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Bonus: An extra week to save on tickets to TC Sessions: Space 2020

Published November 14, 2020

When you’re laser-focused on reaching beyond the stars, it’s hard to remember more earthly, mundane tasks. That’s why we’re giving you an extra week to score early-bird savings to TC Sessions: Space 2020 (December 16-17). So, to all you harried, procrastinating visionaries: take a breath, relax a bit and buy your pass before November 20 at 11:59 p.m. (PT).

Join the two-day online conference to hear from and connect with the leading forces within the space industry. Learn how to secure grants for your space company, how and where the Air Force plans to spend $60 billion on R&D, what savvy space investors think and where they might place their bets. And that’s just the tip of the rocket.

Presentations range from asteroid mining, extra-planetary robotic research and the future of space exploration to human spaceflight, manufacturing in space and supply-chain issues. Here are just two stellar examples, and you’ll find many more in the event agenda. Start planning your time now.

Bridging Two Eras of Human Spaceflight: When Kathryn Lueders started working at NASA in 1992, it was the peak of the Space Shuttle era. As she begins her leadership of the Human Spaceflight Office this year, a new and exciting era is just beginning. Lueders will discuss the possibilities and challenges of the new systems and technologies that will put the first woman and the next man on the surface of the moon…and perhaps Mars.

Crafting the Kuiper Constellation: Amazon is set to create its own global constellation of LEO satellites — a very different type of gadget from what Amazon SVP of Device & Services Dave Limp is used to overseeing. He’ll tell us how Project Kuiper fits in with Amazon’s grand plans.

Looking for more ways to save? Bring the whole team with a group discount. Tickets cost $100 each — bring four team members and get the fifth one free. Discount passes for students cost $50, while current government, military and nonprofit employees pay $95. Plus, Extra Crunch subscribers get a 20% discount.

Step into a virtual spotlight and showcase your startup in our expo: An Early-Stage Startup Exhibitor Package ($360 gets you three tickets, digital exhibition space and the ability to generate leads). Bonus: Exhibiting startups each get five minutes to pitch live to attendees around the world.

As you reach for the stars, connect with the experts and opportunities at TC Sessions: Space 2020 to help make your galactic dreams a reality. You have an extra week. Now, breathe, relax and buy your early-bird pass before November 20 at 11:59 p.m. (PT).

Is your company interested in sponsoring TC Sessions: Space 2020? Click here to talk with us about available opportunities.

NextView Ventures closes its fourth fund with $89 million

Published November 13, 2020

NextView Ventures, a Boston-based venture capital fund, has raised an $89.6 million fund, according to SEC filings. The firm’s fourth fund, its largest to date, is oversubscribed, with early documents indicating a $70 million goal. The NextView Ventures team did not immediately respond to request for comment.

NextView Ventures was launched in 2010 by Rob Go, a former partner at Spark Capital; Dave Beisel, who clocked time at Venrock and Masthead Venture Partners; and Lee Hower, a former investor at Point Judith Capital. Melody Koh joined as a partner three years ago, and most recently, the fund brought on former journalist Leah Fessler as an investor.

The fund, which has offices in New York as well as Boston, invests in consumer and software-as-a-service enterprise startups at the pre-seed and seed stage. Its portfolio includes Ellevest, an investing platform for women; Grove Collaborative, a sustainable goods subscription platform; and ThredUp, which has confidentially filed for IPO. In April, NextView launched a virtual accelerator for startups to build a more robust pipeline for deal flow. The firm invested $200,000 for an 8% equity stake in a number of pre-seed and seed startups focused on “the everyday economy.”

More Boston coverage

A hot Boston VC Summer

13 Boston investors reflect on COVID-19

Local accelerators provide a boon to area startups

Despite the pandemic, Boston’s startup scene has continued to attract record numbers in venture capital volume. In fact, according to PitchBook data, Boston-area startups raised more private capital during summer 2020 than they did in summer 2019, suggesting that the pandemic has been a boon to startups in aggregate.

