Year: 2021

Agora, a startup that has built a materials management platform for contractors, has raised $33 million in a Series B round of funding led by Tiger Global Management.

8VC, Tishman Speyer, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, Michael Ovitz, DST, LeFrak and Kevin Hartz also participated in the financing, which brings the startup’s total raised since its 2018 inception to about $45 million.

Construction tech is one of those sectors that has not historically been considered “sexy” in a startup world that often favors glitzier technology. But construction fuels the commercial and real estate industries, which in turn impacts all of us in one way or another.

Meanwhile, the $10 trillion construction industry has long been plagued with productivity challenges. In fact, according to McKinsey, labor productivity growth in the industry has been stagnant since 1947.

Maria Rioumine and Ryan Gibson founded Agora with the mission of making it easier for commercial trade contractors to order and track materials, automate manual data entry and give everyone involved in the procurement process a single platform by which they can communicate with each other.

The end goal is to help projects move along faster, and contractors to avoid unnecessary delays by reducing building costs. The bigger picture impact, Agora hopes, is that its SaaS platform can help make the “built environment faster and more efficient to build,” and thus help make cities “more affordable and accessible to all.” 

San Francisco-based Agora is tackling the problem in a very specific, niche way that is proving to be popular both with contractors and investors alike. Rather than attempting to be a blanket solution for all trades, Agora is focusing on specific trade verticals, one by one. For example, it started out with electrical and is now moving into mechanical.

“Last year, there was more than $101 billion worth of electrical work done. Our customers work on all types of products,” Rioumine told TechCrunch. “For example, we have customers that do power stations, some that build hospitals and others that build school classrooms and university campuses, and still others that build churches and casinos. The work that these contractors do is so essential.”

Agora’s annual recurring revenue has grown 760% year over year while its customer base is up 6x during the same time frame, according to the company. It has also tripled its headcount to 45 people and today is processing $140 million in annualized materials volume for its customers.

The startup wasn’t actively raising for the Series B — instead, investors were proactively offering term sheets, Rioumine said.

“A few investors that knew us well approached us about preempting the round,” she told TechCrunch. “Twelve days after the first conversation, we had multiple term sheets.”

Tiger Global Partner John Curtius said he was drawn to Agora’s “unique” trade-specific approach.

In his view, the startup is “defining the future of procurement in construction.”

“Agora is solving a huge and critical problem,” Curtius wrote via email. “Billions of dollars a year are wasted because of inefficient procurement processes and breakages in the supply chain.”

The platform specifically does things like give contractors the ability to: customize templates, create pre-approved materials lists and easily reorder frequently needed items, order from a catalogue that offers more than 400,000 SKUs and eliminate manual data entry, which reduces errors and automates basic processes.

By bringing both field and office teams onto one digital platform, Agora claims it saves office teams 75% of the time they spend processing purchase orders, and field teams 38% of the time their foremen spend on materials management. In total, the company said its technology can provide up to $300,000 of potential annual savings for its average customer.

The company plans to use its new capital to hire across a number of teams, as well as continue to expand beyond 30 states and into other trade verticals.

“There has been this really heavy underinvestment in tech in construction for a long time,” Rioumine said. On average, the technology spend as a proportion of revenue in construction is about 1.5%, “which is actually the lowest of the industries out there where the median is 3.3%,” she added.

“So when we think about just how large this industry is and how little productivity improvements there have been recently, I think now we have this amazing opportunity to really invest in technology and bring it on to the job sites and into trade contractors’ hands.”

Aforza, developing cloud and mobile apps for consumer goods companies, announced a $22 million Series A round led by DN Capital.

The London-based company’s technology is built on the Salesforce and Google Cloud platforms so that consumer goods companies can digitally transform product distribution and customer engagement to combat issues like unprofitable promotions and declining market share, Aforza co-founder and CEO Dominic Dinardo told TechCrunch. Using artificial intelligence, the company recommends products and can predict the order a retailer can make with promotions and pricing based on factors like locations.

