Year: 2021

Rocket launch company Astra, which just reached space this past December with a test launch from Alaska, will be going public on the NASDAQ via a merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) called Holicity. The recent SPAC craze has already extended to the New Space sector, and Virgin Galactic was among the in this wave of a new path to public listing, so there is precedent for space launch in particular, but Astra will be the first to list on the NASDAQ.

The terms of the deal will result in an anticipated $500 million in cash for Astra, from a combined $300 million held by Holicity in trust and a $300 million injection via a PIPE (private investment in public equity) from funds under management by BlackRock. The arrangement sets a pro forma enterprise valuation of Astra at around $2.1 billion – that valuation of the company minus the $500 million in cash the SPAC merger brings in. Astra expects it to complete by the second quarter of this year, after which the company will trade under the ticker ‘ASTR.’

Astra manufactures its own rockets, which are designed to carry small orbital payloads, at a facility in Alameda, California. Thus far, it has then shipped its launch vehicles to Kodiak, Alaska for flight – requiring just a handful of people on the ground at the actual spaceport to mount and launch the rocket, with the majority of the team overseeing the flight operating remotely out of a mission control facility back in California. The company’s model focuses on high output production of relatively inexpensive rockets, which can be responsively shipped and launched virtually anywhere depending on needs.

With its successful test in December, Astra achieved a pay-off of years of quiet work building and iterating its launch model. The startup was originally pursuing a DARPA-funded competition to achieve rapid response launch capabilities, but that contest expired with the prize unclaimed. The successful test in December still proved out the viability of Astra’s model – though it fell slightly short of achieving orbital velocity for actual payload delivery. The company said that this was a relatively easy remaining issue to fix, wholly manageable via software tweaks, and it intends to deliver its first commercial satellites beginning this summer.

Ultimately, Astra aims to be launching payloads on a daily cadency by 2025, and in a blog post accompanying the SPAC news, Astra founder and CEO Chris Kemp said that it’s also intent on “building a platform of space services” that implies ambitions beyond its work today on rockets.

Yesterday, China flipped the switch on a nationwide carbon trading market, in what could be one of the most significant steps taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in 2021 — if the markets can work effectively.

China is the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases and its share of the world’s emissions output continues to climb.

As the Chinese government works to curb its environmental impact, policies like a carbon trading system could spur the adoption of new technologies, increasing demand for goods and services from domestic startups and tech companies around the world.

Carbon markets, implemented in some parts of the U.S. and widely across Europe, put a price on industrial emissions and force companies to offset those emissions by investing in projects that would remove an equivalent portion of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.

They’re a key component of the 2015 Paris Agreement, but they’re also a controversial one. That’s because if they’re not implemented properly and managed effectively they can be a “massive loophole” for emitters, as Gilles Dufrasne, policy officer at Carbon Markets Watch, told Time last year.

This is especially true of China. Corruption in China is endemic and the country has long sacrificed environmental policy and stewardship at the altar of economic growth. China’s not alone in making that calculus, but the decisions have happened at a scale orders of magnitude larger than almost any other nation (with the exception of the U.S.)

The efficacy of the policy is also effected by the hierarchies that exist within the bureaucracy of the Chinese Communist Party. As ChinaDialogue noted, the measures were issued by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, which carry lower legal authority than if they came from the NDRC, the leading governing body for macroeconomic policy across China and the overseer of the nation’s major economic initiatives.

That said, no country as large as China, which accounts for 28% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, has ever implemented a national carbon emissions trading market.

BEIJING, CHINA – MARCH 20: Chinese President Xi Jinping delivers a speech during the closing session of the National People’s Congress (NPC) at the Great Hall of the People on March 20, 2018 in Beijing, China. (Photo by Lintao Zhang/Getty Images)

China first started testing regional emissions trading systems back in 2011 in Shenzhen, Shanghai, Beijing, Guangdong, Tianjin, Hubei, Chongqing and Fujian. Using a system that instituted caps on emissions based on carbon intensity (emissions per unit of GDP) rather than an absolute emissions cap, the Chinese government began rolling out these pilots across its power sector and to other industries.

After a restructuring in 2018, the plan, which was initially drafted under the auspices of the National Development and Reform Commission was kicked down to the Ministry of Ecology and the Environment. The devolution of China’s cap and trade emissions program came as the United States was withdrawing from the Paris Agreement amid an abdication of climate regulation or initiatives under the Presidency of Donald Trump.

