Year: 2021

DotCom Therapy, a pediatric teletherapy company, just closed a $13 million series A round. It’s far from the only teletherapy company looking to capitalize on a boom in venture capital investment in mental health startups, but it’s operating in a hyper-specific sphere: therapy for kids. 

DotCom Therapy was originally co-founded in 2015 by Rachel Mack Robinson, who, at the time, was a practicing pediatric therapist at a neurology clinic in Missouri, and Emily Purdom, also a speech language pathologist. Purdom is no longer involved with the company. 

The pair noticed a pattern that still holds true in 2021: about one in five children in the US experience a mental disorder (like ADHD, or anxiety or depression for example), but just 20 percent receive treatment from a mental healthcare provider, per the CDC. 

DotCom Therapy’s bet is that teletherapy can close that gap. 

In the company’s infancy, Robinson called school districts across the country asking to pilot a teletherapy program. Her first greenlight was a district in rural Alaska, where Robinson delivered a combination of in-person and teletherapy.

Today, the company provides fully online speech, occupation and behavioral therapy and has still focused on partnering with schools and other youth programs, like Little League (the company provided mental health services for the Little League World Series Tournaments). DotCom Therapy has partnered with over 400 schools (in over 100 districts) in 38 states, so far. 

With this most recent round of funding, the company plans to expand operations beyond school districts, and scale up their service to reach kids both in and out of school. The program for families specifically is called Zesh, an online therapy platform that matches kids with therapists, schedules visits and hosts video calls. 

“Our main customer base was K-12 school districts. We have the core of our business rocking and rolling with our education market,” says Robinson. “But we know that we are wanting to expand our footprint, enter into health systems and also offer services for private patients through working different health plans,” she says. 

This Series A was led by New Capital Partners – a firm with a history of success in the telemedicine space. New Capital Partners were early investors in Teladoc, a virtual healthcare company founded in 2002. Teladoc went public in 2015 at an enterprise value of $620 million. The round was flushed out with investment from LRVHealth and OSF Ventures. 

Will Cowen, general partner of LRVHealth, Stan Lynall, the vice president of investments for OSF Ventures, and James Outland, managing partner of New Capital Partners will join DotCom Therapy’s board. In total, the company has raised $14 million in funding. 

Before the pandemic, Robinson says the greatest barrier to success  would have been hooking school districts and families on teletherapy. The pandemic has changed that outlook significantly. 

In response to COVID-19, restrictions on reimbursement for telehealth services, as well as geographic requirements for telehealth services were loosened. Use of telehealth services peaked in April 2020, but has since stabilized at about 38 times pre-pandemic usage, according to a July 2021 McKinsey report. 

With a move outside of school-based partners, DotCom Therapy will be entering into the wider sphere of mental health and telehealth, where there’s a significant amount of competition. Those range from unicorns like TalkSpace to other startups. 

At least in Robinson’s view, a specific focus on kids’ telehealth, and the specific disciplines of occupational and speech therapy will help to set DotCom apart in an increasingly crowded space. 

“The majority of our competitors, I like to think, are the Teladocs, or the Gingers. But for them, the main focus has been on the adult population,” she says. 

DotCom Therapy does have general research backing the idea that online speech and occupational therapy for kids works. One systematic review of seven studies on telehealth-delivered speech and language therapy made significant improvements in children’s language skills that were comparable to in-person therapy – though the research is still limited. 

In general, a lack of platform specific validation has common critique for other mental-health telemedicine companies. DotCom Therapy has released white papers suggesting children have benefited from their teletherapy program. However, Robinson didn’t disclose any additional ongoing validation studies focused specifically on DotCom’s service. 

Instead she notes that the company has worked with two advisors Andre Ostrovsky, a former chief medical officer of Medicaid and Colleen Kraft, a past president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, to develop and track outcome metrics for each service. 

“This will include DSM-5 cross cutting measures, ASHA’s functional communication metrics & proprietary occupational therapy outcomes generated from a team of occupational therapists from masters to doctorate level,” says Robinson. 

On the business side, DotCom’s current school district based approach is a multifaceted process – it takes more than just downloading an app. In one sense, they provide a service rather than just a platform. 

DotCom Therapy aims to become embedded within school districts the company works with. If a school has about 150 students that require speech therapy, for instance, DotCom Therapy will determine how many therapists they believe a school might need.

“We have a proprietary calculator that we’re able to identify the number of therapists that we need to deploy for that specific location,” Robinson says. Overall it takes about 21 days to match therapists with students, per DotCom Therapy’s website.

DotCom Therapy will also coordinate with administrators at K-12 school districts who can be in the room while kids participate in therapy (there’s a video of how that works here), and will also handle the scheduling, and tracking of all student sessions. 

