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From improving cancer treatments to saving the bees, these are the companies in IndieBio’s latest class

Published March 17, 2021

Ultra-precise cancer therapies! Human-like hair grown from plants! A way to potentially save the bees!

The spectrum of companies coming out of IndieBio has always been pretty wild, and its latest batch definitely doesn’t disappoint.

As the early-stage, biology-focused accelerator arm of SOSV, IndieBio gives the companies in its program $250,000+, mentorship and full access to a biology lab to bring their ideas to life.

When founder Arvind Gupta left the accelerator last year to join the venture capital fund Mayfield, Mayfield and IndieBio partnered to form the Genesis Consortium, which offers IndieBio companies an additional $250,000 in optional funding.

Leaving the $3.2 billion portfolio he helped build at IndieBio, Arvind Gupta joins Mayfield to create the Genesis Consortium

IndieBio initially operated solely out of San Francisco, with the accelerator expanding just last year to include a New York cohort that runs in parallel. The SF program is led by Managing Director Po Bronson, while the New York program is led by Managing Director Stephen Chambers.

With its Demo Day still a ways out, IndieBio gave us a peek at the teams currently going through the program. It’s worth noting that IndieBio deliberately invests very early — in many cases, even before it’s entirely clear whether or not the scientific concepts behind a company are fully feasible. “Our program is our diligence,” Bronson tells me. The goal is to prove out concepts — and figure out how to turn them into big businesses — for hundreds of thousands of dollars, rather than millions. “We’re biting off the risk, and de-risking it for the next investors in line.”

Here are the companies currently in each program, alphabetically:

New York

Beemmunity: Humans need bees in order to survive, but bee populations are plummeting, with one of the main causes believed to be exposure to neurotoxic pesticides. Pitched as “pesticide protection for bees,” Beemmunity is working on a “micro-sponge” that, after being ingested by a bee, captures these neurotoxins and eliminates them as waste. Expected to enter field trials soon.

Brickbuilt Therapeutics: A biotherapeutic lozenge meant to help prevent and treat things like gum disease and thrush.

Bucha Leather Synthetic, animal-free leather grown from bacterial nanocellulose. Their process allows them to make “massive mats” of material that can be produced in weeks.

Free to Feed: If an infant proves allergic to something in their mother’s breastmilk, determining exactly what they’re allergic to can be a long and incredibly frustrating process. Free to Feed is developing test strips that identify different food proteins in breast milk, helping breastfeeding mothers better determine what proteins are leading to an allergic reaction.

Gypsy Basin Genomics: Developing a test, simple enough to be administered as a gargle-and-a-spit during a dentist visit, that can detect at an early stage the oral cancers caused by HPV.

Harmony Baby Nutrition: Pitched as “the only dairy-free, allergy-free, and environmentally friendly baby formula,” Harmony is producing infant formulas that “closely mirror human breast milk.”

MicroTERRA: Using duckweed water lentils to convert fish-farm wastewater into protein. The duckweed helps to purify the fish waste water as it grows; once grown, this “lemna protein concentrate” can be used as a source of protein in animal feed.

Nyoka Design Labs: Non-toxic, biodegradable and recyclable glowsticks powered by bioluminescence.

Sequential Skin: Wipe your face with their skin test kit, send it to their lab, and get a full report on the products that should work well with your skin’s microbiome.

Stembionix: With personal stem cell banking in mind, Stembionix is developing a “mailable bioreactor system” that would allow for the transporting of stem cells without the freezing/thawing that complicates things and can negatively impact viability.

San Francisco

Aja Labs: Pitched as the “beyond meat of hair extensions,” Aja Labs wants to use plants to grow fibers that look and feel like human hair, potentially eliminating the need for chemical-heavy synthetics or human hair in the production of hair extensions.

Avalo.ai: Using interpretable machine learning to identify genes (and what said genes do) in plants at a much faster pace to help develop better crops.

California Cultured: Lab-grown cocoa. The company says it can grow cocoa that is less bitter, and as such requires far less sugar to be tasty.

