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Sapphire Ventures bets big on esports and entertainment with new $115M fund

Published January 28, 2019

Sapphire Ventures, formerly the corporate venture capital arm of SAP, has lassoed $115 million from new limited partners (LPs) to invest at the intersection of tech, sports, media and entertainment.

A majority of the LPs for the new fund, called Sapphire Sport, have ties to the sports industry, from City Football Group, which owns English Premier League team Manchester City, to Adidas, the owners of the Indiana Pacers, New York Jets, San Jose Sharks and Tampa Bay Lightning, among others.

The firm plans to do five to six investments per year, sized between $3 million and $7 million. So far, they’ve deployed capital to five startups: at-home fitness system Tonal, live soccer streaming platform mycujoo, digital sports network Overtime, ticketing and events platform Fevo and gaming studio Phoenix Labs. Sapphire began backing tech startups in 2008; in 2016, the firm closed on $1 billion for its third flagship venture fund.

Sapphire managing director and co-founder Doug Higgins is leading the effort alongside newly tapped partner Michael Spirito, who joined from 21st Century Fox, where he focused on business development and digital media for the Fox Sports-owned Yankees Entertainment and Sports (YES) Network, in September.

Higgins was an investment manager at Intel Capital for four years prior to co-launching Sapphire. Throughout his career, he’s managed the firm’s investments in LinkedIn, DocuSign, Square and more.

“We invest in anything that tech is disrupting,” Higgins told TechCrunch. “We were early investors in Fitbit, so we saw the beginning of digital fitness and how tech can impact the lives of anyone, not just high-performance athletes … We are also investors in Square, TicketFly and Paytm and what we’ve been seeing — the dream as a VC — is these massive markets in the sports, media and digital health world that are getting disrupted by tech.”

Sapphire is betting its traditional and well-established venture platform, coupled with the expertise of leading sports entities on board as LPs, will give it a competitive edge as it targets some of the best emerging sports tech companies.

“We see a lot of FOMO happening in this world, where everyone wants to have a play, but to make the best investment you need to have the widest perspective,” Higgins said. “So if you’re a team owner of a particular football team you are going to make better decisions if you are able to share perspectives with owners of other teams.”

“The best entrepreneurs, the ones we all want to invest in, there’s not a draft, they have to select you,” he added.

Investment in esports and gaming has skyrocketed, surpassing a total of $2.5 billion in VC funding in 2018. According to PitchBook, a handful of startups have already raised a total of $65 million in VC backing this year, including a $10.8 million financing for ReKTGlobal, a provider of esports infrastructure services.

“You can’t ignore the numbers on esports,” Higgins added. “They just continue to grow massively and people who have teenage kids, like myself, [those kids] want to grow up to be the next ninja, not the next Tom Brady .”

With investors knocking, PlayVS opens the door to a $30M Series B

Apple could be working on gaming subscription service

Published January 28, 2019

Apple is slowly building a lineup of content subscriptions. According to a report from Cheddar, Apple may also be working on a gaming subscription. Alex Heath managed to get five people to talk about the rumored service.

If Apple goes ahead and launches such a service, users could pay a monthly subscription fee to access a library of games. It’s still unclear how much it would cost and what would be included in the subscription.

Given that many iOS games are now free-to-play games, it’s hard to see how it would work. Apple could choose to focus on paid games and provide those games as part of the subscription. The company could also give you free coins and perks when it comes to free-to-play games.

Apple has to talk with potential partners to put together the service — that’s probably how Cheddar learned about Apple’s plans. The company isn’t going to develop a bunch of games overnight (remember Apple’s Texas Hold ‘Em?). But it could act as a sort of game publisher by promoting and distributing new games in a subscription tier.

Games are by far the most popular category on the App Store. They generate a ton of downloads and revenue. And it sounds like Apple thinks it could generate more revenue by switching to a different business model, beyond the usual 30 percent cut on in-app purchases.

Apple has also been signing deals with TV producers in order to put together a streaming service. The company wants to compete with Netflix and other streaming platforms.

