Startups
Auto Added by WPeMatico
Darkstore raises $21 million Series B round
Darkstore, the tech-driven fulfillment solution to enable e-commerce companies to offer same-day delivery, just raised a $21 million Series B round led by EQT Ventures. The deal will bring EQT principal Laura Yao to Darkstore’s board of directors.
This Series B round comes less than one year after Darkstore raised a $7.5 million Series A round. In total, Darkstore has raised more than $30 million in funding.
Darkstore works by exploiting excess capacity in storage facilities, malls and bodegas and enables them to be fulfillment centers with just a smartphone. The idea is that brands without local inventory can store it in a Darkstore and then ship out same-day. Darkstore charges brands across three areas: fulfillment, storage and delivery.
“Consumer expectations are relentless,” Yao told TechCrunch via email. “We want things now, now, now. Obviously, it’s in a brand’s best interest to be able to meet those demands. The amazing team at Darkstore has built a platform-agnostic, cost-effective way for brands to do so, and in the process has unlocked a new revenue stream for urban infrastructure, and created valuable partnerships with last-mile delivery services.”
Currently, Darkstore has more than 600 fulfillment centers across 39 cities in the U.S., including Honolulu, Toledo, Ohio and Omaha, Neb.
Darkstore is unable to share the full roster of its customers, but it has worked with the likes of Nike, premium headphones maker Master & Dynamic, mattress startup Tuft & Needle and others. With the additional funding, Darkstore plans to grow the general team, as well as the management team.
Yao added, “We’ve worked with Lee [founder Lee Hnetinka] and the team for over a year and have been able to see this Darkstore flywheel come to life, and are excited to see what the future holds.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Airbnb says it will go public next year
Airbnb has said that it will have its initial public offering in 2020.
The company is one of the last of the big unicorn herd that grew up roughly a decade ago (a herd that includes Uber, Lyft, The We Company and Postmates) to declare its public market intentions.
Yesterday evening the company announced it had hit over $1 billion in revenue for the second quarter 2019. It’s the second time in the company’s history that it pulled in more than $1 billion, according to the statement.
Airbnb also said that through September 15, 2019 users who list their homes and rooms on the company’s marketplace have made more than $80 billion since the company’s launch. The supplemental income for underpaid teachers alone clocks in at $160 million, and roughly 51% of people surveyed by the company said hosting has helped them afford their home.
The company also said that Airbnb’s housing stock now includes 7 million listings in more than 100,000 cities around the world. Airbnb says that over 1,000 cities have more than 1,000 listings — eight years ago, that figure was only 12.
Airbnb is also pulling in more money from its tourism business, with more than 40,000 tours and “experiences” booked in over 1,000 cities.
All of this travel has led to over $100 billion in economic impact across 30 countries, the company said.
This growth hasn’t come without controversy, and Airbnb’s success will depend on its ability to continue to thread the needle between government regulation over the company’s impact on housing prices and the creation of vacant apartments and homes that are only investment properties that increase Airbnb’s housing stock.
The company’s imminent public offering is good news for investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Manhattan Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, TCV, Firstmark and Altimeter Capital, which have collectively invested roughly $4.4 billion into the company, according to Crunchbase.
Powered by WPeMatico
Ginkgo Bioworks’ dev shop for genetic programming is now worth $4 billion
Ginkgo Bioworks is now worth $4 billion after a $290 million capital infusion that will give the company the cash to dramatically expand its developer shop for genetic programming.
The Boston-based company is one of a handful of U.S.-based early-stage companies that are on the forefront of developing the tools to modify genetic material for everyday applications.
“Cells are programmable similar to computers because they run on digital code in the form of DNA,” said Jason Kelly, CEO and co-founder of Ginkgo Bioworks, in a statement. “Ginkgo has the best compiler and debugger for writing genetic code and we use it to program cells for customers in a range of industries. Today’s fundraise will allow us to expand our technology and continue our drive to bring biology into every physical goods industry — materials, clothing, electronics, food, pharmaceuticals and more. They are all biotech industries but just don’t know it yet.”
Ginkgo makes money in two ways. The company sells its development services to anyone who comes in with an idea. Kelly said that it’d be like any agreement with an entrepreneur who hires a coding shop to develop an application.
For example, if an entrepreneur wanted to develop houseplants that smelled like roses or lilies, they could approach Ginkgo, pay a (not-insignificant) fee and Ginkgo would do the research into designing something like a lily-scented fern. (Kelly puts the sticker price on that kind of development somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 million, so a founder best believe their product can sell.)
“You don’t need to come in with deep biological know-how,” Kelly says. “The question is, is capital interested in the problem?”