For now, the emissions trading system covers China’s power industry and roughly 2,000 energy generation facilities. That alone represents 30% of the nation’s total emissions and over time the trading system will encompass heavy industry like cement, steel, aluminum, chemicals and oil and gas, according to ChinaDialogue.

Initially, the government is allocating emissions allowances for free and will begin auctioning allowances “at the appropriate time according to the situation.”

That kind of language, and concerns raised by state-owned enterprises and financial services firms flagging the effect carbon pricing could have on profitability and lending risk shows that the government in Beijing is still putting more weight on the economic benefits rather than environmental costs of much of its industrial growth.

That said, a survey of market participants cited by ChinaDialogue indicated that prices are expected to start at 41 yuan (US$6.3) per ton of CO2 and rise to 66 yuan per ton in 2025. The price of carbon in China is expected to hit 77 yuan by 2030.

Meanwhile, a commission on carbon prices formed in 2017 and helmed by the economists Joseph Stiglitz and Nicholas Stern indicated that carbon needed to be priced at somewhere between $40 and $80 by 2020 and somewhere in the $50 to $100 range by 2030 if the markets and prices were to have any impact on behavior.

No nation has actually hit those price targets, although the European Union has come the closest — and seen the most reduction in greenhouse gas emissions as a result.

Still, the plan from the Chinese government does include public reporting requirements for verified company-level emissions. And the existence of a market, if the government decides to put real prices in place and consequences for flouting the system, could be a huge boon for the monitoring and management equipment startups that are developing tech to track emissions.

As the analysts at ChinaDialogue note:

“The hardest part of carbon pricing is often getting it started. The moment that the Chinese government decides to increase ambition with the national ETS, it can. The mechanism is now in place, and it can be ramped up if the momentum and political will provided by President Xi’s climate ambition continues. In the coming years, this could see an absolute and decreasing cap, more sectors covered, more transparent data provision and more effective cross-government coordination. This is especially so with energy and industrial regulators who will need to see the ETS not as a threat to their turf, but as a measure with significant co-benefits for their own policy objectives.”

The growth of remote working and managing workforces that are distributed well beyond the confines of a centralized physical office — or even a single country — have put a spotlight on the human resources technology that organizations use to help manage those people. Today, one of the HR startups that’s been seeing a surge of growth is announcing a round of funding to double down on its business.

Oyster, a startup and platform that helps companies through the process of hiring, onboarding and then providing contractors and full-time employees in the area  of “knowledge work” with HR services like payroll, benefits and salary management, has closed a Series A round of $20 million.

The company is already working in 100 countries, and CEO and Tony Jamous (who co-founded the company with Jack Mardack) said in an interview that the plan is to expand that list of markets, and also bring in new services, particularly to address the opportunity in emerging markets to hire more people.

Currently, Oyster does not cover candidate sourcing or any of the interviewing and evaluation process: those could be areas where it might build its own tech or partner to provide them as part of its one-stop shop. It has dabbled in virtual job fairs, as a pointer to one potential product that it might explore.

“There 1.5 billion knowledge workers coming into the workforce in next 10 years, mostly from emerging economies, while in developed economies there are some 90 million jobs unfilled,” Jamous said. “There are super powers you can gain from being globally distributed, but it poses a major challenge around HR and payroll.”

Emergence Capital, the B2B VC that has backed the likes of Zoom, Salesforce, Bill.com and our former sister site Crunchbase, is leading the funding. The Slack Fund (Slack’s strategic investment vehicle), and London firm Connect Ventures (which has previously backed the company at seed stage) are also participating.  The investment will accelerate Oyster’s rapid growth, and support its mission of enabling people to work from anywhere.

Oyster’s valuation is not being disclosed. The startup has raised about $24 million to date.

One of the great ironies of the global health pandemic is that while our worlds have become much smaller — travel and even local activities have been drastically curtailed and many of us spend day in, day out at home — the employment opportunity and scope of how organizations are expected to operate has become significantly bigger.

Public health-enforced remote working has led to companies de-coupling workers from offices, and that has opened the door to seeking out and working with the best talent, regardless of location.

