Author: azeeadmin

The tidal wave of growth is upon us — an unprecedented economic boom that will manifest later this year, bringing significant investments, acquisitions, and customer growth. But most tech companies and startups are not adequately prepared to capitalize on the opportunity that lies ahead.

Here’s how marketing in tech will shift — and what you need to know to reach more customers and accelerate growth in 2021.

First and foremost, differentiation is going to be imperative. It’s already hard enough to stand out and get noticed, and it’s about to get much more difficult as new companies emerge and investments and budgets balloon in the latter half of the year. Virtually all major companies are increasing budgets to pre-pandemic levels, but will delay those investments until the second half of the year. This will result in an increased intensity of competition that will drown out any undifferentiated players.

Additionally, tech companies need to be mindful not to ignore the most important part of the ecosystem: people. Technology will only take you so far, and it’s not going to be enough to survive the competition. Marketing is about people, including your customers, team, partners, investors, and the broader community.

Understanding who your people are and how you can use their help to build a strong foundation and drive exponential growth is essential.

Tactically, the most successful tech companies will embrace video and experimentation in their marketing — two components that will catapult them ahead of the competition.

Ignoring these predictions, backed by empirical evidence, will be detrimental and devastating. Fasten your seatbelts: 2021 is going to be a turbo-charged year of growth opportunities for marketing in tech.

Differentiation is crucial

The explosion of tech companies and startups seeking to be the next big thing isn’t over yet. However, many of them are indistinguishable from each other and lack a compelling value proposition. Just one look at the websites of new and existing tech companies will reveal a proliferation of buzzwords and conceptual illustrations, leaving them all looking and sounding alike.

The tech companies that succeed are those that embrace one of the fundamentals of effective marketing — positioning.

In the ’80s, Al Ries and Jack Trout published Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind and coined the term, which documented the best-known approach to standing out in a noisy marketplace. As the market heats up, companies will realize the need to sharpen their positioning and dial in their focus to break through the noise.

To get attention and build traction, companies need to establish a position they can own. The “mashup method: (Netflix but for coding lessons) is not real positioning; it’s simply a lazy gimmick.

It is imperative to identify who your ideal customer is and not just who could use your product. Focusing on a segment of the market rather than the whole is, perhaps counterintuitively, the most effective approach to capturing the larger market.

The B2B payments space has seen an explosion in demand, and investor interest, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic as businesses try to figure out how to pay each other digitally. The challenges become even more complex when dealing with cross-border payments.

Startups that were formed before the pandemic stand to benefit from the shift. One such startup, Tribal Credit, launched its beta in late 2019 to provide payment products for startups and small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in emerging markets.

Today, Tribal Credit announced it has raised $34.3 million in a combined Series A and debt round led by QED Investors and Partners for Growth (PFG). Existing backers BECO Capital, Global Ventures, OTG Ventures and Endure Capital also participated in the round, along with new investor Endeavor Catalyst. The raise follows “10x” year-over-year growth, according to CEO and co-founder Amr Shady.

As part of the investment, Tribal received $3 million from the Stellar Development Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports the development and growth of the open-source Stellar blockchain network. 

Tribal uses a proprietary AI-driven underwriting approval process to evaluate businesses and approve them for credit lines. Those businesses can then use those credit lines to spend on Tribal’s products, Tribal Card and Tribal Pay. Tribal Card is a business Visa card that allows users to create physical and virtual multi-currency cards. Tribal Pay allows them to make payments to merchants and suppliers that don’t accept credit cards. 

The company says its value proposition lies not only in its ability to provide SMEs with virtual and physical corporate cards, but also a digital platform that allows founders and CFOs “to give access to and manage the spend of their distributed teams.”

“We’ve seen more demand for making B2B online payments amidst the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, with many SMEs migrating to digital and spending more on online products and services,” Shady told TechCrunch. “Companies in this new economy are digital and global first. The need for a corporate card was accelerated. As card spend grew during the pandemic, this meant greater liability on founders’ using their personal cards, or other competing cards linked to their personal credit.” 

Tribal, he said, underwrites the company without impacting the founders’ credit. 

Another accelerator for its products was how the pandemic forced teams to work remotely. Founders and CFOs needed a way to provide access to corporate payments while maintaining control, Shady pointed out. Tribal’s platform aims to streamline financial operations for a distributed team. 

