Author: azeeadmin

Preply, a tutoring marketplace for language learning, has raised a $35 million Series B co-led by Full In Partners and Owl Ventures, an edtech fund that has backed Byju’s and Newsela. The raise comes nearly a year after the company landed a $10 million Series A. Investors in Preply include Point Nine Capital, Hoxton Ventures, EduCapital, All Iron, Diligent Capital and Evli Growth Partners.

Preply’s recent growth, as well as a global boom in language learning, explains the current investor interest.

When it closed its Series A, Preply had 2 million booked lessons and 10,000 vetted tutors. One year later, there have been over 10 million lessons booked on the platform, and the tutor network has grown to 40,000 people across 190 countries. The startup was eyeing United States expansion in 2020, and today, ⅓ of its revenue comes from the country, making it the single largest market that the company has customers in.

The growth signals that Preply is finding traction despite heavyweight competitors such as Duolingo, which plans to IPO this year, and Babbel, which crossed $150 million in recognized revenue in 2019. Bigali says it’s been able to differentiate itself from others because of its technology, which uses artificial intelligence to connect students with tutors.

Preply’s sell is that it can connect students to the tutors that are best for their specific learning needs, weighing over 400 parameters before connecting two within a marketplace. For example, Bigali said that Preply can connect a student in San Francisco who likes studying in evenings with a tutor in a conducive timezone. It can also help students find tutors who have similar backgrounds than them, such as a bi-lingual base to help go in between languages for learning.

Preply’s largest difference from competitors is in its philosophy of how learning should be done. Preply believes that learning should be live and with a native speaker, while a company like Duolingo thinks it can be gamified and self-led.

“Our customers think that our way of learning a foreign language is much more effective than language learning apps,” CEO Kirill Bigali said. Preply supports 50 different languages, including Spanish, English, French, as well as niche languages such as Icelandic, Tibetan and Catalan.

Other language learning apps have similarly been able to grow amid the pandemic even despite historical disinterest in the edtech subsector and existing players. Fluent Forever raised $4.9 million for its language learning system, and Fluent City, which is a different company, launched subscription service.

Biglai sees a big opportunity for Preply in the enterprise. The company began selling to globally distributed businesses, as a solution to help employees learn languages of their colleagues and clients, in 2019. This year, Preply should have “hundreds and hundreds” of enterprise customers, Biglai said.

The company makes money by revenue-share agreements with its tutors. It takes 20% of each lesson fee, which ranges from $15 to $20 per hour, as well as the entire cost of the first lesson, as a lieu of a lead generation. With the enterprise offering, Preply has the same business model but the hours per employee are capped with the employer taking the cost.

Preply wouldn’t share teacher retention metrics, which would indicate how long teachers stay on the platform (which is key for student comprehension and continuity in learning experiences). Bigali did say that 30% of its top teachers stay on for numerous years.

The company refused to share revenue, but said that it could be profitable if it wanted to be. For now, it’s prioritizing growth in its B2B offering and business development.

Mainspring Energy, the developer of a new generator technology that use fuels like biogas and hydrogen, has unveiled its Mainspring Linear Generator, with a $150 million contract with NextEra Energy Resources.

The company’s technology represents a significant step in the transition to a zero-carbon power grid given its ability to shift between traditional natural gas sources and alternative fuel sources like biogas and hydrogen.

So far, the company’s generators are under contract with a national supermarket chain that’s using the company’s tech at 30 of its grocery stores. The company began shipping pilot units in June and will begin commerical statements in mid-2021 according to a statement.

The company’s tech was initially developed at a thermodynamics lab in Stanford University where co-founders Shannon Miller, Matt Svrcek and Adam Simpson were working. Its design enables the rollout of generators that can replace traditional diesel and be used to improve the resilience of industrial sites against natural disasters.

Their linear generator, which the company said differs from engines, microturbines, and fuel cells, is a device that converts motion along a straight line into electricity using heat or chemical energy. In Mainspring’s case, a low temperature reaction of air and fuel drives magnets through copper coils to produce electricity.

It’s the combination of the design and control software developed by the company that allows its equipment to produce high-efficiency, dispatchable power, without the nitrogen oxide emissions associated with other generators, the company said.

