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Slack files to go public, reports $138.9M in losses on revenue of $400.6M
Slack has filed to go public via a direct listing. Similar to what Spotify did last year, this means that the company won’t have a traditional IPO, and will instead allow existing shareholders to sell their stock to investors.
The company’s S-1 filing says it plans to make $100 million worth of shares available, but that’s probably a placeholder figure.
The S-1 offers data about the company’s financial performance, reporting a net loss of $138.9 million and revenue of $400.6 million in the fiscal year ending January 31, 2019. That’s compared to a loss of $140.1 million on revenue of $220.5 million for the year before.
The company attributes these losses to its decision “to invest in growing our business to capitalize on our market opportunity,” and notes that they’re shrinking as a percentage of revenue.
Slack also says that in the three months ending on January 31, it had more than 10 million daily active users across more than 600,000 organizations — 88,000 on the paid plan and 550,000 on the free plan.
In the filing, the company says the Slack team created the product to meet its own collaboration needs.
“Since our public launch in 2014, it has become apparent that organizations worldwide have similar needs, and are now finding the solution with Slack,” it says. “Our growth is largely due to word-of-mouth recommendations. Slack usage inside organizations of all kinds is typically initially driven bottoms-up, by end users. Despite this, we (and the rest of the world) still have a hard time explaining Slack. It’s been called an operating system for teams, a hub for collaboration, a connective tissue across the organization, and much else. Fundamentally, it is a new layer of the business technology stack in a category that is still being defined.”
The company suggests that the total market opportunity for Slack and other makers of workplace collaboration software is $28 billion, and it plans to grow through strategies like expanding its footprint within organizations already using Slack, investing in more enterprise features, expanding internationally and growing the developer ecosystem.
The risk factors mentioned in the filing sound pretty boilerplate and/or similar to other internet companies going public, like the aforementioned net losses and the fact that its current growth rate might not be sustainable, as well as new compliance risks under Europe’s GDPR.
Slack has previously raised a total of $1.2 billion in funding, according to Crunchbase, from investors including Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Social Capital, SoftBank, Google Ventures and Kleiner Perkins.
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RosieReality, a Swiss startup using AR to get kids interested in robotics and programming, scores $2.2M seed
RosieReality, a startup out of Zürich developing consumer augmented reality experiences, has raised $2.2 million in seed funding led by Redalpine. Other backers include Shasta Ventures, Atomico partners Mattias Ljungman and Siraj Khaliq (both of whom invested in a personal capacity) and Akatsuki Entertainment Fund.
Founded in early 2018, RosieReality’s first AR experience is designed to ignite kids interested in robotics and programming. The smart phone camera-based app is centred around “Rosie,” a cute AR robot that inhabits a “Lego-like” modular AR world within which you and your friends are tasked with building and solving world-size 3D puzzles.
The kicker: to solve these 3D-puzzle games requires “programming” Rosie to move around the augmented reality world.
“By developing Rosie the Robot, we created the first interactive and modular world that exclusively lives in your camera feed,” RosieReality co-founder and CEO Selim Benayat tells TechCrunch. “We use this new computational platform to enable kids to creatively build, solve and share world-sized puzzle games with friends and families – much like modern-day Lego.”
Describing Rosie the Robot’s typical users as teens that “like the challenge of intricately crafted puzzles,” Benayat says part of the inspiration behind the AR game was remembering how as a kid he used to love spending time building stuff and then inviting friends over to show them what he’d built.
“Kids today are not that different,” he argues, before adding that AR makes it possible for them to have the same tangible and contextual sensation while giving them a bigger outlet for their creativity.
“We see the camera as a tool to teach and enable [the] next generation of creators. For us gaming is the ultimate creative, social and educational outlet,” says the RosieReality CEO.
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Carbon, the fast-growing 3D printing business, is raising up to $300M
Carbon, the poster child for 3D printing, has authorized the sale of $300 million in Series E shares, according to a Delaware stock filing uncovered by PitchBook. If Carbon raises the full amount, it could reach a valuation of $2.5 billion.
Using its proprietary Digital Light Synthesis technology, the business has brought 3D printing technology to manufacturing, building high-tech sports equipment, a line of custom sneakers for Adidas and more. It was valued at $1.7 billion by venture capitalists with a $200 million Series D in 2018.
Carbon declined to comment on its upcoming fundraising plans.
Redwood City-based Carbon is well-capitalized. To date, it’s raised a total of $422 million from investors like Sequoia, GV, Fidelity, General Electric, Hydra Ventures and Adidas Ventures, not including the incoming round of capital.