So far, DotCom Therapy has employed about 200 therapists, says Robinson, who are all employed as W-2 employees, rather than independent contractors. The company has about a 97 percent retention rate for employees, says Robinson. On the customer side, the company has retained about 90 percent of customers. 

With this Series A round, Robinson says the company is focusing on expansion into all fifty states by January, and by building out the services for private families. 

“I just feel a lot of urgency for us to grow quickly, but in a very smart way to be able to meet the demand without compromising quality. So what keeps me up at night is really making sure that we can grow at a healthy pace,” says Robinson. 

Relationships ultimately close deals, but long-term relationships come with a lot of baggage, i.e. email interactions, documents and meetings.

Affinity wants to take what Ray Zhou, co-founder and CEO, refers to as “data exhaust,” all of those daily interactions and communications, and apply machine learning analysis and provide insights on who in the organization has the best chance of getting that initial meeting and closing the deal.

Today, the company announced $80 million in Series C funding, led by Menlo Ventures, which was joined by Advance Venture Partners, Sprints Capital, Pear Ventures, Sway Ventures, MassMutual Ventures, Teamworthy and ECT Capital Partners’ Brian N. Sheth. The new funding gives the company $120 million in total funding since it was founded in 2014.

Affinity, based in San Francisco, is focused on industries like investment banking, private equity, venture capital, consulting and real estate, where Zhou told TechCrunch there aren’t customer relationship management systems or networking platforms that cater to the specific needs of the long-term relationship.

Stanford grads Zhou and co-founder Shubham Goel started the company after recognizing that while there was software for transactional relationships, there wasn’t a good option for the relationship journeys.

He cites data that show up to 90% of company profiles and contact information living in traditional CRM systems are incomplete or out of date. This comes as market researcher Gartner reported the global CRM software market grew 12.6% to $69 billion in 2020.

“It is almost bigger than sales,” Zhou said. “Our worldview is that relationships are the biggest industries in the world. Some would disagree, but relationships are an asset class, they are a currency that separates the winners from the losers.”

Instead, Affinity created “a new breed of CRM,”  Zhou said, that automates the inputting of that data constantly and adds information, like revenue, staff size and funding from proprietary data sources, to assign a score to a potential opportunity and increase the chances of closing a deal.

He intends to use the new funding to expand sales, marketing and engineering to support new products and customers. The company has 125 employees currently; Zhou expects to be over 200 by next year.

To date, the company’s platform has analyzed over 18 trillion emails and 213 million calendar events and currently drives over 500,000 new introductions and tracks 450,000 deals per month. It also has more than 1,700 customers in 70 countries, boasting a list that includes Bain Capital Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, SoftBank Group, Nike, Qualcomm and Twilio.

Tyler Sosin, partner at Menlo Ventures, said he met Zhou and Goel at a time when the firm was looking into CRM companies, but it wasn’t until years later that Affinity came up again when Menlo itself wanted to work with a more modern platform.

As a user of Affinity himself, Sosin said the platform gives him the data he cares about and “removes the manual drudgery of entry and friction in the process.” Affinity also built a product that was intuitive to navigate.

“We have always had an interest in getting CRMs to the next generation, and Affinity is defining itself in a new category of relationship intelligence and just crushing it in the private capital markets,” he said. “They are scaling at an impressive growth rate and solving a hard problem that we don’t see many other companies in the space doing.”

 

Starting today, Twitter is testing Tweet Reactions in Turkey for a limited time. Users in the region will be able to react to tweets using  ,  ,  , , in addition to . But if you can’t remember the chaos that ensued when the heart react replaced the favorite star in 2015… brace yourself.

Last year, Twitter added emoji reactions to DMs, but this isn’t the same set of emojis. This announcement comes after Twitter surveyed users in March about how they’d react (ha) if the platform were to adopt a Facebook-like way to engage with tweets, and what emojis they’d want to communicate with. In the survey, some of the proposed emoji sets included “agree” or “disagree” buttons, a dislike button, or Reddit-like upvotes and downvotes. But Twitter found from its survey that users were concerned about getting negative emoji feedback.

“Although ‘frustration’ and ‘anger’ are also common emotions people feel while reading Tweets, and some people want to express disagreement with Tweets, we’re not incorporating these as emoji reactions right now,” Twitter said in a press release. “Our goal is always to support healthy public conversation and we want to see how our current set of emoji will impact conversations.”

Unlike Facebook, which added reactions in 2015, Twitter isn’t testing an “angry” reaction, which was proposed in its survey. This is likely due to users’ hesitancy around negative responses, but still — if you’ve never been on the receiving end of an ill-intended “ha ha” react… Good for you! And it’s not as though arguments don’t happen on Twitter without emoji reactions.

Twitter says that it wants emoji reactions to give people an easier way to show how they feel, which would — in a perfect world — lead to improved expression and participation in public conversation.

