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Is the e-commerce shift going to last?

Published May 17, 2020

Ashwin Ramasamy
Contributor

Ashwin Ramasamy is the co-founder of PipeCandy, an online merchant graph company that discovers and analyzes business and consumer perception metrics about D2C brands and e-commerce companies.

The Great Reset

Published May 17, 2020

Ann Miura-Ko
Contributor

Ann Miura-Ko is a co-founding partner at Floodgate, a seed-stage VC firm. A repeat member of the Forbes Midas List and the New York Times Top 20 Venture Capitalists Worldwide, she earned a PhD in math modeling of cybersecurity at Stanford University.

The Great Reset is not just another economic event

Our current situation is unique. It’s not merely a cyclical economic event, nor is it a standalone health crisis. What we are experiencing is not just an inflection point: it’s a societal phase-change unlike anything we have ever seen. We face an epic choice of how we move forward, and the decisions we make today will shape an entire generation.

Here’s why: COVID-19 is prompting us to reset many of our most fundamental behaviors. These changes are impacting our financial system, with effects visible throughout our homes, businesses and even the concept of “workplace” itself.

COVID-19 is pervasive

As a global pandemic, the virus itself has spread to nearly every country in the world.

Between February 20 and March 26, 100% of the world’s 20 largest economies implemented government-mandated social distancing. Globally, the number of scheduled airline flights is down 64%. In some countries, like Spain and Germany, flight numbers are down by more than 90%.

Since the timeline for lifting government restrictions is unclear — and even then, scientists are uncertain how the virus will spread — the question lingers: How long will this go on?

COVID-19’s impact is uncertain, long-term and potentially undulating, affecting every facet of our lives. You can’t simply wait it out with the expectation that industries will rebound. In 2001, September 11 felt pervasive, but its economic impact ultimately stemmed from just one single incident and the resulting fear… and that one single incident still cost more than three trillion dollars. How much larger will COVID-19 be?

E-bike startup Angell partners with SEB for manufacturing and investment

Published May 17, 2020

French startup Angell has signed a wide-ranging partnership with SEB, the French industrial company behind All-Clad, Krups, Moulinex, Rowenta, Tefal and others. As part of the deal, SEB will manufacture Angell’s electric bikes in a factory in Is-sur-Tille near Dijon, France.

SEB’s investment arm, SEB Alliance, is also investing in Angell . The terms of the deal are undisclosed, but Angell says it plans to raise between $7.6 and $21.7 million (between €7 and €20 million) with a group of investors that include SEB.

“We originally planned to manufacture 1,500 bikes in 2020,” Angell founder Marc Simoncini told me. “We realized that we were selling more bikes than expected. We now expect to sell 10,000 bikes.”

Angell has accepted 2,000 pre-orders over the past six months — 75% in France and 25% from the rest of the world. But pre-orders accelerated drastically with the lockdown in France. During the month of May, Angell expects to sell three times more bikes than during an average month.

Originally, Angell planned to build its own factory and assemble bikes itself. SEB is allocating 25 employees on the production line and production should start at the end of May. It should definitely make things move faster and reduce potential delays.

Angell is a smart bike with an integrated display

Angell unveiled its smart electric bike in November 2019. It has a 2.4-inch touch screen, an aluminum frame, integrated lights and a removable battery.

Like other connected bikes from Cowboy and VanMoof, it pairs with your phone using Bluetooth. This way, the Angell bike has an integrated lock and alarm system. There are also an integrated GPS chip and cellular modem to track it if it ever gets stolen.

But Angell is going one step further with the integrated display. You can select the level of assistance and display information on the screen, such as speed, calories, battery level and distance. It can also display turn-by-turn directions. Your handlebar also vibrates to indicate when you’re supposed to turn left or right.

The company is also announcing a second model this week, the Angell/S. It is a smaller, lighter version of the bike with a step-through frame. Both models feature the same battery, same motor and same electronics. They also both cost €2,690 ($2,900).