The global market for consumer packaged goods apps is forecasted to reach $15 billion by 2024. However, the industry is still using outdated platforms that, in some cases, lead to a loss of 5% of sales when goods are out of stock, Dinardo said.

Dinardo and his co-founders, Ed Butterworth and Nick Eales, started the company in 2019. All veterans of Salesforce, they saw how underserved the consumer goods industry was in terms of moving to digital.

Aforza is Dinardo’s first time leading a company. However, from his time at Salesforce he feels he got an education like going to “Marc Benioff’s School of SaaS.” The company raised an undisclosed seed round in 2019 from Bonfire Ventures, Daher Capital, DN Capital, Next47 and Salesforce Ventures.

Then the pandemic happened, which had many of the investors leaning in, which was validation of what Aforza was doing, Dinardo said.

“Even before the pandemic, the consumer goods industry was challenged with new market entrants and horrible legacy systems, but then the pandemic turned off pathways to customers,” he added. “Our mission is to improve the lives of consumers by bringing forth more sustainable products and packaging, but also helping companies be more agile and handle changes as the biggest change is happening.”

Joining DN Capital in the round were Bonfire Ventures, Daher Capital and Next47.

Brett Queener, partner at Bonfire Ventures, said he helped incubate Aforza with Dinardo and Eales, something his firm doesn’t typically do, but saw a unique opportunity to get in on the ground floor.

Also working at Salesforce, he saw the consumer goods industry as a major industry with a compelling reason to make a technology shift as customers began expecting instant availability and there were tons of emerging startups coming into the direct-to-consumer space.

Those startups don’t have a year or two to pull together the kind of technology it took to scale. With Aforza, they can build a product that works both online and off on any device, Queener said. And rather than planning promotions on a quarterly basis, companies can make changes to their promotional spend in real time.

“It is time for Aforza to tell the world about its technology, time to build out its footprint in the U.S. and in Europe, invest more in R&D and execute the Salesforce playbook,” he said. “That is what this round is about.”

Dinardo intends on using the new funding to continue R&D and to double its employee headcount over the next six months as it establishes its new U.S. headquarters in the Northeast. It is already working with customers in 20 countries.

As to growth, Dinardo said he is using his past experiences at startups like Veeva and Vlocity, which was acquired by Salesforce in 2020, as benchmarks for Aforza’s success.

“We have the money and the expertise — now we need to take a moment to breathe, hire people with the passion to do this and invest in new product tiers, digital assets and even payments,” he said.

 

Talkdesk, a provider of cloud-based contact center software, announced $230 million in new Series D funding that more than triples the company’s valuation to $10 billion, Talkdesk founder CEO Tiago Paiva confirmed to TechCrunch.

New investors Whale Rock Capital Management, TI Platform Management and Alpha Square Group came on board for this round and were joined by existing investors Amity Ventures, Franklin Templeton, Top Tier Capital Partners, Viking Global Investors and Willoughby Capital.

Talkdesk uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve customer service for midmarket and enterprise businesses. It counts over 1,800 companies as customers, including IBM, Acxiom, Trivago and Fujitsu.

“The global pandemic was a big part of how customers interact and how we interacted with our customers, all working from home,” Paiva said. “When you think about ordering things online, call, chat and email interactions became more important, and contact centers became core in every company.”

San Francisco-based Talkdesk now has $498 million in total funding since its inception in 2011. It was a Startup Battlefield contestant at TechCrunch Disrupt NY in 2012. The new funding follows a $143 million Series C raised last July that gave it a $3 billion valuation. Prior to that, Talkdesk brought in $100 million in 2018.

The 2020 round was planned to buoy the company’s growth and expansion to nearly 2,000 employees, Paiva said. For the Series D, there was much interest from investors, including a lot of inbound interest, he said.

“We were not looking for new money, and finished last year with more money in the bank that we raised in the last round, but the investors were great and wanted to make it work,” Paiva said.

Half of Talkdesk’s staff is in product and engineering, an area he intends to double down in with the new funding as well as adding to the headcount to support customers. The company also has plans to expand in areas where it is already operating — Latin America, Europe, Asia and Australia.

