Fundings & Exits
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Iziwork raises $43 million for its temporary work platform
French startup Iziwork has raised a $43 million funding round. Cathay Innovation and Bpifrance’s Large Venture fund are participating in this funding round. The company has been building a platform focused on improving temporary employment.
While it’s a relatively large funding round, the startup is quite young. It was founded in September 2018 and it has raised $68 million overall.
Iziwork manages a marketplace of temporary work; 2,000 companies are using the platform in France and Italy, and 800,000 candidates have used the app to access job opportunities. You can consider it as a tech-enabled version of the good old employment agency.
Candidates can onboard directly from the mobile app. You then get personalized recommendations based on your profile (95% of assignments are filled in less than four hours). And of course, all your documents are managed from the app.
Iziwork tries to add some benefits to compensate for the fact that temporary workers often jump from one company to another. For instance, you get a time savings account, you can request a down payment on your pay every week, etc.
The startup has realized that it can’t open offices in every big and intermediate city. That’s why third-party companies can join the Iziwork network. As a partner, you find new clients and new job opportunities. You can then leverage Iziwork’s app, service and pool of candidates.
This is an interesting strategy, as it greatly increases supply on the Iziwork marketplace. Partners get a revenue sharing deal with Iziwork.
With today’s funding round, the company plans to expand to new countries and improve its tech product. There are still some growth opportunities in its existing markets as well.
Jobandtalent, another company in this space, has attracted some headlines as it raised $108 million last week. Founded in 2009 and based in Madrid, it generated €500 million in revenue last year.
But, let’s be honest, the temporary work market is huge. Adecco, Randstad and other legacy players still represent a bigger threat for this recent wave of temp staffing startups. Let’s see how it plays out in the coming years.
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Wall Street hugs Affirm as it starts life as a public company
And we’re off to the races!
Last night, Affirm priced its IPO above its raised range at $49 per share, a sign that the public markets remain hungry for new listings. Provided that Affirm today trades similarly to how it priced, we could be looking at a 2021 IPO market that resembles last year’s heated results.
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.
That’s good news for a host of companies looking to follow in the financial technology unicorn’s footsteps.
Poshmark prices tonight and trades tomorrow. With Qualtrics in the wings along with Coinbase, Roblox set to direct list, and Bumble said to file as well, we’re heading into another busy IPO quarter. Affirm’s first-day trading results will therefore hold extra importance, even if its pricing augurs well for IPOs more generally.
Affirm first targeted $33 to $38 per share before raising its range to $41 to $44 per share. Pricing at $49 is a victory. Briefly, why, and then a thought about what’s next for the IPO market.
Affirm
What does Affirm sell? First, per its S-1 filings, it charges merchants a fee to “convert a sale and power a payment.” That sounds like software revenues, albeit not in the recurring manner of a SaaS company.
Second, Affirm earns from “interest income [from] the simple interest loans that we purchase from our originating bank partners.” And, it offers virtual cards to consumers via its app, allowing it to generate interchange revenues.
We care about all of that as it’s important to realize that Affirm is not a software company in the context that we usually think about them, namely software as a service, or SaaS.
This matters when we consider how the market values Affirm; the more richly Affirm is valued in revenue-multiple terms by its new, $49 per-share IPO price, the more bullish we can presume the IPO market is.
What are Affirm’s gross margins? A great question, and one that is surprisingly hard to answer. If you read its final S-1 filing, you’ll find that all its chatter concerning “contribution profit” has been removed. This is a shame to some degree as contribution profit — and margin — were Affirm’s closest shared cognate to gross margin.
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Visa will not acquire Plaid after running into regulatory wall
Visa and Plaid called off their agreement this afternoon, ending the consumer credit giant’s takeover of the data-focused fintech API startup.
The deal, valued at $5.3 billion at the time of its announcement, first broke cover on January 13, 2020, or nearly one year ago to the day. However, the Department of Justice filed suit to block the deal in November of 2020, arguing that the combination would “eliminate a nascent competitive threat that would likely result in substantial savings and more innovative online debit services for merchants and consumers.”
At the time Visa argued that the government’s point of view was “flawed.”
