Month: March 2021

Spotify today announced it’s rolling out a new look for its streaming service on the desktop, with the launch of a redesigned app for both Mac and Windows, as well as an updated web app. The changes, which will be made available to all global users, focus on improving the navigation and providing users with access to new controls and features across playlists, search, radio, their queue, library, and more.

Overall, the update gives the Spotify app a more streamlined, less cluttered look and feel, compared with the prior version.

One notable change is that the new app does away with the oddly placed search bar that was previously found at the top left of the screen. Now it’s been relocated to the slimmed down navigation bar on the left side, in between the links for Home and Your Library.

The app also no longer details the various destinations within Your Library within this navigation bar — like Made For You, Recently Played, Albums, Artists or Podcasts, for example. Instead, you’ll have to click into your Library section to view these selections.

Now, the Your Library page will feature four categories across the top of the page, starting with Playlists, where you’ll find your Liked Songs, Discover Weekly, Daily Mixes, Release Radar, and more. Playlists is followed by different sections for browsing Podcasts (which got bumped up to the No. 2 spot in the update! hint hint!), then Artists and Albums.

A new dropdown menu in the Your Library lets you further sort these various sections in a variety of ways: by Most Relevant, Recently Played, Recently Added, Alphabetical, or even by a Custom Order you can configure.

Meanwhile, those who like to build playlists will gain a handful of new features in the updated app.

They can now write descriptions, upload their own images, and drag and drop tracks into existing playlists. They can also use a new embedded search bar located at the top of the “Create Playlist” page to seek out new songs or even podcast episodes to add to the playlist. This could greatly speed up the somewhat tedious process of playlist creation, by reducing the steps it takes between finding a track and getting it into a playlist.

This change in particular speaks to Spotify’s growing interest in catering to curators — something co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek mentioned during his recent appearance on the PressClub show on Clubhouse.

Ek explained that he was “excited about curatorship” because when a service’s content library grows, it needs curators.

“The playlisters are incredible on Spotify, but it seems like there’s limited ability to interact with those playlisters — or for those playlisters to really understand who is listening to them and be able to build that second set of creators [who] are indirectly creating by helping other people find content to experience,” he said.

To address this challenge, Ek said Spotify would try to add more tools to allow users to become better curators, if not on a social basis, at least for themselves.

“The primary focus for us on the roadmap is just enabling you to be a much better curator even for yourself —  just by, for instance, suggesting content that’s relevant to the things you’ve already put in the playlist,” he added.

These updated playlist creation tools seem like a natural first step towards Spotify’s larger goals in this area.

A few other changes in the updated apps include a refreshed listener profile page which now features both your top artists and top tracks; a new way to start a radio session for any song or artist via the three-dot (“…”) more menu; and the ability to now edit your Queue and view your Recently Played items on the Desktop app.

Premium subscribers gain another perk, too: they’ll be able to download music and podcasts to listen to offline, via a download button in the Desktop app.

In a blog post announcing the changes, Spotify admitted that it hadn’t quite kept up with the development of its desktop app as its service had grown, and today’s launch is an attempt to correct that.

“At Spotify, we’re always looking for ways to provide the best possible experience so our listeners can consistently discover and enjoy music and podcasts—and that includes look, feel, and functionality. We constantly test, develop, and launch new features, optimize for new devices, and look to expand our content offering,” the post read. “Yet along the way, we felt that our desktop app experience hadn’t kept up, and that it was time for a change.”

The updated apps for Mac, Windows and the web are rolling out starting today.

In January, localized payments provider PPRO became the latest fintech-as-a-service startup to hit a billion-dollar valuation when it closed $180 million in funding. As a mark of how payments and e-commerce continue to be major areas of focus in the global economy, today PPRO is extending that round by another $90 million and adding in two new investors to its cap table.

The financing is coming by way of strategic backing from JPMorgan Chase, and Eldridge (which is the second time this week the PE firm has been in the news for making a major investment in an enterprise tech company: earlier this week Eldridge was one of the leads on a $475 million round for real-time intelligence provider Dataminr).

The enlarged $270 million round — the January tranche was from Eurazeo Growth, Sprints Capital and Wellington Management — includes both primary and secondary capital, and this latest tranche is part of the secondary element, PPRO CEO Simon Black confirmed to me. Prior to this, London-based PPRO (pronounced ‘P-pro’) raised $50 million in August 2020 from Sprints, Citi and HPE Growth; and in 2018 it raised $50 million led by strategic investor PayPal.

