Fundings & Exits
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What should startup founders know before negotiating with corporate VCs?
Scott runs operations at Kruze Consulting, a fast-growing startup CFO consulting firm. Kruze is based in San Francisco with clients in the Bay Area, Los Angeles and New York.
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Bill Growney, a partner in Goodwin’s Technology & Life Sciences group, focuses his practice on advising technology and other startup companies through their full corporate life-cycle.
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Corporate venture capitalists (CVCs) are booming in the startup space as large companies look to take advantage of the fast-paced innovation and original thinking that entrepreneurs offer.
For startups, taking funding from CVCs can come with many benefits, including new opportunities for marketing, partnerships and sales channels. Still, no founder should consider a corporate investor “just another VC.” CVCs come with their own set of priorities, strategic objectives and rules.
When it comes to choosing a CVC with which to enter negotiations, the most important step is doing your own diligence beforehand. An entrepreneur’s goal is to find the perfect match to partner with and guide you as you grow your business. So before you start discussing terms, you’ll want to understand what’s driving the CVC’s interest in venture investing.
While traditional VCs are purely financially driven, CVCs can be in the venture game for a variety of reasons, including finding new technology that might generate marketplace demand for their products. An example is Amazon’s Alexa fund, which invested into emerging companies that drive use and adoption of Alexa. Alternatively, a CVC’s parent company may be looking to invest in tech that will help them operate their own products more efficiently, such as Comcast Ventures investing in DocuSign.
As a rule of thumb, the bigger CVC funds like GV and Comcast tend to be financially driven, meaning they’ll be approaching negotiations through a financial lens. As such, the negotiating process more closely resembles an institutional fund. You as a founder have to do the work to figure out what’s driving your CVC — is this a customer acquisition or distribution opportunity? Or are they seeking to find a source of knowledge transfer and/or bring new tech into their parent company?
“Before negotiating, always look at a CVC’s existing portfolio,” says Rick Prostko, managing director at Comcast Ventures. “Have they made a lot of investments, at what stage, and with whom? From this information you’ll see the strategic thinking of the CVC, and you can determine how best to position yourself when you begin negotiations.”
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Scandit raises $80M as COVID-19 drives demand for contactless deliveries
Enterprise barcode scanner company Scandit has closed an $80 million Series C round, led by Silicon Valley VC firm G2VP. Atomico, GV, Kreos, NGP Capital, Salesforce Ventures and Swisscom Ventures also participated in the round — which brings its total raised to date to $123M.
The Zurich-based firm offers a platform that combines computer vision and machine learning tech with barcode scanning, text recognition (OCR), object recognition and augmented reality which is designed for any camera-equipped smart device — from smartphones to drones, wearables (e.g. AR glasses for warehouse workers) and even robots.
Use-cases include mobile apps or websites for mobile shopping; self checkout; inventory management; proof of delivery; asset tracking and maintenance — including in healthcare where its tech can be used to power the scanning of patient IDs, samples, medication and supplies.
It bills its software as “unmatched” in terms of speed and accuracy, as well as the ability to scan in bad light; at any angle; and with damaged labels. Target industries include retail, healthcare, industrial/manufacturing, travel, transport & logistics and more.
The latest funding injection follows a $30M Series B round back in 2018. Since then Scandit says it’s tripled recurring revenues, more than doubling the number of blue-chip enterprise customers, and doubling the size of its global team.
Global customers for its tech include the likes of 7-Eleven, Alaska Airlines, Carrefour, DPD, FedEx, Instacart, Johns Hopkins Hospital, La Poste, Levi Strauss & Co, Mount Sinai Hospital and Toyota — with the company touting “tens of billions of scans” per year on 100+ million active devices at this stage of its business.
It says the new funding will go on further pressing on the gas to grow in new markets, including APAC and Latin America, as well as building out its footprint and ops in North America and Europe. Also on the slate: Funding more R&D to devise new ways for enterprises to transform their core business processes using computer vision and AR.
The need for social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic has also accelerated demand for mobile computer vision on personal smart devices, according to Scandit, which says customers are looking for ways to enable more contactless interactions.
Another demand spike it’s seeing is coming from the pandemic-related boom in ‘Click & Collect’ retail and “millions” of extra home deliveries — something its tech is well positioned to cater to because its scanning apps support BYOD (bring your own device), rather than requiring proprietary hardware.