The technology caught the eye of investors like Bill Gates and Vinod Khosla’s eponymous investment firm Khosla Ventures, along with some oil and gas companies like Equinor and utilities like American Electric Power. To date, Mainspring, which used to go by the name Etagen, has raised well over $80 million in financing.

In its approach to energy generation without the need for more complex mechanical systems or catalysts, Mainspring is akin to other startups like the Robert Downey Jr. and Bill Gates-backed Turntide Technologies that are trying to provide more elegant, software enabled solutions to motors and generator technologies.

Mainspring’s generators achieve their low capital and maintenance costs through use of standard materials, only two moving parts, and an innovative air bearing system that eliminates the need for oil, the company said. It operates without the use of complex mechanical systems or expensive catalysts.

The company also touted its ability to spin up and spin down in response to conditions on the energy grid, which means that it can pair well with solar power or battery storage.

“One of our customers’ key drivers, in addition to carbon savings, is to save cost from their current grid prices,” said Miller, in a statement. “Our products can provide substantial savings to commercial customers on their electricity costs with a typical Energy Services Agreement. In this energy-as-a-service scenario, customers pay nothing up front and realize annual savings starting in the first year.”

Mainspring’s first commercial product is designed for a rated output of 250 kW and packaged in a standard 8′ x 20′ container, according to a statement. Those packages integrate two of the company’s125 kW linear generator cores, working in tandem, and combines UL-listed grid-tie inverters and auxiliaries into a turn-key package, the company said. Future configurations will provide higher power output to serve industrial businesses, data centers, hospitals, smart cities, and utility grid-level applications.

“Many commercial and industrial customers as well as utilities want clean, reliable power generation, with the capability to switch to 100% renewable fuels like biogas and hydrogen as they become available,” said NextEra Energy Resources President and CEO John Ketchum, in a statement. “Mainspring is able to integrate clean onsite generation with both renewables and the grid and we’re pleased to support bringing this innovative product to market.” 

Rep. Barbara Lee (D-13 California) took time out of her busy schedule this week to join us for TechCrunch Sessions: Justice. During our our wide-ranging discussion, she talked about the issues in tech that unfortunately do not get enough attention: a lack of diversity in tech, the so-called pipeline problem, the digital divide and access for all to the legal cannabis marketplace.

Rep. Lee has represented the 13^th District of California — Oakland and the surrounding East Bay cities — since 1998. Since then she has been an active member of the Congressional Black Caucus, which formed 50 years ago this month with 13 members and continues to have an enduring impact on the nation.

“They were truly the conscience of the Congress,” Lee says, “because these 13 members of Congress on each and every issue, they pushed the envelope for justice — for racial justice. Yes, for the African American community, but in their initial founding statement, they said for all marginalized communities in this country. And so if you fight for justice for African Americans, you’re fighting for justice and equality for everyone who has been left out of this country’s promise of the American dream.”

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On a lack of diversity in tech

Rep. Lee, along with Rep. Maxine Waters and other Congressional Black Caucus members have visited companies in Silicon Valley and New York to address the issue of diversity in tech. In 2015, as a part of TECH2020 [PDF], the members met with CEOs of some of the biggest companies in the world to get their take on diversity in tech and the struggles the wider industry seems to have when it comes to increasing representation on their teams.

We’ve made many trips to Silicon Valley and to New York and have met with the tech sector over and over and over again. We see a glimmer of hope, but not much. When you look at the numbers of the workforce in terms of employees, I think we’re looking from maybe — as it relates to African Americans — but maybe from 2 to about 7%. If that. When you look at the retention numbers, cultural hostility in many respects that tech sector employees tell me they were faced once they’re in, they don’t stay a long time, because the culture has not been a culture friendly for African Americans and Latinx individuals. And it’s a problem. And we’re gonna keep pushing. I co-chair TECH2020, which we started five years ago. And we’ve heard so many excuses from tech sector.… We’ve got to crack that culture. And I’m telling you, we’ve got to do before we exercise our regulatory reform, and I’ll stick because there’s no way in America, any tech sector, any company should have only — and especially in California, only 2 to 7% of African Americans in the in the workforce. (Timestamp: 2:48)

The conversation around diversity in tech is one that began years ago. Public diversity reports illustrate the struggle that companies still find themselves engaged in. And potential unwillingness to address the issue. Rep. Lee says she and other members of the Congressional Black Caucus have their eyes on the industry as a whole. And she talked a bit more about what tools the federal government has in its arsenal to help encourage companies to engage in equitable hiring.

