Author: azeeadmin

An old rule of thumb for building a startup is to find a group of professionals who use spreadsheets to do their work and then build an app to replace their spreadsheet usage. Presto, you have a startup, and perhaps even a new software category.

Spreadsheet.com, however, is doing the opposite. Instead of turning spreadsheets into apps, the startup wants to put apps in your spreadsheets.

TechCrunch caught up with the company when it reached out, disclosing that it raised $5.5 million last June. That round, wrought from the coffers of Spark Capital, First Round Capital and Firebolt Ventures, is now a pretty dated event. (PitchBook details a valuation of around $22 million, post-money, for that funding event.) But what Spreadsheet.com is up to is neat. Let’s talk about it.

People love spreadsheets

Spreadsheets are a blend of database (structured data storage), calculator (averages, sums and all sorts of other goodies), and programming interface (functions and more). That hybrid feature set has kept traditional spreadsheet tools like Microsoft’s venerable Excel relevant amid a growing sea of applications.

Jokes abound concerning just how much spreadsheets hold up the world. This meme remains stuck in my mind, for example:

The movement to replace spreadsheets has yet to strike a lethal blow against their general usage. That reality forms part of Spreadsheet.com’s thesis. CEO Matt Robinson told TechCrunch that companies that break out parts of their workflow from spreadsheets into tailored apps wind up merely running both sets of software at the same time. So, Robinson and co-founder Murali Mohan want to build a spreadsheet that helps companies avoid running more apps at one time than they must.

What does the company’s product do? Robinson answered that question with a question of his own: What do we currently do with spreadsheets? He offered up managing data, assigning tasks and linking to docs as examples. Using his startup’s service, he said, those are things that you can do in a spreadsheet, without having to use a separate app.

“We designed Spreadsheet.com to be the best of both worlds,” he explained in a follow-up Q&A. “It works just like the traditional spreadsheet you already know, but with a whole new set of capabilities.”

The company’s software can display spreadsheets in various formats like a timeline-style perspective, something that should be familiar to Airtable fans. Robinson also emphasized that Spreadsheet.com can handle formulas that folks already know, adding that it will be able to handle if-then functions to send data to other apps or trigger emails. The CEO argued that his company is building first-party features instead of third-party plugins.

Notably, Spreadsheet.com is not generally available today, so if you haven’t heard of it, don’t consider yourself behind. The company told TechCrunch that it currently has a 16,000-person waiting list, which it plans to open to others on October 17, which, it turns out, is Spreadsheet Day.

Asked how the company managed to build such a large waitlist while being in something akin to stealth mode, Robinson noted that Fast Company did cover the company back in 2019. Not a bad result.

What’s ahead?

When a startup flies out of the ether to announce a historical funding round, our first question is whether it’s about to fundraise again. TechCrunch doesn’t want to play patsy to a company’s next funding cycle. In this case, Robinson said that his startup has received inbound Series A interest and may raise in the next 12 months. Because that’s not tomorrow, I’m content to yammer about them in the interim.

Robinson indicated that Spreadsheet.com has around 2.5 years of capital in the bank and is not cash-constrained. If it does raise in 2021, then, it should be able to extract a pound of flesh in the form of a strong valuation; raise when you don’t need to, another startup rule of thumb states.

Why raise more capital inside the next year if the company doesn’t need cash? Robinson said that if his startup wants to scale its non-engineering roles — it is currently around 92% engineers by headcount — and wants to hire the best, and those folks won’t come cheap. And the CEO noted that some competing players have raised hundreds of millions of dollars. Competing won’t be cheap, either.

In the larger universe that Spreadsheet.com plays in, there are many competing companies. Airtable is the obvious mention; the unicorn has raised more than $600 million, per Crunchbase data. Layer wants to make spreadsheets more collaboration-friendly. Stacker wants to help no-code developers build apps from spreadsheets, something akin to the antithesis of Spreadsheets.com. So does Rows, which was known as dashdash earlier in life. Flowhaven wants to do brand work outside of spreadsheets, an example of the market trend that Spreadsheet.com wants to combat. And Fivetran wants to “bring spreadsheets into the modern age and make it easier for users to work with messy data and analyze large amounts of information,” per our own reporting.