“COVID-19 has shone a spotlight on the need for rapid digital transformation in these uncertain times, and the need to blend the physical and digital plays a crucial role,” said CEO Samuel Mueller in a statement. “Our new funding makes it possible for us to help even more enterprises to quickly adapt to the new demand for ‘contactless business’, and be better positioned to succeed, whatever the new normal is.”
Also commenting on the funding in a supporting statement, Ben Kortlang, general partner at G2VP, added: “Scandit’s platform puts an enterprise-grade scanning solution in the pocket of every employee and customer without requiring legacy hardware. This bridge between the physical and digital worlds will be increasingly critical as the world accelerates its shift to online purchasing and delivery, distributed supply chains and cashierless retail.”
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API startups are so hot right now
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.
A cluster of related companies recently caught our eye by raising capital in rapid-fire fashion. TechCrunch covered a few of them, and I read coverage of others. Looking back through my notes and the media cycles that they generated, it feels safe to say that API -based startups are hot right now.
What’s fun about this trend is that the startups we’re considering are all relatively early-stage, so they aren’t limping unicorns staring down a closed IPO window. Instead, we’re taking a peek at startups that mostly haven’t raised material external capital — yet. They have lots of room to grow.
And the group is somewhat easy to understand. Sure, I don’t fully grok their underlying tech — that’s a bit of the point with API startups; they take something complex and offer it in an easy-to-consume fashion — but I do get how they make money. Not only are their business models fairly easy to understand, there are public companies that monetized in similar ways for us to use as a framework as the startups themselves scale.
This morning let’s look at FalconX and Treasury Prime and Spruce and Daily.co and Skyflow and Evervault, all API-focused startups to one degree or another, to see what’s up.
What’s an API-based startup?
Simply: a high-growth company that delivers its main service via an application programming interface, or API.
APIs help services communicate with other apps, allowing them to execute tasks or request information quickly and easily. These services are sometimes highly valuable because they can offer something complex and difficult, easily and simply.
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Clubhouse proves that time is a flat circle
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
First, a big thanks to everyone who took part in the Equity survey, we really appreciated your notes and thoughts. The crew is chewing over what you said, and we’ll roll up the best feedback into show tweaks in the future.
Today, though, we’ve got Danny and Natasha and Chris and Alex back again for our regular news dive. This week we had to leave the Vroom IPO filing, Danny’s group project on The Future of Work and a handwashing startup (?) from Natasha to get to the very biggest stories:
- Brex’s $150 million raise: Natasha covered the latest huge round from corporate charge-card behemoth Brex. The party’s over in Silicon Valley for a little while, so Brex is turning down your favorite startup’s credit limit while it stacks cash for the downturn.
- Spruce raises a $29 million Series B: Led by Scale Venture Partners, Spruce is taking on the world of real estate transactions with digital tooling and an API. As Danny notes, it’s a huge market and one that could find a boost from the pandemic.
- MasterClass raises $100 million: Somewhere between education and entertainment, MasterClass has found its niche. The startup’s $180 yearly subscription product appears to be performing well, given that the company just stacked nine-figures into its checking account. What’s it worth? The company would only tell Natasha that it was more than $800 million.
- Clubhouse does, well, you know. Clubhouse happened. So we talked about it.
- SoftBank dropped its earnings lately, which gave Danny time to break out his pocket calculator and figure out how much money it spent daily, and Alex time to parse the comedy that its slideshow entailed. Here’s our favorites from the mix. (Source materials are here.)
And at the end, we got Danny to explain what the flying frack is going on over at Luckin. It’s somewhere between tragedy and farce, we reckon. That’s it for today, more Tuesday after the holiday!
Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
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M17 sells its online dating assets to focus on live streaming
M17 Entertainment announced today that it has sold its online dating assets to focus on its core live-streaming business in Asia and other markets. Paktor Pte, which operates Paktor dating app and other services, was acquired by Kollective Ventures, a venture capital advisory firm. The value of the deal was undisclosed.
In its announcement, Taipei-based M17 said the sale will allow it to focus on expanding its live-streaming business in markets including Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong.
Earlier this month, the company said it had raised a $26.5 million Series D that will be used for growth in Japan, where M17 claims a 60% share of the live-streaming market, and expansion into new places like the United States and the Middle East. Its live-streaming apps include 17LIVE (an English-language version is called Livit), Meme Live and live-streaming e-commerce platforms HandsUP and FBBuy.
In a statement, M17 CFO Shang Koo said, “As our Japan live-streaming business has skyrocketed, we found we were unable to devote the same level of internal resources to our dating business in Southeast Asia. Becoming independent will allow Paktor to control its own destiny as M17 focuses heavily on the future of its streaming services in our largest market, Japan.”
