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Former Krux and Salesforce execs raise $15M for their marketing data startup Habu
Marketing startup Habu is emerging from stealth today and announcing that it has already raised $15 million in Series A funding.
The company comes out of super{set}, the startup studio created by Krux founders Tom Chavez and Vivek Vaidya. In fact, Chavez is Habu’s chairman, Vaidya serves as CTO and their former Krux colleague Matt Kilmartin (who eventually became chief customer officer for Salesforce’s consumer engagement platform after Salesforce acquired Krux) is the startup’s CEO.
Kilmartin told me that Habu was created to solve a “still elusive” marketing challenge — delivering “omni-channel orchestration for the entire customer journey.” In other words, he’s saying that chief marketing officers are still struggling to deliver personalized messages to potential customers across every channel and at every stage.
Kilmartin argued that’s because they’re challenged by new privacy regulations, plus the fact that many marketing tools struggle to integrate data from the major digital ad platforms. And then there are the limitations of the big marketing clouds (including Kilmartin’s old employer Salesforce), which he said are “stitching together all the stuff they bought — their goal is to have everyone go all-in on one of their stacks.”
So Habu isn’t trying to build yet another marketing platform. Instead, the company describes its core product as a “marketing data operating system” that can be used alongside the aforementioned clouds, bringing a company’s customer data together across platforms, then providing automated insights and recommendations on how to use that data to deliver personalized marketing. And it does this in a way that complies with privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA.
“We’re trying not to be a platform,” Kilmartin said. “It’s a modular, interoperable suite of services.”
Habu’s software can pull in a marketer’s first-party customer data, as well as data from platforms like Google and Facebook. Kilmartin said that while these platforms remain a “blind spot” for many marketers, “They have APIs and frameworks to be able to do this, it just requires a level of sophistication. And there just aren’t that many extra data scientists that these brands have sitting around.”
In addition to super{set}, Habu’s funding comes from Ridge Ventures. And although Habu is only launching publicly today, it already has customers in the CPG and media industries.
Update: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified some of Habu’s customers.
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Understanding Airbnb’s new, stubborn lack of profits
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.
This morning we’re exploring Airbnb’s march to the public markets. The popular DIY hospitality startup promised last year that it would go public in 2020. That timeline means that its 2019 performance will be included in an eventual S-1 filing, putting the results on public display.
Recent news, however, doesn’t paint a perfect picture for the famous unicorn. Indeed, Airbnb’s history of rapid growth and profitability appears to have been replaced by slowing growth and profit struggles. The Wall Street Journal reported results from the company’s third quarter that are at once encouraging — a return to profitability — and troublesome; Airbnb’s first three quarters of 2019 are in the red as a group, a change from historical profitability.
If Airbnb goes public soon, as it has promised, its recent, trailing results will matter. To get ready for its IPO, let’s rewind through what we’ve learned about Airbnb’s revenue, revenue growth and profitability over the years. Doing this will help us understand how the startup went from rising profitability to posting, through the first three quarters of 2019, a nine-figure net loss.
The Airbnb public offering (likely a direct listing) is going to be the financial event of the year. Get excited.
Rewind
The following data points were culled from a host of reports over the past half decade. Each is accompanied by its original source, and I encourage you to read the pieces to get a feel for how Airbnb has been discussed through time. The tone of Airbnb coverage largely tracks its performance; when Airbnb was at the steepest part of its growth curve, the media was enthused. Lately, however, the writing is a bit different.
You’ll see why:
- 2015: Around $900 million in revenue (24/7 Wall St., implied math)
- Q3 2015: $340 million in revenue (MarketWatch)
- 2016: Revenue of $1.7 billion, $100 million in adjusted EBITDA (Fortune)
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ePharmacy Ro launches doc-approved WebMD rival Health Guide
“Whatever your symptom, WebMD says you have cancer.” It’s a long-running joke that underscores the distrust of perhaps the top source of medical advice, stemming from a confusing site clogged with ads that’s been criticized for questionable information and pushing pills from its sponsors.
Health Guide is the new medical handbook for the internet, where 30% of content is written by doctors and 100% is reviewed by them. On a single clean, coherent page for each condition, it lays out a tl;dr summary, what the ailment really is, how to spot the symptoms and what you need for treatment. Rather than pushing you to nervously keep clicking, it just wants to answer the question.