The other way that Ginkgo is approaching the market is by taking equity stakes in businesses that rely on its technology.
Those take the form of joint ventures with companies like Bayer (the first joint venture partner for Ginkgo) and the launch of Joyn, a $100 million spin-out that was created in the summer of 2018.
The two companies are collaborating on the development of seeds that require less fertilizer for growth — something that could save the industry millions and decrease pollution associated with traditional chemical fertilizers.
Since that first spin-out, Ginkgo has created three other companies and joint ventures. There’s the $122 million deal to produce rare cannabinoids with the Canadian cannabis company, Cronos; a partnership with Roche that was born out of Ginkgo’s acquisition of Warp Drive Bio; and Motif Foodworks, which is working on manufacturing alternative proteins with a $120 million in financing.*
Alongside these large-scale initiatives, Ginkgo has signed partnerships with the West Coast powerhouse accelerator program from Y Combinator and a new Boston-based life sciences-focused group called Petri to conduct development work for startups from those programs in exchange for an equity stake.
“We’re not going to have all the good ideas,” says Kelly. “We want to tap the much larger pool of smart people and really have them building on our platform. Of all of the people we can give value to, we can give the most to startups. If we can offer them to do their biowork without all of the fixed costs of building a lab,” that’s valuable, he says.
Investors in the company include Y Combinator, DCVC, MassChallenge, Felicis Ventures, General Atlantic, Baillie Gifford, Bill Gates and Viking Global.
* An earlier version of this article mentioned three company spinouts. The collaborations with Roche and Cronos are not independent companies.
Powered by WPeMatico
‘The best VC on Instagram’ is now VC-backed
About 18 months ago, Jenny Gyllander created an Instagram account by the name of @thingtesting.
The premise was simple. Gyllander, who was at the center of the London startup ecosystem as an investor with the British seed fund Backed.VC, would upload photos of interesting direct-to-consumer products with a caption that served as a bite-sized review. The experiment began with Birchbox, a provider of curated boxes of beauty products that rose to prominence amid the subscription box hype of yesteryear. In her short review, tailored perfectly for the Instagram generation, Gyllander admitted to being “like 10 years late to this much hyped subscription-everything party,” adding that “after two boxes and ten products, only three products were relevant to me.” Her honesty, and perhaps more importantly, her brevity, garnered her a small following of venture capitalists, founders and consumer-brand enthusiasts.
Since that first post, Gyllander has featured and reviewed more than 100 products on her Instagram account — which today counts 32,800 followers. And she quit her day job and began building an Instagram-inspired, full-fledged review business.
“I found something I am very, very passionate about,” Gyllander tells TechCrunch. “Finding the D2C niche was for me a little bit of a Holy Grail. It’s where brands and startups align for the first time in a concrete way.”
With a $300,000 pre-seed investment from angel investor and Homebrew co-founder Hunter Walk, who previously called Thingtesting “The best VC on Instagram,” early Spotify investor Shakil Khan and more, Gyllander wants to create a full-scale D2C review platform with a team of reviewers and content creators, and a portal for her loyal followers to write and submit their own reviews. She compares what she envisions for Thingtesting to that of Rotten Tomatoes. Akin to the popular website for movie and television reviews, each product review on her future website will include a Thingtesting score and an audience score. The goal is to help consumers shop smarter and filter through the D2C noise.
“People are confused right now by the sheer amount of products launching,” Gyllander said. “I want Thingtesting to be a filter for people to consume better … It’s a role department stores used to have back in the day, but nobody has really filled that role in the online world.”
Gyllander, already making money from what was once a side project, has plans in store to generate significantly more revenue. Currently, she’s capitalizing off Instagram’s Close Friends list, which the social media hub launched last year to allow users to share content to fewer people. Gyllander, like a slew of other Instagram influencers, however, quickly realized an opportunity to monetize content using the feature, a trend explained in detail in a recent report from The Atlantic.
Gyllander charges a lifetime fee of $100 to her followers hoping for a spot on her Close Friends list. Those followers are then provided exclusive content, including behind-the-scenes looks at her product review journeys. So far, 300 people have been granted access to the exclusive group as others sit on the waitlist. Gyllander explains she hasn’t green-lit every request to enter the coveted group because she wants to maintain a sense of community as the account grows in popularity. Early next year, she hopes, she will have launched a Thingtesting website and a new subscription-based membership tier targeting D2C connoisseurs, investors and anyone interested in a front-seat view of the booming D2C industry.
As Thingtesting morphs into a digital review platform and expands from the bounds of Instagram, Gyllander will have to work harder to differentiate what she’s built from other review sites and D2C blogs. Her secret weapon, she believes, is her authenticity.
