Year: 2021

1Password, the password management service that competes with the likes of LastPass and BitWarden, today announced a major push beyond the basics of password management and into the infrastructure secrets management space. To do so, the company has acquired secrets management service SecretHub and is now launching its new 1Password Secrets Automation service.

1Password did not disclose the price of the acquisition. According to CrunchBase, Netherlands-based SecretHub never raised any institutional funding ahead of today’s announcement.

For companies like 1Password, moving into the enterprise space, where managing corporate credentials, API tokens, keys and certificates for individual users and their increasingly complex infrastructure services, seems like a natural move. And with the combination of 1Password and its new Secrets Automation service, businesses can use a single tool that covers them from managing their employee’s passwords to handling infrastructure secrets. 1Password is currently in use by more then 80,000 businesses worldwide and a lot of these are surely potential users of its Secrets Automation service, too.

“Companies need to protect their infrastructure secrets as much if not more than their employees’ passwords,” said Jeff Shiner, CEO of 1Password. “With 1Password and Secrets Automation, there is a single source of truth to secure, manage and orchestrate all of your business secrets. We are the first company to bring both human and machine secrets together in a significant and easy-to-use way.”

In addition to the acquisition and new service, 1Password also today announced a new partnership with GitHub. “We’re partnering with 1Password because their cross-platform solution will make life easier for developers and security teams alike,” said Dana Lawson, VP of partner engineering and development at GitHub, the largest and most advanced development platform in the world. “With the upcoming GitHub and 1Password Secrets Automation integration, teams will be able to fully automate all of their infrastructure secrets, with full peace of mind that they are safe and secure.”

After his last startup, Framed Data, was acquired by Square, Thomson Nguyen began exploring new ideas. While an entrepreneur-in-residence at Kleiner Perkins, Nguyen interviewed hundreds of small business owners and realized that many pay hundreds of dollars in fees to maintain a business checking account. “Most small businesses are low margin, high cash flow, so they don’t have $4,000 just laying around,” Nguyen told TechCrunch. “We found in our analysis that micro-SMBs actually end up paying on average $450 in overdraft fees a year.”

Nguyen’s new startup Hatch recently launched its first two products and announced today it has secured a total of $20 million in funding from investors like Kleiner Perkins, Foundation Capital, SVB and Plaid’s founders. The fintech’s Hatch Business Checking accounts cost $10 a month, don’t charge non-sufficient funds (NSF) or overdraft fees and includes cashback offers. Eligible account holders can also enroll in Hatch Cover, which covers overdrafts up to $100, or apply for lines of credit.

Some of Hatch’s customers have hundreds of employees, but Nguyen said the startup primarily focuses on businesses with up to 20 people. Many are run by only one person, who might be setting up a business account for the first time.

Hatch draws on Nguyen’s professional and personal backgrounds. Framed Data, a predictive analytics company, was acquired by Square in 2016. He worked as Square Capital’s head of data science before becoming an entrepreneur-in-residence at Kleiner Perkins in 2018, focusing on fintech and machine learning problems. As a child of immigrants, Nguyen saw firsthand the challenges small businesses can face.

“During my time at Kleiner, the goal was to think about what other problems I wanted to solve. I definitely wanted to solve additional problems within small businesses. I think a lot of what I appreciate about Square’s mission of economic empowerment for small businesses also really resonated with my own family story,” he said. “My parents immigrated here from Vietnam after the war and were like so many immigrants to the States to start small businesses. Figuring out how to use whatever talents I had to try to make it easier to start small businesses was definitely something I wanted to pursue.”

Hatch’s leadership team, including alumni of fintech companies and major financial institutions like Square, Stripe, Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan, talked to small business owners, and found that recent immigrants or people without credit histories were paying the majority of bank fees. The startup raised a $5 million seed round from Kleiner Perkins, Abstract Ventures and former Square executive Gokul Rajaram in January 2019, then a $14 million Series A round from Foundation Capital, SVB and Plaid founders William Hockey and Zack Perret in February 2020.

Hatch Business Checking began rolling out in January and currently has 4,000 users. The company’s inception coincided with an especially brutal time for many small business owners, as they weathered the COVID-19 pandemic’s economic impact and navigated the process of getting government aid through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act.

