Author: azeeadmin

A payments startup whose backend was originally built by the founder while still living with his parents and bootstrapping the company is today announcing a massive round of funding that catapults it into being one of the most valuable startups in Europe. Mollie, an Amsterdam-based startup that provides a way for businesses to integrate payments into sites, documents and other services by way of an API, is today announcing that it has raised €665 million ($800 million) in an all-equity round that values the company at €5.4 billion ($6.5 billion).

Blackstone Growth (BXG), Blackstone’s growth equity investing business, led the investment, with participation also from EQT Growth, General Atlantic, HMI Capital, Alkeon Capital, and TCV. TCV led Mollie’s breakout Series B in September last year.

Mollie has been on a major growth tear in recent years. The company is currently on track to process some €20 billion (nearly $24 billion) in payments in 2021, up 100% on the year before when it processed around €10 billion. It currently has 120,000 monthly active merchants (versus 100,000 in 2020), and customers include the likes of Deliveroo, Unicef, Acer and Guess. It’s adding between 400 and 500 new customers each day.

To be sure, the pandemic saw a massive shift in commerce with all kinds of transactions — buying goods, paying for services, handling your banking and other finances — all moving into the digital world, and that also played out for Mollie.

But that is also not the full story: growing at the same pace this year as last appears to indicate that even as we start to see more signs of the pandemic moving on (well, at least for some…), the shift to paying and buying online (and using Mollie’s rails to do so) will stay.

“The only thing you can reliably measure in payments is consumer spend. That was at 10% and now it’s at 15-20%,” said Shane Happach, who took over as CEO of Mollie in April of this year from founder Adriaan Mol (who, incidentally, was also the founder of MessageBird; Mol’s knickname is Mollie, hence the name of this company).

In an interview, Happach explained that consumer spend, and the subsequent addressable consumer market, is the metric that best indicates how a company like Mollie will grow. So while Mollie has largely been profitable since being founded back in 2004, the plan now will be to put the gas on growth, building related services around payments to continue expanding its product offering while also continuing to move move into more geographies beyond its core, and biggest, market of Europe, helped in no small part by its new, big investors.

That will bring it into deeper competition with a whole raft of players. That is to say, Mollie is far from the only payments company on the market, nor is it the only one that has seen business boom in recent times. But it is bigger and much more fragmented than you might think. Happach — who spent a decade at WorldPay before joining Mollie — points out that the top ten players in payments have 50% of the market, but the other 50% is held by about 5,000 players.

“You’d be really surprised, companies like Stripe are in the 5,000. They’re not in the top ten,” he said. (JP Morgan, WorldPay, Fiserv (First Data), PayPal are among those that make up the first ten.). That essentially gives the company a lot of opportunity to grow and consolidate, while also underscoring just how big the market is for everyone.

Stripe came up a few times in our conversation, in particular when talking about competitive threats — its basic premise, like Mollie’s, has been the building of a payments platform (complex for any non-payment company to do) that can be integrated by customers anywhere by way of a simple API; when talking about valuations (Stripe is now valued at $95 billion); and when talking about product playbooks.

In all cases, the main takeaway seems to be that Stripe’s success speaks to the market Mollie has ahead of it. “We see a huge opportunity in the super underserved population of SMBs,” Happach said. “Especially if you look at our core markets, where most of our customers come from today, the financial services that they can get access to are very clunky.” The company, he added, will be focusing on a few areas that it believes it can do better than what’s out there now, which also complements its payments business: working capital for small businesses, card issuing and corporate card programs, expense management, and business banking. (All areas, I should note, where Stripe also has launched products.)

It will also be interesting to watch how and if Mollie, as it grows, gets more confident to potentially change its cut. It’s taken PayPal years, but it has recently rebalanced its rates. Happach notes Mollie never has and has no plans to follow it.

One area where Mollie is less likely to invest the new capital is in acquisitions, however.