More recently, my colleague Alex Wilhelm and I wrote about how the Boston area is growing its demographic footprint in venture capital. In Q3 2019, New England drove 9.3% of U.S. venture deals, and 10.3% of U.S. venture dollars. In Q3 2020, those numbers were 9.3% of U.S. venture deals, and 12.7% of U.S. venture dollars. The percentage change is notable, especially amid volatile times.

NextView’s new fund is yet another signal of the city’s ability to attract institutional investment. Its previous fund was raised in 2017 at a $50 million close.

Extra Crunch roundup: Inside DoorDash’s IPO, first-person founder stories, the latest in fintech VC and more

Published November 13, 2020

One of my favorite series of Monty Python sketches is built around the concept of surprise:

Chapman: I didn’t expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition.

[JARRING CHORD]

[Three cardinals burst in]

Cardinal Ximénez: NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition!

I was reminded of this today when I needed to reschedule a few stories so we could cover DoorDash’s S-1 filing from multiple angles. First, Managing Editor Danny Crichton looked at how well the company’s co-founders and many investors stand to make out. Alex Wilhelm covered the IPO announcement in depth on TechCrunch before writing an Extra Crunch column that studied the role the COVID-19 pandemic played in the home-delivery platform’s recent growth.

Our all-hands-on-deck coverage of DoorDash’s S-1 is a good illustration of Extra Crunch’s mission: timely analysis of current and future technology trends that serves founders and investors. We have a talented team, and as today’s coverage shows, they’re just as good as they are fast.

The stories that follow are an overview of Extra Crunch from the last five days. The full articles are only available to members, but you can use discount code ECFriday to save 20% off a one or two-year subscription. Details here.

Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch this week. I hope you have a great weekend!

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

What I wish I’d known about venture capital when I was a founder

Why I left edtech and got into gaming

Image Credits: Klaus Vedfelt / Getty Images

We frequently run posts by guest contributors, but two stories we published this week were written in the first person, which is a bit of a departure.

In Why I left edtech and got into gaming, Darshan Somashekar brought us inside his decision to pivot away from a sector that’s been growing hotter in 2020.

His post is a unique take on two oft-discussed categories, but it also examines one founder/investor’s thought process when it comes to evaluating new opportunities.

Andy Areitio, a partner at early-stage fund TheVentureCity, wrote What I wish I’d known about venture capital when I was a founder, a reflection on the “classic mistakes” founders tend to make when it’s time to fundraise.

“Error number one (and two) is to raise the wrong amount of money and to do it at the wrong time,” he says. “They can also put all their eggs in one basket too early. I made that mistake.”

You can find business writing that explores best practices anywhere, which is why we hunt down stories that are firmly rooted in data or personal experience (which includes success and failure).

What I wish I’d known about venture capital when I was a founder

Why I left edtech and got into gaming

How COVID-19 accelerated DoorDash’s business

Image Credits: DoorDash

The coronavirus pandemic looms large in DoorDash’s S-1 filing.

According to the food-delivery platform, “58% of all adults and 70% of millennials say that they are more likely to have restaurant food delivered than they were two years ago,” and “the COVID-19 pandemic has further accelerated these trends.”

As in other sectors, the pandemic didn’t wave a magic wand — instead, it hastened trends that were already in play: consumers love convenience, which means DoorDash’s gross order volume and revenue were tracking well before the virus started to shape our lives.

“It’s your call on how to balance the factors and decide whether or not to buy into the IPO, but this one is going to be big,” writes Alex Wilhelm in a supplemental edition of today’s The Exchange.

How COVID-19 accelerated DoorDash’s business

The VC and founder winners of DoorDash’s IPO

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – SEPTEMBER 05: DoorDash CEO Tony Xu speaks onstage during Day 1 of TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018 at Moscone Center on September 5, 2018 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch)

None of us knew DoorDash would release its S-1 filing today, but Danny Crichton jumped on the story “so we can see who is raking in the returns on the country’s delivery startup champion.”

After estimating the value of the respective ownership stakes held by DoorDash’s four co-founders, he turned to the investors who participated in rounds seed through Series H.