“Initially I was a little worried, but as I was talking to all of our small business customers and even as I was doing these interviews, I realized that amidst a global pandemic, it’s been humbling to see the grit and perseverance of small business owners trying to innovate and learn,” Nguyen said.

For example, some of Hatch’s users are restaurants that hadn’t done deliveries before, but quickly signed up for multiple on-demand platforms like Postmates or Uber Eats. Others include accountants and lawyers who figured out how to move their practices online.

Hatch serves businesses in a wide range of sectors, including first-time entrepreneurs.

“There’s been this interesting trend of sole proprietors and individual creators who maybe had a side hustle, and after they were laid off during COVID, they decided, okay, I’m going start a small business,” Nguyen said. “Through our research, that’s actually how a lot of small businesses think of themselves, not as Thomson Tacos LLC for example, but just as myself, as Thomson, a person who is running this business.”

The startup uses machine learning to automate Hatch Business Checking’s online sign-up process and its know your customer (KYC) and know your business (KYB) requirements. This includes confirming business incorporation paperwork, social security or employer ID numbers and regulatory compliance like Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) checks. Hatch can approve applications in less than five minute. Once that process is complete, customers get a MasterCard virtual number and can link external bank accounts. Hatch also uses machine learning for real-time fraud and risk monitoring.

Nguyen said Hatch launched its overdraft coverage program because “we found it is a really great way for folks to get themselves out of a bind, finish the point sale and then top up their account later.”

If a business with a Hatch Business Checking account needs more working capital, it can apply for a Hatch Business Line of Credit, or loans between $200 to $5,000 at an APR of 18% to 24%. Hatch does not do hard credit checks and sees the credit lines as an alternative to the payday lenders or check cashers that customers without a FICO score or subprime ratings often use.

To screen loan applicants, Hatch uses information from their Business Checking accounts, including activity from connected point-of-sale systems. This allows Hatch to see real-time data and forecast a business’ potential forward revenue. It also enables the company to approve credit lines in as little as two hours.

“A hard credit check is actually quite difficult for recent immigrants or Americans who had trouble in their recent history. If you declare bankruptcy, it takes seven years to get it struck off your credit history,” said Nguyen. “To us, I think the more important factors are whether you actually have a business and whether that business is growing. We have a couple of examples of folks who declared bankruptcy three or four years ago, but they have a business that is booming and growing, and we’re happy to underwrite or originate that line of credit for them.”

But he emphasizes that Hatch, a signatory of the Small Business Owner’s Bill of Rights, does not see lending as permanent solution and will not encourage its users to take on unnecessary debt.

“I think the reason we feel so strongly about this is that we want to win when our customers win,” Nguyen said. “If all we did was lending, then you would almost have a misalignment of incentives where you want to encourage lending retention. Given our business bank accounts and our revenue model, which is $10 a month and debit interchange, we really win when the business continues to exist. So for us, it’s almost a matter of building that financial independence for our customers.”

Hatch currently covers overdrafts and credit lines with its own balance sheet. “Because we’re using machine learning data to understand our own risk position, the main focus right now is to understand how businesses grow and model those products accordingly,” said Nguyen.

In an emailed statement, Kleiner Perkins partner Ilya Fushman told TechCrunch, “Small businesses account for nearly half of all economic activity in the U.S., but are often hamstrung by the banking ecosystem today. Hatch is democratizing access to the financial resources that small businesses need to start out and grow. Thomson and team are already working with thousands of SMBs and are uniquely suited with the technology and industry expertise to help them grow with the financial resources they need to be successful.”

In his statement about Foundation Capital’s investment, partner Charles Moldow said, “Our view at Foundation Capital is that the next phase of financial innovation is confluence: a coming together of lending and mobile banking. Hatch is a breaker wave of this movement for small businesses. That Thomson and his team were able to so rapidly stand up the only full-solution, mobile-first bank offering for SMBs is a testament to what they can and will accomplish.”

Since Hatch’s Series A, it has grown its team from eight people to 48, hiring remotely during the pandemic. Its plan is to expand its Business Checking accounts and continue building products for the estimated 40 million small businesses in the United States.

“When I think of the future products we can provide, it really centers around how do we make sure that a small business succeeds in starting up correctly and efficiently, and scaling their business,” said Nguyen. “Sometimes that’s financial products like our business accounts. Potentially, it could be software products that help you actually start that business. So there’s a wealth of different ideas and directions in which we can take Hatch.”

