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Hormonal health is a massive opportunity: Where are the unicorns?
Gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse, but Elizabeth Ruzzo says she experienced it firsthand after telling a doctor that she suffered from suicidal ideation after taking birth control pills.
Hormonal health sits at the center of conversations around personalized medicine and women’s health: By 2025, women’s health could be a $50 billion industry, and by 2026, digital health more broadly is estimated to hit $221 billion.
Ruzzo’s doctor told her there was no connection between birth control and self-harm, but she decided to stop taking the pill to see if her mental health improved. When it did, Ruzzo grasped the disconnect between women’s unique hormonal makeup and blanket-statement practices from medicine today.
Her realization led her to found Adyn Health, a startup that proactively helps women make health decisions that complement their hormonal state and background. The company started with, of course, helping people pick more personalized birth control.
Ruzzo is part of a group of growing entrepreneurs who are betting that hormonal health is the key wedge into the digital health boom. Hormones are fluctuating, ever-evolving and diverse — but these founders say they’re also key to solving many health conditions that disproportionately impact women, from diabetes to infertility to mental health challenges.
Many believe it’s that complexity that underscores the opportunity. Hormonal health sits at the center of conversations around personalized medicine and women’s health: By 2025, women’s health could be a $50 billion industry, and by 2026, digital health more broadly is estimated to hit $221 billion.
Still, as funding for women’s health startups drops and stigma continues to impact where venture dollars go, it’s unclear whether the sector will remain in its infancy or hit a true inflection point.
The future is proactive
Ruzzo views Adyn as a precision medicine startup. Its main product is an at-home test that tracks hormone levels, assesses genetic risk for specific side effects, and then gives recommendations for which birth control methods best suits the customer with the fewest side effects.
By Ruzzo’s estimates, 98% of sexually active women use birth control for 30 years of their life. That sort of lifetime value proposition made the company look like a sweet deal to founders, and Adyn raised a $2.5 million seed in April 2021 in a round co-led by Lux Capital and M13.
The moonshot, though, is using that as a way to become a trusted partner in a woman’s life, helping understand baseline hormone levels throughout those 30 years.
“My hope is that we can use precision medicine approaches, including looking at genetic markers to identify reliable diagnostic criteria, that can remove that uncertainty and pain and diagnostic odyssey that people have to go through,” Ruzzo said.
If Adyn becomes a trusted partner with teenage women, it could reach a point where it can detect changes in hormone levels over time.
“The hormone reference ranges that are used [in labs] are too broad to be personalized, let alone prescriptive,” she said. “And so what we’re hoping to do is correct for things that we know affect hormone levels like age, weight, ethnicity and compare you to your own expectations.”
If the first wave of digital health was a company like Ro, which answers consumers when they have a condition such as erectile dysfunction or hair loss, the second wave will look more like Adyn, which helps consumers navigate their health before getting diagnosed with a condition or experiencing issues.
The industry standard is still to wait for consumers to realize they have a condition, and then go to the doctor to manage their symptoms or look for a cure. A new startup that recently graduated from Y Combinator is finding its way into hormonal health through that angle.
One-tenth of all women are impacted by a hormonal condition
Veera Health is a startup that wants to help women in India manage polycystic ovary syndrome, or PCOS. The hormonal condition can cause irregular periods, infertility or gestational diabetes in women, as well as acne, weight gain and excessive hair growth. Plus, PCOS is far from rare, impacting one in 10 women.
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Simplified raises $2.2 million in seed to bring automated content creation to marketers
Simplified, a marketing-focused design software looking to take on Canva, has raised $2.2 million in seed funding led by Craft Ventures. Superhuman’s Rahul Vohra and Todd Goldberg, former Uber CPO Manik Gupta, Pelican Ventures’ Ajay Yadav (also Roomie founder), Form Capital, 8Bit Capital, Early Grey Capital, GFR Fund, MyAsia VC and others participated in the round.