Apple has been working on a magazine subscription service, as well. The company acquired Texture back in March 2018 to build the foundation of the service. And that new subscription should launch pretty soon. You can find a landing page for Apple News Magazines in the beta version of iOS 12.2.

And, of course, Apple has attracted 56 million subscribers for Apple Music. Now let’s see if the company can replicate the same success with other services.

Kite raises $17M for its AI-driven code completion tool

Published January 28, 2019

Kite, a San Francisco-based startup that uses machine learning to build what is essentially a very smart code-completion tool, today announced that it has raised a $17 million funding round. The round was led by Trinity Ventures, with personal participation from now-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. In addition to the funding, Kite also today announced that its tools are now significantly smarter and that developers can run them locally on their machines, even if they don’t have an internet connection.

As Kite founder and CEO Adam Smith told me, the idea for Kite is based on the simple fact that a lot of programming is repetitive. “That’s why [developers] spend so much time on Stack Overflow. That’s why they spend so much time debugging really basic errors and looking up documentation, but not so much time looking at how the solution should work,” he said. “We thought we can use machine learning to fix that.”

Standard code completion tools often still use alphabetical sorting, while Kite uses AI to infer what a developer is likely trying to do (though, to be fair, the likes of IntelliSense and others are also starting to get smarter). In its first iteration, Kite, which sadly still only works for Python code right now, sorted its hints by popularity. Unsurprisingly, that was already more useful than alphabetical sorting, and the right answer appeared in the top three results 37 percent of the time.

What’s interesting here is that if you can predict the next part of a line of code with high accuracy, you can start predicting a few more words ahead, too. And that’s exactly what Kite is starting to do now.

To do this, the team had to build its own machine learning models that worked well for code. As Smith told me, Kite first looked at using standard natural language processing (NLP) models, but it turns out that those don’t really work well for code, which has a different structure. As training data, Kite fed the system all the Python code on GitHub .

Looking ahead, what Smith really wants to achieve is what he calls “fully automated programming.” “It’s that Star Trek vision of where you tell computers in a high-level language what to do,” he said. “If it’s ambiguous, the computer will ask questions.”

It’ll take a few more breakthroughs in AI to realize that vision, but for the time being, Kite’s tools are freely available and come with editor plugins for Atom, Sublime Text3, VS Code, Vim, PyCharm and IntelliJ. Currently, about 30,000 Python developers use its tools.

With today’s release, developers can also use these models locally, without the need for an internet connection. That’s a sign of how efficient the models are, but as Smith also acknowledged, running the model locally means his company doesn’t have to manage a complex cloud infrastructure either. This should also make the tool more appealing to more developers — especially in larger corporations — given that the original tool would send all of your code to Kite’s servers (and in that context, it’s worth noting the company managed to create its own little scandal around some open-source contributions that favored its auto-completion engine).

The company plans to use the new funding to build out the team, which mostly consists of engineers. It’ll also build out its product, with a special focus on supporting more languages.

As for its business model, it’s worth noting that Kite did test a subscription service last year, but as Smith argues, that was mostly to test if the company could monetize the service. “Now we want to optimize for growth,” he said and noted that the focus of the company’s monetization strategy will be on enterprise users. Indeed, that’s a common refrain I hear from startups that focus on developers. It’s very hard to sell subscriptions to individual developers, it seems, so most start to focus on enterprises sooner or later.

China’s social credit system won’t tell you what you can do right

Published January 28, 2019

For the past few years, China has been rolling out a Black Mirror / Harry Potter-esque social rating policy known as the Social Credit System (SCS). Far from just a credit score in the financial sense, an SCS score can determine whether a person can buy business class tickets on trains (or take the train at all) or have access to flights. Apps are rumored to exist that would tell users whether they are standing near someone with a debt listed in the system, so … they can walk away I guess.

This is a massive undertaking, and researchers are finally starting to collect good data on the system’s operation, such as a MERICS report looking at the implementation of this complex system, which involves companies and all levels of the Chinese government. Westerners have also increasingly explored the generally positive reception of the system by Chinese citizens, which would seem at odds with typical desires for privacy.