“I came from a company that had acquired a load of other companies, and I think there’s pluses and minuses,” Happach said. “For Mollie, we are building an organic plan…. [Acquisitions are] always an opportunity, [but] I would say it’s not the thesis of what we have agreed with investors is the most likely things that we’d like to do…. I think, right now, we’re mainly focused on hiring as much great talent as we can, really beefing up our commercial product and engineering teams. There’s still quite a lot to do by just investing in our own business building and training our own people and serving the customers that we’ve already got in the best possible way.”

The company, indeed, hasn’t really grown through a sales force or big marketing investments but largely through word of mouth up to now, one reason Blackstone came knocking.

“One of the things that really impressed us at Blackstone is that of the hundreds that sign up to Mollie on a daily basis, 90-95% of them have almost no interaction with Mollie directly,” said Paul Morrissey, who heads up Blackstone’s investing activities in Europe. “They’re just finding Mollie, loving the product and just getting going and that goes back to kind of the unit economics of the business… It talks to their competitive position in the market.”

That is somewhat due to change with the company embarking on a big hiring push, taking its team of 480 to just under 800 in the next nine months.

Online teaching came into the spotlight for many students and parents in the last year, and today one of the companies that saw a big lift during that rush of activity is announcing a big round of funding to carry it into what has emerged as a more permanent change of habits for many learners.

GoStudent, a marketplace where K-12 students (and their parents) can find and engage with one-to-one video-based tutors in a variety of subjects, has raised €205 million ($244 million), in a Series C round that values the company at €1.4 billion ($1.7 billion).

The funding is coming at a time of strong growth. The Vienna, Austria-based startup is now live in 18 countries and sees some 400,000 sessions booked monthly on its platform, up 700% year-on-year (and up 15% month-on-month). It says it is on track to double employees to 1,000 and reach 10,000 tutors by the end of this year. The plan is to expand to more countries — Mexico and Canada are next on the list — and to continue growing its lists of tutors and subjects covered.

(As a point of comparison, when it last fundraised in March, GoStudent was booking a mere 250,000 tutoring sessions over its platform.)

DST Global is leading the round, with SoftBank (via its Vision Fund 2), Tencent, Dragoneer and previous backers Coatue, Left Lane Capital and DN Capital also participating. Vienna, Austria-based GoStudent has raised €291 million to date, including a €70 million round only this past March and €13.3 million in a Series A this past November.

The rapid pace of funding and GoStudent’s rising valuation — this investment makes it the highest-valued edtech startup in Europe, the company said — comes amid a streak of funding rounds for edtech companies.

And that may be no surprise: online and other digital tools in the last year especially felt more relevant (and in many cases were used more) than ever before due to social distancing during the pandemic. (Other recent deals have included funding for Byju’s, Kahoot, Formative, Engageli, Lingoda, Brainly, ClassDojo, Newsela, and Yuanfudao, among many others.)

But in the case of GoStudent, it’s also because the startup itself is also doing an A+ job in scaling its concept.

The company has been around since 2016 — when it started out initially providing a network for people to help each other answer questions (similar to Brainly), as well as connect with tutors, and for tutors to organize classes — but it was only about 2.5 years ago that GoStudent started to focus more squarely on one-to-one tutoring.

GoStudent provides a fully-integrated service, which lets students and their parents select from a range of topics that are typically taught in schools — currently some 30 subjects, including sciences, math, computing, languages, history, business and more — that they can be tutored on generally or specifically with the aim of taking an exam.

Tutoring comes from people who are tested, vetted and interviewed by GoStudent before they can join the platform; and before engaging tutors, parents and students interview an individual tutor and go through a practice lesson as part of that.

Learning plans are then organized according to students’ schedules and what they are setting out to do (they can send over their homework, or chapters they’re studying in school or even a curriculum outline); and the classes, assessments and payments (based on packages booked), are all handled over the platform, too.

Although there are a number of ways of learning a subject over the internet today — and specifically a number of online-only direct tutoring platforms in the market now (including Brainly, Yuanfudao, and others) — Ohswald said that by and large GoStudent’s biggest competition is the bigger in-person business of teaching, and of students and tutors connecting with each other through word of mouth — the “offline shadow market of tutors,” as he calls it.

All the same, while there are tech tools involved in provisioning and running lessons, at its heart GoStudent is also still about humans connecting to help each other, rather than humans connecting with computer programs.

