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The Exchange: Which VCs are the most popular, why enterprise startups are hot, and how patient are public investors?

Published July 18, 2020

Welcome to The Exchange, an upcoming weekly newsletter featuring TechCrunch and Extra Crunch reporting on startups, money and markets. You can sign up for it here to receive it regularly when it launches on July 25th, and catch up on prior editions of the column and newsletter here. 

It’s Saturday, July 18, and this is The Exchange. Today we’re wrapping our look at second-quarter VC, capping off the recent IPOs of some venture-backed startups, and digging into the hottest VCs while peeking at a new startup trend.

Venture capital activity by the numbers

As July rubs along we’re getting deeper into the third quarter of 2020, meaning it’s time to close the books on Q2. To that end The Exchange combed through all the second-quarter VC data that we could this week.

But, despite working to grasp the health of the global venture scene, the United States’ own venture capital totals, and diving more deeply into AI/ML startups and how women-founded startups fundraised in Q2, there’s still more data to sift.

Keeping brief as we are a bit charted-out, New York City-based venture capital group Work-Bench released a grip of numbers detailing the city’s enterprise-focused startups’ Q2 VC results. Given that Work-Bench invests in enterprise tech, the data’s focus was not a surprise.

The numbers, per the firm, look like this:

  • NYC enterprise tech startups raised 51 rounds in Q2 worth $1.5 billion, above Q1 totals of 44 deals worth $1.3 billion
  • Those quarterly results were the best recorded, according to a Work-Bench historical analysis of enterprise tech deals since at least the start of 2014
  •  Q1 and Q2 2020 were so active in the sector and city that the first half of this year saw nearly as many deals and dollars ($2.7 billion in 95 total deals) than the same cohort and metropolis managed in all of 2019 ($3.3 billion in 114 total deals).

The data is not surprising. B2B startups are raking in a larger share of venture capital rounds as time goes along, so to see NYC’s own enterprise-focused startups doing well is not shocking. (And if you add in the recent $225 million UIPath round, the Big Apple’s enterprise startups are even closer to their 2019 venture dollar benchmark, though the UIPath deal came in Q3.)

One last bit of data and we are done. Fenwick & West, a law firm that works with startups, released a report this week concerning Silicon Valley’s own May VC results. Two data points in particular from the digest stood out. Chew on these (emphasis TechCrunch):

The percentage of up-rounds declined modestly from 71% in April to 67% in May, but continued [to be] noticeably lower than the 83% up-rounds on average in 2019. […] The average share price increase of May financings weakened noticeably, declining from 63% in April to 43% in May. The results for both April and May were significantly below the 2019 average increase of 93%.

The Q2 data mix then shakes out to be better than I would have expected with plenty of highlights. But if you look, it isn’t hard to find weaker points, either. We are, after all, in the midst of a pandemic.

Going public in a pandemic

nCino and GoHealth went public this week. TechCrunch got on the blower afterwards with nCino CEO Pierre Naudé and GoHealth CEO Clint Jones. By now you’ve seen the pricing pieces and notes on their companies’ early performance, so let’s instead talk about why they chose to pursue traditional IPOs.

Our goal was to understand why CEOs are going public through initial public offerings when some players in the venture space have soured on traditional IPOs. Here’s what we gleaned from the leaders of the week’s new offerings:

nCino: Naudé didn’t want to dig into nCino’s IPO process, but did note that he read TechCrunch’s coverage of his company’s IPO march. The CEO said that his firm was going to have an all-hands this Friday, and then get back to work. Naudé also said that becoming a public company could help the nCino brand by helping others understand the company’s financial stability. The company’s larger-than-expected IPO haul (one point for the old-fashion public offering, we suppose) could provide it with more options, we learned, including possibly upping its sales and marketing spend.

  • The Exchange’s take: It’s very hard to get a CEO to say on the record that a different approach to the public markets than the one they took was enticing. Nothing that Naudé was off-script for a newly public company.

GoHealth: Jones told TechCrunch that GoHealth’s IPO was oversubscribed, implying good pre-IPO demand. When it came to pricing, GoHealth worked through a number of scenarios according to the CEO, who didn’t have anything negative to share about how his company finally set its IPO valuation. He did bring up the importance of collecting long-term investors.

  • The Exchange’s take: GoHealth shares dipped after the company went public, so its offering won’t engender the usual complaints about mispricing. nCino, in contrast, shot higher, making it a better poster child for the direct-listing fans out there.