Of course, Tribal is not the only company offering credit cards for startups. Brex, which has amassed $465 million in venture capital funding to date, also markets a credit card tailored for startups. While the companies are similar, there is a distinct difference, according to Shady: “Emerging market SMEs have different pains, particularly when it comes to cross-border payments.”

Tribal’s initial efforts are focused on Latin America, in particular Mexico, which is the startup’s biggest market.

Its new capital will go toward accelerating its growth in the region, according to Shady. In particular, the equity will go toward growing Tribal’s leadership team in Mexico, while the debt will fuel the company’s customers’ growing credit lines, Shady said.

“We have invested heavily in our product over the past year,” Shady said. “We’re the first mover in our segment in LatAm with a diverse suite of SME products that includes corporate cards, wire payments and treasury services. We’re incredibly excited by the future ahead of us in Mexico and beyond.” 

Customers include Minu, Ben and Frank, Fairplay and SLM, among others.

Looking ahead, Tribal is exploring four other Latin American markets and expects to be operational in one new market by year’s end, according to Shady.

Image Credits: Tribal Credit

QED Investors partner Lauren Morton said her firm has been following payments and the lending needs of SMEs in emerging markets closely.

“Compared with everything else we’ve seen in this market, Tribal has a differentiated and superior product that meets customers’ needs in a way that no competitor can match,” she said in a written statement. 

Morton went on to note that Tribal has had strong traction in Mexico, with adoption from “fast-growing startups” across the country, including many companies within QED’s own portfolio. 

PFG is providing the debt facility for Tribal. In addition to funding from PFG’s global fund, the firm will be co-investing from its Latin America Growth Lending Fund in partnership with IDB Invest and SVB Financial Group, the parent company of Silicon Valley Bank. 

Tribal Credit previously raised $7.8 million in a series of seed rounds. The latest round brings its total raised to $42.1 million. Tribal Credit also joined Visa’s Fintech Fast Track Program, a move that it said should accelerate its integration with Visa’s global payment network.  The company currently has 75 employees, up from 31 last year.

Earlier this year, Roku acquired the program catalog from Quibi, the short-form video app backed by Jeffrey Katzenberg that had failed to gain traction amid the pandemic, despite nearly $2 billion in financing. Quibi had been designed for on-the-go viewing, but launched when users were staying at home — watching TV on bigger screens and for longer periods of time. But now Quibil’s shows will return. Roku announced today that Quibi’s catalog will be rebranded as “Roku Originals,” and will arrive on The Roku Channel in the near future.

Roku says it will offer more details about its launch plans in May.

The company’s Roku Originals will become available to stream for free within The Roku Channel, the media platform’s ad-supported streaming hub for TV, movies, news, live TV, sports, and more. The originals arriving will include a range of content, including scripted and unscripted series, as well as documentaries. At launch, these will be available to users in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. only.

Quibi’s service had made headlines for its shows that featured several big names from Hollywood, including Anna Kendrick, Chrissy Teigen, Lena Waithe, Idris Elba, Kevin Hart, and Liam Hemsworth, among others. But none of the Quibi content had been compelling enough to push consumers to subscribe to Quibi’s service — that is, Quibi didn’t have a flagship show like “Game of Thrones” or a new “Star Trek” series to draw people in. It didn’t have any classics, either, like “The Office” or “Friends.” Instead, Quibi was relying on the combination of star power and its “quick bites” mobile viewing format to attract users. But the latter no longer made sense when life on-the-go had been shut down. And for escapist, short-form entertainment, users already had TikTok.

Today, Roku notes that while the Quibi shows will serve as the initial backbone for its Roku Originals catalog, it plans to launch more original programming in the future under this brand.

In 2021, the company will roll out over 75 Roku Originals, which will include Quibi’s catalog and other unreleased series that never got the chance to air on Quibi before its shutdown. This will complement The Roku Channel’s existing lineup of over 40,000 free movies and programs, and its over 165 free live, linear TV channels.

Roku’s streaming business got a big boost during the pandemic, which brought in a record $649.9 million in revenue in the fourth quarter and pushed Roku to a $65.2 million profit when Wall St. was expecting a loss. Active users were also up 39% year-over-year to 51.2 million, and The Roku Channel’s free hub grew faster, doubling to 63 million people. With originals, Roku has a chance to further retain that audience, even as the pandemic bump starts to fade and users go back to their regular lives as vaccination rates increase and workplaces re-open.

