Year: 2020

The idea sounds almost too simple. Create a version of Linkedin that’s specifically for the healthcare industry, where professionals can find out not just who has what credentials, but also learn about the research those professionals are conducting and the specialties they have.

In the middle of a global pandemic, when industry insiders are all trying to find out who is an expert in particular fields of medicine that are most impacted by a novel virus spreading like wildfire around the world, that simple idea becomes a necessity.

That’s the situation that H1, a startup which just raised $58 million in new financing, found themselves in as the pandemic hit American shores earlier this year.

The company only graduated from Y Combinator in January, and now, less than a year later is closing on over $70 million in total financing.

Doubling down on its previous investment in the company is Menlo Ventures, which along with the growth stage investment firm, IVP, co-led the new financing for the company.

Their rationale for investing can be attributed to H1’s explosive growth. The company now has 250 employees after launching from Y Combinator just 12 months ago. Already a player in the US, H1 is looking to expand to Europe and Asia in 2021 and counts 13 of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies as its clients. As of its last tally, the company already had profiles on over 9 million healthcare professionals worldwide.

According to one person with knowledge of the company’s fundraising history, Menlo Ventures was so pleased with the company’s performance that it offered tens of millions of dollars in pre-emptive financing.

“We have created a platform for the healthcare ecosystem to connect in the same way Linkedin connected professional workers in the early 2000’s. There hasn’t been a global platform like H1 before that has connected industry to the right doctors the way H1 does,” said H1 co-founder and CEO Ariel Katz. “This next round of funding, with our excellent investment group, including Menlo who has been a great partner for us, will help us continue to become the largest healthcare professional platform and ultimately create a healthier future.”

Menlo Ventures certainly thinks so.

“When we started working with H1, we could already see early evidence of product-market fit, including both early ‘beachhead’ pharma deals and good logo velocity in smaller biotechs. Feedback from customers was stellar, both in terms of product value and commitment to customer success by the H1 team,” wrote Menlo Ventures partner Greg Yap and JP Sanday in a blog post. “One of our diligence intros even turned into a multi-million dollar customer and investor. But H1 was clearly still at an early stage of maturity for supporting large demanding enterprise customers. Now, at the Series B, H1 has ramped up execution, winning 13 of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies as customers and meeting top-tier venture metrics in gross retention, net retention, and sales efficiency.”

Cloudflare is launching a new product today called Cloudflare Pages. It competes directly with Netlify or Vercel, two cloud hosting companies that let you build and deploy sites using JAMstack frameworks. Popular JAMstack frameworks include Gatsby, Jekyll, Hugo, Vue.js, Next.js, etc.

If that announcement sounds familiar, that’s because reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong, leaked details about the upcoming product by looking into Cloudflare’s code. I covered the leak a couple of weeks ago.

“You saw Jane’s tweet and she sort of spilled the beans a little early, which I thought was kinda awesome,” Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince told me.

But now, Cloudflare Pages is live for real. It integrates seamlessly with a Git repository and existing JAMstack frameworks. When you push a new version of your site to your Git repository, Cloudflare automatically starts building and deploying your site on its network.

If you’re not familiar with JAMstack, it’s a popular way of developing and deploying websites at scale. It lets you take advantage of global edge networks with a focus on performance.

A JAMstack framework lets you decouple the frontend from the backend of your website. Every time you change something to your site, the entire frontend is prebuilt. Your pages are transformed into optimized static pages that can be hosted and cached on a global edge network. This way, pages are served in a few milliseconds across the world.

JAMstack websites don’t have to be 100% static. You can use APIs from popular API-based services, such as Stripe. Payment modules are loaded directly from Stripe’s server when the page is rendered in your web browser. You can also build your own microservices that are loaded on demand and that can scale easily.

Coming back to Cloudflare Pages, it integrates with GitHub and GitLab repositories if you’re hosting your source code on those platforms. Once you your site is configured, you can preview each commit from Cloudflare’s interface — each commit gets its own unique URL and there’s a preview environment.

You can collaborate with other Cloudflare users by inviting them to your Pages project. When your site looks good in the preview branch, you can push it to the production branch.

Cloudflare started working on Pages when people who don’t consider themselves as devops wanted to use Cloudflare. “People on the creative side told us, ‘hey are you interested in building a website builder?’” Prince said. He identified Wix and Squarespace as website builders.

At the same time, Cloudflare noticed that JAMstack was getting quite popular. “A lot of Netlify and Vercel customers actually put Cloudflare in front of their Netlify or Vercel sites,” he added. That doesn’t really make sense when it comes to cost and performance as you’re stacking multiple CDNs.

