Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Twitter is continuing to explore the addition of subscription services and other paid features to supplement its advertising revenues, according to a report from Bloomberg this morning. The company is considering a range of ideas, the report said, including tipping, paid consumer-facing features like profile customizations or an “undo send” option, or subscription-based access to Twitter’s Tweetdeck app. Twitter confirmed the company is researching and experimenting with new models, but declined to provide details.

Twitter’s interest in paid features, including subscriptions, were already public knowledge.

The company last summer ran a survey which asked users which options they were willing to pay for — including things like custom colors, the ability to publish longer and more high-def videos, profile badges, auto responses, an “undo send” (an alternative to the “edit” button users actually want), and, for brands, things like the ability to run brand surveys and added “social listening” analytics.

Then, during its Q2 2020 earnings, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey told investors it’ll likely run subscription tests.

“We do think there is a world where subscription is complementary. We think there is a world where commerce is complementary,” Dorsey said at the time. “You can imagine work around helping people manage paywalls, as well, that we believe is complementary. So that’s what we’re looking for. We have a small team who is exploring our options, obviously we’re hiring for those teams,” he had noted.

And last year, a Twitter job posting was spotted which referenced a team “building a subscription platform.”

Twitter CFO Ned Segal during its Q3 2020 earnings then confirmed those plans, noting “you will see tests from us” on the subscription front. But he also warned these wouldn’t be things that impacted Twitter revenue in the near-term.

Bloomberg’s report added just a couple of new details to our earlier understanding of these efforts. It noted that one of the research projects around subscriptions was code-named “Rogue One,” and another involved the idea of “tipping” for exclusive content.

This latter item could perhaps reference an idea of how Twitter could monetize its recent acquisition of newsletter platform Revue, now rolled out on the web. That is, users could possibly “tip” (pay) to read someone’s newsletter. But Twitter could also be considering a tipping feature inside Twitter’s audio-based networking feature and Clubhouse rival, Twitter Spaces. Or it could be something else — The Information had also previously reported a tipping feature was being looked into, last month, but Twitter told them nothing was yet in development.

Twitter today declined to offer any further clarifications about its plans on this front.

Reached for comment, the company confirmed it was still considering new monetization models in order to grow its revenue.

“Increasing revenue durability is our top company objective. You will see us continue to research and experiment with ways to further diversify our revenue beyond ads in 2021 and beyond,” said Bruce Falck, Revenue Product Lead, in a statement provided to TechCrunch.

“These may include subscriptions and other approaches that will give people and businesses of all sizes on Twitter access to unique features and enhanced opportunities for content creation, discovery, and engagement. While we’re excited about this potential, it’s important to note we are still in very early exploration and we do not expect any meaningful revenue attributable to these opportunities in 2021. Given the massive opportunity to build upon our strengths, our main focus continues to be on growing our ads business,” he added.

Twitter in Q3 2020 had beat analyst expectations on revenue and net income, but investors are still stuck on Twitter’s inability to substationaly grow its user base. The company reports its Q4 2020 earnings on Tuesday, where its plans for new revenue models may again be discussed.

Additive manufacturing has proven an ideal solution for certain tasks, but the technology still lacks more traditional methods in a number of categories. One of the biggest is the requirement for post-printing assembly. 3D printers can create extremely complex components, but an outside party (be it human or machine) is required to put them together.

MIT’s CSAIL department this week showcased “LaserFactory,” a new project that attempts to develop robotics, drones and other machines than can be fabricated as part of a “one-stop shop.” The system is comprised of a software kit and hardware platform designed to create structures and assemble circuitry and sensors for the machine.

A more fully realized version of the project will be showcased at an event in May, but the team is pulling back the curtain a bit to show what the concept looks like in practice. Here’s a breakdown from CSAIL’s page:

Let’s say a user has aspirations to create their own drone. They’d first design their device by placing components on it from a parts library, and then draw on circuit traces, which are the copper or aluminum lines on a printed circuit board that allow electricity to flow between electronic components. They’d then finalize the drone’s geometry in the 2D editor. In this case, they’d use propellers and batteries on the canvas, wire them up to make electrical connections, and draw the perimeter to define the quadcopter’s shape.

Printing circuit boards is certainly nothing new. What sets CSAIL’s machine apart here is the breadth of functionality that’s been jammed into the machine here. An accompanying video lays it out pretty well:

Of course, this is early days — we’re still months out from the official presentation. There are a lot of questions, and more to the point, a lot of potential points of failure for a complex machine like this — especially one that seems to have non-experts as a target audience.