Some growth funds are about to look very good after this IPO, and each founder is looking at hundreds of millions, he found.

But even so, their diminished haul of about $1.3 billion is “a sign of just how much dilution the co-founders took given the sheer amount of capital the company fundraised over its life.”

The VC and founder winners of DoorDash’s IPO

Fintech VC keeps getting later, larger and more expensive

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

Investors sent stacks of cash to late-stage fintech companies in Q3 2020, but these sizable rounds may also point to shrinking opportunities for early-stage firms, reports Alex Wilhelm in this morning’s edition of The Exchange.

2020 could be a record year for fintech VC in Europe and North America, but are these “huge late-stage dollars” actually “a dampener for new fintech startups trying to get off the ground?”

Fintech VC keeps getting later, larger and more expensive

Accelerators embrace change forced by pandemic

Devin Coldewey interviewed the leaders of three startup accelerators to learn more about the adaptations they’ve made in recent months:

David Brown, founder and CEO, Techstars
Cyril Ebersweiler, founder HAX, venture partner at SOSV
Daniela Fernandez, founder, Ocean Solutions Accelerator

Due to travel bans, shelter-in-place orders and other unknowns, they’ve all shifted to virtual. But accelerators are intensive programs designed to indoctrinate founders and elicit brutally honest feedback in real time.

Despite the sudden shift, that boot-camp mindset is still in effect, Devin reports.

“Cutting out the commute time in a busy city leaves founders with more time for workshops, mentor matchmaking, pitch practice and other important sessions,” said Fernandez. “Everybody just has more flexibility and tranquility.”

Said Ebersweiler: “People are for some reason more participative and have more feedback than physically — it’s pretty strange.”

Accelerators embrace change forced by pandemic

Greylock’s Asheem Chandna on ‘shifting left’ in cybersecurity and the future of enterprise startups

Image Credits: Greylock

In a recent interview with Greylock partner Asheem Chandna, Managing Editor Danny Crichton asked him about the buzz around no-code platforms and what’s happening in early-stage enterprise startups before segueing into a discussion about “shift left” security:

“Every organization today wants to bring software to market faster, but they also want to make software more secure,” said Chandna.

“There is a genuine interest today in making the software more secure, so there’s this concept of shift left — bake security into the software.”

Greylock’s Asheem Chandna on ‘shifting left’ in cybersecurity and the future of enterprise startups

Square and PayPal earnings bring good (and bad) news for fintech startups

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

If you missed Wednesday’s The Exchange, Alex scoured earnings reports from PayPal and Square to see what the near future might hold for several fintech startups currently waiting in the wings.

Using Square and PayPal’s recent numbers for stock purchases, card usage and consumer payment activity as a proxy, he attempts to “see what we can learn, and to which unicorns it might apply.”

Square and PayPal earnings bring good (and bad) news for fintech startups

Conflicts in California’s trade secret laws on customer lists create uncertainty

Concept of knowledge, data and protection. Paper human head with pad lock.

Image Credits: jayk7 (opens in a new window)/ Getty Images

In California, non-competition agreements can’t be enforced and a court has ruled that customer contact lists aren’t trade secrets.

That doesn’t mean salespeople who switch jobs can start soliciting their former customers on their first day at the new gig, however.

Before you jump ship — or hire a salesperson who already has — read this overview of California’s trade secret laws.

“Even without litigation, a former employer can significantly hamper a departing salesperson’s career,” says Nick Saenz, a partner at Lewis & Llewellyn LLP, who focuses on employment and trade secret issues.

Conflicts in California’s trade secret laws on customer lists create uncertainty

As public investors reprice edtech bets, what’s ahead for the hot startup sector?

Image: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

News of a highly effective COVID-19 vaccine appeared to drive down prices of the three best-known publicly traded edtech companies: 2U, Chegg and Kahoot saw declines of about 20%, 10% and 9%, respectively after the report.

Are COVID-19 tailwinds dissipating, or did the market make a correction because “edtech has been categorically overhyped in recent months?”

