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Public investors stay in love with tech, as Root and Affirm file to IPO
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Why are there so many tech IPOs right now? Startups are finding that they can get higher valuations from public markets than private ones these days, because so many public investors want to put serious money in tech. Also, the lure of the future, the benevolence of the Fed, the retail investor boom, the sheer number of unicorns that have been waiting for any decent moment to go, the new ways a company can go public… these are some of the reasons Alex Wilhelm found after reviewing the latest listings and quarterly data about tech in public markets.
Various political and economic turmoils threaten to end the run, but the impact to the startup world has arrived. Consider it for a minute before the newsletter dives into stocks, SPACs, emerging industries and other useful startup news.
From this IPO boom, there’ll be another wave of startup employee wealth flooding into adjacent real-world spaces, but spread more broadly outside of the Bay Area than the days of Facebook and Twitter IPOs. Some of those employees will become investors and maybe founders, and the now-public startups will replace those positions with big-company people. The dynamics around tech hiring will be further reshaped in surprising new ways, all combined with the other changes happening like remote work.
Today, if you’re founding a startup now, you can now confidently chart new ways to build your company long-term that previous generations of founders could barely imagine.
This coming decade, we might see a startup go public that raises from pre-seed rolling funds first, pulls in newly legalized crowdfunding, matches with the right VCs from among the thousands that have are operating these days — or perhaps the startup raises debt because it’s doing that well. It could stay private as long as it wants using the various financing and secondary market possibilities that have been figured out over the last decade. Then, when it is ready to go public, it could choose between traditional options, the perfect SPAC and a direct listing, and keep the shareholder pool in favor of the true believers who have been with the company over the course of the journey.
This current group of IPOs also demonstrates something else. Tech is no longer defined as some profitless, highly valued consumer tech startup in San Francisco. It can come from anywhere, it can solve practical problems, it can make real money, and it can keep building and growing — provided you’re okay with some ongoing risk. No wonder public markets like tech these days.
Take a look at Root Insurance, an insurtech unicorn that has already helped define the Columbus, Ohio startup scene. It’s a “startup Rorscach test,” as Alex details this week about its new IPO filing. “You can find things to like (improving adjusted margins! revenue growth!), and you can find things to not like (spiraling losses! negative margins!) very easily.”
Here’s more from the Extra Crunch article:
It appears that the tailwind that many insurance providers have seen during COVID-19 has provided Root with a nice boost (driving fell during the pandemic, leading some insurance providers to return premiums.) Root is taking advantage of the moment by filing when it can show sharply improved economics.
That’s smart. But how do those improved economics bear out in traditional accounting? Let’s find out:
- Root’s revenue has skyrocketed from $43.3 million in 2018 to $290.2 million in 2019. In the first half of 2020, Root managed $245.4 million in revenue, up 135.73% from what it managed in the first half of 2019.
- Root’s losses have also shot higher, from a net loss of $69.1 million in 2018 to $282.4 million in 2019. The startup has managed to consistently lose more money over time. This was also true more recently, when its H1 2020 net loss of $144.5 million dwarfed its H1 2019 loss of $97.0 million.
The other filing this week is for Affirm, which provides a point-of-sale credit for customers (without all the tricks of credit cards). It’s also a symbol of how innovation works across the decades, for those future founders who are studying the IPO experiments of unicorns today.
The company is a high-flying unicorn with a practical purpose from serial entrepreneur Max Levchin, who has also helped shape the concept of the modern startup — from cofounding Paypal and making numerous angel investments over the years, to Slide, a profitless, highly valued consumer tech company in San Francisco a decade ago. It’s not widely understood outside of tech, Slide and other social media companies helped pioneer the growth and engagement techniques that subsequent startups applied across SaaS, e-commerce, fintech and real-world sectors. Today, Root and Affirm and many of the other companies in this era of IPOs are standing on the lessons of those years.
Image Credits: Getty Images
SPAC growing pains
Special Purpose Acquisition Companies are sure to provide valuable lessons, as a growing group of startups use these investment vehicles to ease into public markets. Here’s the latest look at the action, starting with this disturbing quote that Connie Loizos got from one expert this week.
According to Kristi Marvin, a former investment banker who now runs the data site SPACInsider, she’s having, and hearing about, conversations with a much wider range of people interested in launching SPACs than in past years — and not all of them are necessarily equipped to manage the vehicles.