Carbon wants to help designers and manufacturers be more efficient, cut costs and waste less energy and materials. Under the leadership of co-founder and chief executive officer Joseph DeSimone, the company recently promoted Craig Carlson, their former vice president of engineering, to chief technology officer.
“We are at the forefront of digital manufacturing, creating a new standard for the industry. In order to continue pushing the boundaries of what our technology can do and to execute our global growth strategy, we need to have the best team at the top,” DeSimone said in a statement following news of the promotion.
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Movie subscription service Sinemia is ending US operations
Over the past few months, Sinemia has gone from promising MoviePass competitor to the source of frustration for moviegoers across the country. After rumors surfaced earlier this week that it would be backing away from its troubled subscription-based movie ticket offering, it posted official word tonight that it will be shutting down operations in the U.S.
“Today, with a heavy heart, we’re announcing that Sinemia is closing its doors and ending operations in the US effective immediately,” the company writes in a statement posted to its front page.
The service has also struggled with issues of monetization (not unlike MoviePass), leading onlookers to wonder ultimately how sustainable the subscription model is. Those issues have been coupled by increased competition from movie theater chains like AMC offering up their own services, even as Sinemia attempted to create a white label version for theaters.
In recent months, the company has been plagued by lawsuits from both MoviePass and moviegoers, the latter of whom took issue with app problems, hidden charges and policies of shuttering accounts.
“While we are proud to have created a best in market service, our efforts to cover the cost of unexpected legal proceedings and raise the funds required to continue operations have not been sufficient,” the company writes. “The competition in the US market and the core economics of what it costs to deliver Sinemia’s end-to-end experience ultimately lead us to the decision of discontinuing our US operations.”
Sinemia has expressed surprise at the breadth of negative reactions its received from users. In a recent interview CEO Rifat Oguz told TechCrunch, “We are taking it seriously. We are looking at every comment. We didn’t found the company a year ago. It started about five years ago. We are taking every negative comment very seriously.”
To that end, the company has set up multiple sites aimed at addressing user problems. Ultimately, however, operations were just not sustainable here in the States. The note doesn’t clarify whether the service will continue to operate abroad in places like the U.K., Canada, Australia and Turkey, where much of its staff is currently based. Nor is it clear when the end of operations in the U.S. will mean for those customers who are owed money on their accounts. From the note, however, it does sound as if active accounts will be terminated immediately.
We’ve reached out for additional clarification.
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Uber will reportedly seek up to $90 billion valuation in IPO
Uber is reportedly looking to sell shares between $44 to $50, aiming to raise $8 to $10 billion in the offering. This would value the company between $80 billion to $90 billion, Bloomberg reports.
Previous reports had pegged Uber’s valuation at around $120 billion. Still, that valuation is higher than its last valuation of $76 billion following a funding round.
It’s likely this decrease in valuation is influenced by Lyft’s performance on the public market. Since its debut on the Nasdaq, Lyft’s stock has suffered after skyrocketing nearly 10 percent on day one.
While Uber has yet to officially set the terms of its IPO, the company is reportedly expected to do so as early as tomorrow. Even if Uber seeks the low end of the expected range, it would be more than three times the amount of Lyft’s $2.34 billion IPO. It would also make Uber’s IPO the largest one in the U.S. since Alibaba’s in 2014.
In 2018, Uber reported 2018 revenues of $11.27 billion, net income of $997 million and adjusted EBITDA losses of $1.85 billion. Uber, which filed for its IPO two weeks ago, is expected to list on the New York Stock Exchange in May.
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The Markup faces staff exodus and funder scrutiny following ouster of Julia Angwin
The Markup appears to be facing a staff revolt — and its financial backers may be reconsidering their support — following the firing of editor-in-chief Julia Angwin.
When the site was announced last fall, it was backed by $20 million from Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, with additional funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The goal was to do data-driven journalism about the impact of technology on society.
Angwin and her co-founder Jeff Larson seemed particularly well-suited for the job — both are award-winning journalists who worked together at ProPublica, where they did impactful reporting around topics like Facebook’s ad practices.
However, Angwin was fired on Monday, a move she blamed in interviews on executive director Sue Gardner’s plan to turn the site into “a cause, not a publication,” with headlines like “Facebook is a dumpster fire.”
This, Angwin said, was at odds with her own dedication to “evidence-based, data-driven journalism.”
Larson, who’s now become editor-in-chief, offered a different account on Medium, where he said work had fallen “far, far behind” by the end of 2018: “Hiring was slow. Recruitment was slow. Even as of this month, we didn’t have stories banked. We didn’t have editorial processes in place to accept and develop pieces.”
