Year: 2020

TechCrunch recently asked a number of venture capitalists who invest in fintech to share their thoughts about the state of the industry; they pulled us into the present moment, drawing from their portfolio companies, deal flow and inboxes.

Today, we asked them to look into the future.

Although it looks like the COVID-19 pandemic has clipped the tails of many unicorns, this era won’t last forever. Investors expect the domestic and global economy to recover, perhaps starting in late 2020 or early 2021, though those timelines could be aggressive.

TechCrunch wanted to find out what improving macro conditions in the future might mean for fintech startups, a cohort that has attracted huge checks and even larger expectations from its backers and founders. To better understand what is coming, we reached out to a group of VCs we selected based on their experience and their firm’s investing history to predict what’s beyond the horizon.

Here’s our group for today:

• Matt Harris, Bain Capital Ventures
  
• Charles Birnbaum, Bessemer Venture Partners
  
• Jackson Gates, Manresa Ventures
• Rob Moffat, Balderton Capital
  
• Brendan Dickinson, Canaan
• Yann Ranchere, Anthemis
• Cherry Miao, Accel

As always, we will distill and discuss key trends from their responses before sharing their responses in full, lightly edited for length and clarity.

Consolidation, the power of cash, who is doomed and far-off IPOs

Our first theme is that consolidation is generally expected and could come broadly in the diverse fintech space. Digging through the answers, most said they believed the maturation of the fintech industry is upon us. Horizontal mergers might happen at a faster pace than before as companies struggle and acquisitions become cheaper.

Investors largely noted that startups in the lending space will not come out of this crisis unscathed, so expect forced combinations in that sector, as well as companies that target SMB customers.

The second trend we noted deals with who lives and who dies. The answer, contrary to our guess, doesn’t deal with stage but, instead, runway. Preparing this particular survey we had a hunch that later-stage fintech startups would have a better shot at staying alive, given their history of huge capital raises. That was nearly correct, it turned out.

However, instead of stage, our investor group generally agrees that runway matters more; older startups raised more, but they also may have far worse burn rates. In this vein, one investor noted that super early-stage fintech startups that just raised should do fine, as they’ll just build straight through the downturn.

Our third trend deals with which cohort of fintech startups will fare the worst. We had the investors rank a number of types of companies and some categories fared poorly. Consumer lending fintech shops do not inspire investor confidence, nor did consumer-oriented payments companies. Business lending was probably around third from the bottom.

There will naturally be some startups in those categories that do fine, but that’s almost more a comment on the total number of fintech startups than it is a commentary on the viability of any particular sector.

Trend number four: fintech IPOs are on hold for quarters, if not years. If you were hoping for a quick return to fintech liquidity, prepare to be let down. The investors we questioned said that we might see one in Q4, but that public debuts for fintech players are probably more of a 2021 affair.

We also asked if the Bill.com IPO — which went well — had any impact on fintech exits. Not really, was the answer, aside from one note that it might have helped drive some later, pre-COVID-19 M&A activity.

Our final trend: expect doom and gloom for interchange revenue.

The investors we chatted with said they largely think we’ll see a sharp drop in revenue from interchange fees, a slice of the pie that many card issuers take per transaction. This means that the startups that bet on IC revenue to fund their nifty why-not consumer debit cards will see a drop in their ability to issue. And that hurdle could mean startups struggle to make their credit card bets stay a reality, which brings us back to the first theme we talked about: further consolidation.

All this said, but one investor disagreed. You’ll have to read the piece to find out which one and why.

Today SingleOps, an Atlanta-based software startup, announced that it has raised $6 million in new capital. The startup’s service is built to support companies that deal with outdoor work like landscaping, tree care and lawn maintenance. It’s an example of the vertical SaaS trend that has come to the fore in recent years, with startups building software services tailored to particular business categories.

The market that SingleOps is focused on isn’t small, mind. The company claims it’s worth $100 billion each year. And that means there is lots of room for SingleOps to grow.

