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Extra Crunch roundup: BNPL bonanza, scraping Toast’s S-1/A, early-stage SaaS pricing

Published September 14, 2021

Are founders in fundraising mode short-sighted when it comes to working with Chinese venture funds?

Runa Capital’s Asia business development manager Denis Kalinin studied data from iTjuzi, a database of Chinese venture capitalists, and found:

“…Chinese funds invested around $250 billion in 2020 (three times higher than the figure reported in Crunchbase). This figure puts Chinese VC investments only 30% lower than investments by U.S. funds, but three times that of U.K. funds and 12.5 times more than German funds.”

The pandemic, geopolitical tensions and other factors led many Chinese venture funds to pare back their international investments, but that’s largely “because during COVID, China’s economy recovered much faster than other countries’,” writes Kalinin.

His analysis covers multiple angles: Chinese investments in Europe are catching up with those in Asia and the United States, half of China’s top cross-border investors are CVCs, and investors are particularly interested in fintech, deep tech and digital health at the moment.

“Chinese investors can bring value to foreign startups, but you need to study their expertise and how it can be useful for you.”

Is it so bad to take money from Chinese venture funds?

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Today at 2 p.m. PT/5 p.m. ET on Twitter Spaces, Managing Editor Danny Crichton and immigration law attorney Sophie Alcorn will discuss whether remote work is making H-1B visas less critical for international founders.

It’s a provocative question: If remote teams are becoming the norm, tech hubs are decentralizing and investors are comfortable cutting checks after a Zoom call, how important is it to do business as a startup inside the U.S?

It’s sure to be an interesting conversation; to get a reminder, please follow @TechCrunch on Twitter.

Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch this week!

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

Toast looks toward $18B valuation in upcoming IPO

Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)

Toast released an early IPO price range of $30 to $33 per share on Monday, and Alex Wilhelm digs into the S-1/A filing to “better understand how to value vertical SaaS startups that are pursuing a payments-and-SaaS business approach.”

Is the restaurant software startup worth the $18 billion valuation it’s aiming for?

Toast looks toward $18B valuation in upcoming IPO

3 keys to pricing early-stage SaaS products

Family of disposable coffee/tea cups

Image Credits: Peter Dazeley (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Every founder who launches an enterprise software startup has to figure out the “right” pricing model for their products.

It’s a consequential decision: Per-seat licenses are easy to manage, but what if customers prefer a concurrent licensing model?

“Early pricing discussions should center around the buyer’s perspective and the value the product creates for them,” says Ridge Ventures partner Yousuf Khan, who previously worked as a CIO.

“Of course,” he notes, “self-evaluation is hard, especially when you’re asking someone else to pay you for something you’ve created.”

3 keys to pricing early-stage SaaS products

Is India’s BNPL 2.0 set to disrupt B2B?

Image Credits: jayk7 / Getty Images

India’s mom-and-pop businesses are experiencing a digital transformation that’s creating new e-commerce opportunities; smartphones have replaced paper records, and a new government-backed instant payments system is disrupting how value is exchanged.

But instead of importing legacy credit systems, buy now, pay later systems are the “next step for solving the digital B2B puzzle,” writes Anubhav Jain, co-founder and CEO of Rupifi.

Is India’s BNPL 2.0 set to disrupt B2B?

What to make of Freshworks’ first IPO price range

Developing programming and coding technologies. Website design. Programmer working in a software develop company office.

Image Credits: scyther5 / Getty Images

Freshworks, which develops and offers a variety of business software tools, set an IPO price range of $28 to $32 per share on Monday, meaning its valuation could reach nearly $10 billion, Alex Wilhelm writes.

“It appears that the Freshworks IPO is pretty reasonably priced as is, though a boost to its price range is not out of the question if public market investors decide that they are bullish on its future growth prospects. We just don’t see dramatic upside.”

ish on its future growth prospects. We just don’t see dramatic upside.”

What to make of Freshworks’ first IPO price range

Here’s what your BNPL startup could be worth

Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)

The multibillion-dollar exits of Japanese startup Paidy (to PayPal) and Australian buy now, pay later company Afterpay (to Square) “provided hard market proof that what BNPL startups are building has value beyond simple operating results,” Alex Wilhelm writes in The Exchange.

