Author: azeeadmin

Anyone, an audio app that’s building a ‘marketplace for advice’ one five-minute phone call at a time, is launching new versions of its iOS and Android apps today* and beginning to large-scale onboarding after operating in a limited closed beta for the past six months.

The app — which was founded around 18 months ago (so pre-pandemic) — has a simple premise: Advice is best delivered verbally, concisely and one-to-one, in a time-limited format.

Video is distracting and a hassle to fit into busy people’s schedules. Text is time-consuming and prone to misunderstandings. But a simple phone call can — quickly and usefully — cut through, is the thinking here.

Hence the decision to hard-stop at a five-minute phone call. The app automatically terminates each call at the five minute mark — no ifs, no buts (and, well, hopefully fewer time-nibbling ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ too).

To fund development of the marketplace, the team has raised around $4 million in total to date — mainly comprised of a $3.6M seed round led by Berlin-based Cavalry Ventures with participation from Supernode Global, Antler and a number of high-profile angel investors (contributing angels include Atomico’s Sarah Drinkwater and Sameer Singh; and ustwo’s Matt ‘Mills’ Miller, among others).

Broadly speaking, online audio has shown its staying power through a sustained podcast boom and, more recently, a buzzy moment for social audio, via developments like Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces — which speak to a general sense of pandemic-struck ‘Zoom fatigue’ as remote workers max out on video calls at work yet still crave meaningful connections with other people at a time when opportunities to mingle in person are still limited vs pre-COVID-19.

A lot of social audio can still be very noisy, though, and Anyone wants to be anything but. This is short-form, topic-specific audio.

Why five minutes? It’s short enough for a busy person to almost not have to think twice about taking a cold call from someone they’ve probably never spoken to before — while being just about long enough that some useful advice can be distilled and imparted across those 300 seconds of one-to-one connection.

Naturally the short format does not allow for group/conference calls. It’s one-to-one only.

Anyone’s CEO also reckons this “intimate”, short-form audio format could help drive diversity of advice by encouraging people whose voices may be underrepresented in traditional mentorship fora to feel more comfortable offering their time and knowledge to others. (He touts a current 50:50 user-split between men and women offering expertise through the app — and 25% people of color.)

“It’s not about taking long form meetings and compressing them — it’s about taking those conversations that would never have happened… and making them happen,” says CEO and co-founder David Orlic, pointing out that mainstream calendar apps have a default meeting slot that’s set to half an hour or an hour. So the wider thesis is that our current tools/infrastructure just aren’t set up to help people give and grab bitesized advice. (And, well, on the Internet anyone can claim to be an expert — but of course you can’t rely on the quality of the ‘advice’ you find freely floating around online.)

“Our belief is that there are a lot of five minute problems that we could be solving — whereas there are a lot of 30 or 60 minute problems that have solutions designed for them already. So we’re kind of building this for those conversations that aren’t happening,” he adds.

Orlic hints that the intention is also to leave Anyone’s callers a little hungry for more — to feed demand for more five-minute conversations and so fuel transactions across the marketplace.

“If you look at the demand side — the callers — there’s always multiple calls involved. So people will call a lot of people and ask them basically the same question or bounce ideas. And then they will aggregate those insights into something that’s much more valuable than one conversation,” he continues. “So it’s like building an advisory board for yourself.”

The idea for the platform came after Orlic and his co-founders realized they could trace key career decisions to a handful of short conversations — brief moments of advice that ended up profoundly influencing the trajectory of their working lives, to the point where they were still looking back on them years later.

“None of us in the founding team had any networks to speak of when we were growing up. And we had fairly little exposure to opportunity. Alfred is from a small village in the middle of nowhere in Sweden, I grew up in an immigrant family, and Sam is a working class bloke from Leeds. And looking back at our careers we could track them back to this handful of conversations — these haphazard moments when someone gave us a piece of critical advice,” he tells TechCrunch. “For them it was just another five minute chat but for us it turned out to be life-changing.”

“For Alfred it was some quick advice on how he could land a job at Google which he managed to do and spent almost a decade there working as a growth guy on Google Chrome and other stuff; for Sam it was how to start a company; for me it was the suggestion that I as a creative should pursue an MBA — which I ended up doing. So we started thinking long and hard about the concept of advice, and we became obsessed with opening up these closed networks.”

The aim for Anyone’s marketplace is to make similarly pivotal moments accessible to all sorts of people — by giving the app’s users the chance to call any expertise provider on the network (provided they can afford the fee) and ask their question.

A slogan on its website poses the question “imagine if you could call anyone in the world” — which is certainly a poetic-sounding moonshot to be shooting for, although the size of the user-base remains far off that global vision at this early stage.

