified home leasing/buying process. Its system automates the process of background checks, document collection, insurance purchasing and online signing. This modernized tech is free for brokers, and the company plans to monetize by selling mortgage and insurance to customers.

Vori: Vori wants to be the operating system for the American grocery supply chain. Even in 2020, supermarkets still have an old school paper and pen ordering process with wholesale distributors. Vori acts as a B2B marketplace for supermarkets and distributors, helping stores produce inventory from vendors in a more efficient way. It says it has 24 active stores using its tech, and is also supporting over 150 distributors in Northern California. Vori acts also as a product discovery engine for supermarkets, helping them stay competitive with Whole Foods and Amazon.

Linkana: Linkana is compliance-driven procurement software in Latin America. There are 40,000 companies in Latin America that spend $60,000 yearly in procurement solutions, creating a $2.5 billion market opportunity. The four-person co-founding team has members who have worked together for nearly a decade.

Weav: Interviewing new candidates at work can be a time suck, and there isn’t a great way to organize and synthesize feedback from the team. Weav records and transcribes interviews for hiring teams so that companies can reach decisions faster and conduct fewer interviews. Led be an ex-Apple/Google/Microsoft team, Weav says it’s building state of the art NLP tools that leverage information retrieval, topic modeling and entity recognition.

ElectroNeek RPA: Everyone agrees that robots are the future of automation, but actually deploying the technology often requires a great deal of expertise. ElectroNeek is building a desktop and cloud-based interface designed to help streamline the automation process for IT employees and business professionals without a robotics background.

Reaktive: Aimed at creative professionals like animators, video editors and engineers, Reaktive is designed to replace desktop hardware with cloud-based solutions. The company claims its offering is 100x faster than traditional solutions, greatly reducing things like an eight-hour rendering job down to 45 seconds. The company has already closed $2.2 million in purchase orders from studios.

Eze: Eze is building a used smartphone market that functions like a commodities exchange. The system will update in real time with the fluctuating price of a wide range of different mobile devices. Devices will be sold to wholesalers in bulk, who turn around and sell them to retailers.

Oda: Aggregates real estate data from listing services and government records into a unified API. The company says it’s currently working with 4 pilot companies.

Okay: Hooks into tools like JIRA, GitHub, GCal, and Pagerduty to give engineering managers a dashboard to better understand how their teams are working and improve efficiency (by, for example, reducing meetings that might break up productivity). Charges $350 per manager.

Tajir: A marketplace to help small stores in Pakistan get inventory. The company says that currently nearly all distribution to “mom-and-pop” shops in Pakistan is done offline; Tajir brings the process into a mobile app with free next day delivery.

GuruHotel: A website and property management/booking system for hotels. Eight months after launch, they’re working with 26 hotels and seeing $20k a month in revenue. The base plan provides a basic hosting/booking engine in exchange for a 5% booking commission, while premium plans introduce other features, such as property management tools, for $350 to $499 a month in addition to commission.

Riot Security: An anti-phishing tool that automatically tests your employees with faux-phishing emails based on the most recently discovered phishing techniques. It starts at $200 a month for companies with under 50 employees, with the price shifting to custom scaling after that. The tool is currently in pilot tests with six companies, with an MRR of $1,000. Find our previous coverage of Riot Security here.

LabGrid: A project-tracking and collaboration tool meant to help biotech companies and labs communicate more efficiently than they might over email.

Trimwire: Hooks into a company’s bank accounts and credit cards to automatically reduce monthly costs by flagging anomalies and hunting for potential savings on recurring expenses (such as forgotten subscriptions).

Upflow: Aiming to be the “Venmo of B2B,” Upflow focuses on getting unpaid invoices paid. It automatically sends customized emails and registered letters to unpaid accounts, updates designated team members when account status changes, and handles payments. They charge $50 per month for companies with fewer than 30 invoices per month, scaling it up to $225 per month for companies doing less than $3M annually. Find our previous coverage of Upflow here.

Explo: Explo is meant to let non-technical employees analyze large amounts of data without having to know how to write/run SQL queries, instead providing them with a point/click interface for generating reports. The team says it has over 400 companies on its waitlist.

