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Cross-border fintech Airwallex raises $100M Series D extension at new valuation of $2.6B

Published March 23, 2021

Airwallex, the fintech company for cross-border businesses, announced today it has added $100 million more to its Series D round, bumping its valuation up to $2.6 billion. The extension was led by Greenoaks, with participation from Grok Ventures and returning investors Skip Capital and ANZi Ventures.

Co-founder and chief executive officer Jack Zhang told TechCrunch that the new funding will be used for Airwallex’s United States launch in the second quarter of this year, expand its payment coverage to new regions like the Middle East, Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America, and add more products, including physical cards.

This latest extension brings Airwallex’s Series D round to $300 million, and total equity raised so far to $500 million. Airwallex first announced its Series D in April 2020 after raising $160 million, then another tranche that added $40 million in September 2020.

Airwallex gets $160 million Series D to launch more cross-border financial products

Airwallex reached unicorn valuation after its Series C in March 2019. The company was founded in Melbourne in 2015, and now has more than 600 employees across 12 offices in Australia, China, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, Japan and the United States. In its announcement today, Airwallex said it is also hiring for more than 500 positions.

Airwallex’s products for cross-border businesses include foreign currency accounts and multi-currency debit cards with Visa, international money transfers and a suite of APIs that allow companies to do things like accept and manage international payments, and manage their foreign exchange risk.

Remessa Online raises $20 million to become the TransferWise of Latin America

On the heels of its next fundraise, cross-border payments upstart Payoneer acquires optile

 

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Y Combinator widens its bet in edtech in latest batch

Published March 23, 2021

Y Combinator is slowly growing its stake in education companies, as the sector balloons with newfound demand from remote learners. In its latest batch, the famed accelerator had its highest number of edtech startups yet: 14 companies from around the world, working on everything from teacher monetization to homework apps to ways to train software engineers in an affordable fashion.

While Y Combinator isn’t the definitive source on what success in early-stage startups looks like — it quite literally has a post-mortem dinner after Demo Day to celebrate failure — it does serve well in providing an illustrative glance of how entrepreneurs are thinking about certain sectors in a given moment in time. Managing director Michael Seibel said that the number of startups in each sector isn’t a Y Combinator choice, but is in line with the concentration of applicants in each sector. In other words, YC is backing more edtech companies because more edtech companies are applying to the accelerator.

One dynamic worth pointing out here is that, of the 14 edtech startups in this batch, only two have a woman founder, UPchieve and Degrees of Freedom. Y Combinator provided aggregate batch diversity, stating that 19% of companies in W21 include a woman founder, and 10% of founders in the entire batch are women. It’s a slight uptick from the last batch, but not an immense jump.

With this context, I will use the current edtech cohort within the batch to sketch out one version of the future of education in the eyes of this specific demographic of early-stage founders.

Internationalization is a factor

The current YC batch has 50% of its startups based outside of the United States, a first for the accelerator. The growing internationalization of Y Combinator might help partially explain the uptick in edtech companies. The growth of companies like India’s Byju’s, one of the most valuable edtech companies in the world, shows how consumer spending in education companies internationally is impressive, and it’s clear that early-stage edtech startups are taking note.

Only two of Y Combinator’s 14 edtech investments are from the United States, with the highest concentrations in South America and India.

  • Manara: A marketplace to connect Middle East talent to tech jobs.
  • Prendea: Peru-based startup that offers live, online after-school classes for Spanish-speaking kids.
  • Avion School: The education startup teaches Filipino students to be remote software engineers around the world.
  • Poliglota: A language school for Latin America.

The future is consumer over B2B

The vast majority of startups in the current edtech batch charge consumers, instead of institutions or enterprises, for services. In some ways, edtech startups going for consumers instead of institutions isn’t new: it’s always been easier to convince a parent instead of a public school to pay for a service simply due to red tape. Consumers are an easier way to reach a venture-demanded scale, and that’s always been a truth of edtech.

  • Kidato: Targeting the middle class of Africa, Kidato is an online school for K-12 students. The startup has a focus on quality and affordability.
  • Codingal: An afterschool program for Indian kids to learn coding.

Still, it’s noteworthy that we’re not seeing too much experimentation in business model here, despite the pandemic and that some schools have begun to invest more in edtech services.

Edtech startups find demand from an unlikely customer: Public schools

A potential hurdle that these companies might face is access. If it costs to use your service, you can only educate so many people from specific income groups. As a result, income share agreements, or ISAs, were especially present in this batch, a set-up that allows a student to hold off on paying for an education until they are employed. Upon employment, said student has to give a percentage of their income to the company until their debt is paid. While the model is controversial, it was popularized by YC graduate Lambda School and continues to be one way to make the upfront cost of school more popular.

