Tech Blog - Page 83 of 2385 - 1010Computers | Computer Repair & IT Support1010Computers

Remote raises $150M on a $1B+ valuation to manage payroll and more for organizations’ global workforces

Published July 13, 2021

For many of us, going to work these days no longer means going into a specific office like it used to; and today one of the startups that’s built a platform to help cater to that new, bigger world of employment — wherever talent might be — is announcing a major round of funding on the back of strong demand for its tools.

Remote, which provides tools to manage onboarding, payroll, benefits and other services for tech and other knowledge workers located in remote countries — be they contractors or full-time employees — has raised $150 million. Job van der Voort, the Dutch-based CEO and co-founder of New York-based Remote, confirmed in an interview that funding values Remote at over $1 billion.

Accel is leading this Series B, with participation also from previous investors Sequoia, Index Ventures, Two Sigma, General Catalyst and Day One Ventures.

The funding will be used in a couple of areas. First and foremost, it will go toward expanding its business to more markets. The startup has been built from the ground up in a fully integrated way, and in contrast to a number of others that it competes with in providing Employer of Record services, Remote fully owns all of its infrastructure. It now provides its HR services, as fully operational legal entities, for 50 countries (it has a target of growing that to 80 by the end of this year). The platform is also set to be enhanced with more tools around areas like benefits, equity incentive planning, visa and immigration support and employee relocation.

“We are doubling down on our approach,” van der Voort said. “We try to fully own the entire stack: entity, operations, experts in house, payroll, benefits and visa and immigration — all of the items that come up most often. We want to to build infrastructure products, foundational products because those have a higher level of quality and ultimately a lower price.”

In addition, Remote will be using the funding to continue building more tools and partnerships to integrate with other providers of services in what is a very fragmented human resources market. Two of these are being announced today to coincide with the funding news: Remote has launched a Global Employee API that HR platforms that focus on domestic payroll can integrate to provide their own international offering powered by Remote. HR platform Rippling (Parker Conrad’s latest act) is one of its first customers. And Remote is also getting cosier with other parts of the HR chain of services: applicant tracking system Greenhouse is now integrating with it to help with the onboarding process for new hires.

Indeed, $150 million at a $1 billion+ valuation is a very, very sizable Series B, even by today’s flush-market standards, but it comes after a bumper year for the company, and in particular since November last year when it raised a Series A of $35 million. In the last nine months, customer numbers have grown seven-fold, with users on the platform increasing 10 times. Most interestingly, perhaps, is that Remote’s revenues — its packages start at $149 per month but go up from there — have increased by a much bigger amount: 65x, the company said. That basically points to the fact that engagement from those users — how much they are leaning on Remote’s tech — has skyrocketed.

Remote raises $35M to help orgs with global workforce payroll, benefits and more

Although there are a lot of competitors in the same space as Remote — they include a number of more local players alongside a pretty big range of startups like Oyster (which announced $50 million in funding in June), Deel, which is now valued at $1.25 billion; Turing; Papaya Global (now also valued at over $1 billion); and many more — the opportunity they are collectively tackling is a massive one that, if anything, appears to be growing.

Hiring internationally has always been a costly, time-consuming and organizationally challenged endeavor, so much so that many companies have opted not to do it at all, or to reserve it for very unique cases. That paradigm has drastically shifted in recent years, however.

Even before COVID-19 hit, there was a shortage of talent, resulting in a competitive struggle for good people, in companies’ home markets, which encouraged companies to look further afield when hiring. Then, once looking further afield, those employers had to give consideration to employing those people remotely — that is, letting them work from afar — because the process of relocating them had also become more expensive and harder to work through.

Then COVID-19 happened, and everyone, including people working in a company’s HQ, started to work remotely, changing the goalposts yet again on what is expected by workers, and what organizations are willing to consider when bringing on a new person, or managing someone it already knows, just from a much farther distance.

While a lot of that has played out in the idea of relocating to different cities in the same country — Miami and Austin getting a big wave of Silicon Valley “expats” being two examples of that — it seems just a short leap to consider that now that sourcing and managing is taking on a much more international slant. A lot of new hires, as well as existing employees who are possibly not from the U.S. to begin with, or simply want to see another part of the world, are now also a part of the mix. That is where companies like Remote are coming in and lowering the barriers to entry by making it as easy to hire and manage a person abroad as it is in your own city.

