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Hevo draws in $8 million Series A for its no-code data pipeline service
Hevo founders Manish Jethani and Sourabh Agarwal
According to data pipeline startup Hevo, many small- to medium-sized companies juggle more than 40 different applications to manage sales, marketing, finance, customer support and other operations. All of these applications are important sources of data that can be analyzed to improve a company’s performance. That data often remains separate, however, making it difficult for different teams to collaborate.
Hevo enables its clients’ employees to integrate data from more than 150 different sources, including enterprise software from Salesforce and Oracle, even if they don’t have any technical experience. The company announced today that it has raised an $8 million Series A round led by Singapore-based venture capital firm Qualgro and Lachy Groom, a former executive at payments company Stripe.
The round, which brings Hevo’s total raised so far to $12 million, also included participation from returning investors Chiratae Ventures and Sequoia Capital India’s early-stage startup program Surge. The company was first covered by TechCrunch when it raised seed funding in 2017.
Hevo’s Series A will be used to increase the number of integrations available on its platform, and hire sales and marketing teams in more countries, including the United States and Singapore. The company currently has clients in 16 markets, including the U.S., India, France, Australia and Hong Kong, and counts payments company Marqeta among its customers.
In a statement, Puneet Bysani, tech lead manager at Marqeta, said, “Hevo saved us many engineering hours, and our data teams could focus on creating meaningful KPIs that add value to Marqeta’s business. With Hevo’s pre-built connectors, we were able to get data from many sources into Redshift and Snowflake very quickly.”
Based in Bangalore and San Francisco, Hevo was founded in 2017 by chief executive officer Manish Jethani and chief technology officer Sourabh Agarwal. The two previously launched SpoonJoy, a food delivery startup that was acquired by Grofers, one of India’s largest online grocery delivery services, in 2015. Jethani and Agarwal spent a year working at Grofers before leaving to start Hevo.
Hevo originated in the challenges Jethani and Agarwal faced while developing tech for SpoonJoy’s order and delivery system.
“All of our team members would come to us and say, ‘hey, we want to look at these metrics,’ or we would ask our teams questions if something wasn’t working. Oftentimes, they would not have the data available to answer those questions,” Jethani told TechCrunch.
Then at Grofers, Jethani and Agarwal realized that even large companies face the same challenges. They decided to work on a solution to allow companies to quickly integrate data sources.
For example, a marketing team at a e-commerce company might have data about its advertising on social media platforms, and how much traffic campaigns bring to their website or app. But they might not have access to data about how many of those visitors actually make purchases, or if they become repeat customers. By building a data pipeline with Hevo, they can bring all that information together.
Hevo is designed to serve all sectors, including e-commerce, healthcare and finance. In order to use it, companies sign up for Hevo’s services on its website and employees enter their credentials for software supported by the platform. Then Hevo automatically extracts and organizes the data from those sources and prepares it for cloud-based data warehouses, such as Amazon Redshift and Snowflake. A user dashboard allows companies to customize integrations or hide sensitive data.
Hevo is among a roster of “no code, low code” startups that have recently raised venture capital funding for building tools that enable non-developers to add features to their existing software. The founders say its most direct competitor is Fivetran, an Oakland, California-based company that also builds pipelines to move data to warehouses and prepare it for analysis.
Jethani said Hevo differentiates by “optimizing our product for non-technical users.”
“The number of companies who need to use data is very high and there is not enough talent available in the market. Even if it is available, it is very competitive and expensive to hire that engineering talent because big companies like Google and Amazon are also competing for the same talent,” he added. “So we felt that there has to be some democratization of who can use this technology.”
Hevo also focuses on integrating data in real-time, which is especially important for companies that provide on-demand deliveries or services. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Jethani says e-commerce clients have used Hevo to manage an influx in orders as people under stay-at-home orders purchase more items online. Companies are also relying on Hevo to help organize and manage data as their employees continue to work remotely.
In a statement about the funding, Qualgro managing partner Heang Chhor said, “Hevo provides a truly innovative solution for extracting and transforming data across multiple data sources–in real time with full automation. This helps enterprises to fully capture the benefit of data flowing though the many databases and software they currently use. Hevo’s founders are the type of globally-minded entrepreneurs that we like to support.”
