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Anil Ananthaswamy / Knowable Magazine:
A look at “neurosymbolic AI”, which combines techniques of deep neural networks and “good old-fashioned AI”, with comments from its proponents and critics — The unlikely marriage of two major artificial intelligence approaches has given rise to a new hybrid called neurosymbolic AI.
Dave Sebastian / Wall Street Journal:
Skillsoft, which makes training software for businesses, is going public through a SPAC merger at a $1.3B valuation after emerging from bankruptcy in August — Educational-technology company emerged from chapter 11 in August — Educational-technology company Skillsoft is going public through …
This is The TechCrunch Exchange, a newsletter that goes out on Saturdays, based on the column of the same name. You can sign up for the email here.
It was an active week in the technology world broadly, with big news from Facebook and Twitter and Apple. But past the headline-grabbing noise, there was a steady drumbeat of bullish news for unicorns, or private companies worth $1 billion or more.
The Exchange spent a good chunk of the week looking into different stories from unicorns, or companies that will soon fit the bill, and it’s surprising to see how much positive financial news there was on tap even past what we got to write about.
Databricks, for example, disclosed a grip of financial data to TechCrunch ahead of regular publication, including the fact that it grew its annual run rate (not ARR) to $350 million by the end of Q3 2020, up from $200 million in Q2 2019. It’s essentially IPO ready, but is not hurrying to the public markets.
Sticking to our theme, Calm wants more money for a huge new valuation, perhaps as high as $2.2 billion which is not a surprise. That’s more good unicorn news. As was the report that “India’s Razorpay [became a] unicorn after its new $100 million funding round” that came out this week.
Razorpay is only one of a number of Indian startups that have become unicorns during COVID-19. (And here’s another digest out this week concerning a half-dozen startups that became unicorns “amidst the pandemic.”)
There was enough good unicorn news lately that we’ve lost track of it all. Things like Seismic raising $92 million, pushing its valuation up to $1.6 billion from a few weeks ago. How did that get lost in the mix?
All this matters because while the IPO market has captured much attention in the last quarter or so, the unicorn world has not sat still. Indeed, it feels that unicorn VC activity is the highest we’ve seen since 2019.
And, as we’ll see in just a moment, the grist for the unicorn mill is getting refilled as we speak. So, expect more of the same until something material breaks our current investing and exit pattern.
What do unicorns eat? Cash. And many, many VCs raised cash in the last seven days.
A partial list follows. It could be that investors are looking to lock in new funds before the election and whatever chaos may ensue. So, in no particular order, here’s who is newly flush:
All that capital needs to go to work, which means lots more rounds for many, many startups. The Exchange also caught up with a somewhat new firm this week: Race Capital. Helmed by Alfred Chuang, formerly or BEA who is an angel investor now in charge of his own fund, the firm has $50 million to invest.
Sticking to private investments into startups for the moment, quite a lot happened this week that we need to know more about. Like API-powered Argyle raising $20 million from Bain Capital Ventures for what FinLedger calls “unlocking and democratizing access to employment records.” TechCrunch is currently tracking the progress of API-led startups.
On the fintech side of things, M1 Finance raised $45 million for its consumer fintech platform in a Series C, while another roboadvisor, Wealthsimple, raised $87 million, becoming a unicorn at the same time. And while we’re in the fintech bucket, Stripe dropped $200 million this week for Nigerian startup Paystack. We need to pay more attention to the African startup scene. On the smaller end of fintech, Alpaca raised $10 million more to help other companies become Robinhood.
A few other notes before we change tack. Kahoot raised $215 million due to a boom in remote education, another trend that is inescapable in 2020 as part of the larger edtech boom (our own Natasha Mascarenhas has more).
Turning from the private market to the public, we have to touch on SPACs for just a moment. The Exchange got on the phone this week with Toby Russell from Shift, which is now a public company, trading after it merged with a SPAC, namely Insurance Acquisition Corp. Early trading is only going so well, but the CEO outlined for us precisely why he pursued a SPAC, which was actually interesting:
So now Shift is public and newly capitalized. Let’s see what happens to its shares as it gets into the groove of reporting quarterly. (Obviously, if it flounders, it’s a bad mark for SPACs, but, conversely, successful trading could lead to a bit more momentum to SPAC-mageddon.)