Yet, one of the biggest and most obvious open questions is what exactly will get you rewarded or punished by the SCS? Now, we are finally starting to get answers.

In a new paper that will be presented this week at the ACM FAT* Conference on algorithmic transparency, a group of researchers investigated how positive and negative points were assessed by downloading a large corpus of hundreds of thousands of entries from the Beijing SCS website and analyzing it with content analysis machine learning tools.

They found that Beijing was remarkably clear about what will get you punished, but vague about what will get you positive points. For instance, the vast majority of the blacklist was made up by people who had failed to pay their debts, or who had committed a traffic violation. Meanwhile, the people on the redlist (the positive list) were there because they were, say, great volunteers, but with no criteria on how to get that status or why they were listed at all.

“It’s very difficult to pinpoint the exact degree of transparency,” of SCS said Severin Engelmann, one of the lead researchers based at the Technical University of Munich. Far from being just an experimental startup, SCS is already quite advanced. “Blacklisting and redlisting are already in place, and they clearly indicate what behavior is bad … but not what behavior is actually good,” he said.

Even more interesting, there are more companies on the blacklist and redlist than there are individuals within the Beijing corpus, indicating that while the government is certainly concerned about citizens, it’s bringing its social control mechanism onto companies perhaps more aggressively.

Jens Grossklags, another of the researchers, noted that this level of transparency — while inconsistent — was unusual in the West. “It is really fascinating from a data science perspective to see how much information is being made available not just to individuals but to the general public,” he said. He noted that public shaming has been common with the Chinese system, while Western consumers have a hard time accessing their own scores let alone the scores of others.

The study is one of the first to look at the actual implementation of SCS and reverse engineer its algorithm, and the researchers are potentially following up by investigating regional variations and further changes to the system.

TechCrunch is experimenting with new content forms. This is a rough draft of something new – provide your feedback directly to the author (Danny at danny@techcrunch.com) if you like or hate something here.

Share your feedback on your startup’s attorney

My colleague Eric Eldon and I are reaching out to startup founders and execs about their experiences with their attorneys. Our goal is to identify the leading lights of the industry and help spark discussions around best practices. If you have an attorney you thought did a fantastic job for your startup, let us know using this short Google Forms survey and also spread the word. We will share the results and more in the coming weeks.

Stray Thoughts (aka, what I am reading)

Short summaries and analysis of important news stories

Hustling to nothing

Erin Griffith has a great piece on the increasing pervasiveness of hustle culture. This is part of a long-running debate in Silicon Valley between the work-your-ass-off crowd and the productivity-peaks-at-35-hours crowd. The answer in my mind is that we should see work in phases — running at 100 MPH all the time is most definitely not sustainable, but neither frankly is working a very stable number of hours per week. The vagaries of life and work mean that we need to surge and recede our efforts as dictated, and always track our own health.

Nvidia’s troubles continue

We’ve talked a lot about Nvidia over the past few months (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). Well, the bad news train just continues. As my colleague Romain Dillet reports, Nvidia is cutting its revenue outlook, and now the stock is falling again (another 14% as I write this). It cites lowered demand particularly from China, which is experiencing a major slowdown in its economy.

Can Chinese startups subsidize customers forever?

The Financial Times asks an important question about the “China model” of startups: should founders heavily subsidize customers in order to buy market share and fight competitors? They point to bike sharing startup Ofo’s collapse, although I would point to the expensive rise of Luckin Coffee as perhaps the latest example. It’s a lesson that Munchery’s investors also have had to learn: at the end of the day, those unit economics better turn positive if a company is to survive.

What’s next

More work on societal resilience

This newsletter is written with the assistance of Arman Tabatabai from New York

Apple’s new developer guidelines signal that scammy subscription apps’ time is up

Published January 28, 2019

Apple is sending out a message to app developers: stop tricking users into subscriptions. The company updated its guidelines for mobile developers to more clearly spell out what is and what is not allowed, according to 9to5Mac, which spotted the recent changes. The improved documentation comes at a time when subscriptions are becoming something of a plague on consumers.