“Remote is at the center of a profound shift in the way that companies hire,” said Miles Clements, a partner at Accel, in a statement. “Their new Global Employee API opens up access to Remote’s robust global employment infrastructure and knowledge map, and will help any HR provider expand internationally at a speed impossible before. Remote’s future vision as a financial services provider will consolidate complicated processes into one trusted platform, and we’re excited to partner with the global leader in the quickly emerging category of remote work.”

And it’s interesting to see it now partnering with the likes of Rippling. It was a no-brainer that as the latter company matured and grew, it would have to consider how to handle the international component. Using an API from Remote is an example of how the model that has played out in communications (led by companies like Twilio and Sinch) and fintech (hello, Stripe) also has an analogue in HR, with Remote taking the charge on that.

And to be clear, for now Remote has no plans to build a product that it would sell directly to individuals.

“Individuals are reaching out to us, saying, ‘I found this job and can you help me and make sure I get paid?’ That’s been interesting,” van der Voort said. “We thought about [building a product for them] but we have so much to do with employers first.” One thing that’s heartening in Remote’s approach is that it wouldn’t want to provide this service unless it could completely follow through on it, which in the case of an individual would mean “vetting every major employer,” he said, which is too big a task for it right now.

In the meantime, Remote itself has walked the walk when it comes to remote working. Originally co-founded by two European transplants to San Francisco, the pair had firsthand experience of the paradoxical pains and opportunities of being in an organization that uses remote workforces.

How to do remote work right, from the teams that know it best

Van der Voort had been the VP of product for GitLab, which he scaled from five to 450 employees working remotely (it’s now a customer of Remote’s); and before co-founding Remote, CTO Marcelo Lebre had been VP of engineering for Unbabel — another startup focused on reducing international barriers, this time between how companies and global customers communicate.

Today, not only is the CEO based out of Amsterdam in The Netherlands, with the CTO in Lisbon, Portugal, but New York-based Remote itself has grown to 220 from 50 employees, and this wider group has also been working remotely across 47 countries since November 2020.

“The world is looking very different today,” van der Voort said. “The biggest change for us has been the size of the organization. We’ve gone from 50 to more than 200 employees, and I haven’t met any of them! We have tried to follow our values of bringing opportunity everywhere so we hire everywhere as we solve that for our customers, too.”

Nigeria leads mobile app market growth in Africa as use of gaming apps surge 44% from Q1 2020

Published July 13, 2021

The pandemic’s effect on the global app market has not been hard to miss. In the first quarter and first half of this year, consumer spending in mobile apps hit new records at $32 billion and $64.9 billion, respectively.

In Africa, it can be tough to call out exact numbers on consumer spending because the continent gets hardly a mention in global app market reports. Yet, other metrics are worth looking at, and a new report from AppsFlyer in collaboration with Google has some important insights into how the African app market has fared since the pandemic broke out last year.

The report tracked mobile app activities across three of Africa’s largest app markets (Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa) between Q1 2020 and Q1 2021.

From the first half of 2020 to the first half of 2021, the African mobile app industry (which is predominantly Android) increased by 41% in overall installs. This was analyzed from 6,000 apps and 2 billion installs in the three markets. Nigeria registered the highest growth, with a 43% rise; South Africa’s market increased by 37% and Kenya increased 29%.

Consumer spending on apps hit record $64.9B in first half of 2021, but install growth slowed to 1.7%

Lockdown numbers

On March 22, 2020, Rwanda imposed Africa’s first lockdown. Subsequently, other countries followed; (those in the report) Kenya (March 25), South Africa (March 27), and Nigeria (March 30).

As more people spent time at home from Q2 2020, app installs increased by 20% across the three countries. South Africans were the quickest to take to their phones as the lockdowns hit with installs increasing by 17% from the previous quarter.

On the other hand, Nigerians and Kenyans recorded a 2% and 9% increase, respectively. The report attributes the disparity to the varying levels of restrictions each country faced; South Africa experienced the strictest and most frequent.

Per the report, gaming apps showed strong performance between Q1 and Q2 2020. The segment experienced a 50% growth compared to an 8% increase in nongaming apps pulled. It followed a global trend where gaming apps surged to a record high in Q2 2020, at 14 billion downloads globally.

In-app purchasing revenue and almost year-on-year growth

According to AppsFlyer, the biggest trend it noticed was in in-app purchasing revenue. In Q3 2020, in-app purchasing revenue numbers grew with a staggering 136% increase compared to Q2 2020, and accounted for 33% of 2020’s total revenue, “highlighting just how much African consumers were spending within apps, from retail purchases to gaming upgrades.”