Before this new $6 million round, SingleOps had raised just $2.5 million, using that to scale up to 30 staff (its software team is remote, making the company more prepared for COVID-19 than most) and around 400 customers. How did it do that in an era when most startups raised $2.5 million to clean their offices? According to the company’s CEO Sean McCormick and president Taylor Gould in an interview with TechCrunch, being capital-efficient has been part of the company’s modus operandi since its early days. (You can build SaaS with limited capital if early customers write you checks, it turns out.)

The SingleOps team, via the company.

But toward the end of 2019, SingleOps reviewed its SaaS metrics and, deciding that things looked good, aimed to accelerate by bringing on new capital. The $6 million was led by Kansas City-based Five Elms Capital, with the firm taking a board seat in the transaction. According to McCormick and Gould, they liked Five Elms’ focus on B2B SaaS companies like their own. Diligence with existing Five Elms portfolio companies also helped them in making the choice.

SingleOps’ product, notably, isn’t narrow. Instead, the company’s service can log leads, handle scheduling, help provide estimates, has a mobile app and deals with scheduling, cost tracking and invoicing and payments. With a little tact, the self-described “green industry” that SingleOps works with is not renowned for being on the cutting edge of technological change; by offering a broader feature set, SingleOps can sell a single service to bring businesses in its target niche all the way into the cloud era.

The package of features is sitting well with the market so far, with SingleOps growing both GAAP revenue and ARR by “well over” 100% in the last 12 months, per its executives. And for the SaaS fans out there, SingleOps averaged 120% net retention over the last 12 months.

It was the first call for TechCrunch that I’ve had that involved several mentions of tree climbing as part of a startup’s go to market motion. As such, we had no choice but to write about the company, as it’s different than most startups we talk to, and therefore rather interesting.

For two weeks, Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot has been walking the halls of local hospital Brigham and Women’s. Telemedicine wasn’t generally listed as one of the primary applications for the company’s first commercial product, but Boston Dynamics is only one in a long list of tech companies that’s found itself shifting on the fly as the COVID-19 pandemic has become an all-consuming part of life.

The company says hospitals have been reaching out since early March, asking if there might be a way to incorporate its technology to help with remote health.

“Based on the outreach we received as well as the global shortage of critical personal protective equipment (PPE), we have spent the past several weeks trying to better understand hospital requirements to develop a mobile robotics solution with our Spot robot,” the company writes. “The result is a legged robot that can be deployed to support frontline staff responding to the pandemic in ad-hoc environments such as triage tents and parking lots.”

Fitted with an iPad and a two-way radio, Spot is being used as a mobile teleconferencing system, allowing doctors to check in on patients without risking the spread of the highly contagious virus. It’s a fairly simple task — and one that a number of robotics companies have actively cracked.

While ultimately price-prohibitive for many healthcare facilities, Spot’s four-legged locomotion makes it possible for the robot to visit areas inaccessible for wheeled systems. The modularity always means it has the potential to accomplish further tasks. Boston Dynamics says it’s working on outfitting the robot with a system to detect vital signs like temperature, respiratory rate, pulse rate and oxygen saturation.

In the future, a UV light could also be mounted to the robot’s back to serve as a mobile disinfecting station.

SpaceX CEO and founder Elon Musk has shared more details about when in 2020 we can expect the company’s Starlink low-latency, high-bandwidth satellite internet service to actually be available to customers. He said on Twitter that a private beta for Starlink would begin in around three months, with a public beta to kick off roughly three months after that.

The initial beta test will apply to those located in “high latitudes,” Musk added. To date, SpaceX has said that Starlink service will initially be made available to customers in Canada and in the northern United States in 2020, with additional service expansion to follow to other parts of the world throughout 2021. On Twitter in response to a question about whether Germany counts as “high latitude,” Musk said that it does, indicating beta service at least may be available in more markets than the U.S. and Canada ahead of next year.