This year, the company unveiled new features, including Talkdesk Workspace, a customizable interface for contact center teams, and Talkdesk Builder, a set of tools for customization across workspaces, routing, reporting and integrations. It also launched contact center tools designed specifically for financial services and healthcare organizations and what it is touting as the “industry’s first human-in-the-loop tool for contact centers and continues to lower the barrier to adopting artificial intelligence solutions.”

In addition to the funding, Talkdesk appointed its first chief financial officer, Sydney Carey, giving the company an executive team of 50% women, Paiva said. Carey has a SaaS background and joins the company from Sumo Logic, where she led the organization through an initial public offering in 2020.

“We were hiring our executive team over the past couple of years, and were looking for a CFO, but with no specific timeline, just looking for the right person,” Paiva added. “Sydney was the person we wanted to hire.”

Though Paiva didn’t hint at any upcoming IPO plans, TI Platform Management co-founders Trang Nguyen and Alex Bangash have followed Paiva since he started the company and said they anticipate the company heading in that direction in the future.

“Talkdesk is an example of what can happen when a strong team is assembled behind a winning idea,” they said in a written statement. “Today, Talkdesk has become near ubiquitous as a SaaS product with adoption across a broad array of industries and integrations with the most popular enterprise cloud platforms, including Salesforce, Zendesk and Slack.”

 

Nigeria’s less than two-decade-old ecosystem is evolving fast. But behind the funding and legitimate hype, there’s without a doubt plenty of learning that needs to be done in running a startup.

In retrospect, founders in Nigeria do tremendous work when you consider the kind of harsh market they operate in. They are deserving of all the praise they get. However, some questionable antics require addressing.

There are instances when founders know their companies are dying but would rather sink with it (without having a plan) than let someone else lead. Or other instances where founders know there’s a need to hire someone as CEO to blitz scale their companies but would rather settle for mediocre growth.

Stories where startups take drastic actions to save or scale a company are few and far between.

Despite a relatively short time in the startup scene, Adia Sowho, one of the well-known operators around the region, has been fortunate to experience and live through one. Last year, she became the CEO of Thrive Agric, an agriculture fintech company, guiding it through a turnaround after the COVID-19 pandemic induced a crisis in the business.

Before that, she worked as the VP of Growth and managing director, Nigeria, for fintech platform Migo. And outside the startup scene, she was the director of Digital Business at telecom operator 9mobile and is currently the chief marketing officer of mobile telecoms giant MTN Nigeria.

TechCrunch sat down with Sowho to share her experience working as a telecom executive, an operator with Thrive Agric and Migo, her view on how operators can work with founders, her decision to leave the startup scene and how her new journey is all according to plan.

What was your career like before becoming an operator in tech?

I had a long career across different parts of the mobile telecom space, specifically, with my last role being responsible for digital business. Digital business in a telco is essentially that arm of the telco that interfaces with third parties, often startups who have products more innovative than what the telco might have, in its current portfolio, and of interest to customers.

I got that department in its inception at 9mobile and grew it to a $100 million revenue aspect of the business. In doing that, I interacted with various sectors and launched a couple of music apps, gaming platforms, content platforms from like, short-form two minutes to longer forms.

We also did mobile advertising, the Internet of Things and financial services. But the telco industry is very massive, and the infrastructure is very old and difficult to shift into the internet economy. After that, I was looking for something else to do and having been bitten by the startup bug because my team was essentially the internal startup to 9mobile, I was looking for more of that excitement. And I guess I wanted to put my money where my mouth was.

So, why Migo, since a lot of startups existed at the time? I mean, we’re talking early 2018 here.

After 9mobile, I decided to go to Migo because I felt like financial services was critical and the bedrock of a holistic financial system with four elements — savings, credit, insurance and payments.

So in the Nigerian tech scene, a little bit was happening in savings, but to me, it was not a priority in a country that didn’t have a massive GDP per capita. This period was also still in the early stages of Flutterwave and Paystack and we had just started waking up to payments in a big way.

