Year: 2021

Collaborative software is so hot right now, but the space is also incredibly crowded. It can be hard to rise above the noise, but Coda has managed to do so with $140 million in funding and a valuation topping $600 million.

So it should go without saying that we’re excited to hear from Coda CEO Shishir Mehrotra and Madrona investor S. Somasegar, who invested in the company’s Series C round, on an upcoming episode of Extra Crunch Live.

Soma is a managing director at Madrona, responsible for investments in Snowflake, UIPath, Coda, Pulumi, Seekout and more. He invests in a broad array of categories, including machine learning, next-gen cloud infrastructure, future of work, robotic process automation and more.

Before Madrona, Soma spent 27 years at Microsoft as SVP of the Developer Division. He’s got experience both as an operator and investor and will have plenty of wisdom to impart on the episode.

Mehrotra, for his part, has built a pretty massive business that has not only scaled well, but competes directly with giants like Google. Coda is a collaborative doc/spreadsheet software that looks to take on the G Suite. Before Coda, Mehrotra was an executive at YouTube and, prior to that, held leadership roles at Microsoft working on Windows, Office and SQL Server.

We’ll talk to these two about fundraising for a product like Coda, what attracted Soma to the platform and how they work alongside one another today. We’ll also have an Extra Crunch Live Pitch-Off, where folks in the audience can come on “stage” and pitch their wares. Mehrotra and Soma will give their live feedback and, let’s face it, make all of us better at pitching in general.

The episode goes down on June 2 at 3 p.m. EDT/noon PDT and is accessible to anyone. However, only Extra Crunch members can access this episode (and the entire ECL library) on-demand. If you’re not a member yet, join here.

Register here to hang out with us on the episode.

The NFT world is all about reshaping the idea of digital ownership, but art hardware startup Infinite Objects sees a big opportunity in making physical copies of those assets as it looks to reshape digital art and collectibles.

The startup makes screens that show a single video from a single artist and don’t do anything else. You can’t download apps to the screens or upload your own photos to them or check the time or weather. If you even want another piece of art from Infinite Objects, you can’t just download it, you have to actually go to their site and buy another display with that artwork on it. Each screen boasts information about the work, edition numbers and serial numbers etched on the back of it, inextricably tying the physical display to the work that it displays.

Infinite Objects CEO Joe Saavedra tells TechCrunch they’ve raised $6 million in seed funding from a host of backers including Courtside VC, which led the deal, and NBA Top Shot creator Dapper Labs.

For the longest time, Infinite Objects was an NFT platform without the NFTs. The company has worked with artists since 2018 to make (often limited run) series of physical display frames highlighting a specific digital work of the artist that looped forever. Sure, users could watch that looping video on the Infinite Objects website whenever they wanted, but the value was in owning an official copy of that artist’s work. Sound familiar?

When the wider popularity of NFTs as a speculative asset hit earlier this year, Saavedra saw a huge opportunity as internet users began discussing the future of digital art and digital scarcity. His team had already flirted with NFTs, partnering with artist Beeple back in December — months before he would spring out of relative obscurity in art circles with a $69 million sale at the Christie’s auction house — to release “physical tokens” of NFTs he was selling on the platform Nifty Gateway.

Saavedra sees a bigger opportunity for companies and creators in the NFT world to make their assets more approachable and understandable to a general audience with what his company is building, but he also sees a chance to transform NFTs from blind ownership to something more focused on actually appreciating the digital art that’s been purchased.

“When it comes to ownership, it’s exciting to be buying an NFT for $500 or $5,000, but what’s not exciting is having to open Safari on your phone to show it off,” Saavedra tells TechCrunch. “This physical vessel that we’ve designed is just so understandable for people who maybe don’t even understand what the blockchain at all, but they certainly understand limited edition physical merchandise.”

Saavedra is dismissive of other digital displays that cycle through artwork and says that art owners could also just toss images of their NFTs onto the TV if they wanted to, but that they all only serve up art as “glorified screensavers.”

