Author: azeeadmin

Employers today often use perks to attract new talent in the form of discounts and deals, commuter funds, gym memberships, childcare, free lunches and more. But the pandemic has impacted what sort of in-office or other in-person perks employees can access. That’s led to booming growth — and now, a fundraise — for a startup called Fringe, which offers companies a personalized marketplace of perks that people really want, like Netflix, Uber, Airbnb, DoorDash, Headspace, Talkspace and over 100 other apps.

The idea for Fringe came about from the co-founders’ work as financial advisors where they regularly found themselves consulting people who were weighing new job options and their associated benefits.

“Companies are spending a lot money on traditional benefits…$800, $1,000 a month per person. But the perceived value for most employees is relatively small, given the cost,” explains Fringe CEO Jordan Peace. “I started thinking about what could [companies] offer employees that would be a pretty low actual cost, but a really high perceived value?”

He landed on the idea of subscription services — things people use all the time in their daily lives, but sometimes feel just out of reach from a budgetary standpoint.

That’s where Fringe comes in.

Employers sign up for access to Fringe’s platform at a starting cost of $5 per employee per month. (The rate may decrease for larger organizations.) They then place the dollars they would normally spend on lifestyle benefits into the Fringe accounts of their employees, where they’re converted to “points” that can be spent on any of the apps and services.

Fringe Platform Walkthrough from Fringe on Vimeo.

Today, the marketplace offers a range of benefits, including streaming services like Netflix, Spotify, Disney+, and Audible, as well as virtual fitness, virtual coaching and wellness, online therapy like Talkspace, food and grocery delivery, like Grubhub, Uber Eats, Instacart, and Shipt, prepackaged meals, childcare like UrbanSitter, and more.

In the U.S., there are 135 services partners to choose from, with another couple hundred that are available overseas.

The startup’s business model involves negotiating a discount of anywhere from 10% to up to 60% off these services, which it passes along to the employees through its points back (rebate) system. Initially, it only allowed employees to spend their employer-provided lifestyle benefits dollars on Fringe. But due to user demand, it later opened up to allow employees to spend their own money, too — a feature they wanted specifically because of the points back.

Fringe first launched in 2019 — well ahead of the pandemic — and saw some slow but steady growth. It ended the year with 15 clients, representing a couple of hundred employees in total.

But then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, which sent a number of employees to work from home in a radical change to business culture that appears to have lasting impacts.

“After the dust settled from the first few months of COVID, we started getting 10…20 times more inbound interest,” Peace says, as companies realized Fringe could be a way to support their employees working from home.

“We were just in the right place at the right time to begin to profit from this changed workplace. And it’s not just a ‘pandemic perk.’ We’re going to get past COVID, and we’re still going to have two-thirds of people working from home. The workplace has changed,” he adds.

By the end of 2020, Fringe had grown its client base to over 70 employers, representing now over 12,000 users on its platform. Today, its pipeline includes companies with between 200 and 2,000 employees — a sweet spot that allows them to move relatively quickly. This client base often includes tech companies, like car-sharing startup Turo or talent management system Cornerstone OnDemand, for example.

This year, Fringe expects to grow to well over 100,000 users on its platform, and increase its own team’s headcount, which is today around 20. It also plans to update its marketplace website to include things like automatic point gifting, charitable giving, new Slack integrations, improved navigation, and more.

As a result of the recent growth, Fringe has raised $2.2 million in new funding, in a round led by Sovereign’s Capital, with participation from Felton Group, Manchester Story, the Center for Innovative Technology, and angel investors, including Jaffray Woodriff. As part of this investment, the company also added longtime advisor William Boland, Senior Director of Corporate Development and Strategy at Mission Lane, to its Board of Directors.

With the addition of the new funds, the startup’s total raise to date is $4 million.

Fringe believes the advantage of its marketplace is that it can be personalized to the user. Typically, employers determine what benefits to offer by running employee surveys, where the majority wins. That’s why many companies today provide perks like backup child care or discounted gym access. But this system discounts the minority’s needs — people who may not have kids or don’t want to work out. People who wish they could use their benefits dollars in a different way.