We have Black members everywhere on key committees that are conducting oversight and making sure that the tech sector, especially those — many received federal contracts, and they’re required to comply with executive order 11924. And they just don’t. They get away with it. And so no, I’m not satisfied. I think we made some progress, we see more diversity officers and more human resources officers who are African American, and I work closely with them. And I know the challenges that they’re faced with it. So I try to help them from the outside to make those companies respond in a more adequate and in a fair and equitable manner. (Timestamp: 5:26)

• Apple announces new projects related to its $100M pledge for racial equity and justice
• Facebook hires a VP of civil rights
• Airbnb sets new diversity goals

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On the so-called ‘pipeline problem’

The “pipeline.” It’s what company heads point to when they’re asked why their rosters lack diversity. The thing is, it’s not real.

It’s a total myth. First of all, we have — I know African American engineers, African American professionals who, quote qualify for these jobs. But I do know there’s unconscious bias, i.e. racism in the companies. And so a lot of the companies have developed these anti-racist policies and programs where they tried to do the deep dive and try to help people understand unconscious bias and what have you, but they don’t take the results and implement them. And so it’s just really, you know, it’s not good. When you look at the tech sector jobs, I believe it’s about 40% are non-tech-related. And so you can’t tell me that we don’t have African American accountants, and, you know, auditors, African American communications firms, all of the services that they buy, they don’t contract with, and the non-tech jobs they don’t hire black people for. And so it’s a shame and disgrace, but we’re gonna keep pushing. (Timestamp: 6:08)

• Examining the ‘pipeline problem’
• Black Tech Pipeline proves the ‘pipeline problem’ isn’t real
• The other pipeline

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On investing in diversity

Oakland, Calif.-based Kapor Capital, the investment arm of the Kapor Center for Social Impact, raised $125 million for its third fund. The firm’s investing thesis promotes startups that are committed to building diverse teams and a culture of inclusion.

Thank god for Kapor… They’re committed to racial equity and racial justice. And in terms of their venture capital strategies in terms of how they seed firms to begin to enter into this space. What they do all over the state and in the country is remarkable. And I’m so proud that they are in Oakland, because Oakland, I think, is a microcosm of all of the possibilities, but all the challenges that we as African Americans and people of color have in America. (Timestamp: 10:55)

• Kapor Capital is raising a $125 million fund
• If you’re not investing in diverse founders, you’re a bad investor
• Venture firms rush to find ways to support Black founders and investors

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On cannabis

There remains a disproportionate number of Blacks incarcerated due to drug offenses. And as states continue to legalize marijuana, most recently in New Jersey just last week, the industry is seeing incredible growth. But Black Americans are being excluded from the economic benefits of that. As the co-chair of the Cannabis Caucus, Rep. Lee has plans to ensure the capital in the burgeoning legal cannabis market is available to all.

I also have legislation is called the RESPECT Act, which is about equity in the industry. The licenses — as of last year only maybe 1% or less were granted to African Americans. This is a trillion-dollar industry. And I don’t want to see what’s happening in the tech sector happening in the cannabis sector now, so we’re at the beginning of this. So we have in the MORE Act and in my bills, requirements to set up offices of equity and how you bring companies and help companies — I know in my own district we have an Office of Equity — to help them weed through the bureaucracy to get their licenses. But also access to capital. Sometimes it’s [$300K] to $500K just for a license… But I am determined — I am determined that we’re going to see those who have been most affected by these, this horrific draconian war on drugs get access to the industry and to the benefits. This industry creates jobs – good-paying jobs. They create economic opportunities, and they create community reinvestment opportunities, and so why not? And we’ve got to move forward. And we’re making a lot of progress. (Timestamp: 13:03)

• These 5 VCs have high hopes for cannabis in 2021
• 2020 was a defining year for cannabis

Read the full transcript here.

 

A new alliance between Swedish electric performance automaker Polestar and EV infrastructure startup ChargePoint takes aim at the charging experience with the debut of an in-car app that will let customers seamlessly charge their Polestar 2 model vehicles.