This test is only the latest feature that Twitter has tinkered with in the last week. You may also notice interest-based communities, full-width photos and videos, and new safety features cropping up on your feed. With this particular experiment, Twitter said that it will continue to consider community feedback as it tests additional emoji reactions. Based on user responses, it may expand the test’s availability to other regions.

Users in Turkey can experiment with this feature on iOS, Android, and web, which will roll out across the country in the coming days.

Varo Bank, which last year became the first U.S. neobank to be granted a national bank charter, announced this morning it has raised a staggering $510 million in a Series E funding round at a $2.5 billion valuation.

The massive “oversubscribed” financing comes nearly seven months after the fintech startup raised $63 million in a round led by NBA star Russell Westbrook, who also joined the startup as an advisor focused on the direction of Varo Bank’s programs aimed at underserved communities, including communities of color. 

Varo declined to reveal any hard revenue figures but did note that in the 13 months since obtaining its bank charter, the company has doubled its number of opened accounts to four million and tripled its revenue. The latest financing brings the San Francisco-based startup’s total raised to $992.4 million since its 2015 inception, meaning that this round alone effectively amounts to nearly $30 million more than what the company has raised over its lifetime. Varo has previously never disclosed valuation, but it did note that the $2.5 billion valuation figure is up “5x” since May of 2020.

At the time of its last raise, in February, Varo touted 3 million opened accounts. Doing the math we can deduce that the startup has added one million new accounts over the past seven months. At the time of its $241 million Series D last June (that included participation from U2’s Bono), Varo counted nearly 2 million banking and savings accounts.

New investor Lone Pine Capital led the latest round, along with “dozens” of additional new backers, including Declaration Partners, Eldridge, Marshall Wace, Berkshire Partners/Stockbridge and funds and accounts managed by BlackRock. They joined existing investors Warburg Pincus, The Rise Fund, Gallatin Point Capital and HarbourVest Partners. 

Last year, Varo announced it had been granted a national bank charter from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and secured regulatory approvals from the FDIC and Federal Reserve to open Varo Bank, N.A. — effectively becoming a “real” bank but with no physical branches.

CEO and founder Colin Walsh told TechCrunch that the move had a significant impact on his company’s growth. First off, it effectively eliminated an intermediary.

“Being in the regulated system loop has allowed us to expand our margins considerably,” he said. “We also now have direct access to the payment network so our ability to generate substantial value both to our consumers as well as to our shareholders is becoming more and more apparent.”

Walsh also said that Varo is not yet profitable, but is on its way there. He predicts that Varo will achieve profitability in about two years, or three years after becoming a bank.

“One of the nice things that the charter affords us is that we can actually pursue growth and profitability at the same time,” Walsh said. “It’s very much within that three-year window of when we became a bank.”

Also in the last 13 months, Varo has nearly doubled its employee count to nearly 800 today and expanded into a third hub in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Walsh admits that the raise was not necessarily in the company’s plans.

“We didn’t set out to raise this much money. It was coming in fast and furious and we were at like $510 [million] and I finally said, ‘Ok, enough,’ ” he said. “But the fact that we were able to raise this money without even really trying is evidence of the fact that there’s something happening that is just very culturally relevant in this moment and our success to me is very much about having that kind of impact at scale.”

The executive added that the choice of lead investor did tie in to its eventual plans to go public.

“They’re a very reputable sophisticated crossover investor that invests in high-growth, high-potential private market companies and ultimately work with them to go public,” Walsh told TechCrunch. “It’s definitely on the roadmap for us as I think there’s a ton of value we can create as a public company when the time is right.”

Existing investors, he added, aren’t putting pressure on Varo for that to happen. And so, Walsh predicts any move in that direction will only take place sometime “in the next couple of years.”

He also said that down the line, it’s possible that Varo would explore a global expansion.

Varo launched in 2017 with a mission to become “an all digital, mission-driven, FDIC insured bank designed around the modern American consumer,” Walsh said. Today, the company’s core product offerings include “premium” bank accounts that have no minimum balance requirement or monthly account fee and high-interest savings accounts combined with a suite of “tech-first features” designed to help people save and manage their money.

It recently launched Varo Advance, a short-term line of credit that gives qualifying customers a way to secure a cash advance of up to $100 within its app “in seconds” and Varo Perks cashback rewards. The company also has plans to launch Varo Believe, a credit building credit card program designed to help Varo customers “safely build or repair their credit,” with a flexible security deposit and without fees. 

The new capital will go toward continued investment in its products, risk platform and design, according to Walsh. Varo’s goal is to scale to “tens of millions” of consumers and to become a “loved brand recognized for its social impact mission,” he added.

Since the beginning, the startup has been vocal about its intent to help boost financial inclusion with its offerings that aim to serve marginalized and underserved communities that it says have been historically excluded from traditional financial institutions. For Walsh, that remains important.

