Month: August 2021

Karan Bajaj, the founder and chief executive of WhiteHat Jr, is leaving the firm a year after selling the startup for $300 million to Indian edtech giant Byju’s.

In an email to employees on Wednesday, Bajaj and Byju’s founder and chief executive Byju Raveendran said the departure follows a “mutually decided” decision made at the time of acquisition of WhiteHat Jr.

Chatter about Bajaj leaving the firm has been floating around for more than a quarter. TechCrunch had asked Byju’s on April 1 if Bajaj was going to leave the firm, something India’s most valuable startup dismissed as false information at the time.

Days later, Byju’s announced it was rebranding its international business as Byju’s Future School and appointed Bajaj as its leader.

In the email today, Raveendran said, “while I wish he would’ve stayed longer, Karan is a force of nature and accustomed to making unconventional choices, as you all know, and I wish him only the best for what will surely be an exciting path ahead.”

Raveendran said Trupti Mukker, who previously oversaw the customer experience at WhiteHat Jr, will now be leading WhiteHat Jr.

WhiteHat Jr, which teaches kids coding, math, and science, is one of the fastest growing edtech startups in India. The startup has also drawn attention because of its unusual step to sue critics.

“All in all, I’m truly very excited for your path ahead and deeply grateful for allowing me to be a part of your lives for this intense, challenging but deeply satisfying period we experience together,” wrote Bajaj to employees today.

Loship, the Vietnamese on-demand e-commerce platform that started as a reviews app, announced today it has raised $12 million in pre-Series C funding, bringing its valuation to $100 million. The round was co-led by BAce Capital, an Ant Group-backed venture firm, and the direct investment unit of Sun Hung Kai & Co Limited. 

Founded in 2017, Loship offered one-hour deliveries for a large range of products and services, including food, ride-hailing, medicine and B2B supplies. The company says it has more than 70,000 drivers and 200,000 merchants, and serves about 2 million customers in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Da Nang, Can Tho and Bien Hoa. 

The new round brings Loship’s total raised to $20 million. Its previous funding was a bridge round from MetaPlanet Holdings, announced in February 2021. Loship is in the process of raising a Series C, expected to close by the end of this year, and is in advanced talks with investors.

Co-founder and chief executive officer Trung Hoang Nguyen told TechCrunch that Loship raised a pre-Series C round because “there are so many investors participating in our Series C round that we find it would take a long time to completely close.” As a result, Loship decided to split the round into a pre-Series C and Series C. 

MetaPlanet Holdings returned for the pre-Series C round, which also saw participation from Wealth Well, Prism Ventures and SQ Capital Group (SCCG Ventures Asia). Individual investors included former Starbucks Vice President Mojtaba Ahkbari; FNZ Group APAC chief executive officer Tim Neville; BNP Paribas global macro sales director Ben Fitzpatrick; DASS-Inc founder and CEO Wayne Cowden; EC1 managing partners Simon Eglise; Ilwella Pty Ltd director Quentin Flannery; Prenzler Group director Jonathan Feil; and iVS CEO Milan Reinartz

Loship’s new funding will be used to expand into new cities and grow verticals like B2B deliveries for small food and beverage businesses and retail stores. As part of the round, BAce Capital founder Benny Chen, the former managing director of Ant Group India, where he invested in Paytm and Zomato, will join Loship’s board of directors. 

Co-founder and CEO Trung Hoang Nguyen said Loship has a “very clear path to profitability.” The company started out as an online review platform, before people began using it to buy and sell items through chats. 

“Back then, people used our Lozi app the same way as eBay, where they could list their products, buy from and sell to others. However, we couldn’t really know whether the transaction via Lozi was completed, especially when it was purely online chat,” Nguyen told TechCrunch. “The best way to know the exact status of the transaction was to control the delivery.” 

As a result, the company launched Loship in late 2017, starting with food deliveries and then expanding into other verticals. Nguyen explained that its platform includes “basically anything that can fit on or be transported legally by motorcycle.” This means verticals dedicated to ride-hailing, groceries, medicine, laundry, packages, flowers, beauty products and B2B supplies like ingredients and food packaging. 

The number of its verticals helps Loship differentiate from large players like Grab and Gojek, Nguyen said. He added that being a homegrown startup also gives it an advantage. 