Interestingly, its founders believe that the Covid-19 pandemic effect was not uniformly positive for its business.

“The pandemic had mixed effects,” Ohswald said. “On the one hand there was a natural demand from kids and parents. But with the schools closed, there was less pressure, less exams, less demand for after-school study. That aspect had a negative effect. But more broadly, there was a BIG boost for digital education. So the mindset of the parent and family drastically shifted.”

He noted that many families turned to tutoring to help “support the kids at home, to help them to stop being overwhelmed.” (And I would add, especially in the first part of the lockdown last year when schools were scrambling a little to regroup and teach online, that as a parent, we found it a relief to have at least some consistency with private tutors online at that time.)

What that means, essentially, is that while GoStudent did well in the last year, the company does not want to tie its growth to a specific set of pandemic circumstances that may well become less of an issue in the year ahead.

Indeed, for better or worse, there are bigger factors at play that predate the pandemic. Increasing pressure on students to perform their best competing against others, a continuing focus on testing, and a general level of academic ambition; but also a much easier and cheaper way of finding and connecting with people who can help students feel more supported in their efforts: all of these are also playing a role.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been teasing a neural network training computer called ‘Dojo’ since at least 2019. Musk says Dojo will be able to process vast amounts of video data to achieve vision-only autonomous driving. While Dojo itself is still in development, Tesla today revealed a new supercomputer that will serve as a development prototype version of what Dojo will ultimately offer. 

At the 2021 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition on Monday, Tesla’s head of AI, Andrej Karpathy, revealed the company’s new supercomputer that allows the automaker to ditch radar and lidar sensors on self-driving cars in favor of high-quality optical cameras. During his workshop on autonomous driving, Karpathy explained that to get a computer to respond to new environment in a way that a human can requires an immense dataset, and a massively powerful supercomputer to train the company’s neural net-based autonomous driving technology using that data set. Hence the development of these predecessors to Dojo.

Tesla’s newest-generation supercomputer has 10 petabytes of “hot tier” NVME storage and runs at 1.6 terrabytes per second, according to Karpathy. With 1.8 EFLOPS, he said it might be the fifth most powerful supercomputer in the world, but he conceded later that his team has not yet run the specific benchmark necessary to enter the TOP500 Supercomputing rankings.

“That said, if you take the total number of FLOPS it would indeed place somewhere around the fifth spot,” Karpathy told TechCrunch. “The fifth spot is currently occupied by NVIDIA with their Selene cluster, which has a very comparable architecture and similar number of GPUs (4480 vs ours 5760, so a bit less).”

Musk has been advocating for a vision-only approach to autonomy for some time, in large part because cameras are faster than radar or lidar. As of May, Tesla Model Y and Model 3 vehicles in North America are being built without radar, relying on cameras and machine learning to support its advanced driver assistance system and autopilot. 

Many autonomous driving companies use lidar and high definition maps, which means they require incredibly detailed maps of the places where they’re operating, including all road lanes and how they connect, traffic lights and more. 

“The approach we take is vision-based, primarily using neural networks that can in principle function anywhere on earth,” said Karpathy in his workshop. 

Replacing a “meat computer,” or rather,  a human, with a silicon computer results in lower latencies (better reaction time), 360 degree situational awareness and a fully attentive driver that never checks their Instagram, said Karpathy.

Karpathy shared some scenarios of how Tesla’s supercomputer employs computer vision to correct bad driver behavior, including an emergency braking scenario in which the computer’s object detection kicks in to save a pedestrian from being hit, and traffic control warning that can identify a yellow light in the distance and send an alert to a driver that hasn’t yet started to slow down.

Tesla vehicles have also already proven a feature called pedal misapplication mitigation, in which the car identifies pedestrians in its path, or even a lack of a driving path, and responds to the driver accidentally stepping on the gas instead of braking, potentially saving pedestrians in front of the vehicle or preventing the driver from accelerating into a river.

Tesla’s supercomputer collects video from eight cameras that surround the vehicle at 36 frames per second, which provides insane amounts of information about the environment surrounding the car, Karpathy explained.