Late last year, Musk tweeted saying he was using a Starlink satellite connection to do so, and since then the company has launched six batches of 60 satellites each to build out its network. The small satellites work by flying around the Earth in low orbit, passing off connection between one another to ensure consistent service is provided to ground stations. They orbit lower than geostationary communications satellites, which provides latency and speed benefits, but don’t remain in a fixed position so a large number of them are required to provide consistent connectivity.

SpaceX still has other hurdles to overcome in order to make its timeline, including continuing to prepare and launch more Starlink missions despite the challenging working conditions in place due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The company also still needs to secure authorization form Canadian internet and satellite operation regulators before service goes live in that country, and it isn’t yet listed as an authorized provider on the Canadian government’s official website.

Starlink ultimately aims to provide low-cost, high speed broadband connectivity to customers globally, with the specific goal of offering service to customers who don’t currently have reliable or quality access due to their remote location. A number of satellite and other projects aim to address this gap, including Alphabet-owned Loon, which is using stratospheric balloons to act as cell towers to provide access to had-to-reach places.

A team of researchers from Apple and Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute have presented a system for embedded AIs to learn by listening to noises in their environment without the need for up-front training data or without placing a huge burden on the user to supervise the learning process. The overarching goal is for smart devices to more easily build up contextual/situational awareness to increase their utility.

The system, which they’ve called Listen Learner, relies on acoustic activity recognition to enable a smart device, such as a microphone-equipped speaker, to interpret events taking place in its environment via a process of self-supervised learning with manual labelling done by one-shot user interactions — such as by the speaker asking a person ‘what was that sound?’, after it’s heard the noise enough time to classify in into a cluster.

A general pre-trained model can also be looped in to enable the system to make an initial guess on what an acoustic cluster might signify. So the user interaction could be less open-ended, with the system able to pose a question such as ‘was that a faucet?’ — requiring only a yes/no response from the human in the room.

Refinement questions could also be deployed to help the system figure out what the researchers dub “edge cases”, i.e. where sounds have been closely clustered yet might still signify a distinct event — say a door being closed vs a cupboard being closed. Over time, the system might be able to make an educated either/or guess and then present that to the user to confirm.

They’ve put together the below video demoing the concept in a kitchen environment.

In their paper presenting the research they point out that while smart devices are becoming more prevalent in homes and offices they tend to lack “contextual sensing capabilities” — with only “minimal understanding of what is happening around them”, which in turn limits “their potential to enable truly assistive computational experiences”.

And while acoustic activity recognition is not itself new, the researchers wanted to see if they could improve on existing deployments which either require a lot of manual user training to yield high accuracy; or use pre-trained general classifiers to work ‘out of the box’ but — since they lack data for a user’s specific environment — are prone to low accuracy.

Listen Learner is thus intended as a middle ground to increase utility (accuracy) without placing a high burden on the human to structure the data. The end-to-end system automatically generates acoustic event classifiers over time, with the team building a proof-of-concept prototype device to act like a smart speaker and pipe up to ask for human input. 

Audio events are segmented using an adaptive threshold that triggers when the microphone input level is 1.5 standard deviations higher than the mean of the past minute.

“We employ hysteresis techniques (i.e., for debouncing) to further smooth our thresholding scheme,” they add, further noting that: “While many environments have persistent and characteristic background sounds (e.g., HVAC), we ignore them (along with silence) for computational efficiency. Note that incoming samples were discarded if they were too similar to ambient noise, but silence within a segmented window is not removed.”

The CNN (convolutional neural network) audio model they’re using was initially trained on the YouTube-8M dataset  — augmented with a library of professional sound effects, per the paper.

“The choice of using deep neural network embeddings, which can be seen as learned low-dimensional representations of input data, is consistent with the manifold assumption (i.e., that high-dimensional data roughly lie on a low-dimensional manifold). By performing clustering and classification on this low-dimensional learned representation, our system is able to more easily discover and recognize novel sound classes,” they add.

Apple’s long-rumored Mac ARM chip transition could happen as early as next year, according to a new report from Bloomberg. The report says that Apple is currently working on three Mac processors based on the design of the A14 system-on-a-chip that will power the next-generation iPhone. The first of the Mac versions will greatly exceed the speed of the iPhone and iPad processors, according to the report’s sources.