  • Pragmatic Leaders: The startup wants to build a more cost-effective MBA, which is free until the student is hired post-grad.
  • Awari: The São Paulo-based startup uses income share agreements to help students in Brazil afford a tech education. Courses range from data analytics to product UX and growth marketing.

Acadpal, mentioned later, is an outlier here selling to schools in India. Before I move on to our next section, I do want to shout out two startups that I think embody the most ambitious bets in business model:

Zoom University lives on

Despite the struggles of “Zoom University,” this batch of edtech founders clearly believe that the future of instruction is through online courses. This was perhaps the most overwhelming thread tying together all the companies in the sector: a bet on one of these companies is a bet that remote education will become status quo.

As previous sections show, a number of startups are offering online coding platforms for specific demographics. Now, I always have my inbox filled with different “Lambda School for X” startups, so seeing a variety of these startups pop up yet again isn’t exactly exciting. However, the pandemic did show how much community and network enhances a school experience. If these online schools can pull off strong partnerships with employers and alumni, I think there’s a huge opportunity here.

  • Turing College: The Lithuania-based online data science school uses income-share agreements to bring affordability to education.
  • Coderhouse: An Argentina-based startup that wants to build a live, online tech education for the Spanish-speaking populations of the world.

That said, where there’s big opportunity there’s always a lot of competition. These startups will have to find a way to differentiate themselves, like the one below:

  • Unschool: The startup wants to tie higher education to employment outcomes, so it’s building a platform to increase completion rates in India with a guarantee of internships.

There were bets on the infrastructure of how courses get done online, from course creation to completion.

  • Pensil: A platform that helps YouTube teachers in India monetize their courses.
  • Acadpal: A learning app for teachers in India to create and share homework, and for students to complete and discuss assignments.
  • CreatorOS – Questbook: This company wants to make it easier for teachers to teach online courses. It gives professionals the tools they need to launch a course within minutes, with a focus on a bite-sized end-product.

Tired of ‘Zoom University’? So is edtech

In conclusion

To end, the edtech startups in the current YC batch are more complementary to each other than competitive. For a homework platform like Acadpal to succeed, it would be good news for a company like Codingal, which helps bring afterschool learning online, to get funding as well. For Unschool, which ties higher-ed to employment, a company like Degrees of Freedom could be a key partner or integration for students from a low-income background.

Edtech is growing — and fast — so the fragmentation of different plays is somewhat expected. And while this batch’s hard work starts now, it’s illuminating to understand where the earliest entrepreneurs out there are seeing promise.

Edtech valuations aren’t skyrocketing, but investors see more exit opportunities

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Daily Crunch: OnePlus announces its first smartwatch

Published March 23, 2021

OnePlus unveils new hardware, Apple updates its educational offerings and Facebook reveals plans for its next developer conference. This is your Daily Crunch for March 23, 2021.

The big story: OnePlus announces its first smartwatch

The Chinese smartphone maker announced the OnePlus Watch today, a $159 smartwatch with a minimalist design and a new operating system. It also comes with a number of different sensors to measure things like heart rate and blood oxygen level.

In addition, the company also announced its OnePlus 9 series of phones, its first phone built in partnership with legendary camera company Hasselblad, with a primary camera that includes a 48-megapixel Sony sensor. Pricing starts at $729, with pricing for the Pro starting at $969.

The tech giants

Apple launches the Apple Teacher Portfolio recognition, updates Schoolwork and Classroom apps — Teachers who complete a total of nine lessons will be able to submit their portfolio of lesson examples to earn the Apple Teacher Portfolio designation.

Facebook will bring back F8 on June 2 as a pared-back, single-day, virtual-only conference for developers — There will be no Mark Zuckerberg keynote this year.

New York’s Department of Financial Services says Apple Card program didn’t violate fair lending laws — This follows an investigation triggered by online complaints back in November 2019.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Robinhood files confidentially to go public — The company may be closer to a public debut than we anticipated.

‘Instant needs’ delivery startup goPuff raises $1.15B at an $8.9B valuation — Last fall, delivery startup goPuff made a big splash by raising $380 million in funding and acquiring West Coast beverage retailer BevMo shortly afterwards.

Roll still doesn’t know how its hot wallet was hacked — Move fast, break things, get hacked.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

Discord’s reported $10B exit; Compass and Intermedia Cloud Communications set IPO price ranges — Discord is a well-financed unicorn that has raised significant capital and reportedly sports rapidly expanding revenues.

Pre-seed round funding is under scrutiny: Is VC pandemic posturing here to stay? — New data from the DocSend Startup Index show that for early-stage fundraising, particularly in the pre-seed round, founders need to approach VCs with much more than a great idea to secure funding.