Workbench: Workbench is developing a platform purpose-built for hardware companies for sourcing suppliers and storing information/specs about the components they use.

Jet Admin: A drag-and-drop tool for building internal tools without code, hopefully freeing up dev team resources. Connects to databases and services like Stripe/Google Analytics/Salesforce and allows teams to piece together tools by way of pre-built widgets. Free for indie developers, or $19 per user for teams with up to 10 members.

Battlecard: Trains your sales team on what to say to unhappy customers through simulation (complete with synthesized unhappy customer voice). Teams collaborate to write their “playbook” of responses for different situations, sharing the answers/phrasing they’ve found to work best. Roughly a month after launching, the company says it has already booked over $35k in annual recurring revenue.

SnackThis: Is a collaborative, browser-based tool for motion design. Imagine a remote team fine-tuning moving typography in a video, or the way an app moves from screen to screen. One of the co-founders previously sold his motion design-heavy company to GoPro for $80M.

Zeo Auto: Fleet management and tracking for companies with automative fleets in India, allowing them to do things like view current vehicle position, replay past trips, calculate fuel costs, etc. Compatible with over 50 different GPS devices. The company says it has onboarded 2,000 fleet owners, bringing 30,000 vehicles onto the platform.

Savvy: Built for companies unable to offer group insurance plans, Savvy lets them instead give employees a tax-free stipend to put toward an individual health plan of their choosing. The company says that it’s working with over 30 companies after launching two months ago, accounting for roughly $100K in ARR.

Flowdash: “Human-in-the-loop” operations are those that require a human at some point in a process to make a final call — think claims processing, or moderating user-flagged content. Flowdash helps human-in-the-loop teams build new tools with minimal coding, allowing them to integrate them into services like Slack or Gmail. Their base plan starts at $25 per user per month, increasing if you need things like analytics or on-prem deployment.

Dropee: Dropee helps independent retailers in Southeast Asia buy things in bulk from large brands, charging said brands $8 per store for insight on what is or isn’t selling. The company says it’s seeing over $40K in monthly revenue.

NUMI: Helps retailers and marketplaces in Africa import U.S. goods, handling the challenges involved with freight and customs. Currently in a pilot program with Carrefour, which they expect to account for over $500K per year in sales.

Pilot: Pilot handles payroll, benefits and compliance for hiring remote contractors. Companies pay $60 per contractor per month for Pilot to help treat contractors like full-time employees by offering benefits, stock options and expense reimbursements. With COVID-19 quarantines familiarizing more companies with remote work, there could be a big market for ensuring their retention and productivity by making them feel like part of the team.

SEND: SEND is a digital freight forwarder and customs broker for Africa that manages cargo shipping by air, truck, and sea. SEND optimizes routing for faster, more reliable deliveries by bringing documentation online and letting clients just deal with the one company instead of up to a dozen shipping vendors. SEND’s founders are brothers, and see an opportunity to be the Flexport of Africa by conquering the market before that $3.2 billion valuation startup can reach the continent.

Brokrete: Brokrete, a delivery marketplace app, was developed to connect contractors with available concrete suppliers with the most competitive price. The startup’s founders are aiming to capture a piece of what they describe as a $120 billion market opportunity. They’ve already made some headway, by first demoing the app with contractors and then launching its product in December. The company began in the Canadian marketplace and is expanding to Houston this spring.

Paneau: The founders of Paneau are aiming to create a new way for businesses to advertise to ride-hailing customers by placing interactive tablets inside Uber and Lyft vehicles. The tablet can be used by riders to make purchases and even re-route the car. Paneau is already generating revenue — some $11,000 a month — by charging $0.96 cents per trip.

Bego: Bego has created an app focused on the Latam market that uses machine learning to predict future locations of cargo delivery and helps match truckers to customers in an effort to reduce the number of “empty miles.” For now, the startup has one route — Mexico City to Nuevo Laredo — where 42% of all cargo in Mexico is moved.

99minutos: This Latam startup is focused on last-mile delivery for e-commerce purchases. The startup has a wide geographic footprint of 19 cities across two countries with 15,000 deliveries daily and plans to expand to Colombia and Peru later this year. 99Minutos is now launching delivery with electric vehicles and in Mexico is the last-mile delivery partner for Amazon, MercadoLibre and Walmart.