“As the only local player, we understand our local customers on a deeper level compared to other regional ones. We are locals and we have our winning playbook. We strategically enter into new and relatively untouched markets like lower-tier cities, grow the customer base and then take things forward from there.” 

Loship’s plan until the end of 2021 is to expand into five more major cities, bringing the total number of cities it operates in to 10. Then it plans to launch in Tier 2 and 3 cities in Vietnam, before expanding regionally in Southeast Asia (Nguyen describes Laos and Cambodia as “must-win markets.”)

In a statement about the funding, Chen said, “Loship creates a strong ecosystem which adds value to small business, customers as well as riders. Under Trung’s entrepreneurship and leadership, we saw the company get much stronger during the pandemic by constantly bringing product and service innovation to its merchants and users.”

InstaCarro, a digital marketplace that connects used car sellers to dealers in Brazil, has raised $23 million in a Series B round of funding.

Notably, U.S.-based firms co-led the investment, including J Ventures, FJ Labs and Rise Capital. Spain’s All Iron Ventures and Big Sur also participated in the financing, among others. With the latest round, São Paulo-based InstaCarro has now raised more than $56 million since its 2015 inception.

As we all know, the COVID-19 pandemic led to an increase in people all over the world buying and selling things online, with cars being no exception. InstaCarro plans to use its new capital in part to capitalize on the shift and “aggressively” expand its reach within Brazil.

Until this year, the startup operated only in São Paulo. In the first half of this year, it launched operations in eight new cities, and is now also live in Campinas, Curitiba, Joinville, Santos, Brasília, Goiânia, Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte.

For context, the startup compares itself to Carvana in the U.S., Chehaoduo in India and Carro in Indonesia. 

CEO Luca Cafici started InstaCarro after having co-founded a car classified startup in Asia with Rocket Internet. That experience, according to Cafici, taught him that “car classifieds were not solving the problems people had when selling their own cars.”

Inspired by the early success of Auto1 in Europe, he decided to return to Latin America to build a similar model, with an exclusive initial focus on Brazil because it is the third largest car market in the world.

Today, InstaCarro is one of the largest used car buyers in Brazil, according to Cafici. Since its inception, the company has transacted more than R$1 billion, or US$193.2 million, working with over 35,000 people seeking to sell their cars to dealers. The startup has been growing 21% month over month since the start of COVID, and has been profitable since 2019. Profitability is up by nearly 10x compared to pre-pandemic levels, Cafici said.

Looking ahead, InstaCarro aims to become a “full-service” car trading platform after hearing from customers that they would be interested in buying a car directly through its platform as well.

Under its current model, the process seems straightforward. When a customer sells their car through InstaCarro, the company comes out to their home to inspect the car, taking more than 150 pictures, and then auctions the car through its network of over 4,000 dealers across Brazil. Customers receive a bid for their car in 24 hours, and InstaCarro pays out the customer the same day and handles all of the paperwork, according to Cafici.

“The auction is a key component to achieve a great price, as there is no agreement on what the true value of a used car is,” he added. “The more dealers you talk with, the higher price you get.” 

The startup also plans to use its new capital to “improve the coverage” of its home inspection model and improve the efficiency of its digital auction process, Cafici said. It, naturally, intends to also do some hiring. InstaCarro has 120 employees, and it plans to double that number by 2022.

Prior to the pandemic, the company had partnered with major supermarket chains to create inspection points. But with the onset of the pandemic, it began inspecting cars at the sellers’ homes, which has proven to help the company move and grow faster, Cafici said.

“The pandemic forced us to reinvent our business model. Before the lockdowns, most of our operations depended on central inspection sites, which we had to shut down overnight in March 2020,” he told TechCrunch. “For our customers, our dealers, and our team, last year was challenging and scary. Our team worked hard to reinvent our business model around home inspections, so that we could continue doing business in a safe way. We started going to our client’s driveway instead of having them come to an inspection site.”

Today, over 90% of the company’s customers choose to do everything online.

John Nordin of J Ventures said his firm was impressed by the way the company shifted its business model after COVID hit and is “now growing faster than ever.”

“We see digital car dealerships finding success in markets across the world, from the U.S. to the U.K., Indonesia and Mexico,” Nordin said. “The team or teams that build a digital car dealership in Brazil have a lot of work cut out for them, not only to figure out how to fit the model to Brazilian consumers, but also to handle the operational challenges of buying and selling a huge volume of cars every day. InstaCarro has the right team to tackle the challenges ahead.”