But there was very little happening in credit. I could walk into my bank and get a loan only if the company I worked for was known to that bank, and the bank had some visibility of that company’s finances as well. It was still tough to access credit. That’s why I joined Migo, because I felt like if you don’t solve your financial services problem, you can’t really do anything else. After all, it’s the underlying infrastructure that everything else needs.

How was your experience at the fintech startup?

When I joined, the team was very small at that time. Everyone could fit into one conference room, and then, I started building out the Nigeria business as the managing director.

I hired the team to start delivering products through partnerships and got the userbase to over a million users before leaving. So that was definitely a fun but trying experience. It taught me a lot about myself, and I definitely got first-hand experience of the challenge of building and leading a startup in emerging markets.

Did anything transpire within the startup that led to you leaving?

Let’s say I wanted to start a new journey. I mean, look, COVID hit a lot of businesses hard, and in your startup journey, you have to make some directional changes.

Migo has now more cleanly focused on embedded finance, which required making some changes within the organization, and that happened with COVID. It just seemed like a good time to leave, which I did, plus I might have been a bit burnt out, as I was exhausted when I left.

But you joined Thrive Agric four months after leaving?

Yeah, it was a few months after, that’s interesting [laughs]. So I mean, we’ve talked about how I was drawn to financial services because that’s sort of fundamental to economic development. With Thrive Agric, I definitely felt the same: we eat food. There are millions of smallholder farmers in Nigeria. What Thrive does in consolidating their output to be sold to local off-takers is a critical aspect of Nigeria’s future.

It’s food security. If you sit down and think about the Global Sustainable Development Goals, food security shows up somehow, right? So for me, even though I was still trying to rest, I couldn’t say no. It felt like a call to service to help them figure out what was wrong and try to get them out of the crisis; I really didn’t want to see a company like that die.

I remember it was a rough period for the company. How challenging was it, as it was a new experience for you? 

Oh, it was pretty tough. I don’t think I’ve apologized for anything I’ve ever done in my life as much as I did that period. It was definitely intense to be confronted with the rage of thousands of people at the same time. It’s a one-of-a-kind experience. It definitely wasn’t enjoyable, but then again, everybody was under pressure.

The rage was definitely understandable. I couldn’t challenge or argue with it. It was valid, but at the same time, so many companies worldwide suffered due to the pandemic. Sure, Thrive could have handled things better; obviously, that’s why I joined.

But it was a tough job keeping customers happy and protecting the founders because there were many people ready to take some very extreme measures, as you can imagine, but we managed to all largely survive it.

In a nutshell, how did you bring the company out of the crisis it was facing?

When I stepped in, I was extremely focused on addressing the problem. It took me a while to meet the whole company because I was keenly focused on the specific teams, people and resources required to solve the problem first.

It was only after creating a plan that I could start looking at the rest of the company to address what systemic issue led to the problem. There’s no chronic problem in a startup that is not led or supported by something systemic within the startup.

Let’s talk about the problem. What exactly happened?

Essentially, the challenge with Thrive was a timing issue. Thrive works with the farmers to grow crops. They deliver fertilizer and seeds, and the farmers grow the crops. We support farmers during harvest and manage them getting the harvest to the warehouse. Then we take the goods from the warehouse into the market and sell them to our clients.

So COVID prevented farmers from accessing the farms. It prevented us from accessing the markets to sell the goods. It prevented us from going to the farms to gather the produce and take them to sell.

During the lockdown, you can’t do any of that because you can’t move. You can’t deliver seeds to the farmers; the farmers cannot plant, you cannot get people to support them with harvest, you cannot receive the goods. So the fundamental ability for the company to make money was compromised. 

When that happened, it wasn’t a problem anybody had seen before. The team didn’t know how to react and did not pass on the bad news to subscribers. And bad news is always tough to deliver. What it created was this timing issue and that’s why though we were able to pay back, we did with delay. We wanted to honor the obligations to subscribers. The business model does work. It’s just that Thrive wasn’t prepared for a pandemic, but eventually, we’ve been able to catch up a little bit.

Your case with Thrive Agric is quite unique because you were brought as someone with managerial experience to help the company. That’s not the case generally within the ecosystem. Some founders rarely want to relinquish their position even if the company is going downhill. Why do you think this is so?