This predicament may have become more acute in the last year, but it’s been one that has been gradually coming into focus for years, helped by trends in cloud computing and globalization. Jamous said that the idea for Oyster came to him was something that he’s been thinking about for years, but became more apparent when he was still at his previous startup, Nexmo — the cloud communications provider that was acquired by Vonage for $230 million in in 2016. 

At Nexmo we wanted to be a great local employer. We were headquartered in two countries but wanted to have people everywhere,” he said. “We spent millions building employment infrastructure to do that, becoming knowledgable about local laws in France, Korea and more countries.” He realized quickly that this was a highly inefficient way to work. “We weren’t ready for the complexity and diversity of issues that would come up.”

After he moved on from Nexmo and did some angel investing (he backs other distributed work juggernauts like Hopin, among others), he decided that he would try to tackle the workforce challenge as the focus of his next venture.

That was in mid-2019, pre-pandemic. It turned out that the timing was spot on, with every organization looking in the next year at ways to address their own distributed workforce challenges.

The emerging market focus, meanwhile, also has a direct link to Jamous himself: he left his home country of Lebanon to study in France when he was 17, and has essentially lived abroad since then. But as with many people who move into developed from emerging markets, he knew that the base of technical talent in his home country was something that was worth tapping and nurturing to help residents and the countries themselves improve their lots in life; and he thought he could use tech to help there, too.

Related to that wider social mission, Oyster has a pending application to become a B-Corporation.

Jamous is not the only one that has founded an HR company based on his personal experience: Turing’s founders have cited their own backgrounds growing up in India and working with people remotely from there as part of their own impetus for building Turing; and Remote’s founder hails from Europe but built Gitlab (where he had been head of product) based on a similar premise of tapping into the talent he knew existed all around the world.

And indeed, Oyster is not alone in tackling this opportunity. The list of HR startups looking to be the ADP’s of the world of distributed work include Deel, Remote, Hibob, Papaya Global, Personio, Factorial, Lattice, Turing and Rippling. And these are just some of the HR startups that have raised money in the last year; there are many, many more.

The attraction of Oyster seems to come in the simplicity of how the services are provided — you have options for contractors, and full-timers, and full, larger staff deployments in other countries. You have options to add on benefits for employees if you choose. And you have some tools to work out how hires fit into your bigger budgets, and also to guide you on remuneration in each local market. Pricing starts at $29 per person, per month for contractors, to $399 for working with full employees, to other packages for larger deployments.

Oyster works with local partners to provide some aspects of these services, but it has built the technology to make the process seamless for the customer. As with other services, it essentially handles the employment and payroll as a local provider on behalf of its customers, but can do so under contract terms that reconcile both a company’s own policies and those of the local jurisdictions (which can differ widely between each other in areas like vacation time, redundancy terms, maternity leave and more).

“It has a few well funded competitors, but that’s usually a good signal,” said Jason Green, the Emergence partner who led on its investment. “But you want to bet on the horse that will lead the race, and that comes down to execution. Here, we are betting on a team that’s done it before, an entrepreneur experienced in building a company and selling it. Tony’s made money and knows how to build a business. But more than that, he’s mission driven and that will matter in the space, and to employees.”

If you were itching to launch an email newsletter via Twitter, following its acquisition of the Dutch newsletter platform Revue last month, it appears you’ll have to wait a little bit longer for the official unveiling — although some Twitter users are reporting being able to sign up for the newsletter publishing tool right now.

The social media company confirmed to TechCrunch it’s reverted Revue’s Publisher offer back to private beta for the moment — saying this means it’s only accessible to existing customers at this time.

Nonetheless, it also appears to have quietly flipped the launch switch over the last 12 hours or so — at least for some users.

Earlier today, a number of TechCrunch staffers were able to go through the process of setting up a Twitter Revue newsletter — including our very own Editor-in-Chief, Matthew Panzarino.

At the time of writing India-based reporter, Manish Singh, also has access to the interface — which prompts Twitter users to set up a free newsletter to reach their audience, flagging features such as the ability to embed tweets, import email lists, analyze engagement and earn money from subscribers.

So it looks as if Twitter has been testing a newsletter launch in a number of markets. It’s less clear whether or not it aborted a planned launch. We’ve asked the company for more details and will update this post with any response.

Unless you’ve been on a very long digital detox you’ll have noticed that newsletters have been having quite the moment of late. The rise of platforms that help writers monetize their content via an email-delivery format presents a clear risk/opportunity to Twitter, a company that relies on an army of users freely and publicly contributing short-form content.