As public investors reprice edtech bets, what’s ahead for the hot startup sector?

Dear Sophie: What does a Biden win for tech immigration?

Image Credits: Sophie Alcorn

What does President-elect Biden’s victory mean for U.S. immigration and immigration reform?

I’m in tech in SF and have a lot of friends who are immigrant founders, along with many international teammates at my tech company. What can we look forward to?

— Anticipation in Albany

Dear Sophie: What does Biden’s win mean for tech immigration?

Online learning marketplace Udemy is raising up to $100M at a $3.32B valuation

Published November 13, 2020

Online education has been one of the hotspots in the tech world this year, as people turn to e-learning tools to fill in the gaps variously arising from closed schools, closed offices, social distancing and more time on our hands at home because of the COVID-19 pandemic. And that is giving a big bump to education startups, which are raising money to capitalise on the growth opportunity.

In one of the latest developments, Udemy — which provides a marketplace currently numbering some 130,000 video-based courses across 65 languages, ranging from learning Python or how to photograph better, through to mastering mindfulness and business analytics — is raising up to $100 million in a Series F round of funding that would value the company at up to $3.32 billion.

The company has filed paperwork for the fundraise in Delaware, first discovered by Justin Byers and the team at Prime Unicorn Index. It’s not clear if the round has closed, and whether the full amount was raised (or indeed, more).

Contacted for a response, Udemy didn’t deny the report but also declined to say anything for the moment. “We have a company policy where we don’t comment on speculations,” a spokesperson said to me via email. “We don’t have a comment at this time but I’ll reach out if anything changes.”

The fundraise would be a strong move for Udemy, which only closed its Series E earlier this year — a $50 million round that catapulted the company to a $2 billion+ post-money valuation.

But that was in February, before the novel coronavirus really took hold of the world. Since then, startups focused on education have been seeing a surge of business starting in the spring of this year, and as a result, also a surge of attention from investors who see a good moment to back rising stars.

Just looking at some of the most recent deals, last week, Udacity announced a $75 million debt round and said it was finally profitable. In October, Kahoot announced a $215 million round from SoftBank. And in September, Outschool raised $45 million (and is now profitable); Homer raised $50 million (from an impressive group of strategic backers); Unacademy raised $150 million and the juggernaut that is Byju’s picked up $500 million from Silver Lake.

India’s online learning platform Unacademy raises $150 million at $1.45 billion valuation

And these are just some of the bigger deals; there have been many smaller fundraises, new edtech startup launches and other signs of momentum alongside this. (And Prime Unicorn, incidentally, also noted that Duolingo is also raising money, up to $35 million at a valuation of $2.21 billion if all shares are issued. We’re still digging on that lead.)

When Udemy last raised money, earlier this year, the president of the business division told me it had clocked up 50 million students that purchase courses in an à la carte format, while enterprise customers — which include Adidas, General Mills, Toyota, Wipro, Pinterest and Lyft in a list of some 5,000 in all — use a subscription model.

It looks like its business users have grown and now number over 7,000, according to figures on its site, with total course enrollments now totalling 400 million to date. That could point to the opportunity that Udemy is now exploring with more capital.

But to be clear, the filing does not detail who is in this latest round, nor what the purpose of the fundraising is.

As we wrote at the time of the round in February, that fundraise came from a single, strategic investor, the Japanese educational publisher Benesse Holdings, which partners with Udemy in Japan. Benesse’s bigger business includes developing educational content for children and courses for adults, both online and in-person, and for other educational brands that it owns, such as Berlitz, and Udemy helps Benesse develop content for those various efforts.

Udacity raises $75M in debt, says its tech education business is profitable after enterprise pivot

Other investors in the company include Stripes, Naspers (now Prosus), Learn Capital, Insight Partners and Norwest Venture Partners, among others.

Prime Unicorn Index notes that the terms surrounding this latest Series F include a “pari passu liquidation preference with all other preferred, and conventional convertible, meaning they will not participate with common stock if there are remaining proceeds.” It also noted that Udemy’s most recent price per share is $24.13, an up round from the Series E, which priced shares at $15.57.