Seamless charging—being able to pull up to a charging station, plug in and let the vehicle handle billing and payment—has been dominated by Tesla through its branded Supercharger network. Most other EV drivers have to pay for charging using an RFID card or smartphone, and the convenience level is on-par with a traditional gas station. The partnership eliminates the need for these extra items at ChargePoint’s more than 130,000 stations. The app will embed directly into Polestar 2’s in-car “infotainment system,” which runs on Google’s Android Automotive OS.

There have been some inroads into seamless charging elsewhere, most notably by Electrify America, the entity established by Volkswagen as part of its settlement with U.S. regulators over its diesel-emissions scandal. It introduced an in-car payment technology dubbed Plug&Charge last November that will allow 2021 models of the Porsche Taycan, Ford Mustang Mach-E and Lucid Air to seamlessly charge at its stations.

The partnership also takes aim at the buying experience, another area that Tesla’s cornered with its branded Wall Connector home charger. Polestar 2 drivers will now be able to order the $699 ChargePoint Home Flex home charger alongside the purchase of a Polestar 2 and arrange for home installation prior to vehicle delivery.

It’s a blueprint for future collaboration between the two companies, ChargePoint senior VP Bill Loewenthal said in a statement. The partnerships may be the start of many more alliances between automakers and EV infrastructure companies who see user experience as a key part of their value proposition.

Arlan Hamilton, the Backstage Capital founder and managing partner, joined us at TC: Sessions Justice to chat about how she vets founders beyond Stanford signal, the changing role of venture capital, how raising money from the community, versus institutional LPs, can impact Backstage strategy.

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On what makes a founder make sense for Backstage Capital

In a world of $1 billion valuations for beta-stage startups and deals closed over the Twitter DMs within hours, it feels like the noisiest time in venture in the recent past. Hamilton talked a bit about how her firm, which has backed over 170 companies founded by underestimated founders, keeps focus. She got into if she follows trends, the dynamic of invite-only apps, and, of course, Twitter.

I just don’t engage and follow and I just don’t have the that same need to be on everything early in first and be everywhere. Really. So, I like to watch people kind of run around and ask for invites and things like that. It’s just not as important to me. It’s just a strategy of like keeping myself calm, because there’s always a VIP to the VIP section, there’s always a further, further, further, and I find some of it quite distracting. I think it helps just to know where I was just a few years ago, and to know, kind of what’s important…and not get caught up in any hype anytime. And I think that serves me well when I’m making investment decisions, too. Because people who interview me or are, you know, want insights from me, they are always asking me about “trends.”  And I just don’t know the trends. We’re kind of counter-intuitive and and dancing to the sound of a different beat anyways. So I think that’s all helpful when we’re looking at companies and finding things in different places. (Timestamp: 1:32)

Backstage Capital was in the fortuitous spot of being built on remote work before the pandemic made it necessary. Still, Hamilton said that vetting early-stage founders is a difficult thing to do, and Backstage Capital only backs about 2% of the founders it sees.

When you talk about founder product fit, we have that in spades. I am gay, and if I wanted to my wife and I wanted to have a child, there would be a lot that goes into that. There’s no accidental pregnancy with us. And so many people, you know, in the same boat, it’s almost like that with underrepresented, underestimated founders. They have so much to lose [and] I think they don’t have a second and a third and a fourth chances are that afforded to them. And so a lot of times, you’ll see companies that are built from such authenticity, and such genuine concern about a problem that they’re trying to solve, rather than so many companies I see elsewhere, that are how do we get rich the fastest way we possibly can. And that doesn’t always set you up with the right with the right recipe for success. (Timestamp 8:04)

• Why some VCs prefer to work with first-time founders
• Building paths to funding for Black female founders

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On the future of venture capital as an asset class

One thing that came up during the conversation was that Hamilton doesn’t see Backstage Capital staying within the definition of a traditional venture capital firm. At first thought, this shouldn’t come as a total surprise, considering the rise in popularity of alternative financing among startups, from debt raises, to rolling funds, to revenue-based financing loans.

But in reality, Hamilton says that she has always known that Backstage Capital was a vector into the exclusive world of investment, which despite modest progress has still been reserved for wealthy, white men. Here’s what she said when I asked where she sees herself in five years:

I’ve always said this, I don’t know if people pay too much attention to it, but I’ve always said that venture capital was the tool. It was the mechanism for which I could get in. I couldn’t be an angel investor, couldn’t do all these things. But, I could earn and learn my way in to venture capital. I’ve never been beholden to it. I’ve always said to that, I don’t know what the future holds. But I think maybe there’s another asset class that gets born. And we would certainly be part of that. And if that’s the case, I just think it’s a broken system. It’s an old system. There is a lot that needs to be fixed.