PPRO’s core product is a set of APIs that e-commerce companies can integrate into their check-outs to accept payments in whatever local methods and currencies consumers prefer, removing the need for PPRO customers to build those complex and messy integrations themselves. Its business has boomed in the last year as one of the bigger providers of that localized payment technology, with transaction volumes up 60% in 2020 to $11 billion in processed payments.

JPMorgan Chase, meanwhile, is one of the world’s financial giants, providing banking and credit cards among its many other services. The idea is that it wants to build more payment services around its existing relationships and to expand its payment business globally, working more closely with PPRO as part of that. There are two main areas where PPRO could figure: to help its credit card business gain more ubiquity as a payment method in more parts of the globe; and to be a service provider for its business banking customers to help them expand in more markets with more flexible, localized payments.

“We are extending into payments and we are looking to double down on addressing the needs of our clients and their clients, which can be consumers, suppliers or marketplace sellers,” said Sanjay Saraf, MD and Global Head of the Integrated Payments Group at JPMorgan Chase, in an interview. “That last mile becomes important from a customer service perspective.”

In particular, the US company is hoping to double down on its business and footprint in Latin America and Asia Pacific, two emerging markets still seeing a lot of growth in e-commerce, in particular compared to more developed, penetrated and mature markets like the U.S.

This latest round of financing underscores two trends of the moment in fintech.

First, it points to how active the e-commerce market has become — a trend fueled not in small part by the Covid-19 pandemic, and the resulting shift people have made to carrying out everyday tasks online. Second, it’s a sign of how global financial services companies are looking for ways to remain relevant in every market, tapping into more innovations from fintech startups to get there.

The problem, as it exists, is that payments remains a very fragmented business.

The standard methods that a person might use to pay for goods or services online in one country — for example a credit card in the U.S. — might differ drastically from the preferred methods when selling in another — for example, in Belguim one popular format is Bancontact (where you visit a new screen to authorize a transfer from directly from your bank checking account).

As with other payments and fintech-as-a-service startups, the attraction of using PPRO is that it has built a lot of those integrations at the backend and packaged them up as a service, taking away a lot of the complexity, in its case of identifying and integrating each of those payment methods manually, and making it something that can be done seamlessly and quickly.

JPMorgan is now one of several other partners. Those relationships work in both directions, providing partners a way to expand their consumer-facing products, and to help them work with more businesses in more markets. (Similar, I suspect to how JPMorgan will work with it, too.)

Others in PPRO’s network of 100 large global customers include PayPal, Citi, Mastercard Payment Gateway Services, Mollie and Worldpay, which use PPRO’s APIs for a variety of functions, including localised gateway, processing and merchant acquirer services.

It is also not the only one that has identified the opportunity to simplify this part of the payment process and of other complex financial transactions that rely on localized approaches. Others in the same area include Rapyd, Mambu, Thought Machine, Temenos, Edera, Adyen, Stripe and newer players like Unit, with many of these raising very large amounts of money in recent times to double down on what is currently a rapidly expanding market.

The past year has been “an acceleration of a trend, where behaviors are being reinforced,” said Black in an interview. “At the consumer level, we are buying so many more products and services online, and we value convenience more than ever, which translates to a real strengthening of more demand for local payments.”

And while emerging technologies like cryptocurrency continue to see a lot of buzz, this is not at all where mass-market activity is for now. “The big trend is mobile wallets, not bitcoin,” Black said.

The Brazilian-based pan-Latin American food delivery startup iFood has announced a series of initiatives designed to reduce the company’s environmental impact as consumers push companies to focus more on sustainability.

The program has two main components — one focused on plastic pollution and waste and another aiming to become carbon neutral in its operations by 2025.

Perhaps the most ambitious, and surely the most capital intensive of the company’s waste reduction initiatives is the development of a semi-automated recycling facility in Sao Paulo.

“We want to transform the entire supply chain for plastic-free packaging in Brazil. By controlling the national supply chain, from production to marketing and logistics, we can offer more competitive pricing for packaging to industries that already exist but do not have a scale of production and demand today,” said  Gustavo Vitti, the chief people and sustainability officer at iFood. 