Canaery: Aiming to “do for scent what machine vision has done for sight,” Canaery is building a neural interface for analyzing an object’s “scent fingerprint” to identify dangerous compounds at places like ports and inspection points without (or in addition to) x-rays or cameras.

Capra Biosciences: Finding ways to turn the otherwise detrimental biofilms that can develop during fermentation into products like motor oil or retinol for cosmetics.

Lypid: Developing vegan oils that behave like animal fats, melting at the same temperature and providing the same mouthfeel, to further improve plant-based meats.

OncoPrecision: Building a faster way to help oncologists determine which cancer drugs (of hundreds) will work best for a patient by applying drugs to patient-derived cells, with the goal of finding the best drug within 7-14 days.

Ozone Bio: Using dead cell fermentation (or “Zombiezymes”) to produce nylon in a greener way.

Panacea Longevity: Aiming to replicate the health benefits of fasting… without fasting. Identifying dietary compounds that can “mimic the body’s natural response to fasting” and develop them into a supplement.

Prolific Machines: High-resolution control of cell differentiation. In lab-grown meat, for example, one could use their tech to determine what bits of a steak are muscle tissue, fat, etc.

Proteinea: Using fly larva to grow “pharma-grade proteins” for use in medicine cheaper and more quickly.

Sundial Foods: Bringing “skin” to plant-based chicken, beginning with a coating that will allow for plant-based chicken wings.

Vertical Oceans: Taking the concept of vertical farming and applying it to seafood, Vertical Oceans is working on efficient, low-waste, stackable towers to make the production of shrimp more sustainable.

Accelerators embrace change forced by pandemic

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Cash-and-send fintech startup Diem raises $5.5M seed led by Fasanara Capital

Published March 17, 2021

Diem, a London, U.K.-based fintech startup, has raised a seed round of $5.5 million led by Fasanara Capital, and angel investor Chris Adelsbach, founder of Outrun Ventures. Additional investors include Andrea Molteni (early investor in Farfetch), Ben Demiri (co-chairman at fashion tech PlatformE) and Nicholas Kirkwood (founder of the eponymous brand).

Diem is a debit card with an app affording instant cash access, traditional banking service benefits (debit card, domestic and international bank transfers), but also allowing consumers to dispose of goods for eventual resale. The idea here is that this feeds into the so-called circular economy, making Diem attractive from an environmental point of view. Some estimates put the amount of worth of goods disposed of in the last 15 years at $6.9 trillion.

Here’s how it works: You have an old item of clothing, phone, book or bag, for instance. You load the item it into the app. The app makes you an offer for what the item is worth. If you accept, cash is loaded into your account immediately. You send the item to Diem, which is then resold. The incentive, therefore, is not to throw away the object and add to landfill, because you have now turned it into cash. Think “neo bank meets people who sell your stuff on eBay.”

Geri Cupi said in a statement: “Diem’s mission is to empower consumers to value, unlock, and enjoy wealth they never knew they had. All of this while fuelling the circular economy and supporting the commitment to sustainability as our key value proposition. DIEM makes it possible for capitalism and sustainability to co-exist.”

Lead Investor and CEO at Fasanara Capital, Francesco Filia, said: “Fasanara is excited to announce our partnership with DIEM and Geri Cupi… [it’s] a new generation fintech powered by principles of circular economy and look forward to support its growth.”

End-to-end operators are the next generation of consumer business

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Dear Sophie: What type of visa should we get to fundraise in Silicon Valley?

Published March 17, 2021
Sophie Alcorn
Contributor

Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneur Immigration Services.” She connects people with the businesses and opportunities that expand their lives.
More posts by this contributor

Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.
“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”

Extra Crunch members receive access to weekly “Dear Sophie” columns; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off.

Dear Sophie:

A friend and I founded a tech startup last year. Like a lot of other startups, we’re looking for funding. Should we come to Silicon Valley to meet with venture capitalists?

How should we begin that process? What type of visa should we get and how easy is it to get?

—Logical in Lagos

Dear Logical:

Thanks for reaching out to me from the entrepreneurial hotspot of Lagos!

