Author: azeeadmin

Are you ready to do whatever it takes to move the needle and drive your startup forward? Then you’re ready for TechCrunch Disrupt 2021. The leading tech conference focused on founders takes place September 21-23. There’s nothing like the thrill that comes from discovering early-stage startups and Disrupt is the world’s top launch platform.

The three days of Disrupt 2021 will be jam-packed not only with experts, panel discussions, exhibitors and the leading tech makers, shakers and investors from around the globe — it’ll be packed with value and opportunity.

Let’s talk value. Right out of the gate, you’ll receive a 3-month membership to Extra Crunch — free — when you purchase a Disrupt pass (excluding the Expo Pass). That’s a $45 value-add.

Extra Crunch, a members-only community created by TechCrunch, is specifically designed to help founders and startup teams get and stay ahead. You’ll enjoy articles on startup investment trends, fundraising, late-stage startups and more. You’ll receive weekly startup investor surveys, private tech market analysis, how-tos on fundraising and growth, topical newsletters and other exclusives delivered daily.

Membership also entitles you to Extra Crunch Live, our weekly virtual event series, discounts on TechCrunch events, discounts from software partners and more. Whew — that should keep your fingers on the pulse of everything startup.

Let’s talk even more value. Take advantage of super early-bird pricing on Founder, Innovator and Investor passes, and you can attend Disrupt 2021 for less than $100. But don’t procrastinate. Buy your pass before this time-sensitive offer disappears on May 13, 11:59 pm (PST).

Let’s talk opportunity. You’ll find it in every corner of Disrupt. Whether you’re networking on the fly in our virtual platform’s chat feature or curating your own meetings using CrunchMatch, our AI-powered networking platform, you’ll connect with people eager to collaborate, educate, learn and inspire. It’s a great way to expand your network.

The all-new Startup Alley is ground zero for opportunity — exhibitors can gain valuable media exposure, attract customers, schedule product demos and track leads. Plus, the TechCrunch editorial team will choose two stand-out exhibiting startups to compete in Startup Battlefield for the $100,000 prize. And check out the new Startup Alley+ opportunity here. Exhibiting at Disrupt is an opportunity you don’t want to miss.

The world-famous Startup Battlefield pitch competition is another huge opportunity, and we’ll start accepting applications for the 2021 cohort in Q2.

Opportunity meets value at Disrupt 2021 on September 21-23. You’re ready to do whatever it takes, so jump on this chance to attend for less than $100. Buy your super early-bird pass before May 13, 11:59 pm (PST). Then sit back and enjoy that tasty, ExtraCrunch(y) membership.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt 2021? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

For obvious reasons, food delivery was among the categories that soared during a year of Covid-19 related lockdowns. The question remains how these changes will impact both grocery and restaurant delivery long-term, but at the very least, it seems certain that the categories have hit an inflection point.

This could also be the moment that delivery robotics finally come into their own, as more services look beyond human messengers to plan for future pandemics and other potential issues.

It’s a moment Starship Technologies has been planning for since 2014. With around $100 million of funding under its belt, the company has already been testing its delivery robots in a number of different real-world markets. In January, it added another $17 million in funding to continue growing impressive growth that includes a five-fold increase in its fleet size since the beginning of the pandemic.

The company’s co-founder and CEO/CTO Ahti Heinla will join us at TC Sessions: Mobility 2021 to discuss Starship’s role in the push for last-mile robotic delivery. It’s been a long road for the startup, and there’s still a ways to go, in dealing with everything from technology to regulatory red tape. We’ll discuss these challenges and whether the on-going pandemic will be the push these technologies need to become a more mainstream reality.

By late summer 2021, Starship Technologies plans to expand to 100 universities  – leaping from the 15 campuses it operated from at the beginning of this year. Not only that, but Starship Technology is growing in just about every meaningful way for startups, including delivery locations, number of deliveries, fleet size and workforce, which now is about 400 strong.

We can’t wait to hear from Ahti and more mobility-industry leaders at TC Sessions: Mobility on June 9. Make sure to grab your Early Bird pass before May 6 to save 35% on tickets and join the fun!