Angell now expects to deliver the first batch of bikes in July. By the end of the summer, new customers should be able to order a bike and get delivered within 10 days. Eventually, the company will also roll out a full line of accessories, such as fenders, baskets and mirrors.

Startups Weekly: How will we build the city of the future?

Published May 16, 2020

Editor’s note: Get this weekly recap of TechCrunch news that any startup can use by email every Saturday morning (7am PT), just subscribe here.

Commercial real estate, the traditional heart of most cities, may have lost its reason to exist in the last few months. The world is about to find out what the situation is as more locations start to reopen.

First up in our ongoing coverage of the topic, Connie Loizos caught up with a couple proptech investors this week for TechCrunch, who saw existing trends accelerating — with many medically focused additions.

Brendan Wallace of Fifth Wall is looking for more aggressive pickup of smart tech in general, along the lines of what you already see in some other countries. “He notes sensors that can determine how many people are in a room or pass through a turnstile. He points to facial recognition tech that can help keep points of physical contact to a minimum. He imagines that more companies might embrace robots to patrol buildings and, possibly, to clean them, too.”

Darren Bechtel of Brick and Mortar saw tech remaking the construction site, with growing practices like using large-scale pre-fabricated components: “If you’re limited by how many people can work in the field, and you have to put in controls for people not working on top of each other, the question becomes: how can you do the work in a more controlled environment, with a next-gen HVAC system [to purify the air] and markings on the floor?…. People are now saying, ‘How much can we prepare off-site?’”

Buildings are also going to be focused on health features, Connie wrote. “[B]oth Wallace and Bechtel mentioned advanced air purifiers and air handling units used to recondition and circulate air as part of a heating, ventilating and air-conditioning plan. Both say it will likely become a growing area of interest for building owners and developers.”

What about beyond the buildings? A few writers here put together some thoughts in a post for Extra Crunch. Here’s Danny Crichton’s view from Brooklyn:

Few of us can live in the dreary confines of a suburban enclave our entire workweek. And so I expect to see a revitalization of the classic Main Street clusters that once dotted towns across America as people appreciate the close proximity of amenities that they need throughout their day and remote work makes it possible to skip the commute to the central business district.

It’s not going to be a simple transition, of course. The built environment alone will probably take decades to fully transition. But the spirit of Jane Jacobs lives on and will move beyond the downtown core neighborhoods she observed to spread to medium and perhaps even small towns across the country and throughout the world.

If you want more on the topic, check out our recent investor survey with six other top proptech investors from late March (for subscribers).

Just want to settle down at home and get to work? Check out Darrell Etherington’s TechCrunch guide to setting up a pro-grade videoconference studio.

The $100M ARR club continues to grow, despite everything

When Alex Wilhelm rejoined TechCrunch late last year, he kicked things off with a list of companies that he called “the $100M ARR club” to signify unicorns that were also generating a lot of revenue. It was a clever way of organizing which of the hundreds of highly valued companies heading towards IPOs were most set up for success, and our readers agreed.

But, with entire market categories whipsawed by the pandemic, it has been hard to find companies willing to share numbers lately. He still found a few, as he wrote up for Extra Crunch this week: ActiveCampaign, Recorded Future and ON24. Here’s a vignette from the CEO of ActiveCampaign:

While we had the CEO’s attention, TechCrunch wanted to know if ActiveCampaign was taking incoming fire from COVID-19 and its related economic and labor disruptions. As some other SMB-focused software companies have told us, the answer is no. Here’s [Jason] VandeBoom:

We anticipate continued growth in 2020 and are already seeing further acceleration to support this. The past four months have been the best in company history and we’ve seen monthly trials double in that timeframe and new customer acquisition numbers at 4500, 5500, 6000 and 7000 respectively from January to April.

He did hedge those results a little, adding that while his firm has “seen some acceleration from COVID-19 and the digital transformation that it is inspiring,” the CEO is more convinced that “the need for customer experience is what is fueling the majority of this growth.”

