Year: 2020

If anyone knows early-stage investing and startups, it’s M.G. Siegler. As a general partner at GV, he’s personally invested in his fair share of rocket ship companies early on in their lifecycles, including Anchor, Slack, Medium and Stripe. He’s also a TechCrunch alum and a former startup operator himself as a web dev. We’re thrilled to have Siegler joining us to talk about his investment experience and how his early career as a writer influenced his thinking about startup success on Extra Crunch Live on today live at 2 p.m. EDT/11 a.m. PDT.

Siegler’s career in startups began in 2005, working in web development at a startup agency focused on tech clients. He later reported on startups at both VentureBeat and later TechCrunch, before becoming a founded partner at CrunchFund and then eventually joining GV (then Google Ventures) to focus on early-stage companies. In addition to the companies listed above, Siegler has led investments in other successful early-stage companies including Universe, Giphy, The Players’ Tribune, CTRL-Labs and AltspaceVR.

At the outset of the current global pandemic, Siegler chatted with our own Lucas Matney about GV’s investment in mobile website-builder Universe and about how managing a portfolio changes in light of travel and social distancing restrictions. We’ll find out from Siegler what the ensuing months of living and working in the context of COVID-19 have changed about his perspective and about the early-stage companies he’s working with and scouting for potential investment.

More broadly, Siegler also has a unique perspective and ample experience when it comes to early-stage startups and storytelling. His work as a journalist focused specifically on looking at new and emerging technology companies and assessing their ability to communicate their ambitions, the problems they’re solving and the technology they’re building. He brings that experience to his assessment of the investment potential of startups and their founders, and their ability to tell good and compelling stories about what they’re doing and why.

All these topics, plus more questions from you, our audience. So join us if you’re an Extra Crunch member and get caught up on all the fintech goodness going on. And if you aren’t an Extra Crunch member, be sure to check out subscription options before we get started.

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What’s most remarkable about the push for 5G is how quickly the prices came down on handsets sporting the next-gen wireless technology. The push toward affordable 5G devices is clearly as much an indicator as the current state of the smartphone space as anything — people just aren’t upgrading devices as quickly as the used to. And even more to the point, they’re reluctant to pay $1,000 when they do.

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 765G has been a piece of that puzzle. And unsurprisingly, the mid-tier chip in found in TCL’s new $400 5G handset. Of course, TCL is positioning it as “under-$400” with that $399.99 price tag, which is technically correct — the best kind of correct.

It’s also not really right to say that the TCL 10 5G UW’s a”premium blend of performance, power, stylish design and 5G connectivity that until now has only been available on more expensive flagship smartphones.” Affordable 5G handsets isn’t an entirely new phenomenon — nor are affordable 5G handsets with decent specs and design. But even so, the price point is still notable at this stage in the 5G upgrade cycle — which, frankly, is why we’re writing about it here.

The price/5G combo is the main thing to like here, coming in at even less than, say, the OnePlus Nord, a recent high water mark in the 5G/price point combo. And there are a few other things that should appeal to potential buyers, as well, including a 4,500mAh battery coupled with reverse charging for other devices. There are three rear-facing cameras: a 48-megapixel main, an eight-megapixel ultra wide and a five-megapixel macro, the latter of of which is starting to appear on more phones.

It arrives October 29, and is, notably, a Verizon (TechCrunch’s parent company) exclusive here in the U.S., using the carrier’s mmWave technology.

A few weeks back, The Exchange dug through a number of Techstars demo days and parsed a few dozen startups to find a few favorites. Today, we’re back for more of the same, albeit with a different set of accelerators’ results to examine.

As a reminder, the last time we dug through the various cohorts, we liked YearOne, MyFavorito, Livelii, Albo, Space Products and Innovation GmbH and SATIM.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

This morning let’s take a look at the startups from Techstars’ Atlanta (full class here), Los Angeles (full class here), and New York City cohorts (full class here), with a final peek at what the so-called “Techstars & Western Union Accelerator” managed (full class here).

TechCrunch has also taken looks at startups from the latest Y Combinator batch (parth one, part two), Acceleprise, Envision and others. It’s a time-honored tradition around here — we think startups are inherently interesting. With that, let’s begin.