Simplified is aimed directly at marketers, who are inevitably responsible for generating an enormous amount of content across a variety of channels. The platform uses machine learning to automate as much of the content creation process as possible, including copy, imagery, format and sizing, and more.
For example, a marketer could be looking to post an inspirational quote on social media. They can designate that the content is meant for social media, run a search for inspirational quotes and ask the system to automatically provide an appropriate background. From there, the user can tweak whatever they’d like, like typeface or image cropping, and instantly publish.
Image Credits: Simplified
Simplified also features collaborative tools that let teams share work and assets across the organization, as well as integrations with stock photo and video services.
The general principle here is to take what has already become a simplified process, through products like Canva, to the next level through machine learning and GPT3.
According to founder KD Deshpande, it’s all about scale. While it may be easier than ever to create a single piece of content, there is still the matter of volume. Simplified looks to speed up the process of content creation using its machine learning automation algorithms.
This comes in the midst of a massive evolution of the design space over the past several years, with players like InVision, Figma and Canva leading the charge in providing fresh, new design tools that meet the demands of a new generation of designers and design-oriented organizations.
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Ganaz raises $7M A round to rethink how agriculture workers get hired and paid
The agriculture sector is ripe for technological improvements, but beyond satellite-based crop management and bees-as-a-service, the actual people who work in the fields should be benefiting as well. Ganaz, empowered by a $7 million A round, aims to change how people with little documentation and no bank account get paid and send money with a modern workforce stack that embraces low tech as well.
Growers — that is to say, the companies that own and operate the fields and sell the crops — are under pressure from multiple directions as wages rise, regulations increase and willing workers dwindle. They need to save money to make money, but they can’t do so by paying less; in addition to being cruel to a marginalized class of people, it would only exacerbate the labor shortage in the sector.
There are plenty of companies out there that help save costs by automating things like payroll and onboarding, but the agriculture business has some unique limitations.
“It’s still operating like it’s the ’80s,” explained Ganaz founder and CEO Hannah Freeman. The number one service these workers rely on is check cashing or payday loans, and fees from these, currency exchange, ATM fees and remittances eat up a significant portion of each paycheck. “The workforce in our world definitely doesn’t have corporate email and rarely uses personal email. They have trouble downloading and using mobile apps, don’t use usernames. But they’re very conversant in WhatsApp and SMS — so you have to kind of know how to build for them.”
Image Credits: Ganaz
The ecosystem has parallels to other regions that have stuck with older, cheaper technologies instead of adopting the latest and most expensive tech. Entire markets in Africa and South America, for instance, run on text-based commerce taking place on aging and unreliable infrastructure.
Ganaz has opted for a hybrid approach. The company’s platform offers several services on both the worker and employer side.
Onboarding and basic training can be done simply and intuitively for people who may not be highly literate, via tablets loaded with apps that also operate offline. The most common alternative seems to be file folders served out of a crate in the back of a pickup — that’s not a dig, it’s just what has made sense for years for this highly fluid, distributed workforce.
Payment and balance checks all happen over SMS or WhatsApp with workers, but for sensitive information they are shunted to a web app; similarly, integrated remittance partnerships are coming that will keep things simple and reduce fees.
On the employer side, the workers and all their vital stats and documents are tracked centrally in the kind of interface companies have grown to expect. And Ganaz works as an intermediary to send text alerts and questions.
Image Credits: Ganaz
So far Ganaz has 75 employers signed up, one of which is a Costco supplier group, and all told around 175,000 workers on the platform. Their ARR and user count both approximately tripled year over year, so they’re clearly on to something.
The company has tempered its rapid growth with designation as a public benefit corporation, which emphasizes the intention to do more than grow shareholder value. I asked about the tension between needing to show a profit and working in the service of a marginalized group.
“This keeps me up at night,” admitted Freeman. “We try to make sure to set ourselves up to be true to our mission. That means the folks we hire, our board of directors… we want to make sure we’re empathizing and honoring the trust we’ve built with people.”