“What we’re building is really the phone book of the future,” says Orlic, slotting his elevator pitch into our ~30-minute phone conversation. “We’re building a place for unique, one-to-one, five minute experiences — which is something really different from most social audio plays.”

He points to a trend of other apps intentionally applying limits to change/define the user experience in behavior-shaping ways (like Poparazzi, a self-styled ‘anti-Instagram’ photo sharing app that doesn’t let you take selfies to make you take more pics of your friends and vice versa; or the dating app Thursday which limits users to one active day of use per week to prevent endless swiping and nudge matches toward going on an actual in-person date).

The marketplace component of Anyone’s app is another intentional limit too, of course. Calls are not free by default.

Putting a price on Anyone’s one-to-one advice is one way to try to weed out unserious (or indeed abusive) users from those genuinely seeking others’ expertise on specific topics.

But primarily it’s there to provide an incentivize for people who have expertise worth sharing to make themselves available to take cold-calls (even very short ones) from strangers/those outside their existing contact networks.

Pricing for a five-minute call is set by Anyone users. So the call fee can vary from nothing at all (if the user distributes a free voucher code) to as little as $5 or all the way up to $500 (!) which does sound pretty crazy expensive. But Orlic notes users can choose to donate their fee to a charity if they do not wish to financially benefit from the advice they’re dishing out (so there may be instances where a high fee includes a philanthropic component).

With such highly variable fees, the app will need to have a good safety mechanism to re-confirm a user really does want to be charged the specific fee. (And, god forbid, to avoid the risk of butt-dialling… )

“If you want to connect with someone I think it’s reasonable to put a cost on the scarcest resource on the planet which is someone’s undivided attention,” Orlic argues, suggesting that plenty of mainstream tech confuses transient ‘access’ with attention. “We can ‘access’ people everywhere — we can listen to them, read them, follow them. But that’s not the same as attention… Someone’s undivided attention is a remarkable, remarkable thing. And the five-minute cap forces you to be very clear and to the point about what you want to chat about.”

With its intentionally attention-slicing infrastructure — which manages ephemeral contacts into precisely measured and billed units — “all of a sudden you have all of these conversations that wouldn’t have happened happening thanks to this manageable way of connecting with people”, is the claim. 

Anyone users wanting to list themselves on the marketplace to sell one-to-one advice will need to create a profile that specifies their availability to take calls and some basic details (name, career details, location etc), as well as setting their five minute fee.

They also need to provide details of the “conversation topics” they’re comfortable giving advice on.

Co-founder Alfred Malmros’ profile includes examples such as: “Make the leap. Quitting a dream job to make it on your own”; “Rising quickly in a large organisation — politics vs. talent”; and “It takes a fool to remain sane. Thriving as an employee” — so topic steerage looks intended to be not only specific but maybe also give a flavor of the individual’s personality to further help advice-seekers decide if they want to shell out for five minutes of that particular person’s time.

The risk of imposters or low quality advice is being managed by “vetting and verification” processing all advisors have to go through prior to being able to sell, per Orlic. “Beyond verification, we put a lot of work into making sure that everyone on Anyone understands what constitutes good advice, how to avoid projection and biases in conversations, etc,” he adds.

The platform also incorporates a rating system — again, in an attempt to keep quality up across the marketplace.

Anyone’s early users are a blend of creators, founders and investors, per Orlic — including a lot of first and second time founders, as you might expect, with the pandemic having limited in-person startup networking opportunities.

He also says they’ve attracted a lot of people mid career, looking for advice on how to quit their jobs and pivot into something totally new — again, likely fuelled by the pandemic reconfiguring many things around how we work (and, more broadly, how we may be thinking about work-life balance).

“When you’re doing that kind of big life decision you really want to connect with a lot of people and ask around,” he suggests on the interest from established professionals looking for advice on a career switch. “Also there’s a high willingness to pay, I’d argue, when you’re in that position.”

“Business is a huge thing as a marketplace for advice,” Orlic adds, noting that a record number of businesses started in the last year too. “Investors — by the way — love this for deal flow because they can speed date a lot of founders and then pick who they continue with.”

Parents are another community of early users he highlights — saying they’ve been both offering and soliciting advice during the early test phase. He says one of the best pieces of advice he’s personally gained through the network was a conversation about parenting, adding: “I’ve had some really profound conversations with other dads. People that know a lot more about parenting than I do — where I’ve gotten really actionable advice and support. So that has been a big thing for me personally.”

Orlic also says he’s excited about potential in the area of mental health — suggesting the short-form format could be helpful to get people to have conversations about therapy which, since they’re so bitesized and bounded, may be a non-intimidating introduction toward taking up more sustained support.