“We believe we’re on the cusp of creating what will be an iconic brand that’s doing good in the world,” he said. “I want to be like the ‘Patagonia of banking,’ like where people feel really good about the company and what we’re doing and the impact we’re having on people’s lives.”

Varo Bank competes with a growing number of all-digital banks operating in the U.S., including Chime, Current, N26, Level, Step, Moven, Empower Finance, Dave, GoBank, Aspiration, Stash, Zero and others.

Like many other fintechs, Varo saw a pandemic-related boost in business.

“It’s been a time when many re-evaluated their banking relationships and decided to switch to a digital bank that offers far better value and more convenience than a traditional bank,” Walsh said.

Lone Pine Capital’s David Craver said of his new investment: “What the Varo team has been able to achieve in such a short time in the market is truly remarkable. This is a group of trailblazers who are well on their way to building one of America’s next generation of iconic companies.

Warburg Pincus’ Todd Schell and Varo investor said from day one, his firm was aligned with Walsh’s view that the bank charter was fundamental to a long term sustainable business model.

“In Varo we saw the opportunity to radically redefine a cost structure, introduce new products across a wide variety of categories, and uniquely solve use cases which have historically been out of scope,” Schell wrote via email. “Varo today has all of the pieces to this puzzle, including a next generation banking technology stack, the license to operate and fully derive the benefits of it, and the capital to scale. Varo already serves millions of Americas, but we believe it has the potential to reinvent financial services for tens of millions of people around the world.”

The CRISPR-based biotech startup Mammoth Biosciences is officially a unicorn, the company says. 

The billion dollar valuation comes on the back of a $150 million series D round led by Redmile Group, with participation from Foresite Capital, Senator Investment Group, Sixth Street, Greenspring Associates, Mayfield, Decheng Capital, Plum Alley and NFX. Combined with a late 2020 Series C round of $45 million (which included participation from Amazon), this brings the company’s total financing to $195 million. 

Mammoth Biosciences has been a major player in the CRISPR space since its founding in 2017. CRISPR, put simply, is a pair of biological scissors that can cut and replace genes in cells and living organisms, opening up the potential to perhaps permanently cure genetic disease, and perform DNA-based diagnostics. 

One of the company’s four founders is one of the original discoverers of CRISPR, Jennifer Doudna, who recently won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Emmaneulle Charpentier for their 2012 work demonstrating the CRISPR could be used to cut DNA. The company’s other co-founders are Janice Chen (CTO), Lucas Harrington (CSO), and Trevor Martin, (CEO). 

There are a handful of other CRISPR-based companies out there, including a number that are already publicly traded. This unicorn milestone stands as a sign that Mammoth’s unique approach to CRISPR could help it distinguish itself in that landscape. 

“It’s a milestone,” says Ursheet Parikh, the co-leader of Mayfield’s engineering biology investment practice. “I think the company has a long way to go from here. This round and this valuation are just signifying the promise of this stage of what the future will hold,”

Parikh says he sees Mammoth as a CRISPR “platform.” Mammoth has been discovering new types of CRISPR systems that could be used to solve specific biological problems. 

“The best analog is, before you had Intel and Microsoft, if somebody wanted to build a new application, they would have to build a whole new computer function with an operating system,” says Parikh. “You don’t have to build a CRISPR solution from the ground-up. You can work with Mammoth to find the right proteins for specific problems.” 

The CRISPR system most people think of when they hear the phrase is a two part mechanism called CRISPR/Cas-9. The actual molecular scissors that cut DNA (and allow for the editing to happen) is typically the Cas-9 protein. However, there’s a whole ecosystem of Cas proteins out there that can also cut DNA, and as Mammoth’s leadership argues, can do so even better in the original depending on the application. 

Mammoth is creating a “CRISPR toolbox” or a collection of different Cas proteins. You could think of them as different types of scissors that each have their own specific use cases. 

In August 2020, for instance Mammoth discovered a family of proteins called the Casɸ family. This family is an ultra-small version of the typical Cas9 proteins that may make it easier to develop therapies in living people, and could enhance the precision of gene-editing. Mammoth has also characterized a Cas14 system, another family of ultra-small proteins that latch on to different target sequences in the genome (like landing pads that tell Cas proteins approximately where to cut) than the Cas9 proteins do. 

“Mammoth was really founded with this idea that there’s this whole universe kind of a CRISPR that goes beyond the legacy systems like Cas9,” says Martin. 

The development of a CRISPR toolkit isn’t just interesting science, it’s also a smart business move for Mammoth for another reason: intellectual property ownership. 

The original CRISPR/Cas9 system has been the subject of a patent battle  between the University of California Berkeley, and MIT’s Broad Institute, where scientists also discovered CRISPR around the same time. 

The newer Cas proteins, not part of this patent battle, allow Mammoth to completely sidestep that concern. “The patent disputes that the Broad is involved in concern legacy CRISPR-Cas9 systems. Mammoth’s systems are not Cas9-based, so they are not subject to these disputes,” Martin clarifies. 