So, we now wait for Spreadsheet.com to open its doors and let the world get a better look at its tech. Are spreadsheets going apps, or are apps going spreadsheets? We’ll find out.

While markets grapple with the concept that the pandemic might not be entirely in the rear view mirror, investors are continuing to seek out investment opportunities outside public markets as they seek to diversify.

Vincent, an alternative asset aggregation hub, is hoping to capture some of that investor attention, allowing users to scour multiple types of assets across vertical-specific platforms and build up a diverse portfolio. Vincent CEO Slava Rubin says that more than 100 thousand people have used the platform since its launch in November, and that they now have 75 partner platforms integrated with the site.

Rubin, who previously co-founded the crowdfunding platform Indiegogo, tells TechCrunch that Vincent has just closed a $6 million Series A led by LAUNCH with additional investment from 8VC and Digital Currency Group, among others.

Vincent is looking to approach both accredited and unaccredited investors and the platform is currently a pretty even split between the two, Rubin tells us. The platform’s partner offerings span several alternative asset classes including venture capital, real estate, debt, crypto, art and collectibles. Vincent makes money by facilitating discovery on its partner platforms and earning fees.

We covered the company’s launch back in December when the alternative asset market was taking off but would proceed to get hotter by the week. At the moment, venture capital and real estate deals make up more than half of the capital flowing through the platform while crypto investments have seemed to slide in popularity amid the broader market sell-off there. Unaccredited investors gaining access to VC deals via equity crowdfunding has been a big onramp for the platform, especially amid loosening restrictions which have made that fundraising method more popular among some founders.

Today, there are more $3.5 billion worth of searchable deals on the Vincent platform spread across supported platforms like WeFunder, Groundfloor, Republic, SharesPost, Rally Rd. and Otis.

“The ecosystem of potential investors is bigger than it’s ever been,” Rubin tells us.

Stripe, with its $95 billion valuation, has been taking on the payment landscape with a whole platform approach, bringing in dozens of adjacent services to snag a wider and deeper set of customers that use these services by way of APIs. But in the world of so-called “embedded finance” there still remains a lot of room for smaller players to bring a more sophisticated approach to the business of building complicated financial processes that can be integrated by third parties to carry out their own businesses, and today one of them is announcing some funding to support its own mission.

Dwolla, which provides an API that allows companies to build and facilitate fast payments, specifically with a focus on ACH (automated clearing house, or payments or transfers between banks or other financial institutions), has closed $21 million in funding, money that it will be using to continue building out the functionality of its service and specifically how it integrates and provides more of the responsiveness of card payments; hiring more talent; and starting the process of taking its rails to more markets outside of the U.S., most likely looking at Canada, the U.K. and Australia first.

Foundry Group is leading this round, with Park West Asset Management LLC, Union Square Ventures, Detroit Venture Partners, Firebrand Ventures and Next Level Ventures also participating. Jeremy Andrus, the CEO of Traeger, is also in the round as an individual investor. Other investors in the company include Andreesen Horowitz, High Alpha, Thrive Capital and Ludlow Ventures, and CEO Brady Harris in an interview said Dwolla would not be disclosing its valuation at the moment, but described it as “competitive in what’s happening with transactions and payments overall.”

Dwolla is based out of Des Moines, Iowa, and has been somewhat under the radar over the years. Since 2009 it had only raised just over $50 million before this round, a relatively modest amount for a fintech these days. This $21 million is its biggest-single round to date.

But it’s also been quietly seeing a lot of growth. In 2019, Dwolla processed $11 billion in gross payment volume over its platform. In 2020, that grew to $20 billion. This year it’s projected to be $30 billion, said Harris. Customers include both larger institutions and fintechs that want to incorporate faster and more efficient ACH-based payments into their own services without going through the grunt work of building them from the ground up, as well as businesses that want these also in their stack, with particular requirements around how they would like the white labelled and customised.