This week in China trade news….

The already basic trade agreement between the Trump administration and the Chinese government from last year looks ready to blow up; the administration banned selling more tech to Huawei; TSMC plans to open a factory in Arizona following urging from the US government; Foxconn profits crashed… Danny Crichton has a clear takeaway on TechCrunch for startups about the latest headlines:

[T]he world of semiconductors, of internet infrastructure, of the tech ties that have bound the U.S. and China together for decades — they are frayed and are almost gone. It’s a new era in supply chains and trade, and an open world for new approaches to these huge existing industries.

If your company is not already planning for a more chaotic, multi-polar world than what most of us can remember living through, it may already be too late.

(Photo by CHRISTOPHE ARCHAMBAULT/AFP via Getty Images)

Investor survey: hospitals to increase tech focus after pandemic

Sarah Buhr talked to top investors in the healthcare B2B and infrastructure businesses for one of our investor surveys this week on Extra Crunch. They generally seemed to agree that the pandemic was going to push the system wholesale towards better technology. Here’s Bilal Zuberi of Lux Capital:

While a lot of our healthcare infrastructure will take a little bit of time recovering from the stress COVID placed on it, we anticipate this to provide a push to the system to adopt new technologies that enable distributed health, build resiliency in our delivery networks and deploy data-enabled healthcare. Hospital balance sheets might struggle in the short term to buy new technologies, but payers as well as large businesses might participate in infrastructure development and deployment in a bigger way. We anticipate selling to hospitals to be difficult in the short term, as they try to recover from the revenue shortfall they experienced during COVID-19, but will generally emerge more interested in adopting new technologies, digital and remote health solutions and automation in various functions. Needless to say, a wide-scale digital transformation of our healthcare industry is underway, and there is no looking back.

Don’t miss our other survey this week, on how the mobility investors are viewing the pandemic.

Protecting your equity as a startup employee

Wouter Witvoet of fintech startup SecFi wrote a guest post for TechCrunch going over some key points for anyone working at a startup right now (or recently). As an occasional startup founder and/or employee myself, I’d like to recommend this one for special consideration: “Negotiate for equity during a pay cut or furlough.”

Startups typically offer equity as a means of deferred compensation and as a way to incentivize employees to own a piece of the company they are building. The compensation is deferred as most startups are cash-strapped and cannot afford to pay you what a larger company may be able to.

If your company is now asking you to take a pay cut, or even take no pay during this time, you should consider asking for additional equity to make up for the lost compensation. While not all companies may be amenable to offering more equity, there is no cash outlay from the company’s standpoint, so it’s an efficient way for your company to compensate you for your sacrifice while preserving their cash.

In addition, offering more equity shows a commitment from management to their employees during this difficult time. It may be the win-win scenario for your company and yourself in the long-run so it’s worth having the conversation with management to discuss if this is available for you.

At first it seems weird when you consider typical venture dynamics. The founders have probably already lost leverage against the company’s investors. These investors have probably already lost leverage against their LPs. So nobody is naturally included to give up even more. And the employees were already last in line on the cap table and first to go, so why should founders do anything different?

Tactically, the best employees will be attracted go work at bigger more stable companies as the pandemic recession stretches on — and you might not have the cash to afford the effort to rehire. Strategically, now is the time to build the esprit de corp that will carry your company forward into better times… a few extra basis points for the team now could help deliver a priceless return.

Across the week

TechCrunch

COVID-19 shows we need Universal Basic Internet now

AngelList wants to improve comparing VC fund performance with new metrics and calculator

Seven viral futures

Where to shop online that isn’t Amazon, Target or Walmart

Extra Crunch

4 edtech CEOs peer into the industry’s future

Sequoia’s Roelof Botha is more optimistic about startups today than he was a year ago

These best practices maximize the value of your online events

Fintech startups amass war chests for the economic downturn

Around TechCrunch

Give the gift of Extra Crunch membership to anyone

Extra Crunch Live: Join Alexia and Niko Bonatsos for a Q&A May 19th at 2 pm EDT/11 am PDT

Extra Crunch Live: Join Revolution’s Steve Case and Clara Sieg on May 21 at 3pm ET/12pm PT

#EquityPod

From Alex:

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

Are you a regular Equity listener? Take our survey here! We talk about it on the show.