In a recent episode of my podcast, I spoke with Esther Tricoche, director of investments at Kapor Capital, who offered up many words of wisdom to founders. She also mentioned that in many emerging entrepreneurial markets, including Lagos, accelerator funding and Series A funding are relatively easy to find, but pre-seed and seed funding are not.

Getting yourselves and your startup in front of Silicon Valley investors that focus on pre-seed and seed funding will be important to rapidly scale. Esther mentioned that even in U.S. cities, such as Atlanta, that are entrepreneurial hotspots, investment dollars are not as plentiful as they are in Silicon Valley. Moreover, investors outside of Silicon Valley tend to be more risk-averse.

A composite image of immigration law attorney Sophie Alcorn in front of a background with a TechCrunch logo.

Image Credits: Joanna Buniak / Sophie Alcorn (opens in a new window)

So, yes, you should meet with Silicon Valley investors, but be aware that most U.S. embassies and consulates remain closed to routine visa and green card processing due to the ongoing pandemic. Given that, you can start requesting virtual meetings now; and you will have to wait until the U.S. consulate in Lagos comes back to full capacity to apply for a visa to come to the U.S. I like checking for visa availability through the Waypoint Embassy and Consulate Directory (full disclosure: I am an advisor to Waypoint).

As always, I recommend that you consult an experienced immigration attorney when you’re ready to take the step of actually applying for a visa.

Once U.S. consular offices reopen, if you aren’t eligible for ESTA, you can apply for a B-1 visitor visa for business. With a B-1 visa, you can request an initial stay of up to six months. This is a great status for business meetings such as to talk to prospective investors, negotiate contracts and incorporate a new business. However, you can’t work in the U.S. You must be aware that no hands-on work for pay (or even the chance of future remuneration) by a U.S. entity is allowed.

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The Robinhood competitor landscape intensifies as Invstr raises $20M

Published March 17, 2021

One of the biggest gripes about investing apps is that they are not acting responsibly by not educating users properly and allegedly letting them fend for themselves. This can result in people losing a lot of money, as evidenced by the number of lawsuits against Robinhood.

Today, an eight-year-old company that has been focused on nothing but financial education is now offering trading and banking services in the U.S..

Over the years, London-based Invstr has built out an educational platform with features such as an investing academy. It’s created a Fantasy Finance game, which gives users the ability to manage a virtual $1 million portfolio so they can learn more about the markets before risking their own money for real. Via social gamification, Invstr has set out to make the educational process fun.

It has also built a community around users so they can learn from each other (something another Robinhood competitor Gatsby is also doing).

The great Gatsby raises millions to take on Robinhood

Over 1 million users have downloaded the platform globally.

Invstr, according to CEO and founder Kerim Derhalli, is taking a different approach from competitors by offering education and learning tools upfront. And in addition to giving users the ability to make commission-free stock trades, it’s also giving them a way to digitally bank and invest using their Invstr+ accounts “without ever needing to move money from one place to another.”

Invstr takes it all a step further for subscribers who have access to an “Invstr Score,” performance stats and behavioral analytics among other things.

Derhalli said moving in this direction with the company was part of his business plan from day one.

“I think the most powerful trend in the U.S. is self-directed investing,” Derhalli told TechCrunch. “Younger generations have grown up in an app world and they expect to be autonomous and do things for themselves. Many distrust the banking system, and they don’t want to follow in their parents’ footsteps when it comes to banking and finance. We think this is a massive opportunity.”

In the unveiling of its new offerings, Invstr also announced Wednesday that it has closed on a $20 million Series A in the form of a convertible offering. This builds upon $20 million it previously raised across two seed rounds from investors such as Ventura Capital, Finberg, European angel investor Jari Ovaskainen and Rick Haythornthwaite, former global chairman of Mastercard.

Derhalli said he felt compelled to found Invstr after seeing firsthand how a lack of knowledge and confidence can prevent individuals from starting to invest. He worked for three decades in senior leadership roles at Deutsche Bank, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and JPMorgan before founding Invstr “so that anyone, anywhere could learn how to invest.”