In addition to employee perks, Fringe believes that having so many subscriptions under one roof could present other opportunities further down the line.

Woodriff, for example, sees Fringe’s potential as a big data play, in terms of who is signing up for what subscriptions and why.

“But if you think about the fact that you’ve got a subscription service marketplace…there’s more applications to that than just employee benefits,” Peace explains. “I’d like our Series A to be to be predicated upon the much greater total addressable market. And so I think we’re going to spend the next year to 18 months laying down concrete plans and building the tech to be ready to roll out a couple of different use cases,” he says.

Employers today often use perks to attract new talent in the form of discounts and deals, commuter funds, gym memberships, childcare, free lunches and more. But the pandemic has impacted what sort of in-office or other in-person perks employees can access. That’s led to booming growth — and now, a fundraise — for a startup called Fringe, which offers companies a personalized marketplace of perks that people really want, like Netflix, Uber, Airbnb, DoorDash, Headspace, Talkspace and over 100 other apps.

The idea for Fringe came about from the co-founders’ work as financial advisors where they regularly found themselves consulting people who were weighing new job options and their associated benefits.

“Companies are spending a lot money on traditional benefits…$800, $1,000 a month per person. But the perceived value for most employees is relatively small, given the cost,” explains Fringe CEO Jordan Peace. “I started thinking about what could [companies] offer employees that would be a pretty low actual cost, but a really high perceived value?”

He landed on the idea of subscription services — things people use all the time in their daily lives, but sometimes feel just out of reach from a budgetary standpoint.

That’s where Fringe comes in.

Employers sign up for access to Fringe’s platform at a starting cost of $5 per employee per month. (The rate may decrease for larger organizations.) They then place the dollars they would normally spend on lifestyle benefits into the Fringe accounts of their employees, where they’re converted to “points” that can be spent on any of the apps and services.

Fringe Platform Walkthrough from Fringe on Vimeo.

Today, the marketplace offers a range of benefits, including streaming services like Netflix, Spotify, Disney+, and Audible, as well as virtual fitness, virtual coaching and wellness, online therapy like Talkspace, food and grocery delivery, like Grubhub, Uber Eats, Instacart, and Shipt, prepackaged meals, childcare like UrbanSitter, and more.

In the U.S., there are 135 services partners to choose from, with another couple hundred that are available overseas.

The startup’s business model involves negotiating a discount of anywhere from 10% to up to 60% off these services, which it passes along to the employees through its points back (rebate) system. Initially, it only allowed employees to spend their employer-provided lifestyle benefits dollars on Fringe. But due to user demand, it later opened up to allow employees to spend their own money, too — a feature they wanted specifically because of the points back.

Fringe first launched in 2019 — well ahead of the pandemic — and saw some slow but steady growth. It ended the year with 15 clients, representing a couple of hundred employees in total.

But then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, which sent a number of employees to work from home in a radical change to business culture that appears to have lasting impacts.

“After the dust settled from the first few months of COVID, we started getting 10…20 times more inbound interest,” Peace says, as companies realized Fringe could be a way to support their employees working from home.

“We were just in the right place at the right time to begin to profit from this changed workplace. And it’s not just a ‘pandemic perk.’ We’re going to get past COVID, and we’re still going to have two-thirds of people working from home. The workplace has changed,” he adds.

By the end of 2020, Fringe had grown its client base to over 70 employers, representing now over 12,000 users on its platform. Today, its pipeline includes companies with between 200 and 2,000 employees — a sweet spot that allows them to move relatively quickly. This client base often includes tech companies, like car-sharing startup Turo or talent management system Cornerstone OnDemand, for example.

This year, Fringe expects to grow to well over 100,000 users on its platform, and increase its own team’s headcount, which is today around 20. It also plans to update its marketplace website to include things like automatic point gifting, charitable giving, new Slack integrations, improved navigation, and more.

