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A profile of Discord, which lies at the center of the gaming world with 100M+ MAUs, as it pushes to turn into a communication tool for everyone, not just gamers — Most longtime Discord users have a similar origin story. They liked playing video games, and liked playing with their friends …
Cloud video surveillance company Eagle Eye Networks raises $40M Series E from Accel to invest in new AI projects such as license plate recognition — Eagle Eye Networks, a cloud video surveillance company, raised $40 million in Series E funding from Accel to advance its platform.
StackHawk, whose tech helps developers find application security vulnerabilities before they get into production, raises $10M Series A led by Sapphire Ventures — With a successful beta at its back and paying customers onboard, Denver application security startup StackHawk announced Tuesday …
Wise, a fintech startup that partners with other companies so that they can offer business bank accounts to their own customers, raises $12M Series A — Fintech startup Wise has raised a $12 million Series A round. The company offers business bank accounts with an interesting go-to-market strategy.
Skan, which helps enterprises automate repetitive business processes by combining data engineering with computer vision, raises $14M Series A — Skan.ai, an AI-enabled process discovery and operational intelligence platform, today closed $14 million in funding.
DriveWealth raises $56.7M Series C for its digital brokerage services that help broker-dealers and its global online partners access the US securities market — DriveWealth, LLC, a Chatam, N.J.-based global digital trading technology company, raised $56.7m in Series C funding.
The Internet Archive starts adding banners on some Wayback Machine pages with links that provide contextual information from fact-checking organizations — Fact checking organizations and origin websites sometimes have information about pages archived in the Wayback Machine.
Forty-six top US companies including Apple, Google, and Twitter have filed an amicus brief supporting a legal challenge to block Trump admin's H-1B visa changes — - The move comes in the wake of the US administration's proposal to scrap the computerized lottery system to grant H-1B work visas …
Odaseva, a France-based data protection services provider for large-scale Salesforce customers, raises $25M Series B led by Eight Roads Ventures — French SaaS company Odaseva has raised $25 million in Series B funding to continue growing its data governance platform for enterprise.
Profile of Shield AI, which raised money from a16z and others to develop autonomous military drones that scan buildings to help soldiers clear them — On the battlefield, any doorway can be a death trap. A special ops vet, and his businessman brother, have built an AI to solve that problem.
This is The TechCrunch Exchange, a newsletter that goes out on Saturdays, based on the column of the same name. You can sign up for the email here.
Over the past few months the IPO market made it plain that some public investors were willing to pay more for growth-focused technology shares than private investors. We saw this in both strong tech IPO pricing — the value set on companies as they debut — and in resulting first-day valuations, which were often higher.
One way to consider how far public valuations rose for tech startups, especially those with a software core in 2020, is to ask yourself how often you heard about a down IPO this year. Maybe a single time? At most? (You can catch up on 2020 IPO performance here, if you need to.)
IPO enthusiasm exposed a gap between what many venture capitalists and private investors were paying for tech shares, and what the public market was doing with its own valuation calculations. Insurtech startup Hippo’s $150 million private round from July is a good example. The company was valued at $1.5 billion in the round, a healthy uptick from its preceding private valuation. But if we valued it like the then-newly-public Lemonade, a related company, at the time, Hippo was priced inexpensively.
This week, however, the concept of private investors being more conservative than public investors in certain cases (some eight-figure private rounds happened this year at valuations that were even more bullish than public investor treatment of IPOs, to be clear) took a ding as most big tech companies lost ground, SaaS stocks sold off, and other tech firms struggled to keep up with investor enthusiasm.
Not only tech companies took a beating, but as I write to you on this Friday afternoon, the American stock markets were on a path for their worst week since March, CNBC reported, “led by major tech shares.”
A change in the wind? Perhaps.
Notable is that it was just in September that VCs seemed resigned to having startup valuations pulled higher by public markets’ endless optimism for related companies. Canaan’s Maha Ibrahim told me during Disrupt 2020 that it was a time when VCs had to “play the game” and pay up for startups, so long as companies were being “rewarded in the public markets for high growth the way that Snowflake” was at the time. A16z’s David Ulevitch concurred.