But with Twitter launching its own in-house newsletter, tweets can potentially inflate in value — becoming the top of the funnel for Twitter users to build a community of followers who they made be able to convert to paying subscribers for longer form content, delivered in a newsletter format.

Twitter told us today that it has put new sign-ups to Revue on ice so it can focus on improving the offering in order to effectively meet the demand of new customers — and make Revue an even more powerful tool for publishers.

It added that it’s working quickly to roll out a new version that’s open to new customers, with a spokeswoman pointing to a mailing list for interested parties to sign up to get the latest updates here.

It’s not clear exactly why Twitter might have aborted a launch — or whether it was just quietly testing sign-ups in select markets, which at least three of our writers happened to be able to access. As we reported last month, it had already been working to integrate the newsletter into its platform and is clearly moving at a clip to get Revue plugged in so it can start to capitalize on the hype and momentum around paid newsletters.

Simultaneously, preventing users from finding a home for their longer form thoughts elsewhere is also likely front of mind for Twitter — as competition for attention in the social sphere heats up, such as from the likes of (rival) newsletter platform Substack (which has been building momentum since 2017); and buzzy live-voice chat app Clubhouse (which has recently captivated the clique-loving technorati).

But it seems Twitter feels its Revue newsletters aren’t quite ready for the prime time just yet.

For those eager to know more about how ‘Twitter + Revue’ will work in practice, here’s the lowdown from our very own @refsrc — who does have early access.

The newsletter feature, available from the three-dot “More” menu option on Twitter’s web interface, enables a user to sign up for Revue with a few clicks using their social account. Once onboard, users can begin drafting their newsletter and drag their recent tweets to it — if they so choose.

Image credit: TechCrunch

The newsletter platform, which competes with among others Andreessen Horowitz-backed Substack, maintains integration support for a number of third-party services including Facebook, Instagram, Pocket, Product Hunt, Instapaper, and even RSS feeds. Once users have integrated these services, they can drag and drop stories from those feeds to the newsletter.

In the current avatar, users can manually add email addresses of subscribers, or import a list from Mailchimp or a CSV file. On the welcome screen, which noted reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong first spotted last week, Twitter also advertises that its newsletter can help writers and publishers earn money from paid subscribers.

Like before, Revue lets users schedule their newsletters. All in all, there doesn’t appear to be any additional features in this entire workflow.

Image credit: TechCrunch

French startup Seyna is getting a new CEO. Stephen Leguillon is joining the company as chief executive while Philippe Mangematin is stepping back from day-to-day activities for personal reasons — he’ll become honorary chairman.

If you’re not familiar with the company, Seyna is an insurtech startup that has obtained an insurance license focused on property and casualty. This is a significant move as the French regulator (ACPR) hasn’t handed out a new license in this category since 1983.

The company’s go-to-market strategy is also interesting as it doesn’t sell insurance products to consumers directly. Instead, the company is building out insurance-as-a-service products. It partners with other companies that offer Seyna’s insurance products under their own brands.

Behind the scenes, Seyna offers an API to generate insurance contracts on demand — an API is a programming interface that lets two services interact with each other. You can also connect directly to Seyna’s interface to manage contracts.

Seyna has created its own core insurance system, which is an important differentiating factor compared to legacy players. The startup can generate many different variants that cover around 20 different insurance products — pet insurance, ticket cancelation, rent guarantee, etc. Clients include Garantme and Decathlon.

The company’s new CEO Stephen Leguillon previous co-founded La Belle Assiette, a company that lets you hire a chef for a dinner at home and that I covered on TechCrunch. He added a second product called GoCater, a corporate catering service — GoCater was letter spun out from La Belle Assiette and acquired by ezCater.

Seyna has raised a €14 million seed round ($17 million at today’s rate) from Global Founders Capital, Allianz France, Financière Saint James and several business angels. Insurance companies require a ton of capital to operate, that’s why the seed round seems quite big for the French market.

Prakhar Singh and ex-Paystack employee Abdul Hassan have known each other for seven years, building different tech products individually and collectively along the way.

Before joining Paystack in 2018, Hassan co-founded OyaPay, a payments startup the year before. After leaving the Stripe-owned company in 2019, he launched a data startup called Voyance where Singh, who had already exited one of his products — Transferpay.ng, an offline payments startup — was a software engineer.