The Exchange just yesterday discussed a downward revision in the impending Compass IPO and the disappointing Deliveroo flotation as signals that market demand for high-growth, unprofitable tech shares could be slipping. Recent news underscores the possibly chilling conditions. This morning, Kaltura, a technology company that provides video streaming software and services, delayed its IPO. JioForMe reports that the postponement comes after Kaltura’s “valuation demand was lower than expected.”

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

TechCrunch noted yesterday that Kaltura had not released a second, higher IPO price range. The fact stood out given how hot the public markets had proven in recent months for new tech offerings. Kaltura’s S-1 filing detailed accelerating revenue growth, which at the time we thought would be more than enough to fetch the company an attractive initial public valuation.

It appears that Kaltura was also surprised that it was not trending toward a higher IPO price.

In another sign of how quickly the temperature for new tech flotations may have chilled, digital comms firm Intermedia Cloud Communications also delayed its IPO today. In a release, CEO Michael Gold said the decision is due “to challenging current conditions in the market for initial public offerings, especially for technology companies.”

Challenging current conditions? For IPOs? For tech IPOs? That’s new.

Uh-oh

Axios reporter Dan Primack noted this morning that SPAC formation appears to be slowing. Mix that into the delays and yesterday’s anemic-to-awful IPO news, and the market could be seeing a somewhat rapid retrenchment toward more historical valuations and demand levels for unprofitable equities.

Thinking out loud: We should expect SPAC formation and deal volume to fall the fastest of all the signals we’re tracking, including IPO pricing, the pace of S-1 filings and first-day trading performance. Why? Because it’s the most exotic of the various data points we’ve observed on the way up during the tech boom. Therefore, it should also be the thing most vulnerable to rising financial gravity.

Holler, described by founder and CEO Travis Montaque as “a conversational media company,” just announced that it’s raised $36 million in Series B funding.

You may not know what conversational media is, but there’s a decent chance you’ve used Holler’s technology. For example, if you’ve added a sticker or a GIF to your Venmo payments, Holler actually manages the app’s search and suggestion experience around that media. (You may notice a little “powered by Holler” identifier at the bottom of the window.)

Montaque told me the company started out initially as a news and video content app before focusing on messaging in 2016. Messaging, he argued, is “the most important experience for people online,” since “it’s where we communicate with the people who are closest to us.”

He continued, “It seemed bizarre that we haven’t seen much innovation in the text messaging experience since the first text message was sent in 1992.”

So Holler works with partners like PayPal-owned Venmo and The Meet Group to bring more compelling content into the messaging side of their apps — or as Montaque put it, the startup aims to “enrich conversations everywhere.”

Image Credits: Holler

There’s both an art and a science to this, he said. The art involves creating and curating the best stickers and GIFs, while the science takes the form of Holler’s Suggestion AI technology, which will recommend the right content based on the user’s conversations and contexts — the stickers and GIFs you want to send in a dating app are probably different from what you’d in a work-related chat. Montaque said that this context-focused approach allows the company to provide smart recommendations in a way that also respects user privacy.

“I believe that the future is context, not identity,” he said. “Because I don’t really need to know about Anthony, I just need to know someone is in need of lunch. If I know you’re in the mood for Mexican food, I don’t need to know every aspect of the last 10 times you went to a Mexican restaurant.”

Holler monetizes this content by partnering with brands like HBO Max, Ikea and Starbucks to create branded stickers and GIFs that become part of the company’s content library. Montaque said the startup has also worked with brands to measure the impact of these campaigns across a variety of metrics.

Holler’s content now reaches 75 million users each month, compared to 19 million users a year ago, while revenue has grown 226%, he said. (Apparently, last year was the first time the company saw significant revenue growth.)

The startup has now raised more than $51 million in total funding. The Series B was co-led by CityRock Venture Partners and New General Market Partners, with participation from Gaingels, Interplay Ventures, Relevance Ventures, Towerview Ventures and WorldQuant Ventures.

“Holler is more than simply a groundbreaking technology company,” said CityRock Managing Partner Oliver Libby in a statement. “Under Travis Montaque’s visionary leadership, Holler boldly stands for a new era of ethics in social media, and also deeply reflects the values of diversity, inclusion, and belonging.”