I think part of it is because startup culture comes from Silicon Valley and startup culture there prefers to rely on less-experienced people at the beginning. And to be honest, experience and innovation are not comfortable bedfellows because when you have experience, you will lean on what is tried and tested. When you’re trying to be innovative, you are throwing away what is tried and tested.

So essentially, the challenge that African founders now have is that we have to find a way to localize that context. But going to my first point, we can also see that Google and Facebook made changes when necessary. With Facebook, it was Sheryl Sandberg. Google did with Eric Schmidt. Maybe our startups have to do it a little bit earlier and a little bit more informally first, and that’s fine because of the lack of infrastructure existing in the country.

Experience helps you know where someone may have tried something or made a mistake before. That’s why my joining Thrive made sense. I’m happy to see that there is more interest in welcoming people with experience and quite a few more people feel emboldened to make the jump into startups.

So I believe that the trend is changing, although it can be definitely difficult when you want a long career. To jump into the startup culture, you have to throw away many comforts and embrace an extremely dynamic environment.

How would you say Thrive Agric is faring now?

Because I took a systemic approach to manage the team and the startup, I believe they are on better footing. Now, the founders and the senior team can a little bit more comfortably see around corners. The only thing you can do with risk is to manage it or prevent it.

When I got into Thrive, I was highly focused on what went wrong, understanding the causality and retraining the team to better see around those kinds of corners. That work continues. I stay on as an advisor because I want to ensure the company’s continued success for the same reason I gave before: food security.

I mean, Thrive is one of three companies that the Central Bank of Nigeria is satisfied with giving support to deliver food security nationwide. It means that the sky is the limit in terms of growth because Thrive is aggregating 100,000 farmers in the country just this year. The growth potential for this company is astounding.

So, in all this, what does your experience at Thrive tell you about startups and the Nigerian tech ecosystem in general?

Startup life is hard in countries that are infrastructure rich. It is harder in countries that are infrastructure light. In Nigeria and Africa, that internally forces startups to build infrastructure that they don’t have. But the problem for some is that when they build it, they individualize it, which kind of sucks.

But at the same time, the low-hanging fruit around here is just amazing. I’m excited by the potential and possibility of creating a new version of what the economy can look like by tapping into the internet and connectivity.

So for me, there are definitely opportunities to support startups differently. I think maybe that’s going to be the focus of my work with the ecosystem going forward. Figuring out how to help the ecosystem build better products and run better startups based on my experience.

Since I can’t obviously go in and do that for everybody, I’ll try to figure out a way to share my knowledge at scale.

How will you do that now that you’ve left the startup scene and gone back to the corporate world with MTN?

Well, let’s talk about infrastructure. You know, if you think about your startup with MTN as a partner, what does the trajectory of that startup now look like? It’s massive. So that’s why I took this role.

I’m still doing a lot of startup ecosystem work. For me, there is a telco role in all future unicorn stories. That requires empathy on both sides to happen. It’s something I’ve talked about, written about, been working for years, just figuring out how to make these relationships work better. I guess that’s why, you know, a candidate like me was appealing to the company. I’m keen to go there and continue the same work at scale with the knowledge I have.

Twitter has locked the account of Indian National Congress, the South Asian nation’s largest opposition party, for violating its rules days after the American social network temporarily suspended profiles of several of the party’s senior leaders.

The Indian National Congress wrote about the Twitter episode on Facebook Thursday. “When our leaders were put in jails, we were not scared then why would we be afraid of closing our Twitter accounts now. We are Congress, this is the message of the people, we will fight, we will keep fighting. If it is a crime to raise our voice to get justice for the rape victim girl, then we will do this crime a hundred times. Jai Hind… Satyamev Jayate,” it said.