In-app purchasing revenue among South African consumers increased by 213%, while Nigeria and Kenyan consumers recorded 141% and 74% increases, respectively.

On the advertising front and on an almost year-on-year basis, in-app advertising revenue also increased significantly as Africans were glued to their smartphones more than ever. Per the report, in-app advertising revenue increased 167% between Q2 2020 to Q1 2021.

For gaming and non-gaming apps, which was highlighted between the first two quarters, they both increased by 44% and 40% respectively in Q1 2021 compared to Q2 2020.

Fintech and super apps

In the last five years, fintech has dominated VC investments in African startups. It’s a no brainer why there is so much affinity for the sector. Fintechs create so much value for Africa’s mobile-first population, with large sections of unbanked, underbanked and banked people. This value is why all but one of the continent’s billion-dollar startups are fintech.

African fintechs have grown by 89.4% between 2017 and 2021, according to a Disrupt Africa report. Now, there are more than 570 startups on the continent. Many fintechs are mobile-based, therefore reflecting the number of fintech apps Africans use each day. Consumers in South Africa and Nigeria saw year-on-year growth in finance app installs by 116% and 60%, respectively.

Nigeria is becoming Africa’s unofficial tech capital

AppsFlyer says that like fintech apps, super apps are on the rise as well. These “all-in-one” apps offer users a range of functions such as banking, messaging, shopping and ride-hailing. The report says their rise, partly due to device limitations on the continent, owes much to the same conditions that have led to a surge in fintech apps: systemic underbanking.

“Super apps remove some of the barriers that these users face, as well as providing a level of customer insight and experience that traditional banks cannot,” the report said.

Daniel Junowicz, RVP EMEA & Strategic Projects for AppsFlyer, commenting on the trends highlighted in the report said, “…The mobile app space in Africa is thriving despite the turmoil of last year. Installs are growing, and consumers are spending more money than ever before, highlighting just how important mobile can be for businesses when it comes to driving revenue.”

Quantexa raises $153M to build out AI-based big data tools to track risk and run investigations

Published July 13, 2021

As financial crime has become significantly more sophisticated, so too have the tools that are used to combat it. Now, Quantexa — one of the more interesting startups that has been building AI-based solutions to help detect and stop money laundering, fraud and other illicit activity — has raised a growth round of $153 million, both to continue expanding that business in financial services and to bring its tools into a wider context, so to speak: linking up the dots around all customer and other data.

“We’ve diversified outside of financial services and working with government, healthcare, telcos and insurance,” Vishal Marria, its founder and CEO, said in an interview. “That has been substantial. Given the whole journey that the market’s gone through in contextual decision intelligence as part of bigger digital transformation, was inevitable.”

The Series D values the London-based startup between $800 million and $900 million on the heels of Quantexa growing its subscriptions revenues 108% in the last year.

Warburg Pincus led the round, with existing backers Dawn Capital, AlbionVC, Evolution Equity Partners (a specialist cybersecurity VC), HSBC, ABN AMRO Ventures and British Patient Capital also participating. The valuation is a significant hike up for Quantexa, which was valued between $200 million and $300 million in its Series C last July. It has now raised over $240 million to date.

Quantexa got its start out of a gap in the market that Marria identified when he was working as a director at Ernst & Young tasked with helping its clients with money laundering and other fraudulent activity. As he saw it, there were no truly useful systems in the market that efficiently tapped the world of data available to companies — matching up and parsing both their internal information as well as external, publicly available data — to get more meaningful insights into potential fraud, money laundering and other illegal activities quickly and accurately.

Quantexa raises $64.7M to bring big data intelligence to risk analysis and investigations

Quantexa’s machine learning system approaches that challenge as a classic big data problem — too much data for a human to parse on their own, but small work for AI algorithms processing huge amounts of that data for specific ends.

Its so-called “Contextual Decision Intelligence” models (the name Quantexa is meant to evoke “quantum” and “context”) were built initially specifically to address this for financial services, with AI tools for assessing risk and compliance and identifying financial criminal activity, leveraging relationships that Quantexa has with partners like Accenture, Deloitte, Microsoft and Google to help fill in more data gaps.

The company says its software — and this, not the data, is what is sold to companies to use over their own data sets — has handled up to 60 billion records in a single engagement. It then presents insights in the form of easily digestible graphs and other formats so that users can better understand the relationships between different entities and so on.

Today, financial services companies still make up about 60% of the company’s business, Marria said, with seven of the top 10 U.K. and Australian banks and six of the top 14 financial institutions in North America among its customers. (The list includes its strategic backer HSBC, as well as Standard Chartered Bank and Danske Bank.)