On Sunday Square announced it was gobbling up Afterpay in a deal worth $29 billion at the time of announcement. Alex followed up yesterday with more details on why the deal made sense for Square and Afterpay over here, but we wanted to ask some notable VCs what it means for the startup market.

For context, the Square deal follows a ton of money and interest flowing into the BNPL market. Just this year, VCs have invested in companies like Alma ($59.4 million, January 2021), Scalapay ($48 million, January 2021), Wisetack ($19 million, February 2021), Zilch ($80 million, April 2021) and Dividio ($30 million, June 2021).

Then there’s Klarna, which raised $639 million at a post-money valuation of $45.6 billion in June, after raising $1 billion in March at a post-money valuation of $31 billion.

There’s also interest from some major public companies. After a slow start, PayPal is aggressively pushing BNPL services with merchants that offer it as a payment option. And there are reports that Apple is building its own BNPL offering through Apple Pay.

We reached out to Commerce Ventures founder and GP Dan Rosen,  Better Tomorrow Ventures founding partner Jake Gibson, Fika Ventures partner TX Zhuo, and Matthew Harris of Bain Capital Ventures to see what they thought of the deal, as well as what it might mean for the opportunity for other BNPL companies and startups.

The main takeaways? “Buy now, pay later” may be effective at driving retail conversion, but scale matters and long-term margins look slim for BNPL startups.

Now, let’s hear from the venture community.

The venture view

Why is the BNPL market so hot?

A coalition of app-based ride-hailing and on-demand delivery companies including Lyft, Uber, Doordash and Instacart have filed a petition for a ballot initiative in Massachusetts that would keep gig economy workers classified as independent contractors as the industry takes a fight it won in California on the road.

The ballot measure proposed by the Massachusetts Coalition for Independent Work comes nearly a year after California voters approved a similar measure known as Proposition 22 that pitted labor rights advocates against gig economy companies in a costly multimillion battle.

Lyft, Uber and other members of the coalition, which also includes several local chambers of commerce in the state, said Tuesday they want the ballot question included in the November 2022 election. The question has to pass a legal review and receive enough signatures from voters for it to be included on the ballot.

“While our priority is to find a legislative solution in Massachusetts, this part of our continued efforts to advocate what the vast majority of drivers want — a flexible earning opportunity that our platform provides plus new benefits,” Lyft co-founder John Zimmer said during Lyft’s earnings call Tuesday. ” While we’re pursuing the ballot option, we’re also closely engaged with the Massachusetts State Legislature and are continuing to work with them on a potential legislative solution.”

The coalition said the proposed ballot question would grant app-based ride-hail and delivery workers new benefits such as healthcare stipends while keeping them classified as independent contractors.

Among the provisions that the coalition touted would be an earnings floor equal to 120% of the Massachusetts minimum wage ($18 per hour in 2023 from app-based platforms, before customer tips) and healthcare stipends for drivers who work at least 15 hours per week. Drivers would still keep all of their tips and be guaranteed at least $0.26 per mile to cover vehicle upkeep and gas, according to the coalition.

Labor activists are already pushing back. The Coalition to Protect Workers’ Rights, a group composed of a variety of organizations including the NAACP New England Area Conference, the Union of Minority Neighborhoods and the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Coalition, said Tuesday the ballot measure contains problematic language that will hurt workers.

The group argued there are extensive loopholes that create a subminimum wage for app-based workers and that few qualify for healthcare. It also noted that the measure would remove anti-discrimination protections, eliminates workers’ compensation rules and allows companies to cheat the state unemployment system of hundreds of millions.

While Uber, Lyft and the broader coalition lobbies for either a ballot measure or legislation, it also faces a lawsuit filed last year by the Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey who has asked the court to rule that Uber and Lyft drivers are employees under Massachusetts Wage and Hour Laws.

The AG’s Office alleges in its complaint that Uber and Lyft are unable to meet a three-part test under state law that would allow them to classify drivers as independent contractors. To qualify as an independent contractor the worker must be free from a company’s direction and control, perform services outside the usual course of the business and does similar work on their own.

Uber has been signaling since last year that it planned to push for laws similar to the Proposition 22 measure. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in November 2020 during an earnings call with analysts that the company will “more loudly advocate for laws like Prop 22.” He later added that it will be a priority of the company “to work with governments across the U.S. and the world to make this a reality.”