As a result of the recent growth, Fringe has raised $2.2 million in new funding, in a round led by Sovereign’s Capital, with participation from Felton Group, Manchester Story, the Center for Innovative Technology, and angel investors, including Jaffray Woodriff. As part of this investment, the company also added longtime advisor William Boland, Senior Director of Corporate Development and Strategy at Mission Lane, to its Board of Directors.

With the addition of the new funds, the startup’s total raise to date is $4 million.

Fringe believes the advantage of its marketplace is that it can be personalized to the user. Typically, employers determine what benefits to offer by running employee surveys, where the majority wins. That’s why many companies today provide perks like backup child care or discounted gym access. But this system discounts the minority’s needs — people who may not have kids or don’t want to work out. People who wish they could use their benefits dollars in a different way.

In addition to employee perks, Fringe believes that having so many subscriptions under one roof could present other opportunities further down the line.

Woodriff, for example, sees Fringe’s potential as a big data play, in terms of who is signing up for what subscriptions and why.

“But if you think about the fact that you’ve got a subscription service marketplace…there’s more applications to that than just employee benefits,” Peace explains. “I’d like our Series A to be to be predicated upon the much greater total addressable market. And so I think we’re going to spend the next year to 18 months laying down concrete plans and building the tech to be ready to roll out a couple of different use cases,” he says.

In a mere 72 hours, early bird pricing disappears for TechCrunch Early Stage 2021, our two-part, founder bootcamp series focused on the building blocks you need to grow your company. The first event, TC Early Stage Operations & Fundraising, happens on April 1-2 — that’s two program packed days of education, connection and opportunity.

The second event, TC Early Stage – Marketing & Fundraising, takes place July 8-9. Pro Tip: each bootcamp stands alone and features different topics, content and speakers. Attend one or both events — it’s up to you. But know this: you’ll save more and learn twice as much when you score a dual-event pass at the early bird price. Beat the deadline, buy your passes before Feb 27 at 11:59 p.m. (PT) and save up to $100.

TC Early Stage is all about helping new startup founders (pre-seed through Series A) learn the essential skills required to build a successful startup. No need to reinvent the wheel — you’ll have access to the leading experts across the range of specialties. Much like an accelerator (compacted into two days), you’ll learn about legal issues, fundraising, marketing, growth, product-market fit, tech stack, pitch decks and recruiting. We’re talking highly engaging workshops with interactive Q&As.

On day one you’ll hear from experts like Eghosa Omoigui, the founder and managing general partner of EchoVC Partners, a seed and early-stage technology venture capital firm serving underrepresented founders and underserved markets. He’ll discuss ways to keep your eyes on the big picture and avoid the blind spots that lead to fragmentation and oversights.

Day two features the TC Early Stage Pitch Off! Out of the hundreds of applications we received, we selected 10 founders to pitch on stage for five minutes to a panel of prominent VC judges — followed by a five-minute Q&A. Three founders will move into the finals and pitch to a new panel of judges and endure a more in-depth Q&A. The winner receives a feature article on TechCrunch.com, a free, one-year subscription to ExtraCrunch and a free Founder Pass to TechCrunch Disrupt 2021.

Wondering whether it’s worth your time and money?

“You learn from industry leaders and seasoned founders — people who’ve already been there and done that. They were genuine and honest about industry expectations. Plus, they shared first-hand accounts, which made them more relatable.” — Chloe Leaaetoa, founder of Socicraft

Don’t reinvent the wheel. Go to TechCrunch Early Stage 2021 (in April and July), learn how-to from the best, connect with other early-stage founders and build a stronger startup. The early bird price disappears in three days on Friday, Feb 27 at 11:59 p.m. (PT). Buy your pass today and save up to $100.

In a mere 72 hours, early bird pricing disappears for TechCrunch Early Stage 2021, our two-part, founder bootcamp series focused on the building blocks you need to grow your company. The first event, TC Early Stage Operations & Fundraising, happens on April 1-2 — that’s two program packed days of education, connection and opportunity.