Perhaps that dynamic is changing as stocks dip. If so, startup valuations could decline en masse, along with the more exotic areas of startup-related finance. The SPAC boom, for example, may wane. Chatting with Hippo’s CEO Assaf Wand this week, he posited that SPACs were a market-response to the public-private valuation gap, an accelerant-cum-bridge to help startups get public while demand was hot for their equity.
Without the same red-hot demand for growth and risk, SPACs could cool. So, too, could private valuations that the hottest startups have taken for granted. Whether what we’re feeling in the wind this week is a hiccup or tipping point is not clear. But the public market’s fever for tech equities may have broken at a somewhat awkward time for Airbnb, Coinbase, DoorDash and other not-quite-yet-IPOs.
It started to snow this week where I live, putting a somewhat sad cap on an otherwise turbulent week. Still! There’s lots from our world to get into. Here’s our week’s market notes:
This week featured two IPOs that we cared about. MediaAlpha’s debut, giving the advertising-and-insurtech company a $19 per-share IPO price, quickly exploded out of the gate. Today the company is worth nearly $38 per share. Why? On its IPO day MediaAlpha CEO Steve Yi said that he had chosen the current moment because public markets had garnered an appreciation for insurtech. His share price growth seems to concur.
Until we look at Root, to some degree. Root, a neo-insurance provider focused on the automotive space, priced at $27 when it debuted this week, $2 above the top-end of its range. The company is now worth less than $24 per share. So, whatever wave MediaAlpha caught appears to have missed Root.
I honestly don’t know what to make of the difference in the two debuts, but please email in if you do know (you can just reply to this email, and I’ll get your note).
Regardless, I chatted with Root CEO Alex Timm after his company went public. The executive said that Root had laid down plans to go public a year ago, and that it can’t control market noise around the time of its debut. Timm stressed the amount of capital that Root added to its coffers — north of $1 billion — is a win. I asked how the company intended to not fuck up its newly swollen accounts, to which Timm said that his company was going to stay “laser focused” on its core automotive insurance opportunity.
Oh, and Root is based in Ohio. I asked what its debut might mean for Midwest startups. Timm was positive, saying that the IPO could highlight that there are a lot of smart folks and GDP in the middle of the country, even if venture capital tallies for the region remain underdeveloped.
Stay safe, and vote.
Intel launches new Iris Xe Max discrete GPU, with first laptops now available from Acer, Dell, and Asus — Try out Intel's new discrete GPU — Earlier this month, the public got its first glimpse of Iris Xe Max, Intel's new discrete GPU for thin-and-light laptops, at an Acer press event.
This week, GV General Partner (and TechCrunch alum) MG Siegler joined us on Extra Crunch Live for a far-ranging chat about what it takes to foster a good relationship between investor and startup, how portfolio management and investing has changed as the COVID-19 crisis drags on, and what Siegler expects will and won’t stick around in terms of changes in behavior in investment and entrepreneurship once the pandemic passes.
We last caught up with Siegler on the heels of his investment in Universe, a mobile-focused, e-commerce business-building startup. The coronavirus pandemic was relatively new and no one was sure how long it would last or what measures to contain it would look like. Now, with a few months of experience under his belt, Siegler told me that things have relatively settled into a new normal from his perspective as an investor – sometimes for worse, sometimes for better, but mostly just resulting in differences that require adaptation.
This select transcript has been edited for length and clarity. Aside from section headers, all text below is taken from MG Siegler’s responses to my questions.
Just talking about the business side of the equation, I do think that things have sort of stabilized in the day-to-day world here. For us, certainly, I think it’s it’s just as much of a factor though, of just learning how to operate in this in this weird and surreal environment, and knowing how to do remote meetings better. Knowing how to hop on quick Zoom calls, Hangouts, and phone calls, with portfolio companies, to help put out fires, and doing all board meetings remotely, and all that sort of stuff.
That seems like it’s pretty straightforward on paper, but in day-to-day operations, these are all different little learning things that you have to do and come across. I do feel like things are operating in a pretty streamlined manner, or as much as they can be at this point. But, you know, there’s always going to be some more wildcards – like we’re a week away, today, from from the US election.