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YC alum Paragon snags $2.5M seed for low-code app integration platform
Low-code is a hot category these days. It helps companies build workflows or simple applications without coding skills, freeing up valuable engineering resources for more important projects. Paragon, a member of the Y Combinator Winter 2020 cohort, announced a $2.5 million seed round today for its low-code application integration platform.
Investors include Y Combinator, Village Global, Global Founders Capital, Soma Capital and FundersClub.
“Paragon makes it easier for non-technical people to be able to build out integrations using our visual workflow editor. We essentially provide building blocks for things like API requests, interactions with third party APIs and conditional logic. And so users can drag and drop these building blocks to create workflows that describe business logic in their application,” says company co-founder Brandon Foo.
Foo acknowledges there are a lot of low-code workflow tools out there, but many like UIPath, Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere concentrate on robotic process automation (RPA) to automate certain tasks. He says he and co-founder Ishmael Samuel wanted to focus on developers.
“We’re really focused on how can we improve developer efficiency, and how can we bring the benefits of low code to product and engineering teams and make it easier to build products without writing manual code for every single integration, and really be able to streamline the product development process,” Foo told TechCrunch.
The way it works is you can drag and drop one of 1,200 predefined connectors for tools like Stripe, Slack and Google Drive into a workflow template, and build connectors very quickly to trigger some sort of action. The company is built on AWS serverless architecture, so you define the trigger action and subsequent actions, and Paragon handles all of the back-end infrastructure requirements for you.
It’s early days for the company. After launching in private beta in January, the company has 80 customers. It currently has six employees, including Foo, who previously co-founded Polymail, and Samuel, who was previously lead engineer at Uber. They plan to hire four more employees this year.
With both founders people of color, they definitely are looking to build a diverse team around them. “I think it’s already sort of built into our DNA. As a diverse founding team we have perhaps a broader viewpoint and perspective in terms of hiring the kind of people that we seek to work with. Of course, I think there’s always room for improvement, and so we’re always looking for new ways that we can be more inclusive in our hiring recruiting process [as we grow],” he said.
As far as raising during a pandemic, he says it’s been a crazy time, but he believes they are solving a real problem and that they can succeed in spite of the macro economic conditions of the moment.
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Explorium reels in $31M Series B as data discovery platform grows
In a world with growing amounts of data, finding the right set for a particular machine learning model can be a challenge. Explorium has created a platform to make that an easier task, and today the startup announced a $31 million Series B.
The round was led by Zeev Ventures, with help from Dynamic Loop, Emerge, 01 Advisors and F2 Capital. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $50 million, according to the company.
CEO and co-founder Maor Shlomo says the company’s platform is designed to help people find the right data for their model. “The next frontier in analytics will not be about how you fine tune or improve a certain algorithm, it will be how do you find the right data to fit into those algorithms to make them as useful and impactful as possible,” he said.
He says that companies need this more than ever during the pandemic because this can help customers find more relevant data at a time when their historical data might not be useful to help build predictive models. For instance, if you’re a retailer, your historical shopping data won’t be relevant if you are in an area where you can no longer open your store, he says.
“There are so many environmental factors that are now influencing every business problem that organizations are trying to solve that Explorium is becoming this […] layer where you search for data to solve your business problems to fuel your predictive models,” he said.
When the pandemic hit in March, he worried about how it would affect his company, and he put a hold on hiring, but as he saw business increasing in April and May, he decided to accelerate again. The company currently has 87 employees between offices in Israel and the United States and he plans to be at 100 in the next couple of months.
When it comes to hiring, he says he doesn’t try to have hard and fast hiring rules like you have a certain degree or have gone to a certain school. “The only thing that’s important is getting good people hungry to succeed. The more diverse the culture is, the more diverse the group is, we find the more fun it is for people to discover each other and to discover different cultures,” Shlomo explained.
In terms of fundraising, while the company needs money to fuel its growth, at the same time it still had plenty of money in the bank from last year’s round. “We got into the pandemic and we didn’t know how long it’s going to last, and [early on] we didn’t yet know how it would impact the business. Existing investors were always bullish about the company. We decided to just go with that,” he said.
The company was founded in 2017 and previously raised a $19.1 million Series A round last year.