Health Guide officially launches today. It was built by digital pharmacy Ro, which has raised $176 million for medicine brands Roman for men’s health, Rory for women’s health and Zero for smoking cessation. With Ro, patients can get a $15 telemedicine consultation with a doctor, receive an instant prescription and have it filled and sent to you from the startup’s in-house pharmacy operating in all 50 states. A competitor to Hims & Hers, Ro scored a $500 million valuation last year.
Rather than aggressively hawking its own products at the end of articles, Health Guide just lists the medications you could take, insists you ask a doctor what’s right and leaves it up to you to choose where to buy. Ro founder Zachariah Reitano calls Health Guide “a significant investment in trust. There’s not a clear ROI (return on investment) to it but it’s one of those long-term bets . . . Providing education to patients will serve Ro really well in the long-run.” He acknowledges the suspicions of self-dealing, and says “if we don’t do this correctly, it can hurt more than it can help.”
On Health Guide you can search for specific conditions, browse categories like diabetes or hair loss and browse featured articles like “Proven ways to increase the density of your bones” or “How do you test for gonorrhea.” There are no banner ads, so your search about the flu or testosterone won’t immediately lead to you being bombarded with promotions for Mucinex or dicey supplements. “On these other sites . . you have [advertisers] with unregulated supplements and services that are the highest bidder beside medical information, which creates a lot of distrust.”
The simplicity and accuracy of Health Guide has already attracted a sizable audience. It’s on pace to reach 30 million readers this year, with 25% being women despite Roman’s initial focus on aiding men with erectile dysfunction. It already ranks in the top 10 Google results for 300 medical questions. The no-filler entries come signed by the specific doctors that wrote or approved them, and Ro pledges to have them reviewed and updated at least once per year. At the bottom are links to all the original source material, including peer-reviewed medical journals.
Reitano tells me that the idea from Health Guide came after Ro’s physicians and customer service were bombarded with the same patient questions over and over. The easiest move was to put all the answers on an open site they could send patients to. A major goal was to debunk hoaxes other sites often don’t address directly. “For something like vaccines where there is a potential for misinformation, you’ll see us take a strong stance. We won’t let the potential for misinformation spread through Health Guide.”
One thing Health Guide is missing that could keep people coming back to WebMD is a symptom checker. Right now it’s better at research on major conditions or lifestyle choices than figuring out why your throat’s sore. But given it’s day one and Ro has tons of funding, it has plenty of time to improve. There’s sure to be concerns about how it collects data and what treatments Health Guide lists. So as a precaution, it never forcefully makes recommendations besides asking a doctor for personalized advice, and there’s just one button atop the site for visiting its medication marketplace.
Ro is trying to move fast as the ePharmacy space heats up. It plans to launch 10 more products in the next two quarters, with a focus on Rory for women. It just struck an exclusive deal with Pfizer to provide Roman customers with generic Viagra, offering clear supply chain transparency around a drug that’s often counterfeited. And thanks to its licenses across all states, it’s helping new weight loss treatment Plenity launch nationwide atop its diagnosis, prescription and fulfillment technology.
Yet Reitano sees space for multiple startups to succeed in replacing embarrassing and inconvenient in-person trips to the doctor or drug store. “It might be a somewhat cheesy answer but . . . the best thing about competition is it makes everyone build a better experience for patients,” he says, citing NURX and PillClub enhancing birth control access. “I think all this innovation in digital health — it’s an absolutely massive market. No one’s taking market share from someone else. We’re raising the bar for care.”
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Headspace raises $93 million in equity and debt as it pursues clinical validation for mindfulness
Headspace, the Los Angeles-based mindfulness and meditation company locked in a bitter competitive struggle with Calm for leadership in the mental wellness world, has raised new capital to try to take the pole position.
The company has just closed on $93 million in new equity and debt financing from a slew of investors as it pursues a number of clinical studies that could provide scientific validation for the somewhat nebulous claims around the benefits associated with mindfulness and meditation.
That clinical validation can also unlock new dollars in the form of government payments for mindfulness therapies that could be used to treat a variety of conditions. It also makes more valid the company’s pitch to companies as a useful component of an employee benefit program.
The company touted a pipeline of 70 clinical studies working in conjunction with academic partners, including Carnegie Mellon, University of California San Francisco and Stanford University.
Headspace’s new cash comes from investment firm blisce, with participation from Waverly Capital, Times Bridge (the investment arm of The Times Group of India), The Chernin Group, Spectrum Equity and Advancit Capital. A $40 million debt financing from Pacific Western Bank supplemented the $53 million in equity.