While the vision-only approach is more scalable than collecting, building and maintaining high definition maps everywhere in the world, it’s also much more of a challenge, because the neural networks doing the object detection and handling the driving have to be able to collect and process vast quantities of data at speeds that match the depth and velocity recognition capabilities of a human.

Karpathy says after years of research, he believes it can be done by treating the challenge as a supervised learning problem. Engineers testing the tech found they could drive around sparsely populated areas with zero interventions, said Karpathy, but “definitely struggle a lot more in very adversarial environments like San Francisco.” For the system to truly work well and mitigate the need for things like high-definition maps and additional sensors, it’ll have to get much better at dealing with densely populated areas.

One of the Tesla AI team game changers has been auto-labeling, through which it can automatically label things like roadway hazards and other objects from millions of videos capture by vehicles on Tesla camera. Large AI datasets have often required a lot of manual labelling, which is time-consuming, especially when trying to arrive at the kind of cleanly-labelled data set required to make a supervised learning system on a neural network work well.

With this latest supercomputer, Tesla has accumulated 1 million videos of around 10 seconds each and labeled 6 billion objects with depth, velocity and acceleration. All of this takes up a whopping 1.5 petabytes of storage. That seems like a massive amount, but it’ll take a lot more before the company can achieve the kind of reliability it requires out of an automated driving system that relies on vision systems alone, hence the need to continue developing ever more powerful supercomputers in Tesla’s pursuit of more advanced AI.

For most people in India, having to engage with banks doesn’t instill a sense of joy. Banks in the South Asian market are notorious for making unannounced spam calls to upsell customers loans and credit cards, even when they have been explicitly asked not to do so.

Moreover, when a customer does reach out to a bank with a query, it can take forever to get the job done. Take ICICI Bank, India’s third largest bank and until recently my only banking partner for over six years, for an example.

It is now in its third month in figuring out who exactly in its relationship with Amazon is supposed to re-issue me a credit card. I have moved on with my life, and it looks like they did, too, likely before they even looked at my query.

Small and medium-sized businesses aren’t a big fan of banks, either. If you operate an early-stage startup, it’s anyone’s guess if you will ever be able to convince a bank to issue you a corporate account. So of course, startups — Razorpay and Open — took it upon themselves to fix this experience.

For consumers, too, in recent years, scores of startups have arrived on the scene to improve this banking experience. Whether you are a teenager, or just out of college, or a working professional, or don’t have a credit score, there are firms that can get you a credit card and loan.

But even these services have a ceiling limit of some sort. And customers aren’t loyal to any startup.

“A customer’s relationship is always with the entity where they park their savings deposit,” said Jitendra Gupta, a high-profile entrepreneur who has spent a decade in the fintech world. Since these customers are not parking their money with fintech, “the startups have been unable to disrupt the bank. That’s the hard reality.”

So what’s the alternative? Gupta, who co-founded CitrusPay (sold to Naspers’ PayU) and served as managing director of PayU, has been thinking about these challenges for more than two years.

“If you really want to change the banking industry, you cannot operate from the side. You have to fight from the centre, where they deposit their money. It’s a very time-consuming process and requires a lot of initial capital and experience with banks,” he told TechCrunch in an interview.

After more than a year and a half of raising about $24 million — from Sequoia Capital India, 3one4 Capital, Amrish Rau, Kunal Shah, Kunal Bahl, Tanglin Venture Partners, Rainmatter and others — Gupta is ready to launch what he believes will address a lot of the issues individuals face with their banks.

His new startup, called Jupiter, wants to bring “delight” to the banking experience, and it will launch in India on Thursday.

“We believe that a bank account should be a smart account, where it gives you insight, shares personalized tips and guides you through attaining some financial discipline,” he said.

A snapshot of the reach of banks and fintech startups in India. Data: CIBIL, Statista, BofA Global Research. Image: BofA

To be sure, Jupiter, too, will offer loans and other financial services to customers. But instead of making irrelevant calls to customers, it will assess which of its customers are running short on money and give the option to take a credit line from its app itself, he said. “The upsell doesn’t need to happen by way of spam. It needs to happen by way of contextualization and personalization.”