 The company has also created an in-app option that allows customers to decline plastic cutlery when they’re getting their food delivered. 

“These initiatives will contribute to reducing the consumption of plastic items, which are often sent without being requested and end up going unused into the garbage bin,” said Vitti. “In the first tests that we did, 90 percent of consumers used the resource, which resulted in the reduction of tens of thousands of plastic cutlery and shows our consumers’ desire to receive less waste in their homes.”

On the emissions front, the company will work with Moss.Earth, a technology company in the carbon market, which developed the GHG inventory to offset its emissions by buying credits tied to environmental preservation and reforestation projects. 

But the company is also working Tembici, a provider of electric bikes in Brazil to move its delivery fleet off of internal combustion powered mopeds or scooters.

“We know that compensation alone is not enough. It is necessary to think of innovative ways to reduce CO2 emissions. In October last year, we launched the iFood Pedal program, in partnership with Tembici, a project developed exclusively for couriers that offers affordable plans for renting electric bikes,” said Vitti. “Currently, more than 2,000 couriers are registered and are sharing 1,000 electric bikes in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in addition to the educational aspect of program that we have contemplated. With good adherence indicators, our plan is to gradually expand the project, taking it to other cities and, thus, increase our percentage of clean deliveries.”

The Brazilian electric motorcycle company, Voltz Motors is also working with iFood, which ordered 30 electric motorcycles for use by some of its delivery partners. The company hopes to roll out more than 10,000 motorcycles over the next 12 months. 

Coupled with internal facing initiatives to improve water reuse, deploy renewable energy and develop a green roof at its Osasco headquarters, iFood is hoping to hit sustainability goals that can improve the environment across Brazil and beyond. 

“We know that we have a long way to go, but we trust that together with important partners and this set of initiatives, in addition to others that are under development, it will be possible to reduce plastic generation and CO2 emissions impact on the environment. Our relevance and presence in the lives of Brazilian families further reinforces the importance of these environmental commitments for the planet,” said Vitti.

Clothing giant FatFace had a data breach, but doesn’t want you to tell anyone about it.

The company sent an email to customers this week disclosing that it first detected a breach on January 17. A hacker made off with the customer’s name, email and postal address, and the last four-digits of their credit card. “Full payment card information was not compromised,” the notice reiterated.

But despite going out to thousands of customers, the email said to “keep this email and the information included within it strictly private and confidential,” an entirely unenforceable request.

Under the U.K. data protection laws, a company must disclose a data breach within 72 hours of becoming aware of an incident, but there are no legal requirements on the customer to keep the information confidential. It didn’t take long for the company to face flack from the public. The company didn’t have much to say in response, asking instead to “DM us with any questions.”

In a statement sent via crisis communications firm Kekst CNC, FatFace said: “The notification email was marked private and confidential due to the nature of the communication, which was intended for the individual concerned. Given its contents, we wanted to make this clear, which is why we marked it private and confidential.” (FatFace declined to attribute the statement to a named spokesperson.)

TechCrunch obtained a near-identical email sent to its staff from a former employee who asked not to be named. The email to employees was largely the same as the customer email, but warned that staff may have had their bank account information and their National Insurance numbers — the U.K. equivalent of Social Security — compromised.

FatFace confirmed “a select number of employees, former employees and customers and providing appropriate guidance and support,” but would not say specifically how many customers and employees were affected by the breach.

The home medical supply market in the U.S. is significant and growing, but the way that Americans go about getting much-needed medical supplies, particularly for those with chronic conditions, relies on outdated and clumsy sales mechanisms that often have very poor customer experiences. New startup Better Health aims to change that, with an e-commerce approach to serving customers in need of medical supplies for chronic conditions, and it has raised $3.5 million in a new seed round to pursue its goals.

Better Health estimates the total value of the home medical supplies market in the U.S., which covers all reimbursable devices and supplies needed for chronic conditions, including things like colostomy bags, catheters, mobility aids, insulin pumps and more, is around $60 billion annually. But the market is obviously a specialized one relative to other specialized goods businesses, in part because it requires working not only with customers who make the final decisions about what supplies to use, but also payers, who typically foot the bill through insurance reimbursements.