Already, Apple’s A-series line of ARM-based chips for iPhones and iPads have been steadily improving, to the point where their performance in benchmark tests regularly exceeds that of Intel processors used currently in Apple’s Mac line. As a result, and because Intel’s chip development has encountered a few setbacks and slowdowns in recent generations, rumors that Apple would move to using its own ARM-based designs have multiplied over the past few years.

Bloomberg says that “at least one Mac” powered by Apple’s own chip is being prepared for release in 2021, to be built by chip fabricator and longtime Apple partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC). The first of these chips to power Macs will have at least 12 cores, including eight designed for high-performance applications, and four designed for lower-intensity activities with battery-preserving energy efficiency characteristics. Current Intel designs that Apple employs in devices such as the MacBook Air have four or even two cores, by comparison.

Initially, the report claims Apple will focus on using the chips to power a new Mac design, leaving Intel processors in its higher-end pro level Macs, because the ARM-based designs, while more performant on some scores, can’t yet match the top-end performance of Intel-based chip technology. ARM chips generally provide more power efficiency at the expense of raw computing power, which is why they’re so frequently used in mobile devices.

The first ARM-based Macs will still run macOS, per Bloomberg’s sources, and Apple will seek to make them compatible with software that works on current Intel-based Macs as well. That would be a similar endeavor to when Apple switched from using PowerPC-based processors to Intel chips for its Mac lineup in 2006, so the company has some experience in this regard. During that transition, Apple announced initially that the switch would take place between 2006 and 2007, but accelerated its plans so that all new Macs shipping by the end of 2006 were powered by Intel processors.

Paige, the Sloan-Kettering spinout that has been building an artificial intelligence platform to improve cancer pathology and subsequently use those insights to develop better drug therapies, has raised an additional $5 million in funding to continue its work commercialising its platform and expanding its research reach, while also getting FDA clearance to launch in hospitals in North America and Europe.

The round comes from Goldman Sachs, specifically its merchant banking division, and is an extension to the Series B of $45 million that Paige announced in December 2019 led by Breyer Capital at a valuation (per PitchBook) of about $208 million.

Leo Grady, Paige’s CEO, said that the startup has not been doing any COVID-19-related work — its focus is squarely on cancer research at the moment — but he also said that the recent health pandemic has shone a light on some of the shortcomings that existed in the medical world, an area that Paige is addressing in its work.

“We haven’t worked on COVID-19 related research specifically, but what we have seen is that CV19 has had a strong impact on the pathology community,” he said. “It has highlighted that they are unable to work remotely. The technology we have been building supports the pathology community’s ability to work safely and remotely, and can further accelerate their work through the use of AI technology. Because pathologists’ inability to work remotely is becoming more apparent, it is creating an urgency for going digital.”

Indeed, the ongoing coronavirus pandemic has led to a big focus on the role that tech could play in addressing it and health crises in general, with answers coming in the form of using more AI in research and improving telemedicine and other remote health monitoring solutions, through to more basic things like using the financial resources and consumer reach of tech companies to get vital supplies and information to people who need them.

Paige falls generally into the first of these categories, and Grady said that the new cash is specifically strategic, given Goldman Sachs’ wider investment efforts in cancer research.

It has a very close relationship with the renowned cancer hospital and research center Memorial Sloan Kettering — which has meant it has had exclusive access to MSK’s 25 million pathology slides as well as its intellectual property related to the AI-based computational pathology, two key assets since the slides represent one of the biggest repositories of its kind in the world, and machine learning platforms are only as good as the data that’s fed into them. It recently also announced a deal with Invicro LLC, a subsidiary of Konica Minolta, to provide integrated pathology solutions for pharmaceutical and biotechnology sponsors running drug discovery and development initiatives.