He also mentions that he’s excited about the potential for civic society to make use of the platform as a tool for driving public engagement and awareness around issues and campaigns.

Appropriately enough, Anyone’s team has been dogfooding by using the app to get advice to help build the startup. (Orlic admits he asked someone on the network how to get TechCrunch’s attention and was advised, by the unnamed investor, to pitch this reporter — so it sounds like he got some solid advice there ;)

The app has had around 1,000 test users during the closed beta period — with some 12,000 on the wait-list that Orlic says they’ll be onboarding over the coming weeks.

Network building — so growing the size of the user-base on both the expertise and demand sides — is clearly going to be a key challenge here. (And notably Orlic emphases the network effects expertise of its angel backer, Singh.)

Anyone’s five-minute format may be bitesize enough to encourage users to spread the word of any good experiences they have on the platform to their (wider) social graphs on mainstream social networks. Although the calls themselves must surely remain private between the two interlocutors — so there are some hard limits on the app content being able to go viral.

(At the time of writing, a link to Anyone’s privacy policy wasn’t working so we asked for a confirm on the privacy of calls — and Orlic told us: “All calls on the new app are completely e2e encrypted, and there’s no way to listen in on an ongoing conversation. For user safety, calls are recorded, anonymised and stored in a secure environment for maximum 30 days. So in case a user reports a specific call in the app and wants a refund, or if an advisor flags up harassment or other serious issues, we can deal with that in a sustainable way.”)

At the same time it’s not hard to imagine a platform like Twitter (or, indeed, LinkedIn) seeing value in offering a similar one-to-one user call capability — and bolting it on as a feature on an established network where users have already built up extensive social graphs. So If Anyone’s idea really takes off the risk of cloning could get very real — which means it will have to balance network building/growth with attention to the quality of the community it’s building and innovating to keep its users happily stuck to its own (inevitably smaller) network.

Commenting on backing the app in a statement, Claude Ritter, managing partner at Cavalry Ventures, said: “What sets Anyone apart from other audio apps is the quality and connection of 1:1 advice. The team saw the potential of audio and the emergence of the creator economy long before the hype. We’re impressed by what they’ve accomplished to date and by their mission to build the phone book of the future.”

Around 9,000 five-minute calls have been made via Anyone’s platform so far, per Orlic — who says the goal they’re shooting for as they open up access now is to get to 100,000 calls within a year.

The business model for now is to take a straightforward 20% cut of the advice fee.

On the fee side there’s also potential for things to get bumpy if momentum builds around the concept — given that platform giants have been known to take a predatory approach to pricing when trying to close down creator-supporting upstart competition via their own fast-following clones. (See, for example, Facebook’s recent dive into offering a newsletter platform — for which it’s both paying writers upfront for contributions and, at least initially, not taking any cut of their subscriptions.)

It’s clear that Anyone will need to pay particular attention to the quality of the advice and community it’s building. It may even end up needing to hone in on serving particular niches and specialisms in order to leverage differentiation vs larger more generalist networks which have the advantage of larger user-bases should they decide to move in on the same ‘quick call’ turf.

At the same time, there are signs that some of the buzz around social audio may be fading away to more of a hmm as the hype dies down and app users tire of all the noise. But again, that’s why Anyone keeping the audio side intentionally short looks smart.

“We feel that we are part of a movement that is rebuilding the Internet as we know it and building something that is more sustainable and healthy — and really creating value,” says Orlic, discussing the changing landscape around social apps. “Closed social is a topic that I’m really excited by. We’ve seen this for years, with Slack channels and WhatsApp groups. We’ve seen social closing off because of a tonne of different reasons — and with Geneva and a lot of new really cool startups and platforms we’re seeing everything focus around communities. People building communities around specific verticals and then monetizing them in different ways. So we’re definitely a part of that wave.

“A lot of our most active users are people who have built audiences around specific topic and want more meaningful connections with those audiences — the Substack writers that use us as a way to both connect with their existing readers but also gaining new superfans, if you will, because when you’ve had a five minute chat with someone and then sign up to read their Substack, you will read everything they write after that kind of intro. So we’re definitely a part of that closed social. But as a business we are a marketplace — because again we’re obsessed with that idea of someone’s undivided attention being a very scarce resource and the fact that we’re seeing the ‘cameo-ification’ of everything and everyone. And that is also here to stay.”

“Monetization — in one way — sounds like a really crass and cynical concept but at the end of the day we want people to build income streams around things they’re passionate and know a lot about. At the end of the day that is a wonderful, wonderful thing,” he adds. “A creator middle class is a very exciting concept because looking at all the big platforms, old social media, we know where the money is going — it’s going to the top 0.1% of influencers and creators. Whereas small and mid tier creators are not making money to sustain themselves off their passion. For that you have all of these cohort-based courses through Maven. And platforms like us — that enable people to connect directly with each other in a one-to-one setting.