Montaque (who, as a Black tech CEO, wrote a post for TechCrunch last year about bringing more diversity to the industry) said that Holler will use the funds to continue developing its product and advertising model. For one thing, he noted that although stickers and GIFs were an obvious starting point, the company is now looking to explore and create new media formats.

“We want to invent a new kind of content consumption paradigm,” he said.

Potential threats to the free flow of GIFs continue to trouble the UK’s competition watchdog.

Facebook’s $400M purchase of Giphy, announced last year, is now facing an in-depth probe by the CMA after the regulator found the acquisition raises competition concerns related to digital advertising. It now has until September 15 to investigate and report.

The watchdog took a first look at the deal last summer. It kept on looking into 2021. And then last week the CMA laid out its concerns — saying the (already completed) Facebook-Giphy acquisition could further reduce competition in the digital advertising market where the former is already a kingpin player (with over 50% share of the display advertising market).

The regulator said it had found evidence that, prior to the acquisition, Giphy had planned to expand its own digital advertising partnerships to other countries, including the UK.

“If Giphy and Facebook remain merged, Giphy could have less incentive to expand its digital advertising, leading to a loss of potential competition in this market,” it wrote a week ago.

The CMA also said it was worried a Facebook-owned Giphy could harm social media rivals were the tech giant were to squeeze the supply of animated pixels to others — or require rivals to sign up to worse terms (such as forcing them to hand over user data which it might then use to further fuel its ad targeting engines, gaining yet more market power).

On March 25 the companies were given five days by the regulator to address its concerns — by offering legally binding proposals intended to allay concerns.

An in-depth ‘phase 2’ investigation could have been avoided if concessions were offered which were acceptable to the regulator but that is evidently not the case as the CMA has announced the phase 2 referral today. And given the announcement has come just five working days after the last notification it appears no concessions were offered.

We’ve reached out to Facebook and the CMA for comment.

A Facebook spokesperson said: “We will continue to fully cooperate with the CMA’s investigation. This merger is good for competition and in the interests of everyone in the UK who uses Giphy and our services — from developers to service providers to content creators.”

While Facebook has already completed its acquisition of Giphy, the CMA’s investigation continues to put a freeze on its ability to integrate Giphy more deeply into its wider business empire.

Albeit, given Facebook’s dominant position in the digital advertising space, its business need to move fast via product innovation is a lot less pressing than years past — when it was building its market dominance free from regulatory intervention.

In recent years, the CMA has been paying close mind to the digital ad market. Back in 2019 it reported report substantial concerns over the power of the adtech duopoly, Google and Facebook. Although in its final report it said it would wait for the government to legislate, rather than make an intervention to address market power imbalances itself.

The UK is now in the process of setting up a pro-competition regulator with a dedicated focus on big tech — in response to concerns about the ‘winner takes all’ dynamics seen in digital markets. This incoming Digital Market Unit will oversee a “pro-competition” regime for Internet platforms that will see fresh compliance requirements in the coming years.

In the meanwhile, the CMA continues to scrutinize tech deals and strategic changes — including recently opening a probe of Google’s plan to depreciate support for third party cookies in Chrome after complaints from other industry players.

In January it also announced it was taking a look at Uber’s plan to acquire Autocab. However on Monday it cleared that deal, finding only “limited indirect” competition between the pair, and not finding evidence to indicate Autocab was likely to become a significant and more direct competitor to Uber in the future.

The regulator also considered whether Autocab and Uber could seek to put Autocab’s taxi company customers that compete against Uber at a disadvantage by reducing the quality of the booking and dispatch software sold to them, or by forcing them to pass data to Uber. But its phase 1 probe found other credible software suppliers and referral networks that the CMA said these taxi companies could switch to if Uber were to act in such a way — leading to it to clear the deal.

Who’s ready for bootcamp? Today’s the day new founders get down to the business of, well, building a better business. TechCrunch Early Stage 2021: Operations & Fundraising provides early-stage founders with access to top founders, investors and subject-matter experts across the startup realm. The goal? Learn and develop the skills essential for startup success, avoid common mistakes, expand your network and discover new opportunities.

Procrastination Station: You can still get your founder bootcamp on. Buy a pass right here, right now.

Ready to roll up your sleeves, get to work and have some fun? We’re highlighting just a few of today’s sessions you won’t want to miss. You’ll find descriptions of all the presentations in the program-packed agenda.