The Wall St. Journal had earlier reported Roku paid less than $100 million for Quibi’s catalog.

Robotic process automation (RPA) unicorn UiPath last night priced its IPO at $56 per share, above its raised price target range of $52 to $54. The company sold 9,416,384 shares at that price, alongside 14,474,393 from existing shareholders. Its underwriters can purchase 3,583,616 shares at its IPO price if they so choose.

UiPath raised $527.3 million on a gross basis for the primary shares that it sold in the transaction, a deal that values the company at around $29.1 billion on a non-diluted basis. On a fully diluted basis, The Exchange calculates that UiPath is worth up to $31 billion.

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UiPath’s pricing run has been fascinating to watch. The company first proposed a $43 to $50 per-share IPO price range; at that price, UiPath was worth $22.2 billion to $25.8 billion on a non-diluted basis. A coup? For a company that valued at just over $10 billion a year ago, you’d think so. The company’s final IPO price is nearly a tripling of its 2020 worth.

But for UiPath, things are complicated by a 2021 private round that valued the company at $35 billion, a figure that weighs somewhat heavily around the company’s neck.

Not that we should hold the final down-round IPO price differential against UiPath. It got away with raising $750 million at an inflated price before turning around and raising another half-billion at a more reasonable (more on that in a moment) valuation while providing all but its very final investors with excellent returns.

Its employees should do well, too, I reckon. (And Alphabet. Perhaps the company can now afford to bring more of its contractors on full-time thanks to, say, the nearly 21x return that its late-stage group CapitalG made on the 13 million UiPath shares it purchased during its Series B.)

Regardless, after watching the UiPath IPO pricing dance from its first S-1 filing through settling at $56 per share, I think the only parties that should feel a bit silly are the investors who decided that pushing up the value of the former startup by 3.5x in a less than a year was durable logic. Let’s talk about why.

Insanely valuable, just not that insanely valuable

Many of the world’s organizations shifted to remote work due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But even as more people are vaccinated and offices are planning re-openings, it’s clear that for some organizations, remote work is here to stay. 

Deel, a startup which provides payroll, compliance tools and other services to help businesses hire remotely, has seen increased demand in the wake of this shift.

And today, the San Francisco company has announced that it has raised $156 million in Series C funding led by the YC Continuity Fund and existing backers Andreessen Horowitz and Spark Capital. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, former Stripe payments guru Lachy Groom, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Jeff Wilke, and Anthony Schiller also participated in the round, among others. 

The raise is notable for a few reasons. For one, it comes just over seven months after Deel raised a $30 million Series B financing. So it is essentially more than 5x the size of that round. It’s also a big deal because it propels Deel, a 3 year-old company, to unicorn status with a $1.25 billion valuation. The raise also comes after a massive year of growth for Deel, which says it saw a “20x” increase in revenue in 2020 with over 1,800 business clients. That’s up from 500 at the time of its September raise.

Co-founded by MIT alumni Alex Bouaziz and Shuo Wan, Deel aims to allow businesses “to hire anyone, anywhere, in a compliant manner.” It claims that by using its services, businesses can hire and onboard international employees or contractors in under 5 minutes, with no local entity required and that “paying them in 120+ currencies takes just a click.”

Deel plans to use its new capital to continue an international expansion and set up 80 new Deel-owned entities across the world in 2021. Deel also plans to do some hiring itself, and grow its product offerings. The company’s own team is entirely remote, and has grown from 7 employees to over 120 across 26 countries since January 2020. CB Insights projects the industry for virtual HR software will grow to $43 billion by 2026 as technology platforms like Deel help businesses make the transition to remote-first work.

YC Continuity’s Ali Rowghani, who has joined Deel’s board as part of the funding, believes Deel was already at the forefront of remote work pre-pandemic and that “it will be long after.”

“The way people work is fundamentally changing… the [Deel] team is uniquely equipped to remove the obstacles of remote work so companies hire the best talent in the world, instead of only those nearest to them,” he said in a written statement.

As TechCrunch previously reported, Deel today already provides various tools to employees and the organizations that they work for, such as payroll services, tax compliance information, assistance on building contracts, invoicing services and a range of insurance options covering health and other areas related to working life.