Their rapid proliferation is turning everything into a subscription service, which could ultimately see consumers dropping favorite apps because they can’t afford dozens of ongoing payments. But more urgently, Apple’s lax enforcement of its rules around subscriptions had allowed shady app developers to financially benefit.

Subscriptions are a big business on the app stores, as the industry has begun to shift to a recurring revenue model instead of one-time purchases within free apps or paid downloads. For developers who continue to improve apps and roll out new features, subscriptions give them the financial means of continuing that work, instead of constantly hunting for new users.

However, not all developers have been playing fair.

As TechCrunch reported last fall, a number of scammers had begun to take advantage of the subscription model in order to trick consumers into recurring payments, in addition to constantly pestering their free users to upgrade.

We found apps that constantly popped up upgrade prompts or hid the “x” to close the prompt’s window, as well as apps that promised free trials that actually converted after a very short period — like three days, for example. Others had intentionally confusing designs where subscription opt-in buttons would say things like “Start” or “Continue” in big text, while the text that explains you’re actually agreeing to a paid subscription is tiny, grayed out, difficult to read or hidden in some other way.

Apple’s developer guidelines had clearly prohibited fraudulent behavior related to subscriptions, but Apple has now spelled out the details in black and white.

As 9to5Mac spotted, updates in Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines and App Store documentation now explicitly state that the monthly subscription price has to be clearly displayed, while information about how much people can save if they opt for longer periods of time, like a year, has to be less prominent.

Messages about free trials have to say how long trials last and what will be charged when the trial ends.

The new documentation has also been clearly organized, and includes screenshots of what a proper subscription sign-up flow should look like, as well as sample text developers can modify for use in their own apps. It even suggests that developers allow customers to manage their subscriptions within their app, rather than requiring them to find the subscriptions section in the App Store.

Today, many customers don’t know how to stop their subscriptions once activated — it takes several steps from the iPhone’s Settings to get into subscriptions, and still a few from within the App Store. (It’s also not that obvious. You tap on your profile icon on the top right of the Home page, then your Apple ID, then scroll down to the bottom of the page. By comparison, you can reveal the “Subscriptions” section with just one tap on Google Play’s left-side hamburger menu.)

While the existence of clear documentation that better spells out the dos and don’ts is certainly welcome, the real question now is how well will Apple enforce its rules?

After all, Apple was supposedly not okay with subscription fraud and tricks before, yet its App Store was home to a good handful of bad actors — particularly in the utilities section.

Of course, Apple doesn’t want to develop a reputation for allowing misleading or scammy apps to thrive in its App Store, but it simultaneously benefits when they do.

Although games still account for the majority of App Store spending, non-gaming apps across app stores now account for just over a quarter (26 percent) of total spend, according to App Annie’s “State of Mobile 2019” report. And that number has increased 18 percent since 2016, mainly because of in-app subscriptions.

Getting a handle on the proper way to market subscriptions is key. But there’s also the larger question as to whether subscriptions will be a sustainable model in the long run for the developers. There’s a bit too much of a gold rush mentality around subscriptions in today’s App Store, and it’s hard to resist the near-term benefit of money that rolls in monthly.

But as more developers adopt subscriptions, consumers will ultimately have to decide which have value for them. People are already paying for so many subscriptions — both inside and outside the app stores. Streaming video like Netflix, streaming music like Spotify, streaming TV like YouTube TV, subscription boxes like Ipsy, Prime memberships, grocery delivery like Instacart, smart home subscriptions like Ring or Nest, newspapers and magazines and newsletters, and so on. What’s really going to be left for a selfie editor, to-do list or weather app, in the end?

Many consumers are already starting to hit the point where they don’t have much more to spend, and will have to turn some subscriptions off in order to turn others on. Subscription app user bases could then contract, with only core customers remaining paying subscribers, as casual users return to free products — like Apple’s own built-in apps, for example, or free services offered by well-heeled tech giants, like Google.

Apple would do well to advise developers when subscriptions make sense for an app, not just how to implement and design them. Subscriptions should offer a real benefit, not just continued ability to use an app. And there could be cases where a one-time purchase to retain a customer who continually declines to subscribe makes sense, too.