That includes investors as well, and Freeman noted that the company ended up going with Trilogy as lead for this round partly because of that firm’s experience with Remit.ly.
For instance, Freeman noted, while it would be easy to juice profits by bumping ATM fees, that directly harms the people they’re trying to help. Instead, when they issue their payroll Mastercard later this year, that will allow workers to skip the check cashing step and its fees, and then Ganaz gets a share of the normal card transaction fee. “We can be equally successful that way,” said Freeman, and it doesn’t just replace another predatory structure.
After the cards the plan is to automate remittances, so a user can easily choose to send money to their family in a way that minimizes handling fees and so on. And there will be other options, accessible via text, to choose where money goes if not to the card.
Ganaz’s main market is the U.S. and Mexico, since the agriculture business and workforce are both largely binational, but there are other targets on the horizon. First, though, the company wants to solidify its position and feature set here. “There’s no breakaway winner yet, so we want to be that winner,” said Freeman.
The $7 million round also had participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, Founders’ Co-op, Taylor Ventures, AgFunder and Techstars. Rapid expansion and aggressive pursuit of the roadmap are next up for Ganaz.
“We are conscious of both the huge opportunity ahead of us to digitize billions of dollars in payroll, as well as the responsibility to build inclusive, low-cost, wealth-building tools for workers,” said Freeman.
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Frst and Fabric Ventures announce fellowship program for crypto entrepreneurs
VC funds Frst and Fabric Ventures are teaming up to create Le Crypto Fellowship. With this program, the two firms want to find the next 10 crypto entrepreneurs in France. And they think they might foster the most promising crypto startups if they don’t have any preconceived idea and team yet.
As Pierre Entremont from Frst writes in a Medium post, there are a lot of opportunities if you want to build the next crypto success, but few entrepreneurs are actively looking at this space.
“Nearly all crypto developers and entrepreneurs are already rich and therefore don’t step up their ambition,” he writes.
Blockchain development and DeFi projects are nearly always open source. Learning resources are available for free around the web. So it’s not that hard to get started and build a prototype, but you have to get started. Frst and Fabric Ventures think they can create the right framework to incentivize the next generation of entrepreneurs.
If you get accepted into the program, the two VC firms will hand you €100,000 in exchange for 7% of your company. Basically, this should cover one year of salary for one person in France with a salary of €50,000, €21,000 in employer contributions and €29,000 in expenses. You can be based in another country as long as it’s in the same time zone and you incorporate your company in France.
This way, you get to play around and think about an ambitious idea without feeling any financial pressure. You’ll join a Discord channel with other fellows and you’ll attend weekly Zoom meetings during the first few months. After that, Fabric Ventures and Frst partners will schedule regular office hours with you to check in on your progress.
If you end up creating a proper company and taking your idea to the next level, the fellowship may later ask to invest an additional €700,000 for a 20% stake in the company.
Candidates can apply until June 15. Le Crypto Fellowship isn’t looking for people who already have an idea or are only available part-time. But if you want to join as a team of two or three, you can. Instead of €100,000, you’ll get €200,000 or €300,000. Working as a team will probably help you remain motivated over the long haul.
This isn’t the first startup mentoring program. The Thiel Fellowship is arguably the most well-known. But Le Crypto Fellowship doesn’t limit itself to college dropouts and has a different focus. It’s going to be interesting to see if it pans out and if the VC firms will have a second, a third and a fourth batch down the road.
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The existential cost of decelerated growth
What happens to technology companies with slowing growth and a rising focus on profitability before they reach behemoth scale? How much does the market value hypergrowth?
Just because a technology startup has a hot start, that doesn’t mean it will grow quickly forever. Most will wind up somewhere in the middle — or worse. Put simply, there is a larger number of tech companies that do fine or a little bit worse after they reach scale.