From home once again this week, Danny, Natasha, Alex and Chris got together to pull the show together. But unlike last week’s episode (catch up here if you are behind), this week’s show features a game that actually worked. It’s at the end, as you’ll see.

But before that piece of the puzzle, there was a bunch of news to go over. We had to leave SaaS valuations, the Liftoff List, Brex and FalconX on the floor, but there was still so much good stuff to cover:

Slice raised $43 million from KKR, making us all rather hungry — and curious. Where does Slice fit into the food-delivery market, and does its restaurant-friendly model give it enough room to grow revenue so that its new valuation makes sense?

The Uber Eats-Grubhub deal was an unavoidable topic this week, given that it has the chance to remake the food delivery landscape. What room would be left in the market for Postmates? And would it pass regulatory scrutiny? We’re curious.

Sticking to the on-demand theme, Instacart has grown bonkers-quick in the last few months, even making some money in the process. We’re impressed.

It’s not the only thing out there growing like hell — Shopify is also putting up insane numbers, as reflected in its share price. TechCrunch took a look back through its history the other day.

The secondary markets saw some consolidation this week, which brought back some fond memories.

Quizlet raised $30 million at a $1 billion valuation, causing some consternation among the hosts. And Vise raised a more modest $14.5 million in a round that Danny covered.

Then we played our game. Please hold us to account. And if you have listened to the show for a while, take our survey! It’s right after this next sentence.

Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

This Week in Apps: Houseparty battles Messenger, Telegram drops crypto plans, Instagram Lite is gone

Published May 16, 2020

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all.

The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019. People are now spending 3 hours and 40 minutes per day using apps, rivaling TV. Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus.

In this Extra Crunch series, we help you keep up with the latest news from the world of apps, delivered on a weekly basis.

This week we’re continuing to look at how the coronavirus outbreak is impacting the world of mobile applications, including the latest news about COVID-19 apps, Facebook and Houseparty’s battle to dominate the online hangout, the game that everyone’s playing during quarantine, and more. We also look at the new allegations against TikTok, the demise of a popular “Lite” app, new apps offering parental controls, Telegram killing its crypto plans and many other stories, including a hefty load of funding and M&A.

Headlines

Contact tracing and COVID-19 apps in the news

Global: WHO readies its coronavirus app for symptom-checking and possibly contact tracing. A WHO official told Reuters on Friday the new app will ask people about their symptoms and offer guidance on whether they may have COVID-19. Information on testing will be personalized to the user’s country. The organization is considering adding a Bluetooth-based, contact-tracing feature, too. A version of the app will launch globally, but individual countries will be able to use the underlying technology and add features to release their own versions. Engineers from Google and Microsoft have volunteered their time over the past few weeks to develop the app, which is available open-source on GitHub.
U.S.: Apple’s COVID-19 app, developed in partnership with the CDC, FEMA and the White House, received its first major update since its March debut. The new version includes recommendations for healthcare workers to align with CDC guidelines, best practices for quarantining if you’ve been exposed to COVID-19 and new information for pregnancy and newborns.
India: New Delhi’s contact-tracing app, Aarogya Setu, has reached 100 million users out of India’s total 450 million smartphone owners in 41 days after its release, despite privacy concerns. The app helps users self-assess if they caught COVID-19 by answering a series of questions and will alert them if they came into contact with someone who’s infected. The app has come under fire for how it stores user location data and logs the details for those reporting symptoms. The app is required to use Indian railways, which has boosted adoption.
Iceland: Iceland has one of the most-downloaded contact-tracing apps, with 38% of its population using it. But despite this, the country said it has not been a “game-changer” in terms of tracking the virus and only worked well when coupled with manual contact tracing — meaning phone calls that asked who someone had been in contact with. In addition, the low download rate indicates it may be difficult to get people to use these apps when they launch in larger markets.