Editor’s note: Get this free weekly recap of TechCrunch news that any startup can use by email every Saturday morning (7 a.m. PT). Subscribe here.
Let’s think beyond Monday, for a minute, to the trends playing out in technology this coming decade. While humanity’s problems have never been greater, our tools have never been better. Here’s more, from Danny Crichton:
The 2010s were all about executing on the dreams of mobile, cloud, and basic data. Those ideas had historical antecedents going back in some cases decades or more (Vannevar Bush’s description of the internet dates to the 1940s, for instance). But for the first time, we had the infrastructure and the users to actually build these products and make them useful. It was quite possibly the most extensive greenfield opportunity in the history of technology.
Yet, that greenfield is increasingly fallow. Business has cycles and seasonality as much as media reporting does. The easy stuff has been done. Building an app to text people has been done by dozens before. There are a multitude of analytics packages, and payroll providers, and credit card issuers, and more. What’s required this decade is to start to encroach on the harder questions, topics like how we build a better society, make people more empowered to do deep and creative work, and how we can build a more resilient and sustainable planet for all.
None of these topics have pure point solutions — but that is what is going to make this coming decade so damn interesting. It’s going to take intense collaboration, multiple inventions and products, as well as legal and cultural changes, to realize these next improvements. If you have grown sick (as I have) of the latest apps and SaaS products du jour, this decade is going to be an amazing one to experience and build.
In a companion article for Extra Crunch, he explores five key areas of the future, that he calls: Wellness, Climate, Data Society, Creativity and Fundamentals. Here’s an excerpt from the Data Society part:
Data may be ubiquitous, but it’s amazing how much work it can still be to calculate an LTV, or the return on an advertising campaign. No-code tools solve some of these problems, but what we need is a whole revolution in our data tools. We need to be able to sketch out lines of inquiry and have our tools augment our thinking from data. What are we missing? What gaps in our thinking should we be filling in? What data am I lacking to make a fully-formed decision? Am I overly biased toward one statistic versus a more holistic depiction of my situation? From personal decisions to business strategy, we need better tools to abstract the complexity of today’s modern society.
We also need better thinking around how to network knowledge. Roam Research and some other tools are starting to get better at helping users think in terms of a knowledge graph, but there is an incredible amount of potential if these ideas can be democratized and packaged into easier-to-use interfaces. How do we handle the increasing depth of most fields of knowledge and allow more people to get to the frontiers as quickly as possible?
Finally, we need to further our understanding of complexity and chaos and build those theories into the fundamental structures of our society. How do we make governance more adaptable and resilience, so that when massive crises like COVID-19 happen, we don’t see a complete breakdown in our society? Can we create more flexible systems around ownership and property that can create more diverse housing, or material ownership, or intellectual property? Empowering technology (“blockchain!” but could be all kinds of things) coupled with legal changes could dramatically evolve these core elements of our society.
Even today, we are still locked into a mental model built around paper, titles, and maybe if you are lucky, an Excel spreadsheet. There is so much work to be done to empower each of us through data this decade.
The building blocks of the Data Society concept are getting remade faster than ever this year, as the pandemic has shuttered traditional commerce and education, and forced open alternative approaches. For example, somebody starting a small business today basically has to use a lot of software. But crossing this initial barrier means they can do things like automatically track the lifetime value of each customer. Previous generations of small businesses simply did not have the resources and skills to do such things with the low-tech options available.
That’s the generational power of no-code, as Danny detailed separately on TechCrunch:
In business today, it’s not enough to just open a spreadsheet and make some casual observations anymore. Today’s new workers know how to dive into systems, pipe different programs together using no-code platforms and answer problems with much more comprehensive — and real-time — answers.
It’s honestly striking to see the difference. Whereas just a few years ago, a store manager might (and strong emphasis on might) put their sales data into Excel and then let it linger there for the occasional perusal, this new generation is prepared to connect multiple online tools to build an online storefront (through no-code tools like Shopify or Squarespace), calculate basic LTV scores using a no-code data platform and prioritize their best customers with marketing outreach through basic email delivery services. And it’s all reproducible, as it is in technology and code and not produced by hand.