He breaks down the value of Afterpay, Paidy and Klarna using a simple metric: What would you pay for $1 of BNPL GMV?

Here’s what your BNPL startup could be worth

3 methodologies for automated video game highlight detection and capture

Image of a gaming computer setup with two monitors.

Image Credits: mikkelwilliam (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Video game livestreaming is booming.

Twitch has an average of almost 3 million concurrent viewers; by comparison, on the night of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, CNN’s livestream averaged 1.1 million.

The most successful streamers use their ad revenue and sponsorship money to hire video editors and social media teams to make them look good, but new automated tools are giving part-time streamers the ability to spotlight their best moments as well.

3 methodologies for automated video game highlight detection and capture

Have ‘The Privacy Talk’ with your business partners

Speech bubbles between two human hands against khaki background.

Image Credits: Boris Zhitkov (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

A data breach costs a company an average of $3.8 million, Marc Ellenbogen, Foursquare’s general counsel, notes in a guest post, adding up to a “concrete financial incentive to having The Privacy Talk.”

What is it?

“It’s the conversation that goes beyond the written, publicly posted privacy policy and dives deep into a customer, vendor, supplier or partner’s approach to ethics,” he writes.

If you think the talk doesn’t apply to you, think again.

Have ‘The Privacy Talk’ with your business partners

Advanced rider assistance systems: Tech spawned by the politics of micromobility

First person view of riding an e-scooter in a city

Image Credits: Alexander Spatari (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

In an effort to “reassure local administrations that micromobility is safe, compliant and a good thing for cities,” scooter operators are “implementing technology similar to advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) usually found in cars,” Rebecca Bellan writes.

She breaks down how the tech could help prevent unwanted behavior and explores the cost for scooter operators and opportunities for startups.

Advanced rider assistance systems: Tech spawned by the politics of micromobility

 

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Apple’s iPhone 13 sports better battery and improved cameras, starting at $799

Published September 14, 2021

The rumors were right. The centerpiece of today’s big Apple event is the latest iPhone. The latest device lands less than a year after its predecessor, now that things have settled down somewhat on the supply chain side for Apple. Last year’s iPhone 12 was a massive seller, bucking the trend of stagnating smartphones sales, in part due to a bottleneck in sales from the unplanned delay, but also because it finally brought 5G connectivity to Apple’s mobile line.

Image Credits: Apple

Lucky number iPhone 13 (no skipping for superstition’s sake, mind) features a familiar design. The front notch has finally been shrunken — now 20% smaller than its predecessor — while the rear-facing camera system has also gotten a redesign. The screen is now 28% brighter Super Retina XDR display on both the iPhone 13 and 13 mini at 1200 nits.

Image Credits: Apple

The 13 sports a 6.1-inch screen, while the mini’s is 5.4 inches — same as last year. The display is protected by a ceramic shield coating, and the handset rates IP68 dust/waterproofing.

The phone is powered by Apple’s new A15 Bionic chip, built with a 5nm processor. The CPU is 6-core that the company is calling “the fastest CPU on any smartphone.” The new 4-core GPU, meanwhile, brings advanced graphics to the handset.

Image Credits: Apple

The rear dual-camera system features a 12MP wide-angle camera that’s capable of pulling in up to 47% more light. The new Cinematic Mode, meanwhile, brings rack focus-style shooting capable of adjusting the focus on subjects, using machine learning (you can also tap to adjust manual or switch between subjects). All models in the iPhone 13 also support Night Mode shooting, as well as the ProRes codec for a more pro-level of video.

Image Credits: Apple

Following last year’s introduction of 5G, the company has added more advanced antennae. Through the combination of a larger battery and energy saving software, the company says it’s been able to eke out an additional 2.5 hours of life on the 13 and 1.5 hours on the mini.

Image Credits: Apple

iPhone 13 mini starts at $699, while the 13 starts at $799. It comes in black, gold, silver and a new, lighter blue. Storage options start at128GB.

The iPhone 13 Pro and Pro Max features 120Hz display, better cameras

Not a massive update, all told — Apple seemingly saved a lot of that for the iPhone 13 Pro, which brings a 120Hz display (a feature that was rumored across the line) and a number of key updates to the imaging system. The Pro and Pro Max feature similar battery upgrades as the 13. The devices go up for preorder on September 17 and will be available at retail locations on September 24.