The method by which a company goes public is only a piece of the public-markets saga that companies spin. Once public, either through a direct listing or SPAC-led reverse-IPO, all companies become lashed to the quarterly reporting cycle. Even more common than complaints about the IPO process among Silicon Valley is the refrain that public investors are too short-term-focused to let really innovative companies do well once they stop being private.

Is that true? TechCrunch spoke with Medallia CEO Leslie Stretch this week to get notes on the current level of patience that public investors have for growing tech companies; are public markets as impatient as some claim? 

According to Stretch, there can be enough space in the public markets for tech shops to maneuver. At least that was his take a year after Medallia’s own 2019 IPO (transcript edited by TechCrunch for clarity; additions denoted by brackets):

[Our] partnership with public investors has been phenomenal. They really test you, you know? They really test your proposition, [and] they test your operational resilience in a way that just makes you better. And they give you feedback. Our philosophy is feedback always makes you better.

What people want to do is they want to crest the really big growth rate [that] is unassailable, it can’t be challenged. And then you come out in public, and it’s a no brainer. And some companies managed to do that. But of the [thousands of Series] A rounds that took place in early 2000s, you know, only 75 companies made it public. Right? We’re one of them.

I’m not fearful. I don’t think people should be fearful of [going public]. They should partner with public investors. The stock price, and the quarter-to-quarter, will be what it will be. Don’t worry about that. It’s what are you building for the long term, and make sure you have enough cash, of course, to meet your ambitions. [But] also a bit of fiscal discipline actually makes your products better, because you think how about how you invest, and harder about your priorities. That’s my view on [the] public piece.

Who wants to bet that unicorns keep putting off their IPOs anyways?

Odds & Ends: Popular VCs, extensions, and more

Let’s wrap with some fun stuff, kicking off with the TechCrunch List, a dataset that set out to figure out which VCs were the most likely to cut first checks. I’ve already used it to help put together an investor survey (stay tuned). It’s in front of the Extra Crunch paywall, so give it a whirl.

If you are part of Extra Crunch, Danny also pulled out an even more exclusive list that we built off the back of thousands of founder comments.

And I have two trends for you to think on. First, a wave of startups are trying to make our new, video-chatting based world a better place to be. It will be super interesting to see how much space is left in the market by the incumbent players currently battling for market leadership.

Second, some startups are raising extension rounds not only because they need defensive capital, but because they’ve caught a tailwind in the COVID era and want to go even faster. So, from a somewhat safe move, some extension rounds these days are more weapons than shields.

And that’s all we have. Say hi on Twitter if there’s something you want The Exchange to explore. Chat soon!

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Investing in the hidden generation

Published July 18, 2020
Ilse Calderon
Contributor

Ilse Calderon is an investor at OVO Fund where she specializes in pre-seed investments across capital-efficient markets. Prior to OVO, Ilse spent a year at Silicon Valley Bank rotating across consumer and software teams.

While it’s no secret Hispanics represent unparalleled growth opportunities for the U.S. economy, most startups don’t realize Hispanic youth means an abundance of prime spending years (translation: dollars for businesses). The average age of a Hispanic living in the U.S. is 28. Meanwhile, the average age of their white counterpart is 42. Nearly one in every five people in the U.S. identifies as Hispanic. 

Those few companies that do notice Hispanics and their massive purchasing power (~$1.5 trillion) tend to be legacy companies doing a subpar job at capturing the Hispanic consumer. Furthermore, they don’t target the most valuable member of the Hispanic community — what I call, the “Hypercultural Latinx.” They are where tons of unspent dollars lie. 

As an investor and member of the Hispanic community, I’m confident the startups solving problems for this Hypercultural Latinx member will have the potential to create companies with venture-like returns. 

Who is the Hypercultural Latinx?

The Hypercultural Latinx is a second-generation Hispanic who is 100% Hispanic and 100% American. And while that might sometimes lead to misunderstandings and conflicts with her white counterparts, it also means she excels by creating a pseudo culture where she can thrive best. She brings her unique characteristics to this self-created culture — a culture where her customs, language and values shine through. Furthermore, this person, who often identifies as a Gen Zer or young millennial, is a fanatic of mobile. After all, across socioeconomic classes, their disposable income is disproportionately going to screens (of all types) and tech toys.