“Jupiter has been built in a deep integration with the underlying bank, allowing the consumer to have a frictionless experience for all their banking needs,” said Amrish Rau, chief executive of Pine Labs, co-founder of CitrusPay and longtime friend of Gupta.

The startup, which employs 115 people, has developed a number of products for customers joining on day one. The products include the ability to buy now and pay later on UPI, a feature first offered in the market by Jupiter, and a mutual fund portfolio analyzer. A debit card, in-app chat with a customer service agent, expense categorisation, finding the right card, determining the existing health insurance coverage, and more are ready to ship, the startup said.

Jupiter is currently working on providing zero mark-up on forex transactions, and frictionless two-factor authentication. The startup has published a public Trello page where it has outlined the features it is working on and when it expects to ship them, as well as features suggested by its beta-testing customers. “I want to establish full transparency in what we are working on to build trust with customers,” said Gupta.

Jupiter will have its own customer relationship team that will engage with the startup’s users. The startup, which last month opened a waiting list for customers to sign up, had amassed more than 25,000 applications as of two weeks ago.

Even Jupiter, which one day wishes to disrupt the banking sector, currently has to partner with banks. Its partners are Federal Bank and Axis Bank.

I asked Gupta about the excitement his investors see in Jupiter. “Everyone believes, as you see with fintech giants such as Nubank globally, that we will become a full bank,” he said.

But for the time being, Gupta said he is not looking to partner with more banks. “I don’t want Jupiter to attract customers because they want to bank with Federal or Axis. I want them to come to Jupiter because they want to bank with Jupiter,” he said.

In the next 12 months, the startup hopes to serve more than 1 million customers.

Some Clubhouse users were treated to a surprise feature in their favorite app, but it wasn’t long for this world. A new UI element called “backchannel” popped up briefly before disappearing late last week, pointing the Clubhouse faithful to a new area of the app and generating plenty of chatter among users ready for more ways to connect.

While the backchannel screen was totally blank without so much as a text entry box, it looks like the company is working on building out the text chat feature that Clubhouse CEO Paul Davison previously discussed in a company town hall.

“…. I think that there are so many people who do DM backchannels all the time, so many people who want to deepen friendships and relationships with people and do all sorts of other stuff — I think this is something that we should have,” Davison said.

The Clubhouse co-founder went on to say that building the feature to suit the app’s use cases won’t be trivial and wouldn’t be happening right away. He also declined to elaborate on if the app would add traditional one-on-one DMs or a more open group text chat feature.

When reached for comment, Clubhouse didn’t dissuade TechCrunch from the assumption that a messaging feature is around the corner, but issued a coy statement.

“As part of our product building process, Clubhouse regularly explores and tests potential features,” a Clubhouse spokesperson told TechCrunch. “These functions sometimes become part of the app, sometimes they don’t.”

Spotify’s new Clubhouse copycat app Greenroom offers its own live text chatroom that users can access by swiping right in the app, giving it a bit of flexibility that Clubhouse has yet to offer. From the looks of the Clubhouse backchannel feature, it also lives in a window accessed through swiping, though that’s obviously subject to change.

Mobile commerce is where it’s at, and rising investment in so-called conversational commerce startups underscores the opportunity.

Via, a two-year-old, Bay Area-based startup, is among those riding the wave, having identified some trends that are becoming clearer by the month. First, more e-commerce sales will be on mobile phones this year than desktops (as much as 70% by some estimates), people tend to read text messages almost immediately, and consumers spend upwards of 30 minutes a day engaging with mobile messaging apps.

Via also insists that unlike an expanding pool of startups that are focused on helping retailers and other broadcast their marketing messages in SMS, there’s room for a player to better address the many other pieces that add up to a happy consumer experience, from delivering coupon codes to starting the returns process.