The team at Infinite Objects sees broader opportunities in the NFT world but they’ve been tight-lipped on exactly what these efforts will look like. You can see some potential hints in the list of backers in this round, including most interestingly NBA Top Shot creator Dapper Labs. The startup has been building out its own blockchain called Flow and Saavedra was quick to sing its praises in our conversation, noting that its more scalable and sustainable than the Ethereum network. Dapper Labs recently announced its first major third-party NFT platform, partnering with avatar startup Genies –another investor in this round — for a digital accessories storefront that’s being launched this summer.

Serena Ventures, Betaworks, Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, GFR Fund, Kevin Durant & Rich Kleiman, Genies, and Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures also participated in the round.

On Wednesday evening, Twitter announced that Spaces – its Clubhouse competitor – will start rolling out for use on the web. Earlier this month, Twitter Spaces became available for any user with more than 600 followers on the iOS or Android apps, and around the same time, Clubhouse finally released its long-awaited Android app. Still, Clubhouse has yet to debut on the web, marking a success for Twitter in the race to corner the live social audio market. 

Even Instagram is positioning itself as a Clubhouse competitor, allowing users to “go live” with the ability to mute their audio and video. How will each app differentiate itself? Twitter CFO Ned Segal attempted to address this at JP Morgan’s 49th Annual Technology, Media, & Communications conference this week. 

“Twitter is where you go to find out what’s happening in the world and what people are talking about,” said Segal. “So when you come to Twitter, and you look at your home Timeline and you see a Space, it’s gonna perhaps be people who you don’t know but who are talking about a topic that’s incredibly relevant to you. It could be Bitcoin, it could be the aftershock from the Grammys, it could be that they’re talking about the NFL Draft.” 

Twitter’s focus areas for the web version of Spaces include a UI that adapts to the user’s screen size and reminders for scheduled Spaces. Before joining a space, Twitter will display a preview that shows who is in a Space, and a description of the topic being discussed. Users will also be able to have a Space open on the right side of their screen while still scrolling through their Timeline.

Image Credits: Twitter

Most crucially, this update lists accessibility and transcriptions as a focus area. For an audio-only platform, live transcriptions are necessary for Deaf and hard-of-hearing people to join in on the conversation. In screenshots Twitter shared of the new features, we can see how live captions will appear in Spaces. As for how accurate these transcriptions will be, the jury’s still out.

Twitter fielded well-deserved criticism last year when it failed to include captioning on its audio tweet feature. In an apology tweet, Twitter Support wrote, “Accessibility should not be an afterthought.” By September, Twitter launched two accessibility teams. 

Still, accessibility has often been treated as an afterthought throughout the rise of live audio. Clubhouse does not yet support live captioning. 

Something I think that gets lost in the conversation around robotics is just how many different tasks can — and at some point will — be automated. Here I’m talking specifically about agtech. We’ve seen a ton of agricultural robotics come across our desk in recent years, and one of the more remarkable things about it all is just how broad the applications are.

There are all of the usual automated tasks you’d expect: produce picking, payload carting, weed pulling. All necessary farming tasks that seem to be well served by the industry. But what of rocks? Honestly, it’s something that hadn’t really occurred to me, having not spent any time on farms, aside from the occasional elementary school field trip.

TerraClear first entered our radar in 2018, mostly due to the founder’s former company (Smartsheet). Rocks are, quite literally, a big problem for farmers and farming equipment, so the company built a tractor/robot designed to pick them up. The system, which ships next year, will be able to grab up to 400 rocks an hour — individual rocks weighing up to 300 pounds.

The company just announced a $25 million Series A, which brings its total funding up to $36 million, says founder and CEO Brent Frei.

“There are more than 400 million arable acres worldwide that have been waiting for a cost-effective and productive solution to this problem,” said Frei. “Repetitive tasks like this are optimal targets for automation, and the technologies we are bringing to the field dramatically reduce the labor and time needed to prep fields for planting.”

Image Credits: Bowery Farming

Since we’re talking about farms and robots, Bowery Farming deserves a mention for a massive $300 million round. That puts the NYC-based company’s value at a beefy $2.3 billion. Robots, sensors and AI are a big part of Bowery’s vertical farming approach. The company’s already sending its produce to 850 grocery stores, along with a deal with Amazon Fresh.