I mean, just go into your Hispanic friend’s home: They are likely to have more TV screens than people residing in that household. In fact, a bewildering 29% of U.S. Hispanics planned to purchase a new TV set just ahead of the Super Bowl (guilty as charged). For reference, of the 30% of overall Americans that planned to buy a TV in 2017, only 2.8% purchased in the days before the Super Bowl. Heck, when my family moved, we bought TV screens for every room even before the living room was furnished. Technology — especially newer tech, is significantly more tempting to Hispanics. 

The Hypercultural Latinx should be top of mind for venture investors and founders. She desires to test the untested, and thus, is likely to cross the chasm before the early majority. This makes her an ideal customer segment for consumer startups.

Image Credits: Ilsa Calderon

Startup founders and VCs alike are missing out. As an investor, I often find myself reduced to frustration with the lack of founders and investors committed to exploring audience segments outside cookie-cutter ones. We might not need another consumer vertical product solving a half-felt pain point for the highly educated, white female with a $100,000+ salary living in NYC, SF or LA. However, we do need more products catered toward the Hypercultural Latinx who, by the way, outspend their white counterparts across most categories. In the same way Fenty Beauty exists to solve the make-up needs of primarily Black women, we need that for the Hypercultural Latinx population.

Numbers aside, investors should care about Hypercultural Latinx because they are tech-forward trendsetters who adopt social media at higher rates than their white peers. For example, a Hispanic youth is 87% more likely to use WhatsApp. Additionally, they produce an exorbitant amount of videos on Tik Tok. Several Tik Tok Hispanic-centric hashtags, such as #hispanicmom, are wildly popular and boost over 44 million views. For reference, the most followed Tik Tok stars, like Addison Rae, have just over 47 million followers. In fact, one Hispanic Tik Tok queen, Rosa, has already reached pop culture peak. 

Facebook ad experiment

Examples of ads I ran. (Image Credits: Ilse Calderon )

If you are more driven by quantitative data, know that paid spend targeting this Hypercultural Latinx could result in lower click cost rates and higher engagement. I ran a two-week experiment on Facebook to prove out this hypothesis. I created a landing page for a fake sunscreen brand, Bounce Skin, with a fake first product, an SPF mist. I created a couple of ads. Then, I ran ads on Facebook targeting two audiences: young Hispanic girls (the Hypercultural Latinx audience) and white girls. The average click cost for the young Hispanic girl audience was $0.06 per click; for white girls, it was $0.33 per click. Of course, my experiment was limited, but it did demonstrate that the Hypercultural Latinx is out there and craving content that tells the narrative of her life. (For more details, please check out this Medium post).

Why is the tech community decades behind when it comes to this Hispanic segment? 

Three key reasons: fear, the subpar state of Hispanic marketing and white men cannot relate to the Hypercultural Latinx. 

Fear. There’s always risk associated with offending the same audience you are trying to captivate. Just take a look at the beauty industry and its frequently associated race problem. The world is not white, and beauty brands that think it is have lived through PR nightmares. Even beyond beauty, tech startups fear negative press cutting short the life of their business. However, it is this gap that creates opportunity.

I encourage the right set of up and coming startups to authentically pursue the Hypercultural Latinx. Even though legacy companies might have heavier balance sheets, they don’t have the clout to lure this young, bicultural consumer. Let’s just say, no 18-year-old is going to be rushing to the Walmarts of the world looking for aspirational goods. They are even less likely to browse Walmart.com for content. 

The state of U.S. Hispanic marketing is ridiculous. In fact, there’s a graveyard of failed marketing attempts to the Hispanic community. Most recently, there was a Mother’s Day Kmart ad that blended two Spanish words (Mama + Namaste) to accidentally create a word translating into a very vulgar and offensive word. Furthermore, given most businesses’ “one size fits all” approach to Hispanic marketing, it’s no surprise they keep getting it wrong. However, if anyone is best positioned to take Hispanic marketing out of the 20th century, it’s small, nimble startups with no history of bad marketing or image problems. 

Perhaps the biggest reason the tech community isn’t approaching the Hypercultural Latinx is because most venture-backed founders and investors are white men. These white men cannot possibly relate to the life experiences of young, biracial teenagers and young adults living in white America. Last year, a measly less than 2% of venture funding went to Hispanic founders — those are the founders best suited to be able to genuinely capture the eyeballs and wallets of this Hispanic youth. On the investor side, it’s even worse with only 1% of venture investors identifying as Hispanic. 