The other challenge is that individuals with chronic care needs often require a lot of guidance and support when making the decision about what equipment and supplies to select — and the choices they make can have a significant impact on quality of life. Better Health co-founder and CEO Naama Stauber Breckler explained how she came to identify the problems in the industry, and why she set out to address them.

“The first company I started was right out of school, it’s called CompactCath,” she explained in an interview. “We created a novel intermittent catheter, because we identified that there’s a gap in the existing options for people with chronic bladder issues that need to use a catheter on a day-to-day basis […] In the process of bringing it to market, I was exposed to the medical devices and supplies industry. I was just shocked when I realized how hard it is for people today to get life-saving medical supplies, and basically realized that it’s not just about inventing a better product, there’s kind of a bigger systematic problem that locks consumer choice, and also prevents innovation in the space.”

Stauber Breckler’s founding story isn’t too dissimilar from the founding story of another e-commerce pioneer: Shopify. The now-public heavyweight originally got started when founder Tobi Lütke, himself a software engineer like Stauber Breckler, found that the available options for running his online snowboard store were poorly designed and built. With Better Health, she’s created a marketplace, rather than a platform like Shopify, but the pain points and desire to address the problem at a more fundamental level are the same.

With CompactCath, she said they ended up having to build their own direct-to-consumer marketing and sales product, and through that process, they ended up talking to thousands of customers with chronic conditions about their experiences, and what they found exposed the extend of the problems in the existing market.

“We kept hearing the same stories again, and again — it’s hard to find the right supplier, often it’s a local store, the process is extremely manual and lengthy and prone to errors, they get the surprise bills they weren’t expecting,” Stauber Breckler said. “But mostly, it’s just that there is this really sharp drop in care, from the time that you have a surgery or you were diagnosed, to when you need to now start using this device, when you’re essentially left at home and are given a general prescription.”

Unlike in the prescription drug market, where your choices essentially amount to whether you pick the brand name or the generic, and the outcome is pretty much the same regardless, in medical supplies which solution you choose can have a dramatically different effect on your experience. Customers might not be aware, for example, that something like CompactCath exists, and would instead chose a different catheter option that limits their mobility because of how frequently it needs changing and how intensive the process is. Physicians and medical professionals also might not be the best to advise them on their choice, because while they’ve obviously seen patients with these conditions, they generally haven’t lived with them themselves.

“We have talked to people who tell us, ‘I’ve had an ostomy for 19 years, and this is the first time I don’t have constant leakages’ or someone who had been using a catheter for three years and hasn’t left her house for more than two hours, because they didn’t feel comfortable with the product that they had to use it in a public restroom,” Stauber Breckler said. “So they told us things like ‘I finally went to visit my parents, they live in a town three hours away.'”

Better Health can provide this kind fo clarity to customers because it employs advisors who can talk patients through the equipment selection process with one-to-one coaching and product use education. The startup also helps with navigating the insurance side, managing paperwork, estimating costs and even arguing the case for a specific piece of equipment in case of difficulty getting the claim approved. The company leverages peers who have first-hand experience with the chronic conditions it serves to help better serve its customers.

Already, Better Health is a Medicare-licensed provider in 48 states, and it has partnerships in place with commercial providers like Humana and Oscar Health. This funding round was led by 8VC, a firm with plenty of expertise in the healthcare industry and an investor in Stauber Breckler’s prior ventures, and includes participation from Caffeinated Capital, Anorak Ventures, and angels Robert Hurley and Scott Flanders of remote health pioneer eHealth.

Digital House, a Buenos Aires-based edtech focused on developing tech talent through immersive remote courses, announced today it has raised more than $50 million in new funding.

Notably, two of the main investors are not venture capital firms but instead are two large tech companies: Latin American e-commerce giant Mercado Libre and San Francisco-based software developer Globant. Riverwood Capital, a Menlo Park-based private equity firm, and existing backer early-stage Argentina-based venture firm Kaszek also participated in the financing.

The raise brings Digital House’s total funding raised to more than $80 million since its 2016 inception. The Rise Fund led a $20 million Series B for Digital House in December 2017, marking the San Francisco-based firm’s investment in Latin America.

Nelson Duboscq, CEO and co-founder of Digital House, said that accelerating demand for tech talent in Latin America has fueled demand for the startup’s online courses. Since it first launched its classes in March 2016, the company has seen a 118% CAGR in revenues and a 145% CAGR in students. The 350-person company expects “and is on track” to be profitable this year, according to Duboscq.