A few more things and we’re done. Unicorn exits had a good week. First, Datto’s IPO continues to move forward. It set an initial price this week, which could value it above $4 billion. Also this week, Roblox announced that it has filed to go public, albeit privately. It’s worth billions as well. And finally, DoubleVerify is looking to go public for as much as $5 billion early next year.
Not all liquidity comes via the public markets, as we saw this week’s Twilio purchase of Segment, a deal that The Exchange dug into to find out if it was well-priced or not.
We’re running long naturally, so here are just a few quick things to add to your weekend mental tea-and-coffee reading!
Next week we are digging more deeply into Q3 venture capital data, a foretaste of which you can find here, regarding female founders, a topic that we returned to Friday in more depth.
Reuters:
Yandex and TCS Group Holding, the parent company of Russia's top online bank Tinkoff, have terminated talks on Yandex's proposed $5.48B deal to buy Tinkoff — MOSCOW (Reuters) - Plans for Russia's biggest corporate deal of 2020 collapsed on Friday after talks over a $5.48 billion cash …
Christine Hall / Crunchbase News:
Chiper, a Colombia-based e-commerce platform for corner stores in Latin America, raises $12M Series A from WIND Ventures, Monashees, and Kaszek Ventures — Chiper has been amassing a network of digitized corner stores in Latin America for the past two years.
Maria Deutscher / SiliconANGLE:
Cribl raises $35M Series B led by Sequoia to help companies route the data generated by their tech infrastructure to third-party monitoring and analytics tools — San Francisco startup Cribl Inc. today said that it has raised a $35 million round led by Sequoia Capital to give companies …
“Emily in Paris,” a new series on Netflix, has provoked skeptical responses from actual Parisians who are happy to point out the abundant clichés in its story of a young American (played by Lily Collins) who takes a last-minute transfer to a marketing agency in Paris.
Some fairly obvious culture clash moments ensue, along with equally implausible storylines where Emily’s extremely basic ideas about social media are treated as controversial and groundbreaking by her employer.
And yet, as we discuss on the latest episode of the Original Content podcast, we actually found the show delightful — or at the very least, highly watchable.
Yes, the show’s Paris is a fantasy, but it’s a fantasy that we’re happy to visit, particularly now. Yes, most of the show’s characters are basically cartoons, but they’re entertaining and fun cartoons. And at the end of the day, we’re all suckers for a slick, escapist romantic comedy, which is exactly what “Emily in Paris” delivers.
You can listen to our review in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You can also follow us on Twitter or send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)
And if you’d like to skip ahead, here’s how the episode breaks down:
0:00 Intro
0:31 “Emily in Paris” review
30:43 “Emily in Paris” spoiler discussion
The Equity crew this week chewed through a trio of media stories, each dealing with private companies and their successes. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Axios was growing rapidly and near profitability. The paper also broke news that Morning Brew might exit to Business Insider for a hefty $75 million potential payout. Meanwhile, we covered the news that The Juggernaut raised $2 million for its paywalled publication focused on South Asian news.
The conversation, as a result, was a fairly indulgent and nerdy affair. It’s always fun to celebrate other journalists finding success in different ways, and this week felt like a moment for the media news landscape. Because the topic is so near to our hearts, for better or worse, we’re fitting our broader thoughts into this post about the future of media.
Our own Natasha Mascarenhas writes about how inequity in media and who gets to succeed, Danny Crichton has some pretty strong feelings about digital advertising and Alex Wilhelm writes about how the varied methods of recent media success are themselves heartening.
So this weekend let’s pause for a minute to ruminate on the upstart media world, a place where too often private capital and media economics have had a falling out.
This week, it was announced that advertising might not be a bad idea after all. Axios is reportedly expected to become profitable this year, and Morning Brew, a free newsletter about business insights, could get acquired for between $50 million to $75 million by Business Insider. Both of these media companies make money off of newsletters. And if you end the story there, it’s clear that news isn’t simply a fundamental aspect of our democracy — it makes money, too.
But, the story shouldn’t end there.
Wired:
18% of games announced by major studios this summer had female protagonists, with Sony accounting for over a third; E3 2019 games had 5% female representation — The data on female representation in games looked optimistic—but time will tell if these changes endure beyond a wildcard year.
Morgan Clendaniel / Fast Company:
A look at the pandemic's impact on Nextdoor and how CEO Sarah Friar has attempted to promote the concept of “kindness” amid a tumultuous year for the company — The social network for local communities bet on kindness to power it to an IPO. If only the locals don't ruin it.
