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Startups Weekly: With Asana, JFrog, Palantir, Snowflake, Sumo and Unity, we’re in peak season for tech IPOs
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Pandemic numbers are looking better, it’s still a couple months before U.S. elections and a growing line of tech companies have already ventured out into public markets successfully this summer. Hard to imagine conditions beating the present any time soon, whether you’re traditionally banked, going with a direct listing or getting inside a SPAC vehicle.
We covered the frenzy this week with an eye toward what other startups can learn about the way these companies have arrived at this point. Here are the headlines for each, from Asana to Unity.
But first, consider this special episode of our Equity podcast from Wednesday, where the team reviews the news. And for a faster(ish) read, Extra Crunch subscribers should also check out Alex Wilhelm’s “super-long roundup” of the companies.
The IPOs:
As losses expand, Asana is confident it has the ticket for a successful public listing
Palantir and the great revenue mystery
The bullish case for Palantir’s direct listing (EC)
Leaked S-1 says Palantir would fight an order demanding its encryption keys
Palantir’s S-1 alludes to controversial work with ICE as a risk factor for its business
Unpacking the Sumo Logic S-1 filing (EC)
A quick peek at Snowflake’s IPO filing
Industry experts say it’s full speed ahead as Snowflake files S-1
Unity’s IPO numbers look pretty … unreal?
Sequoia strikes gold with Unity’s IPO filing
Regarding that last one, EC members should be sure to check out our popular deep dive from last year detailing how Unity came to be a leading gaming engine.
Finally, here’s one last EC headline to get you ready for what is sure to be another week of official S-1s, leaked filing information, rumors of imminent IPO dates, controversies over methods of going public, etc.:
SaaS stocks survive earnings, keeping the market warm for software startups, exits
Image Credits: Getty Images
You don’t know SPACs
Special purpose acquisition companies are an older model of financial vehicle used to take companies public that has become a hot trend in recent years as more tech startups try to figure out liquidity events. Here’s Connie Loizos, who put together a long list of questions and answers about SPACs, concluding that the trend is here for the long-term:
[One] investment banker says he’s seeing less interest from VCs in sponsoring SPACs and more interest from them in selling their portfolio companies to a SPAC. As he notes, “Most venture firms are typically a little earlier stage investors and are private market investors, but there’s an uptick of interest across the board, from PE firms, hedge funds, long-only mutual funds.”
That might change if [A* SPAC founder] Kevin Hartz has anything to do with it. “We’re actually out in the Valley, speaking with all the funds and just looking to educate the venture funds,” he says. “We’ve had a lot of requests in. We think we’re going to convert [famed VC] Bill Gurley from being a direct listings champion to the SPAC champion very soon.”
In the meantime, asked if his SPAC has a specific target in mind already, Hartz says it does not. He also takes issue with the word “target.”
Says Hartz, “We prefer ‘partner company.’” A target, he adds, “sounds like we’re trying to assassinate somebody.”
Image Credits: Dougal Waters / Getty Images
Inside the nearly 200 companies of Y Combinator’s Summer 2020 demo day
After YC’s first remote-only demo day this spring, the seed-stage venture firm switched from recorded pitches to live ones. The TechCrunch team was on hand to cover the 192 presentations over Monday and Tuesday this week. We’ve written up these two handy guides to help you find your newest competitors, employers or maybe investment:
The 98 companies from Y Combinator’s Summer 2020 Demo Day 1
The 94 companies from Y Combinator’s Summer 2020 Demo Day 2
The staff also picked out their dozen or so favorites from each day, for Extra Crunch subscribers:
Our 11 favorite companies from Y Combinator’s S20 Demo Day: Part 1
Our 12 favorite startups from Y Combinator’s S20 Demo Day: Part 2
(Check out this special demo day edition of Equity for a free audio rundown.)
One company wasn’t in the mix — a startup called Trove, that provides internal compensation SaaS tools, and has just raised a huge new round from Andreessen Horowitz. Natasha Mascarenhas has more.
What investors are saying about startup cities in 2020: Chicago edition
Cities around the world have developed strong tech scenes, but these startup hubs are at the center of potential disruption from pandemic problems plus the possibilities of remote work. We’re surveying investors around the world about what’s next for their home bases. This week, Matt Burns checks in with top Chicago investors about the tech future of the biggest Midwestern city. Here’s Constance Freedman of proptech-oriented fund Moderne Ventures, who is investing in the middle of all these changes:
World-class startups still need world-class feeders, so I don’t expect expansion to reach all that far, but perhaps density or proximity to work becomes less important for those who work there. This may give more cities a change to rise, including Chicago.