It’s probably safe to say that indoor farming has a future for all sorts of reasons having to do with land use, climate and beyond.

Image Credits: MIT

Of course today’s research is tomorrow’s unicorns (this is not actually a saying…yet), and there are a couple of projects worth noting this week. Leading off the bunch is MIT, which is giving robotic inspection the finger. The oddly (but not inaccurately) named Digger Finger is capable of sensing and identifying objects underground. It’s a useful skill that could someday be deployed for landmines, finding underground cables and a variety of other tasks.

And here’s a nice feel-good story, as it were. A new paper published in Science from University of Pittsburgh engineers highlights the value of adding tactile feedback for prosthetic arms. This delivers some clear advantages over traditional vision sensing. Per the paper:

Flesher et al. added an afferent channel to the brain-computer interface to mimic sensory input from the skin of a hand (see the Perspective by Faisal). The improvements achieved by adding the afferent input were substantial in a battery of motor tasks tested in a human subject.

Instacart is speeding up grocery delivery. The company announced today it’s debuting a faster delivery service, “Priority Delivery,” in select markets across the U.S. and Canada, with the aim of attracting customers who would have otherwise quickly run to the store for their smaller orders or more urgent demands. At launch, the service will operate in several larger U.S. metros, and will offer deliveries in as fast as 30 minutes, the company says. Instacart is also expanding other speedier delivery services, including 45-minute and 60-minute options, to more cities and retailers in the months to come.

Today, many customers use Instacart to order their larger, weekly or monthly grocery orders, but still run to the store when they need a smaller number of items — like ingredients for tonight’s meal, for example. The new Priority Delivery wants to be an alternative to these shorter trips, effectively becoming the grocery delivery alternative to using a store’s express lane checkout.

In the markets where Priority Delivery is live, it will be indicated by supported retailers in the Instacart app with a lightning bolt icon that notes the expected delivery time, like “30 minutes or less.” Customers will also be given the option to choose Priority during checkout, instead of Standard delivery or a scheduled time, if they prefer.

The company tells us there’s not an item limit nor minimum on these types of orders. However, shorter requests — like milk, a few bags of chips, and a couple of bottles of wine, for instance — will be fulfilled faster than orders where the customer is requesting speciality deli items, a pickup from a bakery, or has a larger basket size.

When the basket size grows larger or the order becomes more complicated, the app will update to display that the 30-minute window is no longer available and display the new delivery time.

Instacart hasn’t yet finalized its pricing for the service, but Priority Delivery will carry an upcharge of some kind. However, the company tells us the fee will be “small” and “incremental,” and will likely be dynamic based on market considerations. It notes that the different delivery options and their associated fees and taxes are displayed during checkout, so there are no surprises.

Initially, Priority Delivery will be available in 5 cities, including Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, San Diego, San Francisco, and Seattle, across more than 300 store locations, including grocers and speciality retailers. It plans to roll out the service to more markets and retailers over time.

“We know that no two grocery shops are created equal – whether it’s a bulk buy for the week ahead or just a few ingredients for tonight’s dinner – so we’re launching new features that support the many ways people shop for their groceries today,” noted Daniel Danker, Vice President of Product at Instacart, in a statement about the launch. “For many customers, every minute counts when they’re in a pinch and need something in a hurry. With today’s launch of Priority Delivery, we’re redefining the ‘quick run to the store’ and bringing the grocery express lane online for customers,” he added.

In addition, Instacart will expand access to 45-minute and 60-minute delivery options to more cities across the U.S., allowing consumers other options for faster delivery, even if the Priority service is not available.

The move to increase delivery speeds across its footprint could help Instacart better compete with grocery delivery rivals, like Walmart and Amazon’s grocery businesses, as well as Target-owned Shipt.

It also shortly follows Amazon’s announcement last week that it would be shutting down its standalone Prime Now delivery app and website, to instead direct shoppers who want faster delivery on groceries to the Amazon app and website. However, in Amazon’s case, it’s promising 2-hour delivery windows on both Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods; not as low as 30 minutes. Meanwhile, Walmart’s membership-based delivery service, Walmart+, doesn’t currently guarantee same-day delivery even for its paying subscribers, as its time slots are on a first-come, first-serve basis. Among the big names, that leaves Shipt  — which offers same-day delivery, but not necessarily in 30 minutes.