But alongside those — spurred by a huge shift in the market to rely significantly more on wider data sets, to businesses updating their systems in recent years, and the fact that, in the last year, online activity has in many cases become the “only” activity — Quantexa has expanded more significantly into other sectors.

“The Financial crisis [of 2007] was a tipping point in terms of how financial services companies became more proactive, and I’d say that the pandemic has been a turning point around other sectors like healthcare in how to become more proactive,” Marria said. “To do that you need more data and insights.”

So in the last year in particular, Quantexa has expanded to include other verticals facing financial crime, such as healthcare, insurance, government (for example in tax compliance) and telecoms/communications, but in addition to that, it has continued to diversify what it does to cover more use cases, such as building more complete customer profiles that can be used for KYC (know your customer) compliance or to serve them with more tailored products. Working with government, it’s also seeing its software getting applied to other areas of illicit activity, such as tracking and identifying human trafficking.

In all, Quantexa has “thousands” of customers in 70 markets. Quantexa cites figures from IDC that estimate the market for such services — both financial crime and more general KYC services — is worth about $114 billion annually, so there is still a lot more to play for.

“Quantexa’s proprietary technology enables clients to create single views of individuals and entities, visualized through graph network analytics and scaled with the most advanced AI technology,” said Adarsh Sarma, MD and co-head of Europe at Warburg Pincus, in a statement. “This capability has already revolutionized the way KYC, AML and fraud processes are run by some of the world’s largest financial institutions and governments, addressing a significant gap in an increasingly important part of the industry. The company’s impressive growth to date is a reflection of its invaluable value proposition in a massive total available market, as well as its continued expansion across new sectors and geographies.”

Interestingly, Marria admitted to me that the company has been approached by big tech companies and others that work with them as an acquisition target — no real surprises there — but longer term, he would like Quantexa to consider how it continues to grow on its own, with an independent future very much in his distant sights.

“Sure, an acquisition to the likes of a big tech company absolutely could happen, but I am gearing this up for an IPO,” he said.

How to ensure data quality in the era of Big Data

Whisper Aero emerges from stealth to quiet drones and air taxis

Published July 13, 2021

The skies are on the cusp of getting busier — and louder — as drone delivery and electric vertical take-off and landing passenger aircraft startups move from moonshot to commercialization. One former NASA engineer and ex-director of Uber’s air taxi division is developing tech to ensure that more air traffic doesn’t equal more noise.

Mark Moore, who was most recently director of engineering at Uber Elevate until its acquisition by Joby Aviation, has a launched his own company called Whisper Aero. The startup, which came out of stealth this week, is aiming to designing an electric thruster it says will blend noise emitted from delivery drones and eVTOLs alike into background levels, making them nearly imperceptible to the human ear.

It’s a formidable challenge. Solving the noise problem comes down to more than simply cranking down the volume. Noise profiles are also characterized by other variables, like frequency. For example, helicopters have a main rotor and tail rotor that generate two separate frequencies, which makes them much more irritating to the human ear than if they were at a single frequency, Moore told TechCrunch in a recent interview.

Complicating the picture even further is that eVTOL companies are designing entirely new types of aircraft, ones that may generate different acoustic profiles than other rotorcraft (like helicopters). The U.S. Army recently undertook a research study confirming that eVTOL rotors generate more of a type of noise referred to as broadband, rather than tonal noise which is generated by helicopters. And as each eVTOL company is developing its own design, not all of the electric aircraft will generate the same level or kind of noise.

Whisper is designing its scalable product to be adoptable across the board.

Moore said the idea for the company had been fomenting for years. He and Whisper COO Ian Villa, who headed strategy and simulation at Elevate, realized years ago that noise (that is, less of it) was key to air taxis taking off.

“The thing that was abundantly clear was, noise matters most,” Villa said. “It is the hardest barrier to break through. And not enough of these developers were spending the time, the resources, the mindshare to really unlock that.”

Whisper CEO Mark Moore. Image Credits: Whisper Aero (opens in a new window)

Helicopters have mostly been able to get away with their terrible noise profile because they are used so infrequently. But eVTOL companies like Joby Aviation are envisioning far higher ride volumes. Moore is quick to point out that companies like Joby (which purchased Elevate at the end of 2020) are already developing aircraft that are many times quieter than helicopter, and are “a step in the right direction.”

“The question is, ‘is it enough of a step to get to significant adoption?’ And that’s what we’re focused on.”