So what does this mean for Chicago startup ecosystem? I think Chicago is poised to come out well. The city is affordable to begin with … like 50% more affordable than the West or East Coast hubs. If I live in Chicago I can afford space, I can enjoy my city and I have good transportation if I want to bail out of the city and move to the suburbs. Chicago has a strong ecosystem of universities and capital that can sustain it and may become more appealing to those (tech people and investors) who moved out to go to the coasts in the first place and now realize they don’t need to be there. As people migrate to live where they really want to live, with the lifestyle they want to have, near family they want to be with, they begin to look for more local opportunities and that may bring some great talent back to Chicago and other markets outside of the coasts.
Chicago has long been known for banking, real estate, health care and insurance. I think these sectors and others are poised to do well. The largest opportunity for us (and any major city) is how to close the education gap, which leads to closing the income gap and from there — the sky is the limit!
Meanwhile, Mike Butcher is working on surveys across Europe, and would like to hear from you if you are an investor in Paris or Warsaw.
Around TechCrunch (Disrupt Time)
Conan is coming to Disrupt 2020
Presenting TechCrunch Disrupt’s Asia sessions
Benchmark’s Peter Fenton is joining us at Disrupt
Learn why embedded finance is the future of fintech at Disrupt
Laura Deming, Frederik Groce, Amish Jani, Jessica Verrilli and Vanessa Larco are coming to Disrupt
Carbon Health’s Eren Bali and Color’s Othman Laraki will join us at Disrupt 2020
Black founders can get tactical advice at Disrupt
Five real reasons to attend Disrupt 2020 online
Hear from experienced edtech investors on the market’s overnight boom at Disrupt 2020
Startup Alley exhibitors: Register for VC-led Fundraising & Hiring Best Practices webinar
Here’s how you can get a second shot at Startup Battlefield
Two weeks left on early-bird pricing for TC Sessions: Mobility 2020
Grab your student discount pass for TC Sessions: Mobility 2020
Register for our last pitch-off next week on September 2
Extra Crunch discount now available for military, nonprofits and government employees
Across the week
TechCrunch
The pandemic has probably killed VR arcades for good
Femtech poised for growth beyond fertility
Five proven ways to attract and hire more diverse talent
Will automation eliminate data science positions?
Eduardo Saverin on the ‘world of innovation past Silicon Valley’
The H-1B visa ban is creating nearshore business partnership opportunities
Meet the startups from Brinc’s first online Demo Day
Extra Crunch
What can growth marketers learn from lean product development?
Alexa von Tobel: Eliminating risk is the key to building a startup during an economic downturn
As DevOps takes off, site reliability engineers are flying high
How to establish a startup and draw up your first contract
COVID-19 is driving demand for low-code apps
Synthetic biology startups are giving investors an appetite
Funding for mental health-focused startups rises in 2020
Box CEO Aaron Levie says thrifty founders have more control
#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 is the fourth episode of the week, pushing our production calendar to the test. Happily, we’ve managed to hold it together amidst the news deluge that the last few days have brought. It was a good week for our scheduling change, with the main episode of the show coming to you on Thursday afternoon versus Friday morning.
Change is good.
But unchanging this time around was our hosting lineup, with Natasha Mascarenhas and Danny Crichton and myself yammering with Chris Gates on the mix. Here’s what we got into:
- The CEO of TikTok is out, bids are swirling and who will wind up owning a piece of all of TikTok’s global operations is not clear. Walmart is in the mix, apparently, which feels very 2020.
- The New York Stock Exchange has gotten approval from the SEC for a new type of direct listing, one in which the company going public can sell a bloc of shares during the normal price discovery process. This means that all the banker-faff of setting a price and roadshowing to various investor groups could be going the way of the buffalo.
- About time, maybe? That was our take after reading this Bill Gurley note and the latest SEC news.
- But while the direct listing world is getting more interesting, the SPAC world is taking flight. Desktop Metal is going public via a SPAC which is all sorts of fascinating. A younger, Boston-based unicorn going public in this manner is eye catching!
- And then two funding rounds, the first from Finix, which can’t stop adding to its Series B. And Mural, which raised the largest Series B we can recall.