Indeed, according to cofounder and CEO Tejas Konduru — a Brigham Young grad whose parents immigrated to the U.S. from India and who have themselves have worked at tech startups — one of insights his now 50-person company had early on was that despite that so many of their customers now use the mobile browser to visit and shop from their stores, many retailers use website builders like Shopify or BigCommerce to “cram everything everything into mobile, leaving only enough space for, like, one picture and a Buy button.” Konduru figured there must be a way to take the shopping experience that all these customers have with brands on their website and make them happen in a quick, mobile-native way.

Via’s solution, he says, is to help those businesses interact with customers on the devices and apps they use most often. “When someone uses Shopify of BigCommerce of any of those platforms,” says Konduru, “we also connect it to Via, and it basically takes the entire shopping experience and allows [customers] to quickly swipe right through a menu or like through a catalog on, for example, Facebook Messenger. Via will also create like a native iOS Android app by taking a  website, cloning it into a native iOS Android app, then sell the push notification in-app chat layer. Essentially,” he adds, “anytime someone shops on the phone and they’re not using the browser is what Via is handling.”

The ‘message’ seems to be getting through to the right people. Via, which launched last year, says it now employs 54 people on a full-time basis, has 190 brands as customers, and just secured $15 million in funding in Series A funding led by Footwork, the new venture firm cofounded by former Stitch Fix COO Mike Smith and former Shasta Ventures investor Nikhil Basu Trivedi.

Other participants in the round include Peterson Ventures, where Konduru once interned; famed founder Josh James of Domo, where Konduru also once interned; and a long list of other notable individual investors, including Ryan Smith of Qualtrics and Lattice cofounder and CEO Jack Altman.

As for how the company charges, it doesn’t ask for a monthly or yearly fee, as per traditional SaaS companies but instead charges per interaction, whether that’s an SMS or a voice minute or video or a GIF.

It’s starting to add up, according to Konduru, who says that Via’s average customer is seeing 15 times return on its investment and that from May of 2020 — when the company’s service went live —  through December, the company generated $51 million in sales. Konduru declined to say exactly how much Via saw from those transactions but says the company is on track to reach $10 million in annual recurring revenue this year.

As for how brands get started with Via, it’s pretty simple, by the company’s telling. As long as a company is using a commerce platform — from Shopfiy to WooCommerce to Salesforce– it takes just five minutes or so to produce a mobile app with a menu featuring the types of interactions the brand can enable via Via’s platform, says Konduru.

Konduru, who dabbled in investment banking before deciding to launch Via, says he isn’t surprised by the startup’s fast traction, though he says he has been taken aback by the breadth of conversations the company sees. While he imagined Via would be a strong marketing channel for brands that use the platform to push out notifications about abandoned shopping carts and upcoming deliveries, it’s more of a two-way street than he’d imagined.

“Every month, there are maybe 15,000 people who start the returns process through Via and will get a notification from a channel that Via supports. But suddenly — let’s say the customer gets the wrong T-shirt size — people start communicating with the brand. You see everything from fan appreciation to address changes to messaging about bad discount codes to where’s-my-order type exchanges.  That’s something I didn’t expect,” says Konduru, who says that before raising its Series A round, Via raised $4.2 million in seed funding led by Peterson Ventures.

“I thought that people would just look at the notification and, like, move it into the abyss somewhere. Instead, people start interacting with the brand.”

Facebook’s efforts to bring advertising to the Oculus virtual reality platform it has spent billions of dollars building out doesn’t seem to be off to a great start.

The company announced last week that they were planning to roll out their first in-game ads inside the title Blaston from the more prolific VR game developer Resolution Games, and just days later the game studio has shared that after hearing from users they’ve decided to abandon the ad rollout.

“After listening to player feedback, we realize that Blaston isn’t the best fit for this type of advertising test,” a tweet from the Blaston account read. “Therefore, we no longer plan to implement the test. We look forward to seeing you in the arena and hope you try the Crackdown Update that went live today!”

This potential ad rollout had been particularly noteworthy because the ads were being tested inside a title from a third-party developer. Facebook has purchased a handful of VR studios in recent months and owns a number of the most popular Quest titles inside its marketplace, so the opportunity to roll out advertising with a third-party partner gave Facebook an chance to frame the advertising rollout as a way for developers to open up their monetization channels, rather than for Facebook to do so.