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ComplyAdvantage nabs $50M for an AI platform and database to detect and stop financial crime
The growth of digital banking has opened up a wealth of opportunities for making the world of finance more accessible and transparent to a greater number of people. But the darker underbelly is that it has also created more avenues for illicit activity to flourish, with some $2 trillion laundered annually but only 1-3% of that sum “caught.”
To help combat that, a London-based startup called ComplyAdvantage, which has built an AI platform and wider database of some 10 million entities to help identify and track those involved in financial crime, is today announcing a growth round of funding of $50 million to expand its reach and operations.
Specifically, the plan will be to use the funding for hiring, to invest in the tools it uses to detect entities and map the relationships between them and to bring on more clients.
“We’ve been focused on more granular analysis and being able to scale to hundreds of millions of searches across our database,” said Charles Delingpole, founder and CEO, said in an interview. “The next phase is more around the network of contacts and more enhanced diligence.” The company today has some 250 staff, mainly in the U.K. and Romania.
The Series C is being led by Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board (Ontario Teachers’), a huge pension plan out of Canada (U.S. $155 billion) that is known as a prolific growth-stage tech investor. Previous backers Balderton and Index are also in the round. The company has raised $88 million to date, and while it’s not disclosing its valuation, for some context, it was last valued at around $141 million in its last round a year ago, per PitchBook data.
Today, ComplyAdvantage has more than 500 customers, primarily financial institutions using it to meet regulatory compliance requirements as well as to reduce their own exposure and risk, providing some automated services to complement (and potentially replace) some of the manual checks that they make to prove you are who you say you are.
It also has a growing business with other groups that are tracking fraud for their own ends, such as insurance companies trying to stem fraudulent claims and government entities. It also has a number of partners that access its database and use that as part of their own solutions (Quantexa, which announced a big funding round of its own last week, is one of those licensing partners).
“A lot of companies in the wider identity space are powered by our data, even if they don’t disclose it,” Delingpole said.
The company had its start originally focusing on the process of helping banks meet regulatory compliance around fraud detection by ingesting and analysing documents provided by customers ahead of opening accounts, initiating larger transactions with new entities and so on. That has taken on a more targeted purpose in recent years as ComplyAdvantage’s database has grown deeper.
Today the core of the business is based around a central database of known money launderers, human traffickers, terrorists, drug lords and others who exploit financial rails to run illegal operations and make a profit from them.
It’s formed, Delingpole said, by way of “automatically ingesting tens of thousands of data points, from websites, national warning lists, linked real-time databases of companies and various other applications on top of that.” That central database is still growing, and Delingpole believes that it’s not unrealistic for it to run to a much higher number in order to get the most accurate picture possible.
“Although we have 10 million today, we want to cover every company and person one day. We think the right number is 8 billion” — that is, the world’s population. “With that larger database we can solve other kinds of crimes too.”
The startup already has a straight channel through to government agencies, reporting connections and discoveries on behalf of their clients directly to them. And to be clear, although there are now strong data protection measures in place in Europe, when people are linked to illegal activity, that puts them on a list that supersedes that. When someone is suspected and is tipped to authorities, that information is kept private.
While all institutions will continue to have teams of people dedicated to risk analysis and investigations into activity, the idea here is to supercharge that work with more data that helps those investigators tackle the greater scale of data in the world today.
“Detecting financial crime in billions of transactions that take place around the globe has become nearly impossible without the application of data science and machine learning. It is this approach that has made ComplyAdvantage into a leader in the category, and the go-to partner for organizations that seek to automate what are still very often manual or inadequate processes,” said Jan Hammer, a partner at Index Ventures, in a statement.
The longer-term opportunity is to build out ComplyAdvantage’s customer base by leveraging information that the company is already surfacing that might be relevant to other verticals.
Insurance is a key example, Delingpole said. “We already see a mention of a person having defaulted on a loan then making an insurance claim,” he said. “We see credit, fraud and ownership data together.”
This, of course, puts the company into close competition not just with others building credit databases but those building strong AI platforms to leverage data to gain deeper insights into seemingly disparate digital actions and to build better pictures of activity on behalf of their clients. That includes not just partners like Quantexa, but others like Palantir.
The strength here, said Delingpole, is the sheer size of ComplyAdvantage’s database and its very specific focus on financial crime and how that sits for companies that need to police that, both for their own business health and for regulatory reasons. It’s that focus that has attracted investment.