Paktor will operate independently of M17 after the sale, but Koo said, “we hope to continue working with Paktor on future business cooperation and will always value the synergy and teamwork between M17 and Paktor.”
M17 was formed in April 2017 when Paktor merged with 17 Media. A year later, M17 was supposed to go public, but cancelled its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange on the same day it was supposed to start trading, citing “issues related to the settlement” of shares that CEO Joseph Phua later explained in detail to Tech in Asia.
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Monzo co-founder Tom Blomfield moves from UK CEO role to president
More than five years after starting the company, Monzo co-founder Tom Blomfield is stepping down as CEO of the U.K. challenger bank to take up the newly created role of president.
Current U.S. CEO, TS Anil, will become the new “Monzo UK Bank CEO,” subject to regulatory approval, and for now will hold both U.K. and U.S. roles.
Anil previously held exec roles at Visa, Standard Chartered Bank and Citi, and therefore brings a ton of banking and financial services experience. This includes things like dealing with regulators and overseeing a large corporate structure, two things a scale-up challenger bank like Monzo, with more than 4 million customers and over 1,500 staff, requires.
The thinking behind Blomfield’s move to president is a startup cliché but also likely holds water; he’ll be able to spend more time doing the things he enjoys most (and is arguably best at), such as focusing on the longer-term vision, product and how Monzo can stay close to and best serve customers. Meanwhile, Anil — and, in the future, other country-specific CEOs — can do the day to day, more regulated aspects of running a bank.
In a brief call with Blomfield just moments ago, he told me he had been thinking about a transition into a different role for about 18 months, but it wasn’t until much more recently that a formal decision was taken.
“I went through all the stuff I love about my job, and it was all the stuff I did in the first two or three years,” he said. “And I went through all the stuff that drains me, and it’s all the stuff I’ve done in the last two years, honestly. Things I think TS is awesome at.”
Although it is unlikely that a huge amount will change immediately, Blomfield says he hopes that he’ll be able to spend a “bunch more time doing the stuff I really, really love, which is community, talking to customers, helping develop the product proposition, long-term vision, and talking to journalists, like you Steve, obviously, and try to unwind my involvement a little bit in more formal regulated banking activities.”
Meanwhile, it has been somewhat of a turbulent time for Monzo in recent months, as it, along with many other fintech companies, has attempted to insulate itself from the coronavirus crisis and resulting economic downturn.
Last month, I reported that Monzo was shuttering its customer support office in Las Vegas, seeing 165 customer support staff in the U.S. lose their jobs. And just a few weeks earlier, we reported that the bank was furloughing up to 295 staff under the U.K.’s Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme. In addition, the senior management team and the board has volunteered to take a 25% cut in salary, and co-founder and CEO Tom Blomfield has decided not to take a salary for the next 12 months.
Like other banks and fintechs, the coronavirus crisis has resulted in Monzo seeing customer card spend reduce at home and (of course) abroad, meaning it is generating significantly less revenue from interchange fees. The bank has also postponed the launch of premium paid-for consumer accounts, one of only a handful of known planned revenue streams, alongside lending, of course.
And just last week, it was reported that Monzo is closing in on £70-80 million in top up funding, to help extend its coronavirus crisis runaway. However, as new and some existing investors play hardball, the company has reportedly had to accept a 40% reduction in its previously £2 billion valuation as part of its last funding round last June, with a new valuation of £1.25 billion.
With that said, it’s not all been bad news. Monzo recently launched business accounts, many of which are revenue generating, with both free and paid tiers. It also recruited Sujata Bhatia, a former American Express executive in Europe, as its new COO.
And, hopefully, in his new role as president, Blomfield will sound re-energised next time I call him.
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Human Interest tacks on $10M more to its Series C
The COVID-19 pandemic is making life worse for many startups, but not all. Those benefiting are often taking advantage of the market updraft to add more capital to their accounts. Robinhood, for example, saw usage of its consumer fintech product rise rapidly. Then the company raised a Series F worth $280 million at a new, higher valuation.
Another startup has done something similar. Human Interest, a finservices 401(k) provider for SMBs, added $10 million to its Series C today. The company’s Series C round is now worth a total of $50 million. Glynn Capital led the Series C extension.
The reason for the new capital is simple. According to Jeff Schneble, the company’s CEO, Human Interest has seen “some of the strongest sales months in the company’s history, and are seeing 2-3X year-over-year growth in customer acquisition even in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis.”
When usage and revenue scale ahead of expectations, options open up. TechCrunch had a few questions about the additional capital. Let’s explore.
