Category: UNCATEGORIZED

We’re so excited about today’s news that we’re stealing, ahem, borrowing boxing announcer Michael Buffer’s famous catchphrase, “Let’s get ready to rumble!”

CrunchMatch, our free networking platform is up and ready to help you build your business and expand your empire. Starting today — and for weeks to come — you can find, connect and meet with thousands of Disrupt 2020 attendees from around the world.

Bridging the physical distance of a virtual conference requires the best tools possible. We lifted the AI-powered platform’s hood and upgraded the CrunchMatch algorithm. The result? Faster, more precise matches for a better networking experience  — and the more you use it the smarter it gets.

We’ve simplified the onboarding process, too. When you register for Disrupt 2020, you’ll answer a few quick questions about your business preferences, and within minutes you’ll be automatically registered for CrunchMatch — and receive an email telling you how to access the platform.

Now that you’re ready for networking success, who are the people you need to help grow your business? Founders, investors, engineers, R&D teams, manufacturing mavens, supply-chain experts? The platform makes finding the right people a lot easier, and it helps keep you organized and on schedule.

“I used CrunchMatch to schedule meetings, and the digital aspect made connecting easier. It helped me stay organized, meet people and still have time to take in a piece of everything at Disrupt.” — JC Bodson, founder and CEO of Arbitrage Technologies.

CrunchMatch analyzes your preferences and automatically generates a list of attendees with a similar goals and interests. You can also search manually by industry, job function, company name and more.

Use CrunchMatch to schedule 1:1 video meetings with potential investors, customers, or founders; showcase your innovative products or interview prospective employees. And if that’s not enough, you can also take part in speed networking sessions that will be announced in the coming weeks!

Disrupt 2020 runs September 14 – 18, but you can start networking right now. Buy your pass to Disrupt, fire up CrunchMatch and get a giant head start on building the crucial relationships startups need to grow and succeed. Are you ready to rumble?

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Like so many industries, the last five months have been absolutely devastating for movie theaters. As far as sheer volumes go, no one has been harder hit than the world’s largest theater chain. AMC has had plans to reopen theaters for some time — but things change, particularly when you’re dealing with something as uncertain and always-evolving as a global pandemic.

This week, the theater juggernaut announced plans to reopen more than 100 theaters in the U.S. on August 20, constituting a first wave of re-openings. In an attempt to entice understandably cautious customers to return, it will be offering all tickets for $0.15 for one day only (with a limited quantity as it enforces social distancing measures). The number is a momentary return to 1920 ticket prices, as an homage to the chains founding.

Things are still…tricky, of course. Among the bigger issues here is the current lack of new releases to choose from. It’s one of those chicken and egg deals. Movie studios have been equally eager to release films, but haven’t had much luck as local regulations have kept theaters close. After numerous delays, Warner Bros. announced that it will be taking the unusual measure of premiering Christopher Nolan’s Tenet outside of the U.S. before it comes to the States. More than anything, it’s a clear indication of this country’s handling of the COVID-19.

With movies like Tenet and The New Mutants waiting in the wings, AMC will be relying on older blockbusters to try to get butts back in seats. Upcoming films include The Empire Strikes Back, Black Panther, Back to the Future, Ghostbusters and Grease. Those will be priced at $5 a pop, designed to lure folks who can’t wait to return the theater experience, new releases or no.

AMC, of course, was the subject of controversy when it announced that masks would be voluntary for moviegoers, a stance it quickly retracted after intense online backlash. The release noting the reopening includes a laundry list of sanitation and safety measures,

AMC Safe & Clean components include significant reductions in the maximum tickets available for each showtime and seat blocking in reserved seating auditoriums to allow for appropriate social distancing between parties, enhanced cleaning procedures that include extra time between showtimes to allow for a full, thorough cleaning and nightly disinfecting utilizing electrostatic sprayers, use of high tech HEPA vacuums, upgraded air filtration efforts including the use of MERV 13 filters wherever possible, new guest and associate safety protocols that include mandatory mask wearing by all guests and associates, hand sanitizing stations throughout the theatre, and the availability to guests of disinfectant wipes.

The list of theaters can be found here. It’s limited to a handful of cities and states, skipping key markets like California and New York, likely due to local COVID safety restrictions.

It’s been a wild year for modern software companies, often called software-as-service (SaaS) firms due to how they deliver their product. From a strong start to the year, to a rapid devaluation in the face of a global pandemic, and a return-to-form after it became clear that software wasn’t a category that a consumer recession would harm.

