Author: azeeadmin

Early-stage founders why not take a page from the old Doublemint gum slogan — double your pleasure, double your fun — and buy a dual-event pass for access to both TC Early Stage 2021 events? We can’t promise minty-fresh breath, but you will get twice the knowledge and double the opportunity to connect and expand your network. Sweet!

Fast Action: This early-bird offer expires promptly on March 26 at 11:59 pm (PST). Don’t miss your chance to save up to $100.

The two all-virtual bootcamp experiences (Operations and Fundraising on April 1-2 and Marketing and Fundraising on July 8-9) feature different sets of experts, content and presentations, but both focus on the vital startup skills entrepreneurs need to master.

What’s more, you’ll learn from the best of the best. Founders, investors and other startup experts who’ve been in the trenches and done the heavy lifting. They’ll share their experiences and advice to help you sharpen your skills and avoid pitfalls.

Here’s a quick hit of what we have in store for April. Check out the agenda and start planning your schedule.

Finding Your Product Market Fit: Sean Lane, Olive AI’s founder and CEO, is no stranger to the pivot. Hear how he practiced patience in the search for product market fit, how he knew it when he finally found it and tactics he used to build on it.

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 meeting.

Here’s what Ashley Barrington, founder of MarketPearl, told us about her time at TC Early Stage 2020.

“TechCrunch offered a great variety of sessions and speakers — top investors, founders and credible subject-matter experts — who gave unique insights based on personal experience. You get great mentorship through attending the Early Stage sessions. It’s like a mini masterclass in entrepreneurship.”

Don’t wait. Double down on your own success and join us for both TC Early Stage 2021 events. You have less than two weeks to score the early-bird price on a dual-event pass and save up to $100. That’ll buy a whole lot of Doublemint gum.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Early Stage 2021 — Operations & Fundraising? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Mass manufacturing may be the future of 3D printing (one hopes), but health products are very much its present. From orthodontics to prosthesis, medical needs are right in the sweet spot for additive manufacturing. Prototyping is a category with a specific ceiling, while true mass manufacturing is still at an impossible scale for most of these systems. Medical and dental present a larger market that still requires a good deal of customization.

Today, Desktop Metal announced that it launched Desktop Health, a line specifically devoted to healthcare-adjacent products. The line encompasses a number of different technologies, including binder jetting, bioprinting and various materials.

Image Credits: Desktop Health

“Today the world manufactures more than $85 billion in medical and dental implants each year,” Desktop Metal CEO Ric Fulop said in a release. “We think a large percentage of these parts could be printed and made patient-specific before the end of the decade, making this market a key opportunity for Desktop Metal.

Dentistry/orthodontics continue to be top of mind (think retainers and Invisalign-style braces, to start), but current and future applications extend beyond that. The list includes things like tissue and graft printing, as the company explores how the process might grow in the future.

Leading the division is Michael Mazen Jafar. The former COO of Evolus will be coming on board as the CEO of the new line. “Desktop Health has a mission to change the way patients experience personalized healthcare, through innovation and science-based solutions,” he says in the release.

The additive manufacturing company announced plans to go public via SPAC last August. This January, it purchased EnvisionTEC for $300 million. The German company specializes in photopolymer printing, a key emerging technology for dental. It already sported 1,000 dental customers, including Smile Direct Club, which will no doubt serve as a key foundation for the new division.

Netflix’s original films received 35 Oscar nominations this year, once again putting the streaming service ahead of ahead of any other Hollywood studios.

“Mank” led the pack with 10 nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director (David Fincher), Best Actor in a Leading Role (Gary Oldman) and Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Amanda Seyfried). That doesn’t necessarily make it a shoo-in to be Netflix’s first Best Picture winner, however — it’s worth remembering that in 2019, the streamer’s film “Roma” received 10 nominations as well, ultimately winning three awards but not Best Picture. And last year, “The Irishman” went empty-handed despite its 10 noms.

Besides “Mank,” Netflix’s “The Trial of the Chicago 7” received six nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Sacha Baron Cohen). And “Crip Camp,” a film from the Obamas’ production company Higher Ground, is nominated for Best Documentary Feature, as is “My Octopus Teacher.”

Amazon, meanwhile, received 12 nominations, with six for “Sound of Metal” (including Best Picture). “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” “One Night in Miami” and “Time” were nominated as well. And Apple received its first two nominations ever, for “Wolfwalkers” (Best Animated Feature) and “Greyhound” (Best Sound).

Of course, this is a streaming-centric year for movies overall. With the COVID-19 pandemic forcing theaters to close across the world, the Oscars temporarily abandoned their requirement that films screen commercially in theaters in order to qualify for wards.

And it’s probably safe to assume that most viewers (Academy members and otherwise) watched these movies via streaming. For example, Best Picture nominee and Golden Globe winner for Best Drama Film winner “Nomadland” was released by Fox Searchlight simultaneously in theaters and on Hulu.