The second event, TC Early Stage – Marketing & Fundraising, takes place July 8-9. Pro Tip: each bootcamp stands alone and features different topics, content and speakers. Attend one or both events — it’s up to you. But know this: you’ll save more and learn twice as much when you score a dual-event pass at the early bird price. Beat the deadline, buy your passes before Feb 27 at 11:59 p.m. (PT) and save up to $100.

TC Early Stage is all about helping new startup founders (pre-seed through Series A) learn the essential skills required to build a successful startup. No need to reinvent the wheel — you’ll have access to the leading experts across the range of specialties. Much like an accelerator (compacted into two days), you’ll learn about legal issues, fundraising, marketing, growth, product-market fit, tech stack, pitch decks and recruiting. We’re talking highly engaging workshops with interactive Q&As.

On day one you’ll hear from experts like Eghosa Omoigui, the founder and managing general partner of EchoVC Partners, a seed and early-stage technology venture capital firm serving underrepresented founders and underserved markets. He’ll discuss ways to keep your eyes on the big picture and avoid the blind spots that lead to fragmentation and oversights.

Day two features the TC Early Stage Pitch Off! Out of the hundreds of applications we received, we selected 10 founders to pitch on stage for five minutes to a panel of prominent VC judges — followed by a five-minute Q&A. Three founders will move into the finals and pitch to a new panel of judges and endure a more in-depth Q&A. The winner receives a feature article on TechCrunch.com, a free, one-year subscription to ExtraCrunch and a free Founder Pass to TechCrunch Disrupt 2021.

Wondering whether it’s worth your time and money?

“You learn from industry leaders and seasoned founders — people who’ve already been there and done that. They were genuine and honest about industry expectations. Plus, they shared first-hand accounts, which made them more relatable.” — Chloe Leaaetoa, founder of Socicraft

Don’t reinvent the wheel. Go to TechCrunch Early Stage 2021 (in April and July), learn how-to from the best, connect with other early-stage founders and build a stronger startup. The early bird price disappears in three days on Friday, Feb 27 at 11:59 p.m. (PT). Buy your pass today and save up to $100.

Back when I was a wee lad with a very security-compromised MySQL installation, I used to answer every web request with multiple “SELECT *” database requests — give me all the data and I’ll figure out what to do with it myself.

Today in a modern, data-intensive org, “SELECT *” will kill you. With petabytes of information, tens of thousands of tables (on the small side!), and millions and perhaps billions of calls flung at the database server, data science teams can no longer just ask for all the data and start working with it immediately.

Big data has led to the rise of data warehouses and data lakes (and apparently data lake houses), infrastructure to make accessing data more robust and easy. There is still a cataloguing and discovery problem though — just because you have all of your data in one place doesn’t mean a data scientist knows what the data represents, who owns it, or what that data might affect in the myriad of web and corporate reporting apps built on top of it.

That’s where Select Star comes in. The startup, which was founded about a year ago in March 2020, is designed to automatically build out metadata within the context of a data warehouse. From there, it offers a full-text search that allows users to quickly find data as well as “heat map” signals in its search results which can quickly pinpoint which columns of a dataset are most used by applications within a company and have the most queries that reference them.

The product is SaaS, and it is designed to allow for quick onboarding by connecting to a customer’s data warehouse or business intelligence (BI) tool.

Shinji Kim, the sole founder and CEO, explained that the tool is a solution to a problem she has seen directly in corporate data science teams. She formerly founded Concord Systems, a real-time data processing startup that was acquired by Akamai in 2016. “The part that I noticed is that we now have all the data and we have the ability to compute, but now the next challenge is to know what the data is and how to use it,” she explained.

She said that “tribal knowledge is starting to become more wasteful [in] time and pain in growing companies” and pointed out that large companies like Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, Spotify and others have built out their own homebrewed data discovery tools. Her mission for Select Star is to allow any corporation to quickly tap into an easy-to-use platform to solve this problem.