We’ll update this post as we learn more.

How COVID-19 accelerated DoorDash’s business

Published November 13, 2020

DoorDash filed to go public today, publishing numbers that showed rapid growth, enhanced profitability and an improving cash flow record which helped explain how the company had grown to a $16 billion valuation while private. The unicorn’s impending liquidity event will enrich a host of venture capital firms that bet on its eventual maturity.

Instead of posting this entry of The Exchange on Monday, we’ve put it out today for your Friday and weekend reading. Enjoy! — Alex and Walter.

But notable in DoorDash’s impressive results is the impact of COVID-19, accelerating secular trends already in place, and boosting the unicorn’s growth. Before we get into pricing this IPO and guessing what the company might be worth, let’s strive to understand what portion of its 2020 business gains could stem from the pandemic — and might not persist into the future.

We’re not being pessimistic; we merely want to better understand the company. And DoorDash agrees with our general thrust, writing in its S-1 filing that “58% of all adults and 70% of millennials say that they are more likely to have restaurant food delivered than they were two years ago,” adding that it believes “the COVID-19 pandemic has further accelerated these trends.”

Even more, elsewhere in its filings DoorDash states plainly that COVD-19 led it to experience “a significant increase in revenue, Total Orders, and Marketplace [gross order volume] due to increased consumer demand for delivery, more merchants using our platform to facilitate both delivery and take-out, and improved efficiency of our local logistics platform.” The company then went on to warn investors that the “circumstances that have accelerated the growth of our business stemming from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic may not continue in the future, and we expect the growth rates in revenue, Total Orders, and Marketplace [gross order volume] to decline in future periods.”

We’re not idly speculating.

Let’s observe how DoorDash’s growth accelerated from 2019 through 2020 and then peek at how the company’s economics improved during the same period, giving the company a shot at adjusted profitability for the full year, a nearly unheard of result in the on-demand market.

Growth

DoorDash generates revenue when a customer orders food via its service, splitting the total bill of food costs, taxes, fees and tips, distributing them to itself, the merchant creating the goods and the delivery person.

In an “illustrative” example that DoorDash notes its 2019 “approximate average per-order information,” the split works out as follows:

Bill: $32.90
Merchant: $20.10, or 61%
DoorDash: $4.90, or 15%
Delivery person: $7.90, or 24%

Given that the company is giving us old data and DoorDash’s performance has been stellar this year in terms of generating more gross profit, I wonder what has happened amidst 2020’s upheaval. But, the old numbers do for what we need, which is to understand the link between gross order volume (GOV) and DoorDash revenue. When the former goes up, the latter goes up.

So, as orders rise:

Getaround tops up $25M debt financing to its $140M Series E

Published November 13, 2020

Silicon Valley peer-to-peer car rental startup Getaround has secured a $25 million loan from Horizon Technology Finance Corporation. The financing announcement comes one month after Getaround raised $140 million from investors, including SoftBank Vision Fund, Menlo Ventures, Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus’ Reinvent Capital.

Getaround’s raise signals that the company is looking for new ways to secure cash without further diluting executives or investors.

A Getaround spokesperson said “Horizon presented an opportunity that provides us with additional capital to accelerate our plans in the same way as our recent Series E fundraise.”

Dan Devorsetz, Horizon’s chief investment officer, told TechCrunch that venture debt has been a part of Getaround’s financing strategy for 2020.

“It diversifies funding sources and lowers their overall cost of capital, while also mitigating the dilution impact of incremental equity,” he said. While he wouldn’t clarify on where the debt capital was going, he said that the debt is allowing Getaround to accomplish both “working capital needs and long-term strategic growth initiatives.”

Getaround, like many travel-related startups, struggled in the beginning of the pandemic as governments issued stay-at-home orders in an effort to keep the disease caused by coronavirus from spreading. Bookings dropped 75% in March, forcing Getaround to lay off 100 employees. The company also applied and received approval for a Paycheck Protection Program loan to help retain workers. Getaround previously told TechCrunch that the program “helped reduce the otherwise severe impact on the health of our organization,” due to lockdowns and coronavirus restrictions.