Whisper is staying mum on the details of its thruster design. It has managed to attract around $7.5 million investment from firms like Lux Capital, Menlo Ventures, Kindred Ventures and Robert Downey Jr.’s FootPrint Coalition Ventures. It’s also aiming to convert its provisional patents with the United States Patent and Trademark Office sometime next year.

From there, the startup envisions launching in the small drone market around 2023, before scaling progressively up to air taxis. Moore said the goal is to get the thrusters manufactured and in vehicles by the end of the decade. Should the first generation of eVTOL go to market in 2024 (as Archer Aviation and Joby have proposed), Whisper’s product could potentially appear in second generation eVTOL.

In the meantime, Whisper will continue testing and working out remaining technical challenges – least among which is how to manufacture the end product at a reasonable cost. Whisper is also preparing to conduct dynamic testing in a wind tunnel, in addition to the static tests it has undertaken at its Tennessee headquarters, some in partnership with the U.S. Air Force.

“It’s got to be quiet enough to blend into the background noise,” Moore said. “We know this and that’s the technology we’re developing.”

Vaayu’s carbon tracking for retailers raises $1.6M, claims it could cut CO2 in half by 2030

Published July 12, 2021

Carbon tracking is very much the new hot thing in tech, and we’ve previously covered more generalist startups doing this at scale for companies, such as Plan A Earth out of Berlin.

But there’s clearly an opportunity to get deep into a vertical sector and tailor solutions to it.

That’s the plan of Vaayu, a carbon tracking platform aimed specifically at retailers. It has now raised $1.57 million in pre-seed funding in a round led by CapitalT. Several angels also took part, including Atomico’s Angel Program, Planet Positive LP, Saarbrücker 21, Expedite Ventures and NP-Hard Ventures.

Carbon tracking for the retail fashion industry, in particular, is urgently needed. Unfortunately, the fashion industry remains responsible for 10% of annual global carbon emissions, which ads up to more than all international flights and maritime shipping combined.

SoftBank, Demeter and Coparion invest $3M into Plan A’s B2B carbon monitoring and ESG platform

Vaayu says it integrates with various point-of-sale systems, such as Shopify and Webflow. It then pulls in data on logistics, operations and packaging to monitor, measure and reduce their carbon emissions. Normally, retailers calculate emissions once a year, which is obviously far less accurate.

Vaayu was founded in 2020 by Namrata Sandhu (CEO), former head of Sustainability at fashion retailer Zalando, as well as Anita Daminov (CPO) and Luca Schmid (CTO). Vaayu currently has 25 global brand customers, including Missoma, Armed Angels and Organic Basics.

Commenting on the fundraise, Sandhu said: “We have only nine short years left to achieve the UN’s goal of reducing carbon emissions by 50% by 2030 and as the third-largest contributor to global emissions, retailers need to take action — and fast. Vaayu is here to help retailers measure, monitor, and reduce their carbon footprint at scale across the entire supply chain — something that I know from my own experience can be complex and expensive.”

Speaking to me over a call, Sandhu told me: “Putting the focus on retail basically allows us to automate the calculation, which means in three clicks you can get your carbon footprint right away. That then allows us to really get accurate data, and with that, we can basically do reductions specific to the business but using software, rather than any kind of manual intervention or a kind of ‘intermediate’ state where you need to put together an Excel sheet. Because we focus on retail we can automate the entire process and also automate the reductions.”

“We are delighted to be backed by female-led CapitalT who understood us and our vision right from the start. We look forward to developing Vaayu further in the coming months so we can reach as many retailers as possible and help put the brakes on the impending climate crisis,” she added.

Janneke Niessen, founding partner, CapitalT commented: “We are very excited to join Vaayu on their mission to reduce carbon emission for retailers worldwide. The Vaayu product is very scalable and its quick and easy implementation allows for fast adoption. We are confident that with this experienced team, Vaayu will soon be one of the fastest-growing climate tech companies in Europe and the world.”

5 advanced-ish SEO tactics to win in 2021

Published July 12, 2021

Mark Spera
Contributor

Mark Spera is the head of growth marketing at Minted. He’s the co-founder of growth marketing blog Growth Marketing Pro and content generation tool GrowthBar.

Scaling your time with content generators

Businesses spent over $300 billion on content marketing last year. That’s in part because creating new content is the most straightforward way to draw in organic search traffic. Whether you’ve got a mature site or you’re just starting a WordPress SEO site, content is likely a large part of your SEO strategy.