WhatsApp said that it would soon let users send disappearing photos and videos and this week the feature will be rolling out to everybody. Anyone using the Facebook-owned messaging app can share a photo or video in “view once” mode, allowing a single viewing before the media in question goes poof. Media shared with “view once” selected will show up as opened after the intended audience takes a peek.

The company notes that the new feature could be helpful for an array of needs that definitely aren’t sending nudes, like sharing a photo of some clothes you tried on or giving someone your wifi password. In the fine print, the company would like to remind you that just because the photos or video will vanish, that doesn’t prevent someone from taking a screenshot (and you won’t know if they do).

Facebook says the new feature is a step to give users “even more control over their privacy,” a song it’s been singing since Mark Zuckerberg first declared a new “privacy-focused vision” for the company back in 2019. Facebook has made a few gestures toward letting people wrest control of their online privacy since then, streamlining audience controls on its core app and enabling disappearing messages in WhatsApp.

The company has also been talking a big game about bringing end-to-end encryption to its full stable of messaging services, which it plans to make interoperable in the future. WhatsApp enabled end-to-end encryption by default back in 2016, but for Messenger and Instagram, the hallmark privacy measure could still be years out.

Square paid around a quarter of its present-day value for Afterpay, Alex Wilhelm notes in The Exchange. That seems like a lot. But was it too much?

“Afterpay brings global revenues, global users and a more diverse merchant network to Square,” Alex notes. “It would have had to spend to derive those assets over time. Square is willing to pay up to snag them now.”

Dana Stalder, a partner at Matrix Partners and Afterpay’s only institutional investor, describes the deal as part of a recurring “critical innovation cycle” in fintech that “determines the winners and losers” for decades to come.

“I’ve never seen a combination that has such potential to deliver extraordinary value to consumers and merchants,” says Stalder. “Even more so than eBay + PayPal.”

Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch this week!

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

The best way to grow your career? Treat it like an app

Developers may delight in solving complex technical problems, but the problem of a career path is one many don’t think much about, Juniper Networks CTO Raj Yavatkar writes in a guest column.

He offers a solution that should appeal to developers and engineers: “​​Treat career advancement as you would a software project.”

Design expert Scott Tong outlines 4 concepts founders should consider when designing products

At Early Stage 2021, design expert Scott Tong shared some ways founders should think about design and branding.

If you can link your brand with your company’s reputation, I think it’s a really great place to start when you’re having conversations about brands. What is the first impression? What are the consistent behaviors that your brand hopes to repeat over and over? What are the memorable moments that stand out and make your brand, your reputation memorable?

You can’t afford to make poor decisions about incentive stock options

If you’re fortunate enough to be considering cashing in on vested stock options, this guest column is worth a read.

“Most companies admit they need to be better at explaining how ISOs work in general, but they can’t legally work one-on-one with employees to help them exercise and sell shares the right way,” Wealthramp’s Pam Krueger and John Chapman write.

“That’s why, when the time is right, many employees actively look for help from a qualified fiduciary financial adviser who can walk these could-be ‘options millionaires’ through various cash-in scenarios.”

Demand Curve: Questions you need to answer in your paid search ads

At some point, almost every early-stage startup will use paid search ads to connect with customers and throw down the gauntlet with their competitors.

Most of these initial attempts at paid search are unsuccessful. There’s a steep learning curve when it comes to transforming passive searchers into paying customers, and almost no one gets it right the first time.

In a comprehensive guest post, growth marketing expert Stewart Hillhouse identified “14 questions your paid search should answer to ensure you’re only paying for the highest-intent shoppers.”

Question 1? “What’s in it for me?”

5 lessons from Duolingo’s bellwether edtech IPO of the year

Duolingo’s debut last week was a bright spot, Alex Wilhelm and Natasha Mascarenhas write, with the language learning app’s stock price landing above a raised IPO range.

Alex and Natasha detail five lessons to take from Duolingo’s flotation:

1. The IPO event will bring “more sophistication” to Duolingo’s core service.
2. Roadshow investors didn’t view Duolingo as an edtech company.
3. China’s edtech crackdown will have a “neutral” impact on Duolingo.
4. In certain cases, post-COVID growth declines aren’t lethal.
5. Growth can still absolve rising losses.

Can your startup support a research-based workflow?

In the U.S. alone, yearly spending on AI R&D is expected to reach $100 billion by 2025.