There are two important points here. First is to note the degree of fluency these new workers have for these technologies, and just how many members of this generation seem prepared to use them. They just don’t have the fear to try new programs, and they know they can always use search engines to find answers to problems they are having.
Second, the productivity difference between basic computer literacy and a bit more advanced expertise is profound. Even basic but accurate data analysis on a business can raise performance substantially compared to gut instinct and expired spreadsheets.
How do we realize this future? Zooming in from the generational perspective, Natasha Mascarenhas takes a closer look at how school teachers are adapting to the pandemic — and the emerging online education world they are entering. Some, at least, seem to be moving into supplemental part-time teaching. While the educational experience is not the same as in-person, it clearly has its own value. Here’s one company as an example:
Outschool is a platform that sells small-group classes led by teachers on a large expanse of topics, from Taylor Swift Spanish class to engineering lessons through Lego challenges. In the past year, teachers on Outschool have made more than $40 million in aggregate, up from $4 million in total earnings the year prior.
CEO Amir Nathoo estimates that teachers are able to make between $40 to $60 per hour, up from an average of $30 per hour in earnings in traditional public schools. Outschool itself has surged over 2,000% in new bookings, and recently turned its first profit.
Outschool makes more money if teachers join the platform full-time: teachers pocket 70% of the price they set for classes, while Outschool gets the other 30% of income. But, Nathoo views the platform as more of a supplement to traditional education. Instead of scaling revenue by convincing teachers to come on full-time, the CEO is growing by adding more part-time teachers to the platform.
Maybe one day soon, a class about online business will be a graduation requirement for a high school diploma. And we’ll see that sort of education drive more success in the next generation of your local Main Street.
The problems of the coming decade might be harder than ever, but the solutions are there for the making.
Image Credits: Intpro / Getty Images
The combination of consumer tech product skills and enterprise revenue models fueled this decade’s explosion of SaaS success stories. This week, Caryn Marooney and David Cahn of Coatue management distilled the lessons of this model into a popular how-to article for Extra Crunch. Here’s an excerpt, showing how market leaders approach key metrics and pricing:
The MAP customer value framework:
Metrics: What are the key metrics the customers care about? Is there a threshold of value associated with this metric? Metrics can include things like minutes, messages, meetings, data and storage. Examples:
- Zoom — Minutes: Free with a 40-minute time limit on group meetings.
- Slack — Messages: Free until 10,000 total messages.
- Airtable — Records: Free until 1,200 records.
Activity: How do your customers really use your product? Are they creators? Are they editors? Do different customers use your product differently? Examples:
- Figma — Editors versus viewers: Free to view, starts changing after two edits.
- Monday.com — Creators versus viewers: Free to view, creators are charged $30+/month.
- Smartsheet — Creators versus viewers: Free to view, creators are charged $10+/month.
People: How do your customers fit into a broader organization? Are they mostly individuals? Groups? Part of an enterprise? Examples:
Superhuman — Individuals only: No free version, $30/month.
Asana — Small team versus bigger teams: Teams of <15 people can use the product free.
Atlassian — Free versus team versus enterprise: Pricing scales with size of team.
Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)
The stock market was off this week, but not entirely. Root Insurance was the big IPO this week, ending at $24 per share. That’s a bit below its aggressive $27 opening price per share, but is still in the range of its target pricing from the other week. It is, in other words, a success already for the company — and we’ll see what happens when the entire market stops gyrating around the elections.
“For the Midwest, Ohio-based Root’s IPO is a win,” Alex Wilhelm wrote for Extra Crunch. “The company shows that it is possible to build high-growth technology companies worth billions of dollars far from coastal hubs. For the broader insurtech space, Root’s IPO is a win. The company follows Lemonade to the public markets, setting a strong valuation mark again for the neo-insurance startup market. For similar companies like Clearcover, MetroMile and all startups that related to Root and Lemonade, it’s a good day.”
It’s still looking good for any software company with a growth story, as Alex goes on to say, and it’s looking good for more IPOs this year. Like Airbnb.