“You ask, ‘Have you ever acquired a company for $500 million or more? Do you have operating experience in the vertical that you’re targeting? Do you understand the reporting requirements involved?’ Often,” she says, “the answers are no.”
That was in the context of a controversial former Uber executive starting a SPAC; Connie also looked at gender representation in this emerging slice of high finance. Like other parts of that world, the people involve are almost entirely men (which is also continuing to be the case in startup funding, actually, Alex reports).
Meanwhile, Catherine Shu examined how troubled electric vehicle startup Faraday Futures is approaching SPAC plans, while Alex took a closer look at the challenges and opportunities facing Opendoor.
Image Credits: Getty Images
The future of mobility
Our annual conference on mobility and the future of transportation happened online this year, which means we have lots of easily accessible conference coverage to share for readers (and for Extra Crunch subscribers). Here are a few key headlines to help you focus your clicks:
Quarantine drives interest in autonomous delivery, but it’s still miles from mainstream
Transportation VCs suggest frayed US-China ties will impact mobility markets (EC)
Image Credits: Getty Images
Investor Surveys: APIs, Helsinki and Amsterdam
“I am surprised at how open companies are to a SaaS API for something as critical as cybersecurity,” Skyflow founder Anshu Sharma explains about the explosion of SaaS companies, and specifically API service providers like his company. “While I have spent over a decade in SaaS including some very large deals during my time at Salesforce, the scope of the projects by large companies including banks and healthcare companies is simply beyond what was a possibility just a few years ago. We have truly moved from ‘why SaaS’ to a ‘why not SaaS’ era.” Alex and Lucas Matney surveyed a range of top investors and founders in this exploding niche, and you can read the full thing on Extra Crunch.
Elsewhere in investor surveys, Mike Butcher checked out the Helsinki startup scene and has another about Amsterdam in progress.
Across the week
TechCrunch
Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna shares her perspective on COVID-19 and CRISPR
Podcast advertising has a business intelligence gap
Standing by developers through Google v. Oracle
Dear Sophie: Now that a judge has paused Trump’s H-1B visa ban, how can I qualify my employees?
A clean energy company now has a market cap rivaling ExxonMobil
Extra Crunch
Understanding Airbnb’s summer recovery
Accel VCs Sonali De Rycker and Andrew Braccia say European deal pace is ‘incredibly active’
4 sustainable industries where founders and VCs can see green by going green
Six favorite Techstars startups ahead of its next rush of demo days
To fill funding gaps, VCs boost efforts to find India’s standout early-stage startups
#EquityPod
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
This week Natasha was on vacation, so Danny and your humble servant had to endeavor alone. She’s back next week, so we’ll be back to full strength as a collective soon enough.
But even with a depleted hosting crew, we had a mountain of news to get through. And to joke about, as Danny was in the mood for a laugh. Here’s the rundown:
- Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s New Venture Fund Invests in Disposable Camera App: Danny and I are arbiters of what is cool, so we were the perfect pair to discuss influencers and new social applications. This one is actually neat, and Ohanian’s inclusion in the investment viz his new fund was noteworthy.
- Zira raises $3.1M for its shift-scheduling service that helps manage hourly workers: This is a round that I covered, looking into Zira.ai and its product. Our take? It’s neat, but operates in a competitive market.
- Shogun raises $35M to help brands take on Amazon with faster and better sites of their own: This is a similar story. A neat company with a neat product in a space where there is proven demand (TAM, in other words), and competition.
- Unqork’s $207M Series C underscores growing enterprise demand for no-code apps: Another round worth mentioning is the Unqork deal. Unqork is a no-code service that helps other businesses create apps for their companies. It’s growing like a weed, and is thus something worth knowing a bit about.
- Mmhmm, Five-Month-Old Video Startup Making Virtual Meetings More Fun, Raises $31 Million Pre-Launch: Yes, mmhmm has raised more money, and, we’re excited to learn, could be launching this very month.
- Remotion raises $13M to create a workplace video platform for short, spontaneous conversations: Following the Slack news, this round stood out to us. Who will build the remote work comms platform of the future that people like to use?
- And then there was a host of other stuff to get through, like the FirstMark SPAC news, Root’s impending IPO and more on Airbnb’s impending public offering.
That was a lot. We did our best. Hugs and chat with you next week!
Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PT and Thursday afternoon as fast as we can get it out, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
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Dear Sophie: How can employers hire & comply with all this new H-1B craziness?
Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneur Immigration Services.” She connects people with the businesses and opportunities that expand their lives.
Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.
“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”
Extra Crunch members receive access to weekly “Dear Sophie” columns; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one or two-year subscription for 50% off.
Dear Sophie:
I’ve been reading about the new H-1B rules for wage levels and defining what types of jobs qualify that came out this week. What do we as employers need to do to comply? Are any other visa types affected?
— Racking my brain in Richmond! 
Dear Racking:
As you mentioned, the Department of Labor (DOL) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) each issued a new interim rule this week that affects the H-1B program. However, the DOL rule impacts other visas and green cards as well. These interim rules, one of which took effect immediately after being published, are an abuse of power.
The president continues to fear-monger in an attempt to generate votes through racism, protectionism and xenophobia. The fatal irony here is that companies were in fact already making “real offers” to “real employees” for jobs in the innovation economy, which are not fungible and are actually the source of new job creation for Americans. A 2019 report by the Economic Policy Institute found that for every 100 professional, scientific and technical services jobs created in the private sector in the U.S., 418 additional, indirect jobs are created as a result. Nearly 575 additional jobs are created for every 100 information jobs, and 206 additional jobs are created for every 100 healthcare and social assistance jobs.
The DOL rule, which went into effect on October 8, 2020, significantly raises the wages employers must pay to the employees they sponsor for H-1B, H-1B1 and E-3 specialty occupation visas, H-2B visas for temporary non-agricultural workers, EB-2 advanced degree green cards, EB-2 exceptional ability green cards and EB-3 skilled worker green cards.
The new DHS rule, which further restricts H-1B visas, will go into effect on December 7, 2020. DHS will not apply the new rule to any pending or previously approved petitions. That means your company should renew your employees’ H-1B visas — if eligible — before that date.
The American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) has formed a task force to review the rules and help with litigation. Although both the DOL and DHS rules will likely be challenged, they will likely remain in effect for some time before any litigation has an impact. They are actively seeking plaintiffs, including employees, employers and representatives of membership organizations who will be hurt by the new rules.
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YCharts sells to PE firm in all-cash transaction as it looks to pass $15M ARR this year
This morning, YCharts, a financial data and charting service, announced that it has been purchased by LLR Partners, a private equity firm.
The companies are dubbing the transaction a “growth recapitalization,” indicating that the smaller firm won’t be stripped of its talent in hopes of driving near-term positive EBITDA. The deal was an all-cash transaction, TechCrunch confirmed.
Digging into YCharts itself, the company told TechCrunch via email that it expects to “surpass” $15 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) this year, and that it has been growing top line at a compound annual growth rate of 30 to 40% for “the past several years.”
Those figures imply that YCharts did not sell for cheap. At the market’s current multiples, YCharts was likely worth between 10 and 20x times its ARR, making the deal (presuming, say, $13.5 million ARR at the time of the sale) worth between $135 million and $270 million, unless LLR managed to secure a discount, or the firm’s economics were worse than we’d imagine from our current remove.
The companies declined to share details of the transaction, including price.
As a somewhat long-term YCharts user — the startup set up custom colors in my account so that I could share charts in TechCrunch green, which was fun — the deal is notable in that I’ve come to appreciate what the service is capable of; it’s a great tool to create charts that encompass a wealth of financial data to make a clear point, like the historical trends in Tesla’s price/sales ratio compared to other automotive players, for example.
Financial tooling that is accessible, and shareable, is rare in our Bloomberg world. So here’s to hoping that the transactions promised investment into YCharts bears out.
Turning to the why, I asked YCharts why it didn’t merely raise external capital instead of selling itself. YCharts’ CEO Sean Brown wrote that he’s “found that capital is easy to get,” but that “LLR Partners provides [YCharts] with much more than just capital.” The investing group, Brown continued, shares his company’s vision, has “strong domain experience,” along with “a dedicated team focused on fintech, and a ton of relevant strategic and operational expertise.”
The CEO also stressed LLR’s prior investments into other fintech companies, and said that “as part of the buyout of our existing shareholders, LLR will be funding capital to YCharts’ balance sheet to support continued investment in product and sales [and] marketing.”