The company raised a $2.5 million seed round led by Bowery Capital with participation from Background Capital and a number of prominent angels including Spencer Kimball, Scott Belsky, Nick Caldwell, Michael Li, Ryan Denehy and TLC Collective.

Data discovery tools have been around in some form for years, with popular companies like Alation having raised tens of millions of VC dollars over the years. Kim sees an opportunity to compete by offering a better onboarding experience and also automating large parts of the workflow that remain manual for many alternative data discovery tools. With many of these tools, “they don’t do the work of connecting and building the relationship,” between data she said, adding that “documentation is still important, but being able to automatically generate [metadata] allows data teams to get value right away.”

In addition to just understanding data, Select Star can help data engineers begin to figure out how to change their databases without leading to cascading errors. The platform can identify how columns are used and how a change to one may affect other applications or even other datasets.

Select Star is coming out of private beta today. The company’s team currently has seven people, and Kim says they are focused on growing the team and making it even easier to onboard users by the end of the year.

Aquarium, a startup from two former Cruise employees, wants to help companies refine their machine learning model data more easily and move the models into production faster. Today the company announced a $2.6 million seed led by Sequoia with participation from Y Combinator and a bunch of angel investors including Cruise co-founders Kyle Vogt and Dan Kan.

When the two co-founders CEO Peter Gao and head of engineering Quinn Johnson, were at Cruise they learned that finding areas of weakness in the model data was often the problem that prevented it from getting into production. Aquarium aims to solve this issue.

“Aquarium is a machine learning data management system that helps people improve model performance by improving the data that it’s trained on, which is usually the most important part of making the model work in production,” Gao told me.

He says that they are seeing a lot of different models being built across a variety of industries, but teams are getting stuck because iterating on the data set and continually finding relevant data is a hard problem to solve. That’s why Aquarium’s founders decided to focus on this.

“It turns out that most of the improvement to your model, and most of the work that it takes to get it into production is about deciding, ‘Here’s what I need to go and collect next. Here’s what I need to go label. Here’s what I need to go and retrain my model on and analyze it for errors and repeat that iteration cycle,” Gao explained.

The idea is to get a model into production that outperforms humans. One customer Sterblue offers a good example. They provide drone inspection services for wind turbines. Their customers used to send out humans to inspect the turbines for damage, but with a set of drone data, they were able to train a machine learning model to find issues. Using Aquarium, they refined their model and improved accuracy by 13%, while cutting the cost of human reviews in half, Gao said.

Aquarium currently has 7 employees including the founders, of which three are women. Gao says that they are being diverse by design. He understands the issues of bias inherent in machine learning model creation, and creating a diverse team for this kind of tooling is one way to help mitigate that bias.

The company launched last February and spent part of the year participating in the Y Combinator Summer 2020 cohort. They worked on refining the product throughout 2020, and recently opened it up from beta to generally available.

We love nothing more than highlighting notable early-stage startups, and you’ll find plenty of them in the spotlight on March 3 at TC Sessions: Justice 2021, a virtual conference exploring diversity, inclusion and the human labor that powers tech. You do not want to miss meeting and learning more about these impressive early-stage founders — all participants in the TC Include Program.

Not familiar with TC Include? TechCrunch partners with various founder organizations who act as advisors and nominate promising early-stage founders to participate in the program. In a collective collaboration with VC organizations like Kleiner Perkins, Salesforce Ventures and Initialized Capital and the founder organizations, TC Include provides educational resources and mentorship over the course of the year to help program participants develop and succeed.

You’ll have plenty of opportunity to meet and network with TC Include founders, and you won’t want to miss their live pitch feedback session. Each TC Include founder gets a 60-second pitch to a TechCrunch staffer. It’s a great opportunity to learn how to structure your pitch and pick up a few tips and strategies. Who knows? The pitch you improve could be your own.