“ComplyAdvantage offers mission-critical technology solutions for combating financial crime and keeping pace with an ever-evolving regulatory landscape,” said Olivia Steedman, senior managing director, TIP, at Ontario Teachers’. “The company is well-positioned to continue its rapid growth as its powerful technology platform transforms the compliance and risk management process for its clients.”
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As remote work booms, Everphone grabs ~$40M for its ‘device as a service’ offer
The latest startup to see an uplift in inbound interest flowing from the remote work boom triggered by the coronavirus pandemic is Berlin-based Everphone, which sells a “mobile as a service” device rental package that caters to businesses needing to kit staff out with mobile hardware plus associated support.
Everphone is announcing a €34 million Series B funding round today, led by new investor signals Venture Capital. Other new investors joining the round include German carrier Deutsche Telekom — investing via its strategic investment fund, Telekom Innovation Pool — U.S.-based early-stage VC AlleyCorp and Dutch bank NIBC.
The Series B financing will go on expanding to meet rising demand, with the startup telling TechCrunch it’s expecting to see a 70-100% increase in sales volume versus the pre-crisis period, thanks to a doubling of inbound leads during the pandemic.
“The global pandemic has been a catalyst for growth in the field of digitization,” said CEO and co-founder, Jan Dzulko, in a statement. “We are currently experiencing a significant increase in demand at home and abroad, which is why we are aiming for European expansion with the funding.”
Everphone describes its offer as a one-stop shop, with the service covering not just the rental of (new or refurbished) smartphones and tablets but an administration and management wrapper that covers support needs, including handling repairs/replacements — with the promise of replacements within 24 hours if needed and less client risk from not having to wrangle traditional rental insurance fine print.
Other touted pluses of its “device as a service” approach include flexibility (users get to choose from a range of iOS and Android devices); lower cost (pricing depends on customer size, device choice and rental term but starts at €7,99 a month for a refurbished budget device, rising up to €49,99 a month for high-end kit with a 12-month upgrade); and rental bundles, which can include standard mobile device management software (such as Cortado and AirWatch) so customers can plug the rental hardware into their existing IT policies and processes.
Everphone reckons this service wrapper — which can also extend to include paid apps (such as Babbel for language learning) as an employee on-device perk/benefit in the bundle — differentiates its offer versus incumbent leasing providers, such as CHG-Meridian or De Lage Landen, and from wholesale distributors.
It also touts its global rollout capability as a customer draw, checking the scalability box.
Its investors (including German carrier, DT) are being fired up by the conviction that the COVID-19-induced shift away from the office to home working will create a boom in demand for well-managed and secured work phones to mitigate the risk of personal devices and personal data mingling improperly with work stuff. (On that front, Everphone’s website is replete with references to Europe’s data protection framework, GDPR, repurposed as scare marketing.)
“Everphone envisions that every employee will one day work via their smartphone,” added Marcus Polke, partner at signals Venture Capital, in a supporting statement. “With this employee-centric approach and integrated platform, everphone goes far beyond the mere outsourcing of a smartphone IT infrastructure.”
The 2016-founded startup has more than 400 customers signed up at this point, both SMEs and multinationals such as Ernst & Young. It caters to both ends of the market with an off-the-shelf package and self-service device management portal that’s intended for SMEs of between 100 and 1,500 employees — plus custom integrations for larger entities of up to 30,000 employees.
It says it’s able to offer “highly competitive” prices for renting new devices because it gives returned kit a second life, refurbishing and reselling devices on the consumer market. “Thanks to this profitable secondary lifespan, we are able to offer highly competitive prices and extensive service levels on our rental devices,” Everphone writes on its website.
The second-hand smartphone market has also been seeing regional growth. Swappie, a European e-commerce startup that sells refurbished iPhones, aligning with EU lawmakers’ push for a “‘right to repair” for electronics, raised its own ~$40 million Series B only last month, for example. Its second-hand marketplace is one potential outlet for Everphone’s rented and returned iPhones.
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Tandem snags $5.7M for its language buddy app amid COVID-19’s e-learning boom
The Berlin-based startup behind Tandem, an app for practicing a second language, has closed a £4.5 million (~$5.7 million) Series A round of financing to capitalize on growth opportunities it’s seeing as the coronavirus crisis continues to accelerate the switch to digital and online learning.