“Making fabrication inexpensive, fast, and accessible to a layman remains a challenge,” PhD student and lead author Martin Nisser says in the release. “By leveraging widely available manufacturing platforms like 3D printers and laser cutters, LaserFactory is the first system that integrates these capabilities and automates the full pipeline for making functional devices in one system.”

The software appears to be a big piece of the puzzle — allowing users to view a version of the product before it’s printed. By then, of course, it’s too late.

Aydin Senkut is a Swiss Army knife of an investor. He has been on the Midas List for the past seven years, with early investments in companies like Shopify, Rovio, Fitbit, Ayden, Credit Karma, SoundHound and more.

One such investment is Guideline, an enterprise tech company focused on giving small businesses a simplified way to offer affordable 401ks to employees. Guideline has raised nearly $140 million from investors such as Tiger Global Management, Greyhound, Generation Investment Management, Propel and, of course, Felicis.

It should go without saying that we’re thrilled to have Senkut and Guideline founder and CEO Kevin Busque join us for this week’s episode of Extra Crunch Live.

The new and improved Extra Crunch Live pairs founders and the investors who led their earlier rounds to talk about how the deal went down, from the moment they met to the conversations they had (including some disagreements) to the relationship as it exists today. Hell, we may even take a peek at the original pitch deck that made it all happen.

Then, we’ll turn our eyes back to you, the audience. That same founder/investor duo (in this case, Guideline founder and CEO Kevin Busque and Felicis’ Aydin Senkut) will take a look at your pitch decks and give their own feedback. (If you haven’t yet submitted a pitch deck to be torn down on Extra Crunch Live, you can do so here.)

The hour-long episode is sandwiched between two 30-minute rounds of networking. From start to finish, it goes from 11:30 a.m. PST/2:30 p.m. EST to 1:30 p.m. PST/4:30 p.m. EST. And Extra Crunch Live will come to you at the same time, every week, with a new pair of speakers.

In this case, we’ll be talking to Senkut and Busque about the $15 million Series B investment that Felicis led in the startup: how did they meet, what attracted them to one another, and ultimately, what made them decide to be financially bound together for the foreseeable future.

For now, let’s learn a bit more about Senkut and Busque, shall we?

Before starting Felicis Ventures (and serving as Managing Partner), Senkut was a senior manager at Google responsible for strategic partner development and account management in Asia Pacific. He joined the search giant in 1999 as its first product manager to launch Google’s first international sites. He then became the company’s first international sales manager.

Alongside an impressive portfolio of both angel and institutional investments, Senkut is about as well-rounded as a tech leader can be.

Kevin Busque, meanwhile, founded Guideline in 2015 and has since amassed more than 17,500 small businesses on to the platform with nearly $4 billion in assets under management. Before Guideline, Busque spent seven years at TaskRabbit where he was a cofounder and VP of Technology. Busque deeply understands what it takes to go from idea to MVP to product market fit to hyper growth.

This episode of Extra Crunch Live airs at 3pm ET/12pm PT on Wednesday, February 10.

As a reminder, Extra Crunch Live is for Extra Crunch members only. We’re coming to you with a new pair of speakers every week, and you can catch everything you missed on-demand if you can’t join us live. It’s worth the cost of the subscription on its own, but EC members also get access to our premium content, including market maps and investor surveys. Long story short? Subscribe, smarty. You won’t regret it.

Senkut and Busque join an impressive list of guests on the show.

Full details to register for these events are below.

See you on Wednesday!

Ethena co-founders Roxanne Petraeus and Anne Solmssen began their company with a clear goal: There needs to be a more modern, and effective, way to deploy anti-harassment training to employees. Ethena’s solution is to send employees bite-sized monthly “nudges” or pings with five-minute lessons, replacing the usual one-hour annual workshop with more flexible learning.

The startup raised $2 million off of that vision in June, and today has announced it has raised follow-on funding with the same exact amount, led by GSV. The startup currently has $5 million in venture capital, with investors including Homebrew, Neo and Village Global.

The follow-on capital comes right after Ethena has had some solid growth itself. The startup closed a couple major contracts with companies including Netflix, Zoom and Zendesk, and tells TechCrunch that more than 20,000 active employees complete its monthly training.