“Goldman Sachs recognizes that we have an enormous opportunity, not only with our clinical-grade AI but also with the platform, and viewer, which has the ability to enable pathologists to work remotely,” he said, adding that although the startup is already well-capitalized, “the goal with this new influx of $5M is really to provide an extra push with product development as pathologist’s need to work remotely continues to grow. Additionally, the cancer networks Goldman Sachs have invested in and our ability to support those networks around the world with our technology, make this a great working relationship.”

Grady said that since announcing the Series B, Paige has added several beta sites that have completed a number of studies that will be publishing soon. “These beta studies really form the basis for validating the value proposition that our technology brings into the cancer and pathology workflow. This validation is instrumental in pushing the commercialization of our technology,” he said.

No plans right now for another round, he added.

David Castelblanco, an MD at the investment bank, is joining the board with this round. “Paige is transforming pathology and translational research in the cancer field and is working closely with biopharma companies to create custom diagnostic solutions and drug development technologies to improve patient care,” he said in a statement. “We look forward to supporting the Company’s important mission of improving cancer care through its AI technology.”

“Paige’s leadership is doing a fantastic job in building a stellar team and seizing opportunities in this exciting market,” added Jim Breyer, founder and CEO of Breyer Capital, also in a statement.

SFC (formerly known as Startup Funding Club – a UK a seed stage investor – has received £10 million from British Business Investments (the commercial subsidiary of the British Business Bank), to deploy a total of £40 million across more than 100 early-stage startups in the UK.

SFC intends to deploy the commitment in over 100 early stage businesses across the UK to deliver almost £30m of new funding for start-up and scale-up businesses across all sectors.

This will be a significant boost for early-stage companies across the UK at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic has made the funding landscape highly uncertain — in particular in the wake of the UK government’s announcement of its Future Fund co-investment scheme, which requires startups to already have received at least £250,000 in private funding to qualify for support, leaving many early-stage businesses still ineligible.

SFC has already completed investments totaling £5 million into 28 companies during Q1 2020, with £1.6 million coming from BBI’s commitment.

BBI’s commitment is the second to be made through its Regional Angels Programme, which aims to improve access to funding for businesses in parts of the UK where early-stage capital can be scarce.

SFC was incorporated in 2012 by Stephen Page, a former software entrepreneur who founded and exited a number of companies, with a mission to help high-potential start-ups succeed and to make angel investing more accessible.

NBCUniversal is introducing a new way to incorporate commerce into the viewing and reading experience, which it calls NBCUniversal Checkout.

The new product is part of the company’s One Platform ad offering. As demonstrated for me yesterday, it allows the readers of articles and viewers of videos on NBCUniversal properties to click on a featured product, bring up the listing from a partner merchant and make the purchase.

While there are other shoppable content and video technologies out there, NBCUniversal’s executive vice president for marketing and advertising creative Josh Feldman told me that the key is that with NBCUniversal checkout, you can complete the entire transaction without actually leaving the article or video.

“This is a really unique opportunity for a native shopping experience embedded in content,” Feldman said.

NBCUniversal is launching Checkout in its Shoppable Branded Content, its ShoppableTV ads, in its editorial content (whether digital or on linear TV) and on social media.

The company is also in the process of launching its new ad-supported streaming service Peacock, but when asked about the possibiity of bringing Checkout to Peacock, Feldman said, “We’re not be able to speak to future of Peacock. Commercial innovations are a huge part of Peacock, but we’re announcing this within the traditional NBCUniversal structure.”

He also said that while Checkout has been part of the product roadmap for a while, “our business strategy behind it” has changed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead to trying to make the product immediately profitable, Feldman said the goal now is to support retailers who face a tough economic environment by waiving NBCUniversal’s technology and cart fees for products purchased through Checkout.

I also brought up the broader trend of content companies trying to move into commerce. Discussing how NBCUniversal fits into that shift, Feldman said, “I think there was a misperception of what layer of the purchase funnel a big media company like NBCUniversal plays a part … We have research that shows massive effects on every single layer of that purchase funnel.”