He said that he and Angwin were both asked to take management classes, but she refused. (Angwin acknowledged that she may have had things to learn about being editor-in-chief, but she noted that she’s led investigative teams in the past, and she said, “There was never any attempt to guide me into that learning.”)
Larson also alluded to other issues that led to “a breakdown in trust between the three of us as co-founders.” He said there were attempts to find other roles for Angwin, but she “refused to discuss any role other than Editor in Chief, and would not consider any other configuration. So unfortunately we made the decision to remove her from that role.”
The editorial team of @team_markup has signed a statement of unequivocal support for our Editor in Chief, @JuliaAngwin: pic.twitter.com/aTRsmM6oeo
— The Real Team Markup (@MarkupReal) April 23, 2019
The editorial team has sided with Angwin, with all of them posting a statement supporting her and praising her “effectiveness as a manager and an editor.” Five of the seven editorial team members also resigned in protest.
As a result of all the controversy, Newmark and the other funders of The Markup have issued a statement of their own, saying that while they’re still “committed to the mission of The Markup,” they’ve also decided “it is necessary to reassess our support and we are taking steps to do so.”
I am taking this very seriously. More to come… pic.twitter.com/dXQ6L7BffD
— craig newmark (@craignewmark) April 24, 2019
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Kiwi’s food delivery bots are rolling out to 12 more colleges
If you’re a student at UC Berkeley, the diminutive rolling robots from Kiwi are probably a familiar sight by now, trundling along with a burrito inside to deliver to a dorm or apartment building. Now students at a dozen more campuses will be able to join this great, lazy future of robotic delivery as Kiwi expands to them with a clever student-run model.
Speaking recently at TechCrunch’s Robotics + AI Session at the Berkeley campus, Kiwi’s Felipe Chavez and Sasha Iatsenia discussed the success of their burgeoning business and the way they planned to take it national.
In case you’re not aware of the Kiwi model, it’s basically this: When you place an order online with a participating restaurant, you have the option of delivery via Kiwi. If you so choose, one of the company’s fleet of knee-high robots with insulated, locking storage compartments will swing by the place, your order is put within, and it brings it to your front door (or as close as it can reasonably get). You can even watch the last bit live from the robot’s perspective as it rolls up to your place.
The robots are what Kiwi calls “semi-autonomous.” This means that although they can navigate most sidewalks and avoid pedestrians, each has a human monitoring it and setting waypoints for it to follow, on average every five seconds. Iatsenia told me that they’d tried going full autonomous and that it worked… most of the time. But most of the time isn’t good enough for a commercial service, so they’ve got humans in the loop. They’re working on improving autonomy, but for now this is how it is.
That the robots are being controlled in some fashion by a team of people in Colombia (from where the co-founders hail) does take a considerable amount of the futurism out of this endeavor, but on reflection it’s kind of a natural evolution of the existing delivery infrastructure. After all, someone has to drive the car that brings you your food, as well. And in reality, most AI is operated or informed directly or indirectly by actual people.
That those drivers are in South America operating multiple vehicles at a time is a technological advance over your average delivery vehicle — though it must be said that there is an unsavory air of offshoring labor to save money on wages. That said, few people shed tears over the wages earned by the Chinese assemblers who put together our smartphones and laptops, or the garbage pickers who separate your poorly sorted recycling. The global labor economy is a complicated one, and the company is making jobs in the place it was at least partly born.
Whatever the method, Kiwi has traction: it’s done more than 35,000 deliveries at an increasing rate since it started two years ago (now up to over 10,000 per month) and the model seems to have proven itself. Customers are happy, they get stuff delivered more than ever once they get the app and there are fewer and fewer incidents where a robot is kicked over or, you know, catches on fire. Notably, the founders said onstage, the community has really adopted the little vehicles, and should one overturn or be otherwise interfered with, it’s often set on its way soon after by a passerby.
Iatsenia and Chavez think the model is ready to push out to other campuses, where a similar effort will have to take place — but rather than do it themselves by raising millions and hiring staff all over the country, they’re trusting the robotics-loving student groups at other universities to help out.
For a small and low-cash startup like Kiwi, it would be risky to overextend by taking on a major round and using that to scale up. They started as robotics enthusiasts looking to bring something like this to their campus, so why can’t they help others do the same?