But can your humble startup attract and retain users while it conducts research and product development?

“For obvious reasons, companies want to make things that matter to their customers, investors and stakeholders. Ideally, there’s a way to do both,” says João Graça, CTO and co-founder of Unbabel, an AI-powered language operations platform.

Kodiak Robotics’ founder says tight focus on autonomous trucks is working

As part of an ongoing series with transportation startup founders, Rebecca Bellan interviews Kodiak Robotics CEO and co-founder Don Burnette about why the autonomous trucking company remains private when so many of its rivals have gone public.

“I think there’s also lots of opportunity within the VCs and the private markets,” said Burnette.

“Kodiak is one of the only remaining serious AV trucking companies still in the private sector, and so I think that gives us some advantages in a lot of ways.”

How public markets can help address venture capital’s limitations

After interviewing Draper Esprit co-founder Stuart Chapman, Alex Wilhelm and Anna Heim took a look at the trend of European VCs floating themselves.

Traditional VC models “can foist artificial time constraints on investors and force them to focus their deal flow into particular stages for fund-construction reasons,” Alex and Anna write for The Exchange.

“As we found out researching this piece, the public venture model highlights some of these limitations — and may be able to alleviate them in part.”

Robinhood’s CFO says it was ready to go public

After Robinhood failed to burn up the stock charts, Alex Wilhelm wondered why, exactly, the investing and trading app’s IPO didn’t live up to expectations.

He spoke to Robinhood CFO Jason Warnick, who shared a few reasons why it was time for the company to float:

… Warnick indicated that there were a few factors at play, including that Robinhood had built out its leadership team and its internal processes, and that it had worked on user-safety-related tasks and expanded the site’s use cases. All of that is true.

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here.

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for August 3, 2021. Today we have a delightful mix of news for you, from Twitter product changes to VCs in trouble to megadeals and even some super-early-stage rounds. Let’s have some fun! — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Even VCs get hit by ransomware: Sure, less technically savvy folks get hit by malware and ransomware all the time. You don’t really expect better from legacy telcos or underfunded utilities. But when the victim is Advanced Technology Ventures, which has around $1.8 billion in assets under management, the scourge of aggressive cybercrime starts to take on a more sinister flavor. Who is safe? No one?
• Unfavored Fleets Flee: Twitter’s plan to kill off its Fleets product hit the ground today. It’s gone from our iOS apps. Fleets were fleeting, as everyone has noted, with the lifecycle of the product coming and going in rapid succession. Bad news for Twitter? Not really. Its Stories-like feature wasn’t too popular, and the company has a million other things in the wings, like its subscription service, its live audio product and its newsletter effort.
• Substack buys Letter: TechCrunch covered this deal today, causing your humble scribe to sit back and think. Why would Substack buy Letter, a platform for written debate? Well, the newsletter-focused startup is big on the written word, and the value thereof. And many well-known Substack authors are controversial in one way or another. You know, the sort of folks you might want to see have a, say, debate? The two products should line up well.

Startups/VC

We’re breaking our startup and venture capital news today into three sections. The first deals with VCs themselves. Then we’ll talk through some mega-rounds and close with some small venture deals worth our time.

• Moderne Ventures raises $200M: Every first-time venture capital fund wants to get to its second fund. And if they do, to raise a larger fund. From that perspective, things seem to be going well at Moderne, a firm whose second fund is a multiple of the size of its first. And it was oversubscribed. What does the group invest in? Per our own reporting, startups working in the “real estate, finance, insurance and home services industries.”
• VCs going public is a thing? Yes, it turns out, it is a thing. Several European venture capital funds have gone public in recent quarters, including Draper Esprit moving from the smaller AIM to the main board in London. It turns out that being a public VC can remove certain time constraints that more traditional venture capital firms have to deal with. And regular folks can invest.

Now, some huge rounds:

• India’s BharatPe raises $370M: Confirming TechCrunch’s previous scoop, fintech unicorn BharatPe is now worth $2.85 billion after Tiger led its most recent round. The company, TechCrunch reports, “operates an eponymous service to help offline merchants accept digital payments and secure working capital.” Given the number of SMBs in India, BharatPe’s TAM is huge. And now it has nigh-infinite capital to use to power its own growth.
• Rapyd raises $300M for fintech APIs: The fintech world saw not just one huge round today, but two. Rapyd’s $300 million infusion led by Target Global values the firm at around $8.75 billion, per TechCrunch sources. What does Rapyd do? It offers APIs that power wallets, money transfers and card issuing, among other services, helping other companies offer fintech services around the world.
• Sure, why not, here’s another huge Tiger round from India: More evidence that Tiger is building an index fund of growth-focused private companies the world ’round, and that the Indian startup market is red-hot, Infra.Market announced its third round in nine months today. The $125 million Series D values the Mumbai-based company at $2.5 billion, post-money. Infra.Market builds software to help construction companies get the raw materials they need and handle project logistics.