Last June, the duo started working on Mono, a project that would allow companies to access their customers’ financial accounts in Nigeria.

By streamlining various data in a single API, companies and third-party developers can retrieve vital information like account statements, real-time balance, historical transactions, income, expense and account owner identification. Of course, this isn’t without users’ consent as they are required to login with their internet or mobile login credentials before any transaction takes place.

Following a series of tests and iterations, Mono launched its beta version in August, with Hassan as CEO and Singh as CTO. A month later, the startup closed a $500,000 pre-seed investment from early-stage investors like Lateral Capital, Ventures Platform, Golden Palm Investments and Rally Cap. It was one of the notable pre-seed rounds on the continent because of the length of time it took from launch to funding, a trait other API fintech startups in the region share, albeit with significantly longer timelines.  

In a region where more than half of the population is either unbanked or underbanked, these open finance players are trying to improve financial inclusion on the continent. Open finance thrives on the notion that with access to a financial ecosystem via open APIs and new routes to move money, access financial information and make borrowing decisions, the barriers and costs of entry for the unbanked and underbanked might come down. 

However, for Hassan, Mono’s play overlaps open finance and open banking. Although the two terminologies portray what these African startups want to accomplish, the CEO believes that they are subject to regulation from the government and apex financial institutions. Mono is a data company playing in the fintech space, he says.

Prakhar Singh (CTO) and Abdul Hassan (CEO)

He likened Mono to how Google was in its early days when it started with a simple mission to organize the world’s information and make it accessible. Decades later with enormous data, Google has metamorphosed into an internet giant playing in a plethora of sectors.

“If you ask me, I’ll say we don’t see ourselves entirely in open banking or finance,” he told TechCrunch. “Today, we’re concerned about how we can get data from different sources and aggregate into a database where businesses can get access to them with our users’ consent. Down the line, we can use this data for different use cases and solve various problems.”

Mono has already secured partnerships with more than 16 financial institutions in Nigeria and has a little over a hundred businesses like Carbon, Renmoney, Flutterwave and Indicina using its platform. They process about 5 million datasets per hour, the CEO claims.

These clients are mainly lending companies with a few others in proptech and health tech, which allow users to pay for their services in installments. But there are plans to diversify this clientele. One such way will be to improve onboarding processes on applications through its one-click signup feature.

From a user’s perspective, here’s how it works when considering two savings applications: Users submit their KYC to the first savings app because it’s the first they have come across. But for one reason or the other, maybe due to a better interest rate, some users switch to a second savings app.

However, there’s a little hassle in the sense that a second KYC is needed for this process. What Mono has done with the one-click signup feature is to let users transfer their data from the first app to the second without repeating the process. And to that end, Mono has partnered with two of Nigeria’s leading savings and investment platforms to roll out the service. 

“First, we’ve enabled companies with a new infrastructure that allows them to get access to customers’ financial accounts and understand their history before giving them loans or any financial service. Now, we think with the new generation of companies coming up in Africa, Mono will be the one to power their onboarding processes,” Hassan remarks on the platform’s offerings.

Image Credits: Mono

For any investor, Mono’s sticky features, coupled with explosive growth, looks too good of an opportunity to pass on. Today, the six-month-old startup announced that it has been accepted into Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 batch. It will receive $125,000 in seed funding with an opportunity to receive follow-up funding after graduating in March. The startup also joins 39 other African startups per YC data which have passed through the accelerator since 2009.

Getting into the accelerator helps Mono with one of its biggest challenges. According to Hassan, Mono has come across users who are still skeptical to input their internet banking details on the platform and take precautionary measures due to personal experiences with online fraud in the country.

“To date, we’ve been focusing on building, and I think we’ve gotten to a stage where we’re seeing some people not wanting to use their internet banking on Mono. With YC’s backing and a conscious offline marketing plan afterwards, I think our credibility can get a lift,” the founder said.

At Paystack, where Hassan was a product manager, he was privileged to experience firsthand the company’s innovation and growth before it was acquired by Stripe last year. He says he learned the ropes of product development and management, and hiring — lessons that have stuck with him to Mono, a company now with 13 staff across Nigeria and India.