Don’t miss our special partner sessions. These eight interactive presentations, scheduled throughout the day, cover a range of hot topics.

• Creating and Protecting IP Value in Connection with VC Financings (Perkins Coie)
• Scientist Entrepreneurs – Scaling Breakout Engineering Biology Companies (Mayfield)
• Using Fast Feedback to Make Higher-Confidence Decisions and Accelerate the Dev Process (UserTesting)
• An M&A Playbook for Startup Founders: Lessons from Google and Microsoft (Merus Capital)
• How to Scale a Remote-First Startup (Remote)
• Why Founders Should adopt OKRs Now (Dell for Entrepreneurs)
• Naming & Protecting Your Company’s Intellectual Property with Brainbase (Brainbase)
• Nailing the Little Things: How Startups can Achieve Operational Excellence from Day One (B Capital Group)

Wondering how to pitch effectively in these virtual times? Melissa Bradley, co-founder of Ureeka, shows how to bring the heat in How to Nail Your Virtual Pitch Meeting. The rules of the pitch meeting have changed. Instead of traveling across the country, wasting time in planes, trains and automobiles, founders can take upwards of 30 meetings in a day from the comfort of their home. Entrepreneur and VC Melissa Bradley will outline how to make the most of that half hour on Zoom and lock in the next one.

If you build it, who will sell it? Learn everything you need to know about Building and Leading a Sales Team. Contrary to popular opinion, even the very best products don’t sell themselves. Salespeople do. Hear from Zoom’s Chief Revenue Officer, at the helm of the company’s sales team during the biggest period of growth of any software company ever, lay out how to build a stellar sales team.

Thanks to video on demand, you won’t miss a minute of TC Early Stage. Watch your favorites again to catch nuance you may have missed or check out topics you couldn’t fit into your schedule. All videos will be available after the conference ends and you can access them with the free Extra Crunch membership that you get with your ticket!

That’s a sweet peek at just some of the presentations happening today at TechCrunch Early Stage 2021: Operations & Fundraising. Are you ready? It’s time for bootcamp!

As Covid-19 vaccines are becoming more readily available to larger groups of the U.S. population, Facebook has teamed up with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to launch new Facebook profile frames that allow users to share their support for getting vaccinated with their family and friends. The effort follows a similar launch in the U.K. through a partnership with National Health Services (NHS), which has already resulted in a quarter of Facebook users in the U.K. having seen a Facebook friend with the profile frame.

At launch, users in the U.S. can pick between frames which include banners that say either “Let’s Get Vaccinated” or “I Got My Covid-19 Vaccine” in English or Spanish. The banner will appear overlaid on the edge of their profile picture next to a blue bubble that reads “We Can Do This.”

Although there were already a variety of vaccine-promoting profile frames to choose from on Facebook, these were all third-party efforts until now. The new frames were created, in part, by Facebook, which will allow the company to better track their usage over time.

Image Credits: Facebook

In the weeks ahead, Facebook says it will show people a summary in their News Feed of all your friends, family members and people you follow who are using the new Covid-19 vaccine profile frames. For that reason, adopting the first-party frames will be important, if you want to be a part of that list that’s shown to others.

Facebook notes that it’s launching the frames because research shows how social norms can have a major impact on people’s attitude and behavior when it comes to their health — a notable assertition, given that the company wants otherwise downplay the power its network has when it comes to the spread of disinformation or anti-vax sentiments.

For this effort, Facebook believes, and the research supports, that when people see others who they know and trust getting the vaccine, and they’ll be encouraged to do the same. This can be particularly effective when it comes to encouraging those who were otherwise unsure about getting the vaccine.

Leveraging social media to encourage vaccinations has been part of the CDC’s toolkit as well, which is why you likely saw several photos from healthcare workers and essentials workers sharing their vaccination photos and talking about their experience. The CDC had also provided a sets of sample social media graphics and messages that could be used by organizations that wanted to promote vaccinations across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

The new profile frames are rolling out starting today to Facebook users in the U.S.

Every tech vendor has to pass security muster with customers, typically a tedious activity involving answering long questionnaires. Kintent, a new startup that wants to automate this process, announced a $4 million seed today led by Tola Capital with help from a bunch of tech industry angel investors.