And then there’s startup news from the earlier side of the market:

• bina raises $1.4M for kid-focused edtech: bina — the small b is part of its branding — wants to build an online school with small class sizes aimed at 4- through 12-year-olds. Given the huge changes to the global education market in light of COVID-19, it’s a big task.
• $1.3M for African-focused agtech startup Khula: Providing farmers large and small with software and a marketplace, Khula wants to meet chronic issues in the African farming market with technology.
• Finally, Aira’s wireless charging tech just raised $12 million: Sure, Apple gave up on AirPower, but Aira is still hard at work on the wireless charging problem set. Which gives us hope, because our phones are always out of batteries, along with our headphones, keyboards and pretty much everything else. It’s not just us, right?
• Citizen launches its $20/month Protect service: Controversial consumer security startup Citizen’s Protect service is now something that you can buy. Reach that line of communication and the company’s staff will help you handle your emergency. That doesn’t sound too spicy, but as TechCrunch reports “the app made news earlier this year for launching a private ‘personal rapid response service’ fleet of vehicles and a reward for a person wrongly accused of starting a Los Angeles wildfire.”

Embodied AI, superintelligence and the master algorithm

Over the next 18 months, one technologist says the increased adoption of embodied artificial intelligence will open a path to superintelligence — incredibly powerful software that dwarfs anything the human mind could produce.

“All the crazy Boston Dynamics videos of robots jumping, dancing, balancing and running are examples of embodied AI,” says Chris Nicholson, founder and CEO of Pathmind, which uses deep reinforcement learning to optimize industrial operations and supply chains.

“The field is moving fast and, in this revolution, you can dance.”

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

• YouTube’s big short push goes live: Alphabet’s Google division has a video product called YouTube that you may have heard of. And the subsidiary’s subsidiary has a $100 million fund that it hopes will drive interest in creating short-form videos for its viewers. TikTok changed the video game, and YouTube’s huge financial response is now live.
• Google updates its Maps product on iOS: If you use Maps on iOS, which we reckon is around half of you reading this note, good news. Now you can share location more easily in iMessages, use dark mode and get traffic data on your home screen. You are welcome.
• Nikola warns on EV deliveries: The chip shortage has a new victim. This time it’s Nikola, the troubled EV company that saw its CEO under fire for fraud in recent days. The company was an early SPAC success and now stands as a cautionary tale for the financial mechanism.
• Marvell buys Innovium for $1.1B: Here’s a neat acquisition story that is also something of a letdown. Innovium, a maker of “networking ethernet switches optimized for the cloud,” per our own reporting, was worth a bit more in its final private round. Still, it’s a big deal and a billion-dollar-plus exit, making it worth our time.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

TechCrunch wants to help startups find the right expert for their needs. To do this, we’re building a shortlist of the top growth marketers. We’ve received great recommendations for growth marketers in the startup industry since we launched our survey.

We’re excited to read more responses as they come in! Fill out the survey here.

Our editorial coverage about growth marketing includes articles from the TechCrunch team, guest columns and posts like “Demand Curve: Questions you need to answer in your paid search ads” by Stewart Hillhouse on Extra Crunch.

For mobile users, Discord is adding one new feature that you’d find on a more traditional social app. The company rolled out an option for users to customize their profiles across its iOS and Android apps Tuesday, following the feature’s release on the desktop version of Discord in late June.

The new option lives in Discord’s user settings menu under “user profile.” There, you can describe what you’re all about in 190 characters or less, including links and emojis. You can also select a custom profile color if the new default profile color that Discord assigned you isn’t vibing with your whole thing. If you don’t see the option yet, check back as the feature rolls out widely.

With the addition of custom profiles, the company also offered premium Nitro subscribers the option to choose an image or an animated GIF as a profile banner. The options have been out in the wild for desktop for a bit now, but the additional customization features will now give anyone who mostly uses Discord on iOS or Android a way to spice things up a bit.

