Author: azeeadmin

Fetcher, a startup that promises to make the recruiting process easier while also diversifying the candidate pool, is announcing that it has raised $6.5 million in Series A funding.

Original known as Scout, the New York startup was founded by CEO Andres Blank, CPO Chris Calmeyn and engineering directors Javier Castiarena and Santi Aimetta.

Blank told me that Fetcher automates parts of recruiters’ jobs, namely finding job candidates and sending the initial outreach emails. When I wondered whether that just leads to more spammy recruiting messages, he said that Fetcher emails actually result in “a very good response rate” because they’re targeted at the right candidates.

“The reality is that if you’re looking for a job, you don’t need an email to be so amazing,
and if you’re a recruiter, you don’t want to spend 10 minutes thinking about what to write to each candidate,” he said.

He also described Fetcher’s approach as a “human in the loop” approach. Yes, the initial outreach is automated, but then the recruiter handles the conversations with candidates who respond.

Image Credits: Fetcher

“By automating both the sourcing [and] outreach sides of recruiting, Fetcher reduces the amount of time a recruiter spends in front of a computer searching for candidates, making a recruiter’s job more balanced, strategic and impactful, all while continuing to build a robust, diverse pipeline for the company,” Blank wrote in a follow-up email.

He also suggested that automated sourcing allows recruiters to reach a much more diverse candidate pool than they would through traditional methods. For example, he sent me a case study in which Fetcher helped video collaboration startup Frame.io hire 11 new employees in less than 12 months, nine of whom were women and/or underrepresented minorities.

“Fetcher has freed up time and given us the capacity to diversify our pipeline more
organically,” said Anna Chalon, Frame.io’s senior director of talent and diversity, equity and inclusion, in a statement. “This has allowed us to make some incredible hires, mostly from underrepresented groups, over the last year.”

Blank added that after Fetcher has seen its revenue increase every month since July of last year, owing to shrinking recruiting teams needing to be able to do more with fewer resources, as well as a greater corporate focus on the aforementioned diversity, equity and inclusion.

Fetcher has now raised a total of $12 million. The Series A was led by G20 Ventures, with participation from KFund, Slow Ventures and Accomplice. Blank said he’s planning to double the employee count (currently 80) by the end of the year and to build out additional analytics (including diversity analytics) and CRM tools.

Brian Brackeen, the founder and former CEO of facial recognition startup Kairos, has made his way back to the company following his ouster in 2018. Brackeen is now chairing the company’s scientific advisory board, where he’ll help to address and eliminate issues of racial bias from the technology.

While that’s not the company’s explicit mission — it’s to provide authentication tools to businesses — algorithmic bias has long been a topic the company, especially Brackeen, has addressed.

But what happened in the time leading up to his ouster and the events that followed was quite the whirlwind.

In 2018, Kairos’ board of directors forced Brackeen out of his role as CEO, citing willful misconduct as the cause for his termination. In addition to forcing him out of the company he founded, Kairos sued Brackeen, alleging the misappropriation of corporate funds and misleading shareholders.

At the time, Brackeen referred to the events as “a poorly structured coup,” and denied the allegations. Then, Brackeen countersued Kairos, alleging the company and its CEO Melissa Doval intentionally destroyed his reputation through fraudulent conduct. In 2019, Brackeen and Kairos settled the lawsuits. Brackeen then went on to start Lightship Capital with his wife, Candice Brackeen.

Since returning to Kairos, Brackeen has already directed Kairos to focus on what it’s calling the Bias API. The API is designed to make it easier for companies and firms to detect and address any algorithmic biases, according to Brackeen.

Brackeen is not back on a full-time basis, as he has his hands pretty full with Lightship Capital, but he said he’s generally tasked with steering the ship during quarterly meetings.

As for who’s at the helm, that role falls to Dr. Stephen Moore, who joined Kairos as its chief scientific officer in July 2018 following the company’s acquisition of Emotion Reader.