“It’s my honesty,” Gyllander said. “And it’s the fact that there’s no payment involved from the brands and that I’m not being paid to review products. That’s something quite rare in the Instagram world today. There aren’t that many accounts that are just talking about new products with non-monetary incentives.”
Since launching with a review of Birchbox, Gyllander has shared her thoughts on Magic Spoon, a D2C cereal company: “one bowl kept me full for hours,” she wrote, ultimately concluding she wouldn’t continue eating the cereal. More recently, she referred to the D2C aperitif brand Haus as “stunning;” wrote a lukewarm review of the blue light-protecting eyewear brand Felix Gray; and posted a glowing summary of Dripkit, a D2C coffee brand.
To secure a spot on Gyllander’s grid, a product must bring something new to the market, as well as boast killer branding and packaging. The former VC says she tries out about 20 products a month and shares official reviews of four or five.
“The majority of people today, when it comes to modern brands, they have their first interaction through an ad or an influencer telling them about the product,” Gyllander explained. “Discovery is in a weird place right now when it comes to the general consumer.”
It’s difficult to imagine a venture-scale business within Gyllander’s vision for Thingtesting. But one should never underestimate the value of an exclusive and hyper-focused network. Gyllander, in a short time, has created a meeting place for D2C aficionados and venture capitalists and, as she’s proven, her thoughts are worth paying for.
Powered by WPeMatico
Quilt Data launches from stealth with free portal to access petabytes of public data
Quilt Data‘s founders, Kevin Moore and Aneesh Karve, have been hard at work for the last four years building a platform to search for data quickly across vast repositories on AWS S3 storage. The idea is to give data scientists a way to find data in S3 buckets, then package that data in forms that a business can use. Today, the company launched out of stealth with a free data search portal that not only proves what they can do, but also provides valuable access to 3.7 petabytes of public data across 23 S3 repositories.
The public data repository includes publicly available Amazon review data along with satellite images and other high-value public information. The product works like any search engine, where you enter a query, but instead of searching the web or an enterprise repository, it finds the results in S3 storage on AWS.
The results not only include the data you are looking for, it also includes all of the information around the data, such as Jupyter notebooks, the standard workspace that data scientists use to build machine learning models. Data scientists can then use this as the basis for building their own machine learning models.
The public data, which includes more than 10 billion objects, is a resource that data scientists should greatly appreciate it, but Quilt Data is offering access to this data out of more than pure altruism. It’s doing so because it wants to show what the platform is capable of, and in the process hopes to get companies to use the commercial version of the product.
Quilt Data search results with data about the data found (Image: Quilt Data)
Customers can try Quilt Data for free or subscribe to the product in the Amazon Marketplace. The company charges a flat rate of $550 per month for each S3 bucket. It also offers an enterprise version with priority support, custom features and education and on-boarding for $999 per month for each S3 bucket.
The company was founded in 2015 and was a member of the Y Combinator Summer 2017 cohort. The company has received $4.2 million in seed money so far from Y Combinator, Vertex Ventures, Fuel Capital and Streamlined Ventures, along with other unnamed investors.
Powered by WPeMatico
Get your Startup Alley Exhibitor package plus bonus hotel stay
It’s getting down to the wire for your opportunity to show off your early-stage startup in Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt SF this October 2-4. There’s simply no better way to place your ideas and technology in front of influential change agents that can help you propel your business forward and set the stage for future success. Here are just four of the many reasons you should exhibit in Startup Alley.
1. Awesome exposure to the media
Along with 10,000+ attendees, Disrupt SF will have more than 400 members of the media. We’re talking the big guns — CNBC, Bloomberg, Forbes, Financial Times — alongside TechCrunch writers, scouring the floor looking for stories about fascinating founders, emerging tech trends or maybe even a future unicorn. Scoring media coverage can work wonders for your bottom line — as Luke Heron, CEO of TestCard, learned when he exhibited in Startup Alley:
We got a fantastic writeup in Engadget, which was really valuable. Cash at the beginning of the start-up journey is difficult to come by, and an article from a credible organization can help push things in the right direction.
Last year, TestCard closed a $1.7 million funding round.
2. Beaucoup investor attention
Journalists aren’t the only influencers perusing the tech and talent on display in Startup Alley. Investors are just as eager to find up-and-coming prospects to add to their portfolios. It’s the perfect place to start conversations and develop relationships that lead to big changes. And we’ve got a plethora of investors (both traditional VCs and corporate folk) in the Valley: Sequoia, Verizon Ventures, GV, SoftBank, Naspers, AT&T, Honda Innovations and more. Here’s what David Hall, co-founder of Park & Diamond, had to say about his experience:
Exhibiting in Startup Alley was a game-changer. The chance to have discussions and potentially form relationships with investors was invaluable. It completely changed our trajectory and made it easier to raise funds and jump to the next stage.