The social media head of All Indian Congress Committee, Rohan Gupta, alleged that Twitter had taken the step at the direction of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

“The Twitter Rules are enforced judiciously and impartially for everyone on our service. We have taken proactive action on several hundred Tweets that posted an image that violated our Rules, and may continue to do so in line with our range of enforcement options. Certain types of private information carry higher risks than others, and our aim is always to protect individuals’ privacy and safety. We strongly encourage everyone on the service to familiarise themselves with the Twitter Rules and report anything they believe is in violation,” a Twitter spokesperson told TechCrunch.

Last week, Twitter suspended the account of Rahul Gandhi, the former president of the Indian National Congress, after he tweeted pictures with the family of a nine-year-old who was allegedly raped and murdered. The company was shortly reached by the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights, an Indian statutory body, which said the Congress leader’s tweets violated the privacy of a minor victim.

The new episode is Twitter’s latest headache in India. After months-long public discourse with the Indian government, Twitter finally complied with the South Asian nation’s new IT law, which went into effect in May, a lawyer for New Delhi said in a court Tuesday.

This is a developing story. More to follow…

Mumbai-based Eruditus, which works with top universities globally to offer more than 100 executive-level courses to students in over 80 nations, said on Thursday it has raised $650 million in a new financing round led by Accel and SoftBank Vision Fund 2.

The new financing round — which includes both primary and secondary transactions — values the Indian startup at $3.2 billion, up from about $700 million a year ago. The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board also participated in the new round.

Eruditus, which counts Chan Zuckerberg Initiative among its backers, maintains a tie-up with over 30 top-tier universities, including MIT, Harvard, Columbia, Cambridge, INSEAD, Wharton, UC Berkeley, IIT, IIM and NUS. The universities and Eruditus work to develop courses that are aimed at offering higher education to students. These courses cost anything between $5,000 to $40,000.

The new fundraise comes at a time when Indian startups are raising record capital from high-profile investors. India, which is the world’s second largest internet market, has produced over 23 unicorns this year (Eruditus is the 23rd), up from 11 last year and 6 in 2019. Some investors have also doubled down on the South Asian market after China, one of the other rare big growth markets, enforced a series of regulatory changes that has wiped hundreds of billions of dollars in recent weeks.

Eruditus is SoftBank’s second major bet on India’s edtech market. The Japanese investment firm has also backed Unacademy.

UpGrad, a Bangalore-based startup that specializes in higher education and upskilling courses, joined the unicorn club earlier this week. VerSe Innovation, which operates news aggregator service Dailyhunt and short video apps Josh, said early Thursday that it has raised over $450 million in a new financing round.

This is a developing story. More to follow…

VerSe Innovation, the parent firm of popular news aggregator Dailyhunt and short video app Josh, said on Thursday it has raised over $450 million in a new financing round, just five months after securing $200 million, as the Indian startup looks to expand its offerings to international markets.

Siguler Guff, Baillie Gifford, affiliates of Carlyle Asia Partners Growth II and others financed VerSe Innovation’s Series I round, while existing investors Sofina Group, Qatar Investment Authority and BCap participated.

VerSe Innovation said in a statement that its valuation has more than doubled in the past five months without disclosing a precise figure. The startup was valued at over $1 billion in its Series H financing round.

The Google and Microsoft-backed startup claimed that Josh, which has amassed over 115 million monthly active users, 56 million of whom use the app each day. Dailyhunt, the startup said, has amassed over 300 million monthly active users.

This is a developing story. More to follow…

AppWorks, the Taipei-based venture capital firm focused on Taiwan and Southeast Asia, announced today it has closed its oversubscribed third fund, raising $150 million. AppWorks Fund III’s limited partners include Taiwan Mobile, Axiom Asia Private Capital, Fubon Life, TransGlobe Life, Hongtai Group, Wistron, Cathay Life, Phison Electronics and Taiwan’s National Development Fund. Many of these LPs also participated in AppWorks’ $50 million second fund in 2014.

AppWorks’ total assets under management (AUM) is now $212 million. As part of Fund III’s close, AppWorks is recruiting new investment associates and analysts, especially ones who will focus on sourcing deals throughout Southeast Asia.

Jamie Lin, the firm’s chairman and founding partner, told TechCrunch that Fund III had an initial target of $100 million, but surpassed it because of the strong performance of AppWorks’ second fund.