Clubhouse UX teardown: A closer look at homepage curation, follow hooks and other features — Most startups would kill for hockey-stick growth, but it also means that UX problems can only be addressed while in “full flight.”

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

Top tech CEOs will testify about social media’s role in the Capitol attack this week — Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Google’s Sundar Pichai will all appear virtually before a joint House committee Thursday at 12 p.m. Eastern Time.

‘Black Widow’ and ‘Cruella’ will get Premier Access releases on Disney+ — That means Disney+ subscribers will have the option to pay an additional, one-time $29.99 fee to watch the live action remake of “Cruella” at home on May 28, or to do the same for “Black Widow” on July 9.

Extra Crunch Live’s April slate features speakers from Forerunner, Accel, Fifth Wall and more — April showers bring May flowers, and by “flowers” I mean actionable insights and advice from some of the top minds in tech.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

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Our favorite companies from Y Combinator’s W21 Demo Day: Part 1

Published March 23, 2021

It’s that time again! Today is Demo Day for Y Combinator’s latest accelerator batch — its largest to date, with more than 300 teams getting a minute each to pitch their companies to an audience of investors.

This is the third time YC has held its Demo Day via a Zoom livestream and the second time the entire program was entirely virtual. YC president Geoff Ralston outlined their thinking for this latest batch — and how/why they’ve expanded the program to over 300 companies — in a post this morning.

Want to see all of the companies? YC has a catalog of the entire Winter 2021 batch here (minus those that haven’t publicly launched), filterable by industry and region.

If you don’t have time to skim through it all, we’ve aggregated some of the companies that really managed to catch our eye. This is part one of two, covering our favorites from the companies that launched in the first half of the day.

As Alex Wilhelm put it last time we did one of these, “we’re not investors, so we’re not pretending to sort the unicorns from the goats.” But we do spend a lot of time talking with startups, hearing pitches and telling their stories; if you’re curious about which companies stood out, read on.

Prospa

Prospa is building a neobank for small companies in Nigeria. The startup charges customers $7 per month and has reached $50,000 in monthly recurring revenue. That’s some pretty darn good traction. We found Prospa notable because Nigeria’s economy and population are rapidly growing, neobanks have succeeded in a number of markets thus far, and the company’s clear business model and early traction stood out.

And Prospa isn’t targeting a small market. It said during its presentation that there are 37 million so-called “microbusinesses” in its target country. That’s a lot of scale to grow into, and it’s really nice to hear from a neobank that isn’t going to merely pray that interchange revenues will eventually stack to the moon.

— Alex

Blushh

Image Credits: Blushh

Blushh, built by a team of ex-Google, Amazon, Harvard and BCG professionals, is creating a directory of short, sensual audio stories for women in Asia. The startup believes that there is a massive unmet need for adult content created for women, instead of men, signing up 100 paying subscribers within its first month on the market.

During their pitch, co-founder Soy Hwang said Blushh wants to do for sexual wellness what “Spotify and Audible did for music and audio books.” This startup stands out because it is taking on an untapped market ridden with stigma and lack of innovation. It’s a risk on several levels, and considering the fact that many venture capitalists today still have a “vice” clause that prevents them from investing in sex tech, it will be key to see how Blushh funds itself to keep growing.

— Natasha

BrioHR

TechCrunch caught up with BrioHR a few weeks ago when the startup announced that it had closed a $1.3 million round. During its presentation, the company announced that it had reached $13,000 in monthly recurring revenue (MRR), or $156,000 in annual recurring revenue (ARR).

The company is building human resources software for companies in Southeast Asia, a market it considers fraught with old software and outdated business processes. The company is doing two things. First, building software to help manage and pay workers. The latter part of its work requires lots of localization, so it’s rolling out more slowly than the rest of its software.

If Southeast Asia is as fertile ground for modern HR software as the United States has been shown to be, BrioHR could find more than enough room to grow. I’m excited to see how far the company can scale its ARR with the round that we recently covered.

— Alex

Charge Running

Strava walked so Charge Running could, well, run. The startup, founded by a former Navy SEAL, app connoisseur and kinesiology specialist, is an app that offers live virtual running classes. The consumer play is being framed by the team as a “Peloton for running” with motivation and social engagement during the run.

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This Y Combinator startup is taking lab-grown meat upscale with elk, lamb and Wagyu beef cell lines

Published March 23, 2021

Last week a select group of 20 employees and guests gathered at an event space on the San Francisco Bay, and, while looking out at the Bay Bridge, dined on a selection of choice elk sausages, Wagyu meatloaf and lamb burgers — all of which were grown from a petri dish.