The update may also make Instacart more competitive with other types of fast delivery businesses which don’t don’t serve grocery retailers — like goPuff’s ‘instant needs’ delivery service, Uber Eats Essentials, or DoorDash, which last year expanded to include convenience store items — including things like chips, ice cream, spices, packaged foods, and others that might have otherwise made for a quick store trip.

Instacart’s new service is rolling out now to customers in supported markets.

The world of hybrid work is here, and the usual 10-minute intro call, swag bag and first-day team lunch are just not enough to make your new employee feel welcome.

While many companies have found a way to interview and select candidates in a fully remote environment, fewer have spent time and resources on aligning the “pre-boarding” and onboarding process for the new hybrid world of work. Many employers still rely on old ways of welcoming new hires, despite our totally changed work environment.

In our experience at Greenhouse, where we help companies as diverse as BuzzFeed, HubSpot and Intercom hire talent across their organization, first impressions can make or break a candidate’s chances of staying at a company.

In fact, 69% of employees will stay for more than three years if their onboarding experience is good, while 20% will leave within 45 days if it’s bad. That difference is costly, as it takes, on average, around $4,129 and 42 days to fill a position.

Replacing someone can cost up to 50%-60% of their annual salary. At the same time, 58% of organizations said they were guilty of centering their onboarding processes on administrative and paperwork requirements alone.

Here is how we advise our clients to set up every new hire for success right from the start.

The company’s Day One comes long before the candidate’s Day One

Most of us can remember the excitement (and anxiety) of receiving and signing an offer for a new job. It’s important to capitalize on candidates’ enthusiasm and eagerness from the moment the offer is signed, instead of when they log in on Day One.

RevenueCat, a startup offering a series of tools for developers of subscription-based apps, has raised $40 million in Series B funding, valuing its business at $300 million, post-money. Founded by developers who understood the difficulties in scaling a subscription app first-hand, RevenueCat’s software development kit (SDK) solution gives companies the tools they need to build a subscription business, including not just adding subscriptions themselves, but maintaining them over time even as the app stores implement changes. It also aids by sharing subscription data with other tools the business uses, like those for advertising, analytics or attribution.

The funding round was led by Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund and included participation from Index Ventures, SaaStr, Oakhouse, Adjacent, and FundersClub, as well as Blinklist CTO Tobias Balling and Algolia CEO Nicolas Dessaign. With the round, YC Continuity Partner Anu Hariharan is joining RevenueCat’s board, which today includes Index’s Mark Fiorentino in addition to the founders.

Explains RevenueCat CEO Jacob Eiting, the idea for the company came about after he and co-founder Miguel Carranza Guisado (CTO) struggled to figure out subscription infrastructure while working together at Elevate. After years of untangling a “subscription mess” in order to figure out answers to basic questions like subscriber retention and lifetime value, they realized there was potential in helping solve this problem for other developers.

Apple and Google, Eiting explains, aren’t always up to date with what companies actually need to build subscription businesses. “They’re kind of learning as they go. They just weren’t able to provide us the data we needed, and then also the infrastructure to do that is non-trivial.”

Image Credits: RevenueCat

When Eiting and Guisado sat down to work on on RevenueCat in 2017, no one else was even building anything like this. But the demand for the startup’s tools and integrations soon resonated with developers who had faced similar challenges it the growing subsection app market.

Using the service, developers can access a real-time dashboard that display key metrics, like subscription revenue, churn, LTV (lifetime value), subscriber numbers, conversions and more. The data can then be shared through integrations with other tools and services, like Adjust, Amplitude, Apple Search Ads, AppsFlyer, Branch, Facebook Ads, Google Cloud Intercom, Mixpanel, Segment, and several others. 

After launching out of Y Combinator’s accelerator the following year, RevenueCat was soon live with 100 apps and had crossed $1 million in tracked revenue by the time it raised its $1.5 million seed round.