“Headspace has shown millions of people the power of using mindfulness to mitigate stress, anxiety, and other everyday issues while continuing to advance the field through clinically-validated research,” said Richard Pierson, the chief executive and co-founder of Headspace, in a statement. “As we think about the next ten years and beyond, we are focused on harnessing this power and applying it to other areas of our members’ lives to help them create healthy routines that last a lifetime — whether that is through our Headspace consumer app, the work we currently do with hundreds of employers, or with healthcare providers as we look to deliver better access.”
So far the company’s app has been loaded more than 62 million times in 190 countries. It already has over 2 million paid subscribers and more than 600 businesses are using Headspace’s on-the-job mental wellness tool.
The new money will be used to double down on its pitch to businesses and healthcare practitioners, according to a statement from the company, as well as to look at international markets. The company already has German and French versions of the app and has appointed the Apple executive Renate Nyborg to lead its European expansion.
As the new cash comes in, Headspace also has more money to compete for the attention of consumers with Calm, which raised an $88 million round (one that valued the company at over $1 billion) a little over a year ago.
Backed by TPG Capital and the entertainment agency CAA, Calm has recently inked deals with big time celebrities like LeBron James, who also has an equity stake in the company.
Calm’s approach seems to center more on a direct-to-consumer strategy that has seen the company enlist celebrities like James, John McEnroe, Matthew McConaughey’s and the English comedian, actor and writer Stephen Fry.
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Ramp is a corporate card focused on helping you spend less
Meet Ramp, a new startup that offers corporate credit cards with 1.5% cash back on everything. The company thinks that a cash-back program combined with an analysis of your payments to help you spend less is more valuable than alternative corporate card offerings.
Ramp is launching publicly today and has raised $25 million in funding from Keith Rabois, Coatue, BoxGroup, Conversion Capital, Soma Capital, Backend Capital and more than 50 business angels.
The startup doesn’t charge fees. All your employees can have a white Visa card for $0 per month. There are no foreign transaction fees and no interest either. The company plans on making money with interchange fees — like all card issuers, Ramp will get a very very tiny cut on all transactions.
One of the main selling points of Ramp is that it offers you control and visibility. You can set different limits for each employee, create as many cards as you want and set up spending rules. The service also helps you centralize receipts and attach them to each expense. There are some integrations with accounting software.
Like Brex, Ramp is going to work particularly well with high-growth startups. When you sign up, Ramp doesn’t require personal guarantees. You also get higher spending limits than what you’d get from traditional corporate cards — Ramp says you can expect limits that are 10 to 20 times higher than typical limits.
Unlike Brex, Ramp doesn’t have a complicated point-based reward system. You’re not going to earn more points when you order a Lyft or book flights through Brex. Instead, with Ramp, you get 1.5% back on all your purchases — it can be a recurring subscription, an expensive flight, a team lunch… 1.5% on everything.
Existing customers include some well-known startup names, such as Ro, Candid, Better, Eight Sleep and Truebill.
Ramp goes one step further by analyzing how you spend money. For instance, if you’re paying multiple subscriptions to the same service, Ramp is going to flag that as a duplicate subscription. If you’re spending an unusual amount of money on a specific service, Ramp will recommend a lower subscription tier.
The startup also offers free credits for dozens of third-party services, such as Amazon Web Services, Amplitude, Plaid, Datadog, DocSend, Notion, Twilio, Sendgrid, etc. Overall, it represents $175,000 in free credits.
Ramp was founded by Eric Glyman and Karim Atiyeh. The team previously founded Paribus, a startup that helps you save money on online purchases that was acquired by CapitalOne.
It’s a solid offering overall. There are probably many startups that are looking for a simple corporate card solution with a cash-back program. And the fact that Ramp wants to help you spend less shows that the startup cares more about providing a good user experience over generating quick revenue.
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Taking a page from SimCity, UrbanFootprint pitches new tools for urban development
For decades, the best urban planning simulation wasn’t a simulation for urban planners at all, but the wildly popular city building game, SimCity, says Peter Calthorpe, an expert in the field and the co-founder of UrbanFootprint.
Calthorpe began his career as an urban planner and designer in the late seventies, and in the mid-eighties he wrote the book on sustainable communities alongside the famous architect and designer, Sim Van der Ryn.
Working on design and development projects across Portland, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, and (my home state) Southern Louisiana, Calthorpe approached urban design through the lens of climate resilience and sustainability — all the while developing the suite of tools that would become UrbanFootprint .