“He is a brilliant mind, and I’m excited to see a scientist in the CEO role,” Brackeen said. “We will work closely together to bring the bias work to the fore, and to make sure it’s a world-class solution. He is as deeply committed to solving the problem of bias as I am.”

Despite the drama of the past, Brackeen told TechCrunch he still considers Kairos to be his baby. It’s also worth noting that folks like Doval, who was appointed to CEO following Brackeen’s ouster, and Mary Wolff, the former COO who spearheaded the lawsuit, are gone.

“First, I will always feel a responsibility to the team, investors, and fans of Kairos,” Brackeen said as to why he’s returned. “Many of whom I was singularly responsible for. Secondly, as a society, bias can be found in everything from twitter image cropping to air dryers not turning on for black hands. It’s a painful reminder of a society that’s not fair for all. The challenge is that as AI gets to be imbedded in more and more products, we will see bias in all kinds of products. Kairos with its large dataset and years of IP, must be the firm that saves us from that dystopian future. I am uniquely situated to lead that strategy.”

Poshmark has come a long way over the last decade. Launched in 2011, the social fashion marketplace has raised upwards of $150 million, and has now listed on the public markets. It’s valued at $3.5 billion.

But well before all the success, Mayfield’s Navin Chaddha saw the potential, leading the Series A for the company.

On our next episode of Extra Crunch Live, we’ll sit down with Chaddha and Poshmark founder and CEO Manish Chandra to discuss going from Series A to public company. (Registration info is at the bottom of this post.)

Chandra is a triple-threat executive. He has degrees in marketing, business and computer science, and is a serial entrepreneur who sold his previous company, Kaboodle, to Hearst in 2007. The introduction of the iPhone inspired him to think about the coming shift in consumer behavior, paving the way for an idea like Poshmark to thrive. As is so often the case, what seems obvious in hindsight was incredibly insightful at the time.

The brilliance wasn’t at all lost on Chaddha, an entrepreneur in his own right. Now, Chaddha leads Mayfield, a firm with $2.5 billion in assets under management. Of the 50 companies he’s invested in during his venture capital career, 17 have gone public and 24 have been acquired. In other words, it makes sense that he has made an appearance on the Forbes Midas list 12 times.

We’ll talk to Chandra and Chaddha about the process of fundraising from the early stage to the growth stage and beyond. But more importantly, we’ll talk about how a company has to adapt in order to be successful over time.

Plus, Chandra and Chaddha will take a look at pitch decks submitted by the audience and give their live feedback. If you’re wondering how to perfect your deck, there may be no more valuable resource than the advice of this founder/investor duo. (Also, if you want to submit your deck to be featured on this show, smash this link.)

An important note about this next episode: We’re making Extra Crunch Live free. Folks who tune in live simply have to register and show up. On-demand access to the content is still reserved to Extra Crunch members only. In fact, EC members can check out the entire library of ECL content here.

It features tactical insights from folks including Roelof Botha, Mark Cuban, Aileen Lee, Aydin Senkut, Kirsten Green and more.

You can register to attend this episode, which will include audience Q&A and networking, right here.

Once the path less traveled, bootstrapping today has become a much more viable and common approach to building a startup. By not taking venture capital dollars early, bootstrapping can force founders to remain disciplined in serving their paying customers well. It’s also a pretty compelling way to minimize dilution for founders and early employees. No wonder then that a crop of unicorn enterprise startups has taken this road these past years.

Few companies in that emerging crop though have reached quite the stature of Atlanta-based Calendly. The company is not just on everyone’s calendars (literally), but has also become a $3 billion unicorn behemoth with $70 million in subscription revenue in 2020.

To get Calendly started, CEO and founder Tope Awotona raised $550,000 (which included his life savings) to get the company off the ground, and remained bootstrapped for about seven years before inking a $350 million venture round with OpenView’s Blake Bartlett earlier this year along with Iconiq. OpenView happened to be one of the few investors in the company’s single seed round as well.