The dinner was a coming out party for Orbillion Bio, a new startup pitching today in Y Combinator’s latest demo day, that’s looking to take lab-grown meats from the supermarket to high-end, bespoke butcher shops.

Instead of focusing on pork, chicken and beef, Orbillion is going after so-called heritage meats — the aforementioned elk, lamb and Wagyu beef to start.

By focusing on more expensive-end products, Orbillion doesn’t have as much pressure to slash costs as dramatically as other companies in the cellular meat market, the thinking goes.

But there’s more to the technology than its bougie beef, elite elk and luscious lamb meat.

“Orbillion uses a unique accelerated development process producing thousands of tiny tissue samples, constantly iterating to find the best tissue and media combinations,” according to Holly Jacobus, whose firm, Joyance Partners, is an early investor in Orbillion. “This is much less expensive and more efficient than traditional methods and will enable them to respond quickly to the impressive demand they’re already experiencing.”

Startups making meat alternatives are gaining traction worldwide

The company runs its multiple cell lines through a system of small bioreactors. Orbillion couples that with a high throughput screening and machine learning software system to build out a database of optimized tissue and media combinations. “The key to making lab grown meat work scalably is choosing the right cells cultured in the most efficient way possible,” Jacobus wrote.

Orbillion is co-founded by a deeply technical and highly experienced team of executives that’s led by Patricia Bubner, a former researcher at the German pharmaceutical giant Boehringer Ingelheim. Joining Bubner is Gabriel Levesque-Tremblay, a former director of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, who was a post-doc at Berkeley with Bubner and serves as the company’s chief technology officer. Rounding out the senior leadership is Samet Yildirim, the chief operating officer and a veteran executive of Boehringer Ingelheim (he actually served as Bubner’s boss).

Orbillion Bio co-founders Gabriel Levesque-Tremblay, CTO; Patricia Bubner, CEO; and Samet Yildirim, COO. Image Credit: Orbillion Bio

For Bubner, the focus on heritage meats is as much a function of her background growing up in rural Austria as it is about economics. A longtime, self-described foodie and a nerd, Bubner went into chemistry because she ultimately wanted to apply science to the food business. And she wants Orbillion to make not just meat, but the most delicious meats.

It’s an aim that fits with how many other companies have approached the market when they’re looking to commercialize a novel technology. Higher-end products, or products with unique flavor profiles that are unique to the production technologies available, are more likely to be commercially viable sooner than those competing with commodity products. Why focus on angus beef when you can focus on a much more delicious breed of animal?

For Bubner, it’s not just about making a pork replacement, it’s about making the tastiest pork replacement.

“I’m just fascinated and can see the future in us being able to further change the way we produce food to be more efficient,” she said. “We’re at this inflection point. I’m a nerd, I’m a foodie, and I really wanted to use my skills to make a change. I wanted to be part of that group of people that can really have an impact on the way we eat. For me there’s no doubt that a large percentage of our food will be from alternative proteins — plant based, fermentation and lab-grown meat.”

Joining Boehringer Ingelheim was a way for Bubner to become grounded in the world of big bioprocessing. It was preparation for her foray into lab-grown meat, she said.

“We are a product company. Our goal is to make the most flavorful steaks. Our first product will not be whole cuts of steak. The first product is going to be a Wagyu beef product that we plan on putting out in 2023,” Bubner said. “It’s a product that’s going to be based on more of a minced product. Think Wagyu sashimi.”

To get to market, Bubner sees the need not just for a new approach to cultivating choice meats, but a new way of growing other inputs as well, from the tissue scaffolding needed to make larger cuts that resemble traditional cuts of meat, or the fats that will need to be combined with the meat cells to give flavor.

That means there are still opportunities for companies like Future Fields, Matrix Meats and Turtle Tree Scientific to provide inputs that are integrated into the final, branded product.

Bubner’s also thinking about the supply chain beyond her immediate potential partners in the manufacturing process. “Part of my family were farmers and construction workers and the others were civil engineers and architects. I hold farmers in high respect… and think the people who grow the food and breed the animals don’t get recognition for the work that they do.”

She envisions working in concert with farmers and breeders in a kind of licensing arrangement, potentially, where the owners of the animals that produce the cell lines can share in the rewards of their popularization and wider commercial production.

Bill Gates wants Western countries to eat ‘synthetic meat’; Meatable has raised $47 million to make it

That also helps in the mission of curbing the emissions associated with big agribusiness and breeding and raising livestock on a massive scale. If you only need a few animals to make the meat, you don’t have the same environmental footprint for the farms.

“We need to make sure that we don’t make the mistakes that we did in the past that we only breed animals for yield and not for flavor,” said Bubner. 