“Through our practice we started looking at a tool that gathered all the data together [and] organized it in a way that allowed for intelligent queries… [It] allowed people to ask questions and plan scenarios,” Calthorpe said in an interview.
That tool became the basis for UrbanFootprint, which is a way to visualize certain developments and use the software to model out the results of what would happen if certain design decisions were made, according to Calthorpe.
“Because cities are so complex and so interconnected in all of their dimensions, looking at multiple outcomes simultaneously is the healthiest and the best way to think about possible outcomes,” he says.
Ultimately, it’s not that much different than SimCity.
Partnering with Calthorpe on the project is Joe DiStefano, who serves as the company’s chief executive and was a longtime colleague from Calthorpe’s work at his eponymous urban planning firm (which was sold last May to the infrastructure development giant HDR).
UrbanFootprint actually spun out of Calthorpe as a separate company roughly three years ago and is now looking to expand thanks to an $11.5 million investment from venture capital firms, including previous investor Social Capital and new investors Valo Ventures and Radicle Impact.
“Businesses across every major industry are realizing that to succeed in cities, you need to understand them,” said DiStefano, in a statement. “By creating easy access to essential planning data and analyses, UrbanFootprint offers a new solution for anyone focused on cities or urban markets to build more efficiently and sustainably.”
The company’s software cleans and curates data sets, including open data from municipal agencies and commercially collected data sets, to create a super-schema of land use across the entire United States, DiStefano says. The software then serves up existing conditions based on queries for any parcel of land anywhere the UrbanFootprint software has data.
Above: UrbanFootprint’s data and toolset shows urban infrastructure and its potential risk profile from climate-related and other hazards
Cities now house roughly half of the global population, and that number is expected to reach 70% of the world’s men, women and children over the next several decades. “Just about every major issue we confront… All these things intersect in the way we shape cities and yet there’s no tool that allows people to think coherently about it,” says Calthorpe. “We’re a platform that allows people to understand the city itself.”
That understanding is valuable not just for urban planners and architects, but for corporations ranging from manufacturers to healthcare providers.
The American Lung Association is using UrbanFootprint’s tools to understand how urban density and air quality can impact respiratory disease and health broadly, said Calthorpe.
That’s just one example. The global strategy and design consultancy Gehl is using UrbanFootprint’s software to analyze the optimal locations for micromobility companies to place bikes and scooters in neighborhoods and how those decisions effect job accessibility and neighborhood amenities.
Meanwhile, the much-maligned Northern California utility Pacific Gas and Electric is using UrbanFootprint to see how heat waves affect their infrastructure and distribution network, according to a statement from the company.
“PG&E’s Climate Resilience team is working to ensure that PG&E is building a resilient system that will be able to continue to provide safe, affordable, and reliable energy to its customers amidst the growing risks of climate change,” said Heather Rock, Climate Resilience Chief at PG&E. “To that end, we are using forward-looking climate data to better inform how we plan and protect our infrastructure, employees, customers, and communities in which we serve. UrbanFootprint is an important partner to us as we seek data and tools that allow us to assess and mitigate these risks in a thoughtful way.”
Investors like Jay Zaveri, a longtime partner at Social Capital see UrbanFootprint as part of a growing number of technology companies working on developing tools for the urban environment.
“Cities are superstructures for culture, lifestyles, aspirations, and well-being – the real ‘social networks’ in our lives,” said Zaveri, in a statement. “Since 2018, UrbanFootprint has helped private and civic planners, mobility and energy companies execute nearly 4,000 projects in over 700 cities in the U.S., providing answers for complex scenarios in a matter of hours. This is a phenomenal effort as we move to seven billion urban citizens by 2050, with the urgent need of this decade being resilience and preparedness for urban systems.”
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Reset Button is approaching student debt from a new angle
Student loan debt in the U.S. totals $1.5 trillion, and more than 44 million Americans have outstanding student loan debt.
According to research by Villanova law professor Jason Iuliano, a million student loan debtors have filed for bankruptcy in the past five years. However, 99.9% of them did not include their student loan debt in their bankruptcy filing.
This research was the seed of what would become Reset Button, a new startup founded by Iuliano and Rob Hunter looking to help student loan debtors who have gone through bankruptcy find a new way to include those debts in their filing.
The only way you can include student loan debt in a bankruptcy filing is through litigation. Those cases have been historically less likely to settle out of court than other types of civil cases.