With many higher education institutions going remote as a result of concerns over virus exposure risks of students mixing on physical campuses, there’s a growing need for technology that helps language students find people to practice with, as Tandem tells it. And while language learning apps make for a very crowded space, with giants like Duolingo and Babbel, Tandem focuses on a different niche: native speaker practice.
As the name suggests, its app does pair matching — connecting users with others who’re trying to learn their own language for mutual practice, by (their choice of) text, phone chat or video call.
The platform also incorporates a more formal learning component by providing access to tutors. But the main thrust is to help learners get better by practicing chatting to a native speaker via the app.
Because of the pandemic push to socially distant learners, that’s a growing digital need, according to Tandem co-founder and CEO Arnd Aschentrup. He says the coronavirus crisis spurred a 200% increase in new users — highlighting a “clear appetite” among consumers for digital language learning.
The team has taken another tranche of funding now so it can scale to meeting this growing global opportunity.
The Series A is led by European VC firm Brighteye Ventures, with Trind Ventures, Rubylight Limited and GPS Ventures also participating. It brings the startup’s total raised to date to £6.8 million.
“Given the accelerated user-uptake and clear market opportunity, we felt that 2020 was the right time to partner with the team at Brighteye to bring Tandem into the mainstream,” says Aschentrup, adding: “We anticipate significant growth opportunities for online learning and social learning in the wake of coronavirus.”
He says two “key trends” have emerged over the past few months: “Firstly, schools and universities providing language courses have either temporarily shut down, or moved almost entirely to remote lessons. Students are therefore relying on additional platforms to learn and practice languages, which is precisely what Tandem offers.
“Secondly, we know that lockdown has enormously limited people’s ability to socialise. Friendships have been harder to maintain, and new connections more difficult to spark. We’re excited about Tandem’s ability to connect people all across the globe despite lockdown. Since coronavirus began, engagement on Tandem’s video chat feature has increased three-fold, and new user signups have increased 200%.”
Tandem had been growing usage prior to COVID-19 — increasing membership from around a million back in 2017 (when we last spoke), to more than 10 million members now, spread across 180 countries.
Aschentrup couches the underlying growth as “strong organic demand,” noting the platform has been profitable since 2019 (hence not taking in more outside funding ’til now). But, with the pandemic curve ball accelerating the switch to remote learning, it’s expecting usage of its platform to keep stepping up.
“We’ve successfully increased our community numbers ten-fold in recent years, profitably and organically,” he tells TechCrunch. “More people than ever value digital learning solutions combined with human connection, and so the time is ripe to introduce Tandem to language learners more widely around the globe. With the team at Brighteye on our side we’re excited to further develop Tandem’s reach and voice over the coming period.”
“We expect increased interest in online learning to sustain well after lockdown lifts. In China — where lockdown sanctions were implemented and lifted earlier — user engagement has remained buoyant.”
“Once people experience the value of learning as part of a like-minded global community, it often becomes a lasting part of their lifestyle,” he adds.
Tandem’s best markets for language learners are China (10%), the U.S. (9%) and Japan (9%) — which combined make up close to a third (27%) of its user base.
While the most popular language pairs (in ranked order of popularity) are:
- English – Spanish
- Spanish – Portuguese
- English – Chinese
- English – French
- Chinese – Japanese
While the vast majority (94%) of Tandem’s user base is making use of the freemium offering, it monetizes via a subscription product, called Tandem Pro, which it introduced in 2018 to cater to members who “preferred taking a community approach to language learning,” as Aschentrup puts it.
“For $9.99 per month, members can access key features such as: translating unlimited messages, finding Tandem partners nearby or in specific locations — for example ahead of international travels or studying abroad — and having enhanced visibility in the community as a featured Pro member,” he explains.
Aschentrup describes the “community aspect” of Tandem as a key differentiator versus other language learning apps — saying it helps users “develop and maintain cross-cultural friendships.”
“Members are often on opposite sides of the world to each other, yet able to enjoy a window into another culture entirely. Now more than ever, we’re pleased to be facilitating members’ healthy curiosity about other languages, countries and styles of living.”