Dr. Ian Cutress / AnandTech:
Interview with AMD's CTO, Mark Papermaster, on the launch of Zen 3, its new core complex design and improved power efficiency, and pressure from Arm ecosystem — The announcement of the new Ryzen 5000 processors, built on AMD's Zen 3 microarchitecture, has caused waves of excitement and questions as to the performance.
Marietje Schaake / Foreign Affairs:
Democratic governments must take an active role in bringing accountability to cyberspace to avoid losing more ground to harmful actors and authoritarian regimes — This past summer, a host of public organizations as varied as the Norwegian parliament, the New Zealand stock exchange, and the Vatican all came under attack.
Pear, the eight-year-old, Palo Alto, Calif.-based seed-stage venture firm that has, from its outset, attracted the attention of VCs who think the firm has an eye for nascent talent, staged its seventh annual demo day earlier this week, and while it was virtual, one of the startups has already signed a term sheet from a top-tier venture firm.
To give the rest of you a sneak peak, here’s a bit about all of the startups that presented, in broad strokes:
What it does: Video conferencing platform for enterprise workflows
Website: accessbell.com
Founders: Martin Aguinis (CEO), Josh Payne (COO), Kamil Ali (CTO)
The pitch: Video has emerged as one of the prominent ways for enterprises to communicate internally and externally with their customers and partners. Current video conferencing tools like Zoom and WebEx are great for standalone video but they have their own ecosystems and don’t integrate into thousands of enterprise workflows. That means that API tools that do integrate, like Agora and Twilio, still require manual work from developer teams to customize and maintain. AccessBell is aiming to provide the scalability and reliability of Zoom, as well as the customizability and integrations of Twilio, in a low code integration and no code extensible customization platform.
It’s a big market the team is chasing, one that’s expected to grow to $8.6 billion by 2027. The cost right now for users who want to test out AccessBell is $27 per host per month.
2.) FarmRaise
What it does: Unlock financial opportunities for farmers to create sustainable farms and improve their livelihoods.
Website: farmraise.com
Founders: Jayce Hafner (CEO), Sami Tellatin (COO), Albert Abedi (Product)
The pitch: Over half of American farms don’t have the tools or bandwidth they need to identify ways to improve their farms and become profitable. The startup’s API links to farmers’ bank accounts, where its algorithm assesses financials to provide a “farm read,” scoring the farms’ financial health. It then regularly monitors farm data to continuously provide clean financials and recommendations on how to improve its customers’ farms, as well as to connect farmers with capital in order to improve their score. (It might suggest that a farm invest in certain sustainability practices, for example.)
Eventually, the idea is to also use the granular insights it’s garnering and sell these to hedge funds, state governments, and other outfits that want a better handle on what’s coming — be it around food security or climate changes.
3.) Sequel
What it does: Re-engineering life’s essential products – starting with tampons.
Website: thesequelisbetter.com
Founders: Greta Meyer (CEO), Amanda Calabrese (COO)
The pitch: Founded by student athletes from Stanford, Sequel argues that seven out of 10 women don’t trust tampons, which were first designed in 1931 (by a man). New brands like Lola have catchy brands and new material, but they perform even worse than legacy products. Sequel has focused instead on fluid mechanics and specifically on slowing flow rates so a tampon wont leak before it’s full whether they’re in the “boardroom” or the “stadium.” The company says it has already filed patents and secured manufacturing partners and that it expects that the product will be available for consumers to buy directly from its website, as well as in other stores, next year.
4.) Interface Bio
What it does: Unlocking the therapeutic potential of the microbiome with a high-throughput pipeline for characterizing microbes, metabolites, and therapeutic response, based on years of research at Stanford.
Founders: Will Van Treuren, Hannah Wastyk
The pitch: The microbiome plays a major role in a wide range of human diseases, including heart disease, kidney disease, liver disease, and cancer. In fact, Interface’s founders — both of whom are PhDs — say that microbiome-influenced diseases are responsible for four of the top 10 causes of death in the United States. So how do they better size on the opportunity to identify therapeutics by harnessing the microbiome? Well, they say they’ll do it via a “high-speed pipeline for characterizing metabolites and their immune phenotypes,” which they’ll create by developing the world’s largest database of microbiome-mediated chemistry, which the startup will then screen for potential metabolites that can lead to new therapies.