As Cloudflare already has a huge network of servers around the world, it doesn’t cost them that much money to host JAMstack websites on its edge network — it’s cheaper than caching content hosted by Netlify. That’s why there’s a generous free tier with unlimited bandwidth and unlimited requests.

“We timed the release intentionally to be this time of the year. We really wanted to give a gift back to the developer community,” Prince said.

The company expects to get a lot of attention with today’s release. It’s going to add a thousand people to the service per day up until January. After that, it’ll open the service to everyone.

Cloudflare thinks you’ll choose Pages for JAMstack projects because of the free tier and its robust infrastructure. But the company also expects users to try out other Cloudflare services down the road.

For instance, if you want to go beyond static websites, Cloudflare offers a serverless platform called Cloudflare Workers. You can deploy some code on Workers and use it in your Pages site. With Workers KV and Durable Objects, you can go beyond stateless functions as well.

Similarly, as you start using Pages, you might be interesting Cloudflare’s advanced security features and other Cloudflare products. The company has always been betting on the long tail of developers to find its next customers, and Pages is another example of that strategy.

Launch startup Astra had a monumental week, achieving their first spaceflight with a rocket test on Tuesday. Astra CEO Chris Kemp joined Relativity CEO Tim Ellis, and VOX Space President Mandy Vaughn at our TC Sessions: Space event on Wednesday, and with Relativity’s huge $500 million round earlier this year, and Virgin Orbit’s milestone test flight in May, it was a big year for all involved.

A significant portion of our discussion focused on the very different approaches that each of these launch companies is taking to solving what boils down to the same problem – improving cost and availability of launch. Kemp first described Astra’s approach, which boils down to rigorous and continuous process and cost optimization.

“Where we focus our software effort is in understanding where to make engineering optimizations,” Kemp said. “So by having an Astra operating system that is making it visible to all of our engineers, where your costs are, because you have a long lead time on this part, because there’s a lot of labor to assemble this part. […] We’re not throwing any specific technology solution at a problem, we’re trying to basically triage the trade-offs that you’re making between the performance of the rocket – you can always use a higher-cost material, and you can potentially also use a higher cost manufacturing process, like 3D printing, but it isn’t always the right approach.”

Kemp added that Astra is essentially technology-agnostic when it comes to their production stack, and flexible in terms of how to configure that based on available resources and end goal parameters.

“You want to optimize the overall economics of the business without regard to what technology you’re going to use,” he said. “So we pick the right technology to optimize the business based on the capital we have, and the production rate and the launch rate that we’re trying to target.”

Ellis, meanwhile, talked about Relativity’s use of 3D printing, and how it differs significantly from its use in the production stack of other existing rocket manufacturers.

“What we’re doing at Relativity is completely different than then what almost everyone else is doing with using 3d printing for bits and pieces of a rocket,” he said.” From Apollo and launching rockets to the Moon, how we fundamentally build and develop, and the tool sets we use to make rockets and aerospace products is more or less the same as what it was 60 years ago – you walk into a factory, and it’s full of giant, expensive, fixed tooling, very complicated supply chains building products one at a time by hand with hundreds of thousands, to even millions of parts, depending on whether it’s a rocket or commercial aircraft.”

Image Credits: Virgin Orbit, Astra, Relativity Space

By contrast, Ellis pointed out that it’s creating rockets with less than 1,000 total components by viewing 3D printing from a top-down angle, and using it for the vast majority of the production process, rather than for select components.

“Then we’re able to actually build each rocket and from raw material and fly it in 60 days, once our factories operational, and then 60 days later, we’ll do a better version and 60 days later, a better version than that,” he said. “So the compounding rate of progress that’s possible with an all-in 3d printing approach, I believe, is equivalent to going from on-premise servers to cloud, or from gas internal combustion engines to electric – it’s really actually an entirely different tech stack and value chain, it’s not just the rocket itself.”

Vaughn pointed out that while all the companies have different approaches, they all seek to change the accessibility and cost of getting payloads to orbit. She then pointed out that Virgin Orbit has identified launch location flexibility as one of the key levers to speed that change in the right direction.

“It’s not just about getting mass to orbit. It’s about how do we change what is that cost point to do, and how do we change the accessibility to do so,” she said. “Also, really unique from our perspective is, what is that just kind of inherent mobility to do – so how can we actually just fly the launch pad around, and really change the CONOPS [concept of operations] of what it takes to establish an infrastructure and leverage that infrastructure to have access to space.”

Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne is carried by a modified 747 passenger airplane, which takes off from and lands at a traditional runway. That not only means the rocket itself requires less fuel, and therefore less mass, to deliver its cargo to orbit, but also introduces a lot of launch site flexibility.