Consumer advocacy groups say TikTok is still violating COPPA

(Formerly Augean) Burro is giving a helping hand to field workers

Published May 15, 2020

Rather than focusing on robots that will replace human workers outright, the company has created a semi-autonomous robotic cart that saves pickers a long trip.

Forerunner Ventures’ Kirsten Green demystifies the COVID-19 consumer era

Published May 14, 2020

“In general, the consumer has proven to be more resilient than I would have thought,” said Kirsten Green, founder of Forerunner Ventures, which has investments in breakout D2C stars like Glossier, Hims and Bonobos.

She joined us for an Extra Crunch Live conversation to help us better understand buying habits in the COVID-19 era. With tens of millions out of work and uncertainty all around, people are spending less, but Green showed up with a healthy dose of optimism — while acknowledging that her worst-case scenario planning was wrong.

Her top-line advice for companies

Take a cautious approach, be prepared to make hard decisions, but be thoughtful about that. Don’t just make a knee jerk-reaction, which is “this is the apocalypse, we all need 36 months of runway, fire half your staff and go to the bunker.” I think the biggest opportunity for companies right now in many ways is to create value by demonstrating their flexibility.

Investors cozy up to LA-based ettitude’s bamboo bedding and sleep wear with $1.6 million

Published May 14, 2020

Ettitude, the Los Angeles-based, direct-to-consumer startup making sustainable bedding and sleepwear from bamboo fibers, has raised a sustainably sized round that should keep the company going even in the face of an economic recession.

Co-founded by the Melbourne, Australia native Phoebe Yu and serial entrepreneur Kat Dey, ettitude sells high-end bamboo bedding made using a process she first heard about in her old job working as an exporter helping chain stores source textiles in China.

Sourced from a factory in Zhejiang, China, near Shanghai, the bamboo textiles are made using non-toxic solvents and a closed-loop system that reuses water for the process, according to Yu.

Yu started selling the cleanBamboo-branded bedding under the ettitude label in Melbourne first, but when she saw the orders begin to pick up from the U.S. she relocated and took her company with her.

Upon arrival, Yu realized she’d need a strong co-founder with experience in branding to help her navigate the massive market in the U.S. So Yu turned to AngelList, which is where she found Dey.

A serial entrepreneur with a background in retail, whose first company TryTheWorld was acquired by EarthBox in 2017, Dey was looking for her next project.

“Phoebe sent me a sample and I had the best night of sleep in my life,” Dey said. From then on the two co-founders began the long, hard slog of marketing their business.

Sales are growing, according to the two women, and the company’s chances have certainly been improved by the capital infusion from Drumbeat Ventures and TA Ventures, a European female-founded fund focusing on technology innovation.

The $1.6 million financing will be used to boost sales and marketing as the company expands beyond bedding — with an average price of $178 for a queen-sized sheet set — and into sleepwear and other categories.

“Phoebe, Kat and their brand, ettitude, are as genuine a combination of passion, purpose, and proprietary product that I’ve seen in the marketplace in my 20 years,” said Drumbeat Ventures founder, Adam Burgoon, in a statement. “They are perfectly positioned to bring their mission of sustainability and comfort to a broader audience.”

Forget sourdough, these sisters are launching a starter to create authentic Asian food

Published May 14, 2020

For immigrants in the United States, representation can feel complex, celebrated and oftentimes a mix of the two. And that’s exactly why sister duo Vanessa and Kim Pham launched Omsom, a seed-stage food startup that sells packaged “starters” to recreate authentic Asian dishes at home. The starter contains sauce, spices and aromatics, and the co-founders say consumers can make a dish in 30 minutes or less.