In total the company has some 3 million end users on its platform, which are channelled through some 500 customers using its services.  Those customers include real estate companies, educational institutions, and retailers and brands like GOAT, Ibotta, and Rally. Some of those customers are bigger than you might think. Harris noted to me that one of its customers using the Dwolla API in a white-label service is a fintech that sees some $9 trillion in gross transactions. (Dwolla is under NDA so cannot disclose the name.) That 3 million number, Harris said, is currently growing by 1.5 million each quarter, so it’s really seeing a lot of transaction traffic right now.

And $30 billion is, of course, just a small part of the payments pie, with transactions estimated to be valued at $5.4 trillion in 2020 and projected to grow to $11.29 trillion by 2026.

As Harris describes it, while there are a lot of options out there in the market today for companies that want to incorporate payments and specifically bank transfer-based payments into their stack, Dwolla’s unique approach is that it’s made this particular service more efficient, and easily customizable for those that want to add more features into the process. (That could include more timing, incorporating a blended approach including card payments or other payment methods, or something else altogether.)

“ACH products are something that a consumer can pull off the shelf at a payments company like Stripe, but this is about creating more customization,” said Harris. “We get a lot of people who are mid integration with another provider but it can’t do it what they would like it to, and so they come to us. We like to think of ourselves as programmatic and flexible.”

This focus and mastery of its space has helped Dwolla’s star rise not just with customers but also investors.

Much has been made of the rise of the “creator economy” in the last year. With the Pandemic biting, millions flooded online, looking for a way to make money or promote themselves. The podcasting world has exploded, and with it platforms like Patreon, Clubhouse, and many others. But the thorny problem remains: Do you really own your audience as a creator, or does the platform own you? Companies like Mighty Networks, Circle and Tribe have tried to address this, giving creators greater control than social networks do over their audiences. Now another joins the fray.

Disciple Media bills itself as a SaaS platform to enable online creators to build community-led businesses. It’s now raised $6 million in funding in what it calls a ‘large Angel round’. It already claims to have garnered 2 million members and 500 communities since launching in 2018. Investors include Nick Mason (drummer in Pink Floyd), Sir Peter Michael (CEO of Cray Computers, founder of classic FM, Quantel and Cosworth Engineering), Rob Pierre (founder and CEO of Jellyfish), and Keith Morris (ex. chairman Sabre Insurance). It’s also announced a new Chairman, Eirik Svendsen, a expert in online marketplaces, SaaS and the publishing and media industry.

On its communities so far it has American country star and American Idol judge Luke Bryan, Gor Tex, and Body by Ciara. The platform is also available on iOS and Android and comes with community management tools, a CRM, and monetization options. The company claims its creators are now “earning millions in revenue each year.”

Benji Vaughan, Founder and CEO said: “The scale and rapid growth of the creator economy is extraordinary, and today that growth is being driven by entrepreneurial creators looking to build independent businesses outside of Youtube and the social networks.”

Vaughan, a Techno DJ and artist-turned-entrepreneur, says he came up with the idea after building similar communities for clients. He says the data created on Disciple communities is owned entirely by the host who built the network, “removing third-party risk and allowing insights to be actioned immediately”.

He told me: “We are moving from a position of effectively having ‘gig economy workers for social networks’ to owners of businesses who use social networks for their needs, not the other way around. Therefore, these people are starting to leave social networks to build their businesses and using social networks as marketing channels, as the rest of the world does. Once that migration happens where they move away from social networks as their prime platform, they need a hub where their data is going to get pulled together, they have an audience, which we see as a community that connects with itself as much as they do with the host.”

He thinks the equivalent of Salesforce or HubSpot in the creative economy is going to be a community platform: “That’s where they’re going to aggregate all the information about their valuable audience or community engagement. So, we are looking to, over time, to build out something very akin to what HubSpot sites they have for tech companies or SaaS businesses: a complete package, a complete platform to manage your engagement with your users, grow your user base and then convert that into revenue.”

Rob Pierre, founder and CEO Jellyfish said: “Creating and engaging with your community digitally has never been more important. Disciple allows you to do both of those things with a fully functional, feature-rich platform which requires very little upfront capital expenditure. It also provides numerous options to monetize your community.”