However, today the two companies confirmed the deal is officially off. In a release Visa wrote that it could have eventually executed the deal, but that “protracted and complex litigation” would take lots of time to sort out.
It all got too hard, in other words.
Plaid was a bit more upbeat in its own notes, writing that in the last year it has seen “an unprecedented uptick in demand for the services powered by Plaid.” Given the fintech boom that 2020 saw, as consumers flocked to free stock trading apps and neobanks, that Plaid saw growth last year is not surprising. After all, Plaid’s product sits between consumers and fintech companies, so if those parties were executing more transactions, the API startup likely saw more demand for its own offerings.
TechCrunch reached out to Plaid for comment on its plans as an independent company, also asking how quickly it grew during 2020. Update: Plaid responded to TechCrunch noting that it saw 60% customer growth in 2020, bringing it to more than 4,000 clients. If we presume even moderate net dollar retention amongst its customer base, Plaid could have grown by triple-digits last year, in percentage terms.
While the Visa-Plaid deal was merely a single transaction, its scuttling doesn’t bode well for other fintech startups and unicorns that might have eyed an exit to a wealthy incumbent. The Department of Justice, in other words, may have undercut the chances of M&A exits for a number of fintech-focused startups or at least created more skittishness around that possible exit path.
If so, expected exit valuations for fintech upstarts could fall. And that could ding both fintech-focused venture capital activity, and the price at which startups in the niche can raise funds. If the Visa-Plaid deal was a huge boon to fintech companies that used it as a signpost to help raise money at new, higher valuations, the inverse may also prove true.
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Techstars names Maëlle Gavet CEO as the accelerator group looks to expand
This morning Techstars, a network of startup accelerators and a venture capital fund, announced that Maëlle Gavet is its new CEO. Former CEO and co-founder David Brown will stay on Techstars’ board, while the group’s other co-founder, David Cohen, will become the chairman of its board.
TechCrunch spoke with Gavet this morning about her new job, the timing of the change, the company’s plans for expansion and her goals in the role.
Gavet, who said she was brought aboard to help Techstars grow, detailed her work experience at prior roles in companies of greater scale and multiple geographies, including Compass and Booking.com.
TechCrunch was curious, given how large the startup market is, how much space there is left for Techstars to expand into new geographies and niches. Gavet said that she had asked the same question to Techstars when she was being recruited for her new role. She said there is a wealth of overlooked talent and underinvested geographies that could be empowered and unlocked with capital and help. Techstars wants to go find those founders and invest in them.
That means, we presume, more accelerators in more places investing in more founders.
Gavet told TechCrunch that Techstars has invested in over 2,300 companies and is putting capital into around 500 yearly.
The new CEO explained that she believes it is possible to generate strong returns for her investors while providing lots of support for entrepreneurs and having a positive social impact. That’s an ambitious list of things to execute at once, but if she succeeds her effort could help diversify the world of tech entrepreneurs, something that has long been needed.
Seeing a startup exchange leaders to optimize for different, and larger-scale, operating experience is not rare. For a meta-startup, an accelerator-and-investing concern, to do the same is not surprising.
TechCrunch regularly covers accelerator cohorts, including Techstars (some recent notes here) and Y Combinator, among other programs. Some of tech’s biggest names have come out of such accelerator groups, historically, including Airbnb (now public) from Michael Seibel-led Y Combinator, TalkDesk (worth over $3 billion) from Christine Tsai-led 500 Startups, and Techstars’ own SendGrid (bought by Twilio for $2 billion).
It will be interesting to see where Techstars takes its accelerator model next — the group sometimes partners with companies, or groups like the United States Air Force to sponsor and support tailored programs — in terms of location and focus. But if it can successfully help diversify the founder pool at the same time as making itself money, it will underscore how others in its market could do better.
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‘Brand tech’ company You & Mr. Jones adds $60M to its Series B
You & Mr. Jones announced today that it has added $60 million in new funding from Merian Chrysalis, bringing the Series B round announced in December to a total of $260 million.
The round values the company at $1.36 billion, post-money.
You & Mr. Jones takes its name from CEO David Jones, who founded the company in 2015. After having served as the CEO of ad giant Havas, Jones told me that his goal in starting what he called “a brand tech group” was to provide marketers with something that neither traditional agencies nor technology companies could give them.