But to scale content like a startup, you’ll need to devote a lot of time to it and/or manage a fleet of writers. Your time is probably better spent building your product or helping customers than on planning hundreds of blog articles. This is precisely where a content generator tool comes into play.

A whole new era of SEO tools is emerging, and some of these are augmented by OpenAI’s GPT-3 technology, the most advanced artificial intelligence language model. These tools have changed the game for SEOs and content creators by automating parts of the content creation cycle. Several tools utilize SEO signals and combine them with OpenAI to help you create blog outlines that include SEO-optimized titles, word counts, keywords, headlines, intro paragraphs and much more.

Q3 IPO cycle starts strong with Couchbase pricing and Kaltura relisting

Published July 12, 2021

Today we have new filings from Couchbase and Kaltura: Couchbase set an initial price range for its IPO, something we’ve been waiting for, and Kaltura’s offering is back from hiatus with a new price range and some fresh financial information to boot.

Both bits of news should help us get a handle on how the Q3 2021 IPO cycle is shaping up at the start.

TechCrunch has long expected the third quarter’s IPO haul to prove strong; investors said as 2020 closed that quarters one, three and four would prove very active in terms of public market exits this year. Then the second quarter surpassed expectations, with more companies going public than at least some market observers anticipated.

With that in mind, you can imagine why the newly launched Q3 could prove an active period.

So! Let’s start with a dig into the filing from NoSQL provider Couchbase, working to understand its first price range and what the numbers may say about market demand for technology debuts. Here’s our first look at the company’s value. Then we are taking the Kaltura saga back up, checking into the pricing and second-quarter results from the technology company that provides video-streaming software and services.

Frankly, I’ve been waiting for these filings to drop. So, let’s cut the chat and get into the numbers:

Couchbase’s IPO price range

In its new S-1/A filing, Couchbase reports that it anticipates a $20 to $23 per share IPO price. With a maximum sale of just over 8 million shares, Couchbase could raise as much as $185.15 million in its public offering.

The company will have 40,072,801 shares outstanding after its IPO, not including 1,050,000 shares that are reserved for possible release. The math from here is simple. To calculate Couchbase’s possible simple IPO valuation we can just do a little multiplication:

Couchbase simple valuation at $20 per share: ~$802 million.
Couchbase simple valuation at $23 per share: ~$922 million.

If you want to include the company’s reserved shares, add $21 million to the first figure, and $24.2 million to the second. Notably, TechCrunch wrote before it priced that using a historical analog from the Red Hat-IBM sale — both Couchbase and Red Hat work in the OSS space — the company would be worth around $900 million. So, we were pretty close.

Bambee founder talks about entrenched fundraising challenges facing Black founders

Published July 12, 2021

Allan Jones dropped out of college and spent a decade learning how to run a startup. In 2016, that education resulted in the launch of Los Angeles-based Bambee, which helps small companies by acting as their HR department with the goal of keeping them in compliance with government rules and regulations.

But he found getting funded a challenge in spite of his background. He said that as a Black man, he had to move more carefully in the startup world.

“I think it came as part of the complexities of navigating a mostly white male ecosystem, a mostly straight cis white male ecosystem that either helps you create some skills that make you really effective at the job, or generates so much resentment that it becomes hard to be effective. […] I think that I was always one comment away from the opposite direction [I ended up going],” he explained.

Fortunately, that didn’t happen, and he kept on climbing and gaining skills and single-handedly founded his own company, one which has reached Series B and raised $33 million, a significant amount of money for any startup, but particularly for a startup run by a Black founder.

A study published by Crunchbase in February found that VC firms distributed $150 billion in venture funding in 2020. Of that, less than 1%, or around $1 billion, went to Black founders. That highlights just how difficult it has been for him to raise from such a limited pool of money in spite of having a great idea and the business skill and acumen to pull it off.

Jones got his start at the age of 20 at a startup called Helio, which targeted the youth market for multimedia services on mobile phones. It was eventually acquired by Virgin Mobile. He went on to run product at a couple of companies before landing as CMO at ZipRecruiter in 2013. He left that position after three years to launch Bambee in 2016.

In spite of all that experience, he felt that as a gay Black man in Silicon Valley that he was continually saddled with the label of “the kid with potential,” and not always taken as seriously as his straight white counterparts. “And I don’t think those intentions necessarily were bad, I think it was quite the opposite, which actually makes them almost worse because they were entrenched in a bias of how to characterize [my abilities].”