Customer success company Vitally raised $9 million in Series A funding from Andreessen Horowitz to continue developing its SaaS platform automating customer experiences.

Co-founder and CEO Jamie Davidson got the idea for Vitally while he was at his previous company, Pathgather. As chief customer officer, he was looking at tools and “was underwhelmed” by the available tools to automate repetitive tasks. So he set out to build one.

The global pandemic thrust customer satisfaction into the limelight as brands realized that the same ways they were engaging with customers had to change now that everyone was making the majority of their purchases online. Previously, a customer service representative may have managed a dozen accounts, but nowadays with product-led growth, they tackle a portfolio of thousands of customers, Davidson told TechCrunch.

New York-based Vitally, founded in 2017, unifies all of that customer data into one place and flows it through an engine to provide engagement insights, like what help customers need, which ones are at risk of churning and which to target for expanded revenue opportunities. Its software also provides automation to balance workflow and steer customer success teams to the tasks with the right customers so that they are engaging at the correct time.

Andreessen approached Davidson for the Series A, and he liked the alignment in customer success vision, he said. Including the new funding, Vitally raised a total of $10.6 million, which includes $1.2 million in September 2019.

From the beginning, Vitally was bringing in strong revenue growth, which enabled the company to focus on building its platform and hold off on fundraising.

“A Series A was certainly on our mind and road map, but we weren’t actively fundraising,” Davidson said. “However, we saw a great fit and great backing to help us grow. Tools have lagged in the customer success area and how to manage that. Andreessen can help us scale and grow with our customers as they manage the thousands of their customers.”

Davidson intends to use the new funding to scale Vitally’s team across the board and build out its marketing efforts to introduce the company to the market. He expects to grow to 30 by the end of the year to support the company’s annual revenue growth — averaging 3x — and customer acquisition. Vitally is already working with big customers like Segment, Productboard and Calendly.

As part of the investment, Andreessen general partner David Ulevitch is joining the Vitally board. He saw an opportunity for the reimagining of how SaaS companies delivered customer success, he told TechCrunch via email.

Similar to Davidson, he thought that customer success teams were now instrumental to growing SaaS businesses, but technology lagged behind market need, especially with so many SaaS companies taking a self-serve or product-led approach that attracted more orders than legacy tools.

Before the firm met Vitally, it was hearing “rave reviews” from its customers, Ulevitch said.

“The feedback was overwhelmingly positive and affirmed the fact that Vitally simply had the best product on the market since it actually mapped to how businesses operated and interacted with customers, particularly businesses with a long-tail of paying customers,” he added. “The first dollar into a SaaS company is great, but it’s the renewal and expansion dollars that really set the winners apart from everyone else. Vitally is in the best position to help companies get that renewal, help their customers expand accounts and ultimately win the space.”

DNSFilter, an artificial intelligence startup that provides DNS protection to enterprises, has secured $30 million in Series A funding from Insight Partners.

DNSFilter, as its name suggests, offers DNS-based web content filtering and threat protection. Unlike the majority of its competitors, which includes the likes of Palo Alto Networks and Webroot, the startup uses proprietary AI technology to continuously scan billions of domains daily, identifying anomalies and potential vectors for malware, ransomware, phishing, and fraud. 

“Most of our competitors either rent or lease a database from some third party,” Ken Carnesi, co-founder and CEO of DNSFilter tells TechCrunch. “We do that in-house, and it’s through artificial intelligence that’s scanning these pages in real-time.” 

The company, which counts the likes of Lenovo, Newegg, and Nvidia among its 14,000 customers, claims this industry-first technology catches threats an average of five days before competitors and is capable of identifying 76% of domain-based threats. By the end of 2021, DNSFilter says it will block more than 1.1 million threats daily.

DNSFilter has seen rapid growth over the past 12 months as a result of the mass shift to remote working and the increase in cyber threats and ransomware attacks that followed. The startup saw eightfold growth in customer activity, doubled its global headcount to just over 50 employees, and partnered with Canadian software house N-Able to push into the lucrative channel market.  