5.) Gryps
What it does: Gryps is tackling construction information silos to create a common information layer that gives building and facility owners quick, enriched and permanent access to document-centric information.
Website: gryps.io
Founders: Dareen Salama, Amir Tasbihi
The pitch: The vast size and complexity of the construction industry has resulted in all kinds of software and services that address various aspects of the construction processes, resulting in data and documents being spread across many siloed tools. Gryps says it picks up where all the construction-centered tools leave off: Taking delivery of the projects at the end of a construction job and providing all the information that facility owners need to operate, renovate, or build future projects through a platform that ingests data from various construction tools, mines the embedded information, then provides operational access through owner-centered workflows.
6.) Expedock
What it does: Automation infrastructure for supply chain businesses, starting with AI-Powered Freight Forwarder solutions.
Website: expedock.com
Founders: King Alandy Dy (CEO), Jeff Tan (COO), Rui Aguiar (CTO)
The pitch: Freight Forwarders take care of all the logistics of shipping containers including financials, approvals and paper work for all the local entities on both sides of the sender and receiver geographies, but communications with these local entities are often done through unstructured data, including forms, documents, and emails and can subsequently eat up to 60% of operational expenses. Expedock is looking to transform the freight forwarding industry by digitizing and automating the processing and inputting of unstructured data into various local partner and governmental systems, including via a “huan in the loop” AI software service.
7.) Illume
What it does: A new way to share praise
Website: illumenotes.com
Founders: Sohale Sizar (CEO), Phil Armour (Engineering), Maxine Stern (Design)
The pitch: The process of thanking people is full of friction. Paper cards have to be purchased, signed, passed around; greetings on Facebook only mean so much. Using Illume, teams and individuals can download its app or come together on Slack and create a customized, private, and also shareable note. The nascent startup says one card typically has 10 contributors; it charging enterprises $3 per user per month, ostensibly so sales teams, among others, can use them.
8.) Quansa
What it does: Quansa improves Latin American workers’ financial lives via employer-based financial care
Website: quansa.io
Founders: Gonzalo Blanco, Mafalda Barros
The pitch: Fully 40% of employees across Latin America have missed work in the past 12 months due to financial problems. Quansa wants to help them get on the right track financially with the help of employers that use its software to link their employees’ payroll data with banks, fintechs and other financial institutions.
There is strength in numbers, says the firm. By funneling more customers to lenders through their employers, for example, these employees should ultimately be able to access to cheaper car loans, among other things.
9.) SpotlightAI
What it does: Spotlight turns sensitive customer information from a burden to an asset by using NLP techniques to identify, anonymize, and manage access to PII and other sensitive business data.
Website: hellospotlight.com
Founder: Austin Osborne (CEO)
The pitch: Data privacy legislation like GDPR and CCPA is creating an era where companies can no longer use their customer data to run their business due to the risks of fines, lawsuits, and negative media coverage. These lawsuits relating to misuse of personal data can reach billions of dollars and take years to settle. Spotlight’s software plugs into existing data storage engines via APIs and operates as a middleware within a company’s network. With advanced NLP and OCR techniques, it says it’s able to detect sensitive information in unstructured data, perform multiple types of anonymization, and provide a deep access control layer.
10.) Bennu
What it does: Bennu closes the loop on management communication
Website: bennu.io
Founder: Brenda Jin (CEO)
The pitch: Today’s work communication is done through forms, email, Slack, and docs; the timelines are unnatural. Bennu is trying to solve the problem with communication loops that use integrations and smart topic suggestions to help employees prepare for substantive management conversations in seconds, not hours.
11.) Playbook
What it does: Playbook automates the people coordination in your repeatable workflows with a simple system to create, execute and track any process with your team, customers, and more.
Website: startplaybook.com
Founders: Alkarim Lalani (CEO), Blaise Bradley (CTO)
The pitch: Whether you’re collecting time cards from 20 hourly workers every week, or managing 30 customer onboardings – you’re coordinating repetitive workflows across people over email and tracking it over spreadsheets. Playbook says it coordinates workflows between people at scale by taking programming concepts such as variables and conditional logic that let its customers model any workflow, and all packaged in an interface that enables anyone to build out their workflows in minutes.
12.) June Motherhood
What it does: Community-based care for life’s most important transitions.