China’s smartphone shipments dropped 14 percent in 2018

Published January 28, 2019

Smartphone numbers are down all over — but things look especially stark in China these days. Tim Cook cited softened demand in the world’s largest smartphone market as a key factor in Apple’s lowered guidance, and Apple is far from alone in feeling the pinch. Today, Canalys reported another large drop in the country for 2018.

The firm says that shipments dropped 14 percent in China for the year. That’s the second year in a row shipments have dropped, following more than half a decade of impressive growth, rocketing China to the number one spot, ahead of the U.S. All told, 396 million units were shipped last year, marking the lowest level since 2013.

Domestic companies Huawei and Vivo both managed to grow in that time, hitting first and third place, respectively. Oppo and Xiaomi slipped a bit, but managed to hold the second and fourth place positions, respectively. Apple, the sole U.S. representative in the top five, held on to fifth place, but still dropped 13 percent. The rest of the industry, meanwhile, dropped a staggering 60 percent, year over year.

Much of what’s at play here is a familiar story all over. A matured market means upgrade cycles have slowed down, as more users are choosing to hold onto handsets for longer. Even more pronounced, however, is a combination of slowed economic growth and lowered purchasing power in the country.

The new Parsley Health Center in NYC doesn’t feel like a doctor’s office

Published January 28, 2019

Parsley Health has just opened a new, fully redesigned space on Fifth Avenue in New York City, marking the first true Parsley Health Center.

Since launch, the startup has been operating out of clinics in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. But TechCrunch got the chance to check out Parsley’s new Fifth Avenue location, which marks the company’s first space designed from the ground up as Parsley Health.

Founded by Dr. Robin Berzin, Parsley Health is a healthcare membership, where customers are offered a holistic approach to their health by a team of doctors and health coaches, complete with 24/7 unlimited messaging.

The idea stemmed from the troublesome reality that the average American spends less than 20 minutes a year with their doctor, who more often than not treat symptoms instead of the root problem.

Parsley members spend around four hours/year with medical professionals, including five doctor visits a year and five health coach visits. Plus, Parsley offers 24/7 communication with your doctor and health coach. The hope is that Parsley doctors can better diagnose and treat their patients’ issues if they have the time to get the full story. Plus, Parsley doctors have the benefit of advanced biomarker testing alongside their focus on functional medicine, where root issues are prioritized for treatment rather than symptoms.

Part of giving the highest-quality treatment is creating an open relationship between doctor and patient. That, in many ways, can be influenced by the physical space.

The new Parsley Health Center takes into account the principles of biophilic design. In other words, the space is designed specifically to make people feel healthier and better. The lighting, for example, is built to mimic natural light by using ribbed glass partition systems in the smaller rooms of the space. The space is also full of plants, as being in connection with nature reduces stress and improves mood.

The company even paid attention to the details of designing a main hallway where the halls that sprawl off the main corridor are somewhat hidden by overhanging walls. This pattern, of visually implying a mystery waits around the corner, is supposed to provoke a strong pleasure response.

Beyond the design itself, Parsley also took into account the look and feel of the waiting room.

Rather than a sterile room with old magazines and no light, the Parsley waiting room is more of a communal living room, with plenty of couches and a kitchen, complete with draught kombucha and healthy snacks for purchase.

The hope is that Parsley can use this room for community events around learning how to optimize health across all parts of life, including food, sleep and behavior.

Doctors’ offices and exam rooms are rethought to ensure a more comfortable relationship between doctor and patient. There are no desks that separate patient from doctor, instead featuring a couch with a small side table to write on.

Observation tables have been redesigned to fit in with the room instead of standing out like a giant piece of “medical equipment.” Doctors’ instruments all fit into a small set of drawers off to the side.

Even the lab is built adjacent to a restroom where patients can pass their specimen through a small compartment in the wall instead of walking it through the hallways.