Indeed, SaaS and other cloud companies have seen their valuations reach new heights in 2020, pushing the larger stock market up as their own worth soared. These frothy, booming times make the larger effort to take software into new parts of the larger global economy all the more exciting.

After all, if public SaaS companies are worth more than ever, startups themselves are inherently worth more, which means that even more capital should pour into the young companies that want to transform software eating the world from catchphrase into reality.

To dig into the SaaS market this year, we’ve compiled a panel of well-known investors to chat with TechCrunch at Disrupt this September 14-18. We’re bringing Canaan Partners‘ Maha Ibrahim, Andreessen Horowitz’s David Ulevitch, and Bessemer Venture Partners’ Mary D’Onofrio to help explain the changed world to us. (Astute readers will recall that D’Onofrio makes regular Extra Crunch appearances as a SaaS guru.)

We want to know how important seeing a COVID-19-era growth acceleration is to raising capital in 2020, what metrics are most attractive to the investing classes in this new world, and where SaaS is being deployed that’s new, and exciting. And, maybe, if any of the assembled investors are feeling spicy, if any bit of the SaaS market is overhyped, or overvalued.

SaaS has become the de facto business model for what feels like the majority startups, and inside of SaaS itself a focus on business-focused upstarts are taking a large slice of available venture capital. We’ll dig into why that’s the case, and how that impacts startups at different stages of maturity.

Grab your pass today to attend Disrupt to check out this session and so much more. You will also get access to the CrunchMatch platform after registering so you can start networking right away with the TechCrunch community. Get your pass here.

This morning Cube announced that it has closed a Seed round worth just over $5 million. The software startup, focused on financial planning and analysis (FP&A) work, raised $3.8 million of the total recently, with remaining $1.25 million having come in an earlier Pre-Seed round.

Christina Ross, Cube’s CEO and founder, told TechCrunch that she started raising the most recent tranche of capital in March, winding up with a few term sheets within a few weeks. Eventually the startup picked Bonfire Ventures‘ Brett Queener to lead the round, with Operator Collective, Clocktower Technology Ventures, Alumni Ventures Group, Techstars, and others taking part.

So, what is FP&A and why is Cube attracting so many interested investors? Let’s talk about both.

Attack the spreadsheets

There’s an old startup chestnut that I can’t source this morning, but goes something like this: If you want to know where to found a startup, just go to a big company, walk around until you figure out where they still use spreadsheets, and build something that will replace them. Voilà, you have a company.

Ross is doing something similar with Cube.

She detailed her work experience in an interview, noting stints at GE, at Deloitte doing financial work, at Rent The Runway as employee 34 and first head of finance, at Criteo where she was its North America head of finance, and, finally, at Eyeview as its CFO. She has helped growing companies manage and track their monetary resources, and draw a plan for the future.

Or in industry-speak, she has spent a lot of time doing FP&A, a business process where she says there are still too many old-fashioned spreadsheets.

That’s where Cube comes in. Ross noted during our chat that lots of what a CFO does is being automated, with Carta, Bill.com, Expensify, and other tools, but that FP&A is still something of a crap experience.

What Cube does is collect information from a company’s general ledger (think Quickbooks), CRM (say, Salesforce), and HRIS (ADP, perhaps) into a single repository. From there the company’s FP&A denizens can control and sort the data, viewing it using Cube’s own visualization tool, spreadsheets, or web interface.

Once you can see the information in a manner of your choosing, you can get to the real work of FP&A, namely sketching out the future. What is that sketch good for? Providing a company’s leadership with profit and loss forecasting, and other operating details.

In Ross’s conception, FP&A is actually pretty simple. Put away all the numbers, it’s just telling the story of the past, and writing the story of the future for any given company.

It’s a neat problem to solve, and one that Cube can charge handsomely for helping with. Pricing for the company’s service starts at $850 per month, and goes up from there (the startup also offers a discounted startup plan).

But don’t worry, Cube isn’t trying to build a slightly better note taking app and then begging people to please, please pay for a pittance for it. The startup wants to build a part of companies’ financial brains. And as its product will sit next to the nexus of spend and cash, the startup is probably right to demand a higher fee than we often see from less mission-critical SaaS products.

Its business-importance and price point, we presume, were part of why Cube didn’t struggle to raise during a pandemic. Based in New York City, the startup intends to triple its staff size in the next year now that it has closed its funding cycle.

Cube’s software isn’t something that I’ll ever use, but I’ve been at a startup at the time when it began to mature its accounting and finance functions. It’s a struggle to just get the numbers in line, let alone get the books so perfect that you can raise your eyes from the fine print to glance at the horizon. If Cube can help more companies do just that, it could do well for itself.