And with that, we’re all going to bed. We’re tired. No more news, thanks!
Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
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TikTok’s rivals in India struggle to cash in on its ban
For years, India has served as the largest open battleground for Silicon Valley and Chinese firms searching for their next billion users.
With more than 400 million WhatsApp users, India is already the largest market for the Facebook-owned service. The social juggernaut’s big blue app also reaches more than 300 million users in the country.
Google is estimated to reach just as many users in India, with YouTube closely rivaling WhatsApp for the most popular smartphone app in the country.
Several major giants from China, like Alibaba and Tencent (which a decade ago shut doors for most foreign firms), also count India as their largest overseas market. At its peak, Alibaba’s UC Web gave Google’s Chrome a run for its money. And then there is TikTok, which also identified India as its biggest market outside of China.
Though the aggressive arrival of foreign firms in India helped accelerate the growth of the local ecosystem, their capital and expertise also created a level of competition that made it too challenging for most Indian firms to claim a slice of their home market.
New Delhi’s ban on 59 Chinese apps on June 30 on the basis of cybersecurity concerns has changed a lot of this.
Indian apps that rarely made an appearance in the top 20 have now flooded the charts. But are these skyrocketing download figures translating to sustaining users?
An industry executive leaked the download, monthly active users, weekly active users and daily active users figures from one of the top mobile insight firms. In this Extra Crunch report, we take a look at the changes New Delhi’s ban has enacted on the world’s second largest smartphone market.
TikTok copycats
Scores of startups in India, including news aggregator DailyHunt, on-demand video streamer MX Player and advertising giant InMobi Group, have launched their short-video format apps in recent months.
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Steno raises $3.5 million led by First Round to become an extension of law offices
The global legal services industry was worth $849 billion in 2017 and is expected to become a trillion-dollar industry by the end of next year. Little wonder that Steno, an LA-based startup, wants a piece.
Like most legal services outfits, what it offers are ways for law practices to run more smoothly, including in a world where fewer people are meeting in conference rooms and courthouses and operating instead from disparate locations.
Steno first launched with an offering that centers on court reporting. It lines up court reporters, as well as pays them, removing both potential headaches from lawyers’ to-do lists.
More recently, the startup has added offerings like a remote deposition videoconferencing platform that it insists is not only secure but can manage exhibit handling and other details in ways meant to meet specific legal needs.
It also, very notably, has a lending product that enables lawyers to take depositions without paying until a case is resolved, which can take a year or two. The idea is to free attorneys’ financial resources — including so they can take on other clients — until there’s a payout. Of course, the product is also a potentially lucrative one for Steno, as are most lending products.
We talked earlier this week with the company, which just closed on a $3.5 million seed round led by First Round Capital (it has now raised $5 million altogether).
Unsurprisingly, one of its founders is a lawyer named Dylan Ruga who works as a trial attorney at an LA-based law group and knows first-hand the biggest pain points for his peers.
More surprising is his co-founder, Gregory Hong, who previously co-founded the restaurant reservation platform Reserve, which was acquired by Resy, which was acquired by American Express. How did Hong make the leap from one industry to a seemingly very different one?
Hong says he might not have gravitated to the idea if not for Ruga, who was Resy’s trademark attorney and who happened to send Hong the pitch behind Steno to get Hong’s advice. He looked it over as a favor, then he asked to get involved. “I just thought, ‘This is a unique and interesting opportunity,’ and said, ‘Dylan, let me run this.’ ”
Today the 19-month-old startup has 20 full-time employees and another 10 part-time staffers. One major accelerant to the business has been the pandemic, suggests Hong. Turns out tech-enabled legal support services become even more attractive when lawyers and everyone else in the ecosystem is socially distancing.
Hong suggests that Steno’s idea to marry its services with financing is gaining adherents, too, including amid law groups like JML Law and Simon Law Group, both of which focus largely on personal injury cases.
Indeed, Steno charges — and provides financing — on a per-transaction basis right now, even while its revenue is “somewhat recurring,” in that its customers constantly have court cases.
Still, a subscription product is being considered, says Hong. So are other uses for its videoconferencing platform. In the meantime, says Hong, Steno’s tech is “built very well” for legal services, and that’s where it plans to remain focused.
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KitchenMate makes it easy to cook fresh meals at work
KitchenMate is a Toronto-based startup promising businesses a fresh approach to feeding their employees.