Now the plan is to continue building out that stack with more services aimed at both the workers and their employers. That includes loans based on salary for workers, more insurance and benefits options and other offerings.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

For this week’s deep dive Natasha and Alex and Danny wanted to chat crypto. No, not cryptography, but cryptocurrency. The topic has been hot in recent months thanks to Coinbase, recent weeks thanks to the rapid price appreciation in the value of many coins, and in recent days because dogecoin went crazy.

Vote for Equity to win a Webby so that our parents are proud!

So with our minds tuned to the future of money, and commerce, and content, here’s the show’s rundown:

• Recent crypto news has been more than busy, with Venmo adding crypto support, Brian Brooks joining Binance, and the Coinbase direct listing.
• But that’s not all, there have been a host of NFT marketplaces that have raised millions in the past week. We talk about Rarible, SuperRare, OpenSea, and Dapper Labs. We talk about differentiation, UX, and if more than one marketplace can win.
• Dogecoin’s to the moon moment had reached a new price high and come down some before our show recorded, but the cryptocurrency’s joke apparently is still funny after all these years. Here’s a tweet and an article about it.
• And the idea that Coinbase’s successful direct listing will matter for investors betting on crypto-focused startups is true, at least according to investors. More on that here, and hit us up if you want a sweet discount code to get past that paywall.

Equity is back on Friday with our weekly news roundup. It’s going to be a treat. Chat soon!

Welcome Tech, which has built a digital platform aimed at immigrants and their families, has raised $35 million in a Series B funding round co-led by TTV Capital, Owl Ventures and SoftBank Group Corp.’s SB Opportunity Fund.

Crosscut Ventures, Mubadala Capital, Next Play Capital and Owl Capital also participated in the financing, which brings the Los Angeles-based company’s total raised to $50 million since its 2010 inception. Welcome Tech, which has an office in San Antonio, Texas, raised an $8 million Series A in March of 2020.

Built by immigrants for immigrants, Welcome Tech aims to do just what its name indicates — help immigrants feel more welcome, have an easier transition and achieve greater success when moving to the United States.

The company’s approach was different in that rather than launch a banking product and then set out to earn the trust of the community it aims to serve, it first worked hard to earn that trust and understand the community’s needs. 

So in its first years of existence, Welcome Tech has focused on building out a platform that provides educational resources, information and services that “they need to thrive in a  new country.” Its efforts are initially primarily focused on the Hispanic community in the U.S.

The goal of its platform, dubbed SABEResPODER (meaning Knowledge is Power in Spanish), is to serve as “a widely recognized and trusted resource” to members of the Hispanic community in the U.S., the company says.

Armed with knowledge and data that it has gathered over the years, Welcome Tech six months ago launched a banking service, including a debit card and bilingual mobile app. And in January, it launched a monthly subscription offering that gives users access to discounted resources such as medical and dental professionals.

Gardiner Garrard, co-founder and partner, TTV Capital, points out that the Hispanic market represents the largest minority cohort in the U.S., with a population of 62.8 million. 

“That said, less than half of Hispanic households are ‘fully banked’, meaning they cannot open an account, which then negatively impacts their ability to secure other products or services,” Garrard said. “To not serve this community is a major failure. Welcome Tech is addressing this issue head on.”

Today, Welcome’s platform is approaching 3 million active users, according to co-founder and CEO Amir Hemmat. Its ultimate goal, he said, is to serve as “digital Ellis Island.” 

“The way we leave immigrants’ success to chance is pretty crazy,” he told TechCrunch. “If you think of countries the way you think of companies and the way they want to attract and retain…here, we almost do the opposite.”

Image Credits: Welcome Tech

In particular, Hemmat and co-founder Raul Lomeli-Azoubel recognized that access to financial services was crucial to immigrants’ success.

“Although we ultimately see ourselves building towards a better future for immigration and a broader platform, the foundation and beachhead for that is definitely in financial services,” Hemmat said.  

Welcome offers a free banking account that is fully bilingual for English and Spanish speaking communities with “key features that are very tailor made for this community.”

A number of new digital banks targeting Latino and immigrant communities in general have emerged in recent years, including TomoCredit and Greenwood. Welcome aims to differentiate itself from competitors in being a more broad-based platform. Its subscription offering — at $10 a month — does things like offer discounts to healthcare professionals and free televisits, for example.