But enough about IPOs this year — Alex also built on previous coverage to explore Databricks going public next year, which sounds quite likely at this point.
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Extra Crunch
Good and bad board members (and what to do about them)
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Dear Sophie: Any upgrade options for E-2 visa holders interested in changing jobs?
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
A few notes before we get into this. One, we have a bonus episode coming this Saturday focused on this week’s earnings reports. And, second, we did not record video this week. So, if you like watching the show on YouTube, this is not the week for that!
Right, here’s what Natasha, Danny and your humble servant got into this week:
We capped off with the latest from r2c, and then got the hell off the mics. Catch you all Saturday, and then back to regular programming on Monday morning.
Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PDT and Thursday afternoon as fast as we can get it out, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the TechCrunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all.
The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019. People are now spending three hours and 40 minutes per day using apps, rivaling TV. Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus.
Thanks for all the market research, app developers.
Image Credits: Apple
Apple issued a slight beat on earnings this week, despite the COVID pandemic and a 20% decline in iPhone sales year-over-year, including a drop in China.
But for app developers who already have a large install base to serve across Apple’s mobile devices, it’s Apple’s expansion into the services market that may draw more attention. Apple continues to edge its way into nearly every category that has proven popular on mobile devices. Streaming music? Apple Music. Streaming TV and movies? Apple TV+. Paid news and magazine subscriptions? Apple News+. Cloud storage? iCloud. Payments? Apple Card and Apple Pay. Gaming? Apple Arcade. And so on.
Its latest effort, launching on October 30, is Apple One — a way for users to pay for multiple Apple services in a single bundle.
At launch, the $14.95 per month Individual bundle includes Apple Music, Apple TV+, 50GB of iCloud storage and Apple Arcade. The same thing as a Family Plan (up to six people) is $19.95 per month and ups the iCloud storage to 200GB. And for $29.95 per month on the Premier plan, you get 2TB of iCloud storage, and add in Apple News+ and the new Fitness+, which arrives later this quarter.
Image Credits: Apple
While each plan saves a little money than if paying individually, the most value can be found at the higher end. Which means Fitness+ could immediately gain an influx of new subscribers, even if the user primarily opted for the Premier plan because of its access to News+. That means Fitness+ doesn’t even have to try that hard to compete with third-party membership-based fitness apps. Instead, Fitness+ acquires users by its association with other known and valued Apple services.
As Apple stretches itself into new services markets — say, AirTags subscriptions, or something we haven’t thought of yet — like subscription medications (Health+?), financial news (Stocks+?), ridesharing (Car+?) social (FaceTime+?) — it will have a head start on user acquisition.
For app developers finding themselves having done the job of proving the market for a subscription-based business in their category, they’ll then be thrust into the role of trying to value add on top of a baseline product that offers a deeper integration with the iOS operating system than they’re allowed.
Image Credits: Facebook Gaming featuring Asphalt Legends
Speaking of services…this week Facebook launched its cloud gaming service that offers free-to-play games that Facebook users can play without leaving the social app.
The games are streamed from the cloud (meaning, Facebook’s servers), instead of requiring users download the titles locally.
This format for mobile gaming makes sense in mature markets that are now steadily moving to 5G. However, Facebook’s new service is only available on desktop and Android — not on iOS.
Facebook excluded Apple devices from the launch, citing Apple’s “arbitrary” policies around third-party apps. Though Apple recently updated its guidelines, it still doesn’t allow applications to act like third-party app stores where games are bought, used and streamed from within the main app directly. Instead, it’s permitting the model GameClub pioneered as a means of working around Apple’s rules last year. That is, there is a main app where users can subscribe and browse a catalog, but each individual game has to be listed on the App Store individually and be playable in some way — even if it’s just a demo.
There’s one school of thought (a point Facebook keeps pushing) that says Apple’s rules here are losing it money.
After all, Facebook says its avoidance of iOS is not about the 30% commission — it’s paying that on Android, in line with Google Play policies. Oh, why oh why doesn’t Apple want its 30%, too?, Facebook cries.
The answer is because Facebook’s iOS snub is part of its long-term strategy. To say it’s not about the money is disingenuous. Facebook at launch is already taking the 30% when in-app purchases are made on the web version of its cloud gaming services.