In 2017, Parsley raised $10 million led by FirstMark Capital, with participation from Amplo, Trail Mix Ventures, Combine and The Chernin Group. Individual investors such as Dr. Mark Hyman, M.D., director of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine; Nat Turner, CEO of Flatiron Health; Neil Parikh, co-founder of Casper; and Dave Gilboa, co-founder of Warby Parker, also invested in the round.

Membership to Parsley costs $150/month.

Lack of transparency in healthcare startups risks another Theranos implosion

Published January 28, 2019

Are more Theranos -style scandals looming for investors in healthcare startups?

A team of researchers associated with the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford thinks so. They’ve published a paper warning investors in life sciences startups that a systemic lack of transparency exists in their portfolio companies — creating the possibility for more multi-billion-dollar implosions and scandals like the one that toppled Theranos and its charismatic founder, Elizabeth Holmes.

Indeed, one of the study’s authors, Dr. John Ioannidis, the co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford and director of the University’s PhD program in Epidemiology and Clinical Research, was among the first people to identify the risks associated with Theranos and its “stealth research.”

Now Dr. Ioannidis and his co-authors, Ioana A. Cristea and Eli M. Cahan, have published a study surveying the publicly available research from the largest privately held companies in the healthcare space, and found them lacking.

Most of the highest-valued startups in healthcare have not published any significant scientific literature, the study found. Nearly half of the publications from companies worth more than $1 billion came from only two startups — 23andMe and Adaptive Biotechnologies, according to the paper.

“Many years ago I was the first person to say that Theranos had a problem,” says Ioannidis. “The problem that I had then was that Theranos did not have any peer-reviewed evidence to show.”

In an interview and in their paper, Ioannidis and Cahan warn that investors have overlooked systemic problems created by the lack of transparency among healthcare startups.

They write:

It would be tempting to dismiss the Theranos case as just one rotten apple. However, we worry that the focus on fraud puts aside a more fundamental concern. Fraud is making waves in the news, but stealth research may have a more detrimental impact.

According to the study’s findings, more than half of the healthcare startups that are worth more than $1 billion have published no highly cited papers at all. For companies that were acquired or are publicly traded that number is around 40 percent.

In all, healthcare startups that are currently valued at more than $1 billion published 425 Pubmed papers. And of those papers only 34 (8 percent, including two reviews) were highly cited. For companies with valuations of more than $1 billion that had been acquired or are publicly traded on stock exchanges, the researchers counted 413 papers, of which 47 (11 percent, including nine reviews) were highly cited.

Digging deeper into some of the companies that had high valuations but little or no published research revealed scores of operational and technological issues for the researchers.

For instance, StemCentrx, which was bought for $10.2 billion in 2016 by AbbVie, had published 16 papers — and only one highly cited paper. Since the acquisition, the Food and Drug Administration had imposed a delay on the readout of the company’s phase II trial for its Rova T targeted antibody drug for cancer treatment. In December, a Phase III trial for Rova T as a second-line treatment for patients with advanced small cell lung cancer was halted because the treatment wasn’t working, according to a report in Targeted Oncology.

Acerta Pharma, another healthcare-focused startup focused on cancer treatments, was bought by AstraZeneca for $7.3 billion. That company published nine articles and had one highly cited paper for a very early study of a potential treatment for relapsed chronic lymphocytic leukemia. Acerta received accelerated approval for a drug called acalabrutinib, which treats a rare form of lymphoma called mantle cell lymphoma. Two years ago, AstraZeneca had to retract data and admit that Acerta falsified preclinical data for its drug.

Then there’s Intarcia, the developer of a device for diabetes treatment that’s worth $5.5 billion. That company had its device rejected by the FDA and was forced to lay off staff and halt a couple of later-stage trials. It had only published six papers — none of them very highly cited.

Ultimately, the researchers concluded that highly valued healthcare startups don’t contribute to published research and that the valuation of these companies by investors is divorced from any externally validated data.

For the researchers (and for investors) this should present a problem.