“By changing the discussion in terms of what is a launch, and what is the end game, it’s not just about mass to orbit, it’s about all of these other elements of how can we react quickly, how can we design and produce something quickly, as well as deploy that capability, maybe in a unique way from an unexpected location, and then get the on-space effects delivered uniquely and quickly,” Vaughn said.

All three panelists agreed that the market will likely support many providers when it comes to small launch vehicles, and their existing sold inventory queues reflects that. We also heard later in the day from Amazon SVP Dave Limp, who pointed out that they alone will require multiple launch providers contracted for multiple missions to get Amazon’s Project Kuiper constellation in place on orbit.

Corporate spend management startup Ramp has raised $30 million more in a new round, it announced today. TechCrunch covered Ramp’s launch earlier this year, when it also detailed that it had raised around $23 million up to that point.

The startup raised its latest round in August of 2020, with conversations about the deal kicking off in June. The new capital is Ramp’s second priced raise after its August, 2019 seed round worth $8 million and the first after its February, 2020-era $15 million raise. D1 and Coatue were new investors in this new investment, which included some prior backers.

Ramp CEO Eric Glyman called the new equity something akin to a Series A3, noting that it had effectively reused docs from a preceding round, albeit with a new price attached. Venture history purists could argue that Ramp’s new raise was the company’s Series B — the second priced round after its seed — or that it is really a Series C, as the startup’s seed round was as big as a 2000s-era A and was also a priced event.

Whatever.

Ramp did not need the funds. Per Glyman, the startup still had part of its original seed round in the bank when it raised the latest check. That implies that the company had more than $45 million in cash as of August, 2020.

Asked why he raised the capital if it was not needed, the CEO told TechCrunch that its new investors had “pretty unbelievable” investment track records. And Glyman added that the round was attractively priced, limiting dilution. The exec also said that having the new funds helped Ramp hire more aggressively with confidence.

But while the round is interesting to a degree, more intriguing is the space in which Ramp competes. So let’s talk about the power of software, and when the startup and its competitors might start charging more for their deployed code.

Software

Ramp competes for market share in corporate spend management, an active vertical with a number of venture-backed players. That actor density has generated a level of competition that has rewritten the ground rules for getting credit and charge cards into the hands of companies. The table stakes are higher than ever in the niche.

Why? Because issuing credit and debit cards to consumers and corporations has largely been commoditized, causing startups hunting for slices of spend via interchange to build increasingly powerful software suites around their original products; if you can’t entice new customers with fancy cards, how about lots of digital tooling built around spend itself, to help your company manage and limit cash outflows?

The examples of this trend are myriad: Brex built out a cash management solution, for example, and expense management tools. Ramp itself launched expense management software of its own this year, and Divvy has a similar service along with other card-related software tools.

Venture capitalists have poured $55 million into Ramp, by our count, north of $400 million into Brex, not counting debt raised by the unicorn, and more than $250 million into Divvy . So, the game of building increasingly robust software stacks atop corporate cards is one to watch, as the scale of venture bets made on the key players in the space is titanic.

Ramp is dropping new code with its funding news, underscoring the point. The company recently added vendor management tooling, and is now adding reimbursing capabilities so that employees can be paid back for expenses not made on the startup’s cards.

Which of the three has the best software stack? They each think that they do, we reckon.

The result of the efforts by Ramp and its competitors to build out software around their card offerings has been rapid customer growth. Divvy, reached this week concerning its own metrics, told TechCrunch that it has seen its customer number expand 120% in 2020 and total spend on its platform rise 100% this year. Brex declined to share growth metrics.

Ramp announced its own growth figures as part of its news passel, including that it reached $100 million in spend on its platform in the first 18 months following its incorporation (a somewhat non-GAAP time frame, we admit), and that a quarter of the total spend that it has supported for corporations was recorded in the last 30 days.

There appears to be plenty of market for the startups to grow into, just as there is plenty of capital available for them to tap.

To close, a question: When will corporate spend management startups flip the switch, and start to charge for their software suite? Currently the trio make money largely from interchange, collecting a tiny piece of transactions that they power with their cards. This scales well, and keeps friction of signing up new customers low; after all, who doesn’t want a free set of financial tooling?

But, eventually, they will charge for their software. SaaS revenue is simply too highly valued to not go after. At some point. Perhaps that day will mark the end of the corporate spend land logo grab, and the start of the software niche’s maturation. At which point I expect new competitors to sprout up and the cycle to repeat.