Even though the company is still in its earliest days, it already has one letter of intent, with one of San Francisco’s most famous butchers. Guy Crims, also known as “Guy the Butcher,” has signed a letter of intent to stock Orbillion Bio’s lab-grown Wagyu in his butcher shop, Bubner said. “He’s very much a proponent of lab-grown meat.”

Now that the company has its initial technology proven, Orbillion is looking to scale rapidly. It will take roughly $3.5 million for the company to get a pilot plant up and running by the end of 2022, and that’s in addition to the small $1.4 million seed round the company has raised from Joyant and firms like VentureSouq.

“The way I see an integrated model working later on is to have the farmers be the breeders of animals for cultivated meat. That can reduce the number of cows on the planet to a couple of hundred thousand,” Bubner said of her ultimate goal. “There’s a lot of talking about if you do lab-grown meat you want to put me out of business. It’s not like we’re going to abolish animal agriculture tomorrow.”

Image Credit: Getty Images

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Tableau CEO Adam Selipsky is returning to AWS to replace Andy Jassy as CEO

Published March 23, 2021

When Amazon announced last month that Jeff Bezos was moving into the executive chairman role, and AWS CEO Andy Jassy would be taking over the entire Amazon operation, speculation began about who would replace Jassy.

People considered a number of internal candidates viable, such as Peter DeSantis, vice president of global infrastructure at AWS and Matt Garman, who is vice president of sales and marketing. Not many would have chosen Tableau CEO Adam Selipsky, but sure enough he is returning home to run the division he left in 2016.

In an email to employees, Jassy wasted no time getting to the point that Selipsky was his choice, saying that the former employee helped launch the division when they hired him in 2005, then spent 11 years helping Jassy build the unit before taking the job at Tableau. Through that lens, the choice makes perfect sense.

“Adam brings strong judgment, customer obsession, team building, demand generation, and CEO experience to an already very strong AWS leadership team. And, having been in such a senior role at AWS for 11 years, he knows our culture and business well,” Jassy wrote in the email.

What Andy Jassy’s promotion to Amazon CEO could mean for AWS

Jassy has run AWS since its earliest days, taking it from humble beginnings as a kind of internal experiment on running a storage web service to building a mega division currently on a $51 billion run rate. It is that juggernaut that will be Selipsky’s to run, but he seems well-suited for the job.

He is a seasoned executive, and while he’s been away from AWS since before it really began to grow into a huge operation, he should still understand the culture well enough to step smoothly into the role.  At the same time, he’s leaving Tableau, a company he helped transform from a desktop software company into one firmly based in the cloud.

Salesforce bought Tableau in June 2019 for a cool $15.7 billion and Selipsky has remained at the helm since then, but perhaps the lure of running AWS was too great and he decided to take the leap to the new job.

When we wrote a story at the end of last year about Salesforce’s deep bench of executive talent, Selipsky was one of the CEOs we pointed at as a possible replacement should CEO and chairman Marc Benioff step down. But with it looking more like president and COO Bret Taylor would be the heir apparent, perhaps Selipsky was ready for a new challenge.

Selipsky will make his return to AWS on May 17th and spend a few weeks with Jassy in a transitional time before taking over the division to run on his own. As Jassy slides into the Amazon CEO role, it’s clear the two will continue to work closely together, just as they did for over a decade.

Salesforce has built a deep bench of executive talent via acquisition

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Robinhood files confidentially to go public

Published March 23, 2021

Today Bloomberg reported, and Axios confirmed that Robinhood has filed privately to go public. The well-financed Robinhood is an American fintech company that provides zero-cost trading services to consumers.

Private IPO filings have become common in recent quarters, making Robinhood’s decision to file behind closed doors before showing its numbers to the public unsurprising. That it has filed privately, however, implies that the company is closer to a public debut than we might have anticipated.

Robinhood has long been expected to have a 2021 IPO in its plans. The company has not yet responded to an inquiry from TechCrunch regarding the news of its private IPO filing.

Robinhood’s Q4 2020 revenue shows a return to growth

There are several reasons why Robinhood may be interested in a near-term public debut, despite running into controversies in recent quarters. No amount of time in front of Congress, bad PR from a user’s suicide, or settlements with the SEC can change the fact that today’s stock market favors growth, something that the company has in spades. Or that recent IPOs have been rapturously received by public investors as a cohort; it’s a warm time to pursue public-market liquidity.

The company’s revenue expanded greatly in 2020, something that TechCrunch has covered through the lens of Robinhood’s payment for order flow, or PFOF income. The company told Congress that the particular revenue source was the majority of its top line, meaning that PFOF growth is a reasonable comp for the company’s aggregate growth. And as TechCrunch has reported, those numbers rose sharply in 2020, from around ~$91 million in Q1 2020, to ~$178 million in Q2 2020, and ~$183 million and ~$221 million in the third and fourth quarter of last year.