Today, RevenueCat has over 6,000 apps live on its platform, with over $1 billion in tracked subscription revenue being managed by its tools. That’s double the number of apps that were using its service as of its $15 million Series A last August.

With the additional funding, the company will lower its pricing to put its tools in reach of more developers. Previously, it charged $120 per month for its charts and some of its integrations, or $499 per month for access to all integrations. This was affordable for larger companies, but could still be a difficult sell to the long tail of app developers where revenues ranged from $10K to $50K per month.

Now, RevenueCat will charge a small percentage of an app’s sales instead of a flat fee. Developers with up to $10,000 in monthly tracked revenue (MTR) can get started with the service for free and as their demands grow — like needing access to charts, support for web hooks, integrations and others — they can move up to either the Starter or Pro plans as $8/mo or $12/mo per $1,000 in MTR, respectively.

“I’m excited to give those tools to developers, especially on the small end, because it might be what they need to get out of that ‘less than $10K range,'” Eiting says. “Also, the beauty of freemium, or having a really generous free tier, is that it makes your tool the de facto — you remove as much friction as possible for providing software services and then, if you get your pricing right — which I think we have — it all kind of pays for itself,” he adds.

The company also plans to use the new funds to further invest in its business, expanding from App Store and Google Play support to include Amazon’s Appstore. It will also grow its team.

As part of its expected growth, RevenueCat recently hired a Head of Product, Jens-Fabian Goetzmann, previously a PM at Microsoft and then product head at fitness app 8fit. Currently 30 people, in the year ahead, RevenueCat will grow to 60 people, hiring across design, product, engineering, sales and other roles.

“The world is moving toward subscriptions — and for companies, building out this model translates to weeks of developers’ time,” says YC Continuity’s Hariharan. “RevenueCat helps developers rollout subscriptions in minutes and creates a source of truth for customer data. With developers creating solutions to problems in the world, it’s important that they can find ways to monetize, grow, and support their most committed customers. RevenueCat is doing so by building subscriptions 2.0.”

We’ve had a blast meeting new folks in different cities this year and we’re keeping the train rolling. We learned quite a bit about what’s happening now in Miami and got up to speed on what’s been happening in the great city of Detroit. 

Up next? Pittsburgh. Register for free the event here.

That’s right, on June 29th, the TechCrunch City Spotlight is heading to The Iron City. The River City. Blitzburgh (for you Steelers fans). The Pitt. 

A perfect blend of history and modern technology makes for an amazing venue. So far we’ve heard about the medical advancements, robots and self-driving cars. But we know there’s more! (Your unofficial mayor is there on the ground dropping us hints.)

Did you know the Kleiner Perkins origin story centers around Pittsburgh? And speaking of Steelers, have you been keeping tabs on former safety Will Allen’s turn as a VC? Speaking of big hits, Duolingo is on fire. Our own Natasha Mascarenhas recently wrote a four-part EC-1 on the company that has grown to 500 million registered learners.

These are all things that we’ve been digging into as we prepare for next month.

We’re going to have some special guests and interesting panels, and we’re of course going to share the stage with the best and brightest in the city. 

That’s where you come in!

If you’re building something awesome and you’re based in Mark Cuban’s old stomping grounds, we want to hear from you. We’ll be doing a pitch feedback session like the ones you’ve been watching on Extra Crunch Live. So drop us a note here and maybe you’ll be one of the companies to show everyone why Pittsburgh is hot.

Register now and hit us up with tips and unknown facts about your city. (Heads up, we already know about John Fetterman’s Sheetz fandom.)

See you soon!

Boston-based Filtered.ai has raised a $7 million round to accelerate its hiring cadence, and built out the go-to-market model for its its engineering and developer-focused hiring service, it recently announced.

TechCrunch caught up with the company to discuss not only why it decided to leave bootstrapping behind, but also to dig into how its service could widen the market for some technical roles.

The startup was born back in 2016 out of a need when its founder and CEO Paul Bilodeau started to work on it as an internal project while employed at a consultancy. Filtered later split from the consulting group in 2019, signing a term sheet to raise capital in March of 2020. Then COVID-19 arrived, and things got a bit turbulent.

But before we get lost in the money side of things, let’s talk about what the company does.