In essence, Mammoth has been building up a collection of proprietary tools that might later be put to use. Though the possibilities are nearly limitless (genetic medicine or CRISPR-based diagnostics) many of these therapeutic products don’t exist quite yet. 

2020 was a big year for CRISPR therapeutics due to an influx of new clinical trials. That suggesting therapeutics are just beginning to work their way through the regulatory requirements – though approvals are still far off. 

Companies like CRISPR Therapeutics and Vertex Pharmaceuticals have announced promising results from trials on CRISPR-based beta thalassemia and sickle cell treatments. And this summer, Intellia Therapeutics (another company co-founded by Doudna) and Regeneron took the field a step further, showing that CRISPR-based treatments injected directly into the body were useful in silencing a gene that causes ATTR amyloidosis, a disorder where proteins produced in the liver are misfolded (this can lead to complications, like heart failure over time). 

Mammoth’s niche in the expanding world of CRISPR therapeutics, notes Martin, will be a focus on in-vivo applications (or therapies delivered in the human body) which he argues their CRISPR toolbox may enable. 

“We don’t have a timeline [for potential products] on the therapeutic side but we’ll definitely be releasing more information over the next few years and we’ve been really excited about the technical results so far,” says Martin. 

Diagnostics, however, is already an area where Mammoth could distinguish itself sooner rather than later. There, the company is already working with partners to create viable products.

In January, Mammoth earned funding through the The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a point-of-care test that could detect up to 10 pathogens at once, and a larger, lab-based test that could detect up to 1,000. Mammoth has also received funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADx) program to develop advanced diagnostics using CRISPR, and entered into a partnership with GSK to develop a point-of-care Covid-19 test that could detect viral RNA in about 20 minutes.

Mammoth has continued to straddle both worlds of diagnostics and therapeutics, despite “pressure” to fit into one box or the other, says Parikh. The unicorn valuation, he adds, is an additional sign that the company’s technology can operate in both worlds. 

“I think what this milestone, this round, does, is validate their approach to company building, which was really to focus on an area of expertise, rather than just putting themselves in a box, of diagnostics or therapeutics,” he says.

This has felt like an inevitability at least since Amazon teamed with South Carolina-based Element Electronics to bring the world a 43-inch Amazon Fire TV Edition back in 2017. The company has also teamed with several third-party TV makers to build its popular voice assistant into sets, but today Amazon is taking things to the next level with the arrival of two new smart TVs, the Fire TV Omni Series and 4-Series.

The company is calling these the “first-ever Amazon-built smart TVs,” implying that they were purpose built, ground up, rather than slapping its voice technology into a set built and branded by another company.

The Fire TV Omni Series is the headliner — and more premium of the pair. Though, the price is still pretty low, as far as these things go, with a starting point of $410. That’s $40 cheaper than the aforementioned Amazon-branded Element system.

“Smart TVs have been around for decades, but we don’t think they’re really smart,” Amazon VP Daniel Rausch tells TechCrunch. “They’re not really that capable compared to what customers would love to get from them. More often than not, TVs present a passive experience. It can be complex and difficult to interact with. There are many heterogeneous devices and content experiences in our living rooms. And I think coordinating across all that is probably only grown in complexity for customers. We believe that with voice and ambient computing, TVs really have the potential to do so much more and to be so much smarter for customers.”

The company is entering a crowded space, with stiff competition from the likes of Samsung and LG (even if the seemingly decades-long rumors of an Apple Television have thus far proven fruitless). Naturally, the company is looking to distinguish itself with Alexa integration. The Omni set features far-field technology to use voice for a range of activities, from TV watching, to music and gaming.

The system features new integration with the recently rolled out Alexa conversations, offering a more natural way to ask the assistant things like “Alexa, what should I watch,” (that specific command won’t be out until later this year in a beta form), “Alexa, Play Something from Netflix,” (ditto, but for the fall) and the same feature for TikTok. The wildly popular social network launched on Fire TV in the U.K., Germany and France and is coming soon to North America. Now you can watch short videos on up to a 75-inch screen, if you’re so inclined.

The Omni is available in 43-, 50-, 55-, 65- and 75-inch models, all with 4K resolution. There’s on-board support for HDR10, HLG and Dolby Digital Plus, while the larger two models sport Dolby Vision support. There doesn’t seem to be a ton of differences between the Omni and the cheaper 4-Series. The latter starts at $370 and comes in 43-, 50- and 55-inch sizes, again all in 4K. The biggest difference between the two lines appears to be that the 4-Series has near-field Alexa capabilities built into its remote, while the Omni has far-field directly built into the set.

The new TVs arrive next month.

The TVs are joined by the new Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max. The $55 streaming stick offers a number of the above voice features, coupled with a quad-core 1.8GHz processer and 2GB of RAM, promising better performance. The stick supports WiFi 6 and, naturally, Amazon’s gaming service, Luna.