The company is also launching a number of accessories, including a new MagSafe Wallet that works with the Find My feature.

 

Read more about Apple's Fall 2021 Event on TechCrunch

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The Disrupt Desk will help you catch everything you missed at Disrupt 2021

Published September 14, 2021

This year at TechCrunch Disrupt (happening just next week), there is more to explore than ever before. From the scores of Startup Alley companies to the Startup Battlefield presentations to the Disrupt Stage, Extra Crunch Stage and beyond.

We’ll hear from big name VCs like Chamath Palihapatiya, a16z’s Katie Haun, GC’s Niko Bonatsos, Forerunner’s Kirsten Green and more. Founders, such as Stewart Butterfield (Slack), Tope Awotona (Calendly), Brian Armstrong (Coinbase) and Melanie Perkins (Canva), will share how they’ve grown an idea into a unicorn. We’ll even have policy folks like Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and the SEC’s Erin Schneider at the show, with celebrities Ryan Reynolds and Seth Rogen to boot.

On the Extra Crunch stage, panels on how to raise your first dollars, how to craft your pitch deck, how to land your first B2B customers and how to find product market fit will include audience Q&A, to make sure you leave with everything you need to know to be successful.

Obviously, it would be impossible to catch it all in real time. But the Disrupt Desk is making its grand return after debuting in 2020.

The Disrupt Desk will hit you with all the biggest highlights from the show, complete with analysis of breaking news and meaningful insights from our speakers. Plus, the Disrupt Desk will have a few never-before-seen demos and breaking news announcements.

Of course, alongside catching up with the Disrupt Desk, Disrupt attendees can catch everything from the show on-demand with their complementary 3-month Extra Crunch membership.

TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 goes down in just a few days (September 21-23 to be exact), so snag your pass soon before it’s too late! Prices are less than $100 to get access to it all but just until Monday when prices increase by $200.

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LinkedIn launches a $25M fund for creators, will test Clubhouse-style audio feature in coming weeks

Published September 14, 2021

When LinkedIn first launched Stories format, and later expanded its tools for creators earlier this year, one noticeable detail was that the Microsoft-owned network for professionals hadn’t built any kind of obvious monetization into the program — noticeable, given that creators earn a living on other platforms like Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, and those apps had lured creators, their content and their audiences in part by paying out.

“As we continue to listen to feedback from our members as we consider future opportunities, we’ll also continue to evolve how we create more value for our creators,” is how LinkedIn explained its holding pattern on payouts to me at the time. But that strategy may have backfired for the company — or at least may have played a role in what came next: last month, LinkedIn announced it would be scrapping its Stories format and going back to the proverbial drawing board to work on other short-form video content for the platform.

Now comes the latest iteration in that effort. To bring more creators to the platform, the company today announced that it would be launching a new $25 million creator fund, which initially will be focused around a new Creator Accelerator Program.

LinkedIn is scrapping its Stories feature to work on short-form video

It’s coming on the heels of LinkedIn also continuing to work on one of its other new-content experiments: a Clubhouse-style live conversation platform. As we previously reported, LinkedIn began working on this back in March of this year. Now, we are hearing that the feature will make an appearance as part of a broader events strategy for the company very soon.

“We’ll be starting to test audio with a small pilot group in the coming weeks,” said Chris Szeto, senior director of product at LinkedIn, who heads up its audio efforts. “Given the trends in virtual, hybrid events we are also working on making audio part of our overall event strategy rather than a standalone offering, so that we can give people more choice about how they want to run and engage with their audiences.”

Notably, in a blog post announcing the creator fund, LinkedIn also listed a number of creator events coming up. Will the Clubhouse-style feature pop up there? Watch this space. Or maybe… listen up.

In any case, the creator accelerator that LinkedIn is announcing today is part of a bigger effort it’s been making to build out a platform for creating content. That has included building new tools and acquiring companies like Jumprope (a platform devised to make “how-to” videos) earlier this year. Together with the accelerator, the idea that LinkedIn wants to encourage more dynamic and lively set of voices to get more people talking and spending time on LinkedIn.

Andrei Santalo, global head of community at LinkedIn, noted in the blog post that the accelerator/incubator will be focused on the many ways that one can engage on LinkedIn.