A fraction of Robinhood’s users are driving its runaway growth

Invstr is offering its new investing services in partnership with Apex Clearing, which formerly provided execution and settlement services to Robinhood. Its digital banking services are being offered through a partnership with Vast Bank. To address the security piece, Invstr said its user data is also protected by technology from Okta.

The company, which also has offices in New York and Istanbul, plans to use the new capital to launch new brokerage and analytics tools and a portfolio builder.

Early Stage is the premier “how-to” event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear firsthand how some of the most successful founders and VCs build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios. We’ll cover every aspect of company building: Fundraising, recruiting, sales, product-market fit, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session also has audience participation built-in — there’s ample time included for audience questions and discussion. Use code “TCARTICLE at checkout to get 20% off tickets right here.

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Oso announces $8.2M Series A to simplify authorization for developers

Published March 17, 2021

When we think about getting access to an application, we tend to focus on the authentication side — granting or denying people (or devices) entry. But there is another piece to this, and that’s authorization. This is related to what you can do once you are inside the application, and Oso, an early-stage startup, has created an open-source library for developers to make it easier to build authorization in their applications.

Today, the company announced an $8.2 million Series A led by Sequoia with participation from SV Angel, Company Ventures, Highland Capital and numerous angel investors. When combined with a $2.7 million seed round from 2019, it brings the total raised to $10.9 million.

Company co-founder and CEO Graham Neray says that developers have benefited from tools like Stripe and Twilio to normalize the use of third-party APIs to offload parts of the application that aren’t core to the value prop. Oso does the same thing, except for authorization.

“We help developers to speed up their authorization roadmaps by up to 4x, and the way that we do that is by providing this library, which comes with pre-built integrations, guides and an underlying policy language,” Neray explained.

He says that authorization is a misunderstood concept, and as though to confirm this, when I tried to explain Oso to a colleague, his first thought was that it is an Okta competitor. It’s not. As Neray explains, authorization and authentication are related, but are in fact different and require a different set of tools.

While tools like Okta grant you access, authorization determines what buttons can you click, what pages can you see, what data can you access. Most developers handle this manually by writing the authorization code themselves, linking it to Active Directory (or a similar tool) and fashioning a permissions matrix. Oso’s goal is to remove that burden and provide a set of tools to abstract away most of the complexity.

The tool is open source and the startup is concentrating on building a community of users for now to build developer interest. Over time, they fully intend to build a commercial company on top of that, but are still thinking about how that will look.

Where top VCs are investing in open source and dev tools (Part 1 of 2)

For now,  the company, which launched in 2018, has nine employees with plans to triple that over the next 18 months. Neray and co-founder and CTO Sam Scott are thinking carefully about how to build a diverse, inclusive and equitable company as they grow. That means hiring from underrepresented groups, treating them fairly and making them feel like they belong. Neray says at this point, he is doing all of the hiring.

“I make a concerted effort to ensure that our pipeline is as diverse as I want the team to be — full stop — and that’s the only way to do it,” he said.

He adds that while building a diverse workforce is the morally right thing to do for him and his co-founder, there is also a practical business side to this too. “We don’t want to build an echo chamber with people from the same background, the same thought process and all the same upbringing,” he said.

When the company can return to the office, the plan is to have a home base, but let folks work where they want and how they want. “The plan is we will have an office in New York, and we will have remote team members. So in one form or another it will be hybrid,” Neray said.

API startups are so hot right now

Early Stage is the premier “how-to” event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear firsthand how some of the most successful founders and VCs build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios. We’ll cover every aspect of company building: Fundraising, recruiting, sales, product-market fit, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session also has audience participation built-in — there’s ample time included for audience questions and discussion. Use code “TCARTICLE at checkout to get 20% off tickets right here.

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Pixxel closes $7.3M seed round and unveils commercial hyperspectral imaging product

Published March 17, 2021

LA and Bangalore-based space startup Pixxel has closed a $7.3 million seed round, including newly committed capital from Techstars, Omnivore VC and more. The company has also announced a new product focus: hyperspectral imaging. It aims to provide that imaging at the highest resolution commercially available, via a small satellite constellation that will provide 24-hour global coverage once it’s fully operational.