More when Cube shares growth numbers.

In the past two years, Waymo has scaled up a robotaxi service in the Phoenix area, locked in or expanded partnerships with Volvo and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, acquired at least one company, launched a lidar business and ramped up testing of its automated trucks.

Standing at the frontline of this change — and Waymo’s future — is Tekedra Mawakana, the company’s chief operating officer. In October, Mawakana will join our virtual stage at TC Sessions: Mobility. The virtual event, which will highlight the best and brightest minds in mobility, will occur over two days on October 6 and October 7.

Mawakana will join us to discuss Waymo, the business case of autonomous vehicles as well as her career path, plans for the future and experience as an angel investor.

As COO, Mawakana oversees business strategy, operations, business development, global public policy, public affairs, marketing, communications and corporate social responsibility.

In short, Mawakana is the person behind Waymo who makes things happen.

Her two decades of experience leading teams at eBay, Yahoo, AOL and Startec Global Communications has prepared her for the ultimate job: ensuring Waymo’s technology is commercialized and widely adopted. Mawakana is already deep into that mission. She was responsible for the launch of Waymo’s first commercial service, Waymo One, in December 2018.

Mawakana is also a social impact-focused angel investor and serves on the Board of Industry Leaders for the Consumer Technology Association, and as a member of the Executive Committee on the Board of Saving Promise. She previously served as the Chairman of the Board of the Internet Association, and on the Global Network Initiative’s Board of Directors.

You can attend both days of TC Sessions: Mobility at the early-bird price of $145, with group discounts available when you buy in bulk with others from your office. If you’re a student, you can get in for just $50. Early-stage startups can get additional exposure for their company and the ability to generate leads with a virtual startup exhibition package, which includes three (3) tickets for $335. Reserve your place today for TC Sessions: Mobility and save.

With a hot IPO market and a world accelerating its shift to digital technologies amidst a pandemic, it’s a busy time for late-stage startups. Happily, the current moment is generating a wave of leaks and news. So much so, it’s actually been pretty hard to keep up.

In honor of the somewhat crazy week we’ve had, I’ve compiled the biggest and best bits of unicorn news, with two final items concerning companies that are not quite unicorns. Our goal is to get caught up so we can start next week sufficiently informed.

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

As always with this sort of work, we’ll have to handle each entry quickly. But if you want to know what’s up lately with the most valuable private companies, this should provide a working summary.

We’ll start with the Gong round, talk Palantir, peek at Stripe, chat about Airbnb’s results, detail a few other revenue milestones that were new to us, discuss Robinhood trading volume, gander at some Coinbase product news and a few other items, wrapping with a note on recent funding rounds from Parsable and Coda.

The theme, in case you were hoping for a unifying thread, is that the good times that took temporary flight in March and April, are back.

Today, it’s nearly hard to recall the fear that took over startup-land; sure, there are warning signs about cloud growth rates, but for many unicorns, we still live in boom times.

Let’s begin.

A  blessing of unicorns

As promised, we’re starting with the Gong round, which my dear friend Ron Miller covered for TechCrunch. The salestech software company put together a $200 million round at a $2.2 billion valuation after raising several other rounds in recent quarters. As Ron reports, the company’s growth has been torrid, with 1,300 customers and 2.5x revenue growth “this year alone.” But most critically, Gong’s CEO Amit Bendov said that “there’s a lot of liquidity in the market.” Yep.

In the latest sign of US platforms bracing for the 2020 US presidential election in November, Twitter has said it will step up efforts to prevent its service from being used to target voters with false information around election participation.

Earlier today Facebook announced the launch of a voting hub aimed at combating election misinformation on its platform by gathering together genuine election resources.

Twitter is spinning a bolder message — saying its aim is to “empower every eligible person to register and vote” by working to surface accurate information. The aim is then that genuine information being made more prominent will squeeze the risk of voters being tricked out of their vote by election misinformation being spread on its platform.

In a statement reported earlier by Reuters the company’s VP of public policy and philanthropy for the Americas, Jessica Herrera-Flanigan, said: “Twitter is working hard to increase informed participation in democratic processes around the world. Ahead of the 2020 US Election, we’re focused on empowering every eligible person to register and vote through partnerships, tools and new policies that emphasize accurate information about all available options to vote, including by mail and early voting.”

New tools, policies, and voting resources will be rolling out over the next month that reflect that mission, according to Twitter, though it’s not offering much detail on exactly what’s cooking.