Website: junemotherhood.com
Founders: Tina Beilinson (CEO), Julia Cole (COO), Sophia Richter (CPO)
The pitch: June is a digital health company focused on maternal health, with community at the core. Like a Livongo for diabetes management, June combines the latest research around shared appointments, peer-to-peer support and cognitive behavioral therapy to improve outcomes and lower costs, including through weekly programs and social networks that encourage peer-to-peer support.
13.) Wagr
What it does: Challenge anyone to a friendly bet.
Website: wagr.us
Founders: Mario Malavé (CEO), Eliana Eskinazi (CPO)
The pitch: Wagr will allow sports fans to bet with peers in a social, fair, and simple way. Sending a bet requires just three steps, too: pick a team, set an amount, and send away. Wagr sets the right odds and handles the money.
Users can challenge friends, start groups, track leaderboards, and see what others are betting on, so they feel connected even if they aren’t together in the stadium. Customers pay a commission when they use the platform to find them a match, but bets against friends are free. The plan is to go live in Tennessee first and expand outward from there.
14.) Federato
What it does: Intelligence for a new era of risk
Website: federato.ai
Founders: Will Ross (CEO), William Steenbergen (CTO)
The pitch: Insurance companies are struggling to manage their accumulation of risk as natural catastrophes continue to grow in volume and severity. Reinsurance is no longer a reliable backstop, with some of the largest insurers taking $600 million-plus single-quarter losses net of reinsurance.
Federato is building an underwriter workflow that uses dynamic optimization across the portfolio to steer underwriters to a better portfolio balance. The software lets actuaries and portfolio analysts drive high-level risk analysis into the hands of underwriters on the front lines to help them understand the “next best action” at a given point in time.
15.) rePurpose Global
What it does: A plastic credit platform to help consumer brands of any size go plastic neutral
Website: business.repurpose.global
Founders: Svanika Balasubramanian (CEO), Aditya Siroya (CIO), Peter Wang Hjemdahl (CMO
The pitch: Consumers worldwide are demanding businesses to take action on eliminating plastic waste, 3.8 million pounds of which are leaked into the environment every few minutes. Yet even as brands try, alternatives are often too expensive or worse for the environment. Through this startup, a brand can commit to the removal of a certain amount of plastic, which will then be removed by the startup’s loal watse management partners and recycled on the brand’s behalf (with rePurpose verifying that the process adheres to certain standards). The startup says it can keep a healthy margin while also running this plastic credit market, and that its ultimate vision is to our vision is to become a “one-stop shop for companies to create social, economic, and environmental impact.”
16.) Ladder
What it does: A professional community platform for the next generation
Website: ladder.io
Founders: Akshaya Dinesh (CEO), Andrew Tan
The pitch: LinkedIn sucks, everyone hates it. Ladder (which may have a trademark infringement battle ahead of it) is building a platform around community instead of networks. The idea is that users will opt in to join communities with like-minded individuals in their respective industries and roles of interest. Once engaged, they can participate in AMAs with industry experts, share opportunities, and have 1:1 conversations.
The longer term ‘moat’ is the data it collects from users, from which it thinks it can generate more revenue per user than LinkedIn. (By the way, this is the startup that has already signed a term sheet with a firm whose team was watching the demo day live on Tuesday.)
Exporta
How it works: Exporta is building a B2B wholesale marketplace connecting suppliers in Latin America with buyers in North America.
Website: exporta.io
Founders: Pierre Thys (CEO), Robert Monaco (President)
The pitch: The U.S. now imports more each year from Latin America than from China, but LatAm sourcing remains fragmented and manual. Exporta builds on-the-ground relationships to bring LatAm suppliers onto a tech-enabled platform that matches them to U.S. buyers looking for faster turnaround times and more transparent manufacturing relationships.
Via
What it does: Via helps companies build their own teams in new countries as simply as if they were in their HQ.
Website: via.work
Founders: Maite Diez-Canedo, Itziar Diez-Canedo
The pitch: Setting up a team in a new country is very complex. Companies need local entities, contracts, payroll, benefits, accounting, tax, compliance…and the list goes on. Via enables companies to build their own teams in new countries quickly and compliantly by leveraging local entities to legally employ teams on their behalf, and integrate local contracts, payroll, and benefits in one platform. By plugging into the local hiring ecosystem, Via does all the heavy lifting for its customers, even promising to stand up a team in 48 hours and at less expense than traditional alternatives. (It’s charging $600 per employee per month in Canada and Mexico, where it says it has already launched.)