Pixxel’s funding today is an extension of the $5 million it announced it had raised back in August of last year. At the time, the startup had only revealed that it was focusing on Earth imaging, and it’s unveiling its specific pursuit of hyperspectral imaging for the first time today. Hyperspectral imaging uses far more light frequencies than the much more commonly used multispectral imaging used in satellite observation today, allowing for unprecedented insight and detection of previously invisible issues, including migration of pest insect populations in agriculture, or observing gas leaks and other ecological threats.

Standard multispectral imaging (left) vs. hyperspectral imaging (right). Image Credits: EPFL

“We started with analyzing existing satellite images, and what we could do with this immediately,” explained Pixxel co-founder and CEO Awais Ahmed in an interview. “We realized that in most cases, it was not able to even see certain problems or issues that we wanted to solve — for example, we wanted to be able to look at air pollution and water pollution levels. But to be able to do that there were no commercial satellites that would enable us to do that, or even open source satellite data at the resolution that would enable us to do that.”

India’s first Earth-imaging satellite startup raises $5 million; first launch planned for later this year

The potential of hyperspectral imaging on Earth, across a range of sectors, is huge, according to Ahmed, but Pixxel’s long-term vision is all about empowering a future commercial space sector to make the most of in-space resources.

“We started looking at space as a sector for us to be able to work in, and we realized that what we wanted to do was to be able to enable people to take resources from space to use in space,” Ahmed said. That included asteroid mining, for example, and when we investigated that, we found hyperspectral imaging was the imaging tech that would enable us to map these asteroids as to whether they contain these metals or these minerals. So that knowledge sort of transferred to this more short-term problem that we were looking at solving.”

Part of the reason that Pixxel’s founders couldn’t find existing available hyperspectral imaging at the resolutions they needed was that as a technology, it has previously been restricted to internal governmental use through regulation. The U.S. recently opened up the ability for commercial entities to pursue very high-resolution hyperspectral imaging for use on the private market, effectively because they realized that these technical capabilities were becoming available in other international markets anyway. Ahmed told me that the main blocker was still technical, however.

Pixxel's Hyperspectral imaging satellite at its production facility in Bangalore

Image Credits: Pixxel

“If we were to build a camera like this even two or three years ago, it would not have been possible because of the miniaturized sensors, the optics, etc.,” he said. “The advances that have happened only happened very recently, so it’s also the fact that this the right time to take it from the scientific domain to the commercial domain.”

9 top space tech VCs on the market’s opportunities and challenges

Pixxel now aims to have its first hyperspectral imaging satellite launched and operating on orbit within the next few months, and it will then continue to launch additional satellites after that once it’s able to test and evaluate the performance of its first spacecraft in an actual operating environment.

Early Stage is the premier “how-to” event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear firsthand how some of the most successful founders and VCs build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios. We’ll cover every aspect of company building: Fundraising, recruiting, sales, product-market fit, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session also has audience participation built-in — there’s ample time included for audience questions and discussion. Use code “TCARTICLE at checkout to get 20% off tickets right here.

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Pregame Y Combinator with Equity

Published March 17, 2021



Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down and focus on a single topic, or theme. This is our sweet spot: going beyond definitions and into the dirty and deep impact of how a phenomenon could impact startups and tech. We are hoping to explore more than answer, and debate more than agree.

This week we’re riffing on the impending Y Combinator Demo Day class, all hailing from the Winter 2021 cohort. As we stated on the show, we’re not saying that these are the only startups worth looking at. They’re simply the startups from the batch that TechCrunch has already covered, as well as some crowdsourced favorites.