“As we were seeing Asian Americans claim their voices in media and in culture more broadly, we then would juxtapose it with walking down this ethnic aisle in the grocery store and see the way Asian flavors were being represented,” Vanessa told me.

The existence of the ethnic aisle itself has drawn criticism for “othering” cultures that have long been within the United States. It was enough to make Vanessa, who worked at Bain & Company, and Kim, who has spent time in venture at Frontline Ventures and Dorm Room Fund NYC, join forces to create Omsom.

“The ethnic aisle feels super outdated,” Vanessa said. “Flavors have been diluted, branding and design have been stereotypical in nature. How can you boil a cuisine down into one sad jar of sauce?”

The aisle, also named the international aisle, currently contains bottles of never-to-expire thai pastes. Walk a little farther and you’ll find microwavable containers of high-fat butter chicken. And there in the corner is a bottle that boils down one of the world’s most diverse cuisines simply: “curry sauce.”

While progress is pitiful in grocery store representation, the founders are optimistic that they can change that. Omsom, from the flavors to the meaning behind its name (it means rowdy in Vietnamese) to the cap table it has at the moment, is another story waiting to be told about immigrant culture. This is theirs.

Omsom launched today with an undisclosed amount of pre-seed money. The early-stage startup’s ownership group is 50% women of color, including Reshma Saujani, the founder of Girls Who Code, and Brita Rosenheim, a partner at Better Food Ventures. It also raised investment from Peter Livingston, the founder and partner at Unpopular Ventures, a fund dedicated to entrepreneurs who are aiming at unconventional niches.

Livingston said that he invested in Omsom despite not actually being a “food tech investor at all” because it covers an unconventional category.

“Venture capital as an industry is so homogeneous, is clustered in a handful of geographies, prefers to invest close to home, and tends to invest within a small number of the same themes,” Livingston said. “Historically, ethnic food essentials hasn’t really been a ‘VC category,’ which to me, smells like opportunity.”

Saujani said her investment is “betting on the team and a product designed for a vastly underserved market, and the current circumstances make consumer appetite for pantry staples even larger,” referring to COVID-19 forcing more people to cook from home since restaurants are closed.

Your mother’s dish

Recreating authentic dishes with “mom’s ingredients” is not an easy goal, so the Pham sisters focused heavily on sourcing and chef collaboration and spent over a year in research and development of the recipes.

The sisters teamed up with three chefs — Jimmy Ly of Madame Vo, Nicole Ponseca of Jeepney and Chat and Ohm Suansilphong of Fish Cheeks — to create the first line of products. The chefs will get a tiered royalty on sales depending on volume.

“We made sure our ingredients, 90% of them, are unique to Asian food products and sourced directly from Asia,” said Vanessa. “We bent over backwards to get just the right kind of chili.”

But beyond authenticity, the Pham sisters also had another misconception to overcome: the oily and processed reputation of Americanized international dishes, like your favorite Chinese orange chicken takeout or a creamy bowl of butter chicken.

These flagship dishes that are so often associated with those cultures are often multitudes unhealthier than what an immigrant family within, say, the Indian culture, might serve on a day to day basis. Omsom flips that by offering dishes that have no preservatives, no high-fructose corn syrup, and are shelf stable for up to a year. It’s “acceptable for users trying to be generally health conscious, in line with something you would find at Whole Foods.”

Now, the Pham sisters just need to see if they can deliver on the promise of providing uncompromising dishes amid a pandemic. They think it will be a welcomed change for people stuck at home and looking to experiment with cooking.

“We grew up south of Boston in a predominantly white suburb and there was a bit of shame associated with our food,” said Kim Pham . “But as I went through the process of stepping into myself as a woman of color, I started to use food as the first stop in engaging with my identity.”

“I moved away from home, I don’t speak Vietnamese as I used to, but I turned to food,” she continued. “Even if it was a bowl of pho.”