The startup has raised $3.5 million in seed funding led by Eniac Ventures and Golden Ventures, with participation from FJ Labs and Techstars. It’s also expanding into the United States.
Founder and CEO Yang Yu said KitchenMate was founded with the goal of providing “healthy meals at an affordable cost.” The solution he and his team developed combines refrigerated, tamper-proof “smart meal-pods” containing fresh, prepared meals that are then heated in a “smart cooker.”
You might think a pandemic is the wrong time for this idea, since so many companies are still working from home. And Yu acknowledged that some of KitchenMate’s most likely customers (such as tech companies) don’t need the product right now.
At the same time, he said there are many “old-school companies” in industries like manufacturing, distribution and essential services that can’t operate that way — and in those sectors, business is “booming.”
“[Before the pandemic,] it was a nice-to-have for a lot of companies that care about employees and want to offer them a healthy meal,” he said. “It’s become a must-have for a lot of companies now that everything is closed.”
In other words, Yu said that with many restaurants and other businesses shuttered by the pandemic, KitchenMate has emerged for some employers as “the only option.” He also said it’s being used by hospitals as an efficient way to prepare healthy meals for patients.
Without a KitchenMate Smart Cooker at home, I can’t vouch for the quality of the food, but Yu showed me how he prepared a meal in the KitchenMate office: He opened the refrigerator, removed a Smart Meal-Pod and scanned it with his phone, then loaded the Meal-Pod into the cooker. A few minutes later, a tasty-looking lunch of rice, curry, vegetables and tofu was ready for him.
KitchenMate offers the equipment for sale or rent to employers. The meals are then purchased by employees via smartphone app at an average cost of $9, usually with employees paying $7 and employers subsidizing the rest.
KitchenMate delivers new Meal-Pods once or twice a week, and teams can influence what gets delivered by voting on the dishes that they want. The startup also offers an option where staff members can prepare the meals for employees, rather than having everyone raid the refrigerator and making meals for themselves.
Yu suggested that as offices reopen, people will want to avoid crowded cafeterias, and they’ll choose KitchenMate’s bulk deliveries over having lots of individual deliveries going in and out of buildings and elevators.
Yu acknowledged that there is a risk of a “backlog” in the kitchen if everyone wants their lunch at the same time, but he said KitchenMate tries to alleviate this issue by allowing people to pre-order their meals in the app.
“We create more flexibility around people eating for a lot of companies who either can’t afford catering or, post-COVID, it’s just not possible anymore to have shared meals,” he said.
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A faster, easier, cheaper way of going public
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
This is the fourth episode of the week, pushing our production calendar to the test. Happily, we’ve managed to hold it together amidst the news deluge that the last few days have brought. It was a good week for our scheduling change, with the main episode of the show coming to you on Thursday afternoon versus Friday morning.
Change is good.
But unchanging this time around was our hosting lineup, with Natasha Mascarenhas and Danny Crichton and myself yammering with Chris Gates on the mix. Here’s what we got into:
- The CEO of TikTok is out, bids are swirling and who will wind up owning a piece of all of TikTok’s global operations is not clear. Walmart is in the mix, apparently, which feels very 2020.
- The New York Stock Exchange has gotten approval from the SEC for a new type of direct listing, one in which the company going public can sell a bloc of shares during the normal price discovery process. This means that all the banker-faff of setting a price and roadshowing to various investor groups could be going the way of the buffalo.
- About time, maybe? That was our take after reading this Bill Gurley note and the latest SEC news.
- But while the direct listing world is getting more interesting, the SPAC world is taking flight. Desktop Metal is going public via a SPAC which is all sorts of fascinating. A younger, Boston-based unicorn going public in this manner is eye catching!
- And then two funding rounds, the first from Finix, which can’t stop adding to its Series B. And Mural, which raised the largest Series B we can recall.
And with that, we’re all going to bed. We’re tired. No more news, thanks!
Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PT and Friday at 6:00 a.m. PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
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To reach scale, Juni Learning is building a full-stack edtech experience
Juni Learning connects kids with math and science tutors, but co-founder Vivian Shen would prefer not to be lumped in with other edtech startups, despite the sector’s pandemic-born boom.
“We’re not just in the middle to take a few percentage points off of each side and pretend like we’re delivering value,” said Shen. “That’s not scalable.”