The solution is complex, and frankly, I can’t provide a solution with clarity. However, we can start by building goodwill and non-transactional relationships with those role models Hypercultural Latinx admire. I’ve found that these role models are usually under-the-radar influencers, like Glenda. We as investors can also diversify our top of funnel deal flow to include more underrepresented founders. Lastly, founders with a reach and network of Hispanic youth should consider diving deep into the pain points of Hypercultural Latinx lives.

The new darling of the VC world will be solving problems for the Hypercultural Latinx

In order to become this new VC darling, founders approaching the Hypercultural Latinx should consider two suggestions: a platform play and an army of social guides.

The platform approach entails creating an organization of brands that later spew out new brands horizontally or vertically. An example of this is the company behind my favorite over-priced lemon drink, Iris Nova, or Glossier-team spin-off, Arfa.

The second approach, an army of social guides, means combining elements of affiliate marketing with a kick-ass referral program to create loyal fans that are financially incentivized to sell your products. Sequoia-backed Stella & Dot built out their version of social guides that ultimately became its most defensible strategy. Additionally, in a post-coronavirus world, this strategy is a way for an ever-increasing labor force to get back on their feet. 

At the end of the day, the Hypercultural Latinx demographic is only increasing, and so are its needs. For founders who truly care about the U.S. Hispanic market, pay attention to this hidden generation. For investors, look beyond solutions for your own problems. Winning over the multi-faceted Hypercultural Latinx is not easy, but startups that successfully do so attract my attention and my investment dollars. 

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‘Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ and the limits of today’s game economies

Published July 17, 2020
Kaiser Hwang
Contributor

Kaiser Hwang is a longtime member of the games community and a vice president at Forte, an organization building an open economic platform for games.

“Animal Crossing: New Horizons” is a bonafide wonder. The game has been setting new records for Nintendo, is adored by players and critics alike and provides millions of players a peaceful escape during these unprecedented times.

But there’s been something even more extraordinary happening on the fringe: Players are finding ways to augment the game experience through community-organized activities and tools. These include free weed-pulling services (tips welcome!) from virtual Samaritans, and custom-designed items for sale — for real-world money, via WeChat Pay and AliPay.

Well-known personalities and companies are also contributing, with “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” scribe Gary Whitta hosting an A-list celebrity talk show using the game, and luxury fashion brand Marc Jacobs providing some of its popular clothing designs to players. 100 Thieves, the white-hot esports and apparel company, even created and gave away digital versions of its entire collection of impossible-to-find clothes.

This community-based phenomenon gives us a pithy glimpse into not only where games are inevitably going, but what their true potential is as a form of creative, technical and economic expression. It also exemplifies what we at Forte call “community economics,” a system that lies at the heart of our aim in bringing new creative and economic opportunities to billions of people around the world.

What is community economics?

Formally, community economics is the synthesis of economic activity that takes place inside, and emerges outside, virtual game worlds. It is rooted in a cooperative economic relationship between all participants in a game’s network, and characterized by an economic pluralism that is unified by open technology owned by no single party. And notably, it results in increased autonomy for players, better business models for game creators, and new economic and creative opportunities for both.

The fundamental shift that underlies community economics is the evolution of games from centralized entertainment experiences to open economic platforms. We believe this is where things are heading.

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Autonomous vehicle startup AutoX lands driverless testing permit in California

Published July 17, 2020

AutoX, the autonomous vehicle startup backed by Alibaba, has been granted a permit in California to begin driverless testing on public roads in a limited area in San Jose.

The permit will allow AutoX to test its autonomous vehicles without a human safety driver behind the wheel. This is the third company to receive a driverless testing permit. Waymo and Nuro also have driverless testing permits. Unlike the other two companies, AutoX’s permit is limited to one vehicle and restricted to surface streets within a designated part of San Jose near is headquarters, according to the California Department of Motor Vehicles, which regulates AV testing in the state. The vehicle is approved to operate in fair weather conditions and light precipitation on streets with a speed limit of no more than 45 mph, the agency said.

AutoX, which is developing a full self-driving stack, has had a permit to test autonomous vehicles with safety drivers since 2017. Currently, 62 companies have an active permit to test autonomous vehicles with a safety driver on California roads.