Bootstrapping is a continuous commitment to not take venture capital for an extended period of time. Why make that commitment? How does a founder build the fortitude to resist the lucre of VC when it can make so many things easier? What are the advantages to bootstrapping, and when does the calculus switch from avoiding VC to embracing it?

I’m excited to talk about those questions and more with Awotona and Bartlett at our upcoming Early Stage — Operations & Fundraising event, where we explore how to answer the strategic and tactical questions that founders must make in the course of leading their startups.

Not only will we be getting Awotona’s deep perspective as a founder, but we’re also going to dig into Bartlett’s long-time relationship with Calendly and how he assiduously built a partnership there over many years to “win” what was one of the marquee deals of the year. Bartlett has backed a variety of major enterprise startups, such as Expensify (which has also demurred from the high stakes world of big-dollar VC), Highspot, Postscript and others, and I’m curious to see how he thinks about companies that go big with venture versus those who want to go big without it.

While many decisions when building a startup can be delayed, how you fund your startup (and therefore, how you fund your employees and growth) is one that must be made early and consistently. Join us and learn more about the different paths to financing startups, and how one calendar company timed its approach to greatness.

The TC Early Stage curriculum is being spread across two events, with fundraising and operations represented on April 1 & 2 and fundraising and marketing deep dives on July 8 & 9. Folks who buy a ticket to just one event will get three months of Extra Crunch for free, and folks who buy a dual-event ticket will get six months of Extra Crunch membership for free.

Recently public unicorn Upstart announced earnings that blew the socks off of Wall Street this week. After closing on Wednesday at around $61 per share, Upstart wrapped Thursday worth $115 per share. It turns out that all the blather we’ve had to endure about artificial intelligence (AI) in the past decade is coming true, at least in certain applications for select companies.

But Upstart’s blockbuster guidance for 2021 is just a sliver of the story. The AI-powered fintech is projecting a year so good that its valuation nearly doubled yesterday, but there are other shoots of life in the AI world worth discussing, and investors are taking note.

Per a new data set I spent this morning chewing on, VCs are firing cannons of capital into the AI startup world while exits reach new records.

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

Real-world financial output coupled to historically strong venture capital activity — and new technologies dripping into the tech upstart world at a record clip — are creating whole-cloth new use cases for AI tied to lots of capital access. It’s all very exciting.

This morning, I want to discuss Upstart and its quarterly results. I spoke with CEO Dave Girouard yesterday, which yielded some notes on AI-powered tech adoption rates among more conservative companies. Then, we’ll peek into PitchBook data on global AI-focused startup fundraising and their exit market.

After that, we’ll start to come up with a list of GPT-3 powered startups, my new favorite thing aside from pastries. Sure, we’re not as laser-focused today as we are most mornings, but the AI world has me jazzed, so I can’t help but talk about it. Let’s go!

Upstart expects 114% YOY growth in 2021

In its first earnings report as a public company — you can read The Exchange’s coverage of its IPO here and here — Upstart reported Q4 2020 revenues $86.7 million (up 39% on a year-over-year basis), while its 2020 revenues totaled $233.4 million (up 42% on a year-over-year basis).

The quarter was a strong revenue beat, and a beat on adjusted profits. But it’s what the company has coming next that really stuck out. Here’s its CFO:

Earlier this month, Los Angeles became the latest city to task its various departments with prepping a feasibility study for deploying new software and monitoring technologies to better account for its carbon footprint.

LA’s city council initiative, led by Council member Paul Koretz, follows a push from the state legislature to mandate that all businesses operating in California that gross over $1billion annually disclose their greenhouse gas emissions and set science-based targets to reduce those emissions.

California is far from the only state in the U.S. that’s feeling the disastrous effects of global climate change, but it’s among the most aggressive in trying to address the causes. Whether that’s a dramatic effort to remove fossil fuels from its power supply or the proposal to make businesses accountable for their contributions to climate change, California has been a leader in trying to encourage the adoption of new technology and services that can mitigate the impact of climate change and reverse course on the production of greenhouse gas emissions.