“Creating content on LinkedIn is about creating opportunity, for yourselves and others,” he writes. “How can your words, videos and conversations make 774+ million professionals better at what they do or help them see the world in new ways?”

The incubator will last for 10 weeks and will take on 100 creators in the U.S. to coach them on building content for LinkedIn. It will also give them chances to network with like-minded individuals (naturally… it is LinkedIn), as well as a $15,000 grant to do their work. The deadline for applying (which you do here) is October 12.

The idea of starting a fund to incentivize creators to build video for a particular platform is definitely not new — and that is one reason why it was overdue for LinkedIn to think about its own approach.

Leading social media platforms like TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook and YouTube all have announced hundreds of millions of dollars in payouts in the form of creator funds to bring more original content to their platforms.

You could argue that for mass-market social media sites, it’s important to pay creators because competition is so fierce among them for consumer attention.

But on the other hand, those platforms have appeal for creators because of the potential audience size. At 774 million users, LinkedIn isn’t exactly small, but the kind of content that tends to live on there is so different, and maybe drier — it’s focused on professional development, work and “serious” topics — that perhaps it might need the most financial incentive of all to get creators to bite.

LinkedIn’s bread and butter up to now has been around professional development: people use it to look for work, to get better jobs, to hire people, and to connect with people who might help them get ahead in their professional lives.

But it’s done so in a very prescribed set of formats that do not leave much room for exploring “authenticity” — not in the modern sense of “authentic self”, and not in the more old-school sense of just letting down your guard and being yourself. (Even relatively newer initiatives like its education focus directly play into this bigger framework.)

With authenticity becoming an increasing priority for people — and maybe more so as we have started to blur the lines between work and home because of COVID-19 and the changes that it has forced on us — I can’t help but wonder whether LinkedIn will use this opportunity to rethink, or at least expand the concept of, what it means to spend time on its platform.

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Tonal adds live classes to its strength training workouts

Published September 14, 2021

Wall-mounted fitness startup Tonal this morning announced that it’s bringing live courses to it portfolio of strength training workouts. The company did a soft launch of the live offering back in December of last year, though at the time, it wasn’t live, so much as prerecorded — “live, on tape,” to steal a line from The Larry Sanders Show.

“[Y]our coach works out with you — just like in a live class,” the company wrote. Our Live (Beta) workouts combine the energizing feeling of working out alongside a coach with Tonal’s ability to count your reps and wait for you to complete each set […] It’s all on-demand, so you can work out whenever it fits into your schedule.”

The new offering brings the company’s content selection more in-line with leaders in the home fitness space like Peloton. Certainly live isn’t for everyone, but many users do appreciate the motivation that comes with a fixed schedule, as well as the sense of community one derives from working out with others.

The new offering provides real-time feedback from coaches, coupled with a “social zone” for interacting with fellow Tonal users. The portfolio is also getting four new coaches for live workouts. After a day, live workouts will be archived in Tonal’s on-demand offerings.

“As our community has grown over the past few years, we’ve been encouraged by the organic social engagement, the craving for more interaction with our coaches, and the excitement that comes from reaching new milestones,” founder and CEO Aly Orady said in a release. “Tonal Live will allow us to connect these elements through a studio experience while retaining the foundation of what differentiates our workouts: personalization, guidance, and feedback.”

Founded in 2015, the San Francisco-based company is among those connected fitness brands that saw a major boost as the pandemic forced many to rethink their workout routines. Tonal has raised $450 million to date, including a $250 million Series E that raised its valuation to $1.6 billion, back in March.

The Tonal EC-1

Strength-training startup Tonal crosses unicorn status after raising $250M

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1047 Games raises $100M on the runaway success of its debut title, Splitgate

Published September 14, 2021

When you’re hot, you’re hot. And 1047 Games is making the most of the heat generated by Splitgate, its first game and now a breakout success. After working on a shoestring for years, the team has since May raised three rounds, the latest for a massive $100 million.

Co-founder and CEO Ian Proulx credited a dedicated community and, as he described it, “taking a Silicon Valley approach to running a game business.”

At the time 1047 Games was founded, about five years ago, free to play (F2P) PC games were a niche genre. While games like World of Tanks and Warframe were seeing success, and of course many mobile games relying on in-app purchases, Fortnite had yet to show the industry that F2P could be so ludicrously profitable.