$10 million more
TechCrunch first wanted to know if the San Francisco-based Human Interest’s new $10 million — which brings its total known capital raised to around $80 million — is earmarked for offense (greater investment into GTM functions, for example), or defense (runway extension, and so forth).
According to the CEO, the round is “more about playing offense,” with the executive adding that offense has been “something we’ve had the luxury of thinking about since the beginning of the crisis, given our large raise in February.” Human Interest intends to double its engineering team, and is “aggressively ramping up [its] GTM team (more reps, more partners, growing our marketing team and budget).”
TechCrunch was also curious about its customer profile — is Human Interest seeing growth from a different set of customers in the COVID-19 era? According to Schneble, not really: “We have not seen a significant shift in customer size, geography or vertical,” he said.
Human Interest, however, is seeing more companies coming to it looking to change 401(k) providers. Schneble told TechCrunch that “historically” 85% of his company’s customers are looking to offer “a retirement benefit for the first time.” However, “in the last couple of months” Human Interest has seen “a surge of customers with existing retirement plans that want to move to a lower-cost benefit.”
As Human Interest uses “technology, rather than people” to run its 401(k) service, the startup can offer a service that is “typically 30-50% lower-cost than a legacy 401(k) plan,” according to Schneble.
Is this new demand changing the company’s economics? TechCrunch wanted to know if market interest in 401(k) plans — consumers are flocking to savings and investing apps, likely driving more companies to add retirement savings plans for their employees — was lowering Human Interest’s customer acquisition costs (CAC).
According to the CEO, Human Interest focuses on gross-margin payback, or the time period it takes for gross-margin adjusted revenue to repay CAC. “I can’t stress how important profitability is in this space,” Schneble told TechCrunch, adding that “many of [his] competitors have negative contribution margins, which is obviously not a recipe for building a successful public company.”
The company’s gross-margin payback pace is improving, with the company telling TechCrunch that it has “come down by ~70% in the past 12 months, and is now approaching zero for many of our customers (meaning the margin contribution from their initial payment when they launch their plan covers our CAC).”
Human Interest’s gross margins help with that, with Human Interest telling TechCrunch that it has “typical software margins” on its product. That means 70%+ gross margins.
Back to the $10 million add-on, TechCrunch confirmed that the new capital was raised at the same pre-money valuation as the rest of its Series C. The CEO added the following color:
We had interest from several of the later-stage growth funds we talked to in our Series C process, but decided to move forward with Glynn Capital. They are long-term investors that plan to hold their investment in us long after we’re public (similar to one of our other large investors, Oberndorf Enterprises). While we probably could have demanded a higher price for the extension, given the acceleration we’ve seen in the last few months, we decided to optimize on partner quality instead.
Now with more capital aboard, expectations are even higher for Human Interest. Let’s see how fast it can grow.
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Cybersecurity insurance startup Coalition raises $90M Series C
This morning, Coalition announced that it has closed a $90 million Series C. The funding comes around a year after the cybersecurity insurance startup raised a $40 million Series B that TechCrunch covered at time.
The startup’s new, larger funding round was led by Valor Equity Partners and included participation from Greyhound Capital and Felicis, along with “existing investors,” per the company. Coalition told TechCrunch that its Series C was raised at an $800 million pre-money valuation, making the firm worth $890 million today.
Coalition noted in a release that it has raised $125 million in equity capital in its life. Given that the company’s Series B was generally reported as $40 million, the math didn’t add up. TechCrunch spoke with the company, learning that its Series B was $25 million in primary, and $15 million in secondary. So, the company’s $10 million Series A, $25 million primary Series B, and its $90 million Series C do add up to $125 million, as they should.
The San Francisco-based cybersecurity insurance startup raised its new capital, and nearly reached a unicorn valuation (the $1 billion threshold means less than it once did, of course), on the back of rapid customer growth. Let’s dig into the numbers.
Customers
Coalition’s funding round stood out not only because it represented an outsized Series C, but also because the firm reported an impressive customer growth figure. The startup told TechCrunch that had grown its customer base to 25,000, a figure that was up 600% from “the prior year.”
Landing that many new customers in a year, more or less, made us sit up and take notice; there is a strong connection between customer growth and revenue growth, implying that Coalition’s business was rapidly scaling.
TechCrunch wanted to know more, so we corresponded with Joshua Motta, the company’s co-founder and CEO.