This means that the cost of including student loan debt in bankruptcy filings is, at the very least, around $10,000. Now, if there was some guarantee that you could trade hundreds of thousands of dollars of student loan debt for $10,000-$15,000, you’d obviously do it. But most folks who are already in the process of filing for bankruptcy don’t have a spare $10,000 minimum to spend on a litigator. And even if they did, there is no guarantee they’d win in court, resulting in even more debt and no relief.
This is what Reset Button is trying to change.
To be clear, Reset Button is targeted directly at folks who have already filed for bankruptcy but were told they couldn’t include their student loan debt in those filings, and so they didn’t.
Here’s how it works:
Reset Button has built a network of litigation lawyers who have experience in seeking student loan discharges. When a new user fires up Reset Button, the startup sends them through an evaluation process that collects financial information, etc. to assess whether or not one of those lawyers could litigate the discharge of that user’s student loan debt. That evaluation factors in a number of signals, including past legal cases that are comparable to the user’s situation.
That process also does a lot of the heavy lifting that makes hiring a litigator so expensive. These lawyers often have to do tons of research, tracking down statements and bills and other paperwork, before they can truly get started with the litigation.
Reset Button, as the connective tissue between debtor and lawyer, is able to automate a lot of that process for the lawyers, delivering a package of information on the case and connecting the user with the right lawyer for them.
Reset is also looking to bring down the cost for debtors. The company charges either 12% of the total debt discharged, or $10,000 (whichever is lowest). Reset also allows users to pay that sum over time, in $300 monthly installments. This is in stark contrast to people who hire their own lawyer, who would be responsible for the costs upfront.
Reset Button is able to do this through a payment process called factoring. In short, Reset buys the receivables from the attorney’s fees, and charges the debtor with their own payment plan. Reset makes money from lawyers who pay for the lead generation, the technology services and the marketing apparatus.
Factoring has come under fire from some who say that service providers sometimes raise prices to account for their fee, but Reset Button co-founders Hunter and Iuliano say their lawyers are actually charging less because of the workflow optimization provided by Reset Button.
The company also provides a Knowledge Base for debtors seeking financial guidance and resources, but the only revenue stream comes from the actual litigation of student loan debt in bankruptcy filings. Other services like refinancing, debt consolidation or income-based payments are not provided by Reset Button, and the company has no official partnerships with those types of service providers.
However, Hunter said that it may be an avenue the company explores as it grows.
Perhaps most importantly, Reset Button offers a Fresh Start guarantee. In short, if the lawyer doesn’t manage to get your debt wiped, Reset will pay your legal bills.
There has been movement in the landscape of student loan discharges with bankruptcy.
Essentially, debtors must prove in court that they pass the test of “undue hardship,” which is a notably vague framework. Though there is a bit of variability among the various court circuits, the general idea is that a debtor must prove that they can’t currently pay back the loan, that there will not be a change down the line that will allow them to pay the loan in the future and that they have made every effort to pay the loans in the past.
Historically, that’s been a difficult threshold to cross for the fraction of people who take steps to litigate their student loan debt. However, in small ways, courts seem to be opening up the interpretation of undue hardship.
“There’s a phrase that gets used in these cases that I think perpetuates this myth, and that is to call it a ‘certainty of hopelessness’,” said John Rao, attorney with the National Consumer Law Center. “And it’s almost like, as long as you’re still alive and breathing, something could improve for you. That’s just an impossible burden. It’s basically saying you could win the lottery or something. That’s just not the standard I think Congress had in mind.”
In 2015, in a case between Robert E. Murphy and the DOE/ECMC, Rao wrote to the courts arguing that they should reassess the test for undue hardship:
Rather than adopt one existing test over another, we urge this Court to provide a formulation of the undue hardship standard in simple terms, that restricts consideration of extraneous and inappropriate factors not consistent with the statutory language. A finding about whether a debtor’s hardship is likely to persist should be based on hard facts, not conjecture and unsubstantiated optimism.
More recently, a judge in the Southern District of New York ruled in favor of a debtor, wiping more than $200,000 in Kevin Rosenberg’s student debt. Of course, the lenders will be appealing the case.
However, Judge Morris, who presided over the case, wrote in her decision that “most people (bankruptcy professionals as well as lay individuals) believe it impossible to discharge student loans,” and that her “Court will not participate in perpetuating these myths.”