And, again, it’s the people are kind of living in a fantasy world…So I think, just the way that I came in, I’ll probably pivot or or backstage, we’ll find ways we’ve already started. I mean, if you look at the rays that we did on Republic recently, that were that were, you know, still you could still be part of it, it’s just it’s an interesting thing. It didn’t exist, the way that we wanted it to exist this ability to to go to the crowd as a fund. And we trailblazing made a way we made a path. And I think that’s what founders are doing. We were just inspired by founders who are making a way for themselves left and right. (Timestamp: 15:50)

• Why two startups are betting on debt instead of equity
• Examining the pipeline problem

Her confidence in a potential pivot of Backstage Capital also stems from the fact that venture capital has stagnated, as an industry, to invest in underrepresented founders. The investor explained how the industry might lag behind from big deals if they continue to skip over diverse founders. Venture capital, as she sees it, might become less relevant in the future.

And eventually what’s going to happen is what I’ve seen so much of the same way people are leaving San Francisco in droves, they’re going to leave the arena of venture capital in droves. because so many people have just said I’m done trying to play that game. I’m going to bypass this altogether. I’m going to bootstrap I’m going to crowdfund I’m going to go with family offices. And venture capitalists don’t have that same sway and that same importance that they once did. And you may not feel that today, but you feel it soon. And you’re going to be the person who did not invest in Bumble, you’re going to be the person who did not invest in XYZ. So it’s at your own peril that you keep being blind to this in my opinion. (Timestamp: 14:38)

• Black Founders Matter, a fund focused on Black entrepreneurs, makes first investment
• A beginner’s guide to diversity, equity and inclusion

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On raising from a community

Since founding Backstage Capital, Hamilton has been clear that she believes the biggest opportunity for investment is underrepresented founders. Toddy, she talked about her decision to bring let others into the process through Republic.

Now let’s be clear: equity crowdfunding isn’t a new concept, but this year will likely bring some healthy energy to the fundraising technique. It’s because new SEC rules allow companies to now raise $5 million a year through the fundraising channel. Republic is enabling startups and firms to take advantage of these new rules: the platform had more than $150 million in capital deployed across 150 deals in 2020.

In the chat, Hamilton explained why raising from supporters one by one instead of an institutional fund is important toher.

For so many years, we had been beholden to ‘you need to raise a large fund, and then you need the management fee to pay for your operations, to keep you in business.’ And every single year, we found a different way to do that, by necessity. It has been so difficult to raise. And this time, the crowd comes into play. That’s a grand and a great responsibility to have 1000s of people who are looking to you, looking for updates, and wanting you to win. I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’d much rather have 5000 people get a few extra bucks every year and be part of this, then to watch one or two institutional just get fatter. It’s just not as exciting. So the institutions are going to have to compete with the crowd now. And that is where things get really, really interesting. (Timestamp: 18:09)

• Two new efforts could widen the pool of people investing directly in venture funds
• Here’s how to start a venture fund if you’re not rich
• For more equitable startup funding, the ‘money behind the money’ needs to be accountable, too

You can read the entire transcript here.

 

Dropbox announced today that it plans to acquire DocSend for $165 million The company helps customers share and track documents by sending a secure link instead of an attachment.

“We’re announcing that we’re acquiring DocSend to help us deliver an even broader set of tools for remote work, and DocSend helps customers securely manage and share their business critical documents, backed by powerful engagement analytics,” Houston told me.

When combined with the electronic signature capability of HelloSign, which Dropbox acquired in 2019, the acquisition gives the company an end-to-end document sharing workflow it had been missing. “Dropbox, DocSend and HelloSign will be able to offer a full suite of self-serve products to help our millions of customers manage the entire critical document workflows and give more control over all aspects of that,” Houston explained.

Houston and DocSend co-founder and CEO Russ Heddleston have known each for other years, and have an established relationship. In fact, Heddleston worked for Dropbox as a summer in intern in 2010. He even ran the idea for the company by Houston prior to launching in 2013, who gave it his seal of approval, and the two companies have been partners for some time.