The Academy Awards will air on April 25 at 5pm Pacific on ABC.

Relativity Space already has a significant volume of launch contracts on the books – more pre-sales for its Terran 1 rocket than any other launch vehicle in history, in fact, according to CEO and co-founder Tim Ellis. But its latest customer is a key one: The U.S. Department of Defense, which has contracted Relativity Space to launch a payload on its behalf as part of the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU)’s continued efforts to find responsive launch partners capable of sending payloads with a mass between 450 kg and 1,200 kg (roughly 1,000 to 2,650 lbs) to low-Earth orbit.

“It’s a bigger satellite, and there’s a much limited number of companies that can actually launch this spacecraft,” Ellis said in an interview. “[Terran 1’s] three meter payload fairing is unique, among all the US=based companies that can actually launch that payload size, we’re still the only one that actually has the fairing big enough for that scale.”

The DIU has a specific mandate of working with innovative American companies, typically in the earlier stages of their development, and their collaboration is often seen as a stamp of approval that can set up a company for a much deeper DoD relationship going forward. In this case, citing Relativity’s relative maturity and its queue of pre-sold missions, which include a number of non-defense government contracts.

“In this case, there was just a true mission need for this particular spacecraft,” Ellis said. “And it was a good opportunity to work with them as our first DoD customer, to start on-ramping into a broader ecosystem of capabilities that we’re hearing the government wants to see. So it’s all specifically focused on Terran 1, though of course, we now have talked about Terran R, totally independent of this program. It’s a start of a conversation, and we see lots of opportunities to help support national interests across many different places with all the things that we’re building.”

Ellis is referencing Relativity’s newly-unveiled larger payload spacecraft, the Terran R. The 3D printing rocket company debuted its plans for the much larger launch vehicle in February, and it’s tailor-made for delivering satellite constellations to low-Earth orbit – a need that the DoD has expressed plenty of interest in, given its focus on satellite technologies that offer responsive, redundant capabilities to suit shifting needs.

Early Stage is the premier ‘how-to’ event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear first-hand how some of the most successful founders and VCs build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios. We’ll cover every aspect of company-building: Fundraising, recruiting, sales, product market fit, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session also has audience participation built-in – there’s ample time included for audience questions and discussion. Use code “TCARTICLE at checkout to get 20 percent off tickets right here.

Well, it happened.

Over the weekend, Stripe announced the closure of its widely reported new round of capital. The $600 million round values the payments and banking software company at $95 billion, near the top end of the valuation range at which the company was said to be raising funds back in November 2020.

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

Sadly, despite being bigger than most public companies in revenue terms, and now in possession of a valuation on a par with some of the world’s leading public companies, Stripe is still being coy with growth metrics. As part of its announcement, Stripe provided a few new notes on its recent scale that we’ll unpack, but we’re more left to read the entrails of a modest metrics sacrifice at this stage of the company’s growth.

But what is The Exchange for, except to dig into the numbers, no matter how vague?

Today, let’s examine the company’s newly shared growth results, compare them to what we knew previously, and see if we can suss out why Stripe could be worth $95 billion today, and presumably more when it does float.

New money, same questions

Stripe’s new $600 million investment values the company at $95 billion. As a reference point, Roblox is worth around $38 billion and closed 2020 out on a run rate of around $1.24 billion.

Gaming companies and payments companies are very different, but Roblox’s number gives you a taste of what a company needs to generate in revenue terms in one part of the public markets.

Stripe is likely far larger than Roblox in revenue, but weaker in terms of gross margins. Keep that lens in mind as we remind ourselves of Stripe’s known numbers, ending with what we learned from its latest disclosures:

Airtable, the no-code relational database that has amassed a customer base that spans 250,000 different organizations, has today announced the close of a $270 million in series E funding. The valuation comes out to $5.77 billion post-money, more than doubling its valuation from September, when it raised $185 million in Series D funding.

This latest round was led by Greenoaks Capital, with participation from WndrCo, as well as existing investors Caffeinated Capital, CRV, and Thrive.

The company says it plans to use the funding to accelerate the development of its enterprise product and growing the team. Also of note: Founder and CEO Howie Liu told Forbes that he was approached by Greenoaks, rather than actively seeking funding.

Airtable is a relational database that many describe as a souped up version of Excel or Google Sheets. Being such, and having the infrastructure to support an app ecosystem on top of that, means that this no-code tool can actually be used to write software. In other words, the use cases are nearly infinite, and so is the potential customer base.