YCharts raised capital as an independent company across a number of rounds, including a 2010 Series A led by Hyde Park Angels and I2A Fund, and a Series B and C led by Morningstar. The company had around $15 million in known capital raised, according to Crunchbase data.
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Funding for female founders falls to 2017 levels as pandemic shakes up the VC market
So much for progress.
New data out this week from PitchBook indicates that the number of rounds raised by female-founded and co-founded companies fell year-over-year, with dollars invested in those rounds collapsing to 2017-era levels.
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.
It’s a disappointing quarter that comes after a few years in which female founders saw an increase in the amount of capital they were able to raise. In 2016, PitchBook data shows quarterly results for female founders totaling around 100 to 125 rounds, and between $300 and $400 million in value. By 2019, those figures rose to 150 to 200 rounds per quarter, worth between $700 million and $950 million.
To see Q3 2020 manage just 136 rounds worth just $434 million is a sharp disappointment.
The depressing results come not during a time of sharply lower aggregate venture capital results, notably. Recent data concerning Q3 2020 compiled by PwC indicates that the quarter was relatively rich. Certainly, overall deal volume in the United States is down slightly compared to year-ago periods, but female founders fared worse.
In short, a fear that well-known seed investor Charles Hudson discussed with TechCrunch during an Extra Crunch Live session back in April has come true. Let’s talk about it.
A diversity downturn?
Cards on the table, I think it’s better when venture capital is more diversely distributed. Why? Because when there’s more general access to funds, we’ll see a more varied set of products built to attack a more diverse set of issues and problems. Even more, venture capital can be a pathway to financial success for founders and employees, so investing it in all sorts of folks instead of one particular demographic set can spread the wealth around more equitably.
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Join Yext’s Howard Lerman for a Q&A October 13 at 2 pm ET/11 am PT
Heading into the third quarter and earnings season, TechCrunch is excited to announce that Yext CEO Howard Lerman will join us for a live Q&A next Tuesday as part of our continuing Extra Crunch Live series.
The series recently hosted pairs of investors from Accel and Index Ventures and has hosted business leaders, from Mark Cuban to Roelof Botha. Lerman will be one of the few guests who is the CEO of a public company.
But Lerman is no regular public CEO — his company debuted at a TechCrunch event back in 2009, quickly raising capital after the pitch. Yext’s 2017 IPO was therefore an event of interest here at TechCrunch.
What will we talk about? There are a number of things that come to mind, but we’ll certainly get into the impact of COVID-19 on small businesses and how Yext is handling an uneven market. We’ll dig into search, a rising product and revenue area for the company, and how Yext has managed to broaden its product mix without diluting its focus.
We’ll also discuss what changes for a tech CEO heading into the public markets and what advice he might have for companies either considering, or actively going public in 2020. It has been a busy year for startup liquidity, pushing a great number of startups into the public sphere with varying results.
And we’ll riff on where Lerman is seeing the most interesting startups being built, along with your questions. As with all Extra Crunch Live sessions, we’ll snag a few questions from the audience. So make sure your Extra Crunch Live subscription is live and prep your thoughts.
Details follow after the jump. See everyone Tuesday!
Details
Below are links to add the event to your calendar and to save the Zoom link. We’ll share the YouTube link on the day of the discussion:
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Waymo and TuSimple autonomous trucking leaders on the difficulty of building a highway-safe AI
TuSimple and Waymo are in the lead in the emerging sector of autonomous trucking; TuSimple founder Xiaodi Hou and Waymo trucking head Boris Sofman had an in-depth discussion of their industry and the tech they’re building at TC Mobility 2020. Interestingly, while they’re solving for the same problems, they have very different backgrounds and approaches.
Hou and Sofman started out by talking about why they were pursuing the trucking market in the first place. (Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity.)
“The market is massive; I think in the United States, $700-$800 billion a year is spent on the trucking industry. It’s continuing to grow every single year,” said Sofman, who joined Waymo from Anki last year to lead the effort in freight. “And there’s a huge shortage of drivers today, which is only going to increase over the next period of time. It’s just such a clear need. But it’s not going to be overnight — there’s still a really long tail of challenges that you can’t avoid. So the way we talk about it is the things that are hardest are just different.”
“It’s really the cost and reward analysis, thinking about building the operating system,” said Hou. “The cost is the number of features that you develop, and the reward is basically how many miles are you driving — you charge on a per mile basis. From that cost-reward analysis, trucking is simply the natural way to go for us. The total number of issues that you need to solve is probably 10 times less, but maybe, you know, five times harder.”