What’s really happening is that Facebook is making a calculated risk. It’s betting that regulators will ultimately force Apple to permit third-party app stores on iOS and maybe even end Apple’s requirements around in-app purchases, allowing alternative payments. If that comes to pass, the 30% goes back in Facebook’s own pocket.
Even if regulators only push Apple to allow third-party payment systems in addition to the Apple Pay requirement, Facebook could still make money when users picked the Facebook payment option. And it’s ready. Facebook has already built out Facebook Pay infrastructure and it’s now encouraging Facebook Pay usage by redesigning Facebook and Instagram as online shopping platforms.
This all makes the near-term loss of cloud gaming users on iOS worth the risk. Instead of catering to the iOS base, Facebook is raising a stink about “Apple’s rules” to make it look like Apple is harming the market and stifling competition. In reality, Facebook could very easily list its handful of gaming titles separately, if it desired, as per Apple’s current rules — especially because many are more casual games than those found on xCloud or Stadia.
But that wouldn’t help its larger goal: to see Apple’s App Store regulated.
It’s not even like Facebook is being shy about its motives here. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has publicly stated that Apple’s control of the App Store “deserves scrutiny.”
“I do think that there are questions that people should be looking into about that control of the App store and whether that is enabling as robust of a competitive dynamic,” he said in an Axios interview. “…I think some of the behavior certainly raises questions. And I do think it’s something that deserves scrutiny.”
Image Credits: Shopify
Remember how Walmart angled in on that TikTok acquisition (whose status is still unknown) and everyone was wondering what the heck Walmart was doing? Well, it was thinking ahead.
TikTok this week partnered with Shopify on a social commerce initiative. The deal aims to make it easier for Shopify’s moer than 1 million merchants to reach TikTok’s younger audience and drive sales, by creating and optimizing TikTok campaigns from their Shopify dashboard.
The ad tools allow merchants to create native, shareable content that turns their products into In-Feed video ads that will resonate with the TikTok community. Merchants will be able to target their audiences across gender, age, user behavior and video category (see, TikTok does have SOME data on you!), and then track the campaign’s performance over time.
As a part of this effort, Shopify merchants can also install or connect their “TikTok Pixel” — a tool that helps them to more easily track conversions driven by their TikTok ad campaigns.
The campaigns’ costs will vary, based on the merchant’s own business objectives and how much they want to spend.
The partnership will eventually expand to include other in-app shopping features, as well.
The TikTok-Shopify partnership could help the video platform better compete against other sources of social commerce, including the growing number of live stream shopping apps as well as efforts from Facebook and its family of apps.
Image Credits: Sensor Tower
Image Credits: Lightricks
From the makers of Facetune, this new iOS app lets influencers create custom filters that can be shared across social media along with their photos, allowing fans to snap a screenshot of the photo — which includes a QR code on a banner — into order to import the custom preset photo filter into the app’s library. The filter can then be used to edit photos, and further personalized by the end user.
Image Credits: Apple
Apple rolled out an updated version of its casual video creation app, Clips. Before, the app only supported Instagram-like square video, but the new version, Clips 3.0, expands to include support for vertical and horizontal video, making it easier to export videos to apps like TikTok.
The new app also features a refreshed interface on iPhone and iPad, HDR recording with iPhone 12, support for a mouse, trackpad and keyboard cases on iPad, along with other smaller changes, like new stickers, sounds and posters. There are eight new social stickers (like “Sound On” for Instagram Stories), 24 new royalty-free soundtracks (bringing the total library to 100), and six new arrows and shapes, as well as a set of poster templates to use within videos.
Image Credits: Backbone
The Backbone app works with the new $99 Backbone One mobile gaming controller for iPhone that lets you play games like Call of Duty: Mobile, Minecraft, Asphalt 9: Legends, hundreds of Apple Arcade titles and other iPhone games that support game controllers.
The controller also includes a Capture Button that lets you record gaming clips to share directly to social platforms like Instagram Stories and iMessage.
Read the TechCrunch review here.
Image Credits: Pinterest