“At that moment, the choices were to go work with an agency group, which is great at brand and marketing, but they don’t understand tech, or with a tech company, which will only ever recommend their platform and don’t have the same [brand and marketing] expertise,” he said.
So You & Mr. Jones has built its own technology platform to help marketers with their digital, mobile and e-commerce needs, while also investing in companies like Pinterest and Niantic. And it makes acquisitions — last year, for example, it bought influencer marketing company Collectively.
You & Mr. Jones has grown to 3,000 employees, and its clients include Unilever, Accenture, Google, Adidas, Marriott and Microsoft. In fact, Jones said that as of the third quarter of 2020, its net revenue had grown 27% year over year.
That’s particularly impressive given the impact of the pandemic on ad spending, but Jones said that’s one of the key distinctions between digital advertising and the broader brand tech category, which he said has grown steadily, even during the pandemic, and which also sets the company apart from agencies that are “digital and tech in press release only.”
“We’re not an ad agency, we’ll never acquire agencies,” he said. “We have the technology platform, process and people to deliver all of your end-to-end, always-on content — social, digital, e-commerce and community management.”
In addition to the funding, the company is announcing that it has hired Paulette Forte, who was previously senior director of human services at the NBA, as its first chief people officer.
“The brand tech category didn’t even exist before You & Mr Jones was established,” Forte said in a statement. “The company became a true industry disruptor in short order, and growth has been swift. In order to keep up with the momentum, it’s critical to have systems in place that help talent develop their skills, encourage diversity and creativity, and find pathways to improving workflow. I am excited to join the leadership team to drive this crucial work forward.”
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Content discovery platform Dable closes $12 million Series C at $90 million valuation to accelerate its global expansion
Launched in South Korea five years ago, content discovery platform Dable now serves a total of six markets in Asia. Now it plans to speed up the pace of its expansion, with six new markets in the region planned for this year, before entering European countries and the United States. Dable announced today that it has raised a $12 million Series C at a valuation of $90 million, led by South Korean venture capital firm SV Investment. Other participants included KB Investment and K2 Investment, as well as returning investor Kakao Ventures, a subsidiary of Kakao Corporation, one of South Korea’s largest internet firms.
Dable (the name is a combination of “data” and “able”) currently serves more than 2,500 media outlets in South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia, Vietnam and Malaysia. It has subsidiaries in Taiwan, which accounts for 70% of its overseas sales, and Indonesia.
The Series C brings Dable’s total funding so far to $20.5 million. So far, the company has taken a gradual approach to international expansion, co-founder and chief executive officer Chaehyun Lee told TechCrunch, first entering one or two markets and then waiting for business there to stabilize. In 2021, however, it plans to use its Series C to speed up the pace of its expansion, launching in Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, mainland China, Australia and Turkey before entering markets in Europe and the United States, too.
The company’s goal is to become the “most utilized personalized recommendation platform in at last 30 countries by 2024.” Lee said it also has plans to transform into a media tech company by launching a content management system (CMS) next year.
Dable currently claims an average annual sales growth rate since founding of more than 50%, and says it reached $27.5 million in sales in 2020, up from 63% the previous year. Each month, it has a total of 540 million unique users and recommends five billion pieces of content, resulting in more than 100 million clicks. Dable also says its average annual sales growth rate since founding is more than 50%, and in that 2020, it reached $27.5 million in sales, up 63% from the previous year.
Before launching Dable, Lee and three other members of its founding team worked at RecoPick, a recommendation engine developer operated by SK Telecom subsidiary SK Planet. For media outlets, Dable offers two big data and machine learning-based products: Dable News to make personalized recommendations of content, including articles, to visitors, and Dable Native Ad, which draws on ad networks including Google, MSN and Kakao.
A third product, called karamel.ai, is an ad-targeting solution for e-commerce platforms that also makes personalized product recommendations.
Dable’s main rivals include Taboola and Outbrain, both of which are headquartered in New York (and recently called off a merger), but also do business in Asian markets, and Tokyo-based Popin, which also serves clients in Japan and Taiwan.