“We think it’s very cool that we’re doing an opinionated, one-to-one, five-minutes, audio-only platform because that gives us a unique positioning. And this is what excites the team. Seeing these stories come out of it — and those stories would not come out of it if it was just another broadcasting or Clubhouse thing.”

There is of course no small irony that it’s exactly because of the proliferation of mobile connectivity and apps — which have driven increased utility by providing people with on-demand access to so much data (and people) — that the traditional ‘quick call’ of old has been derailed, creating conditions where a startup feels there’s an opportunity to build a dedicated marketplace for scheduled quick phone calls. (Albeit, one that’s aiming to scale to a far wider network that the average person would have had in their phone book back in the 1980s, say.)

But as software and connectivity keeps eating the world, enforcing tech upgrades and reconfiguring learned behaviors, it’s clear that the resulting disruption can recreate the right conditions for new tools to come in and repackage some of the old convenience — which maybe got a bit lost in the noise.

*App Store review gods willing

 

Pratilipi, an Indian startup that operates an online storytelling platform to enable writers to share their work in various formats, said on Wednesday it has raised a $48 million financing round led by Krafton.

South Korean gaming giant Krafton led the Series D round for the seven-year-old Bangalore-based startup, bringing its to-date raise to $78.8 million.

Existing investor Omidyar Network India as well as scores of high-profile entrepreneurs including Pratilipi chief executive Ranjeet Pratap Singh as well as Unacademy’s Hemesh Singh and Gaurav Munjal, Locus’ Nishith Rastogi, Meesho’s Vidit Aatrey, Udhyam’s Mekin Maheshwari and NoBroker’s Amit Agarwal also participated in the round.

Pratilipi started its journey as an online reading and writing platform, where writers shared their stories in several Indian languages. The idea at the time was to create a platform where quality literary work could be hosted and shared in Indian languages, something that only had sparse representation on the web, said Singh, who is a voracious reader of Indian literary work and worked at Vodafone before starting Pratilipi, in an interview with TechCrunch.

The platform has ballooned to become a market leader since. Over 370,000 writers on the platform today share their work in a dozen languages and more than 30 million readers browse Pratilipi each month to read their work.

These writers can choose to share their work with readers for free or charge a subscription fee. But increasingly there’s another avenue for them to monetize their work.

Pratilipi — which has expanded to book publishing, audio and comics in recent years — uses proprietary algorithms to identify stories that it believes could be turned into a book or a web series and buys the IP from the writers.

The startup has inked several partnerships with industry players including giant on-demand video streaming service MX Player, which carried Pratilipi’s show “Midnight Lily” earlier this year.

“We have been a part of Pratilipi’s growth story since the early stages,” said Pratik Poddar, Principal at Nexus Venture Partners, an early backer of Pratilipi, in a statement. “Over the years, we have witnessed the team’s deep product focus, an obsession to make creators successful, and keen understanding of monetizing content IP which is extensible across different formats.”

Pratilipi’s Singh said the startup will deploy the fresh funding to broaden its partnerships with industry players as well as invest in building in-house publishing stack. With Krafton, which recently launched the Battlegrounds Mobile India game in the South Asian country, the startup aims to develop stories that can be incorporated into global gaming franchises.

The demand for original stories have surged in India in recent years and many streaming services and publishing giants are engaging with Pratilipi, he said. “We will continue to work with ecosystem partners and for formats where we already have in-house expertise we will expand on those,” he said.

Pratilipi also plans to use the fresh funds to expand outside of India. A fraction of its users today already live outside the country, said Singh. “We haven’t worked on the expansion so far, but now the plan is to actively reach out to creators and readers in other markets,” he said.

Wednesday’s announcement also illustrates Krafton’s growing push into the Indian market, where in recent months it has held talks to acquire several gaming studios, according to a person familiar with the matter.

“It is exciting to see the growth of Indian local IPs in online literature, comics and audio platform in Pratilipi, which is already the largest player in India in multiple categories,” said Sean Hyunil Sohn, Head of Krafton’s India division, in a statement.

“With Pratilipi already having a multilingual platform for online literature, it is poised to become one of the strongest players in emerging markets in the future. Krafton believes in long term potential of local Indian IPs that can be successful not just in India but globally as well across formats including literature, comics and gaming and our investment in Pratilipi is another step in realising that vision.”