The new funding will go on developing additional features for the app, and expanding the team across marketing and engineering, per Aschentrup. Currently Tandem has 24 full-time employees — it’s planning to double that to a 50-member team globally, post-Series A.
Commenting in a statement, Alex Spiro, managing partner at Brighteye Ventures, lauded the team’s “innovative and effective strategy” in building a community platform that tackles the language gap by connecting learners with fluent speakers.
“The product has not only proven resilient in this global crisis but has seen impressive growth during the period, and the team is now very well equipped to come out of it stronger and to continue to support loyal language learners that now number in the millions and will number many more in the coming years,” he added.
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Y Combinator’s Vitable Health is bringing basic healthcare to underserved populations
Joseph Kitonga, the 23-year-old entrepreneur behind Vitable Health, first saw the need for a new kind of healthcare service growing up in Philadelphia and seeing the experience of the home healthcare workers who worked at his parents’ business.
The Kitongas immigrated to the United States a decade ago and settled down in Philadelphia, where they started a home-care business matching workers with patients in need. What was surprising to the younger Kitonga was that the people who worked for his parents taking care of others couldn’t afford basic healthcare coverage themselves.
It was that observation that provided the seed for the business idea that would become Vitable Health, Kitonga’s first business and a recent member of Y Combinator’s latest summer cohort.
The company provides affordable acute healthcare coverage to underinsured or un-insured populations and was born out of his experience watching employees of his parents’ home healthcare agency struggle to receive basic healthcare coverage.
A lot of caregivers make $10 per hour, which is too much to qualify for Medicaid and too little to afford health insurance, Kitonga says.
Even with the Affordable Care Act, many workers in the home-care business that Kitonga’s parents ran in Philadelphia were unable to receive care.
So Kitonga built a service that could cover everything but catastrophic coverage for lower costs than the company’s customers would have to pay if they went to an urgent care facility.
Vitable is able to lower the cost of care through its use of nurse practitioners instead of doctors to provide the care. For a small monthly fee, the company will send providers to make house calls or customers can receive a consultation over the phone.
“We focus on acute and preventive coverage,” says Kitonga. “Most high deductible plans are geared toward providing catastrophic coverage.”
What Kitonga saw with his parents’ employees was that they would wind up going to the emergency room and put $1,300 in charges on their credit cards rather than pay for insurance per month.
Vitable’s lowest plan levels start at $15 per month and the co-payment is $30, according to Kitonga. Vitable’s technicians will do in-home lab tests.
There’s just no low-cost care option available for the population that Kitonga wants to serve, he said. These are people who will be referred to emergency rooms by nearby care providers because they lack the necessary insurance. “The population that we service has been ignored by healthcare providers,” said Kitonga.
For now, the service is only available in Philadelphia, but Kitonga says there are already 1,000 people who receive care through Vitable. “We work with a lot of small businesses that might have 10 or 20 employees,” Kitonga said.
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Digital elective care and telemedicine provider Ro raises $200 million at a reported $1.5 billion valuation
In three years Zachariah Reitano’s startup, Ro, has managed to hit a reported $1.5 billion valuation for its transformation from a company focused on treating erectile dysfunction to a telemedicine service for a range of elective and urgent care-focused treatments.
Through Rory for women’s health, Roman for men’s health and Zero for smoking cessation, Reitano and fellow co-founders Saman Rahmanian, and Rob Schutz, built a company that now treats 20 conditions, including sexual health, weight loss, dermatology, allergies and more, according to a statement from the company.
Image Credit: Zero
Ro also has a new pharmacy business, Ro Pharmacy, which is an online cash pay pharmacy offering more than 500 generic medications for just $5 per month per drug. And the company is getting into the weight loss business through a partnership with the private equity-backed healthcare company, Gelesis.
Ro’s also becoming a gateway into patient acquisition for primary care providers through Ribbon Health, and a test-case for the use of Pfizer’s Greenstone service, which provides certification that a generic drug is validated by one of the major pharmaceuticals.
The company’s $1.5 billion valuation is courtesy of a new $200 million investment from existing investors led by General Catalyst and including FirstMark Capital, Torch, SignalFire, TQ Ventures, Initialized Capital, 3L and BoxGroup. New first-time investor The Chernin Group also participated. In all, Ro has raised $376 million since it launched in 2017.