Facebook’s self-styled ‘Oversight Board’ (FOB) has announced an operational change that looks intended to respond to criticism of the limits of the self-regulatory content-moderation decision review body: It says it’s started accepting requests from users to review decisions to leave content up on Facebook and Instagram.

The move expands the FOB’s remit beyond reviewing (and mostly reversing) content takedowns — an arbitrary limit that critics said aligns it with the economic incentives of its parent entity, given that Facebook’s business benefits from increased engagement with content (and outrageous content drives clicks and makes eyeballs stick).

“So far, users have been able to appeal content to the Board which they think should be restored to Facebook or Instagram. Now, users can also appeal content to the Board which they think should be removed from Facebook or Instagram,” the FOB writes, adding that it will “use its independent judgment to decide what to leave up and what to take down”.

“Our decisions will be binding on Facebook,” it adds.

The ability to request an appeal on content Facebook wouldn’t take down has been added across all markets, per Facebook. But the tech giant said it will take some “weeks” for all users to get access as it said it’s rolling out the feature “in waves to ensure stability of the product experience”.

While the FOB can now get individual pieces of content taken down from Facebook/Instagram — i.e. if the Board believes it’s justified in reversing an earlier decision by the company not to remove content — it cannot make Facebook adopt any associated suggestions vis-a-vis its content moderation policies generally.

That’s because Facebook has never said it will be bound by the FOB’s policy recommendations; only by the final decision made per review.

That in turn limits the FOB’s ability to influence the shape of the tech giant’s approach to speech policing. And indeed the whole effort remains inextricably bound to Facebook which devised and structured the FOB — writing the Board’s charter and bylaws, and hand picking the first cohort of members. The company thus continues to exert inescapable pull on the strings linking its self-regulatory vehicle to its lucrative people-profiling and ad-targeting empire.

The FOB getting the ability to review content ‘keep ups’ (if we can call them that) is also essentially irrelevant when you consider the ocean of content Facebook has ensured the Board won’t have any say in moderating — because its limited resources/man-power mean it can only ever consider a fantastically tiny subset of cases referred to it for review.

For an oversight body to provide a meaningful limit on Facebook’s power it would need to have considerably more meaty (i.e. legal) powers; be able to freely range across all aspects of Facebook’s business (not just review user generated content); and be truly independent of the adtech mothership — as well as having meaningful powers of enforcement and sanction.

So, in other words, it needs to be a public body, functioning in the public interest.

Instead, while Facebook applies its army of in house lawyers to fight actual democratic regulatory oversight and compliance, it has splashed out to fashion this bespoke bureaucracy that can align with its speech interests — handpicking a handful of external experts to pay to perform a content review cameo in its crisis PR drama.

Unsurprisingly, then, the FOB has mostly moved the needle in a speech-maximizing direction so far — while expressing some frustration at the limited deck of cards Facebook has dealt it.

Most notably, the Board still has a decision pending on whether to reverse Facebook’s indefinitely ban on former US president Donald Trump. If it reverses that decision Facebook users won’t have any recourse to appeal the restoration of Trump’s account.

The only available route would, presumably, be for users to report future Trump content to Facebook for violating its policies — and if Facebook refuses to take that stuff down, users could try to request a FOB review. But, again, there’s no guarantee the FOB will accept any such review requests. (Indeed, if the board chooses to reinstate Trump that may make it harder for it to accept requests to review Trump content, at least in the short term (in the interests of keeping a diverse case file, so… )

How to ask for a review after content isn’t removed

To request the FOB review a piece of content that’s been left up a user of Facebook/Instagram first has to report the content to Facebook/Instagram.

If the company decides to keep the content up Facebook says the reporting person will receive an Oversight Board Reference ID (a ten-character string that begins with ‘FB’) in their Support Inbox — which they can use to appeal its ‘no takedown’ decision to the Oversight Board.

There are several hoops to jump through to make an appeal: Following on-screen instructions Facebook says the user will be taken to the Oversight Board website where they need to log in with the account to which the reference ID was issued.

They will then be asked to provide responses to a number of questions about their reasons for reporting the content (to “help the board understand why you think Facebook made the wrong decision”).