“Many unicorns may be overvalued [21] and subject to unrealistic scientific expectations,” the study’s authors write. And they reject the argument that simply applying for — and receiving — patents is enough to prove that a technology in the healthcare space has been thoroughly vetted. “[Patents] do not offer the same level of documentation as peer-reviewed articles. For example, Theranos had over 100 patents [1], but these were unable to supplant the vacuum in their evidence,” the researchers wrote.

Even if companies want to protect their technology, there are still ways for them to be more transparent about the results or benefits of their technology. The authors acknowledge that publishing isn’t the primary mission of startups. They can, however publish a few high-value articles, secure their technology through patents and then work with researchers, universities or hospitals to validate the technology and have those organizations publish results of the tests, the authors argue.

As the authors conclude:

Start-ups are key purveyors of innovation and disruption. Consequently, holding them to a minimal standard of evaluation from the scientific community is crucial. Participation in peer review, with all its limitations, is the best way we have to uphold this standard. We are not arguing that start-ups should divert excessive resources to having peer-reviewed papers. However, when their products are destined to affect patient health, they should neither be solely doing marketing. Confidential data sharing with potential investors or regulators cannot replace more open scrutiny by the scientific community.

Scribd has more than 1M paying subscribers

Published January 28, 2019

Subscription e-book and audiobook service Scribd says it’s grown to more than 1 million subscribers.

It still has a long way to go before reaching the heights of Netflix (nearly 150 million subscribers) or Spotify (87 million paying subscribers), but the announcement should help put any lingering doubts to rest around whether there’s a sizable audience willing to pay an $8.99 subscription fee for books.

The company also says it’s been profitable since early in 2017, and that it’s currently bringing in $100 million in annual recurring revenue.

Scribd started as a document-sharing service before moving into the subscription e-book business in 2013, when it signed its first deal with a major publisher — namely, HarperCollins. Since then, the service has added other big publishers and moved beyond older “backlist” titles. In fact, last year HarperCollins released the latest book from “Divergent” author Veronica Roth on Scribd, on launch day.

Chantal Restivo-Alessi has been chief digital officer at HarperCollins for the duration of the Scribd partnership. Via email, she praised the company’s “willingness to monitor, analyze, learn and adjust – something that clearly it has been doing in the past years.”

“We have continued to learn and adapt together,” Restivo-Alessi said. “We expected the digital ebook market to be a bigger part of our and their business now, and we have been positively surprised by the uptake in digital audio. We have continued to calibrate our catalog offer in line with the evolution of Scribd’s platform and customer base. And we continue to be pleasantly surprised by the depth of exposure that the platform provides to our backlist.”

Trip Adler

The adjustments to which Restivo-Alessi alludes include Scribd’s pricing model — it initially offered subscribers unlimited access to its library, then capped them at three e-books and one audiobook per month, then went back to a modified version of its unlimited plan last year. (Apparently the most voracious readers and listeners might still encounter a cap.)

Asked whether we can expect the Scribd offering to continue changing, co-founder and CEO Trip Adler said, “I don’t think there will be any big changes. We’re always optimizing … We’re constantly improving the way we find the right balance for readers and for publishers.”

Adler credited audiobooks as a key ingredient to the service’s growth, with engagement growing 100 percent year over year. Surprisingly, he also said Scribd’s old document-sharing business continues to be crucial, because it helps the service attract between 100 million and 200 million visitors each month (mostly from search engines), who can then be converted into paying subscribers.

“That’s kind of the key thing we’ve figured out,” Adler said. “We use the [user-generated content] to attract users and use premium content to retain them.”

Scribd’s new unlimited plan for audiobooks and e-books might be an avid reader’s dream

Scribd has raised a total of $47.8 million in funding, according to Crunchbase.

Investors include Khosla Ventures, with Khosla’s Keith Rabois on the Scribd board. In an emailed statement, Rabois said, “Scribd has one of the largest libraries of content in the world — which reaches millions of readers every month, giving the company exceptional data and the unique ability to help readers discover content uniquely suited to them. Scribd hitting one million subscribers is just the beginning of Scribd transforming how we choose what books to read and how we read them.”