“It’s really hard to quantify those numbers, though,” he concluded, “but you get my point.”
The two also discussed the complexity of creating a perceptual framework good enough to drive with.
“Even if you have perfect knowledge of the world, you have to predict what other objects and agents are going to do in that environment, and then make a decision yourself and the combination knows is very challenging,” said Sofman.
“What’s really helped us is a realization from the car side of the of the company many, many years ago that in order to help us solve this problem in the easiest way possible, and facilitate the challenges downstream, we had to create our own sensors,” he continued. “And so we have our own lidar, our own radar, our own cameras, and they have incredibly unique properties that were custom designed through five generations of hardware that try to really lean into the kind of most challenging situations that you just can’t avoid on the road.”
Hou explained that while many autonomous systems are descended from the approaches used in the famous DARPA Grand Challenge 15 years ago, TuSimple’s is a little more anthropomorphic.
“I think I’m heavily influenced by my background, which has a tinge of neuroscience. So I’m always thinking about building a machine that can see and think, as humans do,” he said. “In the DARPA challenge, people’s idea would be: Okay, write a dynamic system equation and solve this equation. For me, I’m trying to answer the question of, how do we reconstruct the world? Which is more about understanding the objects, understanding their attributes, even though some of the attributes may not directly contribute to the entire self-driving system.”
“We’re combining all the different, seemingly useless features together, so that we can reconstruct the so-called ‘qualia’ of the perception of the world,” continued Hou. “By doing that we find we have all the ingredients that we need to do whatever missions that we have.”
The two found themselves in disagreement over the idea that due to the major differences between highway driving and street-level driving, there are essentially two distinct problems to be solved.
Hou was of the opinion that “the overlap is rather small. Human society has declared certain types of rules for driving on the highway … this is a much more regulated system. But for local driving there’s actually no rules for interaction … in fact very different implicit social constructs to drive in different areas of the world. These are things that are very hard to model.”
Sofman, on the other hand, felt that while the problems are different, solving one contributes substantially to solving the other: “If you break up the problem into the many, many building blocks of an AV system, there’s a pretty huge leverage where even if you don’t solve the problem 100% it takes away 85%-90% of the complexity. We use the exact same sensors, exact same compute infrastructures, simulation framework, the perception system carries over, very largely, even if we have to retrain some of the models. The core of all of our algorithms are, we’re working to keep them the same.”
You can see the rest of that last exchange in the video above. This panel and many more from TC Sessions: Mobility 2020 are available to watch here for Extra Crunch subscribers.
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Blissfully expands from SaaS management into wider IT services aimed at midmarket
When Blissfully launched in 2016, it was focused on helping companies understand their SaaS usage inside their organizations, but over time the company has seen that there is a wider need, especially in midmarket companies, and today it announced it was expanding into broader IT management.
Company co-founder and CEO Ariel Diaz says that the startup began helping to track SaaS usage, eventually expanding into employee onboarding and exiting, and today they are expanding into a broader set of IT services.
“Our vision when starting a company was really that IT is being redefined in the age of SaaS. So step one was to help with everything around managing SaaS. And step two is what does that mean in terms of the broader IT management vision,” Diaz told TechCrunch.
Blissfully believed that SaaS was going to take a bigger and bigger part of IT in terms of mindshare, spend and how you manage it, and they turned out to be right. Now, they felt the time is right to expand their original idea to encompass more of the IT management function.
That has resulted in a newly expanded platform they are releasing today that not only includes the earlier SaaS management components that it’s been providing all along, but also four other new categories.
For starters they are offering IT asset management. “We are now offering the ability to track not just SaaS applications, but all your IT assets, including hardware devices and traditional software,” Diaz said.
Next, they are including help desk management and ticketing capabilities to handle requests that fall outside of their SaaS management workflows. In addition, they are adding role-based access control to allow different people access to various IT management services, which is increasingly essential during the pandemic as people are being forced to troubleshoot and manage various IT issues from home. Finally, the startup is opening up its APIs so that IT can tap into that and build customized functionality or workflows on top of the Blissfully platform.
Diaz believes that the company has reached a point of maturity when it comes to SaaS management, and they saw a need in the midmarket to provide these additional IT services that larger organizations tend to get from a company like ServiceNow.