The new “normal” offers new opportunities. That’s the thinking behind a new pre-seed funding program from Heartcore Capital . The European consumer-focused VC usually invests in startups at seed and Series A, but recognising that many potential founders are in lockdown and with time of their hands, is moving to the top of the funnel with the launch of a pre-seed fellowship programme.

Specifically, entrepreneurs interested in starting a consumer technology company during lockdown can apply for a pre-seed investment of €100,000 per founder to finance development of a prototype. The entire investment process will be conducted online and begins via a simple web form, followed by Zoom conversations with the investment team.

“Heartcore is offering €100,000 per founder for a 7% equity stake per company – to reflect that a larger founding team will also mean a larger initial cost base,” explains the VC. “The investment instrument is a convertible note. The company does not need to be founded yet, nor is an idea required to apply. All companies must operate within consumer technology (B2C/B2B2C) and be based in Europe”.

More broadly, the goal of Fellowship financing is to “build a prototype, with a view to raising a seed round when normal life resumes”.

To find out more, I caught up with Heartcore Capital General Partner Max Niederhofer, where we discussed the program’s inception, who it competes with, and startup opportunities after lockdown.

TechCrunch: How did the idea of the fellowship come about or was Heartcore working on a pre-seed model before the coronavirus crisis hit (I gather it might be the latter)?

Max Niederhofer: Heartcore has been investing from inception to Series A since we got started in 2007. Half of the investments in the last twelve months have been in a team and a plan, often pre-product. But many of these were sizeable funding rounds where there was already a fully fleshed out idea, already a larger team, already a company.

This is different. We sat down two weeks ago, after we had worked to make sure that our portfolio is well funded, and after closing the three deals we had in the pipe from pre-lockdown. And we asked ourselves: what if this lasts longer? Is there an instrument that we could come up with that is tailored to this situation, that lives the Heartcore ethos of “no fear, no greed” and puts founders’ needs first.

Everyone seems to be examining their life right now, including their life’s work. We know some exceptional people have lost their jobs. Others might have more time to think about the big idea they’ve been mulling over for a while. What can we offer them to get going right now, rather than having to wait until normal life resumes?

Will the fellowship continue to be open to applications if/when lockdown restrictions are lifted across Europe?

The intention is to keep it open through 2020, potentially into 2021, depending on how long it takes to resume “normal life.” We will see what happens this year, whether the offering resonates with entrepreneurs, and we will adjust accordingly.

There’s certainly a possibility that this becomes part of our operating model going forward. But like any startup, we will iterate it to make sure that it’s something that makes sense for founders given the overall fundraising environment.

Arguably, with the maturity of remote working tools, a period of lockdown is a good opportunity for a small team to build an MVP or have a prolonged period of product development without worrying too much about go-to market. Is that your thinking?

That is certainly part of it. This is a great time for focused product work. But we also think it’s a great time to launch prototypes, get people using them, and collect feedback. App downloads are significantly up. The willingness to try new things is high.

More than that, however, we think that founding teams will want to be ready to raise larger seed financing when restrictions are lifted. We want to put them in a position to do so.

Which funding sources or other programs do you think the Heartcore fellowship most closely competes with?

It’s like Y Combinator for people who can’t leave their house.

You’re targeting companies within consumer technology (B2C/B2B2C) that are based in Europe. Within this definition, what type of products or sectors do you think have the best opportunity to be founded in the current crisis and (hopefully) as we come out of it?

The crisis serves as an accelerant to some of the secular trends we’ve been seeing anyway, e.g. the convergence of online and offline. Of course everyone is talking about the “digital only” companies right now, but we invest in B2C and marketplaces across the entire consumer spend spectrum: in health, food, finance, insurance, real estate, mobility, travel, retail/ecommerce, education, media/entertainment, and of course consumer productivity tools.

We are also happily counter-cyclical: we definitely want to speak with founders in the travel sector. We believe travel will rebound in a big way and that online travel companies will disproportionately benefit.

We are big believers in technology’s potential to give people superpowers, but also to help them become more human by addressing our common desires to belong, to stay safe and protect others, to have fun and work on something meaningful.