Robinhood also makes money from consumer subscriptions, and other sources.

The fact that Robinhood has filed privately implies that it will go public sometimes soon, though perhaps not quickly enough to get around providing Q1 2021 numbers. More when we get our hands on the filing.

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Kargo unveils its new Fabrik publishing system

Published March 23, 2021

Digital advertising company Kargo is launching a new product and new business unit called Fabrik.

Founder and CEO Harry Kargman explained that Fabrik is a content management system designed for publishers’ modern needs and integrated with Kargo’s advertising technology.

Kargman suggested that he sees this as part of Kargo’s broader mission of “saving publishing.” That might seem like a tall order for an ad business, but he said the company has tried to do that “by driving extraordinary ad experiences and monetization.” And yet, he’s come to realize, “That’s not enough.”

In particular, Kargman came to realize that many websites have “too much weight” and load far too slowly (to illustrate his point, he loaded the TechCrunch homepage, and it was indeed slower than I would like). This drives readers away and also has a detrimental effect on Google search rankings.

So the goal with Fabrik is to create a “lightning fast” web experience, which you can see for yourself on the OK Magazine website. Fabrik says that one of the key steps to achieving this speed is by eliminating the need for third-party trackers and plugins — in fact, Kargman described plugins as “the death of the internet” and told me he often asks publishers, “Do you want to make money, or do you want to have a lot of plugins?”

After A Decade In Business, Kargo Says It’s Growing Fast, With Big Ambitions For Premium Mobile Ads

“We built it for Google’s best practices and the core Web Vitals,” added COO Michael Shaughnessy. “We’re very strategic about how we load items that would really slow us down.”

This launch comes as many publishers are exploring business models beyond advertising, such as subscriptions and memberships. Shaughnessy suggested that Fabrik is complementary to those efforts, because it’s “simplifying the foundation,” thus freeing teams to focus on new commercial initiatives.

As for the advertising side, Kargman said, “We think we’ve built our adtech directly into Fabrik in a way that there’s absolutely no reason not to use Kargo — but certainly, it doesn’t require you to exclusively use Kargo. We expect publishers to monetize their own sites, to cut branded entertainment deals, to do all the good things that they do.”

And as previously mentioned, the plan is for Fabrik to be a separate business unit under the Kargo’s corporate umbrella, with its own customers and its own CEO — Kargman said he’s talking to a potential hire, but it’s “not quite ready yet to announce.”

10 VCs say interactivity, regulation and independent creators will reshape digital media in 2021

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Clubhouse UX teardown: A closer look at homepage curation, follow hooks and other features

Published March 23, 2021

Clubhouse, the social audio app that first took Silicon Valley by storm and is now gaining much wider appeal, is an interesting user experience case study.

Hockey-stick growth — 8 million global downloads as of last month, despite still being in a pre-launch, invite-only mode, according to App Annie — is something most startups would kill for. However, it also means that UX problems can only be addressed while in “full flight” — and that changes to the user experience will be felt at scale rather under the cover of a small, loyal and (usually) forgiving user base.

In our latest UX teardown, Built for Mars founder and UX expert Peter Ramsey and TechCrunch reporter Steve O’Hear discuss some of Clubhouse’s UX challenges as it continues to onboard new users at pace while striving to create enough stickiness to keep them active.

Homepage curation

Peter Ramsey: Content feeds are notoriously difficult to get right. Which posts should you see? How should you order them? How do you filter out the noise?

On Clubhouse, once you’ve scrolled past all the available rooms in your feed, you’re prompted to follow more people to see more rooms. In other words, Clubhouse is inadvertently describing how it decides what content you see, i.e., your homepage is a curated list of rooms based on people you follow.

Except there’s a problem: I don’t follow half the people who already appear in my feed.

Image Credits: Clubhouse

Steve O’Hear: I get it. This could be confusing, but why does it actually matter? Won’t people just continue to use the homepage regardless?

Peter: In the short term, yes. People will use the homepage in the same way they’d use Instagram’s search page (which is to just browse occasionally). But in the long term, this content needs to be consistently relevant or people will lose interest.

Steve: But Twitter has a search page that shows random content that I don’t control.

Peter: Yeah, but they also have a home feed that you do control. It’s fine to also have the more random “slot machine style” content feed — but you need the base layer.

The truth about aha moments

Peter: In the early days of Twitter, the team noticed something in their data: When people follow at least 30 others, they’re far more likely to stick around. This is often described as an “aha moment” — the moment that the utility of a product really clicks for the user.

This story has become startup folklore, and I’ve worked with many companies who take this message too literally, forgetting the nuance of what they really found: It’s not enough to just follow 30 random people — you need to follow 30 people who you genuinely care about.