The new services will be available starting today from Blissfully.
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Millennial Media’s Paul Palmieri launches Tradeswell, a startup promising to fix e-commerce margins
A new startup called Tradeswell said it’s using artificial intelligence to help direct-to-consumer and e-commerce brands build healthier businesses.
The company is led by Paul Palmieri, who previously took mobile advertising company Millennial Media public and then sold it to TechCrunch’s corporate parent AOL (now Verizon Media). Afterwards, Palmieri founded Grit Capital Partners, but he told me he decided to join Tradeswell as a co-founder and CEO because he was so excited about the vision.
Palmieri said that just as Millennial helped independent app developers get smarter about advertising, Tradeswell gives upstart e-commerce companies the data they need to compete with “the big platform behemoths.”
It’s no secret that a number of direct-to-consumer companies have struggled to make a profit due to challenging unit economics. Palmieri suggested that one reason for this is the fragmentation of their tools and data.
“If you’re selling something like Campbell’s Soup, you want to figure out, how is your tomato soup business and your chicken soup business?” Palmieri said. “Today, brands are saying, ‘How’s my Amazon business? How’s my Shopify business? How’s my Shopify business on Instagram?’ ”
So rather than relying on those platforms for data, Palmieri suggested brands want an independent platform that they trust to bring everything together, “where it’s a combination of a Bloomberg terminal plus a trading platform.”
Tradeswell’s AI focuses in six key areas of an e-commerce business: marketing, retail, inventory, logistics, forecasting, lifetime value and financials. Palmieri suggested that in some cases (like ad-buying), Tradeswell will replace existing software, while in other cases it will integrate.
“Think of us as a neural AI layer, where [a brand] might have different platform relationships, which are the fingers, and we’re the AI brain,” he said. “We’re giving brands insights and forecasts: If you make this change, we anticipate XYZ will happen.”
In some cases, like the aforementioned advertising, Tradeswell can also support full automation, so that merchants don’t have to worry about “setting up and tearing down hundreds of campaigns.”
The key, Palmieri said, is that the platform has access to the business’ full financials, so it can optimize for net margins, rather than simply driving the most impressions or clicks or sales.
While Tradeswell is only coming out of stealth mode today, it’s already been working with more than 100 brands. For example, Steve Tracy of Red Monkey Foods and San Francisco Salt Company said in a statement that the startup’s “unique, comprehensive, algorithmic approach has helped us grow sales, identify commercialization opportunities and forecast far more accurately.”
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Instacart raises $200M more at a $17.7B valuation
Instacart announced today that it has raised $200 million in a new funding round featuring prior investors. D1 Capital and Valiant Peregrine Fund led the investment. Instacart is now worth $17.7 billion, post-money, or $17.5 billion pre-money. The plan is to use the funding to focus on introducing new features and tools to improve the customer experience, and further support Instacart’s enterprise and ads businesses, according to a blog post.
Previously in 2020, Instacart raised $100 million in July, and $225 million in June. The June round valued the company at around $13.7 billion, meaning that the unicorn’s new funding round — raised just months later — came at a much higher price.
Instacart, like some other tech, and tech-enabled businesses, has seen demand for its service expand during the pandemic. It’s not hard to trace a connection between COVID-19 and its business results, as folks wanting to stay at home have turned to on-demand services to keep themselves safe.
The growth shown by Uber’s food delivery business is another example of this trend.
Instacart’s valuation has more than doubled since its 2018 Series F, when it was worth around $7.9 billion. The pace at which Instacart has created paper value is impressive, though its IPO plans appear murky from the outside and how much of its COVID-bump will be retained when the pandemic ends is not yet clear.
The startup famously turned a profit during a month in Q2, worth around $10 million per The Information. The same report indicated that Instacart lost around $300 million in 2019. What the company’s full-year profitability profile will look like is not known.
TechCrunch sent a number of questions to the firm, including if it has had any further profitable months in 2020, and how quickly it grew in Q3 2020. The company’s spokespeople did not answer those questions.
“Today’s investment is a testament to the strong conviction our existing investors have in the strength of our teams and the important role Instacart plays for customers, partners, and the entire grocery ecosystem,” Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta said in a press release. “I’m incredibly proud of our team’s work to scale our business this past year and rise to meet the unprecedented consumer demand and growth.”