The plan for Mono is to be a global company and getting into YC provides the perfect opportunity to do so. The company is also planning an imminent pan-African expansion to Ghana and Kenya, and from all indication, Mono might execute one if not the two before the end of Q1. Setting the company up for expansion and the hiring spree that comes with it will require capital, so a seed round is in the works to facilitate the whole process.

Digital ordering and paying at restaurants was already gaining much ground in China before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The tap-to-order method on a smartphone is part of the greater development in China where cash and physical documentation is increasingly being phased out. Many restaurants across large cities go as far as making digital menus mandatory, cutting staff costs.

Meanwhile, there has been pushback from the public and the authorities over aggressive digitization. An article published this week by People’s Daily, an official paper of the Chinese Communist Party, was titled: “Scan-to-order shouldn’t be the only option.”

Aside from harming consumers’ freedom of choice and removing the human interaction that diners might appreciate, mandatory smartphone use also raises concerns over data privacy. Ordering on a phone often requires access to a person’s profile on WeChat, Alipay, Meituan or other internet platforms enabling restaurants’ digital services. With that trove of data, businesses will go on to span users with ads.

“These approaches harm consumers’ data protection rights,” the People’s Daily quotes a senior personnel at the consumer rights unit of China Law Society, China’s official organization of legal academic professionals, as saying.

China has similarly targeted the ubiquity of cashless payments. In 2018, China’s central bank called rejecting cash as a form of payment “illegal” and “unfair” to those not accustomed to electronic payments, such as senior citizens.

The elderly also face a dilemma as digital health codes, which are normally generated by tracking people’s movement history using location data from SIM cards, becomes a norm amid the pandemic. Without a smartphone-enabled health pass, senior citizens could be turned away by bus drivers, subway station guards, restaurant staff and gatekeepers at other public venues.

To bridge the digital divide, the southern province of Guangdong recently began allowing citizens to check their health status by tapping their physical ID cards on designated scanners.

Cashless payment is an irreversible trend though. Between 2015 and 2020, the digital payments penetration rate amongst China’s mobile internet users went from less than 60% to over 85%, according to official data. Moreover, the government is hastening the pace to roll out digital yuan, which, unlike third-party payments methods, is issued and managed by the central bank and serves as the statutory, digital version of China’s physical currency.

Two years after launching its $56 million debut fund, Kindred Ventures, a San Francisco-based pre-seed and seed-stage venture fund founded by Steve Jang and Kanyi Maqubela, has closed its second fund with $100 million in capital commitments.

Jang is himself a founder who later jumped into investing. In more recent years, he cofounded Bitski, a crypto-asset wallet startup, and previously founded Schematic Labs, an early social music app that was brought into Rhapsody in 2014 and co-created the music streaming service imeem, whose assets were later acquired by MySpace.

Jang was also an early advisor to Uber, and angel invested in a number of breakout companies, including the delivery company Postmates, the synthetic biology company Zymergen, the fitness company Tonal, and the crypto exchange Coinbase — deals that he rolled into Kindred’s first fund.

Maqubela has similarly worn the hats of both founder and investor, spending six years as an investor with the seed- and early-stage firm Collaborative Fund before joining forces with Jang, as well as cofounding Heartbeat Health — a platform that invites patients who are at risk of heart disease and other chronic ailments to talk remotely with experts for care management.

The fund is notable, including because it doesn’t zero in on one or two sectors of tech. Why is that interesting? Well, because the venture landscape is now so crowded that institutional investors typically prefer to see seed-stage funds with a specific sector focus or an angle of some sort. It’s a way for these limited partners to better diversify their own investments and keep from backing managers who are investing in the very same deals.

Indeed, that Jang and Maqubela secured commitments from a mix of major university endowments, foundations, fund-of-funds, and strategic investors despite being generalists is something a feat.

No doubt investor interest ties to some of their earlier investments, like Coinbase — bets that underscore they are in the right entrepreneurial circles. Yet they say that another aspect of their pitch also resonated with investors, which is their “high concentration, high conviction” approach. Part of their workflow, for example, involves creating a Signal group or Slack channel as soon as they invest in a team so there can be a constant back-and-forth and to bolster the sense that Jang and Maqubela are extensions of a founding team.

Kindred says it also schedules weekly one-on-one chats with the founders it funds until their startup has designated a product launch date, after which “we move into a less rigorous, less frequent meetings,” says Jang, describing the firm’s approach very “programmatic and designed.”