So the team looked at dozens of universities, narrowing them down by factors important to robotic delivery: layout, density, commercial corridors, demographics and so on. Ultimately they arrived at the following list:
- Northern Illinois University
- University of Oklahoma
- Purdue University
- Texas A&M
- Parsons
- Cornell
- East Tennessee State University
- University of Nebraska-Lincoln
- Stanford
- Harvard
- NYU
- Rutgers
What they’re doing is reaching out to robotics clubs and student groups at those colleges to see who wants to take partial ownership of Kiwi administration out there. Maintenance and deployment would still be handled by Berkeley students, but the student clubs would go through a certification process and then do the local work, like a capsized bot and on-site issues with customers and restaurants.
“We are exploring several options to work with students down the road, including rev share,” Iatsenia told me. “It depends on the campus.”
So far they’ve sent 40 robots to the 12 campuses listed and will be rolling out operations as the programs move forward on their own time. If you’re not one of the unis listed, don’t worry — if this goes the way Kiwi plans, it sounds like you can expect further expansion soon.
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Render gets $2.25M seed round to give developers alternative to biggest names in tech
A couple of weeks ago, when Pinterest filed its S-1, its AWS bills raised eyebrows and questions about cheaper alternatives for startups. Render is a small startup with a big idea to provide infrastructure services for developers, who might be looking for a cheaper and easier alternative to bigger, more familiar names. The company launched today with broad ambition and $2.25 million in seed funding from General Catalyst and the South Park Common Fund.
As developers work with increasingly complex sets of technologies, it often requires teams of people to launch an application and keep it running.”What we’re doing at Render is making it incredibly easy and quick for application developers to deploy their applications online without knowledge of servers, and without having a DevOps person with them,” Anurag Goel, founder and CEO, told TechCrunch.
Steve Herrod, managing director at General Catalyst and former CTO at VMware, knows a thing or two about infrastructure, and he sees a company that could provide a viable alternative to the established players in this space. “Render is building the logical next step to cloud infrastructure — making it disappear. Application developers clearly want to focus on the functionality and usability of their work, and not on server setup, deployment and scaling. Render is enabling exactly this focus and that’s why early developer users love it so much,” he said in a statement.
The company is going after companies like Salesforce and Heroku on the platform side and AWS, Azure, GCP and even DigitalOcean on the infrastructure side. It is not an easy market to ease your way into, but Goel believes he has come up with a solution that is cost-effective and easy to use, and that could help separate him from these established brands.
The complexity of today’s application environment requires teams of highly trained engineers to implement. While a company like Harness is trying to reduce that complexity by providing Continuous Delivery as a Service, Render is going at it from a different angle by providing a platform and infrastructure to launch and manage applications more easily.
“We’re focused, first and foremost, on developer experience and ease of use. And we’ve seen over and over again, that when you look at AWS and Azure and GCP, they force you to build out these large DevOps teams that take care of all the infrastructure needs,” he said. He believes part of the problem with the larger company approaches is that they put this expensive engineering layer between the developer and the application they created, and Render brings the developer closer to the process.
The company got the funding last year, but is announcing now because it wasn’t really ready to launch at that point, and didn’t want to announce the funding before it had a viable product.
Goel got his start as an early employee at Stripe, a company that made it simple for developers to add payment infrastructure to an application. He is hoping to bring that same level of simplicity to application hosting.
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Mejuri raises $23M Series B to serve women buying jewelry for themselves
New Enterprise Associates, the 42-year-old venture capital firm, has invested in the $23 million Series B round for Mejuri, a startup capturing millennial women’s penchant for affordable and treat yo’ self type of jewelry rather than diamonds and precious stones for special occasions.
It’s the latest instance of startups drawing investor interest with their direct-to-customer retail model. Based in Toronto and Buenos Aires, four-year-old Mejuri designs, makes and sells jewelry directly to women online and through offline showrooms, bypassing middle-person costs. Besides striving for reasonable prices, Mejuri also wants to upend an entrenched practice in its industry.
Traditional jewelry, the startup points out, targets men for gifting and makes higher markups acceptable. With its D2C play, Mejuri believes it’s putting the purchasing decision back with women; indeed, it found 75 percent of its customers are buying for themselves. Its team of 120 employees is constantly on the watch for trends and consumer feedback, a strategy made possible by its online presence of more than 422,000 Instagram followers. Instead of releasing large batches of seasonal pieces, Mejuri adapts the so-called “drop” model that introduces only a small quantity of products each week, which allows it to timely translate customer sentiments into designs.
Photo source: Mejuri
Another enabling factor is the company’s female-led team: 80 percent of the staff are women, headed by founder Noura Sakkijha, a third-generation jeweler and a former industrial engineer who scored the company’s latest capital when she was seven months pregnant with two twins.