“This new investment will further our mission to become every patient’s first call. We’ll continue to invest in our vertically-integrated healthcare ecosystem, from our Collaborative Care Center to our national pharmacy operating system. This is just the beginning of Ro’s patient-centered healthcare platform.”
It’s all part of the company’s mission to provide a point of entry into the healthcare system independent of insurance qualifications.
“Telehealth companies like Ro are using technology to address long-standing healthcare disparities that have been exacerbated by COVID-19,” said Dr. Joycelyn Elders, MD, Ro Medical Advisor and Former U.S. Surgeon General. “By empowering providers to leverage their skills as efficiently and effectively as possible, Ro delivers affordable, high-quality care regardless of a patient’s location, insurance status, or physical access to physicians and pharmacies.”
Ro’s new financing is one of several forays by tech investors into reshaping the healthcare system at a time when patient care has been severely disrupted by attempts to mitigate the spread of COVID-19.
Digital medicine is assuming a central position in the healthcare world, with most consultations now occurring online. Reimbursement schemes for telemedicine have changed dramatically and investors see an opportunity to capitalize on these changes by aggressively backing the expansion plans of companies looking to bring digital healthcare directly to consumers.
That’s one of the reasons why Ro’s major competitor, Hims, is reported to be seeking access to public markets through its sale to a special purpose acquisition company for roughly $1 billion, according to Reuters.
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Crisis management tips from startup whisperer Margit Wennmachers
When it comes to building a company, lots of things can and do go wrong. Margit Wennmachers — an operating partner at Andreessen Horowitz and long one of the most powerful public relations pros in the startup world — knows this firsthand.
Thankfully for all of you, Wennmachers was able to join us for our recent Early Stage event, where she shared some of her tips and tricks for dealing with everything from fast-ballooning crises that reporters catch wind of, to laying off people during a pandemic, to why lawsuits can actually fuel some companies’ growth.
It’s advice you might save for future reference. As she noted, how a crisis is handled can make or break a startup, and the list of things that can go wrong at even the smallest outfit is “long,” including a product needing to be recalled, a site going down, a cyber breach, a founding team that doesn’t get along, inappropriate behavior, lawsuits and cultural issues.
Some of her most actionable advice included:
Prepare for the inevitable crisis
First, said Wennmachers, spend time modeling out the scenarios, and “let your imagination run wild” as you do. Spend a month on this if necessary. As you’re thinking of worst-case scenarios, also figure out the team that would be involved in a crisis response. Legal will always have to be involved but also, often, HR, outside counsel, and, if a startup can afford it, the help of an outside crisis communications team. If it’s a product failure, you’ll also need the product lead, too, she noted.
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Boston’s Q2 shows that the startup rebound isn’t ahead of us, it’s upon us
The coronavirus caused some disagreement amongst Boston’s venture capital community. Looking back at our mid-2020 survey of its VCs, some saw the city’s strength in biotech and healthcare as a competitive advantage, while others saw Boston’s diverse startup ecosystem as key to its survival.
And some were worried that activity was about to clamp down. Jeff Bussgang, Flybridge Ventures, put it most frankly: “Q2 financing for Boston is going to fall off a cliff. The biotech industry may see some bright spots […] but the financing market has frozen up as solid as the Charles River in February.”
With fresh data in hand, it appears that the more bullish were more right than the bears and that, in a good turn of affairs for Boston startups, Bussgang was wrong.
The city, much like the country, did not see the sharply negative quarter that many anticipated. Boston posted record venture capital investment in the period, its highest total since at least Q3 2018 according to CB Insights data.
The same dataset also says that Boston-area companies raised $3.7 billion across 126 deals. Indeed, the good news from Boston’s Q1 bested better-than-anticipated-results from both the global venture capital community, and the domestic VC world in Q2.
Bussgang sent an updated metaphor to the TechCrunch team in response to this data: “It was a tundra in March and April but, as happens in Boston, April showers and May flowers kicked in and the financing markets started to gush again in the late spring/early summer, just in time to save Q2 .”
While the data isn’t historically definitive due to reporting lags, it can be used as a directional sign that Boston’s rebound isn’t ahead of us, it’s upon us.
The solid numbers are a sign that COVID-19 and economic turmoil have put many startups in greater demand than before, which means that they need to amass money to meet growth needs.
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