Probably the most surprising bit in all of this is the appearance of Pioneer’s name. Years after dropping its beloved plasma line due to low margins, the company is returning to the TV space with a new 4K set bundled with an Alexa remote. The 43-inch version is scheduled to arrive through Amazon and Best Buy in September, while a 50-inch version is set to arrive two months later.

Toshiba’s upcoming set, meanwhile, has far-field tech built in. That will come in 55-, 65- and 75-inch models and is set for a spring 2022 debut.

AV8 Ventures unveiled its AV8 Ventures II fund with $180 million from Allianz Group, an insurance and asset management giant, aimed at supporting entrepreneurs developing artificial intelligence-driven technologies in the areas of health, mobility, enterprise and deep tech.

Since the Palo Alto venture firm’s launch in 2018, it has invested in 20 seed-stage companies, with another four in the pipeline. Its first fund was also $180 million and backed by Allianz, George Ugras, managing director at AV8, told TechCrunch. The new fund will also invest in seed stage and some Series A and will aim to go into 25 companies.

“The idea is to operate as a financial VC with the support of the world’ largest insurance company and asset manager behind us,” Ugras said.

Some of the technologies the firm is excited about include how chronic diseases are managed. Ugras believes the lack of access to swaths of data and alignment of interest around the table are prohibiting many of the right solutions from bubbling up. In enterprise, AV8 is looking at management around cyberattacks, predicting vulnerabilities and the impact they have on enterprises, so that companies can be proactive in securing their vulnerabilities versus reactive.

Meanwhile, the driver for the second fund was to ensure continuity in deal activity. AV8 “is seeing so many deals right now,” and the competition to get into a VC deal makes it difficult to project how fast a fund will be able to deploy the capital. Even if a firm gets excited and issues terms sheets, there is always uncertainty, he added.

With venture capital being abundant these days, Ugras noted that the velocity is the fastest he has seen in 22 years. The competitiveness in the market is such that if a startup has a decent team, there is no issue raising capital. However, on the investor side, they have to do things better than ever.

“In terms of the key diligence, you need domain expertise to be very clear on how you can add value and key execution milestones going forward,” he added. “Healthcare and insurance more so than others because the business models are complicated. If you have the startups educating you on the front end, it is going to be difficult for the fund.”

 

Airplanes and drones today, regardless of size or fuel type, all face the same limitation: eventually they have to land.

Skydweller Aero, the U.S.-Spanish aerospace startup, wants to break free from that constraint by developing an autonomous solar-powered aircraft it says will eventually be capable of perpetual flight.

Their pitch, which helped the company raise $32 million in a Series A, has led to an additional $8 million in oversubscribed funding led by Leonardo S.p.A, Marlinspike Capital and Advection Growth Capital. The company has also entered into a partnership with Palantir Technologies to use its Foundry analytics platform to process information at-scale and onboard the aircraft designed for telecommunications, government operations and emergency services.

“[Palantir is] the best at creating value from your data, whether it’s putting data into their system to create operational insights for how we may fly our aircraft, putting data in to understand the sensing systems that are coming off of our aircraft and what those might provide, or to understand what’s coming through the networks in the aircraft,” Skydweller co-founder John Parkes told TechCrunch in a recent interview.

And Skydweller will be generating a lot of data. The company is focused on three data-rich markets: telecommunications, geospatial intelligence and government surveillance. Skydweller plans to use the Foundry platform to help its customers, which includes the government, better understand whatever areas are being monitored.

The Foundry platform will also come in handy for route and mission planning, as Skydweller intends to leverage weather and atmospheric information to ensure the aircraft can efficiently use the sun’s rays to stay in the air.

“What it’s all about is creating a persistent aerial layer or pseudo satellite,” Parkes said. “We’re focused on building a perpetual flight aircraft. The goal is to create a plane that will fly for forever, so long as the sun rises.”

Weather and atmospheric data is especially important as it will determine, in part, the altitude at which the aircraft flies. While the plane will be able to fly at high altitudes, “the harder problem and the more useful problem,” according to Parkes, is to capture enough energy and use weather planning to stay at lower altitude. Lower altitudes give better internet quality, geospatial data, and provide more power for payload, he said.

Skydweller’s tech was born out of the Swiss solar aircraft project dubbed Solar Impulse, which was helmed by Bertrand Piccard and Andre Borschberg. The project operated for 14 years and invested $190 million into the solar-powered aircraft, before the foundation behind it sold the intellectual property to Skydweller in 2019. The Solar Impulse was configured to be piloted, however, so much of the work since then has been to unman the platform and turn it into an ultra-long endurance aircraft, Parkes said.