“DNSFilter’s rapid growth and efficient customer acquisition are a testament to the benefits and ease of use compared to incumbents,” Thomas Krane, principal at Insight Partners, who has been appointed as a director on DNSFilter’s board. “The traditional model of top-down, hardware-centric network security is disappearing in favor of solutions that readily plug in at the device level and can cater to highly distributed workforces”

Prior to this latest funding round, which was also backed by Arthur Ventures (the lead investor in DNSFilter’s seed round), CrowdStrike co-founder and former chief technology officer  Dmitri Alperovitch also joined DNSFilter’s board of directors. 

Carnesi said the addition of Alperovitch to the board will help the company get its technology into the hands of enterprise customers. “He’s helping us to shape the product to be a good fit for enterprise organizations, which is something that we’re doing as part of this round — shifting focus to be primarily mid-market and enterprise,” he said.

The company also recently added former CrowdStrike vice president Jen Ayers as its chief operating officer. “She used to manage their entire managed threat hunting team, so she’s definitely coming on for the security side of things as we build out our domain intelligence team further,” Carnesi said.

With its newly-raised funds, DNSFilter will further expand its headcount, with plans to add more than 80 new employees globally over the next 12 months.

“There’s a lot more that we can do for security via DNS, and we haven’t really started on that yet,” Carnesi said. “We plan to do things that people won’t believe were possible via DNS.”

The company, which acquired Web Shrinker in 2018, also expects there to be more acquisitions on the cards going forward. “There are some potential companies that we’d be looking to acquire to speed up our advancement in certain areas,” Carnesi said.

More than half of the U.S. population has stayed away from considering life insurance because they believe it’s probably too expensive, and the most common way to buy it today is in person. A startup that’s built a platform that aims to break down those conventions and democratize the process by making life insurance (and the benefits of it) more accessible is today announcing significant funding to fuel its rapidly growing business.

Ethos, which uses more than 300,000 data points online to determine a person’s eligibility for life insurance policies, which are offered as either term or whole life packages starting at $8/month, has picked up $100 million from a single investor, SoftBank Vision Fund 2. Peter Colis, Ethos’s CEO and co-founder, said that the funding brings the startup’s valuation to over $2.7 billion.

This is a quick jump for the the company: it was only two months ago that Ethos picked up a $200 million equity round at a valuation of just over $2 billion.

It’s now raised $400 million to date and has amassed a very illustrious group of backers. In addition to SoftBank they include General Catalyst, Sequoia Capital; Accel; GV; Jay-Z’s Roc Nation; Glade Brook Capital Partners; Will Smith and Robert Downey Jr.

This latest injection of funding — which will be used to hire more people and continue to expand its product set into adjacent areas of insurance life critical illness coverage — was unsolicited, Colis said, but comes on the heels of very rapid growth.

Ethos — which is sold currently only in the U.S. across 49 states — has seen both revenues and user numbers grow by over 500% compared to a year ago, and it’s on track to issue some $20 billion in life insurance coverage this year. And it is approaching $100 million in annualized growth profit. Ethos itself is not yet profitable, Colis said.

There are a couple of trends going on that speak to a wide opportunity for Ethos at the moment.

The first of these is the current market climate: globally we are still battling the Covid-19 global health pandemic, and one impact of that — in particular given how Covid-19 has not spared any age group or demographic — has been more awareness of our mortality. That inevitably leads at least some part of the population to considering something like life insurance coverage that might not have thought about it previously.

However, Colis is a little skeptical on the lasting impact of that particular trend. “We saw an initial surge of demand in the Covid period, but then it regressed back to normal,” he said in an interview. Those who were more inclined to think about life insurance around Covid-19 might have come around to considering it regardless: it was being driven, he said, by those with pre-existing health conditions going into the pandemic.

That, interestingly, brings up the second trend, which goes beyond our present circumstances and Colis believes will have the more lasting impact.

While there have been a number of startups, and even incumbent providers, looking to rethink other areas of insurance such as car, health and property coverage, life insurance has been relatively untouched, especially in some markets like the U.S. Traditionally, someone taking out life insurance goes through a long vetting process, which is not all carried out online and can involve medical examinations and more, and yes, it can be expensive: the stereotype you might best know is that only wealthier people take out life insurance policies.