After company co-founder and CEO Sravish Sridhar sold his previous startup Kinvey, which provided Backend as a Service to mobile app developers, he took a couple of years off while he decided what to do next. The sale to Progress Software in 2017 gave him that luxury.

He knew first-hand from his experience at Kinvey, that companies like his had to adhere to a lot of compliance standards and the idea for the next company began to form in his head. He wanted to create a new startup that could make it easier to figure out how to become compliant with a given standard, measure the current state of compliance and get recommendations on how to improve. He created Kintent to achieve that goal.

“So the big picture idea is can we build a system of record for trust and our first use case is information security and data privacy compliance, specifically if you’re a company that is building a SaaS business and you’re storing customer data or PHI, which is health information,” Sridhar explained.

The company’s product is called Trust Cloud. He says that they begin by looking at the lay of your technology land in terms of systems and the types of information you are storing, looking at how compliant each system is with whatever standard you are trying to adhere to.

Then based on how you classify your data, the Trust Cloud generates a list of best practices to stay in compliance with your desired standard, and finally it provides the means to keep testing to validate what you’ve done and that you are remaining in compliance.

The company launched in 2019, spent the first part of 2020 developing the product, and began selling it last October. Today, it has 35 paying customers. “We’re in the high six figures in revenue. We’ve been growing at about 20-30% month-over-month consistently since we launched in October, and the customers are across 11 verticals already,” he said.

With 14 employees and some money in the bank from this funding round, he is thinking ahead to adding people. He says that diversity has to be more than something you just talk about, and he has made it one of the core founding values of the company, and one he takes very seriously.

“I’m very conscious with every hire that we make that we’re really pushing to extend ourselves to [find] people from different walks of life, different statuses and so on,” he said.

The company is also working on a DEI component for the Trust Cloud, which it will be offering for free, which enables companies to provide a set of diversity metrics to measure against and then report on how well you are doing, and how you can improve your numbers.

mmhmm, the software that allows folks to personalize their appearance on video chat, has today announced that its introducing usage-based enterprise accounts.

In a conversation with TechCrunch, founder and CEO Phil Libin said this is a natural evolution, remarking that mmhmm has had hundreds of registrations from users all at the same company.

“It was clear that there was a big demand for enterprise accounts,” said Libin. “Not only for central management, to keep it as easy as possible, but also for getting everything on brand. Companies and organizations of all kinds are realizing video is a permanent part of how we’re going to do business and it needs to be on brand.”

The enterprise accounts are priced the same as individual Pro accounts, at $10/month or $100/year. However, when an organization signs up with an enterprise account, they only pay for the number of users who were active on mmhmm each month, rather than worrying about seats.

Enterprise accounts can also share design system assets built specifically for mmhmm to ‘stay on brand’ as Libin said. Folks who opt in to enterprise can also control employee accounts under one umbrella, invite via link, claim an email domain and enjoy a single bill.

Libin also gave us a glimpse into the financials of the business, explaining that while it’s too early to tell, the conversion rate to Pro accounts is outpacing that of Evernote, one of Libin’s earlier ventures.

He said that, with freemium tools like both mmhmm and Evernote, the likelihood of a user upgrading to premium grows with every month they’re on the platform. At Evernote, it was half a percent after the first month, and then five percent by the end of the first year, and after two years it would jump to 12 percent.

Obviously, mmhmm doesn’t have 24 months worth of data. That said, the product is doing 10x better than Evernote did.

But revenue is not the focus, according to Libin. The company is far more concerned with ensuring the onboarding process is easy for casual users and that they really understand what they can do with the platform. In the spirit of that, mmhmm is launching new interactive tutorial videos on the platform to ensure people are fully aware of the features.

mmhmm first came on the scene in the summer of last year in a closed beta, and eventually opened up to everyone who has a Mac in November 2020. Alongside the launch of enterprise, mmhmm is also launching a Windows version of the app in closed beta.

Libin said that mmhmm is in a growth stage, and that after starting five different companies, he knows the biggest challenge is people.

“I’ve been in some startups now that have been through this hyper growth stage,” said Libin. “The toughest thing at this stage is getting people, keeping people from burning out, and doing career development. This is my fifth startup, so I’m trying to demonstrate some learning behavior and apply lessons learned from previous mistakes. We’ll see how it goes.”