Here’s a brief rundown of the show, bucketed by market choice, loosely:

  • Startups serving startups: The largest group of startups in our rundown, we chatted about BrioHR, which is building HR software for Southeast Asia (TechCrunch coverage here); Firstbase, which is building a remote-work onboarding service (TechCrunch coverage here); ContentFly, which wants to use a hybrid of computer and human intelligence to provide writing services; Runway, which wants to help companies better manage app rollouts (TechCrunch coverage here); and Mono, which is building a Plaid for Africa (TechCrunch coverage here).
  • Marketplaces: Here we found two companies to discuss, the first being Providence’s own Pangea, and Queenly. Pangea (TechCrunch coverage here) is building a freelance marketplace for digitally savvy college kids and small businesses, while Queenly is a marketplace for formalwear (TechCrunch coverage here).

YC-backed Queenly launches a marketplace for formalwear

  • Space: Alex demanded that we include Albedo, which is aiming to launch a satellite constellation to improve imaging of the planet using low-orbit flight paths.
  • Biotech: And then there were two biotech companies. The first, Pipe|Bio does big data management for drug development, and Nuntius Therapeutics, which is working on delivering “large genetic payloads into the correct cells.” Which sounds cool.

The actual Demo Day is happening next Tuesday, so TechCrunch and Extra Crunch will be all over day-of coverage as per usual. Talk then!

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST, Wednesday, and Friday morning at 7:00 a.m. PST, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

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

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Writing helper Copy.ai raises $2.9M in a round led by Craft Ventures

Published March 17, 2021

Copy.ai, a startup building AI-powered copywriting tools for business customers, announced a $2.9 million round this morning. The investment was led by Craft Ventures. Other investors took part in the deal, including smaller checks from Li Jin’s newly formed Atelier Ventures and Sequoia.

The startup is notable for a few reasons. First for its model of building in public. I initially heard of the company through its monthly updates that it posts on Twitter. Thanks to that, I can tell you that Copy.ai generated monthly recurring revenue (MRR) of $53,600. That figure, up 46% from January, works out to annual recurring revenue (ARR) of $643,200.

Copy.ai also shares usage numbers, and, humorously, the number of Twitter followers that its founder Paul Yacoubian picked up in the last month.

The startup is also worth watching because it is part of a growing cohort of companies building atop GPT-3, what its progenitor the OpenAI project describes as an “autoregressive language model with 175 billion parameters.” More generally, it’s a piece of AI that can generate words.

Some investors are rather bullish on startups using the technology. Recently on TechCrunch, for example, Madrona’s Matt McIlwain wrote that “the introduction of GPT-3 in 2020 was a tipping point for artificial intelligence” that will lead to “the launch of a thousand new startups and applications.”

4 ways startups will drive GPT-3 adoption in 2021

So far that’s holding up. Not only has Copy.ai managed to find early in-market traction, TechCrunch has covered a number of other startups busy leveraging GPT-3, including OthersideAi, which raised $2.6 million back in November of 2020, and an “AI Dungeon-maker” called Latitude that also employs GPT-3 and raised $3.3 million this February.

But enough about its cohort. Let’s get into how Copy.ai got built.

AI Dungeon-maker Latitude raises $3.3M to build games with ‘infinite’ story possibilities

Origins

Before founding Copy.ai, Yacoubian was an investor and, it seems, a tinkerer. He played with GPT-3 predecessor GPT-2 when it came out, telling TechCrunch in an interview that he discovered that the tool generated lots of “nonsense,” with the occasional “flash of brilliance.” GPT-3 proved even better in his view, providing something akin to a “50x” improvement on the generation that came before it.

Leaning on Twitter as a distribution method — Copy.ai uses Twitter as a distribution channel, hence its reporting on social media metrics — Yacoubian and his co-founder Chris Lu launched a few different draft-projects using GPT-3. Simplify.so did text condensing, a slackbot was built but never made it to the outside world and taglines.ai was put together to help companies come up with slogans.

That last one found early traction, generating around 700 sign-ups in two days. That was enough of a user base, the co-founders decided, to begin monetizing their tool. Then they decided that the initial concept could be extended to other writing use cases, helping people with myriad distinct writing projects. Copy.ai was formed out of that concept.

The product can now generate text for blogs and products and headlines and the like, based on user-provided word inputs.