“Five years ago it was very hit-driven: You spend years developing a product, put all this money into hyping the launch and then hope it’s a success,” Proulx explained. “Our process was, there’s no way we can take that risk — if we spent our entire budget and got it wrong, we’re out of business. So we thought, let’s do a soft launch, put it out there and see what happens, learn, listen, look at the data. Why would I spend money marketing a product that I have no idea about whether it will be a success? If we wanted to spend money, and we didn’t have a lot, I’d rather spend it on a product that has great metrics and KPIs.”

If you’re not familiar with it, Splitgate is a multiplayer online competitive shooter with a lot of DNA from the old-school arena shooters like Quake 3, Unreal Tournament and Halo. Those games are frenetic enough, but Splitgate adds the ability to bend space with portals, like the eponymous Portal, adding a truly ridiculous amount of mobility to the action.

Screenshot of the game Splitgate showing a player aiming through a portal

Image Credits: 1047 Games

Proulx said investors shut the door on him repeatedly because they didn’t see Splitgate competing in any of the popular genres, battle royales and hero shooters, for instance. But he felt confident that this update to a familiar formula would be a success partly because the demand was there, just sleeping. “People grew up playing these games, and the reason [the market] is dead is not because they stopped loving them,” he said. “No one has moved the needle because there hasn’t been a lot of innovation, and there hasn’t been something that’s accessible to the masses. Quake Arena is great, but it’s extremely difficult. No 12-year-old Fortnite kid is gonna play it. We really do fill this void.”

While gameplay-wise Splitgate is most obviously similar to classic shooters, Proulx said a better comparison would be Rocket League, another huge success story in gaming that took a great concept and provided it as cheaply as possible, making money off cosmetic items and other totally optional perks.

“You can just have fun, turn your brain off and play, but there’s this limitless skill ceiling,” he explained.

It didn’t spring fully formed from 1047 in 2019, though. The team put out the gaming equivalent of a minimum viable product. “It was fun, and the basics were there,” he said, “but we learned there’s way more to running a business and free-to-play than just having a fun game.”

The danger for any game is simply that people stop playing, so the team focused on retention and on listening to feedback from the community to make Splitgate a “forever game” that can go years, with “seasons,” new features and maps, and so on.

The original MVP release saw some traction, around 600,000 downloads in its first month, but the big multiplatform relaunch — still as an “open beta” — this summer made a huge splash, pulling in more than 10 million in July.

Suddenly the tables had turned and 1047 was holding, as Proulx put it, “lightning in a bottle.”

“Our first round six months ago was extremely difficult. We talked to every investor on the planet and they all said no,” he recalled. But the hard work paid off: “We got lucky and ended up with the perfect partners — I can’t stress enough how supportive our investors have been.”

The next round (with Human Capital, just as Splitgate was taking off, went from phone call to funding over a weekend. This third round, with 1047 picking and choosing, was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from “Insight Partners, Anthos Capital, and earlier seed round investors Galaxy Interactive, VGames, Human Capital, Lakestar, DraperDragon, and Draper University” (from the press release).

One wonders what a team of fewer than 10 people could possibly do with $100 million ($116 million if you count the two previous rounds). But the bet investors are making is not that 1047 is going to suddenly make Assassin’s Creed, but rather that they think 10 million (and rising) people playing a unique game is potentially a huge opportunity — if the developers have the chance to follow through. This post-hype period is the valley of death for many games, the developers starved for cash after streamers and curious casuals move on. But the funding means that, for 1047, it’s license to hire like mad and double down.

“The scope of what we can do is now through the roof,” said Proulx. “There’s so much we couldn’t think about because we were a tiny team with a tiny budget, but now everything is on the table. We’re focusing on the long term — I look at the game as being 25% done. We don’t need to be Fortnite tomorrow, but now it really is about building the next Riot Games, the next big games business.”

In the meantime, Splitgate itself is still on the road to 1.0 and Proulx says the team can now truly focus on making it the game they and the community have been shaping it to be for years. He noted that many players have stuck by the team for years and helped make the game what it is, and that their input is just as important now.