Farm Theory: Farm theory buys the “ugly” yet fresh and fit-for-consumption vegetables from Indian farmers and then sells and delivers the produce directly to restaurants in India. The vegetable delivery service says it can save restaurants up to 30%.

HYPHY: As advertising matures alongside user-generated social media content, HYPHY is aiming to create a market for consumers to sell their photos and videos directly to brands. The marketplace is a way for brands to source media more quickly for advertising or marketing campaigns.

Zaam: Zaam is building a platform to simplify B2B onboarding, reducing complexity and pushing customers through the tiring process of data and document requests through automating as much as possible. The startup says they have hit $120M ARR in the past two months.

HireSweet: HireSweet is building a hiring platform that pushes recruiters towards ideal candidates that may not explicitly be looking for a new job. The platform analyzes behavior like who is updating their LinkedIn, adding to open source projects on Github, or nearing a vesting cliff. The team earned $150K in MRR last month. Find our previous coverage of HireSweet here.

Stryve: Stryve wants the hiring process to pivot to video, replacing phone screeners with video chat questionnaires. The team bills the platform to cut down on endless scheduling back-and-forth’s and boost turnaround.

Paragon: Paragon is a low-code API builder, helping speed up the time to build APIs, API-based interactions and integrations

Syndetic: “Shopify for data,” Syndetic is a platform that lets organizations make their static datasets more dynamic and useful

Cadence: Cadence is a platform for meetings that should have been emails. The early access platform is focused on eliminating meetings related to sharing project updates. It does this by integrating with task management tools and letting employees easily share on Slack what they’ve been working on, who they’ve been working with, and what’s on the docket.

Zynq: Zynq is building an enterprise calendar tool that helps companies schedule meetings more efficiently across the board. The service helps slot meetings to appropriately sized meeting rooms at opportune times so that companies don’t feel like they’re outgrowing their offices too quickly.

Castodia: Castodia hooks your databases into Google Sheets, ensuring that the information there is always up to date and users aren’t stuck manually importing CSV files time and time again.

Onetool: Onetool is building an all-in-one platform that allows startups to subscribe and save, paying for a single subscription while using a variety of vendors to meet their needs. The company hopes its platform can boost discoverability of new SaaS tools and simplify the lives of founders who are having to manage so many subscription services.

Dashworks: Dashworks is aiming to build a search tool that bring together all of the information from your various collaboration tools and databases. The platform relies on deep integrations across a wide variety of apps and boasts customers including Zapier, Stanford and Armory.

Laserfocus: Laserfocus is creating an app that layers onto your CRM and allows salespeople to quickly work their way through calls, emails and meetings with potential clients. The app wants to re-bundle the tasks currently separated across a handful of apps and cut down on distractions for salespeople who are eager to gather information about potential clients.

TrueNorth: To help fix inefficiencies in the fragmented trucking industry, TrueNorth offers a software solution for independent truckers. Think of it as an operating system, but for trucks, to help with everything from fuel and maintenance, to route optimization and load tracking.

Taiv: Taiv wants to help your local neighborhood sports bar better monetize the commercials you see on those in-bar TVs. Charging $4,200 a year per location, Taiv lets businesses replace live commercials with business advertisements about specials or deals. Find our previous coverage of Taiv here.

Humanly: Humanly wants to automate job candidate screening for companies that typically receive a high volume of applications. The company says its tech helps keep screening consistent, while removing bias. Customers include Farmers Insurance, Feather and Grin.

BuildPlane: BuildPlane has designed a next generation toolkit for commercial construction management. The company’s software tracks document requests, manages change orders, handles subcontractor billing and payments, and requests for quotes and pricing. It’s an industry category that has already produced billion-dollar businesses like Procore and PlanGrid.

SINAI: SINAI Technologies is a next generation software platform that lets organizations plan their carbon emissions strategy: it tracks different departments and processes within a company and then gives recommendations on where to reduce carbon emissions to meet internal and external goals. Find our previous coverage of SINAI here.