How one founder leveraged debt to drive early growth and avoid dilution

Demand returned in May as travelers turned to cars instead of flights for short-distance trips. Getaround CEO Sam Zaid last told TechCrunch that worldwide revenue has more than doubled from pre-COVID baselines.

By July, Getaround said it had rehired all of its furloughed employees.

There have been scattered signs of a comeback throughout the mobility industry. This week, Uber had its highest close since IPO, and Lyft saw its ride revenues recover enough to give investors some calm.

The upshot: The green shoots have sprouted. But will another wave of COVID-19 nip those buds before they can establish roots?

Getaround’s decision to pursue debt financing so soon after raising a six-figure venture capital round could signal the company’s anticipation of another lockdown, and subsequent drop in bookings. Unlike other mobility companies, Getaround doesn’t own the cars, trucks and SUVs on its rental platform, a benefit that could help the company weather a short downturn.

Top mobility VCs on the risks and rewards in partnering with giants like Amazon

Which emerging technologies are enterprise companies getting serious about in 2020?

Published November 13, 2020

Scott Kirsner
Contributor

Scott Kirsner is CEO and co-founder of Innovation Leader, a research and events firm that focuses on innovation in Global 1000 companies, and a longtime business columnist for The Boston Globe.

Startups need to live in the future. They create roadmaps, build products and continually upgrade them with an eye on next year — or even a few years out.

Big companies, often the target customers for startups, live in a much more near-term world. They buy technologies that can solve problems they know about today, rather than those they may face a couple bends down the road. In other words, they’re driving a Dodge, and most tech entrepreneurs are driving a DeLorean equipped with a flux-capacitor.

That situation can lead to a huge waste of time for startups that want to sell to enterprise customers: a business development black hole. Startups are talking about technology shifts and customer demands that the executives inside the large company — even if they have “innovation,” “IT,” or “emerging technology” in their titles — just don’t see as an urgent priority yet, or can’t sell to their colleagues.

How do you avoid the aforementioned black hole? Some recent research that my company, Innovation Leader, conducted in collaboration with KPMG LLP, suggests a constructive approach.

Rather than asking large companies about which technologies they were experimenting with, we created four buckets, based on what you might call “commitment level.” (Our survey had 211 respondents, 62% of them in North America and 59% at companies with greater than $1 billion in annual revenue.) We asked survey respondents to assess a list of 16 technologies, from advanced analytics to quantum computing, and put each one into one of these four buckets. We conducted the survey at the tail end of Q3 2020.

Respondents in the first group were “not exploring or investing” — in other words, “we don’t care about this right now.” The top technology there was quantum computing.

Bucket #2 was the second-lowest commitment level: “learning and exploring.” At this stage, a startup gets to educate its prospective corporate customer about an emerging technology — but nabbing a purchase commitment is still quite a few exits down the highway. It can be constructive to begin building relationships when a company is at this stage, but your sales staff shouldn’t start calculating their commissions just yet.

Here are the top five things that fell into the “learning and exploring” cohort, in ranked order:

Blockchain.
Augmented reality/mixed reality.
Virtual reality.
AI/machine learning.
Wearable devices.

Technologies in the third group, “investing or piloting,” may represent the sweet spot for startups. At this stage, the corporate customer has already discovered some internal problem or use case that the technology might address. They may have shaken loose some early funding. They may have departments internally, or test sites externally, where they know they can conduct pilots. Often, they’re assessing what established tech vendors like Microsoft, Oracle and Cisco can provide — and they may find their solutions wanting.

Here’s what our survey respondents put into the “investing or piloting” bucket, in ranked order:

Advanced analytics.
AI/machine learning.
Collaboration tools and software.
Cloud infrastructure and services.
Internet of things/new sensors.