To qualify for a driverless testing permit, companies have to show proof of insurance or a bond equal to $5 million, verify the vehicles are capable of operating without a driver, meet federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards or have an exemption from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

While AutoX has been operating robotaxi pilots in California and China, the company has said its real aim is to license its technology to companies that want to operate robotaxi fleets of their own. It has been particularly active in China, although this driverless permit hints that the company might be ramping up its activity in the U.S. as well.

AutoX opened an 80,000-square-foot Shanghai Robotaxi Operations Center in April, following a 2019 agreement with municipal authorities to deploy 100 autonomous vehicles in the Jiading District. The vehicles in the fleet were assembled at a factory about 93 miles outside of Shanghai.

The company has been operating a fleet of robotaxis in Shenzhen through a pilot program launched in 2019 with BYD. In January, AutoX partnered with Fiat Chrysler to roll out a fleet of robotaxis for China and other countries in Asia.

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Extension rounds help some startups play offense during COVID-19

Published July 17, 2020

The venture capital world is constantly changing, and its evolution can sometimes flip pieces of conventional wisdom on their heads. For example, a recent flurry of extension rounds from Silicon Valley’s hottest startups like Stripe and Robinhood seem to signal that the investment type has suddenly become cool.

Extensions evolving from unloved to hot is not the first time that a type of VC deal has gained, or lost luster. In past times, for example, raising consecutive rounds from the same lead investor was often perceived as a negative signal; why couldn’t the startup find a new, different lead investor? Today, in contrast, venture capitalists are using inside rounds to double-down on winning startups, a way of helping ensure returns for their own backers.

The recent phenomenon of extensions becoming vogue is a tale of the times, in which the best startups get to play offense, and startups that can’t show accelerating growth are left behind. Let’s explore what has changed.

A series of fortunate extensions

TechCrunch first wrote about the new extension-round trend after seeing what felt like a wave of the deals crop up. Some were large, like MariaDB’s huge $25 million add-on to its Series C, or Robinhood’s biblical $320 million addition to its Series F.

But most were smaller events like Sayari adding $2.5 million to its Series B, or CALA adding $3 million to its seed round. Even more recently, Eterneva raised another $3 million on top of its seed round, and also out this week was a million pounds more for Edinburgh-based Machine Labs’ seed round.

One reason for the growth of extension rounds in 2020 has been runway — making sure that a startup has enough. Upstarts often raise on an 18-month cadence. But because of COVID-19 and its constituent economic disruptions, many have reduced costs in a bid to bolster how long they have until their cash stores reach zero.

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Marketing, PR and brand building, oh my! TechCrunch Early Stage goes down July 21 and 22

Published July 17, 2020

Your product may solve problems. It may cost less and do more. It may very well change the world. But unless you can get the word out, ensuring the right group of people know about it and are willing to use it, pay for it and evangelize it, then your hard work is in vain.

At TechCrunch Early Stage, we’ll hear from some of the world’s top minds in the fields of marketing and brand building. They’ll talk through different growth marketing tactics, from creating growth assets for paid channels to capitalizing on podcasts to SEO to email. They’ll cover the complicated world of PR, and they’ll teach us about how to develop a brand that users can relate to.

Of course, this is just one slice of the pie. At Early Stage, experts across a wide variety of startup core competencies — fundraising, legal, recruiting, tech stack, scaling and more — will take the virtual stage to give early-stage founders the tools they need to get out there and succeed. What’s more, these experts have made time to answer audience questions, so don’t be shy!

Here’s a look at all the marketing sessions you can expect at the show:

Why should anyone care? (Making your brand stand out) with Caryn Marooney

Startups often struggle to create a narrative that stands out. As a general partner at Coatue, former head of Comms at Facebook and co-founder of the OutCast Agency, Caryn Marooney has seen it all. Come learn the brand and messaging framework that can help your company stand out (while staying true to yourself.)

Growth Marketing: Minimum viable email with Susan Su

Love it or hate it, email is here to stay. But understanding where it fits into the conversion funnel and how to maximize its impact can be arduous. Learn from Sound Ventures partner Susan Su how to optimize open rates, deliverability, unsubscribes and conversions for consumer and enterprise products alike.

How to build a high-performance SEO engine with Ethan Smith

Hear from Ethan Smith, who has worked with brands like MasterClass, Ticketmaster and Thumbtack, as he shares some of the most effective modern SEO strategies. Starting with a deep understanding of the user and their intent, the most successful modern SEO strategies focus on building a data-driven approach to drive user experience, content and conversion to ultimately beat the competition.