In recent years the platform has inched up efforts to combat vote misinformation, adding a button that lets users report misleading election tweets last year — and grasping the homegrown nettle by labelling and calling out president Trump’s misinformation about vote by mail earlier this.

More such tools and interventions are slated as on the way — with Twitter saying it’s exploring ways to expand its civic integrity policies, including in order to address new challenges related to election and other civic events as a result of COVID-19.

The coronavirus has thrown a peculiar spanner in the works of democratic processes by attaching potential public health risk to in person voting, making alternatives such as vote by mail or staggered voting vital options to avoid voter disenfranchisement.

Per Twitter, part of the work it’s going to do to expand its civic integrity policies is likely to focus on tackling emerging trends that arise around mischaracterizations of mail in voting and other voting procedures, including voter registration.

Its current policy — which covers political elections, censuses and major referenda and ballot initiatives — states that:

You may not use Twitter’s services for the purpose of manipulating or interfering in elections or other civic processes. This includes posting or sharing content that may suppress participation or mislead people about when, where, or how to participate in a civic process.

But the policy is narrowly focused — on misleading information about vote participation. Whereas posting inaccurate information about a candidate or political party, hyperpartisan content or making broad claims that elections are “rigged” — such as this one — do not currently constitute a civic integrity policy violation, per Twitter’s guidance.

Despite its bold messaging today about empowering voters, there’s no sign Twitter is planning to broaden its policy to, for example, stamp on Trump’s ability to use its ‘free speech’ megaphone to trash established democratic processes with unfounded general claims of manipulation.

Instead, where election participation is concerned, Twitter looks focused on a ‘more speech to combat bad speech’ model. So it’s saying it will continue to promote voter registration resources prominently — while also expanding partnerships aimed at building out a suite of bona fide resources to support eligible voters to vote safely, including by mail and alternative early voting options.

Among its current partners in this area are Vote Early Day, National Voter Registration Day, and Civic Alliance.

It has also worked with organizations such as NASS and NASED, which support local election officials, and to support their #TrustedInfo initiative, along with a number of other nonpartisan civic tech and civil rights organizations which work on ensuring eligible voters have the information they need to engage in the democratic process.

The great huge elephant in the room here is of course voter suppression — and the risk of Twitter’s platform being used to spread negative messaging that’s intended to dissuade certain demographics from voting.

Trump’s baseless claims of “rigged” elections — which Twitter continues to allow to be broadcast at the push of a button to millions of its users — are intended to have such an effect, by firing up his own base to vote while encouraging others to stay at home by undermining trust in the democratic process.

By all accounts, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of robotics and automation by months, if not years. The reasons are fairly clear — robotics don’t call in sick, nor are they disease vectors in the same manner as their human counterparts. As food production and agriculture are looking to be among the biggest winners from the trend, it’s little wonder that Root AI is announcing a new funding round.

The Boston-based startup has already been getting a fair bit of press (including on these very pages) with the promise of produce-picking robotics. This week it announced a seed round of $7.2 million, bringing the company’s total funding up to $9.5 million, courtesy of First Round Capital’s Josh Kopelman, along with Jason Calacanis and Austin McChord of Outsiders Fund.

Image Credits: Root AI

There are, of course, a number of different robots focused on produce picking. It’s one of those jobs with a shortage of workers and a high turnover rate. What sets the company’s Virgo robot apart from the pack, however, is its ability to adapt. Most robotics are focused on a single type of produce, but Virgo’s dexterity and soft grippers are designed to work with different plants.

“The first commercial units will focus on tomato harvesting,” CEO Josh Lessing tells TechCrunch, “with future software updates planned to unlock new crops.” The robots are already out in the real world — albeit in extremely limited quantities. There are currently two units deployed in California fields, with plans for additional robots arriving in the U.S. and Canada later this year, in order to keep up with increased demand from COVID-19.

While you may have heard this phrase several hundred too many times this year, it remains true: These are unprecedented times.

At least a dozen industries are in a state of flux, and only time (a relatively short amount of time) will tell if they can evolve quickly enough to stay in the game. A few of those industries include media, direct-to-consumer retail, travel and hospitality. With the pace of change up dramatically, it can be difficult to make heads or tails of these respective markets and the broader tech startup landscape.

Luckily, Eric Hippeau, cofounder and managing partner at Lerer Hippeau, is uniquely positioned to answer our most pressing questions, particularly around these industries. We’re very pleased to share with you that Hippeau will be joining us today for an episode of Extra Crunch Live. Extra Crunch members can catch the episode live, and ask their own questions directly to Hippeau, at 11am PT/2pm ET/6pm GMT.