French startup Wecasa has raised a $17.7 million funding round (€15 million). Blisce is leading the funding round with existing investors Serena, ISAI and Frédéric Mazzella also participating. The company has been building a marketplace for home care and wellness.

Over the past few years, Wecasa has kept adding new verticals. The startup originally specialized in hairdressing at home. It then added massage, beauty treatments, housekeeping, babysitting and sports coaching.

While the company is mostly active in France, it expanded to London in April 2021. Up next, Wecasa expects to launch its service in a couple of new European markets as soon as next year.

When it comes to metrics, Wecasa expects to generate $23.6 million (€20 million) in revenue this year. That would represent a three-fold increase compared to 2020 revenue. There are 150,000 Wecasa customers and 5,000 registered professionals on the platform.

Like many marketplaces, finding more partners will be key to supporting the company’s growth. Wecasa expects to add another 3,000 professionals by the end of 2021 for instance. There are currently 50 people working for the company and the startup is hiring another 30 employees this year.

This isn’t the only marketplace focused on home care and wellness in France. When it comes to housekeeping, Wecasa competes with Helpling, O2, Shiva and others. When it comes to babysitting, Wecasa competes with Yoojo, Yoopies and others. Some other marketplaces also focus on one-off jobs, such as fixing something that is broken — examples include Lulu dans ma rue and Stootie.

Wecasa has been slowly adding new categories, which is a smart move as it’s easier to make sure you’re working with competent professionals if you don’t have a thousand different verticals. There’s also a huge market opportunity as a lot of recommendations for a baby-sitter or a housekeeper still happen offline — there will be room for multiple marketplaces. And Wecasa now seems to be well positioned to build a strong brand and service across multiple markets.

Last year we covered BestDoctor’s series A round when the Russian insurtech startup raised $4.5 million for its online medical insurance platform for corporates, which also offers telemedicine services to employees.

It’s now closed a $26 million Series B round from Winter Capital Partners, alongside Swedish investor VNV Global and UNIQA Ventures, the corporate VC backed by UNIQA Insurance group. The company claims this round gives it a $90 million valuation.

BestDoctor’s Virtual Clinic platform offers round-the-clock telemedicine services as well as preventive medicine, and other services. While the product is currently offered as an enterprise platform for private companies, it now plans to enter the consumer market in 2021.

Mark Sanevich, BestDoctor’s co-founder and CEO said: “We are pursuing a new goal and building a platform with the best medical services that can be entrusted with any health-related issues. The platform will consolidate all of BestDoctor’s products to become an example of a client and product-oriented approach to medicine. A new type of healthcare service focused on the patient and their needs, is urgently needed – not just in Russia, but globally.”

In 2020 BestDoctor secured Russian tech and telecoms giants Mail.ru Group, Megafon, and RBC media, putting 100,000 patients on its platform.

He Sanevich the startup plans to enter the European digital-health market, which is currently growing by 28% year-on-year.

Anton Farlenkov, Managing Director at Winter Capital Advisors said: “The medical insurance industry is undergoing a digital transformation, as many services move online, creating greater accessibility and improving usability for consumers. BestDoctor is at the forefront of this revolution, accelerating the medical insurance field’s transition to a qualitatively new level.”

Björn von Sivers, investment Manager at VNV Global said: “The company has built a great product and onboarded an impressive set of corporate clients in a short time. We believe BestDoctor is in a great position to continue to lead the Russian market with its innovative offering and also see strong potential for future geographical expansion.”

Previous investors AddVenture, Target Global and the LVL1 fund.

Meet Gourmey, a new French startup that recently raised a $10 million founding round in equity and debt. The startup is working on meat grown in laboratories from animal cells. In particular, the company is focusing on poultry and aims to convince chefs that they should use the company’s products in their restaurants.

“We’ve been raising animals for 20,000 years,” co-founder and CEO Nicolas Morin-Forest told me. “We grow cells, which is much more efficient because you only produce what you eat.”

Victor Sayous and Antoine Davydoff, the two other co-founders, have a background in molecular and cell biology. When they teamed up to create a startup, they started looking at intensive livestock farming.

“When you dip your toes in that, you realize that this isn’t exclusively about animal welfare — it’s also about the planet, humans,” Morin-Forest said.

Gourmey is part of a group of startups that want to create meat alternatives and turn them into mass-market products. The first generation of startups that wanted to replace traditional meat bet heavily on plant-based substitutes. Beyond Meat and Livekindly Collective are some well-known examples.

More recently, a new generation of startups have been focusing on cell-based meat, such as Eat Just, Mosa Meat and Meatable. Gourmey is the first French startup working on lab-grown meat.

Like other lab-grown meat startups, Gourmey relies on stem cells. Combined with the right nutrients at the right temperature, those cells mature in a bioreactor.