Be the best at preparing for the worst with Margit Wennmachers and Miguel Helft

Inevitably, something will go wrong — from product recalls and lawsuits to executive firings and sexual harassment allegations, so you better be prepared. Hear from Margit Wennmachers, operating partner at Andreessen Horowitz and a co-founder of OutCast Communications (now The OutCast Agency) and Miguel Helft, editorial director at Message Lab, about how to develop a framework for crisis and withstand through tough times.

Growth Marketing: Podcasts as a secret weapon with Krystina Rubino and Lindsay Piper Shaw

Podcast advertising is widely viewed as a nascent medium, but smart companies know it can be a powerful channel in their marketing mix. Opportunity is ripe — get in early and you can own the medium, box out competitors and catapult your growth. Krystina Rubino and Lindsay Piper Shaw have launched and scaled successful podcast ad campaigns for early-stage startups and household name brands and will be sharing their strategies for companies to succeed in this often misunderstood channel.

How to get people obsessed with your brand with Emily Heyward

During her 12-year tenure running Red Antler, one of the leading brand companies for startups and new ventures, Emily Heyward has launched more brands than anyone. In this session for TechCrunch Early Stage, she’ll share the modern rules of brand building, breaking down the traditional notions of how modern brands look, feel and behave. Covering a few case studies and tactical applications, Emily will outline the best practices for driving obsession from day one while also building a foundation for long-term growth.

How to create great growth assets for paid channels with Asher King Abramson

Learn about the right ways and wrong ways to create great assets for paid channels, landing pages and more in this teardown workshop with Asher King Abramson, a top growth marketer who has worked with 100+ successful startups. Submit your landing page and ads beforehand for a chance to receive feedback live onstage.

A brand personified with Anna Pickard

Anna Pickard is the head of Brand Communications at Slack, responsible for establishing the company’s voice and tone. Hear Anna share how to bring together the various functions of your organization to create a distinctly unique brand voice that engages and delights customers.

Early Stage goes down July 21 and 22. You don’t want to miss it. Tickets are almost gone — register for your ticket here.

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Ready, set, network! CrunchMatch is now open for Early Stage 2020

Published July 17, 2020

Call it what you will — startup bootcamp, founders’ masterclass or the mother of all how-to events — we’re just days away from TC Early Stage 2020. But you don’t have to wait another minute to start making essential connections. CrunchMatch, our AI-powered networking platform, is now open for business.

Wait up. You don’t have a pass yet? Crikey! Buy your Early Stage pass here, start networking now and get a head start on driving your business forward. Then on July 21-22, tune in to your choice of more than 50 expert-led sessions designed to help early-stage founders succeed and thrive. Topics cover crucial building blocks that span the startup ecosystem. More on those in a minute.

Back to CrunchMatch. There’s no easier way to find and connect with like-minded Early Stage attendees — no matter where they’re located. A new, supercharged AI algorithm makes matching and recommendations even faster and more precise — and the more you use it the smarter it gets.

Keep your networking relaxed and organized — schedule 1:1 video meetings with investors or other founders; meet the people who can help you grow your business.

The Early Stage sessions cover crucial information, along with plenty of tips, tricks and advice, that early-stage founders need to know — like fundraising, tech stack and growth marketing to term sheet construction, recruitment, product management and PR. Here’s just one example, and you can see what else we have waiting for you on the agenda.

The business of bootstrapping: Webflow was bootstrapped and profitable for seven years before co-founder and CEO, Vlad Magdalin trusted Accel’s Arun Mathew as their first institutional investor. Hear how Magdalin designed a sustainable, high-growth business without institutional investment, and the surprising factors that led him to take VC investment.

We’re limiting session capacity to keep interaction and information flowing. Sign up fast for the topics you want most because some sessions are already at capacity. When the conference ends, all ticket holders will have access to a video archive of every sessions.

TC Early Stage 2020 sessions take place from July 21 – 22, but CrunchMatch is open right now. Register for TC Early Stage, then go fill out your profile and start expanding your network — and your empire — today.

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An unsurprising wave of video-focused startups is trying to make video calls better

Published July 17, 2020

As Zoom and Microsoft and Google hammer it out for video-chat hegemony, startups are developing apps and services that either add on or compete with the major players.