Fund II’s portfolio includes Lalamove and 91APP, and at the end of July 2021, its total value to paid-in (TVPI), or the return multiple net of fees, reached 3.3x. By comparison, the top quartile of global VC and private equity funds launched around the same time have a TVPI of 2.4x, according to data from Cambridge Associates. Fund II also achieved internal rate of return (IRR) of 34.7%, compared to 26.1% for the other funds.

Founded in 2009, AppWorks started its accelerator program before launching a $11 million debut fund in 2012. AppWorks’ ecosystem now includes 414 active startups that have collectively raised $4.3 billion, and have an aggregate valuation of $17.4 billion. Over the next 10 years, AppWorks’ goal is to increase that to 1,000 active startups with a collective value of more than $100 billion.

Lin said AppWorks has a strong incoming pipeline because many startups in its ecosystem, including ones run by accelerator alumni and its mentor network of about 100 seasoned entrepreneurs, have reached product-market fit, are scalable and need to raise funding to accelerate growth.

Fund III is earmarked for a portfolio of about 40 startups, split evenly between investments starting at $2 million in Series A to Series C rounds, and seed-stage investments. Seed-stage checks can range in size from about $50,000 to $200,000, depending on a startup’s needs. Part of the fund’s capital will also go toward AppWorks’ current portfolio companies as they reach maturation.

AppWorks’ three main investment themes are Southeast Asia, blockchain and artificial intelligence.

Lin said that many of AppWorks accelerator graduates over the past three to five years are from Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam and, increasingly, Indonesia and the Philippines. (AppWorks also serves as an LP in about 15 seed funds across Southeast Asia, which helped it maintain strong deal flow despite pandemic travel restrictions).

AppWorks’ current blockchain investments include Dapper Labs, Animoca Brands and Splinterlands. Lin is especially keen on NFTs and their “ability to bridge the physical world and digital world,” plus blockchain’s potential to change how people game (for example, the play-to-earn model Splinterlands is known for).

Investing in a mix of seed- and growth-stage deals means Fund III’s schedule will be more evenly spread out. The approach is “better for LPs, but also mostly comes from our philosophy of putting founders front and center,” Lin said. “A lot of our accelerator alumni startups are by first-time founders, so they need help all the way from seed stage. Many of our mentors have already raised seed or Series A rounds, and they come to us when they need someone to lead a Series B of $10, $15 or $20 million. It stems from our particular deal flow, since we’re mainly supporting our alumni founders and mentors, so we have two very different types of deal flows.”

Fund III has already backed AppWorks accelerator alumni like Pickone, WeMo Scooter, Omnichat, XREX, Blocto, SoopahGenius and Docosan. Investments from its mentor network include Carousell, Dapper Labs, Tiki, Dcard, Yummy Corp and Animoca Brands.

 

Sydney, Australia-based Fable Food is the latest plant-based food startup to announce funding. The company, which uses mushrooms in its meat alternatives, has raised $6.5 million AUD (about $4.8 million USD) in a seed round led by Blackbird Ventures, the Australian venture capital firm whose portfolio also includes Canva, Culture Amp and SafetyCulture. Other participants included agriculture and food tech venture firm AgFunder, sustainability-focused Aera VC and Better Bite Ventures, along with Singapore-based produce importer Ban Choon Marketing and former Sequoia Capital partner Warren Hogarth.

Fable is preparing to launch in the United States by the end of this year. In Australia, its products are available at retailers like Woolworths, Coles and Harris Farm Markets, along with restaurants including Grill’d, which recently started serving its Meaty Mushroom Burger Pattie at 136 locations. Fable’s products are also available at restaurants in Singapore and the United Kingdom.

The startup was founded in 2019 by fine dining chef turned chemical engineer and mycologist (mushroom scientist) Jim Fuller, organic mushroom farmer Chris McLoghlin and Michael Fox, whose previous startup was Shoes of Prey.

Fox, Fable’s chief executive officer, told TechCrunch in an email that after being a vegetarian for six years, he recently became a vegan “for a mix of health, environmental and ethical reasons.”