The feature addition is a small, but it’s a step toward the chat app becoming a touch more like more profile-centric social networks. Discord’s chat rooms, known as servers, have long been the platform’s sole focus, but the company has introduced a flurry of quality of life features in recent months.

Discord rolled out threaded, auto-archiving conversations and Clubhouse-like audio event spaces earlier this year, and also picked up a company called Sentropy that makes AI-powered platform moderation software. The app is already a killer service for community-driven voice and text chat, and the recent additions should help the app attract more users well beyond its humble gaming roots.

Today after the bell, U.S. ride-hailing company Lyft reported its second quarter financial performance. In aggregate the company’s performance was a rebound from the year-ago second quarter, which was heavily impacted by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting lockdowns in the United States.

Lyft also managed to produce positive adjusted EBITDA in the quarter, a profit metric favored by technology upstarts that have yet to generate net income, a stricter method of calculating profitability. Adjusted EBITDA for the second quarter was $23.8 million.

The company’s adjusted EBITDA reached a nadir in Q2 2020, when it totaled -$280 million. Since then Lyft has posted successive gains to adjusted EBITDA in every quarter. The company’s adjusted EBITDA margin came to 3% in its most recent quarter. After promising investors that adjusted profits would come, Lyft delivered.

Shares of Lyft are up nearly 7% in after-hours trading following the company’s financial report.

Lyft reported revenue of $765 million in the second quarter, more than double the $339.3 million million it brought in during the same period last year. While that is remarkable, remember last year at this time the economy and ride-hailing were getting pummeled by the COVID-19 pandemic. In other words, we expected this.

Importantly, Lyft’s Q2 revenue grew 25.6% over last quarter’s of $609 million. That means that despite rising case counts in the United States thanks to the Delta COVID-19 variant, Lyft still managed to grow.

The company said it had 17.1 million active riders in the second quarter, up 97% from the 8.68 million million riders it had on its network in the same period last year. In the first quarter Lyft said it had 13.49 million active riders in the first quarter. The company also saw more revenue per active user in the second quarter ($44.63) than it did in the year-ago Q2 ($39.06). The company’s revenue per active rider metric slipped slightly from its Q1 2021 result of $45.13.

Lyft’s growth bested street expectations, which anticipated revenues of $696.2 million, per Yahoo Finance data. Despite this growth, Lyft is still losing money when all costs are counted. Lyft reported a net loss of $251.9 million in the second quarter, a 42% improvement from the $437.1 million it lost in the same period last year, but still a steeply negative figure.

The company said that net loss for the second quarter includes $207.8 million of stock-based compensation and related payroll tax expenses, and the $20.4 million expense related to the previously disclosed agreement to reinsure certain legacy auto insurance liabilities.

In the second quarter, Lyft’s aggregate spend on cost of revenue related expenses rose, though that was to be expected given how sharply its revenues themselves expanded compared to the year-ago period. The company also managed to curtail G&A costs, and its “operations and support” line item. However, R&D costs and S&M expenses both expanded compared to the year-ago quarter.

Finally on numbers, what about cash? Despite managing to generate positive adjusted EBITDA in the last three months, Lyft operations consumed $37.5 million in cash during the quarter. Lyft’s operations have not generated positive cash flow since Q3 2019. But don’t worry that Lyft is about to run out of funds — it has more than $2 billion in cash to support its growth.

There are signs that Lyft’s business is maturing into something more profitable than it once was. The company’s contribution margin, a non-GAAP figure that is used to indicate profitability of its ride-hailing model sans corporate costs, rose to 59.1% in the second quarter, an all-time record result. In the year-ago period the metric fell to 34.6%, its worst result since Q1 2017.

Lest we all forget, Lyft is now free of its costly autonomous vehicle technology program called Level 5. Lyft sold Level 5 to Toyota’s Woven Planet Holdings.

That doesn’t mean the company isn’t interested in getting into the robotaxi game.

Last month, Lyft announced a partnership with Argo AI and Ford to launch at least 1,000 self-driving vehicles on Lyft’s ride-hailing network in a number of cities over the next five years, starting with Miami and Austin. The first Ford self-driving vehicles, which are equipped with Argo’s autonomous vehicle technology, will become available on Lyft’s app in Miami later this year.

TechCrunch has tuned into the Lyft call and will update this story as needed.