What’s odd and nearly antithetical to your humble servant as a writer is that Copy.ai doesn’t want to save you word count, per se. Instead, it generates a number of possible text results from which the customer then chooses. Recall the flashes of brilliance that Yacoubian said GPT-2 could generate? GPT-3 is even better, giving users of Copy.ai even better possible text formulations for their needs. And then the human-in-the-loop plays the editor role, choosing which they want the most and, I presume, tweaking from there.

When it was released back in October of 2020, Copy.ai snagged 2,000 sign-ups in its first two days. Then investors started reaching out.

Quitting their day jobs, Copy.ai became a full-time affair. The unorthodox startup also put together an unorthodox round, raising from what Yacoubian described as “as many people as [they] could.” That wound up being 80 people, give or take.

The round was raised as a capped SAFE, the Y Combinator-favored investing instrument that allows startups to accrete capital from external sources without a formal pricing; instead, SAFEs are often “capped” at a maximum valuation. Copy.ai raised its cap as its fundraising process trundled along.

David Sacks, founder of Craft Ventures, told TechCrunch that he thinks that “natural language generation powered by AI is going to change the way that marketing teams write copy,” adding that amongst startups it is “rare to see such strong bottom-up adoption in so short a time.”

I am honestly a bit excited to see what Copy.ai can do, not because I will use its product — it’s not precisely in my wheelhouse — but because I am rather excited about GPT-3 as a technology. And the startup is an in-market experiment regarding AI and writing. Two things I care quite a lot about.

Early Stage is the premier “how-to” event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear firsthand how some of the most successful founders and VCs build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios. We’ll cover every aspect of company building: Fundraising, recruiting, sales, product-market fit, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session also has audience participation built-in — there’s ample time included for audience questions and discussion. Use code “TCARTICLE at checkout to get 20% off tickets right here.

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SoftBank-backed Indian insurance platform Policybazaar raises $75 million

Published March 17, 2021

Policybazaar has raised $75 million as the Indian online insurance platform looks to expand its presence in UAE and Middle East.

Sarbvir Singh, chief executive of Policybazaar, told TechCrunch that the startup had raised $75 million, but didn’t elaborate. Falcon Edge Capital led the new tranche of investment in the Indian startup, which has raised about $630 million to date, according to research firm Tracxn.

The 12-year-old startup, which counts SoftBank Group’s Vision Fund and Tiger Global among its investors, is among a handful of startups that is attempting to upend India’s insurance market, which is largely commanded by state and bank-backed insurers.

Policybazaar serves as an aggregator that allows users to compare and buy policies — across categories including life, health, travel, auto and property — from dozens of insurers on its website without having to go through conventional agents.

A screengrab of Policybazaar website

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 in a year, according to World Bank. ICRA estimated that of those Indians who had purchased an insurance product, they were spending less than $50 on it in 2017.

In a recent report, analysts at Bernstein estimated that Policybazaar commands 90% of share in the online insurance distribution market. The platform also sells loans, credit cards and mutual funds. The startup says it sells over a million policies a month.

“India has an under-penetrated insurance market. Within the under-penetrated landscape, digital distribution through web-aggregators like Policybazaar forms <1% of the industry. This offers a large headroom for growth,” Bernstein analysts wrote to clients.

The startup, which is working on an initial public offering slated for next year, said it will use the fresh investment to expand its presence across the UAE and Middle East regions.

“PolicyBazaar has shown stellar innovation, execution, and relentlessness in establishing itself as the market leader in online insurance aggregation in India. We believe the playbook it has established over the last 10 years in being the most efficient sales channel for insurance manufacturers, can act as a catalyst to gain market leadership in the GCC,” said Navroz Udwadia, co-founder of Falcon Edge Capital, in a statement.

To fill funding gaps, VCs boost efforts to find India’s standout early-stage startups

Early Stage is the premier “how-to” event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear firsthand how some of the most successful founders and VCs build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios. We’ll cover every aspect of company building: Fundraising, recruiting, sales, product-market fit, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session also has audience participation built-in — there’s ample time included for audience questions and discussion. Use code “TCARTICLE at checkout to get 20% off tickets right here.

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