Blendoor data lets you know if companies are living up to diversity pledges

Jones launched Bambee, a startup that is going after SMBs with fewer than 500 employees, most of which are operating without an HR department, and could be out of compliance with federal mandates because they don’t have anyone in charge who is aware of the rules.

“Bambee aims to put an HR manager in every American small business. We’ve done so by building a model that allows you to hire one on our platform for $99 a month. So you pay us a flat fee and you get access to our platform and your own dedicated HR professional. […] She acts as your human resource manager and your human resource arm for your company. And our platform helps keep those companies compliant,” Jones explained.

Jones says that while he might not encounter direct bias as he builds his business, there is an unconscious bias that investing in Bambee could be riskier than investing in someone who fits the prototypical startup founder mold, and this is especially true in early-stage investing when investors are essentially betting on the entrepreneur.

“They take bets that they deem as a bit safer — entrepreneurs that look like a certain profile — white cis-gender males that come from Stanford and Harvard that match the profile of confidence and they have kind of built in an anti-bias determination around, so they automatically get the benefit of the doubt to those pedigrees, and those profiles,” Jones said.

He says that means that Black founders have to work that much harder to overcome those biases. Today Bambee has some decent metrics to show investors with revenue reaching tens of millions, growing 300% year over year with thousands of customers across all 50 states, according to Jones. With 100 employees, he plans to double that number by the end of this year.

Even with that, he says there are still barriers to entry he has to deal with. Even if it’s harder for investors to ignore the company’s numbers, he still sees a tendency to accentuate the negative.

“Building a great company with the deficit in belief in you that starts so early on in the venture process, the [obstacles] that you have to [overcome] to get here. It seems impossible with less than 1% of venture capital dollars going to Black founders, and it isn’t because Black founders don’t exist, it’s because the belief in us is not there at scale,” he said.

As Jones continues to build the company, he has learned to look for investors who believe in him and his vision for the company. If he senses that negativity from a potential investor, he moves on because he wants to work with people who want to help build the company and believe in it as much as he does. He says this won’t change when he goes to raise his C round, a stage few Black entrepreneurs reach.

“Is it going to be easier for me going forward? I don’t think so. I think the type of bias that I have to combat based on the class of entrepreneur I’m becoming, it starts to shift and change, and I’ve seen that in every round and I’m prepared for it in my Series C, as well.”

He says that the progress he’s made in the company and his belief in the business will help him find the right partners to continue on that journey, just as he has in previous rounds.

“We will navigate this […] and I think we’ll build a really great business, and ultimately the partners we discover along this journey will be the exact right ones who we were meant to.”

Why a startup with $10M in annual revenue took 18 months to get VC funding

On the diversity front, 2020 may prove a tipping point

Papa co-founder lands seed funding for a second swing in eldercare: UpsideHōM

Published July 12, 2021

Jake Rothstein is the co-founder of Papa, a Miami-based company that offers care and companionship to seniors. The business, which pairs elderly Americans with uncertified-yet-vetted pals, helps offer casual services, such as technology support, grocery delivery or even a fun conversation. It has raised upwards of $91 million in venture capital to date.

While Rothstein left day to day responsibilities at Papa in 2017, his experience there gave him a deeper look into the priorities of older adults and families as they go through the aging journey. While Papa was about meeting the elderly where they are, the co-founder began to think of a more complex question: What if “where they are” isn’t as supportive as it should be 24/7?

After a stint at another tech company, Rothstein launched a more modern take on senior living communities in January 2020, alongside co-worker turned co-founder Peter Badgley. UpsideHōM is a fully managed, tech-enabled living space for older adults in the United States. After a year of beta testing, the duo announced today that they have raised a $2.25 million seed round for UpsideHōM, led by Triple Impact Capital and Freestyle Capital, with participation from Techstars.

Elder tech company, Papa, raises $60M Led by Tiger Global

Alongside the funding, UpsideHōM announced its next big bet, dubbed a relaunch, that will sit atop furnished and furnished apartments that sit throughout Raleigh, Atlanta, Jacksonville, Tampa and South Florida: a software platform to take out all the clutter from move-in and maintenance. The platform will give residents one spot to chat with their house manager, pay bills and access perks such as on-demand tech support, house-keeping and companion visits thanks to a partnership with Papa. The company also offers add-on services and amenities, including freshly prepared meals, grocery delivery, fitness programming and accompanied transportation.