“When we dug in, we realized that immigrants are not being provided data-driven recommendations,” Hemmat said. “It’s very much a word of mouth and trial of error, and in some cases highly predatory, experience. We’re working to aggregate a historically fragmented audience and that gives us massive leverage to source better offerings, pricing and experiences for consumers across multiple categories.”

The company plans to use its new capital to build more partnerships so that it can do the above, as well as spread awareness about its services.

Gosia Karas, vice president and head of growth-stage investments at SoftBank’s Opportunity Fund, told TechCrunch that the fact that the immigrant population in the U.S. is “growing really fast and underserved creates an opportunity for someone to come in and serve them well with a financial services offering.”

In particular, SoftBank was attracted to Welcome Tech’s approach to truly understand, and gather data around, its target market.

“Before even jumping head first into building a fintech company, they did a lot of work prior,” Karas said. “They spent years building an understanding of this audience of the immigrant population, including building trust within that demographic. And at the same time, they have been building targeted content. This serves as a really great backbone to build a company that is very well-suited to serve that audience and to roll out things like the debit card and other financial services offerings.”

Misfits Market, a startup known for selling “ugly” fruits and vegetables at discount prices, announced this morning that it has raised $200 million in Series C funding.

The company says this brings its total funding to $301.5 million and moves its valuation into unicorn territory (i.e., above $1 billion). It isn’t getting any more specific about that valuation, though Bloomberg reports that it’s $1.1 billion.

Founder and CEO Abhi Ramesh told me that the Delanco, New Jersey-based startup has expanded beyond produce into a variety of grocery categories. At the same time, he said all of its products remain united by a focus on “a single word, which is value.”

Misfits Market products are discounted by up to 40% compared to what you’d find in other grocery stores (in-person or online), which Ramesh said the company achieves by purchasing products that regular stores won’t buy or sell, often for “crazy, random” reasons. For example, he said the company had recently purchased 50,000 bottles of perfectly good olive oil “where the labeling was just angled the wrong way.”

The company says its active customer base and order volume grew 5x last year, when it shipped 77 million pounds of food to more than 400,000 customers. Ramesh said it was a challenge meeting increased consumer demand, but Misfits had advantages that many other grocery companies did not.

Misfits Market CEO Abhi Ramesh

“Fortunately, because we operate our own fulfillment centers and we have our own internal tech built around this, we were not constrained by the same constraints that physical grocery store have, where we have to close at 9pm every day, where we have to make room for regular foot traffic and Instacart shoppers,” he said. “For us, we just have to scale our fulfillment centers, which is easier said than done.”

The new round was led by Accel and D1 Capital, with participation from Valor Equity Partners, Greenoaks Capital, Sound Ventures, Third Kind Ventures and others. Accel’s Ryan Sweeney is joining Misfits’ board of directors.

“Direct-to-consumer models aren’t anything new in the food industry, but the approach Misfits Market has taken is,” Sweeney said in a statement. “Instead of focusing only on their end customer, they’ve managed to create a dynamic solution that also supports food suppliers at every level.”

With the new funding, Misfits Market plans to continue expanding into new grocery categories and new geographies. For example, it’s taking its first orders from Oregon and Washington today, and Ramesh said his goal is to be shipping to “100 percent of zip codes in the 48 lower states” in the next 12 months.

Amazon is bringing its new biometric device, the Amazon One scanner, to Whole Foods store. The retail giant this past fall first introduced the Amazon One scanner, which allows shoppers to enter a store by having their palm scanned. The customer’s palm signature can be associated with their payment mechanism in a retail environment — like Amazon’s cashier-less Amazon Go stores, where customers shop then walk out without having to go through a traditional checkout process. Now at Whole Foods, the Amazon One scanner will be added as a payment option at checkout.

That means customers could choose to scan their palm over the reader to pay for their purchases, instead of paying with cash or a credit or debit card, for example. It will not replace other payment options, Amazon stressed.

Amazon says it’s initially adding the Amazon One palm scanner to the Whole Foods Market store at Madison Broadway in Seattle, but plans to roll it out to seven more Whole Foods Market stores in the greater Seattle area in the months to come. Seattle will likely serve as a test market for the new technology before Amazon chooses to roll it out more broadly.