By the time a technology is placed into the fourth category, which we dubbed “in-market or accelerating investment,” it may be too late for a startup to find a foothold. There’s already a clear understanding of at least some of the use cases or problems that need solving, and return-on-investment metrics have been established. But some providers have already been chosen, based on successful pilots and you may need to dislodge someone that the enterprise is already working with. It can happen, but the headwinds are strong.

Here’s what the survey respondents placed into the “in-market or accelerating investment” bucket, in ranked order:

Kyklo raises $8.5M to bring electrical distributors online

Published November 13, 2020

Kyklo, a startup that helps wholesale distributors of electrical and automation products launch e-commerce stores, is announcing that it has raised $8.5 million in seed funding.

The industry may sound a bit arcane, but it’s one that founders Remi Ducrocq (Kyklo’s CEO) and Fabien Legouic (CTO) know from having worked at Schneider Electric. Ducrocq said that the process of selling these products to manufacturers and electricians remains cumbersome, relying largely on PDF catalogs.

Shifting these businesses to digital is a much bigger challenge than creating your standard online store, both because of the number of products being sold and the needs for accurate listings.

“Even the small folks sell 100,000 SKUs [distinct products], up to 1 million SKUs,” Ducrocq told me. “If you choose the wrong product, your factory gets shut down. [It’s essential] to have accurate information present on the web store to have a transaction happen.”

Kyklo doesn’t automate the process completely, Ducrocq added, because “you can’t just create content or apply AI to something that is so unstructured.” Creating these stores remains a manual process for the Kylo team, but the company has built “technology to make that manual process as easy as possible.”

That includes standardized data structures and a variety of scripts to create these product listings more quickly. Ultimately, Ducrocq said Kyklo can get distributors up and running with an online store within 30 days, and sometimes as quickly as two weeks.

In total, Kyklo has created a catalog of more than 2.5 million products for more than 35 distributors. It’s also been endorsed by manufacturers like Schneider Electric, Wago, Festo US and Mitsubishi Electric Automation as their preferred e-commerce partner.

Ducrocq suggested that going digital with Kyklo helps these businesses both by allowing them to reach new customers with improved SEO and by giving them tools to expand their sales with existing customers. For example, IEC Supply says that its online sales increased 500% for the first six months after launching with Kyklo, while new customer interactions tripled.

“Market maturity accelerated because of the pandemic,” he added. “These B2B traditional businesses were reluctant to go towards digitization, with only visionaries embarking on the journey. But during the pandemic, salespeople haven’t been able to see their customers in person for six months, so many distributors are reassessing how they should effectively go to market.”

Kyklo has now raised a total of $10.2 million. The new funding was led by Felicis Ventures and IA Ventures, with participation from Jungle Ventures, partners at Wavemaker, Seedplus and strategic angel investors.

“With 80% of the $640 billion electrical, industrial and automation distribution industry still relying on PDF catalogs and phone and emails for its operations, distributors face a challenge in the market,” said Felicis Managing Director Sundeep Peechu in a statement. “KYKLO’s platform helps these companies keep pace with crucial industry needs and reassess how digital tools can transform their sales force.”

Kyklo is bringing the billion-dollar electromechanical industry into digital sales

Personal finance startup Truebill raises $17M

Published November 12, 2020

Truebill, a startup offering a variety of tools to help users take control of their finances, announced today that it has raised $17 million in Series C funding.

When I first wrote about the startup in 2016, it was focused on helping users track and cancel unwanted subscriptions. Since then, it’s expanded into other financial products, like reports on your personal expenses and the ability to negotiate lower bills.

This week, Chief Revenue Officer Yahya Mokhtarzada told me that with the pandemic leading to a dramatic reduction in ad costs, Truebill was able to make TV advertising a key channel for reaching new users.

And of course, the financial uncertainty has made the product more appealing too — particularly its smart savings tool, where users can automatically set aside money for their goals.

“People became aware of the need to have some cushion,” Mokhtarzada said. “You should start saving when things are going well, before you need it, but [saving during the pandemic] is better than not doing it at all. We’ve seen a big bump in smart savings adoption, which is at an all-time high.”