Solid growth and new cash is where the story could stop for now, but Petraeus tells TechCrunch that early momentum has also inspired a shift of sorts in what Ethena is trying to accomplish.

“When we initially launched in Feb 2020, we thought that for our first year, we’d focus entirely on scaling companies because only startups would be interested in an innovative approach to compliance training,” she said. “What’s changed is we’ve learned that even large enterprises want a better approach, deeper impact and are willing to be innovative in a space historically dominated by lawyers and legacy e-learning providers.”

The startup is expanding its offering from anti-sexual harassment training to a wide variety of training courses focused on compliance, from financial compliance to code of conduct measures. The shift wasn’t because of a lack of interest from customers, the co-founder said, but instead demand from existing enterprise customers to offer more than just a singular topic.

“We think taking a specific sector-based approach can actually narrow the impact we’re having,” Petraeus said. “So we are trying to take a really inclusive approach,” from the start on what kind of topics should be treated as more than “just checking off a box.”

Petraeus, an army veteran, says that Ethena’s confidence in effectiveness and outcomes comes from military data on how adults learn.

“We know that traditional training just isn’t effective at behavior change, and there are some studies that show that it’s a pretty big backlash with increased unconscious bias after training versus before.” The startup differentiates from other micro-learning plays in its curriculum.

The curriculum is designed to be consumed over the course of a year instead of in an annual hour-long session. This tiny iteration is enough to give employees a repetitive way to understand the content. “We’re experimenting with things like graphic novels and podcasts to present training,” Petraeus said. “Just making sure whatever we’re doing yesterday is important tomorrow, because I think it’s important for us to be agile content creators.”

But Ethena’s biggest differentiation, Petraeus says, is its content. The pandemic has boasted a whole new sort of situation that employees need help, or proactive guidance, navigating. Petraeus says that Ethena’s monthly cadence gives it flexibility to adopt “modern” scenarios like Slack culture and Zoom etiquette. Ethena’s top performing training nudges in 2020 included lessons on online harassment prevention and mental health inclusivity.

The micro-learning approach has long been popular among edtech companies as a way to sneak or gamify small lessons into a workflow. So far, Ethena says over 90% of 150,000 in-app learner feedback notes are positive, saying the information is engaging and relevant. In Q4, Ethena saw learner growth of more than 250% quarter over quarter.

GSV’s Deborah Quazzo, who led Ethena’s seed and now this follow-on financing, said that it’s “not a coincidence that they’ve picked up some of the best logos in the world at an early stage,” referring to Ethena’s big customers. Quazzo thinks the compliance market has had very limited innovation so far, even though it’s a massive opportunity.

“They are seeing such strong product market fit and customers are pulling them into areas of content extension, so having more room to run faster made total sense,” she said.

Over the past two decades, there has been a complete revolution in software engineering driven by the rise of open source. Proprietary tools and libraries have widely given way to open-source libraries and editors shared on sites like GitHub. The result has been an explosion of new software engineers who can both learn from and contribute to the most cutting-edge software in the world.

That open model remains mostly a pipe dream in the silicon world. The pipeline and tooling for designing and engineering chips remains almost entirely proprietary, and while new architectures like RISC-V and new specifications like OpenRAN have made some headway in recent years, the industry is still almost hermetically sealed to open innovation.

CHIPS Alliance was started in March 2019 with the mission to open that ecosystem up and encourage the development of open-source practices throughout the hardware silicon world. It’s hosted as a member of the Linux Foundation, and shares a similar ethos of using openness to spur further innovation.

The Alliance announced today that it has hired Rob Mains as its new executive director. Mains joined the organization last month as general manager, and previously, had a multi-decade career across the silicon industry at companies like Qualcomm, Oracle, Sun Microsystems and IBM.

Mains sees those experiences as being formative for understanding the current ecosystem, but understands that the silicon world has to change. “Obviously, it’s a very different mindset from silicon companies have had in the past,” Mains said. CHIPS Alliance is “creating a platform that different companies and members can contribute to … and bridge us to the next stage of innovation.”

New CHIPS Alliance executive director Rob Mains. Photo via CHIPS Alliance.

Currently, the organization has more than two dozen corporate and university members, including Intel, Google, Alibaba and RISC-V darling SiFive.