Much like companies in fintech who have rethought how loan applications (and payback terms) can be rethought and evaluated afresh using big data — pulling in a new range of information to form a picture of the applicant and the likelihood of default or not — Ethos is among the companies that is applying that same concept to a different problem. The end result is a much faster turnaround for applications, a considerably cheaper and more flexible offer (term life insurance lasts for only as long as a person pays for it to), and generally a lot more accessibility for everyone potentially interested. That pool of data is growing all the time.

“Every month, we get more intelligent,” said Colis.

There is also the matter of what Ethos is actually selling. The company itself is not an insurance provider but an “insuretech” — similar to how neobanks use APIs to integrate banking services that have been built by others, which they then wrap with their own customer service, personalization and more — Ethos integrates with third-party insurance underwriters, providing customer service, more efficient onboarding (no in-person medical exams for example) and personalization (both in packages and pricing) around them. Given how staid and hard it is to get more traditional policies, it’s essentially meant completely open water for Ethos in terms of finding and securing new customers.

Ethos’s rise comes at a time when we are seeing other startups approaching and rethinking life insurance also in the U.S. and further afield. Last week, YuLife in the UK raised a big round to further build out its own take on life insurance, which is to sell policies that are linked to an individual’s own health and wellness practices — the idea being that this will make you happier and give more reason to pay for a policy that otherwise feels like some dormant investment; but also that it could help you live longer (Sproutt is another also looking at how to emphasize the “life” aspect of life insurance). Others like  DeadHappy and BIMA are, like Ethos, rethinking accessibility of life insurance for a wider set of demographics.

There are some signs that Ethos is catching on with its mission to expand that pool, not just grow business among the kind of users who might have already been considering and would have taken out life insurance policies. The startup said that more than 40% of its new policy holders in the first half of 2021 had incomes of $60,000 or less, and nearly 40% of new policy holders were under the age of 40. The professions of those customers also speak to that democratization: the top five occupations, it said were homemaker, insurance agent, business owner, teacher, and registered nurse.

That traction is likely one reason why SoftBank came knocking.

“Ethos is leveraging data and its vertically integrated tech stack to fundamentally transform life insurance in the U.S.,” said Munish Varma, managing partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, in a statement. “Through a fast and user-friendly online application process, the company can accurately underwrite and insure a broad segment of customers quickly. We are excited to partner with Peter Colis and the exceptional team at Ethos.”

Just over five months after securing $50 million in debt & equity, Valoreo has closed on a $30 million Series A funding round.

Mexico City-based Valoreo aims to invest in, operate and scale e-commerce brands as part of its self-described mission “to bring better products at more affordable prices” to the Latin American consumer.

Valoreo (which the company says is an extension of the Spanish word “valor,” meaning to add value), acquires merchants that operate their own brands and primarily sell on online marketplaces such as Amazon and Mercado Libre. The company targets brands that offer “category-leading products” and which it believes have “significant growth potential.” It also develops brands in-house to offer a broader selection of products to the end customer.

The startup was founded in late 2020 and has since swelled to more than 100 employees throughout Latin America. It has also since completed “multiple” acquisitions of local brands operating across a variety of industries, such as beauty, fitness and home goods.

California-based Presight Capital and Kingsway Capital out of the United Kingdom co-led the round, which also included participation from existing backers such as Kaszek, Upper90 and FJ Labs. The company declined to break down how much equity it raised in its seed round, but including debt, Valoreo has secured $80 million since inception.

It plans to use the new capital mostly to continue acquiring e-commerce brands across Mexico, Brazil and Colombia as well as to do more hiring.

The company says its model differs from that of its U.S.-based competitors (such as Thrasio and Perch) in that it is tailored to “the specific needs of the Latin American market and is specifically focused on the Latin American end customer.”

Valoreo aims to help entrepreneurs who may lack the resources and access to capital to take their businesses to the next level.

At the time of its seed raise, co-founder and co-CEO Stefan Florea told TechCrunch that the company takes less than five weeks typically from its initial contact with a seller to a final payout. 