Lee said Dable proves the competitiveness of its products by running A/B tests to compare the performance of competitors against Dable’s recommendations and see which one results in the most clickthroughs. It also does A/B testing to compare the performance of articles picked by editors against ones that were recommended by Dable’s algorithms.
Dable also provides algorithms that allow clients more flexibility in what kind of personalized content they display, which is a selling point as media companies try to recover from the massive drop in ad spending precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, Dable’s Related Articles algorithm is based on content that visitors have already viewed, while its Perused Article algorithm gauges how interested visitors are in certain articles based on metrics like how much time they spent reading them. It also has another algorithm that displays the most viewed articles based on gender and age groups.
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Snap acquires location data startup StreetCred
Snapchat’s parent company Snap has acquired StreetCred, a New York City startup building a platform for location data.
Snap confirmed the news to TechCrunch and said the acquisition will result in four StreetCred team members — including co-founders Randy Meech and Diana Shkolnikov — joining the company, where they’ll be working on map and location-related products.
A big component of that strategy is the Snap Map, which allows users to view public snaps from a given area and to share their location with friends. Last summer, the Snap Map was added to Snapchat’s main navigation bar, and the company announced that the product was reaching 200 million users every month.
At the same time, Snapchat has been adding other products that tie into a user’s locations, such as Local Lenses, which allow developers to create geography-specific augmented reality lenses that interact with physical locations.
Meech and Shkolnikov should be bringing plenty of mapping experience to Snap — Meech was formerly CEO at Samsung’s open mapping subsidiary Mapzen, and before that the senior vice president of local and mapping products at TechCrunch’s parent company AOL (subsequently rebranded as Verizon Media). Shkolnikov, meanwhile, is the former engineering director at Mapzen.
StreetCred had raised $1 million in seed funding from Bowery Capital and Notation Capital. When I spoke to Meech in 2018, he said his goal was to “open up and decentralize” location data by building a blockchain-based marketplace where users are rewarded for helping to collect that data.
While the financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, the existing StreetCred platform will be shut down as part of the deal.
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F5 snags Volterra multi-cloud management startup for $500M
Applications networking company F5 announced today that it is acquiring Volterra, a multi-cloud management startup, for $500 million. That breaks down to $440 million in cash and $60 million in deferred and unvested incentive compensation.
Volterra emerged in 2019 with a $50 million investment from multiple sources, including Khosla Ventures and Mayfield, along with strategic investors like M12 (Microsoft’s venture arm) and Samsung Ventures. As the company described it to me at the time of the funding:
Volterra has innovated a consistent, cloud-native environment that can be deployed across multiple public clouds and edge sites — a distributed cloud platform. Within this SaaS-based offering, Volterra integrates a broad range of services that have normally been siloed across many point products and network or cloud providers.
The solution is designed to provide a single way to view security, operations and management components.
F5 president and CEO François Locoh-Donou sees Volterra’s edge solution integrating across its product line. “With Volterra, we advance our Adaptive Applications vision with an Edge 2.0 platform that solves the complex multi-cloud reality enterprise customers confront. Our platform will create a SaaS solution that solves our customers’ biggest pain points,” he said in a statement.
Volterra founder and CEO Ankur Singla, writing in a company blog post announcing the deal, says the need for this solution only accelerated during 2020 when companies were shifting rapidly to the cloud due to the pandemic. “When we started Volterra, multi-cloud and edge were still buzzwords and venture funding was still searching for tangible use cases. Fast forward three years and COVID-19 has dramatically changed the landscape — it has accelerated digitization of physical experiences and moved more of our day-to-day activities online. This is causing massive spikes in global Internet traffic while creating new attack vectors that impact the security and availability of our increasing set of daily apps,” he wrote.
He sees Volterra’s capabilities fitting in well with the F5 family of products to help solve these issues. While F5 had a quiet 2020 on the M&A front, today’s purchase comes on top of a couple of major acquisitions in 2019, including Shape Security for $1 billion and NGINX for $670 million.
The deal has been approved by both companies’ boards, and is expected to close before the end of March, subject to regulatory approvals.
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RedHat is acquiring container security company StackRox
RedHat today announced that it’s acquiring container security startup StackRox . The companies did not share the purchase price.