With this move, Los Angeles wants to hitch its wagon to this momentum and is actively looking for tech busineses that can help with carbon accounting.

That means good things for companies like CarbonChain, Persefoni, ClimateView, and SINAI Technologies, which all have offerings meant to help with carbon accounting and management.

It shows that some of the largest cities, with billion dollar budgets, will open their wallets to pay for the tools they need to get a better handle on how they’re contributing to the climate change that threatens their own citizens.

In Los Angeles, the city council tasked the Los Angeles Bureau of Sanitation and Chief Legislative Analyst to report back on the feasibility of developing or buying technology to provide a more accurate accounting of the city’s carbon footprint.

“The City provides a number of services – from lighting and maintaining municipal buildings, facilities and streetlights, to paving roads and operating a transit fleet, and delivering water and operating reclamation facilities – all of which come with environmental impacts,” said Council member Koretz in a statement earlier this month. “If we’re going to take our carbon reduction goals seriously, and make a real difference in the lives of frontline communities near LAX and the Port of Los Angeles, we need a better, more consistent, and more transparent accounting of our emissions.”

Los Angeles has steadily worked to give climate change and climate friendly policies a more central role in political discussions. Roughly two years ago, in July 2019, Los Angeles set up an office of climate emergency and earlier this year Mayor Eric Garcetti launched the climate emergency mobilization office to coordinate activity between civic leaders, the mayor’s office, and the city council. 

Budget hasn’t been allocated for the accountability plan, but people familiar with the City Council’s plan expect that implementation could begin in the 2021-2022 budget cycle.

Los Angeles has tried to address its carbon footprint in the past, but the efforts weren’t very successful. The study was conducted using historical emissions data and did not include the “scope three” emissions, which refer to the greenhouse gas emissions created by service providers for the city’s operations.

As the City of Angels looks to improve its ability to provide accountability and metrics on its contribution to climate change, it could do worse than look at the standard that’s been set by New York City. Under the Bloomberg Administration, carbon accounting and resiliency measures became a priority — even before Hurricane Sandy made clear that the city was highly exposed to climate and weather-related disasters.

That 2012 storm inflicted nearly $70 billion in damage and killed 233 people across eight countries from the Caribbean to Canada.

The disaster only furthered New York’s resolve to be more aggressive with its climate action. The city has a robust accounting program for emissions from its operations, and is moving forward with policies across the city to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the built environment, transportation, and industry.

“Data drives decision making and without data, we cannot chart a path towards a zero-emission future,” said Councilmember Joe Buscaino. “Today’s generation of leaders must continue to address climate change with urgency and be held accountable to the goals we set for Los Angeles, and this motion sets us on the path to do just that.”

SpaceX has completed what’s known as the ‘stacking’ of its first Super Heavy prototype, the extremely large next-generation first-stage rocket booster that it will eventually use to propel its Starship spacecraft to orbit and beyond. The Super Heavy Booster is about 220 feet tall – which is roughly the wingspan of a Boeing 747, or a bit taller than the Cinderella Castle at Walt Disney World in Florida.

That’s without Starship on top, which will add around another 160 feet. Super Heavy will undergo its own testing prior to flying with Starship, however, and a lot of that will be focused on assuring its fuel tanks can handle the pressurization and extreme temperatures required for keeping all that ignitable material stable prior to when the engines actually fire.

Super Heavy uses the same engines as Starship — Raptor engines, to be specific, which SpaceX created new for this generation of launch vehicle. The final version will have a total of 28 Raptor engines, but this first prototype will likely be outfitted with far fewer, and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has confirmed that it’ll also remain grounded, as it’s intended to be use only for testing things like build and transportation mechanics.

He did say the next prototype will fly, and while he isn’t always accurate about timelines, the Starship upper stage (i.e., the one that looks like a big grain silo with fins) is progressing quickly in its development, including with a recent test flight that ended with a near-perfect landing — minus the subsequent explosion that took out the prototype rocket entirely a few minutes after it had touched down successfully.