“We read everything, we’re listening — keep the feedback coming. We’re still operating like the indie team that had to stay close with our community. We’re still in that mindset,” Proulx said, “but now we just have a ridiculous amount of money.”

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Going after social commerce for sportspeople, Millions gets $10M

Published September 14, 2021

Millions.co, a social commerce platform geared toward professional and semi-professional athletes wanting help to monetize their fanbase by selling merch and/or on-demand video, has grabbed $10 million in funding led by Boston-based Volition Capital.

The round is being loosely pegged as a Series A as the seasoned team behind Millions self-funded the first wave of development to get the platform launched.

The founding team includes CEO Matt Whitteker, a boxing gym owner who co-founded the supply chain data management unicorn Assent Compliance and NoNotes.com; CMO Brandon Austin, co-founder of Go-Fish Cam; and, in advisor roles, Adrian Salamunovic, co-founder of DNA 11 and CanvasPop; Scott Whitteker (Fight for the Cure) and Bruce Buffer (a veteran sports announcer).

Millions launched its fan engagement social commerce platform in April — with an initial three products for pro/semi-pro athletes to pitch at their followers: Namely custom merchandize (including a free design service); ask-me-anything personalized videos; and a pay-per-view streaming offering that lets fans pay to tune into a livestream of their favorite sportsperson.

The startup’s initial plan had been to build just an e-commerce and merchandising platform but, having built that component, Salamunovic says the team decided to bundle in video products — such as personalized videos and “democratising” pay-per-view (PPV). 

“Our biggest advantage and differentiator is that we are strictly focused on the sports world and fan engagement,” he tells TechCrunch. “The obvious indirect competitors are Twitch (heavily focused on e-sports/gaming), Patreon (focused on creators), Represent.com (focused on merch drops for ‘influencers’), and even OnlyFans (we know who they focus on) but we’re laser-focused on the multibillion-dollar sports market.”

“Cameo has a very similar product to our video ‘Ask Me Anything’ platform — but we don’t focus on birthday shout-outs we focus on allowing fans to ask their favorite athletes questions around their training, their success, predictions (we’ve seen a lot of gamblers use our platform to get tips) and less on things like shout-outs,” he adds. “We love Cameo, but we’re really different and focused on sports.”

Cameo raises $50M to deliver personalized messages from celebrities & influencers

“Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook are all great social media platforms that allow athletes to engage and interact with their fans but it’s not a great place to monetize your audience,” Salamunovic also argues. “We help athletes create a brand, build a merch line, sell video content (personalized videos and watch parties all on a single platform). We’re not trying to replace any of these platforms, we’re complementing them by allowing the athletes to provide a single link and landing page for deeper interaction and monetization. The fans seem to love it too.”

At this stage, Millions only has around 300 athlete profiles live but says it has “thousands” who’ve registered interest across a variety of sports categories.

Its first focus — including for partnerships with agencies and sports leagues — has been on “combat sports and gyms”. But the platform has a long list of sports types in the search filter — from lacrosse to water polo to baseball or gymnastics — so the ambition is to go after a very broad funnel of pro/semi sportspeople. 

And for every Michael Jordan or Cristiano Ronaldo — aka, those top-tier athletes who can command hundreds of millions in sponsorship fees by inking partnerships with top brands to promote their products and who you certainly won’t find selling hats on Millions — there are scores of athletes who aren’t able to cut such sweet deals and who will have far more modest fanbases.

It’s that broad field of players and performers who Millions hopes will flock to its platform — and take up its dedicated offer of social commerce tools and tech to engage with and monetize their followers.

Commenting on the funding in a statement, Sean Cantwell, managing partner at Volition Capital, suggested: “Athletes are always looking for ways to connect on a deeper level with fans, generate additional revenue streams and build their personal brands and Millions offers all of this on a single platform. We think that Millions is the future of fan engagement.”

To help grease the funnel of sportspeople it needs to drive eyeballs to its platform, Millions is offering athletes a “signing bonus” when they join and start selling — with a variety of tiers of bonus (of up to $5K) per sportsperson.

“We initially wanted to stay hyper-focused on combat sports and not try to ‘boil the ocean’. Now we’re releasing new athletes’ profiles daily and introducing new sports like football, volleyball, golf and more,” notes Salamunovic. “Really, this platform is designed for any athlete who wants to reach their fans and create new monetization channels without having to put a ton of effort into things like page design, technology, design or logistics… we take care of all that so they can focus on engaging with their fans and most importantly on their sport and training.” 