“We’ve just been following the thread of external sending, which has just kind of evolved and opened up into all these different workflows. And it’s just really interesting that by just being laser focused on that we’ve been able to create a really differentiated product that users love a ton,” Heddleston said.

Those workflows include creative, sales, client services or startups using DocSend to deliver proposals or pitch decks and track engagement. In fact, among the earliest use cases for the company was helping startups track engagement with their pitch decks at VC firms.

The company raised a modest amount of the money along the way, just $15.3 million, according to Crunchbase, but Heddleston says that he wanted to build a company that was self-sufficient and raising more VC dollars was never a priority or necessity. “We had [VCs] chase us to give us more money all the time, and what we would tell our employees is that we don’t keep count based on money raised or headcount. It’s just about building a great company,” he said.

That builder’s attitude was one of the things that attracted Houston to the company. “We’re big believers in the model of product growth and capital efficiency, and building really intuitive products that are viral, and that’s a lot of what what attracted us to DocSend,” Houston said. While DocSend has 17,000 customers, Houston says the acquisition gives the company the opportunity to get in front of a much larger customer base as part of Dropbox.

It’s worth noting that Box offers a similar secure document sharing capability enabling users to share a link instead of using an attachment. It recently bought e-signature startup SignRequest for $55 million with an eye toward building more complex document workflows similar to what Dropbox now has with HelloSign and DocSend. PandaDoc is another competitor in this space.

Both Dropbox and SendDoc participated in the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield with Houston debuting Dropbox in 2008 at the TechCrunch 50, the original name of the event. Meanwhile, DocSend participated in 2014 at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York City.

DocSend’s approximately 50 employees will be joining Dropbox when the deal closes, which should happen soon, subject to standard regulatory oversight.

Demostack, an early stage startup that wants to make it easy for companies to build software demos, announced $17.3 million in funding today. The company also announced it was coming out of stealth.

That investment breaks down into a $13.3 million Series A led by Bessemer Venture Partners with help from GTM Fund and several individual investors. They also announced a $4 million seed from last December led by Amiti Ventures with participation from Operator Collective, Cerca Partners and a slew of individual investors. All the seed investors also participated in the A round, according to the company.

Software companies of all types face challenges in building a quality demo, one that doesn’t expose actual customer information, yet shows all of the functionality in a reasonably realistic way. It’s a problem that co-founder and CEO Jonathan Friedman experienced in his previous job and he wanted to do something about it.

“We’re building a perfect demo environment. And what that means is that it’s one that is controlled by sales or marketing. […] There is no need for [engineering] at all, and it’s customized for each prospect by default,” Friedman explained.

He said that it removes that anxiety that the demo won’t work, or that you will expose data you’re not supposed to. “Demo anxiety is real. Just having to worry about PII (personally identifiable information), and having people logging on and coming in and creating stuff within our production environment was unsustainable,” he told me.

Friedman founded Demostack to change that. They provide a full demo building tool that starts with a recording of the environment, so it looks and feels like the live product, and you can create auto customization with variables like customer name that link to the CRM tool and pull in information for you as you build the demo for a particular prospect.

It’s a solution that caught the attention of Adam Fisher, partner at lead investor Bessemer Venture Partners. “Demostack gives every software business a powerful competitive advantage, allowing them to better engage their prospective customers, doing away with old school temperamental demos,” he said in a statement.

Demostack already has 20 employees with plans to triple that number by the end of this year. He said the company is already embracing diversity among its early employees, and sees this as an important building block.

“One of the main reasons that we wanted to lean into this early is because being a diverse company is not a bonus. It’s not like, ‘Oh I’ll do this to make people happy about me’. You can’t understand how people from different walks of life see reality. Everyone sees a different slice of reality. If you can’t grasp that you will never build a company that is successful,” Friedman said.

The company launched last September and released an early version of the product in February. Today, Demostack is publicly unveiling the company, although it doesn’t expect to have the complete product ready for distribution until mid-year.

Last week, Apple announced early results from its ongoing hearing health study. Conducted alongside the University of Michigan School of Public Health, the figures were released to mark World Hearing Day. Now, a day after International Women’s Day, it’s releasing results tied to its Women’s Health Study.

As with the hearing study, the figures are collected from those who choose to participate via the Research app the company launched back in 2019. It’s all a part of Apple’s attempts to take a more serious approach to user health, built, in part, on data collected through the Apple Watch and iPhone.