Favorites and standouts

I wanted to kick off with Atlanta this morning, and not merely because the Falcons are somehow worse than my Eagles. A startup accelerator in Atlanta feels exciting because, while we know that there is lots of startup activity coming out of the city, it’s still not a place I know well.

Unluckily for our goal of picking favorites, I liked nearly every startups’ demo. Meal Me is cool, and as a former San Francisco resident who didn’t cook, where was this when I lived there. Swivl is also worth checking out, because we should be able to expand who can really work with data. And Please Assist Me is pretty spot-on for my generation’s yuppies.

Google today announced several updates related to how it’s helping direct people to the polls, provide election results, and help people access real-time election news across its platforms and services, like Search, Assistant and YouTube. The company said it will again partner with the Associated Press (AP) to deliver authoritative information on election results on both Google Search and Assistant. It also confirmed earlier reports that it won’t run political ads on its platform after the polls close on November 3.

Axios had first reported on Google’s plans to ban political ads after election day, citing an email sent to advertisers. The email had told advertisers they would not be able to run ads “referencing candidates, the election, or its outcome, given that an unprecedented amount of votes will be counted after election day this year.”

Google confirmed the move at the time of the original report by offering a statement.

Today, Google published the details of its decision in a company blog post, saying it has chosen to enforce its Sensitive Events policy as soon as the polls close on Nov. 3, given the possibility of “delayed election results this year” and to “limit the potential for ads to increase confusion post-election.”

The policy, specifically, says Google does not allow:

Ads that potentially profit from or exploit a sensitive event with significant social, cultural, or political impact, such as civil emergencies, natural disasters, public health emergencies, terrorism and related activities, conflict, or mass acts of violence

Google isn’t the only tech giant to take aim at political advertising in this heated election season. Facebook this month widened its ban on political ads, saying those ads would be blocked indefinitely after Nov. 3. Twitter made the decision to ban political ads last year.

In Google’s case, it’s calling its political ad ban a “temporary pause,” and says it’s directed towards an ads referencing “the 2020 election, the candidates or its outcome.”

The company also took the time today to note other voting and election-related initiatives it has underway, including its ongoing activities taking place in election seasons that help people find voter registration information and other election deadlines. It’s also directing users to voting locations and ballot drop boxes on Google Maps.

On YouTube, it’s pointed users to relevant election-related search results, voter registration information, and details on how to vote.

This year, Google noted it will partner with the AP to provide election results in Google Search and Assistant. The companies have worked together in the past elections, too.

Users will encounter a new election module with data provided by the AP when they either search for “election results” on Google Search or ask, “Hey Google, what are the current election results?” The data will include both federal and state level races across more than 70 languages, Google says.

YouTube, meanwhile, will feature real-time election streams from major news providers, and link to coverage on Google Search. Google News will also feature a 2020 U.S. Election section where users can follow both local and national news.

Lightyear, a New York City startup that wants to make it easier for large companies to procure networking infrastructure like internet and SD-WAN, announced a $3.7 million seed round today. While it was at it, the company announced that it was emerging from stealth and offering its solution in public beta.

Amplo led the round with help from Susa Ventures, Ludlow Ventures, Mark Cuban, David Adelman and Operator Partners.

Company CEO and co-founder Dennis Thankachan says that while so much technology buying has moved online, networking technology procurement still involves phone calls for price quotes that could sometimes take weeks to get. Thankachan says that when he was working at a hedge fund specializing in telecommunications he witnessed this first hand and saw an opportunity for a startup to fill the void.

“Our objective is to make the process of buying telecom infrastructure, kind of like buying socks on Amazon, providing a real consumer-like experience to the enterprise and empowering buyers with data because information asymmetry and a lack of transparent data on what things should cost, where providers are available, and even what’s existing already in your network is really at the core of the problem for why this is frustrating for enterprise buyers,” Thankachan explained.

The company offers the ability to simply select a service and find providers in your area with costs and contract terms if it’s a simple purchase, but he recognizes that not all enterprise purchases will be that simple and the startup is working to digitize the corporate buying process into the Lightyear platform.