There hasn’t been enough activity — yet — to call it a boom, but there’s enough going on to warrant our attention. Call it a boomlet, if you will, of startups looking to ride the wave of demand that video-conferencing has seen during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. You can read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or receive it for free in your inbox. Sign up for The Exchange newsletter, which drops Saturdays starting July 25.

The big players are not sitting still. Zoom has spent lots of 2020 on platform security after a surge in popularity exposed some frayed ends. Google has been working to make Meet, its own video-chat service, better and easier to find. And Microsoft has been hammering Teams’s abilities into stronger form as it uses the same product to fend off both Slack and Zoom, which is a tall order.

Other giants are getting into the mix. Reliance Jio, the Indian telecom subsidiary of megacorp Reliance, recently launched JioMeet, which has turned heads for looking rather similar to Zoom. It also quickly raced to millions of downloads. (That Google just put billions into JioMeet’s parent is an odd twist in the video-chatting wars; Google has effectively helped fund a competitor in the country, it appears.)

TechCrunch’s parent company, Verizon, recently bought BlueJeans, giving the American telecom company its own video chatting service. (It’s also eyeing the Indian market.)

But that’s only part of the action. More recently we’ve seen interesting rounds for video-chat software startups Macro and Mmhmm. And we’ve seen money go into companies like Daily.co, which want to let any company bake video-chatting capabilities into their service. And Y Combinator-backed Sidekick has been in the press lately, after building a hardware solution in mind for today’s remote workers who need video comms.

An upstart boomlet, then, amid a war of the majors. But should we have expected anything less from the huge wave of demand that COVID-19 kicked off? Zoom was growing quickly before the pandemic. Now the public company and a host of rivals, big and small, all want a larger slice of an expanding pie.

Video-conferencing startups

The two most interesting recent venture rounds for video-conferencing startups are those belonging to Mmhmm and Macro.

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Give us your seed round and we will send back double

Published July 17, 2020

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

This week was full of news of all sorts, but as we recorded, both Danny and Natasha “not Tash” Mascarenhas were still locked out of their Twitter accounts after a proletariat revolution on the social platform saw the ruling Blue Checkmark Class forced into silence. That’s not really what happened, but it sounds better than what actually went down at Big Social.

Anyway, Twitter accounts or not, the three of us gathered to parse through a wave of news:

It was a lovely time and there is a bit of show news. Namely that Equity is coming back to YouTube either this week or the next. So if you want to see us talk, soon you will be able to! Again!

Oh, and follow the show on Twitter. If you can, that is.

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PT and Friday at 6:00 a.m. PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

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Sign up for next week’s Pitchers & Pitches competition on 7/23

Published July 16, 2020

Can one minute really make a difference in your startup success? If we’re talking about your 60-second pitch (and we are), then heck yeah! A crisp, concise and compelling pitch opens doors to opportunity, and we’re here to help you pump up your pitch.

Join us online for the next Pitchers & Pitches competition on July 23 at 4 p.m. ET / 1 p.m. PT, where you’ll hear rapid-fire pitches from five Digital Startup Alley exhibitors who will be participating at Disrupt this year. The five early-stage startups will take the virtual stage and present their best pitch to a panel of highly qualified judges — TechCrunch editors who coach Startup Battlefield competitors and leading VCs. Seriously, who wouldn’t want feedback from pros like that?

After each pitch, the judges provide the founders with an invaluable critique, tips and advice. Even if you don’t pitch, you can apply what you’ve learned to take your elevator pitch to the next level. Plus, the viewing audience gets to choose the best pitch of the session. The winning startup gets a consulting session with cela, a company that connects early-stage startups to accelerators and incubators that can help scale their businesses.

This is also an opportunity for the TechCrunch community to try out our new virtual Disrupt platform before we go live in September.

You’ll have an opportunity to check out some of our new features, like:

  • Watch and interact with the pitch-off event on the virtual main stage.
  • Meet and video network with other attendees.
  • Connect with the five pitchers in their virtual booth in the startup expo.

Note: Anyone can attend Pitchers & Pitches, but only companies exhibiting in Digital Startup Alley during Disrupt 2020 are eligible to pitch. There’s still time to be considered for the July 23 pitch-off — if you act quickly and purchase a Disrupt Digital Startup Alley Package. We randomly select the startups that get to participate, and we’ll announce them — and the judges — on July 22.

Register here to attend for free. Help your 60-second pitch open more doors to more opportunity.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

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