Logarithm Labs: Logarithm Labs is a project management service for chip designers covering data pipelines, scripting interfaces, and portals and dashboards to parse, structure, and analyze data generated in chip design work

Snapboard: Snapboard provides software tools to create dashboards, visualizations, and applications without code. Find our previous coverage of Snapboard here.

Slingshow: Slingshow is a download-free video recording and delivery application for customer service and complaint resolution. All a customer has to do is take a video of their problem with an explanation and send it off via Slingshow to explain a problem and get help.

Pulley: Pulley is a next generation cap table management tool. Private companies can use it to issue employee & investor equity and maintain ownership records as a company scales. Like Carta, it has a free tier for smaller startups. Unlike Carta, its focus is first (and currently only) on serving founders rather than investors. The founder is a repeat entrepreneur who sold a previous company to Microsoft.

Rosebud AI: Welcome to the dystopian future of corporate spokesmodeling campaigns. Rosebud.ai creates digital avatars and models for any occasion. Companies can filter by demographic, age, and style.

Termii: Termii is a multi-channel marketing and communications service, providing APIs for SMS and user verification for African businesses.

Able Jobs: Able Jobs trains candidates in India on the skillsets companies need most so that businesses can hire better candidates more quickly. They did 130 placements in February

Skypher: Skypher automates the security questionnaire development-and-response process.

Terusama: Taking logistics management all the way to the dockside, Terusama provides scheduling software for freight pickup and digital sign ins for haulers.

Mistro: Mistro lets employers provide benefits and perks to remote teams in over 200 countries. They can offer health insurance, co-working space, development classes, food, IT equipment and more that workers pay for through a Mistro credit card. Teams around the world are embracing remote work due to coronavirus. That trend could last, creating a big market for whoever can help companies attract the best work-from-homers.

When this growth investor expects startups will be able to raise again

Published March 17, 2020

Earlier today, TechCrunch caught up with Chris Sugden, a managing partner at Edison Partners, to talk about the current fundraising market, what’s next for SaaS startups and if there’s any good news to be found in today’s market.

As the stock market continues to gyrate (more up than down), and the unicorn exit market looks increasingly moribund, understanding how private investors are putting capital to work today and over the next few quarters is critical for startup founders. A host of startups that would have normally raised in Q1 of this year did not. The fundraising market they encounter the rest of the year will help determine their business trajectory.

Before we dive into our Q&A on all that, a short note on Edison Partners . Edison is a growth equity firm, which, according to Sugden, means that its checks range from $5 million to $30 million, with a “sweet spot” between $10 million and $15 million. Regarding stage, Sugden said that Edison looks to put capital into companies with between $8 million and $20 million in revenue, noting that the larger companies stretch his firm’s check size to the max.

About 75% of the firm’s investments are in software-as-a-service companies (SaaS), with the other 25% going into other types of startups. According to the investor, the average growth in Q4 2019 of the firm’s 12 investments from its ninth fund was about 100%, compared to the year-ago period.

So, Sugden is an active investor at a firm that has been around for a few decades with a good-sized account from which to invest. Let’s dig into how he sees the market shaking out.

Fundraising in 2020

The following excerpts come from TechCrunch’s chat with Sugden, which we’ve grouped and edited for clarity. We’ve peeled back the conversation, allowing us to pull out the parts that felt the most useful for startups. We start with his view of the 2020 venture capital market.

What we’re getting right and wrong about coronavirus and VC investing

Published March 17, 2020

It has only been nine days since I wrote an overview of the state of VC investing during the rise of the novel coronavirus pandemic.

And what a week it has been: The markets have triggered circuit breakers for an unprecedented third time, a global economic depression seems in the offing and the Trump administration is now proposing upwards of $1 trillion in fiscal stimulus on top of the Fed’s hundreds of billions of dollars in quantitative easing.

My God, there is so much news.

The dollars and cents of raising VC during the coronavirus pandemic

Given how much has changed in just the past few days, I wanted to revisit my original advice and go over what is still true, what has turned out to be wrong and what is trending one way or the other as events unfold.

Let’s get started.

As I have said ad nauseam this year, VCs are in a hyper-competitive market like we have never seen before. There are more VCs, VC firms and VC dollars in more geos worldwide prowling for the next startup than ever.

The coronavirus outbreak has not changed this basic thesis in the market.