To provide the data that he spoke of, the company has already formed relationships with over 400 networking providers worldwide. The pricing model is in flux, but could involve a monthly subscription or a percentage of the sale. That is something they are working out, but they are using the latter during Beta testing to keep the product free for now.

The company already has 10 employees and flush with the new investment, it plans to double that in the next year. Thankachan says as he builds the company, particularly as a person of color himself, he takes diversity and inclusion extremely seriously and sees it as part of the company’s core values.

“Trying to enable people from non-traditional backgrounds to succeed will be really important to us, and I think providing economic opportunity to people that traditionally would not have been afforded several aspects of economic opportunity is the biggest ways to fix the opportunity gap in this country,” he said.

The company, which launched a year ago has basically grown up during the pandemic. That means he has yet to meet any of his customers or investors in person, but he says he has learned to adapt to that approach. While he is based in NYC, his investors are are in the Bay Area and so that remote approach will remain in place for the time being.

As he makes his way from seed to a Series A, he says that it’s up to him to stay focused and execute with the goal of showing product-market fit across a variety of company types. He believes if the startup can do this, it will have the data to take to investors when it’s time to take the next step.

Vimeo Record is a new product that allows teams to communicate through video messages.

Vimeo CEO Anjali Sud said that while the pandemic has prompted many offices to embrace digital communication tools like Zoom, “There’s a whole host of work communication that needs asynchronous messaging.”

Besides, sometimes a video can get your message across more effectively, rather than “scheduling another call or writing a long email or Slack thread.”

Sud said that since she became CEO of the IAC-owned video platform in 2017, Vimeo has shifted its focus from being a destination site that competed with YouTube to providing video tools for businesses: “We really want to be the single corporate video solution for the modern organization.”

Vimeo Record is an extension of that strategy. During the pandemic, Vimeo’s revenue has already been growing 40% to 50% year-over-year each month, but Sud said this product been in the works since before then, reflecting the long-term trend that “more and more teams are distributed, and they need ways to communicate.”

So Vimeo created a Google Chrome extension that allows users to easily record their screen or their face, share and comment on those recordings, organize them into folders with different permissions and receive notifications when someone watches.

Sud said around 400 companies have already been beta testing the feature. Teams are using it to review design and code, to work together to resolve customer support tickets, to share messages from company leadership and more.

Asked whether there’s been a learning curve for recording effective video messages, Sud said, “The biggest barrier is just making it not feel intimidating. The easiest way [to do that] is for people to receive a video message themselves. If a colleague sends you something that’s not perfect, it lowers that intimidation factor.”

She also noted that Vimeo Record fits into the company’s freemium business model. Anyone can send unlimited messages for free, but Vimeo will charge for premium features like the ability to host videos on a third-party, custom-branded video platform.

“My team is using Vimeo Record to share product demos internally and to give our customers a preview of what’s launching soon,” said Mailchimp’s director of product marketing Trevor Wolfe in a statement. “We love it! It adds a personal touch that you just can’t replicate with email or a chatroom message.”

Deep tech. Hard tech. Or, as The Engine dubs it, Tough Tech.

Venture investing today is essentially identical to what happens on Wall Street, focused on data rooms, spreadsheets, SaaS churn models and cohort analysis. Yet, the history of venture capital firms is heavily interwoven with universities and their research. Some of the most famous VC funds like Kleiner Perkins got their start funding compelling research projects out of laboratories and financing their commercialization toward scale.

Technical risk is something many VCs like to avoid, but The Engine has built an entire brand and thesis around it. Centered around Kendall Square and the broader MIT ecosystem, The Engine debuted a couple of years ago with a focus on “tough tech” problems that are perhaps a touch too early for other VCs. That’s led to investments in companies like Boston Metal, which builds environmentally-friendly steel alloys, WoHo, which is rethinking modular building construction that we profiled last week, and Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which is developing fusion power.

Indeed, the firm’s portfolio page has to be one of the most interesting in the industry today.