The aircraft is all-electric, outfitted with 2,200 square-foot solar panel wings, 600 kilograms of batteries and a hydrogen fuel cell back-up power system. The solar panels aren’t only used to maintain flight; they will also power systems for customers, like a geospatial camera system or payload from a telecom company.

The company’s using standard commercial aviation parts but most of them haven’t been tested beyond a certain number of hours of use – certainly far less than the number of hours Skydweller plans to keep the aircraft in the air. Plus, like other planes built from emerging technologies, there isn’t a full certification framework already established for the vehicle

“You’re into that uncharted territory to break some of those hour paradigms,” he said.

Skydweller launched its flight test campaign in 2020, and has focused on installing and testing the autonomous systems tech since. He added that “in a very short horizon” the company will be test flying the autonomous aircraft, including take-off, full flight and landing, with future milestones focused on completing long-endurance flights. Customers will be able to start licensing the aircraft within a year to eighteen months, Parkes estimated.

Revitalized by the pandemic, entrepreneurs are on the hunt to refresh some of education’s most traditional tenets, from flashcards to tutors to after-school programs. And those aren’t just bets: They’re unicorn-valued businesses looking to capitalize on consumers’ newfound digital adoption.

The edtech sector’s boom is rivaled by that of the creator economy, which promises to help creators monetize and democratize their passions, all while maintaining their identity. The creator economy has grown over the past year due to an increased appetite for digital content from at-home eyeballs and a wave of new creators eager to meet demand.

Edtech and the creator economy certainly differ in the problems they try to solve: Finding a VR solution to make online STEM classes more realistic is a different nut to crack than streamlining all of a creator’s different monetization strategies into one platform. Still, the two sectors have found common ground in the past year — as encapsulated by the rise of cohort-based class platforms.

At large, cohort-based platforms help experts launch classes for their communities, no previous teaching experience required. Students move through the class together — ergo “cohort” — with the expert on-demand as a sounding board. It’s a bet on education, but it also allows an individual to showcase their passion by pushing all their chips to the center of the table rather than working for an institution. While the idea of experts teaching a group of people isn’t exactly new, it’s being refreshed by a wave of new startups.

It’s not a simple overlap, entrepreneurs and investors say. Some fear that turning creators into educators could bring in a rush of unqualified teachers with no understanding of true pedagogy, while others think that the true democratization of education requires a disruption of who is traditionally given the right to educate.

Anyone’s a teacher!

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) and traditional institutions are built around the belief that students want to learn from accredited teachers, while many cohort-based platforms are forming around a more controversial, yet compelling, ethos: Anyone can be a teacher. The idea of empowering people to monetize their talents is a page directly out of the creator economy rulebook.

In other words, instead of convincing a college professor to teach in their spare time, what if you convinced the star product manager at a tech startup to launch a class sharing their tips and trade secrets? It’s not a theory; it’s a venture-backed business. Mighty Networks raised a $50 million Series B to help its creators launch classes. Last month, Nas Academy raised $11 million to help creators launch their own MasterClass-type series. Then there’s Maven, an early-stage edtech company that raised millions before it even had a name — and led the charge on popularizing cohort-based classes as a branding move to begin with.

These companies sit at the intersection of edtech — and its evolving views on how education should look — and the creator economy, with its empowering premise of “individuals as a business.”

Mark Tan has taken part in a dozen fellowships and received years of coaching through his years in tech. For Tan, who moved from the Philippines to the United States, the allure of virtual classes has always been the network of students also participating in the program. That virtual networking led him to stints at Amazon and Twitch, and, most recently, he spent the last three years working as a director of product at Wyze.

The realization that “you don’t need to be an expert teacher, just an expert” is what eventually gave Tan the confidence to launch a course of his own on Maven. It will begin in a few weeks and is about community-driven product development.

“I’ve been in fellowships with people who are really well known, and sometimes it’s hard to connect with them because they’ve been in my shoes five or 10 years ago,” he said. “I think there’s an overreliance on the expert being the teacher.

“Over time, what I realized is that there’s way more stuff to learn from other people, so I spent more time connecting to [my peers] rather than spending time listening to the lecture.”

His four-week class was originally priced at $799 but now costs $599 and requires a commitment of five to 10 hours per week. Programming will range from live weekly workshops and open Q&As to guest speakers and peer-to-peer networking.

In many ways, Tan is the quintessential example that cohort-based platform founders look for when trying to bring creators onto their service. He has experience at big, well-known companies, has spent years experiencing the product he is now selling and has a passion for education after seeing the benefit of peer-to-peer learning firsthand.

“The best teachers are the ones who haven’t been teachers before,” said Ana Fabrega, who spent years as a primary school teacher before joining Synthesis, an online enrichment school inspired by Elon Musk’s Ad Astra model. “I think that the instinct of a teacher is to jump in and try to control, over-engineer and plan everything so kids don’t struggle … but I think the approach that works the best is [by doing] the opposite.”