Image Credits: UpsideHōM

Part of UpsideHōM’s focus is in creating personalized solutions. Elders are diverse in age, needs and financial circumstances — which means the turnkey solution needs to be easily adaptable to service needs when they pop up. The company needs to be careful though: It can’t offer traditional caregiver services due to state by state compliance; instead Rothstein describes the offerings as supportive services, not in replacement of health assistant caregivers.

Image Credits: UpsideHoM

When the company first launched, it was betting on a more unconventional idea.

“I thought, let’s solve loneliness even more completely than what Papa is doing by building in companionship,” Rothstein said, instead of letting people order it on demand. The company decided to offer roommate matching services for elders as one of its core services, alongside the aforementioned supported living characteristics. It didn’t fully stick. Over half of inbound participants responded to the marketing efforts by saying that they liked the idea, but didn’t want to share the space. Today, 50% of UpsideHōM’s business covers individuals or people with spouses or significant others; the other half covers those looking to share units.

The synergies between UpsideHōM and Papa, Rothstein’s previous company, are clear beyond an overlapping customer base. Papa offered up to and almost including actual care, stopping at traditional care-giving services, which require their own vetting and compliance measures. UpsideHōM offers up to and almost including traditional senior living services, but gives supportive services instead of assisted living services, which similarly have their own logistic hurdles to figure out.

As for why Rothstein didn’t just launch supportive living services as a new product vertical within his earlier company, he chalked it up to the “tremendous” opportunity in the former, which warranted it’s own company. He also said that customer acquisition looks different between the two companies.

Venture investing in elder tech

“At Papa, what we found was that acquiring customers in this space was incredibly challenging [so we went through] the Medicare Advantage route,” he said. “But senior living is a completely different segment.”

The millions in new venture capital money are coming as UpsideHōM prepares for aggressive growth. While the company did not disclose revenue or total residents, it did say it has hit 1,000% in new resident headcount in the first half of 2021 as a vague proxy. As the startup prepares for its next phase of growth, the co-founders will need to focus heavily on sustainable customer acquisition.

Rothstein thinks that downsizing elders into homes that work for them is a simple argument to make.

“You can age in place for as long as it’s practical, but there’s going to be a day and time when it’s not [going to] be practical,” Rothstein said. “Why would you want to make this decision after you’ve broken your hip, after you run out of money or after your spouse died?”

Editor’s note: A previous version of this story wrote that Rothstein had spent six years scaling Papa. This is incorrect. He left in 2017 but remains an investor in the company.

10 proptech investors see better era for residential and retail after pandemic

The most important API metric is time to first call

Published July 12, 2021

Joyce Lin
Contributor

Joyce Lin is head of developer relations at Postman.

API publishers among Postman’s community of more than 15 million are working toward more seamless and integrated developer experiences for their APIs. Distilled from hundreds of one-on-one discussions, I recently shared a study on increasing adoption of an API with a public workspace in Postman. One of the biggest reasons to use a public workspace is to enhance developer onboarding with a faster time to first call (TTFC), the most important metric you’ll need for a public API.

If you are not investing in TTFC as your most important API metric, you are limiting the size of your potential developer base throughout your remaining adoption funnel.

To understand a developer’s journey, let’s first take a look at factors influencing how much time and energy they are willing to invest in learning your technology and making it work.

Urgency: Is the developer actively searching for a solution to an existing problem? Or did they hear about your technology in passing and have a mild curiosity?
Constraints: Is the developer trying to meet a deadline? Or do they have unlimited time and budget to explore the possibilities?
Alternatives: Is the developer required by their organization to use this solution? Or are they choosing from many providers and considering other ways to solve their problem?

Developer journey to an API

With that context in mind, the following stages describe the developer journey of encountering a new API:

Step 1: Browse

A developer browses your website and documentation to figure out what your API offers. Some people gloss over this step, preferring to learn what your tech offers interactively in the next steps. But judgments are formed at this very early stage, likely while comparing your product among alternatives. For example, if your documentation and onboarding process appears comparatively unorganized and riddled with errors, perhaps it is a reflection of your technology.

Step 2: Signup

Signing up for an account is a developer’s first commitment. It signals their intent to do something with your API. Frequently going hand-in-hand with the next step, signing up is required to generate an API key.

Step 3: First API call

Making the first API call is the first payoff a developer receives and is oftentimes when developers begin more deeply understanding how the API fits into their world. Stripe and Algolia embed interactive guides within their developer documentation to enable first API calls. Stripe and Twitter also use Postman public workspaces for interactive onboarding. Since many developers already use Postman, experiencing an API in familiar territory gets them one step closer to implementation.