Last year, Park & Diamond closed its first round of funding, allowing the company to relocate to New York and make its first key hires.
3. Wild Card shot at the Startup Battlefield competition
Missed out on the Startup Battlefield applications? All exhibitors in Startup Alley get a chance to win one of TWO Wild Card entries to the Startup Battlefield pitch competition. TechCrunch editors will select two standout startups as Wild Card teams that will go on the Main Stage to compete head-to-head in Startup Battlefield for $100,000 equity-free cash, the Disrupt Cup and even more glorious investor and media attention.
4. Free hotel stay for Startup Alley companies who book now
With all of those reasons, it’s hard to top all the value you’ll get from a Startup Alley Exhibitor Package, but we’ll even sweeten the deal and throw in a complimentary 3-night stay at a SF hotel if you book by Wednesday, September 25. All of this opportunity for $1,995 sounds like it’s too good to be true, but if you act now, this can become your reality.
There you have it. What are you waiting for? Buy your Startup Alley Exhibitor Package and strut your stuff at Disrupt San Francisco 2019.
Powered by WPeMatico
How to profit from valuable peer referrals hiding in Slack
Colin is Senior Director of Analytics and Strategy for Cloudinary, the co co-author of High Performance Images, and passionate about data, web performance and user experience.
Brands are often left to act like the person who searches for their keys under the streetlight simply because that is where the light is better. However, when brand marketers focus only on engaging with the customers they can more easily see — where online activity is visible — they risk overlooking the valuable opportunities hiding in darker spaces.
One of the most valuable of those dark web spaces is in the realm of what we call “microbrowsers” — the messaging apps like Slack, WhatsApp and WeChat. We call them microbrowsers because they display miniature previews of web pages inside private message discussions. These previews, also known as ‘unfurled links’, create your brand’s first impression and play a big role in whether or not the person on the receiving end will click through to buy, or read or engage.
Google Analytics lumps all microbrowser-generated web traffic into the ‘Direct’ bucket, which we often just ignore. This means we look for customers where we know how to create campaigns easily — on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and buying Google Ad Words.
And as more people rely more heavily on messaging apps for primary communication, these link previews from microbrowsers are becoming the leading segment of your direct traffic visitors. In Cloudinary’s 2019 State of Visual Media Report, which drew on data from more than 700 customers and 200 billion transactions, we found that 77% of link sharing in Slack occurs during working hours and that the vast majority of the click-throughs are reported as ‘direct’ traffic. The rise of microbrowsers gives us an opportunity to engage and attract customers through word of mouth discussions.
The good news is that the ‘leads’ that microbrowsers send to your brand site are usually highly qualified and close to the bottom of the traditional sales pipeline funnel. When consumers arrive on your site they are often ready and eager to buy (or read, view and listen to your content).
Whether it be for sneakers, tickets to a concert, a birthday gift idea, or an article to read — a trusted peer recommendation typically happens in that fleeting moment when the appetite to buy is right now. That isn’t just valuable, it’s the holy freaking grail!
Top tips for creating links that engage
Image via Getty Images / drogatnev
The way to get the most value from microbrowser traffic is by helping along this peer influencing that happens in the dark. By creating compelling, informative links with images, video and text information specifically for microbrowsers, you increase the likelihood that peer-to-peer recommendations in groups convert into sales and reads.
What follows are some top tips to ensure that the links unfurling within microbrowsers have the greatest impact.
First, remember the golden rule: your audience is human. When creating content for microbrowsers, design it for humans, not machines.
Powered by WPeMatico
Lunchclub raises $4M from a16z for its AI warm intro service
There are apps out there that help you find friends, find dates and find your distant family histories, but when it comes to “growing your professional network,” the options are shockingly bad, we’re talking LinkedIn here.
Lunchclub is a startup that’s looking to help users navigate finding new connections inside specific industries. The company has recently closed a $4 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz with other investments coming in from Quora’s co-founder, the Robinhood cofounders, and Flexport’s cofounders.
The app follows in the footsteps of others that aimed to be dating app-like marketplaces for growing out your professional network via 1:1 lunch and coffee meetings. Lunchclub is more focused on setting up a handful of meetings for users that have a specific goal in mind. Lunchclub is aiming to be your warm intro and connect you with other users via email that can assist you in your professional goals.