Gourmey is starting with a premium product and a premium distribution strategy. The startup has been working on cultivated foie gras or — as they say — slaughter-free foie gras. Reproducing the taste of foie gras is also a complex task, which means that Gourmey is setting high expectations.

In some countries, there’s such a stigma attached to foie gras that it has been removed from supermarket shelves. As a result, some people might be tempted by lab-grown foie gras. Gourmey hopes that chefs in particular will try its first product and use it in their high-end restaurants. Gourmey hopes to sell its product more or less at the same price as regular foie gras.

The idea is to launch more mass-market products as the startup scales. Once it has optimized its production lines and there’s enough demand for Gourmey’s products, you can expect to see other chicken and duck products.

There are some regulatory hurdles to overcome before lab-grown startups can sell their products around the world. Eat Just started selling lab-grown meat in Singapore but it could take several years before you see cultivated meat in Europe for instance. Food safety regulators will have to approve those new products.

When it comes to Gourmey’s funding, Point Nine and Air Street Capital are co-leading the $10 million seed round. Heartcore Capital, Partech, Big Idea Ventures, Eutopia, Ataraxia, Beyond Investing ans several angel investors are also investing. Gourmey also received some support from public institutions, such as Bpifrance and the European Commission.

“Cultivated meat is one of the most promising solutions to deliver energy-efficient, sustainable proteins to the world,” Point Nine managing partner Christoph Janz said in a statement. “However, taste parity will remain the key success factor. We have been truly impressed by Gourmey’s delicious products and the company’s ability to progress both on the science and the flavor at record speed.”

With this funding, the company plans to create its pilot production line in Paris. It expects to be able to sell its foie gras products in late 2022 or early 2023.

Customer research is invaluable for software companies, but there are many obstacles, like finding the right group of people to survey. Great Question wants to make building and talking to their own panels accessible to all companies, no matter their size. The startup, which recently completed Y Combinator’s summer 2021 program, announced today that it has raised $2.5 million in seed funding.

Great Question launched in February 2021, and its clients include Linktree, Honeybook, O’Reilly Media and MainStreet. The platform has been used to interview customers about product ideas and strategy, find product-market fit, conduct usability studies on UX designs and see how well marketing landing pages perform. Great Question’s seed round came from investors including Funders Club, January Capital, Nomo VC and Twenty-Two Ventures. Angel investors like Warren Hogarth, co-founder of Empower Finance; Jon Williams, co-founder of Culture Amp and Pyn; Jason Smale, senior vice president of engineering at Zendesk; and Robbie Allan, former group product manager at Intercom also participated.

Before founding Great Question, PJ Murray and Ned Dwyer sold their last startup, web developer marketplace Elto, to GoDaddy in 2015. In email, Dwyer told TechCrunch that they did very little formal research at Elto. “We would talk to customers, but it wasn’t structured or consistent.”

After joining GoDaddy, however, they became “a lot more rigorous in our approach to building product—we suddenly had a much larger audience, a bigger team and aggressive targets.” Murray and Dwyer also had the advantage of working with GoDaddy’s UX research team.

The two saw an opportunity to make customer research more accessible to product development teams. Dwyer said that if companies outsource to a large UX research provider, the starting price can be $40,000 a year. On the other hand, Great Question’s freemium pricing model includes paid subscription plans for $49 and $199 a month.

Great Question has almost all of the things needed for customer research—survey smart templates, prototype tests, scheduling tools and transcription—in one place, so teams can share information easily. One of its most important features is customer recruitment and filtering tools. Dwyer explained that many UX research companies sell access to panels they have already built. That means clients often get feedback from relatively homogenous groups of people who are not their target customers—for example, college students or stay at home parents who signed up to answer surveys so they can earn extra cash or gift cards.

Great Question builds custom landing pages where users can opt into panels, decide what kind of research they want to participate in and how often they are willing to answer questions (for example, the platform automates rolling studies, sending questions to different groups of customers every two weeks). Great Question lets its clients integrate incentives programs, such as Tremendous, to compensate participants with cash or gift cards. But many of the people who participate in research through Great Question are motivated because they want to have a say in products they are already using, or find out first about upcoming releases, Dwyer said.

Once customer panels are created, Great Question provides smart templates for surveys or interviews and automatically schedules them for distribution. This saves clients time. For example, MainStreet approached Great Question when it was preparing to release a product that would change its onboarding flow. The startup, which lets small businesses find and claim tax credits and economic incentives, didn’t have time to perform customer research before the launch. “Within 24 hours of signing up to Great Question they’d booked eight customer interviews—this was over Christmas mind you—and got the usability feedback they needed to iterate on the designs before they went to production,” said Dwyer.