Once an appeal has been submitted, the Oversight Board will decide whether or not to review it. The board only selects a certain number of “eligible appeals” to review; and Facebook has not disclosed the proportion of requests the Board accepts for review vs submissions it receives — per case or on aggregate. So how much chance of submission success any user has for any given piece of content is an unknown (and probably unknowable) quantity.

Users who have submitted an appeal against content that was left up can check the status of their appeal via the FOB’s website — again by logging in and using the reference ID.

A further limitation is time, as Facebook notes there’s a time limit on appealing decisions to the FOB

“Bear in mind that there is a time limit on appealing decisions to the Oversight Board. Once the window to appeal a decision has expired, you will no longer be able to submit it,” it writes in its Help Center, without specifying how long users have to get their appeal in. 

You might think that a startup whose primary customers are tourism bureaus would have had a pretty rough 2020, but CEO Monir Parikh said Bandwango‘s customer base more than doubled in the past year,  growing from 75 to 200.

In Parikh’s words, the Murray, Utah-based startup has built a platform called the Destination Experience Engine and designed for “connecting businesses with communities.” That means bringing together offers from local restaurants, retailers, wineries, breweries, state parks and more into package deals — such as the Newport Beach Dine Pass and the Travel Iowa State Passport — which are then sold by tourism bureaus.

Obviously, the pandemic dealt a big blow to tourism, but in response, many of these organizations shifted focus to deals that could entice locals to support nearby businesses and attractions. Parikh predicted that even after the pandemic, tourism bureaus will continue to understand that “local-focused tourism is going to be part of the mix of what we do — locals are your ambassadors, they are the best organic marketing channel.”

Plus, Parikh said that as new privacy regulations make it harder to collect data about online visitors, it’s becoming more challenging for tourism bureaus to “to prove to their funders that they’re having an economic impact.” So where bureaus were content in the past to advertise deals and then link out to other sites where customers could make the actual purchases, selling the deals themselves has become a new way to prove their worth.

With last year’s growth, Bandwango has raised $3.1 million in seed funding led by Next Frontier Capital, with participation from Kickstart, Signal Peak Ventures, SaaS Ventures, and Ocean Azul Partners. (The startup had previously raised only $700,000 in funding.)

Parikh said that until now, Bandwango has been a largely full service option. The selling point, after all, is that the tourism bureaus already “have great relationships with these local businesses,” but the startup can handle the hard work of “trying to wrangle 200 of their local businesses” to offer deals and accept those deals in-store.

“Our mantra is: We become your back office,” he added. But with the new funding, he wants the startup to build a self-serve product as well. “What I say to my team is that a 90-year-old grandmother, as well as 12-year-old teenager, should be able to come into our platform and say, ‘I want to create a local savings program or an ale trail’ and do it end-to-end, without our assistance.”

And while Bandwango is currently focused on providing a white-label solution to its customers (rather than building a consumer deal destination of its own), Parikh said it eventually distribute these deals more broadly by creating its own “private label brands.”

One of the issues with deploying a machine learning application is that it tends to be expensive and highly compute intensive.  Deeplite, a startup based in Montreal, wants to change that by providing a way to reduce the overall size of the model, allowing it to run on hardware with far fewer resources.

Today, the company announced a $6 million seed investment. Boston-based venture capital firm PJC led the round with help from Innospark Ventures, Differential Ventures and Smart Global Holdings. Somel Investments, BDC Capital and Desjardins Capital also participated.

Nick Romano, CEO and co-founder at Deeplite, says that the company aims to take complex deep neural networks that require a lot of compute power to run, tend to use up a lot of memory, and can consume batteries at a rapid pace, and help them run more efficiently with fewer resources.

“Our platform can be used to transform those models into a new form factor to be able to deploy it into constrained hardware at the edge,” Romano explained. Those devices could be as small as a cell phone, a drone or even a Raspberry Pi, meaning that developers could deploy AI in ways that just wouldn’t be possible in most cases right now.

The company has created a product called Neutrino that lets you specify how you want to deploy your model and how much you can compress it to reduce the overall size and the resources required to run it in production. The idea is to run a machine learning application on an extremely small footprint.

Davis Sawyer, chief product officer and co-founder, says that the company’s solution comes into play after the model has been built, trained and is ready for production. Users supply the model and the data set and then they can decide how to build a smaller model. That could involve reducing the accuracy a bit if there is a tolerance for that, but chiefly it involves selecting a level of compression — how much smaller you can make the model.