The announcement last week still brought out plenty of critics in the VR community who weren’t thrilled about Facebook’s broader struggles with balancing advertising efforts with user privacy, but other users seemed to be more annoyed by the prospect of ads being rolled out inside a paid title they had already purchased. Blaston retails for $9.99 in the Oculus store.

Resolution Games abandoning the test before it even started is an early setback for Facebook’s VR advertising efforts that showcases just how skeptical the Oculus platform’s most vocal users still are of Facebook. In a blog post last week, Facebook sought to address early concerns with what user data would be used to serve up advertising in VR, specifically noting that conversations recorded by a headset’s microphone and images analyzed by the onboard tracking cameras would not be used.

Facebook saw considerable backlash last year from virtual reality fans when they shared that new headset owners would need a Facebook account in order to activate their devices. While criticism poured in following the announcement, the recently released $299 Quest 2 headset has already outsold all of Facebook’s previous VR devices combined, the company has said.

We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment.

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for June 21, 2021. The tech industry is skipping any sort of a summer slowdown. Facebook is taking on Clubhouse and Spotify, India is still figuring out how to manage its burgeoning technology industry, and everyone is raising money. Plus, we have notes on a new VC fund that has quite a twist. Let’s get into it! — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Facebook wants your voice: Facebook’s live-audio service is out, putting Big Blue in competition with Clubhouse, a buzzy startup, and Spotify. In the wake of Clubhouse’s super-active early 2021, a host of Big Tech companies are looking to capture the magic that the startup managed to bottle. How successful Facebook will be at cutting in on Clubhouse’s game is not clear; so far, Facebook has yet to dominate the dating world, for example, making its entrance into the live-audio space more potential than promise of domination.
• Consumer fintech is looking good: New numbers from European fintech unicorn Revolut dropped today, with TechCrunch’s Romain Dillet taking a look at the company for our publication. The gist is that Revolut had a deeply unprofitable 2020, but one that showed a real ramp toward smaller losses as it went on. I doodled on the company’s numbers here, if that’s your thing.
• IPOs keep coming: Sure, we’re still waiting for Robinhood to file to go public, but after WalkMe’s public debut last week, there are new tech companies approaching the public markets. Couchbase filed today, kicking off the process of floating the database software company backed by Accel, Mayfield and Ignition Partners. Expect more filings in the coming weeks.

Startups

To keep proper tabs on both sides of the startup fundraising marketplace, we’re stripping VC news into its own section on occasion. Today is one such day. First, however, some startup news:

• $10M for e-bikes: Ubco, a New Zealand-based electric utility bike startup, announced a $10 million raise today. The company is best known for its Ubco 2X2, an “all-wheel-drive electric motorbike that looks like a dirt bike but rides like a moped” — and looks rather fetching. Urban transit is changing as cities look to limit their car — and carbon — footprints. If trends hold, startups like Ubco could find themselves selling into a market that is moving in their direction.
• Consumers love debt: TechCrunch covered news today that Kredivo, an Indonesian buy now, pay later (BNPL) startup, added $100 million to its credit facilities. The new capital access doubles the amount of debt that Kredivo can access. The news illustrates both the global consumer appetite for rejiggered debt products that transcend traditional credit cards, as well as the willingness of investors around the world to provide BNPL companies with ever more capital access. More on the subject here.
• Music licensing remains complicated, lucrative: When Ludacris rapped that up-and-coming artists should “get a entertainment lawyer in the music profession,” he wasn’t kidding. The musical world is complicated. Mechanical licenses, platform cuts — it’s a lot. And where there’s complexity, there’s opportunity. Songtradr just raised $50 million to help license music to “high-profile names for advertising, films, TV, gaming and the like,” TechCrunch wrote in covering its latest round. Songtradr has now raised more than $100 million to fund its efforts.
• Are shoes still hot? Backers of SoleSavy think so. They just put $12.5 million into the company’s Series A round. Unlike StockX — which is big business these days — SoleSavy isn’t a retail marketplace. Instead, it’s a company looking to build a sneaker head community. A community is like a subreddit, but on a different CMS and hosting provider, in case you’d forgotten.