When you’re on-boarded to the service, you are asked to highlight some “objectives” that you might have and this is where the app really makes its goals clear. Options include, “raise funding,” “find a co-founder or parter,” “explore other companies,” and “brainstorm with peers.” These objectives are pretty explicit and complementary, i.e. for every “raise funding” objective, there’s an “invest” option.
There isn’t a ton being asked for on the part of the user when it comes to building up the data on their profile, Lunchclub is hoping to get most of the data that they need from the rest of the web.
“Our view is that there’s tons of data already out there,” Lunchclub CEO Vlad Novakovski told TechCrunch in an interview. “Anything that comes from the existing social networks, be in things like Twitter, be it things that are more specific to what people might be working on, like Github or Dribble or AngelList — all of those data sources are in the public domain and are fair game.”
Lunchclub’s sell is that they can learn from what matches are successful via user feedback and use that to hone further matches. Novakovski most previously was the CTO of Euclid Analytics which WeWork acquired in 2017. Previous to that, he led the machine learning team at Quora.
The web app, which currently has a lengthy-waitlist, is available for users in seven cities including the SF Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York, Boston, Austin, Seattle and London.
Co-founders Vlad Novakovski, Scott Wu and Hayley Leibson
Powered by WPeMatico
Out of the box influencer strategies to accelerate awareness for your startup
Kamiu Lee is CEO at Activate, an influencer marketing technology platform and agency that partners with brands and influencers to tell engaging and compelling stories across social media at scale.
For new brands, growing awareness and gaining the trust and credibility of consumers are two of the most important yet challenging marketing objectives. As an added constraint, most startups don’t have the budgetary flexibility to activate mega-influencers and celebrities that have national attention at their fingertips. However, new research from ACTIVATE found that smaller-tier, more accessible influencers are a top choice for marketers – they enable brands to tap into niche communities and offer superior engagement rates.
Surveying over 110 brand marketers, PR professionals, social media managers and agency executives, we found that 64 percent of marketers are choosing to utilize micro-influencers very often, as opposed to larger creators, mega influencers and celebrities. We also found that more than 44 percent of marketers are repurposing influencer-created content following a sponsorship, a practice that extends the ROI of an influencer campaign and can help startups attain valuable visual assets for future marketing use.
While mega-influencer content rights are often negotiated to steep rates, those of smaller tier influencers are more affordable, as the influencers themselves also benefit from the added exposure.
With this in mind, when developing an influencer campaign, it’s critical not to feel constrained to the most popular creators, and instead think out of the box and consider what factors will be most important to the audience you’re specifically trying to reach. When being thoughtful about how you’re implementing influencers, smaller creators can be just as impactful as their larger counterparts.
Let’s go through some of the most impactful emerging influencer strategies, to grow awareness, without growing debt.
Key influencer casting strategies to drive targeted impact
Powered by WPeMatico
Video ad company Eyeview names Rob Deichert as its new CEO
After 13 years at the helm of video advertising company Eyeview, founder Oren Harnevo is stepping down as CEO.
The company’s new chief executive is Rob Deichert, who was most recently COO at digital advertising company 33Across. The company is also announcing two other new hires — Sean Simon as senior vice president of sales and Risa Crandell as vice president of sales.
Harnevo, meanwhile, will remain on Eyeview’s board of directors.
“It’s been a long and incredible ride for the last 13 years since I co-founded Eyeview, and I feel it’s time to let a new leader help propel Eyeview to its next chapter,” he said in a statement. “2019 has been a great year for Eyeview. With strong revenue growth, and seasoned additions to our leadership team, it’s the perfect time to bring on
[ad] Empty ad slot (#1)!
industry veterans like Rob, Sean and Risa to accelerate our business as I depart to work on my next venture while supporting Eyeview on the board of directors.”Deichert acknowledged that it can be challenging to step into the shoes of a company’s founder, but he said he consulted with Harnevo before taking the job.
“I was just emailing with him today,” he added. “He’s going to be a great partner going forward.”
Rob Deichert
Deichert also said he has a standard on-boarding process when he joins a new company, which involves holding 30-minute, one-on-one meetings with every single person. (In this case, that means holding nearly 100 meetings.)
And while Eyeview has been around for more than a decade, Deichert suggested that there’s still plenty of room for its “outcome-based video marketing” (its specialty is video ads that are personalized based on viewer data) to grow.
In particular, he predicted that as direct-to-consumer brands are “maxing out on Facebook,” they’ll start turning back to traditional ad channels like television. With Eyeview, they can do that without losing the measurement and customization of online video.
Powered by WPeMatico