Instacart is one of the company’s caught up in a regulatory war after California passed AB5, which changed the state’s rules on gig workers. A voter proposition — Prop 22 — that would keep rideshare drivers and delivery workers classified as independent contractors, is coming up for a vote in California. Instacart is in favor of the proposition, along with Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and Postmates (now owned by Uber).
Uber, Lyft, Instacart and DoorDash have collectively contributed $184,008,361.46 to the Yes on 22 campaign. Those contributions have been monetary, non-monetary and have come in the form of loans. In September, the four companies each committed another $17.5 million to Yes on Prop 22 in monetary contributions. Of all the measures on this November’s ballot, Yes on Prop 22 has received the most contributions, according to California’s Fair Political Practices Commission.
Beyond Prop 22, Instacart is facing a lawsuit from Washington, D.C. District Attorney General Karl A. Racine that alleges the company charged customers millions of dollars in “deceptive service fees” and failed to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of sales tax. The suit seeks restitution for customers who paid those service fees, as well as back taxes and interest on taxes owed to D.C. Specifically, it alleges Instacart misled customers regarding the 10% service fee to think it was a tip for the delivery person, from September 2016 to April 2018.
Meanwhile, amid the pandemic and wildfires in California, workers have demanded personal protective equipment and better pay, and, most recently, disaster relief.
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The Zebra reaches $100M run rate, turns profitable as insurtech booms
From a cluster of insurance marketplace startups raising capital earlier this year, to neoinsurance provider Lemonade going public this summer at a strong valuation, Hippo’s huge new round and Root’s impending unicorn IPO, 2020 has proven to be a busy year for startups and other growth-oriented private tech companies focused on insurance.
That news cycle continues today, with The Zebra announcing that it has reached a roughly $100 million run rate, and, perhaps even more notably, that it has turned profitable.
TechCrunch most recently covered the car and home insurance marketplace startup in February, when it raised the first $38.5 million in a Series C eventually worth $43.5 million that Accel led. As we noted at the time, the startup joined “Insurify ($23 million), Gabi ($27 million) and Policygenius ($100 million) in raising new capital this year.”
The Zebra released a number of financial performance metrics as part of its Series C cycle, including that it recorded revenues of $37 million in 2019, and that it had reached a $60 million annual run rate around the time of its Series C. The Zebra also said that it could double in size this year, putting it above a $100 million run rate by the end of 2020.
With that history in hand, let’s talk about the company’s more recent performance.
A changing market
According to the company, The Zebra recorded net revenue of $6 million in May, 2020. That number grew to around $8 million in September. For those of you able to multiply, $8 million times 12 is $96 million, or a hair under $100 million. According to a call with the The Zebra’s CEO Keith Melnick, the company’s September was very close to $8.3 million, a figure that would put it on a $100 million run rate.
Given that our $100 million ARR club has a history of granting startups a little wiggle room when it comes to their size, it seems perfectly fine to say that The Zebra has reached revenue scale of $100 million; at its current rate of growth, even if its final September revenue tally is a hair light. the company should reach a nine-figure topline pace in October.
According to Melnick, while the bulk of The Zebra’s revenue isn’t recurring, a growing portion of it is. Per the CEO, around 2-5% of The Zebra’s revenue was recurring last year, a figure that he said is up to around 10% today. (If The Zebra binds an insurance policy itself, and that policy is renewed, its commissions can recur.)
What drove the company’s quick 2020 growth? In part, the insurance market changed, with insurance networks that depended on in-person sales seeing their ability to drive business slow thanks to COVID-19. Insurance marketplaces like The Zebra stepped in to assist, helping move some offline demand online. Melnick detailed that dynamic to TechCrunch, adding that when certain advertising channels saw demand fall, his company was able to leverage inexpensive inventory.
A number of factors appear to have added to The Zebra’s rapid growth thus far in 2020. Our next question is whether other, related players in the insurtech startup space have seen similar acceleration. More on that in a few days.
Finally, regarding The Zebra, the company said that it is now profitable. Of course, profit is a squishy word in 2020, so we wanted to know precisely what the company meant by the statement. Per the company’s CEO, it is generating positive net income, the gold-standard for profitability as the metric is inclusive of all costs, including the non-cash expenses that startups tend to strip out of their numbers to make the results look better than they really are.
If other players in the insurtech space are surfing similar trajectories, all that capital that went into the sector around the start of the year is going to appear prescient.
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