SpaceX is launching a Falcon 9 today from Kennedy Space Center, with a launch window that spans three hours and opens at 9 AM EST (6 AM PST). The mission will carry a spy satellite for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), and will include a recovery attempt for the first-stage booster used on the Falcon 9 vehicle.

This Falcon 9’s first stage has already flown four times previously, including during two of SpaceX’s commercial resupply missions to the International Space Station for NASA, and during a Starlink launch, as well as for SAOCOM 1B, a satellite launch operation for the Argentinian space agency in August.

SpaceX will be attempting a landing back at its landing pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, a rarer occurrence vs. its use of its two drone landing ships positioned out in the ocean. SpaceX’s at-sea launches were introduced to allow for recovery of rocket boosters that didn’t have enough fuel remaining on board to make it all the way back to land – meaning this NRO mission’s parameters allow for a ‘return to sender’ trip back home.

Typically, when there’s a longer launch window, SpaceX will aim to launch at the beginning, depending on weather conditions. If that’s the case today, the stream above should begin at around 8:45 AM EST (15 minutes prior to the opening of the window).

SpaceX is launching a Falcon 9 today from Kennedy Space Center, with a launch window that spans three hours and opens at 9 AM EST (6 AM PST). The mission will carry a spy satellite for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), and will include a recovery attempt for the first-stage booster used on the Falcon 9 vehicle.

This Falcon 9’s first stage has already flown four times previously, including during two of SpaceX’s commercial resupply missions to the International Space Station for NASA, and during a Starlink launch, as well as for SAOCOM 1B, a satellite launch operation for the Argentinian space agency in August.

SpaceX will be attempting a landing back at its landing pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, a rarer occurrence vs. its use of its two drone landing ships positioned out in the ocean. SpaceX’s at-sea launches were introduced to allow for recovery of rocket boosters that didn’t have enough fuel remaining on board to make it all the way back to land – meaning this NRO mission’s parameters allow for a ‘return to sender’ trip back home.

Typically, when there’s a longer launch window, SpaceX will aim to launch at the beginning, depending on weather conditions. If that’s the case today, the stream above should begin at around 8:45 AM EST (15 minutes prior to the opening of the window).

A startup with a new type of spacecraft propulsion system could make the interplanetary travel seen in Star Trek a reality. Magdrive has just closed a £1.4M seed round led by Founders Fund, an early investor in SpaceX, backed by Luminous Ventures, 7percent Ventures, and Entrepreneur First.

Magdrive is developing a next generation of spacecraft propulsion for small satellites. The startup says its engine’s thrust and efficiency are a “generational leap” ahead of any other electrical thrusters, opening up the space industry to completely new types of missions that were not possible before, without resorting to much larger, expensive and heavier chemical thrusters. It says its engine would make fast and affordable interplanetary space travel possible, as well as operations in Very Low Earth orbit. The engine would also make orbital manufacturing far more possible than previously.

Existing electrical solutions are very efficient but have very low thrust. Chemical thrusters have high thrust but lack efficiency and are hazardous and expensive to handle. Magdrive says its engine can deliver both high thrust and high efficiency in one system.

Magdrive prototype render

If it works, the Magdrive engine could make spacecraft go faster for longer. This could open up the industry to new space missions, such as a satellite (or X-wing fighter?) that can make multiple, fast maneuvers, without worrying about conserving fuel. In order to do this right now, satellites require a chemical thruster, which requires a significant payload in fuel for launch. A 200kg satellite would require 50kg of hydrazine fuel, which would cost £1,350,000 in launch mass alone.

Co-founder (and Star Trek fan) Dr Thomas Clayson did a PhD in plasma physics, working on advanced electromagnetic fields. He realized this could be a cornerstone for developing a plasma thruster that could achieve the accelerations required for interplanetary space travel. After meeting Mark Stokes, a mechanical engineer at Imperial College London with similar dreams of space travel, they decided to build a small scale thruster for satellites.

But Magdrive is not alone. Other companies are developing so-called ‘Hall Effect Thrusters’, which is a technology that has existed since the 1960’s. Much of the development is towards miniaturization and mass reduction, but thrust and efficiency remain the same. These companies include Busek, Exotrail, Apollo Fusion, Enpusion, Nanoavionics. Meanwhile, large international companies with huge technology portfolios are working on improving chemical propulsion and making it non-toxic to handle, such as Aerojet Rocketdyne and Moog ISP.

They plan to scale up our technology to power larger manned spacecraft (once in orbit) to long-distance destinations such as the Moon and Mars. Our system would present a much more affordable than a chemical or nuclear solution, due to the huge reduction in fuel costs, and because it is reusable.