RedHat, which is perhaps best known for its enterprise Linux products has been making the shift to the cloud in recent years. IBM purchased the company in 2018 for a hefty $34 billion and has been leveraging that acquisition as part of a shift to a hybrid cloud strategy under CEO Arvind Krishna.
The acquisition fits nicely with RedHat OpenShift, its container platform, but the company says it will continue to support StackRox usage on other platforms including AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform. This approach is consistent with IBM’s strategy of supporting multicloud, hybrid environments.
In fact, Red Hat president and CEO Paul Cormier sees the two companies working together well. “Red Hat adds StackRox’s Kubernetes-native capabilities to OpenShift’s layered security approach, furthering our mission to bring product-ready open innovation to every organization across the open hybrid cloud across IT footprints,” he said in a statement.
CEO Kamal Shah, writing in a company blog post announcing the acquisition, explained that the company made a bet a couple of years ago on Kubernetes and it has paid off. “Over two and half years ago, we made a strategic decision to focus exclusively on Kubernetes and pivoted our entire product to be Kubernetes-native. While this seems obvious today; it wasn’t so then. Fast forward to 2020 and Kubernetes has emerged as the de facto operating system for cloud-native applications and hybrid cloud environments,” Shah wrote.
Shah sees the purchase as a way to expand the company and the road map more quickly using the resources of Red Hat (and IBM), a typical argument from CEOs of smaller acquired companies. But the trick is always finding a way to stay relevant inside such a large organization.
StackRox’s acquisition is part of some consolidation we have been seeing in the Kubernetes space in general and the security space more specifically. That includes Palo Alto Networks acquiring competitor TwistLock for $410 million in 2019. Another competitor, Aqua Security, which has raised $130 million, remains independent.
StackRox was founded in 2014 and raised over $65 million, according to Crunchbase data. Investors included Menlo Ventures, Redpoint and Sequoia Capital. The deal is expected to close this quarter subject to normal regulatory scrutiny.
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At $35 to $39 per share, Poshmark’s IPO could 5x its last private valuation
The new year is off to a busy IPO start. As The Exchange reported a few weeks ago, investors anticipate a busy Q1 IPO cycle, followed by a slower Q2 and a busy Q3 and Q4.
With Affirm releasing an initial IPO price range last night and Poshmark repeating the feat this morning, private-market investor expectations are holding up thus far.
Secondhand fashion marketplace Poshmark anticipates its IPO could price between $35 and $39 per share. Using its simple share count, the former startup could be worth nearly $3 billion. So, we’ve seen two multiunicorns set early pricing terms this week. That’s comfortably busy.
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.
As we did with Affirm, we’ll dig into Poshmark’s new pricing interval, calculate valuations for the company using both simple and fully diluted share counts, and figure out how they compare to its most-recent financial results and final private valuation. For the last bit, we’ll pull from PitchBook data and the S-1/A filing itself.
But for those of you in a hurry, the short gist is that for Mayfield, GGV, Menlo Ventures, Inventus Capital and Temasek, the company’s first pricing estimate looks like a win.
If you want to read our first dig into the company’s IPO filing that is more focused on performance than pricing, head here. Let’s go!
Poshmark’s hugely “up” IPO
Poshmark’s $35 to $39 per-share IPO price interval could change, but even if it fails to rise, the company’s implied valuation is a dramatic step up from prior rounds.
For example, the company’s S-1 filings note that during its 2017 venture round — the last that it raised per the IPO filing and PitchBook data — Poshmark sold shares at $8.37 per share. That’s a fraction of the price that the company now expects public-market investors to pay.
As with Affirm, let’s calculate Poshmark’s valuation using both simple and fully diluted share counts. The latter takes into account shares that have been earned, but not yet exercised or converted.
Here’s the company’s valuation range using a simple share count, inclusive of its underwriters’ option to purchase 990,000 shares at its IPO price:
- Poshmark valuation, low-end of range: $2.6 billion.
- Poshmark valuation, high-end of range: $2.9 billion.
If we expand the company’s share count to include vested options and RSUs, the numbers go up. Again, the following math is inclusive of the underwriters’ option:1
- Poshmark valuation, low-end of range: $2.95 billion billion.
- Poshmark valuation, high-end of range: $3.29 billion.
So, are those good numbers? Yes.
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