Eric Hippeau served as CEO for the Huffington Post before co-founding Lerer Hippeau . He also served as chairman and CEO at Ziff-Davis, a former top publisher of computer magazines. He sits on the boards of BuzzFeed and Marriott International.

Lerer Hippeau portfolio companies include Axios, BuzzFeed, Genius, Chartbeat and Giphy. And while the firm has experience in media, that doesn’t mean the portfolio is squarely focused on it. Other portfolio companies include Casper, WayUp, Warby Parker, Mirror, HungryRoot, Glossier, Everlane, Brit + Co. and AllBirds, to name just a few.

We’ll chat with Hippeau about the rapidly changing media landscape, how direct-to-consumer companies can survive (and in some cases, capitalize) on the new world ushered in by the coronavirus, and get some pointers on how to pitch Lerer Hippeau for investment.

I’m also curious about Lerer Hippeau’s investment in startup studios (Betaworks and Expa) and to learn which sectors seem most attractive to the firm going into the back half of 2020.

As previously mentioned, Extra Crunch members can ask their own questions during the chat. If you’re not yet an Extra Crunch member, you can sign up right here.

We’re amped to have Hippeau join us and we hope you will, too!

Details:

Omaze, the startup became famous for its celebrity-centric fundraisers, is announcing that it has raised $30 million in Series B funding.

Some of the company’s best-known campaigns include opportunities to meet Michelle Obama, meet Star Wars cast members and visit the set of “Star Trek Beyond.” (I’ll admit that I thew my hat in the ring for that last one.) But co-founder and CEO Matt Pohlson said that in recent years, the Omaze model has shifted away from “talent campaigns” to include fundraisers offering prizes like an Airstream Caravel or a trip to the Four Seasons resort in Bora Bora.

Pohlson said that he became interested in this model after a campaign combining a chance to meet Daniel Craig and win an Aston Martin, which made him wonder whether the Aston Martin would be a big enough draw on its own. Shortly after that, in 2018, he had a near-death experience during surgery, which he said only strengthened his conviction to move the company in a new direction.

Pohlson recalled the surgeon telling him that he’d flat-lined for four-and-a-half minutes, with extremely low chances for survival, and that he only pulled through because of the “love and optimism” coming from the family members in the room with him.

“Because of the one-in-2-million chance I’m getting, I want to put as much of that out in the world as I can,” he said. “The way we do that is through the money we raise and the optimism we spread. Doing that with talent limits the scalability.”

Plus, by organizing its own campaigns, the Omaze team gets to “pick the causes we’re passionate about,” rather than being limited to the causes that celebrities want to support.

At the same time, Pohlson hastened to add that Omaze would never have been able to move in this direction without the help of stars to attract a big user base, and he said the company continues to pursue talent campaigns as well — they’re just one part of a larger strategy.

With COVID-19, the company had to delay some of its prizes. After all, celebrity meetings and elaborate vacation getaways don’t make a lot of sense right now, but Pohlson said, “People get it.” And overall, he said the pandemic has actually increased interest, giving people “a deeper desire to give back” while also making them “want to dream more than ever.”

The performance of the average Omaze campaign has quadrupled over the past 18 months, Pohlson said, while revenue has increased by 500%.

Omaze previously raised $12 million in Series A funding. The new round was led by FirstMark Capital, with participation from Causeway Media Partners, BDMI, Tusk Ventures, Inherent Group, Gaingels, Penni Thow’s Copper and Guy Oseary. Thow and Celtics owner Wyc Grousbeck are joining the company’s board of directors.

“Omaze is unmatched in their ability to empower world-changing charities as a leader in experiencial giving and social impact,” Thow said in a statement. “As a new member of the Omaze board, I couldn’t be more excited to support their growth as they continue to scale new categories and expand further internationally.”

More about those growth plans: Pohlson said that while Omaze’s expansion started with cars, it recently launched luxury home campaigns. It will use the new funding to expand those campaigns while also adding new campaign categories. He also noted that the company recently launched in the United Kingdom, with plans to expand into Western Europe and Asia.

And although Omaze has already raised more $130 million for charity, Pohlson said that one of his big goals is to make it the first for-profit company to donate $1 billion.

“We want to pave the way for other social entrepreneurs,” he said. “There seems to have this false choice between being able to do good in the world and also having a lot of economic opportunity. Our culture has trouble with people being rewarded for doing good. [At Omaze,] we think that holds back people from doing good.”