Andrew J Scott, Founding Partner, 7percent Ventures: “At 7percent we seek founding teams with ‘moonshot’ ambitions. With Magdrive this is not just a metaphor: their revolutionary plasma thruster will soon be powering satellites, but in the future could take us to deep space. While the UK’s expertise in constructing satellites is world-renowned, there has been far less focus on propulsion. In fact, Great Britain is the only country to have successfully developed and then, in the 1970’s abandoned, an indigenous satellite launch capability, which undoubtedly curbed the UK’s space sector. So we’re excited to be backing Magdrive, one of a new generation of British space startups, which has the vision and ambition to become a world-beating company in this burgeoning sector.”

The satellite industry is worth $5 Billion in 2020, predicted to grow to USD$30Billion by 2030, due to the rise in mega-constellations. Some 5,000 satellites are due to be launched in the next two years and 75% of all the companies launching these satellites have already flown something in space.

Magdrive is at the European Space Agency Business Incubation Centre in Harwell, Oxford.

The Covid-19 pandemic has led to a major upswing in virtual learning — where some schools have gone (and stayed) remote, and others have incorporated significantly stronger online components, in order to help communities maintain more social distancing. That has in turn led to a surge in the usage of tools to help home learners do their work better, and today, one of them is announcing a growth round that speaks to the opportunity in that market.

Brainly, a startup from Poland that has built a popular network for students and their parents to engage with each other for advice and help with homework questions, has raised $80 million, a series D that it will be using both to continue building out the tools that it offers to students as well as to hone in on expansion in some key emerging markets such as Indonesia and Brazil. The news comes on the heels of dramatic growth for the company, which has seen its user base grow from 150 million users in 2019 to 350 million today.

The funding is being led by previous backer Learn Capital, with past investors Prosus Ventures, Runa Capital, MantaRay, and General Catalyst Partners also participating. The company has now raised some $150 million and while it’s not disclosing valuation, CEO and co-founder Michał Borkowski confirmed it is “definitely” an upround for the company. For more context, Pitchbook estimates that the company was valued at $180 million in its last round, a Series C of $30 million in 2019.

That C round was raised specifically to help Brainly grow in the U.S. It currently has some 30 million users in that market, and it happens to be the only one in which Brainly is monetising users. Everywhere else, Brainly is currently free to use.

“Brainly has become one of the world’s largest learning communities, achieving significant organic growth in over 35 countries,” said Vinit Sukhija, Partner at Learn Capital, in a statement.

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, Brainly was finding an audience with students — primarily those aged 13-19, said Borkowski — who were turning to the service to connect with people who could help them with homework when they found themselves at an impasse with, say, a math problem or getting to grips with the sequence of events that led to the revolutions of 1848. The platform is open-ended and is a little like a Quora for homework, in that people can find and answer questions they are interested in, as well as ask questions themselves.

That platform, however, took on a whole new dimension of importance with the shift to virtual learning, Borkowski said.

“In the western world, online education wasn’t a big investment area [pre-Covid] and that has changed a lot, with huge adoption by students, parents and teachers,” he said. “But that big transition, switching from offline to online, has left kids struggling because teachers have so much more to do, so they can’t engage in the same way.”

So with “homework” becoming “all work”, that has effectively led to needing more help than ever with home studies. And while many parents have tried to get more involved to make up the difference, “having parents as teachers has been hard,” he added. They may have been taught differently from how their kids are learning, or they don’t remember or know answers.

One thing that Brainly started to see, he said, was that with the pandemic more parents started using the app alongside students, either to work out answers together or to get the help themselves before helping their kids, with a number of these being from parents of kids younger than 13. He said that 15-20% of all new registrations currently are coming from parents.

Brainly up to now has been mainly focused on how to build out more tools for the students — and now parents — that use it, and has so far been about organic growth for those communities. However, there is clearly scope to expand that to more educational stakeholders to better organise what kind of questions are answered and how. Borkowski said that the company has indeed been approached by educators, those building curriculums and others so that answers might tie in better with the kinds of questions that they are most likely to ask of students, although for now the company “wants to keep the focus on students and parents getting stuck.”

In terms of future products, Brainly is looking at ways of bringing in more tutoring, video and AI into the mix. The AI aspect is very interesting and will in fact tie in to wider curriculum coverage based on more localised needs. For example, if you ask for help with a particular kind of quadratic equation technique, you can then be served lots of same practice questions to help better learn and apply what you’ve just been learning, and you might even then get suggested related topics that will appear alongside that in a wider mathematics examination. And, you might be offered the chance to meet with a tutor for further help.

“It will be about looking at what students are studying and how to map that to the curriculum in the country,” Borkowski said.