Venture Capital News

What educational background generates the best entrepreneurs? Every university will tell you that they are the best. Many founders manage without a degree at all. The Academy Investor Network is betting that graduates of American military academies will prove lucrative. The fund just announced a $2.5 million anchor LP for its first fund, adding to capital from Scout Ventures, where co-founder Emily McMahan is a venture partner. She’s partnering with Sherman Williams in targeting a $50 million first raise.

Let’s see how far their thesis carries them. At least they will be able to brag with confidence that when it comes to rucking they will have the highest founder quality in the world.

Seed is not the new Series A

Usually, a teacher who grades students on a curve is boosting the efforts of those who didn’t perform well on the test. In the case of cloud companies, however, it’s the other way around.

As of Q1 2021, startups in this sector have a median Series A around $8 million, reports PitchBook. With $100+ million rounds becoming more common, company valuations are regularly boosted into the billions.

Andy Stinnes, general partner at Cloud Apps Capital Partners, says founders who are between angel and Series A should seek out investors who are satisfied with $200,000 to $500,000 in ARR. Usually a specialist firm, these VCs are open to betting on startups that haven’t yet found product-market fit.

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Big Tech Inc.

India’s tech scene deals with more government oversight: The Indian e-commerce industry is huge, with Amazon and Walmart battling with domestic companies — or buying them, in the case of Flipkart and Walmart — for market share in a growing market. All the activity is attracting complaints and possible government intervention. TechCrunch reported today that India “proposed … banning flash sales on e-commerce platforms and preventing their affiliate entities from being listed as sellers as the South Asian market looks to further tighten rules.”

India’s government is also busy battling with Twitter, as we’ve reported at length.

Germany is not enthused with Apple: With a fourth investigation opened, this time involving Apple, Germany’s oversight of competition in the tech world ratcheted up another few degrees today. In the case of Big Phone, the governmental body will “determine whether or not the iPhone maker meets the threshold of Germany’s updated competition law.” If Apple does, it would allow the country’s government to “intervene proactively” regarding the company’s activity.

Apple is also taking fire in its domestic market for what some perceive as heavy-handed tactics regarding its mobile app ecosystem, a market that the Cupertino-based company both moderates and extracts rents from.

Uber buys Cornershop: Today is a notable day for Latin American tech startups as the U.S. ride-hailing giant agreed to buy the 47% of Cornershop that it doesn’t own. The price? 29 million Uber shares. That’s about $1.3 billion worth of Uber equity.

The car service and delivery magnate bought Postmates last year, adding to its ability to deliver more than merely rides. The Cornershop buy fits into the thesis because the smaller company is also in the delivery market.

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The IPO rush of 2021 continued this week with a fresh filing from NoSQL provider Couchbase. The company raised hundreds of millions while private, making its impending debut an important moment for a number of private investors, including venture capitalists.

According to PitchBook data, Couchbase was last valued at a post-money valuation of $580 million when it raised $105 million in May 2020. The company — despite its expansive fundraising history — is not a unicorn heading into its debut to the best of our knowledge.

We’d like to uncover whether it will be one when it prices and starts to trade, so we dug into Couchbase’s business model and its financial performance, hoping to better understand the company and its market comps.

The Couchbase S-1

The Couchbase S-1 filing details a company that sells database tech. More specifically, Couchbase offers customers database technology that includes what NoSQL can offer (“schema flexibility,” in the company’s phrasing), as well as the ability to ask questions of their data with SQL queries.

Couchbase’s software can be deployed on clouds, including public clouds, in hybrid environments, and even on-prem setups. The company sells to large companies, attracting 541 customers by the end of its fiscal 2021 that generated $107.8 million in annual recurring revenue, or ARR, by the close of last year.

Couchbase breaks its revenue into two main buckets. The first, subscription, includes software license income and what the company calls “support and other” revenues, which it defines as “post-contract support,” or PCS, which is a package of offerings, including “support, bug fixes and the right to receive unspecified software updates and upgrades” for the length of the contract.

The company’s second revenue bucket is services, which is self-explanatory and lower-margin than its subscription products.