In 2020, 28,000 students across Latin America used its platform. The company projects that more than 43,000 will take courses via its platform in 2021. Fifty percent of its business comes out of Brazil, 30% from Argentina and the remaining 20% in the rest of Latin America.

Specifically, Digital House offers courses aimed at teaching “the most in-demand digital skills” to people who either want to work in the digital industry or for companies that need to train their employees on digital skills. Emphasizing practice, Digital House offers courses — that range from six months to two years — teaching skills such as web and mobile development, data analytics, user experience design, digital marketing and product development.

The courses are fully accessible online and combine live online classes led by in-house professors, with content delivered through Digital House’s platform via videos, quizzes and exercises “that can be consumed at any time.” 

Digital House also links its graduates to company jobs, claiming an employability rate of over 95%.

Looking ahead, Digital House says it will use its new capital toward continuing to evolve its digital training platforms, as well as launching a two-year tech training program — dubbed the the “Certified Tech Developer” initiative — jointly designed with Mercado Libre and Globant. The program aims to train thousands of students through full-time two-year courses and connect them with tech companies globally. 

Specifically, the company says it will also continue to expand its portfolio of careers beyond software development and include specialization in e-commerce, digital marketing, data science and cybersecurity. Digital House also plans to expand its partnerships with technology employers and companies in Brazil and the rest of Latin America. It also is planning some “strategic M&A,” according to Duboscq.

Francisco Alvarez-Demalde, co-founder & co-managing partner of Riverwood Capital, noted that his firm has observed an accelerating digitization of the economy across all sectors in Latin America, which naturally creates demand for tech-savvy talent. (Riverwood has an office in São Paulo).

For example, in addition to web developers, there’s been increased demand for data scientists, digital marketing and cybersecurity specialists.

“In Brazil alone, over 70,000 new IT professionals are needed each year and only about 45,000 are trained annually,” Alvarez-Demalde said. “As a result of such a talent crunch, salaries for IT professionals in the region increased 20% to 30% last year. In this context, Digital House has a large opportunity ahead of them and is positioned strategically as the gatekeeper of new digital talent in Latin America, preparing workers for the jobs of the future.”

André Chaves, senior VP of Strategy at Mercado Libre, said the company saw in Digital House a track record of “understanding closely” what Mercado Libre and other tech companies need.

“They move as fast as we do and adapt quickly to what the job market needs,” he said. “A very important asset for us is their presence and understanding of Latin America, its risks and entrepreneurial environment. Global players have succeeded for many years in our region. But things are shifting gradually, and local knowledge of risks and opportunities can make a great difference.”

The latest in a string of space tech SPACs announced this year is Redwire, an entity created by a PE firm in 2020, which has acquired a number of smaller companies including Adcole Space, Roccor, Made in Space, LoadPath, Oakman Aerospace, Deployable Space Systems and more — all within the last year or so. Redwire announced that it will go public through a merger with special purpose acquisition company Genesis Park Acquisition Crop., and the combined company will list on the NYSE.

The deal puts Redwire’s pro forma enterprise value at %615 million, and is expected to provide an additional $170 million to Redwire’s coffers post-merger, including a PIPE valued at over $100 million. Unsurprisingly, one of the uses of the proceeds that Redwire intends to pursue is continued M&A activity to build out its list of service offering in the space domain.

Redwire’s mandate isn’t specifically to go after new space companies, and instead its targets share in common expertise in a particular, rather narrow slice of the severally space market. It’s capabilities include on-orbit manufacturing and servicing; satellite design, manufacture and assembly; payload integration; sensor design and development, and more. The idea appears to be to build a full-stack infrastructure company that can offer tip-to-tail space technology services, exclusive really only of launch and ground station components (for now).

It’s a smart approach for a bourgeoning new space economy where increasingly, technology companies who want to operate in space would rather focus on their unique value proposition, and outsource the complex, but mostly settled business of actually getting to, and operating in, space. Other companies are addressing the market in similar ways, with launchers bringing more of that part of the process in-house so their payload customers basically only have to show up with the sensor or communication device they want to send to space, and the launcher providing everything else — including even the satellite, in the relatively near future.