Synthesis focuses more on creating good facilitators that can sense engagement and create intimacy with students than educators who focus on a specific curriculum to hit certain metrics, Fabrega explained.

“We really want to make sure that the kids are the ones in charge and doing all the heavy lifting, not the teachers,” she said.

Scalapay, a buy-now, pay-later (BNPL) technology provider that has made significant headway with retailers and consumers in Europe and in categories like fashion, has closed a round of funding that it will be using to fuel its expansion ambitions. The startup has raised $155 million at a $700 million valuation.

Tiger Global is leading this round, with new backers Baleen Capital and Woodson Capital also participating, alongside Fasanara Capital and Ithaca Investments, which had backed Scalapay in its previous $48 million round earlier this year. (Scalapay has now raised $203 million in total.)

This is a sizable round of funding given Scalapay’s age: the company is only two years old and this is a Series A. Ramping up in this way underscores just how hot the BNPL market is right now, and also how the startup has been faring within that.

The company’s service is based around being tightly integrated with online retailers’ check-out process and offering users an interest-free, three-installment way to pay for anything they purchase. It now works with 3,000 merchants in Europe — specifically Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Finland, Belgium, Netherlands and Austria — and it has yet to move into huge markets like the U.S. and U.K.

“When we launched, we saw between 5% and 10% of all transactions for our customers go through Scalapay,” CEO Simone Mancini, who co-founded the company with Johnny Mitrevski, said in an interview. “Now we are at 15%-20% and its growing. In luxury fashion we’re accounting for 30%-50% of all transactions, and in some cases more than half. We want to be the thing that makes purchasing pleasurable again.”

Pleasurable, and more likely to happen: while shopping cart abandonment continues to be an issue for all online retailers, Scalapay claims that its existence has increased conversions by 11%, and gives consumers the confidence to spend more, typically 48% more per shopper.

The growth of buy-now, pay-later services has been one of big hallmarks of the pandemic-era e-commerce market. Although the option to pay for items in installments had been around for years before Covid-19 — indeed, layaway and other delayed payment services were big even before e-commerce was a thing — usage of BNPL saw a new boost of attention on the back of way more people using online channels to shop, and — given the uncertainties of the economy — way more of them needing some financial help ultimately to make purchases.

That was complemented too by a new and more sophisticated approach: the leading BNPL providers are bringing together a much more ambitious big-data play, leveraging wider risk analysis and a much more creative and complete picture of a person and his/her finances in order to better understand what to expect out of any transaction. The algorithms and how they direct the course of transactions have become as important as the accessibility of the services themselves.

All of this has led to a huge rush of big BNPL companies getting even bigger. Klarna, which has long been seen as the most valuable startup in Europe (in terms of paper valuation) raised money at a valuation of nearly $46 billion in June. Affirm went public at the start of the year and is currently valued at aorund $23 billion. PayPal re-upped its own ambitions in the market with an Asian kicker just this week: it acquired Paidy in Japan for nearly $3 billion. And of course Square has waded into the space in a big way with its $29 billion acquisition of Afterpay in June.

And that’s before you consider the many smaller BNPL companies that have raised and are raising money. They include Zilch, which is now valued at over $500 million; and Resolve, a spinout from Affirm, which has raised $60 million.

In that context, Scalapay’s $700 million valuation seems modest — maybe even a little like a bargain? You may not be surprised that this latest fundraising happened on the heels of the startup actually getting approached to be acquired, not by one but by two different companies, which were interested in the technology, but also the fact that Scalapay had made significant headway into specific markets — geographically, in Europe; and also in terms of product categories, specifically fashion — where they are keen to grow.

Mancini declined to say which companies except to note they were among the biggest of the lot. (Just my inference, but maybe the acquisition pace of some of the bigger players gives a clue as to whom it might have been?) In any case, Scalapay said no, but the chatter got other things moving, and that is how Tiger Global came into the picture.

Big investor pockets could prove to be a key part of how any of these companies fare going forward: relationship building and expanding your own pool of talent will be key for growing, both areas where having the right contacts and the right resources to meet new demands will come in handy.

“Scalapay has quickly become an important player in European payments and the BNPL sector,” said Alex Cook, Partner, Tiger Global, in a statement. “We are impressed by their product development pipeline and strong focus on merchant success. We are excited to support Scalapay in the next phase of its growth.”

Interestingly the company said it plans to stay very focused on improving the process of BNPL rather than diversify into other areas like fintech (areas where Affirm and Klarna are doing a lot); or the wider area of payments (an obvious move for Afterpay and Square).

“While the likes of Klarna and Afterpay have launched deposit accounts and moved further into the banking space, Scalapay’s exciting roadmap is laser focused on helping merchants with new customer experiences that increase conversion. They’re leveraging BNPL in an entirely new way,” added Francesco Filia, CEO of Fasanara Capital.