Reset Button has raised money from investors Craft Ventures, Slow Ventures and Jeff Morris Jr. of Lambda School, among others. The company declined to share its total amount of investment.
“Society has been led to believe something for decades that is not true, which is probably the biggest initial challenge,” said founder and CEO Rob Hunter . “One of the unfortunate things is the reason that many consumers believe incorrect information is because a lawyer told them that. So, that is a bit of an uphill battle to swim against.”
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Ever Loved’s funeral marketplace undercuts undertakers
Fifty percent of families are scared they can’t cover the cost of a funeral. They end up overpaying because no one wants to comparison shop amidst a tragedy. That’s why ex-Googler Alison Johnston’s startup Ever Loved built a free funeral crowdfunding tool. Now it’s addressing one of the most expensive parts of saying goodbye: burial. Today Ever Loved launches its online marketplace for caskets, urns, headstones and memorial jewelry.
By sidestepping the overhead of a physical funeral home, Ever Loved can offer better prices while still earning a 10% margin. Its caskets cost 50% less than the average sold at a mortuary, according to the National Funeral Directors Association.
When I called a local San Francisco funeral home, the high markups came into focus. They quoted me $2,795 for a casket sold for $1,200 on Ever Loved.
“Most people don’t think to — or don’t want to — plan funerals in advance, which means that when someone passes away, the family is often scrambling,” Johnston tells me. “When this rush to make decisions is paired with extreme grief, many people don’t do anywhere close to the same amount of research as they would with another several-thousand-dollar purchase. When combined with the fact that most funeral homes don’t publish their prices online, it’s easy for families to spend much more than they need to.”
Johnston co-founded Ever Loved in late 2017 after a family member was diagnosed with terminal cancer. She discovered how few resources there were available for helping people plan and pay for funerals. She’d previously worked at Q&A app Aardvark through its acquisition by Google, then started online tutoring startup InstaEDU that eventually sold to Chegg. The consumer website building and e-commerce tools she’d grown used to weren’t available in the funeral industry, so she set out to build them. Ever Loved has raised seed funding from Social Capital and gone through Y Combinator.
Ever Loved co-founder and CEO Alison Johnston
“Tech too often merely makes life and work easier for those who already have it good,” she told me last year. “Tech that tempers tragedy is a welcome evolution for Silicon Valley.”
Ever Loved’s first focus was its funeral crowdfunding tool that let families ask the decedent’s loved ones to help contribute to offset the costs. Donors could leave a tip for Ever Loved, but otherwise it charged nothing beyond credit card processing fees. The tool was paired with a memorial website builder that families could use for distributing invites and collecting memories. Now Ever Loved is helping people plan thousands of funerals per month with revenue up nearly 20X year-over-year.
Now that it’s helping families raise money for remembrance services, Ever Loved wants to make sure they don’t get ripped off. The fact that there’s such low pricing transparency at funeral homes should clue you in that they try to pass off steep markups since customers might not have the energy to keep looking. “The average funeral home only helps with a funeral once every three days, meaning that many funeral homes need to charge high prices in order to cover their own fixed costs,” Johnston explains.
Remove the overhead costs and assist customers across geographies and there’s room for a strong business with more affordable prices. For example, a Stanford Blue Casket costs $990 on Ever Loved while one LA funeral home charges $1,600. The Last Supper Pieta Casket is $1,500 on Ever Loved but $6,580 from the funeral home. That funeral home had both of these listed under different names, further hindering the ability of customers to find a fair price.
Ever Loved can also more quickly adapt to the diversification of burial options. Between concerns about costs, land use, environmental impact and connection to family and nature, many are looking beyond caskets. Cremation became more popular than burial in the U.S. in 2017. Liquid cremation is now legal in 18 states, and Washington just began allowing body composting.
“We’re seeing a lot of independent providers popping up to do everything from turning your loved one’s ashes into a diamond ring to shooting their ashes into space to planting them under a tree in the forest,” says Johnston. Any single funeral home is unlikely to offer the breadth customers are looking for. “Our goal is to make all of your options available to you in an easily digestible format.”
Ever Loved’s business is protected by the FTC’s Funeral Rule that bars mortuaries from refusing or charging extra to handle a casket or urn purchased elsewhere. That means Ever Loved customers can combine shopping online with in-person memorial services from a local funeral home. Still, it’s a tough business. Startups like HaloLife, Clarity and After I Go have all shut down. Most others merely offer memorial sites, or funeral home search engines.