Redwire has proven revenue-generating power, with projected 2021 revenue of $163 million, and many of the companies now operating under its umbrella are fairly mature and have been operating cash flow positive for many years. Accordingly, a SPAC as a path to public markets likely does make sense in this particular instance, but the increasing frequency and volume of space companies choosing this route, is, on the whole, a trend to watch with healthy skepticism.

Indian edtech giant Byju’s, which raised about a billion dollars last year as the pandemic accelerated growth of online learning services in India, is about to kickoff its fundraising spree for this year.

Byju’s is in talks to raise over $600 million in a new financing round that would value the Indian startup at $15 billion, up from $11 billion late last year, and $5.75 billion in July 2019, two people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

Byju Raveendran, the co-founder and chief executive of the eponymous startup, informed some existing investors last month that he would be raising a sizeable round this month, a person familiar with the matter said. The new round is in advanced stages of talks, and some new investors are expected to participate, the people said.

The startup declined to comment last month and earlier this week.

The startup plans to use the fresh capital to acquire more startups. It is currently in talks with a U.S.-based firm — the name of which TechCrunch could not determine — for an acquisition, and is conducting due diligence to buy Indian physical coaching institute Aakash, the people said, requesting anonymity as talks are private.

Byju’s, which is profitable, generated revenues of over $100 million in the U.S. last year, Deborah Quazzo, Managing Partner of GSV Ventures, said at a session held by Indian venture fund Blume Ventures earlier this week.

Byju’s prepares students pursuing undergraduate and graduate-level courses, and in recent years it has also expanded its catalog to serve all school-going students. Tutors on Byju’s app tackle complex subjects using real-life objects such as pizza and cake.

This is a developing story. More to follow…

The partners at MaC Venture Capital, the Los Angeles-based investment firm that has just closed on $103 million for its inaugural fund, have spent the bulk of their careers breaking barriers.

Formed when M Ventures (a firm founded by former Washington DC mayor Adrian Fenty); the first Black talent agency partner in the history of Hollywood, Charles D. King; and longtime operating executive (and former agent) Michael Palank joined forces with Marlon Nichols, a co-founder of the LA-based investment firm Cross Culture Capital, MaC Venture Capital wanted to be a different kind of fund.

The firm combines the focus on investing in software that Fenty had honed from his years spent as a special advisor to Andreessen Horowitz, where he spent five years before setting out to launch M Ventures; and Nichols’ thesis-driven approach to focusing on particular sectors that are being transformed by global cultural shifts wrought by changing consumer behavior and demographics.

“There’s a long history and a lot of relationships here,” said King, one of Hollywood’s premier power players and the founder of the global media company, Macro. “Adrian and I go back to 93 [when] we were in law school. We went on to conquer the world, where he went out to Washington DC and I became a senior partner at WME.”

Palank was connected to the team through King as well, since the two men worked together at William Morris before running business development for Will Smith and others.

“There was this idea of having connectivity between tech and innovation… that’s when we formed M Ventures [but] that understanding of media and culture… that focus… was complimentary with what Marlon was doing at Cross Culture,” King said.

Few firms could merge the cultural revolutions wrought by DJ Herc spinning records in the rec room of a Bronx apartment building and Sir Tim Berners Lee’s invention of the internet, but that’s exactly what MaC VC aims to do.

And while the firm’s founding partnership would prefer to focus on the financial achievements of their respective firms and the investments that now comprise the new portfolio of their combined efforts — it includes Stoke, Goodfair, Finesse, PureStream, and Sote — it’s hard to overstate the significance that a general partnership that includes three Black men have raised $103 million in an industry that’s been repeatedly called out for problems with diversity and inclusion.

“Our LPs invested in us… for lots of different reasons but at the top of the list was that we are a diverse team in so many ways. We’re going to show them a set of companies that they would not have seen from any [other] VC fund,” said Fenty. “We also, in turn, have the same investing thesis when we look at companies. We want to have women founders, African American founders, Latino founders… In our fund now we have some companies that are all women, all African American or all Latino.”

The diversity of the firm’s ethos is also reflected in the broad group of limited partners that have come on to bankroll its operations: it includes Goldman Sachs, the University of Michigan, Howard University, Mitch and Freada Kapor, Foot Locker, and Greenspring Associates.