We’ve already announced the TC Include startups affiliated with partner organizations Black Female Founders (here) and the Female Founder Alliance (here). Today, we’re thrilled to share with you just some of the early-stage founders affiliated with StartOut and the LatinX Startup Alliance.

StartOut

Endo Industries: Endo Industries sells cannabis plants and, through collaboration with farmers, is building a platform that helps operators scale brands grounded in equity, diversity and wellness. Founded by Nancy Do.

Kyndoo: Kyndoo is a data platform for solving social media’s biggest problems — fraud, attribution and content safety. It helps brands avoid working with #FakeFamous and helps them find companies that share their mission and values. Founded by Kelly McDonald.

Thimble: Thimble is a monthly subscription service that teaches kids robotics and coding skills through a curated STEM curriculum, robotics and coding kits and live, build-along classes. Founded by Oscar Pedroso.

LatinX Startup Alliance

Hoy Health: Hoy Health, a digital health company with a bilingual platform, provides access to primary care products and services, at low cost, to underserved communities. Founded by Mario Anglada.

Caribu: Caribu‌ ‌helps‌ ‌kids have virtual playdates with family and friends by ‌playing games, reading‌ and coloring ‌together in‌ ‌an‌ ‌interactive‌ ‌video-call. Founded by Max Tuchman.

Pandocap.co: Pandocap is a financial media company built around the capital markets. Bilingual content focuses on easy-to-understand information and highlights diverse voices through different strategies. Founded by Laura Moreno.

TC Sessions: Justice 2021 takes place on March 3. Check out the event agenda, buy your pass today, and discover the opportunities that come from building a more diverse, inclusive and just industry.

Virtual events platform Hopin is hopin’ for a mega valuation.

According to multiple sources who spoke with TechCrunch, the company, which was founded in mid-2019, is running around the fundraise circuit and perhaps nearing the end of a fundraise in which it is looking to raise roughly $400 million at a pre-money valuation of $5 billion for its Series C. Two sources implied that the valuation could reach as high as $6 billion, but with greater dilution based on some offered terms the company has received. The deal is in flux, and both the round size and valuation are subject to change.

One source told TechCrunch that the company’s ARR has grown to $60 million, implying a valuation multiple of 80-100x if the valuation we’re hearing pans out. That sort of multiple wouldn’t be out of line with other major fundraises for star companies with SaaS-based business models.

Hopin has been on a fundraise tear in recent months. The company raised $125 million at a $2.125 billion valuation late last year for its Series B, which came just a few months after it raised a Series A of $40 million over the summer and a $6.5 million seed round last winter. All told, the roughly 20-month-old company has raised a known $171.4 million in VC according to Crunchbase.

When we last reported on the company, Hopin’s ARR had gone from $0 to $20 million, while its overall userbase had grown from essentially zero to 3.5 million users in November. The company reported then that it had 50,000 groups using its platform.

Hopin’s platform is designed to translate the in-person events experience into a virtual one, providing tools to recreate the experience of walking exhibition floors, networking one-on-one and spontaneously joining fireside chats and panels. It’s become a darling in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has seen most business and educational conferences canceled in the midst of mass restrictions on domestic and international travel worldwide.

It’s probably also useful to note that our business team uses Hopin to run all of TechCrunch’s editorial events, including Disrupt, Early Stage, Extra Crunch Live and next week’s TechCrunch Sessions: Justice 2021 event (these software selections and their costs are — thankfully — outside the purview of our editorial team).

Hopin may be the mega-leader of the virtual events space right now, but it isn’t the only startup trying to take on this suddenly vital industry. Run The World raised capital last year, Welcome wants to be the ‘Ritz-Carlton for event platforms,’ Spotify is getting into the business, Clubhouse is arguably a contender here, InEvent raised a seed earlier this month and Hubilo is another entrant which nabbed a check from Lightspeed a few months ago. Plus, quite literally dozens of other startups have either started in the space or are pivoting toward it.

We have reached out to Hopin for comment.

Virtual events platform Hopin is hopin’ for a mega valuation.