That means Ever Loved’s biggest competitors, beyond the standard just accepting the local mortuary’s prices, are Google and Amazon. Often they surface the same prices as Ever Loved with comparable shipping, though Google could sometimes find a slight discount by buying straight from the manufacturer, while Amazon was missing some top brands. Costco and Walmart sell funeral products too. But Johnston says “many people don’t feel like generic, mass-market stores are the appropriate place to purchase funeral products.” I agree it might feel disrespectful buying an urn from the same place you get toilet paper.
“We also put a huge focus on customer service, which you don’t get at Walmart, Costco or Amazon,” Johnston tells me. “When you’re grieving and spending thousands of dollars, we’ve found that this is very important.”
As the demographic planning funerals gets more tech-savvy over time and want personalized farewells rather than cookie-cutter conclusions, there’s a chance to change the status quo. Discussing death is becoming less taboo. Being smart about paying for it should too.
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Orbital debris startup Astroscale chosen by JAXA for its first space junk removal mission
Japanese orbital debris removal technology startup Astroscale is going to be working with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) on the agency’s first mission to remove some of the junk that currently exists on orbit. They’ve been selected by the agency to participate in its Commercial Removal of Debris Demonstration project (CRD2), which includes two separate mission phases that together will aim to accomplish the removal of a large body currently on orbit, the spent upper stage of a Japanese rocket.
Astroscale, which was founded in 2013, is focused entirely on cleaning up orbital space, which it sees as a necessary step for long-term sustainable activity on orbit. Space debris has become a hot-button topic in the space industry, with current projections anticipating massive increases in the number of active satellites orbiting the planet, thanks to the uptick in satellite constellation projects in the works from commercial operators including SpaceX, Amazon and OneWeb.
The JAXA mission aims to complete its first phase by the end of 2022, and Astroscale will support that phase by building, launching and operating a satellite that will observe and acquire data on the rocket upper stage that the second phase will seek to de-orbit. The goal is to find out more about its movement and the surrounding debris environment in order to set up a safe and successful removal.
“The data obtained in Phase I of CRD2 is expected to reinforce the dangers of existing debris and the necessity to remove them,” said Astroscale founder and CEO Nobu Okada in a press release. “Debris removal is still a new market and our mission has always been to establish routine debris removal services in space in order to secure orbital sustainability for the benefit of future generations. The international community is growing more aware of the risks of space debris and we are committed more than ever to turning this potential market into a reality.”
Astroscale is also already involved in other orbital debris-removal projects, and plans to launch a demonstration mission of its “End-of-Life Services” offering sometime in the second half of this year. This mission will be a world-first demo of commercial orbital debris removal if all goes to plan, a key step in proving that its technology can meet the needs of this growing opportunity.
Earlier this year, a near-miss of two defunct orbital spacecraft made headlines, and observers noted that had a collision occurred, it would’ve resulted in a new debris cloud with “at least hundreds” of new pieces of trackable debris. Astroscale and others like it could, combined with other initiatives like more granular tracking and information sharing among satellite operators, provide a much more sustainable in-space operating environment for the range of commercial activities either planned or in progress for orbital space.
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Nova Credit banks $50M to expand its service sourcing credit reports across borders
Around 70% of the world’s population now has some form of bank account or — thanks to mobile phones — a facility to receive and send money virtually, according to the World Bank. But when it comes to people crossing borders and setting up lives in new countries, they essentially leave behind their financial histories, starting again from scratch in their new homes. But there are signs of that starting to change. A startup called Nova Credit has built a facility to import financial histories from one country to another, and today it’s announcing a $50 million round of funding to grow that business to cover more countries.
The funding is being led by Kleiner Perkins, with a list of other big names also participating. They include Canapi Ventures, a new fund focused on fintech startups, as well as previous backers Index Ventures, General Catalyst and Nyca Partners. Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary’s fund Sound Ventures is also in this round, along with baseball legend Alex Rodriguez and U2 guitarist the Edge.
Nova is not disclosing its valuation, but according to PitchBook, in the first-close of the round it was estimated at around $295 million. CEO and co-founder Misha Esipov would only say it was “much higher” than the company’s valuation in its previous round — supported by the facts that revenues grew four-fold in 2019, and that it now covers more than 1 billion consumer credit profiles, working out to over 50% of the most popular U.S. immigrant countries of origin.
Prior to this Series B, the company had raised just under $20 million, which also included funding from Y Combinator (where it was part of a 2016 cohort).