First, we wanted to know if Coalition had juiced its sales and marketing spend in the last year, perhaps pushing its customer number through brute force and heavy spend. According to Motta, the answer appears to be not really:
Coalition’s insurance products are sold by insurance brokers across the country. While we’ve grown our internal sales and marketing team from 5 to 13 people [year-over-year], we’ve appointed over 1,000 new brokers in the same period, each of whom was driven by an interest to help their clients manage growing cyber risks.
Accreting brokers is not the same sort of cost as, say, spending gobs of money on advertising.
As TechCrunch noted at the time of the company’s Series B, “an ongoing threat of breaches and data exposures” has made cyber insurance attractive, so there may be secular tailwinds that are pushing Coalition along, helping boost its customer count.
Motta agrees, telling TechCrunch in an email that “data breaches and cyberattacks are now so commonplace that organizations can no longer afford to ignore them, and there is a growing awareness that insurance is often the only protection from catastrophic financial loss.”
Back to customer growth, TechCrunch was curious if the company had changed its pricing in the last year, perhaps lowering it and thus attracting more customers. Answer from its CEO: No.
But what is changing at Coalition is its size. According to Motta, the company has “made 20 new hires since the outset of March, and anticipates making an additional 100 hires over the next twelve months.”
The staffing-up makes sense, as the company plans to enter the Canadian market. TechCrunch asked what markets are coming next. According to the company: The UK, Europe and Australia.
Now we have to wait until we get another growth metric from the firm. Perhaps next time we’ll get a revenue figure, instead of merely a customer result. But hey, better some data than no data.
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Headless CMS company Strapi raises another $10 million
Strapi, the company behind the popular open-source headless CMS also called Strapi, has raised a $10 million Series A round led by Index Ventures. The company previously raised a $4 million seed round led by Accel and Stride.vc in October 2019.
Strapi is a headless content management system, which means that the back end and the front end operate totally separately. You can run Strapi on your own server and write content and pages for your site by connecting to Strapi’s admin interface.
After that, the front-end part of your application can fetch content from your Strapi instance using an API and display it to your customers and readers.
There are many advantages in separating the front end from the back end. First, it gives you a ton of flexibility when it comes to displaying your content. You can use a popular front-end framework, such as React, Vue and Angular, or develop your own custom front end.
When you want to update the design of your site, you can just switch from one front end to another with Strapi running like usual behind the scene.
Similarly, it offers more flexibility when it comes to server architecture. For instance, you could also leverage Strapi to build static websites and distribute them using a content delivery network, such as Cloudflare or AWS CloudFront. You could imagine using Gatsby combined with a CDN to deploy your site on the edge. Most of your traffic will go through your CDN instead of hitting your servers directly.
Additionally, Strapi can be used to distribute content to different front ends. For instance, you could use a Strapi instance for the content of your website and your mobile app.
Strapi proves that eventually everything becomes an API. Sure, a headless CMS is probably overkill for most projects. But if you’re running a large-scale application, Strapi can fit nicely in your architecture. Companies using Strapi include IBM, NASA and Walmart.
Many well-known open-source business angels have also invested in Strapi, such as Augusto Marietti and Marco Palladino from Kong, David Cramer from Sentry, Florian Douetteau from Dataiku, Solomon Hykes from Docker, Guillermo Rauch from Cloudup, Socket.io, Next.js and Zeit.co, and Eli Collins from Cloudera.
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Despite COVID-19, optimism reigns in the Midwest’s startup scene
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.
Startups in the Midwest are optimistic despite the fact that a fair number of companies in the region are suffering from economic impacts stemming from COVID-19, recently collected data shows.
The global pandemic has shaken the U.S. economy, but it hasn’t affected each area in the same way. States have seen differing levels of infection, paces of response, qualities of medical infrastructure and so on. What happens to Silicon Valley startups in the COVID-19 era, therefore, might not be exactly the same as what happens to Boston’s or Utah’s startup ecosystems (more on Boston here, Utah here).
A report out this month from Sandalphon Capital that digs into the reality, reaction and sentiment of the Midwest’s startup scene paints an interesting picture. While data collected from 197 startup CEOs from the region includes worrisome responses regarding fundraising and cash runways, it also reflects more optimism and green shoots than we anticipated.
This morning, let’s study a few key data points from the Chicago-based, early stage venture capital firm’s survey to better understand one of America’s most interesting, if least-covered, startup scenes.
Chin up
The full survey — you can find Sandalphon’s summation and the link here — contains a wealth of data, but today we’re focusing on three things:
- COVID-19’s direct impacts
- runway and fundraising situations
- CEO optimism
Impact
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