According to multiple sources who spoke with TechCrunch, the company, which was founded in mid-2019, is running around the fundraise circuit and perhaps nearing the end of a fundraise in which it is looking to raise roughly $400 million at a pre-money valuation of $5 billion for its Series C. Two sources implied that the valuation could reach as high as $6 billion, but with greater dilution based on some offered terms the company has received. The deal is in flux, and both the round size and valuation are subject to change.

One source told TechCrunch that the company’s ARR has grown to $60 million, implying a valuation multiple of 80-100x if the valuation we’re hearing pans out. That sort of multiple wouldn’t be out of line with other major fundraises for star companies with SaaS-based business models.

Hopin has been on a fundraise tear in recent months. The company raised $125 million at a $2.125 billion valuation late last year for its Series B, which came just a few months after it raised a Series A of $40 million over the summer and a $6.5 million seed round last winter. All told, the roughly 20-month-old company has raised a known $171.4 million in VC according to Crunchbase.

When we last reported on the company, Hopin’s ARR had gone from $0 to $20 million, while its overall userbase had grown from essentially zero to 3.5 million users in November. The company reported then that it had 50,000 groups using its platform.

Hopin’s platform is designed to translate the in-person events experience into a virtual one, providing tools to recreate the experience of walking exhibition floors, networking one-on-one and spontaneously joining fireside chats and panels. It’s become a darling in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has seen most business and educational conferences canceled in the midst of mass restrictions on domestic and international travel worldwide.

It’s probably also useful to note that our business team uses Hopin to run all of TechCrunch’s editorial events, including Disrupt, Early Stage, Extra Crunch Live and next week’s TechCrunch Sessions: Justice 2021 event (these software selections and their costs are — thankfully — outside the purview of our editorial team).

Hopin may be the mega-leader of the virtual events space right now, but it isn’t the only startup trying to take on this suddenly vital industry. Run The World raised capital last year, Welcome wants to be the ‘Ritz-Carlton for event platforms,’ Spotify is getting into the business, Clubhouse is arguably a contender here, InEvent raised a seed earlier this month and Hubilo is another entrant which nabbed a check from Lightspeed a few months ago. Plus, quite literally dozens of other startups have either started in the space or are pivoting toward it.

We have reached out to Hopin for comment.

SpaceX’s first all-civilian human spaceflight mission, which will carry four passengers to orbit using a Crew Dragon capsule later this year if all goes to plan, will include one passenger selected by a panel of judges weighing the submissions of entrepreneurs. The panel will include Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Fast Company Editor-in-Chief Stephanie Mehta, YouTuber Mark Rober and Bar Rescue TV host Jon Taffer. It may seem like an eclectic bunch, but there is some reason to the madness.

This seat is one of four on the ride – the first belongs to contest and mission sponsor Jared Isaacman, the founder of Shift4 Payments and a billionaire who has opted to spend a not insignificant chunk of money funding the flight. The second, Isaacman revealed earlier this week, will go to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital employee and cancer survivor Hayley Arceneaux.

That leaves two more seats, and they’re being decided by two separate contests. One is open to anyone who is a U.S. citizen and who makes a donation to St. Jude via the ongoing charitable contribution drive. The other will be decided by this panel of judges, and will be chosen from a pool of applicants who have build stores on Shift4’s Shift4Shop e-commerce platform.

That’s right: This absurdly expensive and pioneering mission to space is also a growth marketing campaign for Isaacman’s Shopify competitor. But to be fair, the store of the winning entrant doesn’t have to be news – existing customers can also apply and are eligible.

The stated criteria for deciding the winner is “a business owner or entrepreneur the exhibits ingenuity, innovation and determination” so in other words it could be just about anybody. I’m extremely curious to see what Benioff, Mehta, Rober (also a former NASA JPL engineer in addition to a YouTuber) and Taffer come up with between them as a winner.

The Inspiration4 mission is currently set to fly in the fourth quarter of 2021, and mission specifics including total duration and target orbit are yet to be determined.