“Compression reduces the size of the model so that you can deploy it on a much cheaper processor. We’re talking in some cases going from 200 megabytes down to on 11 megabytes or from 50 megabytes to 100 kilobytes,” Davis explained.

Rob May, who is leading the investment for PJC, says that he was impressed with the team and the technology the startup is trying to build.

“Deploying AI, particularly deep learning, on resource-constrained devices, is a broad challenge in the industry with scarce AI talent and know-how available. Deeplite’s automated software solution will create significant economic benefit as Edge AI continues to grow as a major computing paradigm,” May said in a statement.

The idea for the company has roots in the TandemLaunch incubator in Montreal. It launched officially as a company in mid-2019 and today has 15 employees with plans to double that by the end of this year. As it builds the company, Romano says the founders are focused on building a diverse and inclusive organization.

“We’ve got a strategy that’s going to find us the right people, but do it in a way that is absolutely diverse and inclusive. That’s all part of the DNA of the organization,” he said.

When it’s possible to return to work, the plan is to have offices in Montreal and Toronto that act as hubs for employees, but there won’t be any requirement to come into the office.

“We’ve already discussed that the general approach is going to be that people can come and go as they please, and we don’t think we will need as large an office footprint as we may have had in the past. People will have the option to work remotely and virtually as they see fit,” Romano said.

When the pandemic forced everyone to stay at home last year, many gym-goers looked to at-home fitness makers to fill the void for their cardiovascular and strength-training workouts.

To help meet that demand, Tempo, the five-year-old fitness startup founded by Moawia Eldeeb and Josh Augustin, closed a $220 million Series C round led by SoftBank. The company plans to use the raise to shore up its supply chain, keep up with increased consumer demand and fuel efforts such as R&D and content. Other participants in the Series C round included Bling Capital, DCM, General Catalyst and Norwest Venture Partners. 

Tempo’s freestanding cabinet, which the company launched in February 2020, includes a 42-inch touchscreen with a 3D motion-tracking camera that consistently scans, tracks and coaches users as they work out.

It currently sells three hardware bundles, starting at $2,495, that include accessories like barbells, dumbbells, a folding bench, a kettlebell system, a squat rack, a workout mat, a recovery foam roller and a heart rate monitor, depending on which bundle customers spring for. Users also pay a $39 monthly subscription to access on-demand and live classes. 

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The concept for Tempo came about in 2015 when Eldeeb and Augustin developed SmartSpot, a computer vision-augmented smart screen they sold to gyms that helped trainers analyze and improve their clients’ form during workouts. With the trove of data generated and collected by SmartSpot, Eldeeb and Augustin developed a program that identified fitness users’ most common movement errors and utilized machine learning to offer unique recommendations for each individual user — a program that became part of the foundation for Tempo. 

“Being a personal trainer once, I remember charging $150 an hour,” explains Eldeeb. “I want to create a better experience and offer it to many more people for a lot less. That means we’re going to continue to invest in the core technology that makes that possible.” 

Tempo’s launch came during a particularly opportune time. With the pandemic unfolding, demand for at-home fitness solutions soared. The startup has seen sales surge 1,000% since it began taking pre-orders in early 2020, with delivery delays currently ranging between five to seven weeks — a common issue faced by other at-home fitness companies such as Peloton, Tonal and Echelon. Tempo users have collectively performed 5 million workouts, or clocked 40,000 hours on their devices to date, according to the company. 

“That [supply chain] was definitely an issue,” acknowledges Eldeeb, pointing to production challenges posed by factories temporarily shutting down or reducing operations in 2020. “We were doing this for the first time at scale, and we’d made small quantities of the product before [launch]. But for our first year in the market, we had to solve all those problems and still ship the product, which was a huge undertaking. We basically had to reduce sales because I wanted the factory workers to be safe.” 

For Tempo, the opportunity to scale is enormous, as the global market is estimated to reach $29.4 billion by 2025. With new funding in tow, Eldeeb wants to capitalize on surging demand, with plans of doubling down on logistics and its supply chain, growing employee headcount and expanding its content to offer yoga and boxing classes later this year.  