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But what every investor hopes for is the hot company that can keep growth alive even after reaching material scale, running through walls, competitors, economic headwinds and anything else that comes its way. Those companies don’t end up worth a few hundred million, or a billion, but can end up valued in the dozens of billions or more.
In reverse, tech companies — even those with strong gross margins — with slipping growth can see their multiples compress rapidly. Then, the vultures circle.
Which explains some of the news we’ve seen recently in the market. As Dropbox comes under fresh pressure from external parties, joining its erstwhile rival Box in the public-market growth penalty box, we’re seeing companies like Braze, Gong, Shippo and others rip ahead with rapid-fire funding rounds or public brags about their growth.
While the differential between the two groups is clear, it’s still worth exploring in more detail. Let’s talk about the growth dividend. Or, if you’d prefer, the existential cost of growth deceleration.
Grow or die
The news this week that Dropbox has attracted an activist shareholder should not have been a surprise. Its former rival Box is in the midst of a long-running struggle with an activist investor of its own. (More here.)
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Realtime Robotics raises a $31M Series A
Boston-based Realtime Robotics this morning announced a $31.4 million round. The funding is part of the $11.7 million Series A the company announced all the way back in late 2019. Investors include HAHN Automation, SAIC Capital Management, Soundproof Ventures , Heroic Ventures, SPARX Asset Management, Omron Ventures, Toyota AI Ventures, Scrum Ventures and Duke Angels.
Realtime is one of a number of startups building control on top of industrial robotics. Specifically, the startup looks to help companies deploy systems with limited programming, offering adaptable controls that work for multiple systems at once.
This round, which nearly doubles the company’s existing funding, will be used to accelerate its product development and extend its offering to more markets, globally. It comes as interest in robotics have ramped up amid the global pandemic.
“This investment by some of the world’s leading manufacturers and automation providers stands as a testament to our ability to dramatically improve the value proposition for robotic implementations,” CEO Peter Howard says in a release. “Having already realized early deployment success, a broad spectrum of customers and partners are working closely with us to refine features and user experiences, readying our technology for rollouts in their engineering, factory and warehouse operations.”
The company’s offerings serve a wide range of different industrial robotics tasks, including pick and place machines, packaging and palletizing boxes.
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Architect Capital brings alternative capital to the early stage with new $100M fund
Early-stage startups are increasingly looking for alternative ways to access capital, meaning not every company wants to raise money from VCs or take on debt.
In recent years, a flurry of startups have emerged to give companies other options. (Think Pipe, for example.)
And today, San Francisco-based Architect Capital is a new firm that is launching with over $100 million in funds to serve as an “asset-based lender” to “high-growth,” early-stage tech companies. Specifically, the new firm aims to provide non-dilutive or less-dilutive financing options to asset-rich fintech, e-commerce and SaaS companies in the U.S. and Latin America, but with an emphasis on the latter. The region, Architect maintains, does not have a plethora of institutional financing available against assets.
The firm is not out to replace traditional venture capital or venture debt, emphasizes founder and CEO James Sagan, but rather to offer asset-based products that will complement them.
For some context, Sagan is no stranger to the startup world, having co-founded and served as managing partner of Arc Labs, an early-stage credit fund focused on lending to technology-enabled businesses. He’s been investing in Latin America for years, and recognized the need for new forms of financing to fund “novel and underappreciated assets.”
Also, he believes the region is home to “the most prominent fintech ecosystem in the world.”
To Sagan, traditional forms of equity and debt financing in the venture world are vital for things like growing headcount, but he believes they are “not engineered to support the growth of a company’s underlying financial products.”
“VC is highly dilutive and should be used for ROI activities such as hiring engineers and building great teams,” Sagan told TechCrunch. “It’s expensive to use equity to fund assets. Equity should not be put in a loan book. We’ll fund the loan book.”