Then, the acquired and developed brands are integrated into the company’s consolidated holding. By tapping its team of “specialists” in areas such as digital marketing and supply chain management, it claims to be able to help these brands “reach new heights” while giving the entrepreneurs behind the companies “an attractive exit,” or partial exit in some cases.

Generally Valoreo acquires the majority of the business, with the purchase price typically being a combination of an upfront cash payment and a profit share component so sellers can still earn money.

Hernan Kazah, co-founder and managing partner of Kaszek, said the firm doubled down on its investment in the startup after seeing its “impressive growth over the past few months.”

Valoreo is not the only Latin American startup focused on this space. In April, Merama announced it had raised $60 million in seed and Series A funding and secured $100 million in debt.

The money was raised “at well over a $200 million valuation,” co-founder and CEO Sujay Tyle said at the time.

Autonomous vehicle technology startup Argo AI and its backer and customer Ford plan to launch up to 1,000 self-driving vehicles on Lyft’s ride-hailing network in a number of cities over the next five years starting with Miami and Austin.

The first Ford self-driving vehicles, which are equipped with Argo’s autonomous vehicle technology, will become available on Lyft’s app in Miami later this year. Ford and Argo have had a presence in Miami for years now and have an active fleet of test vehicles.

Austin will follow in next year with the remaining U.S. cities being added to the Lyft app in 2023 and beyond, according to Jody Kelman, who heads up Lyft’s Autonomous, the company self-driving deployment business unit. Argo currently tests in Detroit, Palo Alto, Pittsburgh and Washington D.C.

“It’s the biggest deployment certainly that we’re doing and that I think anyone else is doing,” Kelman said. “One thousand cars across six markets is a  big leap forward in terms of scaled commercialization.”

This isn’t just about Argo and Ford jumping on the Lyft network. Lyft will also provide access to driving data from its entire network in exchange for a 2.5% stake in Argo AI, under terms of the agreement announced Wednesday. Lyft already captures driving data, which includes telemetry information such as hard-braking events and even collisions. Argo is most interested in two areas of data: safety information around human drivers on its app and more generally what trip movements look like across a city, Argo CEO Bryan Salesky told TechCrunch.

“This will really help us hone and figure out where the demand is and what peak demand looks like, which helps us figure out where we need to map, where we need to go, where we need to operate,” Salesky said.  “It helps us spend our test resources wisely.”

For instance, the Lyft data should help Argo spot areas where public transit is plentiful and other neighborhoods where it’s less available or entirely absent.

“We really want to take a holistic view of the demand picture using their data,” Salesky said. “That helps us really be precise about where to deploy in order to have the greater benefit.”

The Ford vehicles will be operated by Argo and include a human safety driver behind the wheel. Salesky did note that the vehicles will drive autonomously from pickup to drop-off point.

The agreement is an indication that Argo has made progress in its AV development and specifically its work with Ford. The automaker announced in February 2017 that it was investing $1 billion in Argo AI, which was not even six months old at the time. Since then, Argo has focused on developing the virtual driver system — all of the sensors, software and compute platform — as well as high-definition maps designed for Ford’s self-driving vehicles.

In July 2019, VW Group announced it was investing $2.6 billion in Argo. That deal, which was finalized last summer, gives Ford and VW equal ownership stakes, which will be roughly 40% each over time. The remaining equity sits with Argo’s co-founders as well as employees. Argo’s board is comprised of two VW seats, two Ford seats and three Argo seats.

Lyft is also a beneficiary in the deal — and beyond that small equity stake. Lyft main goal is to become the go-to ride-hailing network and fleet management platform used by any and all commercial robotaxi services. Lyft already has partnerships with other AV developers, notably the $4 billion Hyundai-Aptiv joint venture known as Motional, as well as Waymo.

Motional vehicles are on the Lyft ride-hailing network in Las Vegas. All of the vehicles have human safety operators behind the wheel. The companies have an agreement deploy fully autonomous cars on the Lyft network in 2023.