Since its launch in September, Amazon One scanners have already been installed in several Amazon stores in the Seattle area, including Amazon Go, Amazon Go Grocery, Amazon Books, Amazon 4-star, and Amazon Pop Up. The retailer says “thousands” of customers have now enrolled their palm signatures.

With the Whole Foods launch, customers will be able to sign up for Amazon One at a kiosk or device in the participating Whole Foods stores, where they can choose to enroll one or both palms. The scanner uses computer vision technology to create the unique palm signature, which is associated with the payment card the customer inserts into the device.

Existing customers who had previously enrolled in Amazon One at a different location will have to re-insert their credit card one time in the Whole Foods store to continue to use the service in those stores, Amazon said.

In addition, customers will be able to link their Amazon One ID with their Amazon account in order to get their Prime membership discount to apply to their Whole Foods Market purchases via the Amazon One device in the future.

“At Whole Foods Market, we’re always looking for new and innovative ways to improve the shopping experience for our customers,” said Arun Rajan, senior vice president of technology and chief technology officer at Whole Foods Market, in a statement about the expansion. “Working closely with Amazon, we’ve brought benefits like Prime member discounts, online grocery delivery and pickup, and free returns to our customers, and we’re excited to add Amazon One as a payment option beginning today. We’re starting with an initial store at Madison Broadway in Seattle and look forward to hearing what customers think as we expand this option to additional stores over time,” he added.

The device, of course, comes with concerns given Amazon’s track record with biometric technology. The company has sold biometric facial recognition services to law enforcement in the U.S.; its facial recognition technology was the subject of a data privacy lawsuit; and its Ring camera company continues to work in partnership with police. It was also found to be keeping Alexa voice records indefinitely, with no option for customers to delete them. (Amazon later changed that — and, to be fair, Google and Apple were mishandling customer voice data, too.)

Just yesterday, Amazon announced tests of other retail and AR technology in a London area hair salon, which would involve cameras capturing customer images. The company said it wasn’t retaining “customer data,” but declined to answer a question about the non-personal data being collected at the salon.

In today’s announcement, Amazon notes that the Amazon One device is “protected by multiple security controls, and palm images are never stored on the Amazon One device.” It says the images are encrypted and sent to a secure area built for Amazon One in the cloud where Amazon creates the customers’ palm signatures. It also offers a way for customers to unenroll from Amazon One from either a device itself or from one.amazon.com, which also deletes their biometric data when all their transactions have completed.

Companies like Ro and Hims have capitalized on the need for more seamless and discreet access to health and wellness products that are part of everyday life. For men.

Stix is looking to do the same for women, and has today announced the raise of a $3.5 million seed round. The financing was co-led by Resolute Ventures and SWAT equity partners, with participation from Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, Bullish, and a variety of strategic angels. This brings the total amount raised by the company to $5 million.

Stix launched in 2019 with a D2C pregnancy test that was easy to buy and use, and that eliminated some of their associated stigma. For example, some pregnancy tests show a smiley face when a woman tests positive, despite the fact that not all women taking a pregnancy test want to be pregnant.

The company then expanded to ovulation tests and prenatal supplements. Most recently, Stix has moved into UTI diagnostics tests, pain relief products, and preventative supplements. This last product category is particularly important. First of all, women are 30 times more likely to get a UTI than men, according to womenshealth.gov, and more than half of all women will have at least one UTI in their lifetime. It’s a huge market.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, there are few if any diagnostic products out on the market that women can buy over the counter. In other words, it’s taxing for a woman to diagnose a UTI (usually having to go see a doctor) despite the fact that UTIs are incredibly common.

The FDA-cleared UTI test makes it much easier for women to take action and get some answers from the comfort of their own home. Stix offers these products as a subscription and gives customers the option to choose how frequently they’d like them delivered.

Stix was cofounded by Cynthia Plotch and Jamie Norwood. The startup is looking to build a full suite of not only products, but educational resources and content to help guide women through these hyper common, but difficult, experiences.

Stix has eight people on the team, including the cofounders, three of whom are people of color. All are women.

The startup is not alone in the market. Modern Fertility, for example, is selling ovulation and pregnancy tests direct to consumer and has distribution through big box retailers like Wal-Mart.