With vaccinations across the U.S. steadily increasing and gyms reopening, the big question is whether people will stick with their at-home fitness workouts, throw themselves back into their old gym routines or adopt a hybrid model that marries the two. Eldeeb is betting that now that more people have acclimated to working out in their homes, they’ll stay the course out of sheer convenience, pointing to a Consumer Trends report from The New Consumer published earlier this year indicating that 81% of people under the age of 40 prefer to exercise at home. 

If true, then companies like Tempo will continue to reap the benefits of this shift of fitness into the home. 

 

For a long time, “revenue” seemed to be a taboo word in the startup world. Fortunately, things have changed with the rise of SaaS and alternative funding sources such as revenue-based investing VCs. Still, revenue modeling remains a challenge for founders. How do you predict earnings when you are still figuring it out?

The answer is twofold: You need to make your revenue predictable, repeatable and scalable in the first place, plus make use of tools that will help you create projections based on your data. Here, we’ll suggest some ways you can get more visibility into your revenue, find the data that really matter and figure out how to put a process in place to make forecasts about it.

Base projections on repeatable, scalable results

Aaron Ross is a co-author of “Predictable Revenue,” a book based on his experience of creating a process and team that helped grow Salesforce’s revenue by more than $100 million. “Predictable” is the key word here: “You want growth that doesn’t require guessing, hope and frantic last-minute deal-hustling every quarter- and year-end,” he says.

This makes recurring revenue particularly desirable, though it is by no means the be-all-end-all of predictable revenue. On one hand, there is always the risk that recurring revenue won’t last, as customers may churn and organic growth runs out of gas. On the other, there is a broader picture for predictable revenue that goes beyond subscription-based models.

Ross and his co-author, Marylou Tyler, outline three steps to predictable revenue: predictable lead generation, a dedicated sales development team and consistent sales systems. They wrote an entire book about it, so it would be hard to sum it up here. So what’s the takeaway? You shouldn’t base your projections on processes and results that aren’t repeatable and scalable.

Cross the hot coals

In their early days, startups usually grow via word of mouth, luck and sheer hustle. The problem is that it likely won’t lead to sustainable growth; as the saying goes, what got you here won’t get you there. In between, there is typically a phase of uncertainty and missed results that Ross refers to as “the hot coals.”

Before the hot coals, predicting revenue is vain at best, and oftentimes impossible. I, for one, remember being at a loss when an old-school investor asked me for five-year profit-and-loss projections when my now-defunct startup was nowhere near a stable money-making path. Not all seed investors expect this, so there was obviously a mismatch here, but the challenge is still the same for most founders: How do you bridge the gap between traditional projections and the reality of a startup?

Mobility mavens, June 9 will be here before you know it, and that means it’s time to get your strategy ducks in a row for TC Sessions: Mobility 2021. You want to make the most of your time at this one-day virtual intensive featuring interactive presentations with the mobility industry’s top movers, shakers and startup dream makers, amirite?

Take your team to increase your ROI. Right now, you can grab a group discount — at the early bird price — when you buy a block of four or more tickets to TC Sessions: Mobility. Don’t procrastinate. At $70 per pass, you’ll save a couple hundred bucks — but only if you make your purchase by May 5, at 11:59 pm (PT).

Like the old expression says, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. You’ll cover more ground and discover more opportunities with your whole team at your side.

TC Sessions: Mobility 2021 will feature an incredible lineup of speakers, presentations, fireside chats and breakouts all focused on the current and future state of mobility — like EVs, micromobility and smart cities for starters — and the investment trends that influence them all.

Investors like Clara Brenner (Urban Innovation Fund), Quin Garcia (Autotech Ventures) and Rachel Holt (Construct Capital) — all of whom will grace our virtual stage. They’ll have plenty of insight and advice to share, including the challenges that startup founders will face as they break into the transportation arena.

You’ll hear from CEOs like Starship Technologies’ Ahti Heinla. The company’s been busy testing delivery robots in real-world markets. Don’t miss his discussion touching on challenges ranging from technology to red tape and what it might take to make last-mile robotic delivery a mainstream reality.

Taking your team also makes you a highly efficient networking unit. Find ad hoc opportunities in the virtual platform’s chat feature or use CrunchMatch, our AI-powered platform to zero in on the people best aligned with your business goals. Schedule virtual product demos, pitch investors or recruit new talent.