Compared to the RISC-V Foundation and other orgs focused on specific open-source technologies, Mains sees CHIPS Alliance trying to create a more open ecosystem holistically. “There are a number of different areas where we can promote standards and examples,” he said, pointing to examples like bus protocols and interfaces between chiplets. CHIPS Alliance hosts the OpenXtend protocol first developed at Western Digital, which is designed to provide a consistent interface between processor caches and memory controllers, and it is also backing the Advanced Interface Bus (AIB) standard first developed at Intel to connect multiple semiconductor dies together.

Mains has a particular background in electronic design automation (EDA) tools, which help chip designers translate their models into actual transistors on physical silicon. He sees a real opportunity to further expand open-source tools in the EDA space. In addition, the organization is interested in further exploring progress on Open PDK (process design kit) infrastructure such as a recent experimental preview offered by Google and Skywater.

Mains hopes that by being a community and a champion for open-source methodologies in hardware, this cloistered industry can open up and expand the range and efforts of innovation happening.

The IPO frenzy is not letting up, Bumble informed the world this morning.

Per a new SEC filing, the dating company raised its target IPO price range, indicating that its previous attempt to quantify its per-share value was an undershoot. This means we’ll need to calculate a host of new valuations and revenue multiples for the company.

But more than that, we have a question to answer: Is Bumble aiming for a Match.com price, despite not being as profitable as its already-public rival? The last time we covered the pair, Bumble’s implied revenue multiples were discounted compared to Match, but with this new price, has the smaller company gained ground?

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

And if so, does it mean that we’re seeing more public market enthusiasm for private companies? We’ll find out.

When it comes to the frenetic demand for IPO shares from public investors, I am reminded of a particular Dilbert. In this particular strip, Wally gets fired and is then hired back as a consultant. People outside the company appear smarter, he said, so he’s now back and getting paid more money than before.

This, but for private companies going public. Some companies appear to have huge promise while private, only to fizzle slowly while public. Or they manage huge price gains during their IPO process, only to cede those wins after they have a few trading months under their belt.

Is that what’s going to happen with Bumble?

Bumble’s new IPO pricing range

Bumble targeted a $28 to $30 per-share IPO price when it first set a range, implying a greater-than $1 billion raise. Now the company is selling more shares at an even higher price. From 34.5 million shares to 45 million, and at a new $37 to $39 per share price range, Bumble could raise $1.66 billion to $1.76 billion in its IPO.

And that’s not counting its underwriters’ option of 6.75 million shares, which might bring its total raise to $2.02 billion at the top end of its new pricing interval.

What is Bumble worth at those new prices? Using its simple, shares-outstanding post-IPO count of 112,745,301 — inclusive of its underwriters’ option — the company would be worth $4.17 billion to $4.40 billion.

A Chicago-based startup, Jiobit, wanted to make a better child location tracker than the bulky smartwatches and other insecurely designed products already on the market. So in 2018, it launched its own modular kid tracker — a small dongle of sorts that could be tied to shoelaces, belt loops, or school backpack, for example. Today, the company is out with a new generation of this device, the Jiobit Next, which aims to improve the accuracy, battery life, reliability, and more.

The company says it took its two years’ of learning and customer feedback into account, when developing the new design, which is today used not only by parents, but also by pet owners.

The updated version of the Jiboit, now $129.99, is a small device that weighs less than four quarter coins, and includes a combination of radios — Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, cellular, and GPS — as well as sensors including an accelerometer/pedometer, temperature sensor, and barometer.

Image Credits: Jiobit

The upgraded version now includes a new antenna system designed to increase performance inside schools, stores, high rises, and other challenging signal environments, the company claims.

It also leverages the reach of low-power, wide-area (LPWA) wireless networks in order to better serve rural regions where cellular coverage is limited and spotty. This allows the device to still be tracked when outside of Wi-Fi or Bluetooth mesh networks.

The new Jiobit is also waterproof (IPX8) up to 5 feet of water for up to 30 minutes and includes an alert button that instantly notifies loved ones that the user is lost or in danger. This button can be customized through the Jiobit app as to which family members will receive the alert, or it can even be turned off — which may be useful if the child is too young to understand how to use it.

Jiobit owners can continue to monitor the device through the app or now, a web app that includes alerting and notification controls. This opens the service up to more than just families — it could be used by organizations to deploy Jiobit into the field.

Like some software-based tracking apps, the device supports features like “Trusted Places,” which are geofenced areas where you expect the device to be at certain times, like school or maybe a doggie day care. When the device is not in a Trusted Place, you can enable “Live Mode” to watch its movement in real-time.