Image Credits: Architect Capital founder James Sagan / Architect Capital
Architect’s goal is to provide “tailored and less dilutive funding,” especially to companies that produce repeatable revenues, such as SaaS and subscription businesses.
Sagan said he first discovered the strategy in 2015 when he was working for a multifamily office that was lending against a bunch of traditional assets.
“A colleague and good friend of mine started a business and raised some equity and venture debt, but he couldn’t find the asset-specific financing for the receivables he was generating,” Sagan recalls. “He was lending to small businesses and needed asset-specific financing against those receivables.”
Venture debt doesn’t really work for receivables-based lending because venture debt shops typically are underwriting assets, or rather, underwriting the quality of the investors in the company, Sagan believes.
“So we really tailor our underwriting towards those assets themselves right and those assets range from unsecured consumer receivables to secure small business receivables to real estate,” he told TechCrunch. “Essentially, we’re providing an additional instrument for asset-heavy businesses that will allow them to scale in a way that venture debt will not.”
Architect’s LPs are mostly large institutions, as opposed to traditional high net worth individuals. The firm’s average check size will land at around $10 million to $15 million.
“Our portfolio allocation is more concentrated in general,” Sagan said. “We expect to grow our AUM (assets under management) pretty precipitously.”
Architect Capital has invested in six companies since inception, including PayJoy, a company that delivers consumer financing and smartphone technology to customers in emerging markets; Forum Brands, a U.S.-based e-commerce marketplace aggregator; and ADDI, a fintech that aims to give Colombian consumers access to fair and affordable credit through point-of-sale-financing that recently raised $65 million.
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Little Black Door launches app on iOS/Android allowing women to share wardrobes, online and off
Our relationship with fashion has changed, and not just because of the pandemic. Months in lockdown means people are probably more aware of their fashion purchases and how they consume, given its been such a long time without socializing. But the oft-talked about “Clueless” wardrobe, which would allow women to both see into their collections, as well as share and potentially borrow from friends, has yet to go mainstream. Now a U.K. startup aims to change this.
The Little Black Door app, previously in closed beta, has just launched on the Apple iOS store here and on Android.
The app allows women to share the content of their wardrobes in an Instagram-like manner by creating collections (“Lookbooks”), as well as curate their private wardrobe for their own use, with a focus on premium and luxury fashion. Women, says LBD, can “see, style and share”, as well as resell and borrow clothes offline.
The Lookbook feature allows women to share wardrobes collections with friends or followers in a controlled way, a feature that lets users borrow from each other.
Co-founder Lexi Willetts tells me: “We’d simply gotten to a point where we didn’t know what fashion we owned, given that almost every other area of life allows this. Most fashion can be easily dash-boarded on our phones — we couldn’t understand why our wardrobe wasn’t! Equally the effort required to list an item on resale was also super hard.”
Willetts and co-founder Marina Pengilly came up with the app when they realized they could make as much as £30,000 a year reselling their luxury clothes and accessories online. LBD is going after four key trends: the rise of resale (Depop etc); rentals like Rent the Runway; AI in e-commerce; and re-receipts.
Users upload their wardrobe by taking a photo of an item. The app will then recognize the item using computer vision. Lookbooks showcases fashion collections; new and old also have an “I have this” button, allowing users to add items to their own wardrobes, or add as they buy automatically via links to retailers.
Another key feature allows users to see into their own wardrobes to see what they have, and, crucially, see how much they’ve spent, and own, in value.
Users can also create a Lookbook, not unlike on Pinterest, which can be shared with friends or a wider fashion community in a public or private group-controlled way. Lookbooks can be shared with a user’s network to allow them to see your style, or borrow the outfit in real life. As well as this, LBD itself also curates a feed of fashion/lifestyle news and surveys.
Willetts says partnerships with retailers and supplier deals for sales and fashion repairs are also in the offing.
LBD competes with the Save Your Wardrobe’ app.