In a statement about the investment, Funders Club co-founder and chief executive officer said Alix Mittal said, “Even the best product and business teams know everyday iteration, large pivots, and new launches can be hit or miss. We backed Great Question because they provide the missing tool to effortlessly incorporate customers into product and business decisions and to never miss the mark.”

Ask anyone who runs a fulfillment/warehouse robotics company what companies’ top motivation is for embracing automation and they’ll probably cite labor shortages or shipping speeds. The looming truth of the matter boils down to one word: Amazon. And while it’s true that smaller businesses are feeling the worst crunch, no one is immune to the online retailer’s dominance. Not even Walmart.

Today, the fellow retail giant announced its latest robotics partnership, teaming with Massachusetts-based automation company Symbotic. The two announced today an extension of their relationship that will bring robotics to 25 regional Walmart distribution centers. The company says the rollout will take “several years” to complete.

The deal follows a 2017 pilot that brought Symbotic’s autonomous robotics platform to Walmart’s Brooksville, Florida distribution center in a bid to increase freight sorting, stocking and unloading.

“The digital transformation happening today, alongside evolving customer habits, is reshaping the retail industry,” Walmart’s Joe Metzger said in a release. “To serve customers now, and in the future, our business must provide the right tools and training to our associates so they can deliver the items our customers want, when they want them, with unmatched convenience. We’re investing in our supply chain at an unprecedented scale in order to optimize that process end-to-end.”

Walmart has been aggressive about piloting robots over the last several years, in hopes of expediting some of its processes. As we’ve noted before, however, its results have, thus far, been uneven. Most notable is the case of Bossa Nova Robotics. The startup was thrown for a loop when Walmart ended its contract with the inventory robotics maker. That’s what pilots are for, of course, but that likely doesn’t dull the sting for the smaller company.

Symbotic has a significantly stronger track record, however. The company lists among its partners one of Walmart’s biggest competitors: Target. And while Walmart could be exploring the possibility of acquiring its own startups (à la Amazon, which built its robotics wing atop its acquisition of Kiva Systems), it seems like existing ties could make such a deal a large hurdle.

Investment apps in Southeast Asia are attracting a lot of funding, and now some are raising fast follow-on rounds, too. For example, Indonesian robo-advisor app Bibit raised $65 million in May just four months after a $30 million growth round. Now Singapore-based Syfe is announcing that it has closed a $40 million SGD (about $29.6M USD) Series B, only nine months after its Series A. It also said all of Syfe’s full-time employees will receive equity in the company.

The latest round’s lead investor is Valar Ventures, which also led Syfe’s Series A, marking the fintech-focused venture capital firm’s first investment in an Asian startup. Returning investors Presight Capital and Unbound participated, too.

This brings Syfe’s total raised so far to $70.7 million SGD (about $52.3 million USD) since it was founded in 2019. The startup did not disclose its Series B post-money valuation, but founder and chief executive officer Dhruv Arora told TechCrunch it increased 3.6 times from its Series A. The company also hasn’t disclosed total user numbers, but assets under management have grown four times since January, thanks in large part to user referrals and the launch of new products like Syfe Cash+ and Core portfolios.

“To be honest, we weren’t really looking to raise a Series B,” Arora told TechCrunch. “We saw some of the positive outcomes of resources from our Series A. We really scaled up the team and started launching new products and options for our users.” Syfe probably could have waited another six months to a year to raise a new round, he added, but its investors approached the startup again and offered good terms for another round.

About 50% to 70% of new users each month come through recommendations from existing customers, which keeps Syfe’s acquisition costs extremely low, Arora says. Since the beginning of this year, it has also doubled its team in Singapore to more than 100 people, allowing the startup to explore different kind of distribution strategies and partnerships. The app currently has users in 42 countries, but only actively markets in Singapore, where it holds a Capital Markets Services license from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). It has plans to announce a second market soon.

Syfe was founded in 2017 and launched its app in July 2019. Prior to starting Syfe, Arora was an investment banker at UBS Investment Bank before serving as vice president and head of growth at Indian grocery delivery startup Grofers.

While retail investment rates are still low in Southeast Asia, interest has jumped significantly over the past year. One of the reasons most commonly cited is the economic impact of COVID-19, which motivated people to earn returns from their money instead of keeping it in saving accounts.

“Most of my career has been within Hong Kong, Singapore and parts of India. I think culturally we’ve always been told to save, save, save,” Arora says. “It made sense because banks were giving good interest rates, but now the majority of economies are in negative real rate of interest.” Along with consumers’ growing familiarity with online wallets and other digital financial services, this set the stage for investment apps to come in, attracting customers who might not have gone to traditional brokerages.