What it asks for in exchange is an ownership stake that ranges from between 5% of a company to 20% percent, with an average ownership position of 11%, they say, and ticking upward as the firm matures.

Another way Kindred tries to gain an edge over competitors is by moving as close to the concept stage as possible and even helping to form startups. Jang and  Maqubela point back to Heartbeat Health and Bitski, which they helped incubate and spin out. Another startup born of their “formation investing” approach is a payments company called Otto, and they say to expect more to come.

In some cases, they start the company and assemble the founding team. In other cases, they help a new founder evolve from concept to prototype to landing the right cofounder.

As for deal flow, they say they source their deals through introductions from the founders in their portfolio, through their own outreach based on ideas that excite them, and from employees of past portfolio companies.

Interestingly, though the bets they make range widely in focus, different themes do emerge, including around digital health, where in addition to Heartbeat Health and Tonal they backed Color Genomics, whose at-home tests can help people understand if they are at risk of hereditary cancer, as well as whether they have been exposed to COVID-19.

Kindred is focused on community, too,. with bets that include the audio social network Clubhouse. And Kindred is writing checks to the occasional security company, including Anjuna Security, which aims to protects applications and data from insiders by seamlessly encrypting everything end to end.

Not last, finance is plainly an area of interest. In addition to Coinbase, for example, Kindred more recently invested in dYdX, an open trading platform for crypto assets that just last announced it had raised $10 million in Series B funding.

As for how the two — who wound up funding 25 companies altogether in their first fund — can continue to cover so much ground as they set out to invest this new, bigger vehicle, Maqubela says the question came up “more than half the time” in conversations about this next fund with its investors. But their secret sauce is no great mystery, they insist. They say they just happen to be incredibly curious people who are willing to get up to speed however possible when they meet a founder with whom they want to partner.

“It ultimately comes down to who Kanyi is and who I am,” says Jang, “and we’re both voracious about learning, it’s what drives us.”

Though both have experience and know-how about a wide number of verticals at this point, they’re “absolutely novices” at times, and they don’t let that stop them, they say. “If we’re inspired by the founder, their intellect, their dedication to a problem, and why they’re doing what they’re doing, we’re happy to go learn as quickly as possible,” says Jang. “We’re very dutiful students.”

Google has agreed to pay $2.59 million to more than 5,500 current employees and former job applicants as part of a settlement with the U.S. Department of Labor over allegations of systemic discrimination as it relates to compensation and hiring. Google has also agreed to reserve $250,000 a year for the next five years to address any potential pay equity adjustments that may come up. That brings Google’s total financial commitment to $3.8 million — a drop in the bucket for the company, whose parent company Alphabet has a market cap of $1.28 trillion.

The settlement comes after the DOL’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs found pay disparities affecting female software engineers at Google’s offices in Mountain View, as well as in offices in Seattle and Kirkland, Washington. The OFCCP also found differences in hiring rates that “disadvantaged female and Asian applicants” for engineers roles at Google’s locations in San Francisco, Sunnyvale and Kirkland. The OFCCP’s evaluation covered Sept. 1, 2014 through Aug. 31, 2017.

As part of the settlement, Google has agreed to pay $1.35 million in back pay and interest to 2,565 female software engineers at the company ($527.50 per employee), and $1.25 million in back pay and interest to 1,757 women and 1,219 Asian applicants for software engineering roles they were not hired for ($414 per person).

Lastly, Google will reserve $1.25 million of the money to go toward pay-equity adjustments for the next five years for U.S. engineers at Google’s Mountain View, Kirkland, Seattle and New York offices.

“We believe everyone should be paid based upon the work they do, not who they are, and invest heavily to make our hiring and compensation processes fair and unbiased,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement to TechCrunch. “For the past eight years, we have run annual internal pay equity analysis to identify and address any discrepancies. We’re pleased to have resolved this matter related to allegations from the 2014-2017 audits and remain committed to diversity and equity and to supporting our people in a way that allows them to do their best work.”

“The U.S. Department of Labor acknowledges Google’s willingness to engage in settlement discussions and reach an early resolution,” Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs Regional Director Jane Suhr said in a press release. “The technology industry continues to be one of the region’s largest and fastest growing employers. Regardless of how complex or the size of the workforce, we remain committed to enforcing equal opportunity laws to ensure non-discrimination and equity in the workforce.”