Lyft’s intention was always to lock up the rest. Unclear with which companies might commercialize the tech first, Lyft also took on the expensive pursuit of developing autonomous vehicle technology internally through a division called Level 5. That self-driving division was acquired in April by Toyota’s Woven Planet Holdings subsidiary for $550 million.

As part of the acquisition agreement, Woven Planet signed commercial agreements to use the Lyft platform and fleet data.

Byju’s said on Wednesday it has acquired California-headquartered reading platform Epic for $500 million, the latest in a series of moves from India’s most valuable startup as it deepens its footprint in the U.S. market.

The deal involves both cash and stock and Epic founders — Kevin Donahue and Suren Markosian — will continue to run the business, they said in an interview with TechCrunch.

Epic operates an eponymous digital reading platform for kids aged 12 or younger. The platform, which has a presence across 90% of elementary schools in the U.S., has amassed over 2 million teachers and 50 million kids (up from 20 million last year).

Epic collects and analyzes real-time anonymized and aggregated data on how many children read a book, how deeply they engage with it and where their interests start to fall off. In a Netflix-esque move, the firm has also started to release several print versions of its own original titles.

TechCrunch reported in March that Byju’s was in talks to acquire Epic. Donahue and Markosian are no strangers to Byju’s. They first met with Byju Raveendran, co-founder and chief executive of the eponymous Indian startup, four or five years ago, but conversations about an acquisition only began this year, they said.

Raveendran said in the interview that his son uses the app, which gave him the conviction to explore any opportunity with the startup more seriously.

“We started Epic about eight years ago with the goal of bringing books to every child. We thought through technology we can get kids excited about reading and we can remove any barrier between the child and book. We are now in almost every school in the U.S., reaching over 50 million kids and a billion books read,” said Markosian.

“It has been our personal passion to build this platform because we wanted our kids to read more, too. So when we got to this point, it really made sense for us to look at scaling globally and internationally. When we started to talk to Byju, we realized that we share a common passion for education and belief in technology helping solve this opportunity. Together with Byju, we can take Epic to the next level,” he said.

Some original titles released by Epic. Image Credits: Epic

U.S. expansion

For Byju’s, the new product expands its current portfolio and brings expertise about a demographic of the U.S. that the startup has been looking for, said Raveendran. The addition of Epic to Byju’s offerings is “complimentary from a product standpoint as reading is a very powerful format for students to learn,” he said.

“The distribution they have will also help us offer more options to students in the U.S. and reach a demographic that we have also been working to serve. They understand this demographic very well,” he said.

Earlier this year, Byju’s rebranded its international business as Byju’s Future School, as part of which it is offering coding and math in synchronous and asynchronous formats to students and plans to add music, English, fine arts and science to the catalog. Raveendran said he hasn’t decided whether Epic will be rebranded, acknowledging that the California-headquartered startup has a strong brand awareness in the U.S.

Byju’s, which launched a learning app featuring Disney characters in the U.S. earlier this month, now has three large offerings in the U.S. that Raveendran expects to generate $100 million in revenue this year alone. “Our ambition is to make a global impact,” he said.

Byju’s, which also has a significant presence in China, plans to bring Epic’s offering to India and other markets, he added.

Acquisitions and fundraise

Epic is the latest in a series of acquisitions by Byju’s. In the past two years, the startup has acquired U.S.-based kids-focused “phygital” startup Osmo (for $120 million), online coding platform WhiteHat Jr (for $300 million), coaching centre chain Aakash (for nearly $1 billion), and Indian edtech startups Toppr* and Gradeup*. (*Yet to be officially confirmed.)

“We have not done acquisitions not for the sake of doing it,” said Raveendran, who himself is a teacher, pointing to the growth and success of firms he has acquired post-acquisition and how these firms have been led by their original founding teams. “Our aspiration is very long-term. We work with the founders to help them turbo-charge their growth,” he said, adding that the startup is open to exploring more M&A opportunities.

Byju’s, which has raised about $1.5 billion since the pandemic broke last year and has attracted several high-profile investors including Blackstone, said the fundraise in recent years has helped the startup to acquire younger firms. He said the startup currently doesn’t plan to raise more external capital, but he didn’t rule out more fundraises in the next few months.