The good news is that the firm’s ambitious funding strategy looks set to continue. It announced this morning that it has raised $230 million toward the firm’s second fund, which on top of the firm’s first fund brings it to a total of $435 million under management. In a press statement, the firm said that it has funded 27 portfolio companies out of its first fund. While MIT continues to be the anchor LP, Harvard joined for Fund 2, creating a cross-Cambridge, MA venture platform.

Katie Rae remains CEO and managing partner of the fund, and her team has expanded over the past few years as the firm has scaled up.

One interesting point that we haven’t noted previously is that MIT is building The Engine a 200,000 square foot building near its campus that will offer massive space for startups and portfolio companies to start and grow over time. That building is expected to open in 2022, hopefully when this whole pandemic situation allows for in-office collaboration again.

Boston has become something of a hub for deeper technical projects. Local startup Desktop Metal, which builds 3D printers that can print metal, is going through a SPAC process that values the company at roughly $2.5 billion. With this latest news from The Engine, it seems clear that Boston’s tough tech ecosystem will continue to have a pipeline of interesting and compelling companies.

Milan-headquartered scale-up Boom, which offers a two-sided tech platform to let companies book and manage commercial photo shoots, has raised $7 million in Series A funding.

The round is led by Italy’s United Ventures, with the participation from Wellness Holding. It will be used to support the photo tech company’s next stage of growth as it sets its sights on “5% market share” of the $80bn global digital photography market.

Specifically, Boom says it will invest in its proprietary plug & play technology for managing the commercial photography production pipeline, and build a presence in 180 countries, including opening offices and studios in London and New York. The platform combines a marketplace, logistics, photo online storage, APIs and a CRM, with Boom pitching itself as wanting to become the “Amazon for commercial photography”,

“Today, visual content is more vital than ever,” says Boom co-founder and CEO Federico Mattia Dolci. “Data shows that photography is the second most important key driver for successful online commerce after online payments. This was our opportunity”.

Dolci says that, while demand for high-quality content was huge, when the company was founded in 2008, “there was a lack of scalable solutions”. And scale is the name of the game, with estimates suggesting there was more than 2 trillion photos uploaded online in 2019.

“The largest online sellers have massive, ever-growing image libraries,” says the Boom CEO. “And the faster the market grew, the more we recognised a major digital supply-and-demand gap. We could see that countless internet giants were changing the way people shopped online, uploading billions of pictures on their websites and platforms every day, but these same brands had no access to a content provider that could keep up with their scaled-up, global, fast-paced environment. The whole system was expensive and obsolete”.

To address this, Boom has developed a “tech-first” oder system that enables companies and brands to easily commission “high quality, affordable content” on a global scale. The promise is that it offers a simple, streamlined, automated work-flow, coupled with a network of thousands of professional photographers, without compromising on quality. The platform matches a client photoshoot request with the best photographers in the area. It also employs automatic photo-editing to improve raw shots, so that if a brand wants to get access to photos instantly, the photographer can spend less time editing.

Meanwhile, Boom’s order system doesn’t just manage photoshoots. Clients can also book videographers, drone pilots, designers, and other creative assets using the innovative platform.

To that end, Boom claims in excess of 250 major corporate clients including the likes of Deliveroo, Vacasa, Uber Eats, OYO, Lavanda, Casavo, Westwing, Getyourguide and hundreds of SMEs across verticals. It has a presence in more than 80 countries and has processed 3 million images to date, averaging one shoot per minute, across real estate, travel, F&B, and e-commerce.

Adds Dolci: “Our customers can place an order and expect a delivery 24h later, whether the photoshoots take place in Milan, New York, or Sydney, and whether the order calls for one photoshoot or a thousand! We guarantee speed, efficiency, and quality consistency every single time”.

Noteworthy, Boom says it is profitable on a unit economics basis, bar re-investing in its tech and expansion plans, and aims to be fully profitable as early as 2022.

Two automotive giants are teaming up to bring self-driving semi-trucks to market. Under this deal, Waymo and Daimler Trucks are partnering to build an autonomous version of the Freightliner Cascadia truck. This is Waymo’s first deal in the freight business.

The truck would be equipped with level 4 autonomous technology, meaning it could drive itself without a human but only in pre-defined areas. It is expected to be available in the US “in the coming years.”