Here’s what Rachael Wilcox, a creative producer at Volvo Cars, told us about her networking experience at TC Sessions: Mobility 2020.

“I didn’t think I’d network on a virtual platform but, it turns out, it’s a lot easier to network with more people. Folks just felt more comfortable reaching out. I had conversations with people I probably wouldn’t have met otherwise, and that was an unexpected benefit.”

TC Sessions: Mobility 2021 take place on June 9, but if you want to take your team — and save 25% in the process — it’s now o’clock. Buy your group discount passes before the early bird price disappears on May 5 at 11:59 pm (PT). Grab your cohort and go!

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Mobility 2021? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

The $9 trillion financial management firm Blackrock is collaborating with the $313 billion Singapore investment firm Temasek to back companies developing technologies and services to help create a zero emission economy by 2050.

The two mega-investment firms will invest an initial $600 million to launch Decarbonization Partners, and look to raise money from investors committing to achieving a net zero world and long-term sustainable finacnial returns. The two partners have set themselves a goal to raise $1 billion for their first fund, including capital from Temasek and BlackRock.

The partnership, coming during Earth month, is one of several big multi-billion dollar initiatives that are underway to prevent global climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions.

Indeed, BlackRock is somewhat tardy to the party. Temasek, for its part, has already made a number of high-profile bets in the alternative meat market — namely in companies like Impossible Foods — and in alternative energy technology developers including Eavor, a geothermal company, and a $500 million bet on a renewable power developer in India.

Meanwhile, a coalition of billionaires led by Bill Gates are already on their second billion dollar investment vehicle through Breakthrough Energy, a multi-stage, multi-strategy initiative that includes a venture capital arm as well as other types of financing on the way.

“The world cannot meet its net zero ambitions without transformational innovation,” said Larry Fink, Chairman and CEO of BlackRock, in a statement. “For decarbonization solutions and technologies to transform our economy, they need to be scaled. To do that, they need patient, well-managed capital to support their vital goals. This partnership will help define climate solutions as a standalone asset class that is both essential to our collective mission and a historic investment opportunity created by the net zero transition.”

To get a sense of what Decarbonization Partners might back, companies should probably look to the Breakthrough Energy portfolio — the firms share similar interests in new sources of energy, technologies to distribute that energy, building and manufacturing technologies, and material science and process innovations.

It’s a big swing that the firms are taking, but the flood of capital coming into the sustainability sector is commensurate with both the size of the problem, and the potential opportunity in returns generated by solving it.

A report from Morgan Stanley estimated that solving climate change would be a $50 trillion problem, according to a 2019 report from Forbes.

“Bold, aggressive actions are needed to make the global net zero ambition a reality. Decarbonization Partners represents one of several steps we are taking to follow through on our commitment to halve the emissions from our portfolio by 2030, and ultimately move to net zero emissions by 2050,” said Dilhan Pillay, Chief Executive Officer of Temasek International. “Through collective efforts with like-minded partners, we will be able to create sustainable value for all of our stakeholders over the long term, and investors will have the opportunity to help deliver innovative solutions at scale to address climate challenges.”

How much is Epic Games worth? Well, we’ve long ago surpasses the realm of dollar figures regular humans can contextualize. With its latest round, the gamer hits an equity valuation of $28.7 billion. Yes, “b” for “billion.” That’s a lot of micro-transactions.

Time to start talking metaverse!

Best known for the wildly successful battle royale title, Fortnite, Epic just announced another $1 billion funding round, featuring a $200 million Sony Group Corporation investment. The rest of the list is, predictably, a long one, including [deep breath], Appaloosa, Baillie Gifford, Fidelity Management & Research Company LLC, GIC, T. Rowe Price Associates-managed accounts, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board, BlackRock managed accounts, Park West, KKR, AllianceBernstein, Altimeter, Franklin Templeton and Luxor Capital.

“We are grateful to our new and existing investors who support our vision for Epic and the Metaverse,” CEO and founder Tim Sweeney said in a statement tied to the news. “Their investment will help accelerate our work around building connected social experiences in Fortnite, Rocket League and Fall Guys, while empowering game developers and creators with Unreal Engine, Epic Online Services and the Epic Games Store.”

Sweeney has plenty of reason to be grateful, as the controlling shareholder.

Developing…