Clubhouse has clearly adopted a similar methodology, by pre-selecting 50 people for you to follow while signing up.

Have you noticed that some people have accumulated millions of followers really quickly? It’s because the same people are almost always recommended — I tried creating accounts with polar opposite interests, and the same people were pre-selected almost every time.

At no point does it explain that following those 50 people will directly impact the content that is available to you, or that if your homepage gets uninteresting, you’ll need to unfollow these people individually.

But they should, and it could look more like this:

Steve: Why do you think Clubhouse does this? Laziness?

Peter: I think in the early days of Clubhouse they just wanted to maximize connections, and by always recommending the same people (Clubhouse’s founders and investors), they could somewhat control the content that is shown to new users.

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Y Combinator’s new batch features its largest group of Indian startups

Published March 23, 2021

Y Combinator’s latest batch — W21 — features 350 startups from 41 nations. Fifty percent of the firms, the highest percentage to date, in the new batch are based outside of the United States.

India is the second-largest demographic represented in the new batch. The world’s second-largest internet market has delivered 43 startups in the new batch, another record figure in the history of the storied venture firm. (For comparison, the W20 batch had 25 Indian startups, up from 14 in S20, 12 each in S19 and W19 and one each in W16, S15 and W15.)

“YC going remote has helped make YC more attractive to companies at different stages and far away geographies. For companies in India, founders no longer have to spend three months away from their customers or teams. Covid has also taught us that building a program that is remote and more software based makes YC more accessible to founders around the globe,” the firm said in a statement to TechCrunch.

“When it comes to choosing founders in India, we accept them based on the same criteria we judge companies from anywhere else. Founders must be able to communicate their local context to investors. That is an important skill.”

Here’s a list of startups, in no particular order, from India that have made it to YC W21, with some context — wherever possible — on what they are attempting to build (several have elected to stay off the record).

QuestBook, from CreatorOS, is an app for professionals to teach in bite-sized courses using chat and a mobile-first experience. We wrote about CreatorOS last year.

Leap Club is attempting to build a Good Eggs for India. Leap Club users can order fresh and organic groceries sourced from local farms through the startup’s website or through WhatsApp. The startup says it delivers the item to customers within 12 hours of harvesting. Leap Club is already garnering over $14,000 in monthly revenue.

CashBook is building a cash account app for small businesses in India. There are over 60 million small businesses in the country, nearly all of which currently rely on traditional ways — pen and paper — for bookkeeping. The startup launched its app just six months ago and has already amassed 200,000 monthly active users. In the month of February, CashBook logged cash transactions of $511 million.

GimBooks is attempting to solve a similar problem as CashBook, though from a different angle. The startup says it offers industry-based invoicing and bookkeeping with integrated banking and payments. Its app has been downloaded more than 1.4 million times, amassed over 11,000 paying customers and clocked revenues of over $450,000.

BusinessOnBot is banking on the popularity of WhatsApp in India, where the Facebook-owned app has amassed over 450 million monthly active users. BusinessOnBot says it is building Shopify on WhatsApp for direct-to-consumer brands and small and medium-sized businesses, helping them acquire users and automate sales.

Our 11 favorite companies from Y Combinator’s S20 Demo Day: Part 1

ZOKO is helping businesses do sales, marketing and customer support on WhatsApp.

Prescribe is a Shopify for hospitals. Its platform is aimed at helping doctor’s offices run their business online. Users can book appointments, chat with the doctor, pay and refer friends on WhatsApp.

Chatwoot is an open-source customer engagement suite alternative to Intercom and Zendesk. Over 1,000 companies are already using Chatwoot and it’s clocking $32,000 in ARR from six customers.

Weekday is helping companies hire engineers who are crowdsourced by their network of scouts. The startup says it has found a way to solve the biggest problem with referrals — that it doesn’t scale.

Fountain9 helps food brands and retailers reduce food wastage. According to some estimates, over $260 billion worth of food is wasted every year due to mismanaged inventory.

Dyte is attempting to build a Stripe for live video calls. The startup says a firm can integrate its branded, configurable and programmable video calling service within 10 minutes using the Dyte SDK.

YourQuote has built a writing platform, with over 100 million posts. It has over 250,000 daily active users. The startup clocked revenues of $200,000 last year and is profitable.

Fifthtry is building a GitHub for product documentation. The tool blocks code changes until documentation has been approved. It has piloted its tool with three companies, all of which have over 100 developers. The startup plans to launch its tool publicly next month.

Voosh is building an OYO for restaurants and dark kitchens in India, helping them improve their economics using tech.