“We have the highest regard for Daimler’s engineering skills and broad global truck product portfolio,” said John Krafcik, Waymo CEO, in a released statement, “and so we look forward to scaling the Waymo Driver, together with our new partner, to improve road safety and logistics efficiency on the worlds’ roadways.”

This deal provides Daimler Trucks, the world’s largest maker of commercial vehicles, with Waymo Driver. This is a suite of vision sensors, software, and the computing system powering the platform.

In March 2019, Daimler Trucks purchased a majority stake in Torc, another company developing Level 4 self-driving technology for semi-trucks. Martin Duaum, Chairman of Daimler Truck AG notes the new partnership with Waymo is part of Daimler’s “dual strategy approach” by working with two partners to bring customers different options.

Numerous companies are approaching autonomous trucking as its seen as a massive opportunity ready for a technology overhaul.

“The market is massive; I think in the United States, $700-$800 billion a year is spent on the trucking industry. It’s continuing to grow every single year,” said Boris Sofman, Waymo Director of Engineering and Head of Trucking, earlier this month at TechCrunch Sessions: Mobility. “And there’s a huge shortage of drivers today, which is only going to increase over the next period of time. It’s just such a clear need. But it’s not going to be overnight — there’s still a really long tail of challenges that you can’t avoid. So the way we talk about it is the things that are hardest are just different.”

Months after its $80 million Series B fundraise, Course Hero has acquired Symbolab, an artificial intelligence-powered calculator that helps students answer and understand complex math questions.

The price of the deal was undisclosed. The 9-person Symbolab team, based in Tel Aviv, will join Course Hero . The platforms will live under independent branding for the near future, according to Andrew Grauer, CEO of Course Hero.

Founded in 2011, Symbolab is an advanced calculator and question solver that is on track to answer 1 billion questions this year, Grauer says. The service has a deep focus on college-level math, and solves complex geometry problems with explanations and proofs.

Course Hero is a question and answer platform at its core. The addition of a calculator and company that holds a data-set on the most asked mathematics questions could give Course Hero a bigger edge on its math services, which the company says is one of its most popular subjects among its current students. The service will be offered to Course Hero subscribers as a deal-sweetener.

The model of using a computational engine to give solutions to stuck students is fairly common. In a remote schooling word, flexibility is key for students who might be lost in their classes. While teachers and tutors might only be available for a certain amount of hours, a technology service powered by AI could prove to be a 24/7 solution that students can rely on — and pay for.

Symbolab feels similar to Wolfram Alpha, a popular computational engine. While Grauer says that Wolfram Alpha is a “powerful tool” he thinks that Symbolab does a better job on depth and explanations. Big companies have added similar services too, such as Google, which acquired homework helper app Socratic in 2019, and Microsoft, which built Microsoft Solver in the same year.

Grauer had to decide between building or buying. The founder ultimately decided to acquire the technology because the true success of artificial intelligence only comes if a platform is able to compound data over time. Symbolab was founded nearly a decade ago, and back-end information is valuable. Grauer says he’s excited to approach the solver problem differently than Google and Microsoft.

“You can’t just [do this] in a short amount of time,” he said. “You’re looking for how do we get the right, accurate answer. But then, how am I going to get, not just accurate, but step by step solutions that are actually helpful.”

Consolidation remains rare in the sector that has historically been underfunded. Edtech acquisitions have been growing steadily but slowly. In 2018, edtech had less than 40 acquisitions. In that same year, fintech had 193 acquisitions, according to Crunchbase.

Still, amid edtech’s larger boom, this acquisition makes a good amount of sense. Course Hero recently raised its biggest tranche of money yet, passed $100 million in annual run revenue, and became profitable. Thus, the company likely had money in the bank to afford the deal. In 2012, Course Hero bought InstaEdu, an on-demand video platform.

Grauer says that he expects Course Hero to make more acquisitions across a variety of subject areas in the future. In edtech more broadly, he thinks that the next 5 to 10 years will have more acquisitions.

“If you look back 15 years, there just weren’t that many education technology businesses,” Grauer said. “Now, I think there’s enough of them that potentially have this scale, and both have metrics on the distribution side technology and built out product market fit during the expansion phase.”