Early results note that symptoms like nausea and sleep changes are common, along with more frequently discussed things like bloating and cramps. The study also notes that many of the tracked symptoms are common and consistent across age, race and location — even though they may not be widely discussed. The company says the efforts are, in part, to de-stigmatize discussions around these sorts of symptoms.

Data was collected from some 10,000 participants around the U.S. with a range of different ages and ethnic backgrounds. While much of the data collection is still in early stages, Apple and research partner Harvard are looking to study the connection between menstrual cycles and a variety of different health conditions, including infertility, polycystic ovary syndrome and perimenopause.

“What researchers and physicians in the scientific community want and need to know is more about the menstrual cycle, its relation to long-term health, as well as more about what environmental factors might affect cycle length and characteristics,” Harvard’s Dr. Shruthi Mahalingaiah said in a statement. “With this study, we are creating a larger foundational data set on this topic, which can eventually lead to further discovery and innovation in women’s health research and care.”

A little over one year ago, Pipe raised a $6 million seed round led by Craft Ventures to help it pursue its mission of giving SaaS companies a funding alternative outside of equity or venture debt.

The buzzy startup’s goal with the money was to give SaaS companies a way to get their revenue upfront by pairing them with investors on a marketplace that pays a discounted rate for the annual value of those contracts. (Pipe describes its buy-side participants as “a vetted group of financial institutions and banks.”)

A few months after that initial seed raise, Pipe brought in another $10 million in funding as an extension of that round.

And now today, Miami-based Pipe is announcing a new raise — $50 million in “strategic equity funding” from a slew of high-profile investors. Siemens’ Next47 and Jim Pallotta’s Raptor Group co-led the round, which also included participation from Shopify, Slack, HubSpot, Okta, Social Capital’s Chamath Palihapitiya, Marc Benioff, Michael Dell’s MSD Capital, Republic, Alexis Ohanian and Joe Lonsdale.

While most of the round is dedicated to purchasing primary equity, a minority of the round is allocated toward buying secondary equity (meaning that a small portion of the dollars raised went toward buying shares from existing shareholders, such as employees and executives).

Pipe co-CEO and co-founder Harry Hurst is loath to label the latest raise with a stage.

“We don’t want to play the alphabet game,” he said. “This wasn’t about the money. We had five or six years of runway going into this round. It was about getting the right partners on our cap table.”

In conjunction with the new financing, Pipe said it is also broadening the scope of its platform beyond strictly SaaS companies to “any company with a recurring revenue stream.” This could include D2C subscription companies, ISP, streaming services or a telecommunications companies. Even VC fund admin and management are being piped on its platform, for example, according to Hurst.

“When we first went to market, we were very focused on SaaS, our first vertical,” he said. “Since then, over 3,000 companies have signed up to use our platform.” Those companies range from early-stage and bootstrapped with $200,000 in revenue to publicly traded companies.

Pipe’s platform assesses a customer’s key metrics by integrating with its accounting, payment processing and banking systems. It then instantly rates the performance of the business and qualifies them for a trading limit. Trading limits currently range from $50,000 for smaller early-stage and bootstrapped companies to over $100 million for late-stage and publicly traded companies, although there is no cap on how large a trading limit can be.

“The best way to summarize it is we can work with any company that has a high degree of predictability around their revenue,” Hurst said. Pipe, he added, aims to turn that monthly recurring revenue into annual recurring revenue.

In the first quarter of 2021, tens of millions of dollars were traded across the Pipe platform. Between its launch in late June 2020 through year’s end, the company also saw “tens of millions” in trades take place via its marketplace. Tradable ARR on the platform is currently in excess of $1 billion.

“We’re helping companies grow on their own terms,” Hurst said. “Or, you could say we’re building the Nasdaq for revenue. Virtually every company in the world has a recurring revenue model already, or if they don’t, they’re thinking about how they can shift to it.”

Pipe is also using its new capital and partnerships to take its platform to a global stage.

The startup officially launched in the U.S. but is seeing traction in Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America and Canada. Long-term, Hurst expects India to be one of its largest markets.

“When we talk about global expansion, we’re talking about multi-currency support,” Hurst said. “And, teams on the ground in local markets. Technically we’ve served a global audience from day one.”

Some context

Hurst, Josh Mangel and Zain Allarakhia founded Pipe in September 2019.