“We’re looking to build the most important sports tech company in history,” he adds. “We’re going to be the Etsy ($21 billion market cap) of sports. That’s an ambitious statement but it’s true; 98% of athletes NEED our product/platform.”

Chasing that scale is why Millions is raising now. And while the early focus has been on North America — where about 90% of the onboarded sportspeople hail from currently — it reckons there’s “huge growth potential” in Europe and Asia so is very much gunning to build a global business.

It says it’ll be splashing Series A cash on growing its product engineering team and recruiting to expand its team generally, as well as spending on marketing to get the word out to athletes and get more signed up to build their own brands and sell direct to fans. 

“I believe a powerful thing we’re doing, past just the product offering, is enabling athletes to have a team,” adds Austin. “With Millions, athletes get a marketing team, a personal account manager, and a design team that they can use to build their brand and product line, and to promote to, and further build, their fan base. We allow the athlete to focus on training, playing/fighting, and winning while we help take care of everything else, and coach them on how to brand and market themselves.” 

Millions’ business model is to take a 20% cut of all sales athletes make via the platform — with the split remaining the same for merchandise or video sales.

For the former, Millions is using a global network of print-on-demand suppliers to do the fulfilment.

While products the platform can customize for athletes to sell as their own brand merch include t-shirts, caps and hoodies.

TikTok partners with Shopify on social commerce

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EverAfter closes $13M to help companies ride off into the sunset with their customers

Published September 14, 2021

EverAfter secured $13 million in seed funding to continue developing its no-code customer-facing tool that streamlines onboarding and retention and enables business-to-business clients to embed personalized customer portals within any product.

The Tel Aviv-based company was founded in 2020 by Noa Danon and Tal Shemesh. CEO Danon, who comes from a project management background, said they saw a disconnect between the user and product experience.

The company’s name, EverAfter, comes from the concept that in SaaS companies, someone has to be in charge of the “EverAfter,” with customers, even as the relationship changes, Danon told TechCrunch.

Via its no-code platform, customer success teams are able to build a website in weeks using drop-and-drag widgets like training materials, timelines, task management and meeting summaries, and then configure what each user sees. Then there is a snippet of code that is embedded into the product.

EverAfter also integrates with existing customer relationship management, project management and service ticket tools, while also updating Salesforce and HubSpot directly through an interface.

“It’s like the customer owns a piece of real estate inside the product,” Danon said.

TLV Partners and Vertex Ventures co-led the round and were joined by angel investors Benny Shneider, Zohar Gilon and Amit Gilon.

Yanai Oron, general partner at Vertex Ventures, said he is seeing best-in-breed companies try to solve customer churn or improve the relationship process on their own and failing, which speaks to the complexity of the problem.

Startups in this space are coming online and raising money, but with EverAfter, they are differentiating themselves by not only putting a dashboard on their product, but launching with the capabilities to manage thousands of customers using the product, he added.

“I’ve been tracking the customer success space over the past few years, and it is a growing field with the least sophisticated tools,” Oron said. “During COVID, companies realized it was easier to retain customers rather than get new ones. We are all used to more self-service and wanting to get the answer ourselves, and customers are the same. Companies also started to be more at ease in letting customers develop things on their own and leave R&D departments to do other things.”

Clients include Taboola, AppsFlyer and Verbit, with Verbit reporting its company’s customer success managers save 10 hours a week managing ongoing customer communication by using EverAfter, Danon added. This comes as CallMiner reports that unplanned customer churn costs companies $35.3 billion in the U.S. alone.

EverAfter offers both customer success and partner management software and clients can choose a high-touch service or kits and templates for self-service.

The new funding will enable the company to focus on integration and expansion into additional use cases. Since being founded, EverAfter has grown to 20 employees and 30 customers. The founders also want to utilize the data they are collecting on what works and doesn’t work for each customer.

“There are so many interesting things that happen between companies and customers, from onboarding to business reviews, and we are going to expand on those,” Danon said. “We want to be the first thing companies put inside their product to figure out the relationship between customers and customer success teams and managers.”

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