Greenoaks Capital partner Neil Mehta basically said as much in the press release:

We believe Airtable is chasing a massive opportunity to become the ‘residual’ software platform for every bespoke and custom use case that is either performed manually today or structurally underserved by rigid third-party software. By equipping business users with fundamental software primitives that can be assembled together into powerful business applications, Airtable has become central to its users’ everyday workflows but at the same time is scalable and extensible enough to support incredibly complex enterprise use cases like ticketing, content management, and CRM.

Airtable has raised a total of $617 million since inception, according to Crunchbase.

Millennials and GenZers seem interested in investing more than ever these days. As a result, a number of startups have emerged in recent years to give them more options.

One such startup, Gatsby, announced Monday that it has raised $10 million in a Series A round of funding.

Backers include Techstars Ventures, Beta Bridge Capital, a network of “super angels” placed by ClearList and an oversubscribed SeedInvest campaign. Previous investors include Barclays Bank, SWS Venture Capital, and Rosecliff Ventures, 

Jeff Myers and Ryan Belanger-Saleh co-founded Gatsby, a commission-free options and stock trading app aimed at younger traders, in 2018. The pair had already one successful exit in Dealtable.com, a social data room platform. 

Co-founders and co-CEOs Jeff Myers (left) and Ryan Balenger-Saleh (right)

Notably, Peter Quinn, a founder of stock trading service Public.com — which recently raised $220 million at a $1.2 billion valuation — serves as Gatsby’s chief operations officer and as the company’s first hire, is considered a member of its founding team.

Besides focusing on a younger demographic, Gatsby aims to give people “a safe and fair platform to trade on without users having to worry about getting in over their heads or being shut out of names when volatility spikes.” The app launched into iOS and Android in early 2020, with the number of signups doubling since the beginning of 2021.

It’s also seen a spike in trade volume with cannabis and meme stocks ranking among its most popular trades of the year so far. 

Gatsby aims to take on Robinhood by offering traders no commission trading, no per-contract fees and “with no excessive jargon.” Beyond that, it also offers users a way to earn revenues from trade activity through a rewards program or as Myers puts it, “get paid to trade.” It also hosts a social network that can be a source for trade ideas or a place for Gatsby traders to share on their wins (or commiserate their losses).

“We believe that PFOF (payment for order flow) is a fundamentally better pricing model than commissions for users trading on small accounts as long as customers feel like their broker is being fair and honest about execution quality and how they make money,” Myers said.

In the second quarter, Gatsby plans to launch a feature called ‘Gatsby Circles,’ through which traders can create groups of friends to follow and share trades, and get alerts when someone in their circle executes a trade. 

The startup plans to use its new capital “to grow aggressively” in 2021. Specifically, the company plans to expand in engineering and brokerage operations over the course of the year. It plans to boost its 12-person team by another “10 to 20 heads” over the next three quarters, according to Myers.

The company’s goal is to have over 100,000 accounts by year’s end.

Gatsby also plans to launch additional research tools for more sophisticated options traders, as well as more advanced strategies. Down the line, the startup is also planning to launch crypto-trading features.

It’s also working on building an adaptive interface. This means that Gatsby’s algorithm will assess the trader and adjust the feature set and interface to be tailored for that user depending on their experience level.

For Jordan French, an early stage investor in Gatsby and publisher at Grit Daily News, Myers and Belanger-Saleh “have the right combination of technology and marketing experience to grow Gatsby into a defensible position that will be very difficult for competitors to unseat.”

He also believes the company’s approach aligns closely with its core investor base.

Gatsby seeks to “shed the ‘fat-cat cronyism’ of legacy financial institutions,” French added.

Researchers at Canada’s University of Waterloo are showcasing work with prosthesis and exoskeletons that utilizes cameras and AI to deliver more natural human movement. The ExoNet project leverages video captured by wearable camera, run through deep learning AI, in order to mimic how humans adapt and adjust movements based on their environment.

The project is an attempt to create more natural locomotion on the fly than is currently offered through systems with connected smartphone apps or other external controllers.

“That can be inconvenient and cognitively demanding,” Waterloo PhD candidate Brokoslaw Laschowski said in a release tied to the research. “Every time you want to perform a new locomotor activity, you have to stop, take out your smartphone and select the desired mode.”

The research highlighted primarily focuses on robotic exoskeletons, which are being developed by a number of different companies to help assist people with impaired mobility. The hope here is that the ExoNet system could eventually replace the need for external control by the wearer, in order to create more natural locomotion.

Of course, there’s still a lot of work to be done. Naturally, the system is easier to navigate on flat terrain. Next steps would involve adapting it to environments that can give those with limited mobility some difficult, including stairs and other obstacles. A final version of the system would be able to anticipate and adapt accordingly.

“Our control approach wouldn’t necessarily require human thought,” Laschowski adds. “Similar to autonomous cars that drive themselves, we’re designing autonomous exoskeletons that walk for themselves.”