“Mejuri’s mission really hits home for me,” said NEA partner Vanessa Larco in a statement. “I noticed a shift in trends when none of my friends wanted to go to any of the traditional fine jewelry companies to purchase jewelry anymore, and I realized a lot of those big brands were in trouble.”
Natalie Massenet, founder of Net-a-Porter and partner at Imaginary, another venture fund that participated in Mejuri’s Series B, said the startup is set to “disrupt” the jewelry industry through supply chain standards that modern consumers demand, “like sourcing from conflict-free and socially responsible diamond suppliers and maintaining affordable prices to serve a consumer who is buying for herself and her friends.”
The user-centric focus has brought customer loyalty to Mejuri. The startup claims that 30 percent of its monthly transactions come from returning shoppers, and 70,000 customers are on the waitlist for its products. It’s accumulated a total of 20 million visitors to its website and released 1,500 designs since launch. Revenues have quadrupled year-over-year for the fourth consecutive year, and the company, one of TechCrunch’s favorite picks from 500 Startups’ Batch 15 Demo Day three years ago, said it’s on track to achieve the same level of traction in 2019.
The new proceeds bring Mejuri’s total funds raised to more than $29 million to date. Others in the new funding round include follow-on backers Felix Capital, BDC Capital, Incite Ventures and Dash Ventures. The company plans to spend its latest financial injection on offline expansion, overseas growth and investment in branding and customer experience.
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Meet the 13 startups launching out of Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator
The Entrepreneurs’ Roundtable Accelerator is today presenting yet another batch of startups to the world at its Demo Day in NYC. ERA has already launched a total of 180 startups which have raised more than $300 million and are collectively valued at more than $2 billion.
This sixteenth class is comprised of 13 companies across a variety of sectors, all of whom have received $100K in investment from the accelerator.
So without any further ado, here’s a look at the startups launching out of ERA today:
Apteo is a platform that helps financial institutions &mash; analysts, equity researchers, asset managers, etc. — make sense of all the data at their fingertips without actually hiring a data scientist. The key features of the product include continuously updated data (on the interval of your choice), automatically cleaned and normalized data, and easy-to-use access to troves of publicly available datasets.
CareSwitch matches home care agencies with qualified professionals. The platform gives agencies a reliable and steady stream of candidates to match supply with demand, and gives home care professionals the chance to work more flexibly across multiple agencies. The platform also manages payroll, benefits and employee records.
Cloudonix is a CRM platform that facilitates and aggregates conversations between businesses and their consumers via voice, text, and video over IP.
Confetti is a product that helps companies with their various events. Event planners can specify the requirements around their event and then be matched with vendors. Confetti also generates proposals for the various vendors and handles the logistics for customers.
Riding the wave of investment in eco-friendly food, HoneyFlower Foods is offering plant-based, grab-and-go meals that are sold both through physical retailers or sold wholesale to offices.
Iterate Labs is a hardware company that has developed the Delta-1 wearable focused on improving workplace safety. The wrist-worn wearable tracks repetitive wrist and arm movement and lets managers track the safety of their employees from the moment they walk out on the floor for the first time.
Maverick Retirement offers customers a special bank account, either as an alternative or a compliment to an existing IRA, that allows those customers to choose their investments in assets such as real estate, technology startups, etc.
Moon is a new payments platform that allows online retailers to accept cryptocurrency for purchases. The Moon browser extension gives users the chance to attach their Coinbase account or other wallet to make transactions in crypto. For now, Moon is only operational on Amazon.com, but the company says it will soon roll out to “any of your favorite ecommerce websites.”
Pawlicy Advisor, a pet insurance broker, allows pet parents to select a plan that makes the most sense for their specific breed of animal and its respective health risks.
Piecewise is looking to make a different in the student debt crisis. The payment platform lets universities and financial institutions lower student loan default rates and manage their loan portfolios. Borrowers can save toward their loan payments via round-ups and auto-save features, as well as refinance their loans.
Scopio is looking to take on Shutterstock with its own platform of high-quality commercial images taken by social media users. The platform looks to offer a steady stream of fresh new images to clients at a fraction of the cost while allowing anyone to submit their own photos and make some extra cash.
Soundmind is a system that lets senior care providers manage and customize voice assistants to better serve their customers. The platform gives seniors the ability to simply ask about their daily schedule, what’s on the menu at dinner, or make a request from the staff. These queries are centralized for the organization’s staff so they can spend less time organizing and more time serving their clients.
Yogi is a tool that helps businesses aggregate and understand all the feedback that comes back about its product. This includes product reviews, customer interviews and survey results, usability tests and more. This information is pulled from all its various sources and translated into actionable insights.
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