“We are thrilled to join MaC Venture Capital in this key milestone toward building a new kind of venture capital firm that is anchored around a cultural investment thesis and supports transformative companies and dynamic founders,” said Daniel Feder, Managing Director with the University of Michigan Investment Office, in a statement. “Their unified understanding of technology, media, entertainment, and government, along with a successful track record of investing, give them deep insights into burgeoning shifts in culture and behavior.”

And it extends to the firm’s portfolio, a clutch of startup companies headquartered around the globe — from Seattle to Houston and Los Angeles to Nairobi.

“We look at all verticals. We’re very happy to be generalists,” said Fenty.

A laser focus on software-enabled businesses is complemented by the thesis-driven approach laid out in position papers staking out predictions for how the ubiquity of gaming; conscious consumerism; new parenting paradigms; and cultural and demographic shifts will transform the global economy.

Increasingly, that thesis also means moving into areas of frontier technologies that include the space industry, mixed reality and everything at the intersection of computing and the transformation of the physical world — drawn in part by the firm’s close connection to the diverse tech ecosystem that’s emerging in Los Angeles. “We’re seeing these SpaceX and Tesla mafias spin out, entrepreneurs who have had best-in-class training at an Elon Musk company,” said Palank. “It’s a great talent pool, and LA has more computer science students graduating every year than Northern California.”

With its current portfolio, though early, the venture firm is operating in the top 5% of funds — at least on paper — and its early investments are up 3 times what the firm invested, Nichols said. 

“The way to think about it is MaC is essentially an extension of what we were building before,” the Cross Culture Ventures co-founder said. “We’re sticking with the concept that talent is ubiquitous but access to capital and opportunity is not. We want to be the source and access to capital for those founders.”

Everybody says they want to build user-centric companies and products, but how exactly is that achieved? Talking and listening to users, of course — a task that is both unnecessarily time-consuming and cumbersome to organise, according to Axel Thomson, a former product manager at U.K. recipe-box subscription unicorn Gousto.

His burgeoning startup, dubbed Ribbon, wants to make it easy for product teams to recruit and interview users, and to “continuously test and validate their hypotheses”. This, it’s hoped, will then lead to better products for users. The idea was born out of a need Thomson says he experienced himself while leading a user experience-focused product team at Gousto.

“I initially joined Gousto in the growth team, running product and marketing experiments focused on improving the user experience and increasing retention before moving over to the product team to work on improving the user experience more holistically,” he tells me.

“In both of these teams we had to constantly make decisions on what features and experiments we wanted to take bets on, quickly realising that as much as we thought we knew what the users wanted, the best way to find out was by having real conversations with users, and letting them test out different concepts. This was a big eye-opener to how difficult it could be to consistently make good and informed decisions on which products and features were worth testing and which ones were doomed to fail”.

Thomson says it’s become a trope within management circles that product teams should be user-centric and that products should be designed to help users solve “real problems”. But in reality, it’s often hard to know what users really think or actually want, while continuously doing user research and conducting interviews is very time-consuming.

“Teams will often spend days setting up interviews, resulting in a slow feedback loop that slows down product development and experimentation,” he says. “Alternatively, product teams seek solace in quantitative data from analytics platforms such as Amplitude and Mixpanel, which only give insight into how users have used their products once they’ve been shipped”.

Enter Ribbon, which its founder says lets companies start user interviews in roughly “the same time it takes to order a ride through Uber”. Product teams simply install the Ribbon widget on their website and can then recruit and conduct video interviews with users any point in the user journey.

“We want to help product teams rapidly and continuously do user interviews, and ultimately any type of qualitative user research, without having to make compromises on how quickly they can ship, how reliable results they can get and how frequently they can do research,” explains Thomson.

Ribbon is designed to appeal to product managers, designers and user researchers, all of whom benefit from validating their ideas by having conversations with users. However, Thomson argues that the benefits of user research isn’t limited to these roles only, and that while companies often have dedicated teams or people that “own” user interviews, there is an increasing interest in “socialising research findings and participation in user research across companies”.

“Our goal as a user research platform is to make it easy for our users to become evangelists of their research within their own teams and organisations, by making it really easy to do great research and share it with your team,” he adds.

It’s still early days, of course — Ribbon launched its MVP to the Product Hunt community at the end of October last year. Until now, the London-based startup has been bootstrapped, too, but today is disclosing that it has raised £200,000 in pre-seed funding from MMC Ventures, RLC Ventures and a group of London-based angels.