Musk clearly wants to move fast with Starship and Super Heavy, in part because of ambitious goals it has of serving as a provider to NASA for future human lunar landing missions as part of the Artemis program, and also because it’s still planning to fly the first commercial tourist flight of a Starship in just two short years in 2023.

As WhatsApp spends months to address users’ concerns and confusion about its planned policy update, there is evidently one entity it hasn’t had much luck making inroads with: The Government of India.

The Indian government alleged on Friday that WhatsApp’s planned privacy update, which goes into effect in two months, violates local laws on several counts.

In a filing to the Delhi High Court, the federal government also asked the court to prevent Facebook-owned messaging app from rolling out the update in India, WhatsApp’s biggest market by users.

“Social media in recent years has been used by billions of people around the world and millions of Indians today are dependent on WhatsApp. Therefore, information that is generally personal is shared at an enormous level. This information is susceptible to being misused if the social media giant decides to either sell or exploit the information, sensitive to the users, to any third party,” the government wrote in the filing.

The filing suggests that WhatsApp hasn’t been able to assuage concerns of New Delhi, which first raised issue about the planned policy update in January.

Earlier this year, India’s IT ministry had written to Will Cathcart, the head of WhatsApp, to express its “grave concerns” about the update and its implications and had “called upon to withdraw the proposed changes.”

A WhatsApp spokesperson declined to comment.

The Indian government’s unchanging stand — and ongoing legal case — on WhatsApp’s forthcoming terms and conditions change is the latest headache for the popular instant messaging firm, which is also grappling with a forthcoming guideline from New Delhi that could require WhatsApp to compromise end-to-end encryption it offers on its service.

Used by over 2 billion users, WhatsApp has been sharing some information with parent firm Facebook since 2016. The company, which hasn’t substantially updated its terms of service since, said last year that it will be making some changes to share a set of personal data about users such as their phone number and location with Facebook. 

Through an in-app alert earlier this year, WhatsApp asked users to share their consent for the new terms in January, which prompted an immediate backlash from some users. Following the backlash — which saw tens of millions of users explore competing services such as Signal and Telegram — WhatsApp said it will give users three additional months to review its new policy. (On a side note, Signal mobile apps had crossed 100 million monthly active users in February, according to a popular mobile insight firm.)

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

Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace were all here to chat through the week’s biggest tech happenings. This time around we had whatever passes for a quiet week as far as news volume. But that still meant we had to cut stuff and move the rest around. But, once we got done editing the notes doc down, here’s what was leftover:

• Snap acquires Fit Analytics, a fitting technology startup: A far-past TechCrunch Disrupt alone has found a new home inside of the LA’s social leader. No price on this one, but a fun thing to talk about all the same.
• eToro is going public via a SPAC (cool), and as it competes with Robinhood it gave us a chance to dig into the market. And frankly there’s a lot to like about eToro. And thus Robinhood? Probably.
• The co-founder of Siri and a scientist have teamed up to create Riva Health, a software solution that hopes to turn your phone into a blood pressure monitor accurate enough for clinical use.
• Copy.ai raised $2.9 million, a round that Alex would not shut up about because of GPT-3. More on that tech here.
• The future of cannabis is in the hands of retail shops, or at least thats what Dutchie, a Bend, Oregon-based startup, believes. The cannabis management startup raised $200 million at a $1.7 billion valuation this past week.
• Airtable raised another round. A huge one. Again. This time it was $270 million at a $5.77 billion valuation. How much more money could it need? Who knows!
• Squarespace, everyone’s favorite podcast sponsor, has raised $300 million at a steep, $10 billion valuation. The news broke nearly two months since Squarespace filed confidentially for IPO.
• And we closed on how unequal the venture capital world really is. It’s super embarrassing to report on, but knowing the numbers is better than not. So we wrote about it.

The show wraps with a teaser for next week that we won’t spoil here.

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST, Wednesday, and Friday at 6:00 AM PST, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts!

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