Image Credits: Truebill

The new round brings Truebill’s total funding to $40 million. It was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Eldridge Capital, Cota Capital, Firebolt Ventures and Day One Ventures.

The startup says the round will allow it to develop new products and features, including net worth tracking, automated debt payments and shared accounts.

Mokhtarzada added that the company will be making big investments in data science to help follow its “north star” of financial health, where he said, “The data challenge is significant.”

Sure, it’s pretty straightforward to recognize whether someone’s doing well or poorly financially, but the real goal is to “recognize trends and shortfalls before they happen.”

For example, instead of simply alerting users when they’ve been charged an overdraft fee on their account, Mokhtarzada said, “What is helpful is to have predictive models analyze data to anticipate a cashflow shortage and have the right tools in place that prevent it.”

Truebill raises $15M to build a comprehensive platform for personal finance

Netflix’s latest experiment is a TikTok-like feed of funny videos

Published November 12, 2020

Netflix already borrowed the concept of short-form video “Stories” from social apps like Snapchat and Instagram for its Previews feature back in 2018. Now, the company is looking to the full-screen vertical video feed, popularized by TikTok, for further inspiration. With its latest experiment, Fast Laughs, Netflix is offering a new feed of short-form comedy clips drawn from its full catalog.

The feed includes clips from both originals and licensed programming, Netflix says. It also includes video clips from the existing Netflix social channel, “Netflix Is A Joke,” which today runs clips, longer videos and other social content across YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

Fast Laughs resembles TikTok in the sense that it’s swiped through vertically, offers full-screen videos and places its engagement buttons on the right side. But it’s not trying to become a place to waste time while being entertained.

Like many of Netflix’s experiments, the goal with the Fast Laughs feed is to help users discover something new to watch.

Instead of liking and commenting on videos, as you would in a social video app, the feed is designed to encourage users to add shows to their Netflix watch list for later viewing. In this sense, it’s serving a similar purpose to Netflix’s “Previews” feature, which helps users discover shows by watching clips and trailers from popular and newly released programming.

As users scroll through the new Fast Laughs feed, they’ll encounter a wide range of comedy clips — like a clip from a Kevin Hart stand-up special or a funny bit from “The Office,” for example. The clips will also range in length anywhere from 15 to 45 seconds.

In addition to adding clips to Netflix’s “My List” feature, users can also react to clips with a laughing emoji button, share the clip with friends across social media, or tap a “More” button to see other titles related to the clip you’re viewing.

Here’s the full intro explaining this new Netflix feature… pic.twitter.com/T7OriLUHd8

— Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra) November 12, 2020

The feature was first spotted by social media consultant Matt Navarra, based in the U.K. In his app, Fast Laughs appeared in front of the row of Previews, where it was introduced with text that said “New!”

Netflix confirmed to TechCrunch the experiment had been tested with a small number of users earlier this year, but has recently started rolling out to a wider group this month — including users in the U.K., the U.S. and other select markets.

It’s currently available to a subset of Netflix users with adult profiles or other profiles without parental controls on iOS devices only. However, users don’t need to be opted in to experiments nor do they need to be on a beta version of the Netflix app to see the feature. It’s more of a standard A/B test, Netflix says.

And because it’s a test, users may see slightly different versions of the same feature. The product may also evolve over time, in response to user feedback.

Netflix is hardly the first to “borrow” the TikTok format for its own app. Social media platforms, like Instagram and Snapchat, have also launched their own TikTok rivals in recent months.

But Netflix isn’t a direct competitor with TikTok — except to the extent that any mobile app competes for users’ time and attention, as there are only so many hours in a day.

Instead, the new feed is more of an acknowledgment that the TikTok format of a full-screen vertical video feed with quick engagement buttons on the side is becoming a default style of sorts for presenting entertaining content.

“We’re always looking for new ways to improve the Netflix experience,” a Netflix spokesperson said, confirming the experiment. “A lot of our members love comedy so we thought this would be an exciting new way to help them discover new shows and enjoy classic scenes. We experiment with these types of tests in different countries and for different periods of time — and only make them broadly available if people find them useful,” they added.