The goal of the platform is to offer companies with recurring revenue streams access to capital so they don’t dilute their ownership by accepting external capital or forcing them to take out loans.

Pipe, essentially, is a trading platform for a new asset class: recurring revenue.

But Hurst is also quick to say the 25-person company doesn’t view its solution as an alternative to equity in every case.

“We feel like there’s a very important time and place for equity,” he said. “The fundamental problem with equity is that selling it becomes more valuable over time as you grow.”

Pipe, he said, has no cost of capital. Institutional investors compete against each other for deals on its platform. In return, Pipe charges both parties on each side of the transaction a fixed trading fee of up to 1%, depending on the volume.

Its goal with the latest round is to partner with its investors “to provide access to growth capital for the millions of customers they collectively service.”

“They’re building tools on the product side and we’re providing access to capital markets, and especially in the case of early-stage companies that would not otherwise have access to capital, we’re trying to level the playing field,” Hurst said.

Its investors all echo a similar sentiment: that they like how Pipe gives companies an alternative to traditional funding mechanisms.

For Monty Gray, SVP Corporate Development at Okta, Pipe’s platform “simplifies the time-consuming process of traditional fundraising, allowing founders to focus on their core product growth.”

“We are excited to see how Pipe can help not only Okta Ventures’ portfolio startups approach financing, but also Okta’s large customer base,” he said.

Months after raising a Series C worth $45 million, Chicago-based M1 Finance announced a new round of capital today. A Series D, the new $75 million investment was led by Coatue, with two prior investors — Left Lane Capital and Clocktower Technology Ventures — also taking part.

The new financing comes after M1 raised twice in 2020, including the previously mentioned Series C and a smaller $33 million Series B.

While rapid-fire fundraising has become increasingly common in recent years, M1 Finance’s recent capital accretion remains notable for its pace and scale. And as the company has been comparatively free with both growth metrics and notes about its long-term business model, TechCrunch has been able to keep tabs on its expansion over the past few quarters.

M1 Finance’s growth

In February of 2020, M1 announced it had reached the $1 billion assets-under-management (AUM) mark after starting the year at $800 million. At the time, the company’s CEO Brian Barnes told TechCrunch that his company was targeting to generate revenues of around 1% of consumer AUM. That provided a good toe-hold into tracking how quickly the startup was scaling its revenues as it grew its asset base.

In June of 2020, the company announced its Series B and a new AUM milestone: $1.45 billion. That was something akin to 50% growth in les than half a year. Not bad.

When M1 Finance raised its Series C later that year, it had scaled to $2 billion in AUM. That was double its earlier-year tally, and was big enough to secure more of our attention. Then in January of 2021 the company announced $3 billion in AUM.

As you can quickly math out, 1% of $3 billion is $30 million in yearly income, provided that M1 is hitting its revenue goals. Today as part of its Series D, the company announced that it has reached $3.5 billion in AUM.

How did it manage such quick growth, adding $500 million in AUM in just a few months? According to Barnes, partially due to an expanding product mix. The startup added a cash-management product in early 2019. That service has reached hundreds of millions of dollars in assets, the CEO said. The company’s borrowing product has also seen rapid growth, quadrupling as a percentage of assets in the last year, he added.

AUM expansion has also been driven in part by the company’s user base. Barnes told TechCrunch that his company has around 500,00 funded accounts, a growing tally that has helped with word-of-mouth marketing in recent quarters. And, finally, AUM growth has come from existing user cohorts adding more capital to their M1 accounts over time, the CEO said.

Of course the company is not the only service in the savings, investing and spending spaces that has seen growth in the last year. Robinhood and Public have done well on the investing side of things, and Chime has scaled quickly in the spending and saving markets.

What’s ahead

M1 has more money than ever after this round, with its CEO telling TechCrunch that he had had no intention of raising new capital, and that his company had only barely touched its Series B while its entire Series C is untapped. But now with a fresh forklift of funds, perhaps M1 can boost its advertising spend to help keep its user growth strong; and the extra capital won’t hurt when it comes to competing with even better-funded rivals that also want to build consumer fintech super apps.

We’ll check back with M1 Finance when it reaches $10 billion AUM. Its CEO thinks that the company could reach double-digit billions of AUM by the end of the year, or early 2022. Let’s see how fast it reaches that next milestone.