But it is pushing the fact that it places a greater emphasis on sharing the wardrobe as well, also allowing people to borrow items With this focus on premium and luxury fashion this makes it a truly social wardrobe, says LBD.
The business model is likely to be a Premium version that unlocks extra features, affiliate revenues, advertising, and resale commissions.
Disclosure: Mike Butcher was an early, informal, adviser.
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Gong going gangbusters, grabs $250M Series E on $7.25B valuation
Gong, the revenue intelligence startup, has been raising capital at a rapid pace, and today the company announced another $250 million on a $7.25 billion valuation, a number that triples its previous valuation from last summer.
Franklin Templeton led today’s festivities with participation from Coatue, Salesforce Ventures, Sequoia, Thrive Capital and Tiger Global. The company raised $200 million last August at a $2.2 billion valuation, and has now raised $584 million, $450 million coming in the last year.
What is making investors open their wallets and pull out such large sums of cash? The company is helping solve a hard problem on how to bring more intelligence to the revenue process. They do this by using artificial intelligence to listen to every customer interaction, whether that’s a sales or service call (or anything else), and use that information to determine valuable information like who is most likely to buy and who is most likely to churn.
It’s been going well and CEO Amit Bendov says the company’s performance really validates the valuation. While he wasn’t ready to discuss specific numbers, he did say that ARR grew 2.3x between Q1 last year and this year, and he says Q2 is on pace to triple ARR.
“The valuation is up about 3x from last summer, but sales are more than 3x. We have high logo customers. [Last year], it was still unclear how COVID was going to impact us. People believed [our business] was going to do well [during the pandemic], but it wasn’t as obvious. Now, it is obvious. And all the […] financials are way better, so from a pure financials [perspective] our multipliers are pretty reasonable for our revenue trajectory,” he said.
With all this growth, the company is adding employees at a rapid pace. It closed the year with 400 people, and is up to around 550 today with a goal of reaching 950 by year end. It has partnered with a consulting firm called ReadySet, which helps companies build diverse and inclusive organizations, and Bendov says they are an equal-pay company.
Women represent around 40% of the employees and around 4% are Black, a number he hopes to increase by growing the Atlanta office. In the office in Israel, he has set up employment and training programs to build bridges to the Arab community.
Bendov says he looks forward to meeting his U.S. employees in the coming weeks when he’ll be visiting the Atlanta office for the first time.
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One Concern raises $45M from SOMPO to scale its disaster resilience platform across Japan
Climate change is intensifying across the globe, and one of the most challenging cases is Japan. In addition to lying on a major fault, the archipelago is increasingly inundated from rising sea levels that make the country more prone to disasters. A decade ago, the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami dealt billions of dollars in damage, and the recovery from that tragedy remains a major international relations flashpoint.
Technology to address disasters and resilience is a key area of venture capital investment these days, and now another startup in the space is proving that there is widespread interest in this growing market.
One Concern, which builds a platform to model and simulate community resilience and response to earthquakes, floods and other natural disasters, announced this morning that it has raised $45 million from SOMPO Holdings, the holding company of Japan’s SOMPO, one of the country’s largest insurers. The investment is part of a total $100 million, multi-year deal that will plug One Concern’s platform into the Japanese market.
Japan has been something of a gem in One Concern’s market development the past few years. The startup hired Hitoshi Akimoto as country manager for Japan in late 2019 before formally announcing that it was expanding to Japan in February 2020. In August last year, it announced a strategic partnership with SOMPO, and the insurer’s holding company invested $15 million. Today’s deal expands that partnership further.
According to its press release, One Concern will sell its platform to six or more Japanese cities as part of the tie-up.
Previously, One Concern had raised three rounds of capital according to Crunchbase and SEC filings: a seed round in October 2015, a $33 million Series A round led by NEA in 2017 and a $37 million round also co-led by NEA. The company was founded in 2015.
Update June 3, 2021: Rephrased SOMPO Holdings as the parent company of SOMPO, and not its venture wing.
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