“Talking to my friends and family, a lot of people want to reduce their meat consumption for the same reasons but they find it challenging because they love the taste and texture of meat and giving it up is hard,” Fox said. He wanted to find a way to make it easier for people to transition to plant-based foods, and spoke to several chefs who suggested using mushrooms as a base ingredient. Then Fox met Fuller and McLoghlin, who were in the process of developing meat alternatives using mushrooms.

“When we met, we realized we shared the same values and goals and had complementary skill sets,” said Fox. “We shared a common desire to help end industrial agriculture and wanted to make our food system more ethical, healthy, sustainable and lower its greenhouse gas emissions.”

Fable’s first products include a substitute for pulled pork, braised beef and beef brisket (Fuller grew up in Texas eating slow-cooked meats and wanted to recreate the experience), along with a line of ready-made meals. The company uses shiitake mushrooms, which Fox explained are “very flavorful with their natural umami flavors, they are a slow-growing mushroom so they naturally have the fleshy fibers that give the meaty bite you typically get from animal proteins, and have the right chemical composition that when cooked allow us to taste flavors that are found in animal products.”

Fuller serves as Fable’s chief science officer and the startup leverages his experience as a chef/chemical engineer/mycologist to create the right combinations of flavor, aroma and texture while keeping processing and ingredients to a minimum. For example, its braised beef alternative is made with shiitake mushrooms, seven other ingredients and salt and pepper.

Fable also announced today it has appointed Dan Joyce, who was previously safety and compliance software company SafetyCulture’s general manager of Europe, the Middle East and Africa, as chief growth officer to head global sales and marketing. It will launch in the U.S. through a combination of partnerships with restaurants and meal kit companies.

Other startups that use mushrooms as basis for meat alternatives include Meati and AtLast. Fox said a main difference is that those two startups ferment mycelium, or the root structure of fungi, instead of using mushrooms, which are the fruiting body of fungi.

Fable’s new funding will be used for research and development, expanding its production and manufacturing capacity in Australia and other countries. The company is keeping its product pipeline under wraps for now, but Fox said it plans to develop mushroom-based substitutes for pork, chicken, lamb and other animal proteins.

Over the last year, Tinder has experimented with creative ways for people to connect beyond just swiping right. Pandemic or not, it’s hard to make the first move — so why not break the ice by weathering a virtual apocalypse with a potential date? Today, Tinder announced that it will launch its second “Swipe Night” series after its first installment garnered engagement from over 20 million users.

Tinder launched Swipe Night in 2019 as an interactive “choose your own adventure” story at a time when the app had experienced a decline in one of its user engagement metrics and saw a dip in quarterly revenue. In the months since, COVID slowed Tinder’s revenue further, but more recently, it’s been rebounding.

Noting that its user base was half Gen Z (ages 18-25), Tinder hired now 25-year-old director Karena Evans, who has also directed music videos for Drake, as well as the premiere of HBO Max’s “Gossip Girl” reboot. The Swipe Night story invited users to choose what they would do in the apocalypse, swiping left or right to indicate their decisions as a character in the story. Based on how they swiped, users would get matched with other Swipe Night participants, and their choices would appear on their Tinder profile.

“All of this new information will make for plenty of material for post-apocalyptic banter,” the company had said.

Skeptics might find this to be an inorganic way to boost user engagement and matches, but on Swipe Nights, there was a 26% increase in matches compared with a typical Sunday night, Tinder now reports. The interactive video series was even recognized at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival.

The next installment for Swipe Night will be a “Gen Z whodunnit,” Tinder announced today.

The upcoming series will utilize Tinder’s “Fast Chat,” the quick chat feature that powers Tinder’s new “Hot Takes” experience where users can talk before matching. On Swipe Night, Fast Chat will allow users to analyze clues and work together to solve the mystery, even if they haven’t already matched.

Tinder says Swipe Night will debut in the app’s “Explore” section, which is a newer part of the Tinder app that gives members different ways to meet beyond just swiping. The section was announced last month as part of a group of features targeting Gen Z users, along with Hot Takes and video profiles.