In a creator-economy world, if you’re only as good as your last YouTube video, then your next YouTube video had better be bigger and louder than the last.

Vibely, a new startup co-founded by Asana alumni Teri Yu and Theresa Lee, wants to turn the constant, and often exhausting, beast of content creation on its head. The startup has created a premium, creator-controlled community platform that allows fans to gather and be monetized in new ways, beyond what is possible on YouTube or TikTok.

The core of Vibely, and what the co-founders hope will keep users coming back, is the ability to let any creator make a challenge for their fans to enjoy. For example, a creator whose brand evokes thoughtfulness could ask fans to sketch out their personal growth goals or take action around a new year’s resolution everyday. Or a fitness influencer could motivate fans to work out for a sprint of days.

“Most people in the creator economy are thinking about how to immediately monetize and get that instant gratification of like money here,” Yu said, which is why creators sell merchandise or hop on Cameo. “We’re focusing on long-term strategic communities.” Yu describes her startup’s shift as a mindset change, from a linear relationship between creators and fans to a multi-directional relationship between fans, superfans, new fans and creators.

Image Credits: Vibely

Vibely’s pitch is two-fold. For fans, the platform gives them a chance to chat with other fans from around the world. It also lets fans participate in community challenges and have a place to plan virtual hangouts over shared love for makeup or dance. The startup helps creators simultaneously, by giving them a one-stop shop to announce plans, do call to actions and create an ambassador program. It lets the “creator scale their time and have a multi-directional relationship with the community under or beneath them.”

Notably, Vibely is trying to be different from Patreon or OnlyFans, which is basically paywalled content for fans. Vibely doesn’t need creators to post more content, it just needs them to pop into a premium community and interact with fans in a meaningful way.

The startup is formalizing a sporadic daily occurrence: When a creator posts content, their comment sections in YouTube, Instagram and TikTok light up with fans discussing every detail you can imagine, from a suggestive hair flip to if that background poster has a hidden message. Creators often pop in to respond to a spicy thread or a random compliment, which incentivizes fans to keep swarming the content section.

The startup has spent little on customer acquisition cost and relied heavily on word of mouth. In December, Vibely launched a part-in-person, part-virtual creator house to pair top TikTok creators with their followers, generating some buzz. In 2020, Vibely had more than 600 communities with 392,000 messages sent and 37,000 challenges completed. Creators include Lavendaire, with 1.3 million YouTube subscribers and Rowena Tsai, who has 520,000 subscribers.

Yu says that there is one day where Kim Kardashian might have a community on the platform, but the main “bread and butter” of Vibely is searching for creators who represent a true interest, value or belief system. This can be a book influencer or a religious creator, for example.

“[Creators] are controlling their own destiny,” Yu said. “On Instagram or Facebook, you might create content but the algorithm decides at the end of the day whether or not your audience sees it. With Vibely, they have 100% control since this is their community.” The startup is planning to make money through membership dues and in-app mechanics like social currencies and rewards.

Vibely’s moonshot goal is to be a more positive, and supportive, Discord, a platform used by gamer communities across the world. So far, Yu says that less than .1% of Vibely users have been flagged by other users, although notably would not share total user numbers. There is also an ambassador program that appoints a user to oversee a community, as well as a global community manager on the team.

“The ceiling of where [Discord] can support is really only going to be gamers,” she said. “But creators want to protect their brand right now and make sure people have a positive experience,” so they are looking for another place to set up.

Image Credits: Vibely

While moderation is apparently going well so far, Vibely will most certainly encounter problems as more and more users join its platform. In the world of challenges, craze and hype led by fanatics could potentially become harmful if someone takes it too far. While Vibely aims to be a judgement-free zone for people to connect around the world, scale has a uniquely pessimistic way of forking that from time to time. Some consumer apps have responded to this truth by aggressively hiring on-staff moderators, but that too can become grueling work.

To hit the ground running, Vibely announced today that it has raised $2 million in seed financing from backers including Steve Chen, the co-founder of YouTube; Justin Rosenstein, the co-founder of Asana and co-creator of Netflix’s “Social Dilemma” documentary; Scott Heiferman, the co-founder of Meetup; Turner Novak, formerly an investor at Gelt, and more.