Filtered’s product is interesting as it could help shake up a hiring system for technical roles for startups that is rife with bias and wasted time. If you are friends with any developers, for example, or data scientists, you are aware of how not-good their hiring process can be.

To pick two issues: Resumes are often a pretty poor indicator of talent, and on-site whiteboard sessions are super unpopular. Filtered is taking on both by providing skills-based take-home tests with AI aboard to help detect fraud. The hiring company can play back those sessions to see how candidates approached problems. Filtered also allows companies to ask candidates open-ended interview questions via video, removing the need for formulaic phone screens that are only good for providing full-employment to junior HR staff.

Filtered claims that its system can get companies to the point of making offers more quickly.

That’s all well and good, but what TechCrunch was most curious about was what the startup’s service might manage when it comes to making hiring more equitable. If it’s more skills-focused than resume-centric, does that shake up who gets hired? It does, the company thinks. Once resumes lose some of their luster, and candidates are vetted on skills over keyword optimization in their applications, “diversity just happens,” Bilodeau explained.

The round

Let’s get back to the money. The timing of Filtered’s anticipated venture capital round and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic were unfortunately timed rather close to each other.

So, Bilodeau told TechCrunch in an interview that his startup effectively raised capital on a drip basis throughout 2020, until it finally closed its round in the fourth quarter of the year. That timing was somewhat fortuitous for its investors — Silicon Valley Data Capital and the AI Fund — as Filtered’s CEO said that that was the company’s best quarter in its history.

From bootstrapping to taking on capital, what changed at Filtered that led it to decide to raise external funding? Per Bilodeau, he didn’t want to raise money. And he said that crowing about fundraising news is somewhat nonsensical, likening it to sharing on LinkedIn that he took out a mortgage on a house.

But as Filtered wanted to hire proactively instead of when it closed a new deal, picking up new funds made sense. The startup also wanted to work more on its marketing efforts, shake up its pricing and move toward a land-and-expand model from an enterprise sales focus. More money would make all of that a bit easier, so it took on capital.

Looking ahead, we’re hoping that Filtered can somehow quantify the impact it has on hiring diverse folks for technical roles. If it’s material, that could be even more exciting than rapid revenue growth.

Rivian said that deliveries of the R1T Launch Edition, the limited edition release of its first series of “electric adventure vehicles,” will be delayed by a month, according to an update on its website.

Customers who preordered can now expect to start receiving their pickup trucks in July instead of June, with Launch Edition deliveries to be completed by Spring 2022. The change was first spotted by the Rivian Forum.

The Amazon-backed EV startup told preorder holders in July 2020 to expect deliveries of the truck in June 2021, with R1S electric SUV deliveries starting two months later in August. The delivery timeline has already been extended once, after Rivian suspended construction work on its factory due to the coronavirus pandemic.

It also appears that the R1S SUV has been delayed by several months, according to the website, which states that all R1T and R1S Launch Edition preorder holders will hear from their designation Rivian customer rep “by the end of November with their expected delivery timing.”

Rivian did not immediately respond with a request for comment. TechCrunch update the article, if they do.

Despite the delay, it looks like Rivian will still be first to bring an electric truck to market among both new EV entrants and legacy automakers. Lordstown Motors CEO Steve Burns said in an investor call last week that deliveries for the company’s “Endurance” truck are still on track for September (despite slashing production numbers in half). Ford’s F-150 Lighting, the electric version of its nameplate pickup, is expected in 2022. And Tesla recently confirmed that its Cybertruck will start production late this year.

Rivian also said it will be starting its drive program in August, which will let customers schedule at-home drives or attend a tour event. The company will be releasing details on launch dates and reservations for the tour events in the coming weeks. Rivian selected Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Detroit and Seattle as the first batch of cities on the tour.

In addition, it released a few product updates. Customers now have the option to add an Off-Road Upgrade to their vehicle configuration for an additional $2,000. Every Rivian will now also come with an onboard air compressor, previously available only with the Off-Road Upgrade.

Customers can also add Rivian Adventure Gear to their configuration. These include a rooftop tent, cargo bars, and camp kitchen (that now comes with a 30-piece kitchen set).