Semantics aside, Shen’s words underscore a truth about live tutoring businesses: Anyone can start one. All it takes is smart friends, eager students and a platform to bring them together.
The low barrier of entry has given rise to a slew of new startups. Some view edtech as a marketplace play, others go the gig economy route, and some are trying to make tutoring as simple as calling an Uber — on-demand and only when you need it.
Juni Learning, co-founded by Shen and Ruby Lee, is entering a fragmented and fatigued market full of better-funded and well-known startups. The startup views itself as a consumer play instead of an edtech startup and raised a $10.5 million Series A back in February to prove it can take a slice of the market.
With only 4,000 active subscribers, Juni Learning is bringing in $10 million in annual run revenue (ARR), compared to $2 million of ARR in March, according to my calculations.
So how is it faring?
A word of warning
In 2005, Andrew Geant was thinking about two-sided gig economy marketplaces. He applied the model to tutoring, thinking he could grow a business from connecting students and tutors online to meet offline. So, Geant and Mike Weishuhn, both recent Princeton graduates, founded Wyzant.
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Berbix raises $9M for its identity verification platform
Berbix, an ID verification startup that was founded by former members of the Airbnb Trust and Safety team, today announced that it has raised a $9 million Series A round led by Mayfield. Existing investors, including Initialized Capital, Y Combinator and Fika Ventures, also participated in this round.
Founded in 2018, Berbix helps companies verify the identity of its users, with an emphasis on the cannabis industry, but it’s clearly not limited to this use case. Integrating the service to help online services scan and validate IDs only takes a few lines of code. In that respect, it’s not that different from payment services like Stripe, for example. Pricing starts at $99 per month with 100 included ID checks. Developers can choose a standard ID check (for $0.99 per check after the basic allotment runs out), as well as additional selfie and optional liveness checks, which ask users to show an emotion or move their head to ensure somebody isn’t simply trying to trick the system with a photo.
While ID verification may not be the first thing you think about in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the company is actually seeing increasing demand for its solution now that in-person ID verification has become much harder. Berbix CEO and co-founder Steve Kirkham notes that the company now processes the same number of verifications in a day that it used to do monthly only a year ago.
“The inability to conduct traditional identity checks in person has forced organizations to move online for innumerable use cases,” he says in today’s announcement. “One example is the Family Independence Initiative, a nonprofit that trusts and invests in families’ own efforts to escape poverty. Our software has enabled them to eliminate fraudulent applications and focus on the families who have been economically affected by COVID.”
Berbix co-founder Eric Levine tells me the company plans to use the new funding to expand its team, especially the product and sales department. He also noted that the team is investing heavily in localization, as well as the technical foundation of the service. In addition, it’s obviously also investing in new technologies to detect new types of fraud. Scammers never sleep, after all.
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Fondeadora is a Mexican challenger bank that just raised $14 million
Meet Fondeadora, a fintech startup based in Mexico City that wants to build a full-stack neobank. The company just raised a $14 million Series A round led by Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI-focused venture fund. Founded in 2018, the company already manages 150,000 accounts and is adding $20 million in deposits every month.
Mexico represents a massive opportunity for a challenger bank as many people still rely on cash for most of their transactions. Given that all countries are progressively switching to card and digital payments, it seems like the right time to launch Fondeadora .
Y Combinator, Scott Belsky, Sound Ventures, Fintech Collective and Ignia are also participating in the funding round.
“We launched the first crowdfunding platform in Mexico about 10 years ago,” co-founder and co-CEO Norman Müller told me. “About 50% of card transactions failed in the system.”
That platform was also called Fondeadora. After a deal with Kickstarter, Müller and Fondeadora co-founder René Serrano went back to the drawing board and thought about the problems they had while operating the crowdfunding platform. It became Fondeadora as we know it today, a challenger bank that wants to improve the banking experience in Mexico.
The team traveled across Mexico to find a bank charter that they could use. “We acquired the charter, it was owned by a group of tomato farmers in Mexico. Twenty years ago, the government gave about 10 charters to create financial inclusion,” Müller told me.
The company launched its banking service after that. You can open an account without visiting a branch. You then receive a Mastercard debit card. You can choose to receive notifications after each purchase, lock and unlock your card, send instant transfers to other users and more. There are no monthly subscription fee and no foreign transaction fee.
Up next, Fondeadora wants to democratize savings accounts. “Cash has a great UX and UI. You can touch it, you can store it in your drawer. But as a medium to generate income, it’s terrible,” Müller told me.