And now that Scribd has reached the 1 million subscriber milestone, Adler said he’s already thinking about how it can get to 10 million. His plans include further international expansion in markets like Latin America, Europe and India (apparently half of Scribd’s subscriber base is already outside the United States), working with publishers and authors to create original content, and continuing to add new formats.

“We started out by offering documents, then e-books, and then audiobooks, magazines and sheet music,” he said. “We’re just getting started. There’s going to be a lot more new types of content in the coming years.”

Dropbox snares HelloSign for $230M, gets workflow and e-signature

Published January 28, 2019

Dropbox announced today that it intends to purchase HelloSign, a company that provides lightweight document workflow and e-signature services. The company paid a hefty $230 million for the privilege.

Dropbox’s SVP of engineering, Quentin Clark, sees this as more than simply bolting on electronic signature functionality to the Dropbox solution. For him, the workflow capabilities that HelloSign added in 2017 were really key to the purchase.

“What is unique about HelloSign is that the investment they’ve made in APIs and the workflow products is really so aligned with our long-term direction,” Clark told TechCrunch. “It’s not just a thing to do one more activity with Dropbox, it’s really going to help us pursue that broader vision,” he added. That vision involves extending the storage capabilities that is at the core of the Dropbox solution.

This can also been seen in the context of the Extension capability that Dropbox added last year. HelloSign was actually one of the companies involved at launch. While Clark says the company will continue to encourage companies to extend the Dropbox solution, today’s acquisition gives it a capability of its own that doesn’t require a partnership and already is connected to Dropbox via Extensions.

Fast integration

Alan Pelz-Sharpe, founder and principal analyst at Deep Analysis, who has been following this market for many years, says the fact it’s an Extensions partner should allow much faster integration than would happen normally in an acquisition like this. “Simple document processes that relate to small and medium business are still largely manual. The fact that HelloSign has solutions for things like real estate, insurance and customer/employee on boarding, plus the existing extension to Dropbox, means it can be leveraged quickly for revenue growth by Dropbox, Pelz-Sharpe explained.

He added that the size of the deal shows there is high demand for these kinds capabilities. “It is a very high multiple, but in such a fast growth area not an unreasonable one to demand for a startup showing such growth potential. The price suggests that there were almost certainly other highly motivated bidders for the deal,” he said.

HelloSign CEO Joseph Walla says being part of Dropbox gives HelloSign access to resources of a much larger public company, which should allow it to reach a broader market than it could on its own. “Together with Dropbox, we can bring more seamless document workflows to even more customers and dramatically accelerate our impact,” Walla said in a blog post announcing the deal.

HelloSign remains standalone

Whitney Bouck, COO at HelloSign, who previously held stints at Box and EMC Documentum, said the company will remain an independent entity. That means it will continue to operate with its current management structure as part of the Dropbox family. In fact, Clark indicated that all of the HelloSign employees will be offered employment at Dropbox as part of the deal.

“We’re going to remain effectively a standalone business within the Dropbox family, so that we can continue to focus on developing the great products that we have and delivering value. So the good news is that our customers won’t really experience any massive change. They just get more opportunity,” Bouck said.

Alan Lepofsky, an analyst at Constellation Research who specializes in enterprise workflow, sees HelloSign giving Dropbox an enterprise-class workflow tool, but adds that the addition of Bouck and her background in enterprise content management is also a nice bonus for Dropbox in this deal. “While this is not an acqui-hire, Dropbox does end up with Whitney Bouck, a proven leader in expanding offerings into enterprise scale accounts. I believe she could have a large impact in Dropbox’s battle with her former employer Box,” Lepofsky told TechCrunch.

Clark said that it was too soon to say exactly how it will bundle and incorporate HelloSign functionality beyond the Extensions. But he expects that the company will find a way to integrate the two products where it make sense, even while HelloSign operates as a separate company with its own customers.

When you consider that HelloSign, a Bay Area startup that launched in 2011, raised just $16 million, it appears to be an impressive return for investors and a solid exit for the company.

The deal is expected to close in Q1 and is, per usual, dependent on regulatory approval.

Dropbox introduces Extensions for deeper integration with third-party tools