Image Credits: Jiobit

Another improvement focuses on battery life. The upgraded version offers 50% longer battery life than the prior version, the company says. Under typical use cases, the Jiobit will last up to 10 days between charges, though it last longer when on standby and not in active use. (That may be why pet owners are seeing slightly longer battery life of 10-20 days, for instance.)

The original idea for Jiobit had come about because founder John Renaldi, a previous VP at Motorola, was shocked to find that most child trackers on the market were strong their certificate keys in the clear and were hackable. He wanted to build a more secure alternative, and brought on co-founder and CTO, Roger Ady, a previous director of engineering at Motorola, to help.

Today, the Jiobit has its own dedicated security chip to communicate with the company’s servers, and uses its AES-256 “Jiobit TrustChip” technology to encrypt data both at rest and in transit with TLS1.2 encryption. It also refuses to download any software that’s not cryptographically signed by Jiobit in order to prevent malware or other “rogue” software from being installed.

Image Credits: Jiobit

The service itself, meanwhile, is compliant with U.S. children’s privacy regulations (COPPA).

The new Jiobit Next will work only within the U.S., while the 1st generation works internationally across 146 countries. But both will continued to be supported by way of subscriptions. Users can choose between a 2-year subscription plan ($8.99/month), a 6-month subscription plan ($12.99/month) or a month-to-month subscription plan ($14.99/month). These don’t require a cellular plan or SIM card from your existing carrier, like other child trackers and smartwatches, though.

To date, the startup says it’s raised $12 million in outside investment, including from Netgear and other midwest VC firms. Jiobit isn’t disclosing how many devices its sold to date, specifically, but says it’s in the “mid-five figure range.”

The new device is on pre-order starting today and will be sold later this month on its website, and then Amazon, Chewy, and Target. It has also partnered with family tracking app Life360 to offer special pricing.

The Atlanta-based BIP Capital has a new name for its venture capital operations (Panoramic Ventures); a new partner (Paul Judge); and is launching a $300 million new fund in its bid to plant a flag as the premier venture fund among the rising startup cities across the country.

Miami may have grabbed headlines recently as a new hub for venture capital and technology startups, but like other cities across the Southeast it’s lacked venture funds of a significant size since the early days of the dot-com bubble. Panoramic wants to be the fundraising destination for entrepreneurs outside of traditional tech hubs like Boston, Silicon Valley and New York as these new tech hubs emerge.

Atlanta, which already boasts several startup companies that have achieved billion-dollar valuations including Greenlight Financial and Calendly, has an equally burgeoning startup scene and an opportunity to become the central hub for venture capital investment in a region that encompasses several other rising tech hubs in the Southeast like Birmingham, Miami, Nashville, and New Orleans.

It’s a strategy similar to the one that Drive Capital has employed to become a leading fund in the Midwest and across the U.S.

Under the new partnership, which will include famed early stage Atlanta investor, Paul Judge, BIP Capital’s venture activities will operate under the Panoramic Ventures brand.

Should the firm manage to raise the $300 million it has targeted for Panoramic’s inaugural investment vehicle it would become the largest venture fund in the Southeast.

“It’s important to have a fund at that scale,” said Mark Buffington, a co-founder of BIP Capital and Panoramic Ventures. “You see the venture activity that is increasing in the region [and] one thing that’s been missing is a really active venture fund that can scale up as companies grow.”

Panoramic intends to be active at the seed stage while having the capacity to make investments in later stage venture backed companies as well, according to the two co-founders. And the firm will also try to focus on a more diverse group of entrepreneurs, thanks to the addition of Paul Judge.

Judge, a Black serial entrepreneur and investor, was the co-founder of the Atlanta-based voice recognition tech developer Pindrop, the Wi-Fi startup Luma Home, and security tech developer Purewire.  He’s also an investor several startups across the Southeast through his own venture initiatives, including Techsquare Labs and Judge sits on the investment committee for the SoftBank Opportunity Fund, focused on Black, Hispanic and Native American founders. His portfolio includes companies like LeaseQuery, Cove.tool, OncoLens and Eventeny.

About $125 million has already been soft-circled for the new Panoramic Ventures fund, which expects to work closely with some of the other investment firms that have cropped up or established a presence in the Southeast. That includes firms like Outlander Labs, founded by the husband and wife investment team of Paige and Leura Craig, and the LA-based firm, Mucker Labs, which has an investment partner working out of Nashville.