Kodo is building a Brex for India, helping Indian startups and small businesses secure corporate credit cards. (Banks and other credit card companies are still not addressing this opportunity. The problem Brex solved in the U.S. is even acute in India, Deepti Sanghi, co-founder and chief executive of Kodo, said in the presentation.

Krab provides instant loans for trucking companies in India. India’s logistics market, despite being valued at $160 billion, remains one of the most inefficient sectors that continues to drag the economy. In recent years, a handful of startups have started to explore ways to work with trucking companies.

Bueno Finance says it wants to help the next billion users in India get access to financial services. It says it wants to solve for short-term cash needs of customers by using digital credit card over UPI. It was to build a Chime for India, and has amassed 70,000 customers.

Betterhalf is building a Match.com for 100 million Indians. It says it is generating $75,000 in monthly revenues, a figure that is growing 30% every month.

Pensil is helping teachers who use YouTube monetize their courses. “YouTube is the largest education platform in India — but it’s not built for teachers,” said Surender Singh, co-founder of Pensil, at the presentation on Tuesday. The startup has built tools to allow teachers to create content, facilitate discussions and collect payments.

AcadPal operates an eponymous app for India’s 10 million teachers to share homework with a tap. The startup is attempting to target a $1.4 billion market, which consists of over 400,000 private schools.

Pragmatic Leaders is attempting to build a platform to provide cost-effective alternative to an MBA. It is already clocking a monthly revenue of $112,000 and is cash-flow positive.

Splitsub is addressing a problem that tens of millions of users in India face — subscription fatigue. It says it has built a Pinduoduo for online subscriptions in India, allowing group buying and sharing of online subscriptions for services such as Netflix and Spotify.

Our 12 favorite startups from Y Combinator’s S20 Demo Day: Part 2

Zingbus has built a platform for bus travel between Indian cities. (Several startups in India are helping users get cabs, three-wheelers autos and two-wheelers bikes. Buses have remained largely untapped.)

Tilt is building a docked bike-sharing platform for Indian campuses. The startup, which has generated about $20,000 in revenues this month so far, says it has been profitable for the past 18 months.

FanPlay is a platform for social media influencers, helping them monetize by playing mobile games with their fans and followers.

(Also read: Why Y Combinator Went 8,725 Miles Away From Mountain View To Find The Next Big Startup)

In India only a fraction of the nation’s 1.3 billion people currently have access to insurance and some analysts say that digital firms could prove crucial in bringing these services to the masses. According to rating agency ICRA, insurance products had reached less than 3% of the population as of 2017.

An average Indian makes about $2,100 a year, according to the World Bank. ICRA estimated that of those Indians who had purchased an insurance product, they were spending less than $50 on it in 2017.

Three startups in the current batch are planning to disrupt this market, which is largely commanded by state and bank-backed insurers.

GroMo is an app for independent agents to sell insurance in India. Most insurance policies in India are sold by agents. The startup says it is already generating monthly revenues of over $200,000.

Bimaplan is attempting to replace the agents with an app and reach users by a referral network. The app launched last month and has already sold 700 policies this month.

Y Combinator President Geoff Ralston shares actionable advice for startup founders

BimaPe helps users better understand their policies, and make informed decisions about whether those policies are right for them. The startup, leveraging New Delhi’s new regulations, is using a government issued ID card to fetch insurance policies.

Codingal is an online, after-school program for K-12 students in India to learn computer science. There are roughly 270 million K-12 students in the country.

Unschool provides professional education for college students in India. The founders say, “As former leaders in youth-run organisations with 3,000 members and edtech startups in India, we saw how colleges are not preparing students for the real world.”

Flux Auto builds self-driving kits for trucks.

SigNoz is an open-source alternative to DataDog, a $30 billion company, helping developers find and solve issues in their software deployed on cloud. The startup says recent laws such as GDPR and CPRA have helped drive adoption of SigNoz.

Pibit.ai are APIs to turn unstructured documents into structured data.

Invoid creates identity workflows in India. It’s tapping into a huge market opportunity: About 11 billion know-your-customers authentication is conduced by firms in India each year.

Redcliffe Lifesciences performs genetic testing and IVF treatments across India. Its revenue in March has topped $600,000.

Veera Health is an online clinic that treats Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS), a lifelong condition that affects 10-20% women in India. The startup says it launched 12 weeks ago, and 85% members have reported feeling “in control” of their PCOS after 1 month.

Snazzy is SmileDirectClub for India. The startup says it sells clear aligners that are 70% cheaper than those sold by dentists.

BeWell Digital is building the operating system for India’s 1.5 million hospitals, labs, clinics and pharmacies by starting with insurance regulatory compliance.

Triomics is operating a SaaS platform for end-to-end automation of clinical trials.

India’s Razorpay becomes unicorn after new $100 million funding round

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