Esipov — who has worked as a banker at Goldman Sachs and at private equity firm Apollo, and himself is a first-generation Russian immigrant moving to the U.S. with his parents when he was three — said he and co-founders Loek Janssen and Nicky Goulimis first came up with the idea for Nova when they were still graduate students at Stanford, where they turned to their own classmates to look for gaps in the market of financial services.
“We made a discovery among the international students we surveyed, which was that many said they couldn’t get credit, cell phone plans, leases and anything else that required credit histories,” he said. “Many of them said the same thing to us: ‘I feel like a second-class citizen.’ And that was the light-bulb moment for us. We saw it was a systemic problem, and four years later I believe we’re solving a decent share of this problem.”
Nova’s solution is that it has built a digital framework that connects an individual’s credit history information from one country back into the country where the person is currently residing, creating a product that it refers to as a “Credit Passport.”
Nova partners with businesses that rely on this credit history in order to decide whether to do business with an individual. In cases where it comes up short in accessing an in-country history for a specific person — for example, American Express, in evaluating a person’s credit history to determine whether it should issue a card for a particular applicant — it can now use Nova to source a history from another market, using details provided by the user in question.
Nova’s business model is that it pays a fee to the credit bureau where the records are originating in order to source the data, and it then charges the business that is making the request for the data.
For now, the service is not global in a number of ways. The first is in terms of the geographies covered: Nova has so far only facilitated links between 11 countries, with the originating requests coming from the U.S. They include Australia, Canada, India, Kenya, Mexico and the U.K. Esipov said that the starting point came from close analysis of which countries send the most people to the U.S.
The other is that the service is largely geared toward people who have a credit history to speak of in their previous country. For many immigrants to the U.S., that is not actually the case for a number of financial, political and other reasons.
The strategy is to increasingly cover both of those bases better over time, Esipov said.
For example, while there are only 11 countries “live” at the moment, the company actually has deals with 19 countries currently, a list it hopes to grow more. The Dominican Republic and the Philippines will be the next two countries to launch. One reason for the relatively slow rollout is that this isn’t exactly a scalable problem with the same issues in each market, although it’s finally started to get some momentum.
“It’s an absolute nightmare,” Esipov said with a laugh when I asked him about the challenges of scaling the business. “Each country has its own complexities, whether it’s in terms of the partnership or technical complexity. Every market is different.” Some are surprising. He noted that France, for example, is the only G20 country without a centralised credit bureau, only a repository that logs “bad marks,” not good behaviour. “So we haven’t been able to develop a solution covering France so far.”
He notes that it has taken Nova a few years to build these relationships. “When we were still trying to find our footing, it was difficult, but now the five biggest credit agencies in the world work with us. We have established ourselves as the solution for cross-border credit reporting access.”
And on the side of making the product something that can be useful for more than just the percentage of immigrants who came from the credit-using class in their previous countries — the typical type of person who might end up at Stanford business school, if you will — Nova is working on that, too.
“There are a lot of potential strategies for those countries where central credit bureaus don’t exist,” Esipov said. “We have to be creative in using potential data sources that we can find to say this is a new and good segment. There are alternative data sources, and we are exploring how to bring those into the U.S. market. But, if they are not as well-established, no matter how creative we are, it’s a matter of working with risk officers and trying to teach them, too.” Indeed, we are starting to see a rise of other services aiming at immigrants — for example, new bank accounts launched by Remitly last week — speaking to how multiple startups are tuning into demographics that have been traditionally overlooked, but now represent growth opportunities in what is otherwise a tight and competitive market with slowing growth.
“In a competitive financial services industry with shifting demographics, developing a strategy to attract the growing newcomer segment has become a strategic necessity for banks to defend and grow market share,” said Gene Ludwig, managing partner of Canapi Ventures, in a statement. “Nova Credit stands out as the only enduring solution to financial access for the millions of newcomers who come to the US each year. They’ve assembled an exceptional, mission-driven team that has what it takes to bring systemic change to life.”
It can’t come a moment too soon. Nova, citing research from Pew, notes that immigrants account for 55% of U.S. population growth, which will grow to 80% by 2050. Helping them get better integrated into the economy is a critical step for integrating into society.
“Credit is fundamental to economic success, but today’s systems and infrastructure have not kept up with an increasingly mobile world,” said Ilya Fushman, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, in a statement. “Nova Credit is democratizing access to credit globally and we’re delighted to lead the Series B.
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