“There’s been an absence of this type of energy and this type of heft in a venture fund in Atlanta,” said Judge. “That’s the hole that we’ve been aiming to fill.”

Panoramic will invest in Seed, Series A, and Series B funding rounds, the company said in a statement. Investment areas will focus on include business-to-business software as a service companies, healthcare software, financial technologies, digital media, cybersecurity, and frontier technologies. 

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

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here — and be sure to check out last week’s main ep that dug into Robinhood, Miami, and a host of other topics.

This morning we had a pile of news to get through. Here’s the rundown:

• Pony.ai raised another $100 million, which underscores our growing thesis that there is no amount of money yet that will produce the tech required for self-driving cars to work. Perhaps we will get there, but it is going to cost a pretty penny or two.
• Sticking to cars, the Apple-Kia tieup is kaput, which we should have known the moment it became known. Apple previously bought startup Drive.ai back in 2019, of course.
• Vroom, a 2020 IPO, bought a Super Bowl ad. Who would have expected that? Its shares are up, however, after the ad.
• Still on the car beat, Tesla bought $1.50 billion in bitcoin, and may accept the stuff as tender to buy its vehicles in the future. The move sent the price of bitcoin higher.
• Clubhouse got banned in China.
• Phable raised $12 million, Nexthink raised $180 million, and Bumble is targeting a higher share price in its impending IPO.
• And we may have figured out the ∆ between what investors are saying about the Seed market, and what data has largely said.

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST and Thursday afternoon as fast as we can get it out, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

Getaway CEO Jon Staff said that while the startup’s offerings weren’t designed with a pandemic in mind, they turned out to be well-suited for a time when people were eager to find safe ways to get off Zoom and out of their homes.

Founded in 2015, Getaway builds “Outposts” — collections of tiny cabins in rustic locations within a two-hour drive of major cities like Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles and New York. Those cabins sound perfect for socially distanced retreats, with guests checking themselves in, each cabin built with its own fire pit and spaced 50 to 150 feet from the others and there were no common areas.

Staff told me that rather than promoting traditional tourist activities, Getaway emphasizes disconnecting from all the stresses and distractions of modern life. So its cabins don’t include WiFi, and they also have lockboxes where visitors can hide their phones for the duration of their visits.

“We try to get you to do nothing, quite literally,” he said. “How few moments are there in life when really have enough free time that you could do nothing? And if not nothing, have a deep conversation with your partner, or take the time to cook a good meal and really enjoy the experience with people who are there sitting next to the campfire with you?”

Staff acknowledged that some investors were skeptical about Getaway’s insistence on building the cabins and Outposts itself. He recalled talking to tech-focused venture capitalists who would ask, “Why isn’t this a platform? Why isn’t it going to be worth $1 billon a year from now?” while potential investors from the real estate world would want to know, “How tall of a skyscraper do you want to build?”

“For a while, I had this anxiety that we don’t fit in any box,” he said. “But I learned to appreciate the benefits of not fitting in any box — that’s where innovation really lies.”

Image Credits: Getaway

And the Getaway approach seemed to resonate in 2020, with bookings increasing 150% year-over-year and the startup’s Outposts operating at nearly 100% occupancy. Today it’s announcing that it has raised $41.7 million in Series C funding — first revealed in a regulatory filing and led by travel- and hospitality-focused firm Certares.

Getaway plans to use the funding to expand to 17 Outposts this year, up from 12 in 2020 and nine in 2019. The startup has now raised more than $81 million in total funding, according to Crunchbase.

Staff said that eventually, Getaway could also add other products and services, because, “The brand is not about tiny houses or tiny cabins, The brand is about [the fact that] the world is too noisy and too connected over the long haul. Getaway could be doing other things to solve that problem.”

At the same time, he said it’s crucial to to remain clear and focused on the experience that Getaway wants to provide.

“We always try to remind ourselves that we are not creating the experience at Getaway,” he said. “You’re creating the experience and, if we’re doing it well, we’re facilitating it, we’re giving you everything you need and nothing you don’t … There’s a lot of freedom to make of it what you want as the guest, but there are also boundaries.”

For example, Staff said that there have been requests to offer Getaway Outposts for work retreats, but that’s not what they’re designed for: “We’re not going to police it, but we’re not going to put in WiFi.”