So, let me preempt this by saying that there are plenty of robotics verticals worth getting excited about. But at the moment, everyone sure seems focused on warehouse fulfillment. It’s understandable, of course. Right now, it’s Amazon versus the world, and the retail giant certainly has a leg up on much of the world on the robotics front — questions around human labor are a different conversation entirely (though that’s also one I’m happy to have).

I’ve spoken to a number of executives at top fulfillment robotics companies, and the message is pretty much the same across the board: How can they stay competitive with Amazon? There’s an answer to that question dripping with more existential dread than I would care to impart in a robotics roundup on a Thursday morning, so I’ll just say that, for better or worse, the easiest answer it automation.

There’s a reason, after all, that Boston Dynamics’ latest robot is designed for the warehouse. It may be the company’s second commercially available robot when it arrives this summer, but in a lot of ways, it’s BD’s first purpose-built robot. Spot, after all, was a direct outgrowth of the quadrupedal robotics research that basically dates back to the company’s founding. The company regularly describes Spot as a platform, and the applications are about as varied as you’d expect.

Image Credits: Boston Dynamics

Stretch evolved from Handle, which evolved from Atlas, but the robotic was created with one very specific thing in mind: moving boxes. Of course, that means a lot of things in the warehouse setting — and Boston Dynamics will get around to many in the future. For now, however, that mostly means unloading trucks and building orders on pallets. This is obviously a huge growth market, so it will be fascinating to see how an organization like Boston Dynamics scales — especially if/when the Hyundai deal goes through.

Some raises worth mentioning in the category. I’ve mentioned before that China is worth watching for fulfillment robots, and this week Beijing-based ForwardX Robotics made a big splash with a $63 million raise. Led by CDH, Eastern Bell and Dohold Capital, the Series B finds the company expanding growth in the U.S. and China, as well as expanding into additional markets, including Japan, the U.K. and Germany.

Here’s founder/CEO Nicolas Chee on the round:

Our customers in the warehousing and manufacturing industries come to us to transform their operations and help them unlock new levels of efficiency that were previously unattainable. ForwardX Robotics’ flexible automation platform enables supply chain facilities to elevate worker performance, reduce growing labor costs pressures, and adapt quickly and effectively to changes in the market.

Image Credits: Ambi Robotics

There was a decent-sized round for Ambi Robotics, which is also using the opportunity to come out of stealth. Founded by UC Berkeley professor (and frequent TC Sessions: Robotics guest) Ken Goldberg, the company announced a $6.1 million seed. The startup specializes in pick and place robotics, starting with a pair of machines: the AmbiSort and AmbiKit. Goldberg has a pretty devoted following in the category, so this will definitely be one to watch.

Image Credits: Skycatch

This week we broke the news of Skycatch’s $25 million raise. We’ve covered the drone startup a number of times over the years. While countless companies are currently taking great pains to put drones to work in the real world, Skycatch has actually turned theory into practice. Its 3D imaging drones have already been deployed to thousands of sites all over the world.

Speaking of actually deploying robots into the real world, the delivery category has been doing a decent job of this. With COVID-19 still very much an issue in much of the country and world, now’s a pretty good time to start testing these system.

Image Credits: REEF Technologies

Granted, the tech isn’t in any real danger of replacing delivery people outright any time soon, but we are seeing a number of companies and cities get pretty aggressive about testing. You can add Cartken to that list. The company, founded by former Google engineers, has begun testing in Miami — a city, I’m told, by countless breathy thinkpieces and at least one Will Smith song, that is the place to be.

Image Credits: Toyota

Nuro, meanwhile, has had very little issue building excitement, event without the Fresh Prince’s encouragement. The delivery startup announced a massive $500 million Series C, back in November. More insight into that round arrives this week, as the Toyota-powered Woven Capital announces it was part of the round. The fund’s head of investments and acquisitions, George Kellerman, tells TechCrunch:

Nuro was a good jumping off point, because a lot of the work that we’re doing is really focused on developing autonomous passenger vehicles, so this is a way for us to learn and advance through a partner that is laser-focused on local goods delivery. There’s a lot of opportunity to learn from them, and potentially over time, to collaborate and help them expand globally.