In the coming months, you’ll earn interest on your deposits in your Fondeadora account. “We’re investing in government bonds, it’s a very secure type of instruments. In Mexico, you can get 5% or 6% interest rate,” Müller said. The startup could allocate a small portion of deposits to medium-risk investments as well.
Image credits: Fondeadora
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Chinese EV startup Xpeng Motors raises $1.5 billion in US public market debut
Chinese electric vehicle startup Xpeng Inc. raised $1.5 billion through an initial public offering in the U.S. as investor interest in EVs and clean energy outstripped concerns over escalating tensions between the U.S. and China.
The automaker, which is headquartered in Guangzhou, China and has offices in Silicon Valley and San Diego, said in a filing that it sold 99.7 million shares for $15 each, raising about $1.5 billion. The automaker had originally planned to sell 85 million shares with a price guidance of between $11 and $13.
Shares of Xpeng began trading Thursday on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol XPEV.
Xpeng had raised a total of $1.7 billion from investors, including Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba and Xiaomi Corp, prior to its Wall Street debut. In July, the company said it had raised around $500 million in a Series C+ round to further develop electric vehicle models aimed at China’s tech-savvy middle-class consumers.
Moving to the public market gives Xpeng access to a far bigger pool of capital, which it will need to compete against an increasingly crowded EV marketplace in China. Xpeng faces competition from Li Auto, Nio, WM Motor and notably, Tesla, which began producing Model 3 sedans at its new Shanghai factory in December 2019.
SHANGHAI, CHINA – 2019/08/25: Customers experiencing a new car at the Chinese automobile manufacturer Xpeng or Xiaopeng Motors store in Shanghai. (Photo by Alex Tai/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Xpeng has two electric vehicles on the market, the G3 SUV and the P7 sedan. Production of the G3 began in November 2018. As of July 31, Xpeng said it had delivered 18,741 G3 SUVs to customers.
Deliveries of the P7 began in May 2020. The company has delivered 1,966 P7 sedans — a direct competitor to the Tesla Model 3 — as of July 31. Xpeng is also planning a third electric vehicle, which will be another sedan, that will come to market in 2021.
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Register for our last pitch-off next week on September 2
It’s time again to start warming up your pitching arm. Our next Pitchers & Pitches session takes place next week on September 2. Register today!
Pitchers & Pitches sessions combine critique and competition with a focus on helping early-stage startup founders create an iron-clad, 60-second pitch. Here’s how it works. Everyone is welcome to attend, but only founders exhibiting in Digital Startup Alley at Disrupt 2020 will be invited to pitch.
We’ll feature five startups from Digital Startup Alley to present their best, rapid-fire pitch to a panel of experts. Previous P&P judges have featured leading VCs, including Monique Idlett-Mosley, Jeff Morris Jr., Sydney Thomas and Curtis Rodgers. Who better than top VCs to provide constructive feedback on your pitch? They’ll help you cut to the chase and present the essential information in the best possible light.
The viewing audience will choose which of the five startups presented the best pitch, and that lucky team will win a consulting session with cela, a company that connects early-stage startups to accelerators and incubators that can help scale their businesses.
Listen to what the winner of our first Pitchers & Pitches session, Hannah Webb, CEO of Findster Technologies, says about her experience:
Disrupt and Digital Start Up Alley haven’t even officially started yet, and we’ve already seen great benefits. Cela introduced us to multiple accelerators in the NYC area and one is a perfect fit for our company’s situation.
Even if you don’t get to pitch, you still get to benefit. Take that top VC advice and apply it to your own business to make your pitch a more effective tool. You need a pitch that impresses, that opens doors and starts conversations. This is a rare opportunity to get advice from the very people you want to attract.
Here are even more reasons to attend Pitchers & Pitches:
- Get familiar with the new virtual Disrupt platform before it goes live in September
- Watch and interact with the pitch-off event on the virtual main stage
- Meet and video network with other attendees
- Connect with the five pitchers in their virtual booth in the startup expo
The next Pitchers & Pitches takes place on September 2 at 1 p.m. PT / 4 p.m. ET — Register to see all of the action today. And while you’re at it, get your Disrupt Digital Startup Alley Package so you can start to reap all of the benefits of Disrupt 2020 right away! Get warmed up and ready to throw the first pitch!
Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.
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