There are other challenges here, as well. Batteries are an issue, for one. The team is looking to improve longevity by experimenting with a system that can recharge with the wearer’s movement.

UpCodes, a startup that develops building code compliance tools, announced today it has raised $3.36 million in pre-Series A funding. This brings its total raised so far to $4.15 million. The new funding was led by Berlin-based Point Nine Capital, which focuses on SaaS and online marketplaces.

The company also recently won a legal victory when United States District Court Judge Victor Marrero granted UpCodes its motion to dismiss a false advertising and unfair competition lawsuit filed against it by the International Code Council (ICC). An earlier copyright lawsuit filed by the ICC against UpCodes is still ongoing, but UpCodes won a major decision in the case last year when Judge Marrero ruled that its posting of building codes is covered by public domain and fair use.

UpCodes’ other investors include PlanGrid co-founders Ryan Sutton-Fee, Ralph Gootee, Tracy Young and Kenny Stone; Bragiel Brothers; Capital X; Flex Capital; and Liquid 2 Ventures. It also took part in Y Combinator’s summer 2017 accelerator program.

Founded in 2016 by brothers Garrett and Scott Reynolds, UpCodes now has about 500,000 monthly active users. The company’s paid customers include construction firms like Stantec and ARCO National Construction, architecture firms SOM and Ennead, and Airbnb, Cornell University and the State University of New York. It is also used by rental tenants, landlords, homeowners, general contractors, plumbers, electricians—basically anyone with a question about building code compliance.

UpCodes’ first product was a searchable database of building codes with collaboration tools. Then in 2018 it launched UpCodes AI, a tool that scans 3D models created with building information modeling (BIM) data and alerts architects about potential issues.

The company’s newest feature, its code calculator, is designed for people who have compliance questions, but might not know how to navigate building codes, which differ between municipalities, contain multiple sections and often have amendments attached.

In response to questions like “how much square footage is allowed per floor,” “how many exits does this floor need” or “what is the maximum corridor length allowed,” the code calculator generates a list of requirements, with links to the relevant building code sections. The feature is currently available for more than 40 states as part of UpCodes’ paid plan.

UpCodes’ building code calculator

“Our end goal is that no matter who you are or what level of sophistication you have with building codes, you can go into a friendly interface and answer your code question,” said Scott, who worked as an architect before launching UpCodes. He notes that even at architecture, engineering and construction firms, which often work with code consultants as part of their compliance process, employees have differing levels of familiarity with referencing building codes.

“We’ve heard from users that they’ll be looking at one particular section of the code, and they’ll make the building compliant to that, but not realize there’s a more stringent piece of code somewhere else, like say the fire code compared to the building code,” he added. “It causes huge downstream issues because they don’t have the full picture of it, so that’s what we’re trying to solve.”

The Reynolds brothers compared UpCodes code calculator to tax software like TurboTax, which help people comply with tax laws even if they haven’t parsed it closely. “When Americans file their taxes every year, they’re not cracking open the tax code. They have tax software,” said Garrett, who was previously a software engineer at PlanGrid. “We’re very much in the dark ages of compliance and so we want to modernize it and not have people read through the raw building codes, which are much more complicated than tax code.”

The new funding will be used for hiring, so UpCodes can add new features more quickly, including ones to automate calculations.

“We want to keep expanding so that ideally an homeowner on their iPhone, for example, can click and get any kind of compliance answer they want,” said Scott.

Sprinklr, a New York-based customer experience company, announced today it has filed a confidential S-1 ahead of a possible IPO.

“Sprinklr today announced that it has confidentially submitted a draft registration statement on Form S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”) relating to the proposed initial public offering of its common stock,” the company said in a statement.

It also indicated that it will determine the exact number of shares and the price range at a later point after it receives approval from the SEC to go public.

The company most recently raised $200 million on a $2.7 billion valuation last year. It was its first fundraise in 4 years. At the time, founder and CEO Ragy Thomas said his company expected to end 2020 with $400 million in ARR, certainly a healthy number on which to embark as a public company.

He also said that Sprinklr’s next fundraise would be an IPO, making him true to his word. “I’ve been public about the pathway around this, and the path is that the next financial milestone will be an IPO,” he told me at the time of the $200 million round. He said that with COVID, it probably was a year or so away, but the timing appears to have sped up.

Sprinklr sees customer experience management as a natural extension of CRM, and as such a huge market potentially worth a $100 billion, according to Thomas. But he also admitted that he was up against some big competitors like Salesforce and Adobe, helping explain why he fundraised last year.

Sprinklr was founded in 2009 with a focus on social media listening, but it announced a hard push into customer experience in 2017 when it added marketing, advertising, research, customer and e-commerce to its social efforts.

The company has raised $585 million to-date, and has also been highly acquisitive buying 11 companies along the way as it added functionality to the base platform, according to Crunchbase data.