Kim and Vanessa Pham (from L to R)

DigitalOcean raises $50M more from Access Industries and a16z

Published May 14, 2020

Earlier today, DigitalOcean announced that it raised $50 million more from prior investors Access Industries and Andreessen Horowitz. The capital comes after the SMB and developer-focused cloud infrastructure company raised nine-figures worth of debt back in February.

DigitalOcean is a large private company that generated revenue at a run rate of around $250 million towards the end of 2019. The company announced today that it has reached $300 million in annual recurring revenue, or ARR. (We recently added the company to our ARR club here.) That’s growth of around 20% in less than half a year, though we don’t know precisely when the company reached the $250 million mark, making it hard to calculate its true growth pace.

Critically, DigitalOcean is walking toward profitability while expanding.

DigitalOcean’s CEO Yancey Spruill told TechCrunch earlier this year that his firm would reach free cash flow positivity in the next few years, a timeline that appears to have moved up (more on that shortly). Provided that the cloud company can keep its growth pace up over the same time period, it could be well positioned for an IPO.

The new $50 million values the company at $1.15 billion, meaning it was worth $1.1 billion pre-money. DigitalOcean is not being valued like a SaaS startup today in revenue multiple terms, then, though its new valuation is still nearly double its old Series B valuation (a company spokesperson confirmed the numbers on that page).

New capital

TechCrunch wanted to know why the company raised equity capital so quickly after it had added debt to its books. The capital was surely welcome given the world’s economic condition, but the timing was worth digging into.

DigitalOcean was not “seeking additional funding,” according to Spruill, but after “reviewing our business performance and outlook with our investors at Access and a16z, they were interested in investing for our next phase of growth.” The company accepted, Spruill said.

Presumably, Digital Ocean’s quick revenue growth from a $250 million run rate to $300 million ARR played a part in the investment decision. For DigitalOcean, receiving a new, higher valuation and a monetary top-off from well-known investors may even provide a brand boost (see this article, especially in light of recent coverage the firm has attracted).

Regarding its plans for the new capital, Spruill told TechCrunch that DigitalOcean can now “better support the increase in demand we’ve seen from entrepreneurs and SMBs around the world as more businesses are transitioning to the cloud, particularly as a result of COVID.” Mark DigitalOcean down as one of the world’s companies that is seeing an uptick from the pandemic; most aren’t, but the firms that are appear to be using the moment to put more capital onto their balance sheets.

TechCrunch also wanted to know if the new capital opened new ground for the firm, or if its priorities for the new capital were similar to its preceding goals. The CEO told TechCrunch that his firm’s focus is the same, namely expanding its business.

“We remain committed to reaching $1 billion in revenue, achieving free cash flow profitability in the second half of this year and, ultimately, position DigitalOcean to be a public company,” Spruill said in an email.

That’s clear enough.

By that measure we can expect to see a DigitalOcean S-1 in the first half of 2021, if markets recover. So a16z and Access Industries (longtime investors in the company) could see a quick return for their most recent checks if current plans hold up.

The company’s release made note of “accelerating growth,” which TechCrunch wanted to know more about. How quickly is the company growing? Spruill didn’t share numbers to confirm or deny our rough math based on his firm’s public revenue milestones, but did tell TechCrunch that the company is “actively working on a number of initiatives to accelerate our revenue growth rate,” adding that these are internally dubbed “Grow Faster” initiatives.

Finally, TechCrunch was curious about the impact that COVID-19 is having on DigitalOcean. The company told us that it has “seen a modest increase in churn as a result of COVID-19,” but nothing too bad, saying that the change was “not significant” when “compared with recent trends immediately prior to the pandemic.”

On the positive side of the ledger, DigitalOcean said that its “sign up of new customers has been accelerating” and that it is seeing “increased business from some existing customers.” Adding that up for the SaaS kids: A little bit more churn, good new logo addition, and some upsell tailwinds. Overall that adds up to growth.

More when we have it, but now we’re at least set up to understand what the company does next.