Arora says he expected people to become more interested in investing, but gradually, over the course of about five to seven years. Instead, that shift is happening much more quickly. “My view is that tomorrow’s saving accounts become smart investing accounts. That’s been my view ever since we started Syfe, but this last year has made it evident that it has to happen and has to happen much bigger. So I think this wave will continue,” he says.

While many investment apps focus on millennial users, Syfe’s target demographic is wider. In the last six to nine months, Arora says there has been an uptick in users aged 50 and above on the platform, and its oldest user is 93 years old.

“The users in that segment have become a bigger percentage and the reality is that they typically have more disposable income. The average customer in their 50s will deploy, in our experience, almost twice the more conventional demographic which might be between 30 to 40,” says Arora.

Out of the many investment apps that have emerged in Southeast Asia, users most often compare Syfe to Stashaway, Endowus and Autowealth when shopping around for a platform. Arora says the space has a lot of room to grow because retail investment in the region is still very low. “I think it’s still super early in the game. There is enough room for multiple players and I think more will come into this domain, because if you can get your acquisition metrics into place, this can be a very profitable business.”

In terms of differentiating, Syfe is focused on new product development and user localization and personalization so customers can create more customized portfolios.

Syfe has a team of financial advisors for users who want person-to-person consultations, but Arora says most of Syfe’s investors rely entirely on its app to decide how to invest. Over the last nine months, it has only added one new advisor to its team, while focusing on making its user interface more intuitive.

“The human touch is optional, but it’s not necessary and in many cases, it’s only needed to help people understand the offering once,” says Arora. “But our goal is always going to be technology company and for the app to become so intuitive that whether you are 18 or 93, you are able to use the offering with very limited guidance.”

In a press statement, Valar Ventures founding partner Andrew McCormack says, “Syfe was our first investment in Asia and we’ve been impressed by its rapid, sustained growth over the past couple of years. The opportunity for the company to meet the saving and investment needs of a burgeoning mass-affluent consumer population in Asia remains significant, and we are confident that Syfe will continue to expand at pace.”

 

Telehealth platform Eucalyptus raised a $22.3 million Series B round of funding to build a digital health portfolio for primary care in Australia.

NewView Capital led the round with participation from existing investors Blackbird Ventures and W23, and new investor AirTree Ventures. As part of the investment, Ravi Viswanathan, NewView founder and managing partner, will be joining the Eucalyptus board.

The new round gives the Sydney-based company a total of $32.8 million raised since it was founded in 2019 by Tim Doyle, Benny Kleist, Alexey Mitko and Charlie Gearside.

Australia’s healthcare system is a two-payer model, where most of the care is paid for by the government, and there is a smaller insurance coverage that is owned by individuals. Eucalyptus fits into these models as a private-pay option selling directly to consumers. In some cases, the company is able to charge lower copays for care than the average $25 per doctor visit, Doyle told TechCrunch.

He touts the company as the “largest vertically integrated telehealth platform in Australia,” serving more than 200,000 patients across four demographic-focused brands: contraception and fertility, skincare, men’s health and sexual wellness. Each brand has its own core platform of healthcare providers, patient data repository, remote monitoring tools and partnerships with pathology labs and pharmacies.

All of that results in a higher touch and higher quality relationship between doctor and patient, Doyle said.

“We are seeing an opportunity to shorten the amount of time between identification of a condition and diagnosis,” he added. “We also want to go more in-depth into diabetes, heart conditions and mental health. People are dropping out of diabetes and mental care because there are not enough touch points that are easy to use. If we can build a hub, it will make it easier to treat those conditions.”

In addition to product development, the new funding enables Eucalyptus to build toward being a major player in the telehealth industry. The company will introduce new brands in the next year around chronic care like behavioral health, weight management and diabetes.

Eucalyptus grew its revenue between 200% to 300% year over year since 2019, Doyle said. This is not unlike other startups in the digital health sector, where 2020 saw another record year for venture capital investment. He expects similar growth in 2021, including adding about 20 employees to be over 100 by the end of the year.

Meanwhile, Doyle said he is excited to work with NewView, especially with Viswanathan and associate Christina Fa, who said Eucalyptus is proving that Australia can lead in digital healthcare.

“The team is impressive in terms of clarity of vision and execution, especially in the way they brought in people to manage the brands,” she told TechCrunch. “It is unique being based in Australia where they don’t have the Teledocs and other digital health companies. Instead, Eucalyptus had to build all of that in-house and do the hard work upfront. In addition, they curated a network of health providers and four brands, each with their own personalities that can be fully vertically integrated and own the customer journey.”