Airbnb
Auto Added by WPeMatico
As the Western US burns, a forest carbon capture monitoring service nabs cash from Amazon & Bill Gates-backed fund
Pachama, the forest carbon sequestration monitoring service that tracks how much carbon dioxide is actually captured in forestry offset projects, has raised $5 million in fresh funding from a clutch of high-profile investors, including Amazon and Breakthrough Energy Ventures.
The investment is one of several deals that Amazon has announced today through its Climate Pledge Fund. Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the firm backed by Bill Gates and other billionaires, led the round, which brings Pachama’s total haul to $9 million so it can scale its forest restoration and conservation emissions reduction monitoring service, the company said.
With the Western United States continuing to burn from several fires that cover acres of drought-impacted forests and deforestation continuing to be a problem around the world, Pachama’s solution couldn’t be more timely. The company’s remote verification and monitoring service using satellite imagery and artificial intelligence measures carbon captured by forests.
It also couldn’t be more personal. Pachama’s founder, Diego Saez-Gil, lost his own home in the wildfires that tore through California earlier this year.
“We will need to restore hundreds of thousands of acres of forests and carbon credits can be the funding mechanism,” Saez-Gil wrote in a direct message.
Pachama joins two other companies that are jointly financed by Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund.
Other big corporate investors also backed Pachama. Groupe Arnault’s investment arm, Aglaé Ventures, and Airbnb’s alumni fund, AirAngels invested, as did a number of prominent family offices and early-stage funds. Sweet Capital, the fund investing the personal wealth of gaming company King.com’s management team; Serena Ventures (the investment vehicle for tennis superstar Serena Williams) and Chris Sacca’s Lowercarbon Capital fund also invested in the round, along with Third Kind Ventures and Xplorer Ventures.
“There is growing demand from businesses with ESG commitments looking for ways to become carbon neutral, and afforestation is one of the most attractive carbon removal options ready today at scale,” said Carmichael Roberts, of Breakthrough Energy Ventures, in a statement. “By leveraging technology to create new levels of measurement, monitoring, and verification of carbon removal—while also onboarding new carbon removal projects seamlessly—Pachama makes it easier for any company to become carbon neutral. With its advanced enterprise tools and resources, the company has enormous potential to accelerate carbon neutrality initiatives for businesses through afforestation.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Berbix raises $9M for its identity verification platform
Berbix, an ID verification startup that was founded by former members of the Airbnb Trust and Safety team, today announced that it has raised a $9 million Series A round led by Mayfield. Existing investors, including Initialized Capital, Y Combinator and Fika Ventures, also participated in this round.
Founded in 2018, Berbix helps companies verify the identity of its users, with an emphasis on the cannabis industry, but it’s clearly not limited to this use case. Integrating the service to help online services scan and validate IDs only takes a few lines of code. In that respect, it’s not that different from payment services like Stripe, for example. Pricing starts at $99 per month with 100 included ID checks. Developers can choose a standard ID check (for $0.99 per check after the basic allotment runs out), as well as additional selfie and optional liveness checks, which ask users to show an emotion or move their head to ensure somebody isn’t simply trying to trick the system with a photo.
While ID verification may not be the first thing you think about in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the company is actually seeing increasing demand for its solution now that in-person ID verification has become much harder. Berbix CEO and co-founder Steve Kirkham notes that the company now processes the same number of verifications in a day that it used to do monthly only a year ago.
“The inability to conduct traditional identity checks in person has forced organizations to move online for innumerable use cases,” he says in today’s announcement. “One example is the Family Independence Initiative, a nonprofit that trusts and invests in families’ own efforts to escape poverty. Our software has enabled them to eliminate fraudulent applications and focus on the families who have been economically affected by COVID.”
Berbix co-founder Eric Levine tells me the company plans to use the new funding to expand its team, especially the product and sales department. He also noted that the team is investing heavily in localization, as well as the technical foundation of the service. In addition, it’s obviously also investing in new technologies to detect new types of fraud. Scammers never sleep, after all.
Powered by WPeMatico
After early-COVID layoffs, Hipcamp is buying competition, hiring
When shelter-in-place was first announced in the United States, most companies in the travel space saw bookings drop. Some shuttered. Hipcamp, a San Francisco-based startup that provides private land for people who want to go glamping or camping, found itself in a similar spot (even though its entire sell is about getting you away from crowds).
“Bookings took a precipitous drop as people sheltered-in-place, and we actually encouraged people to cancel,” founder Alyssa Ravasio said in an interview. The startup conducted a round of layoffs back in April, citing “economic uncertainties.” One employee tells TechCrunch that 60% of the company was laid off in two weeks. Hipcamp did not comment directly on the number of layoffs, other than to say the percentage of laid off employees is significantly lower than the 60% report.
Months later, Hipcamp is in a far better spot. When stay-at-home orders lifted, bookings spiked with people eager to get outside, which the CDC says is a safer activity than being inside a place with less ventilation. Ravasio says that Hipcamp has even brought back some employees it originally laid off. The startup is currently hiring.
Off this new momentum, Hipcamp today announced that it has acquired Australia-based landsharing startup Youcamp, marking its first expansion into an international market. With the new business, Hipcamp will acquire Youcamp’s existing 50,000 listings, bringing its total to 420,000 listings.
Hipcamp declined to disclose the financials of the deal at this time.
Youcamp, founded by James Woodford, was born in New South Wales in 2013. Similar to Hipcamp, Youcamp worked to draw urban-based adults to the great outdoors. For its seven years as an independent company, Youcamp racked up listings by working directly with private landowners.
Ravasio says she made her first big international bet in Australia partly because of revenue predictability.
“Expanding to the Southern Hemisphere also helps us account for natural seasonality with outdoor recreation. Between the U.S. and Australia, it’s an endless summer,” the founder said.
The entire team at Youcamp will join Hipcamp, adding five to Hipcamp’s staff, bringing its employee base to a total of 35.
Along with the acquisition announcement, Hipcamp shared that it is officially launching in Canada. The startup already had a number of Canadian hosts, but it will now increase the total by partnering directly with private landowners.
The company declined to share profitability or growth statistics, instead pointing to aggregate usage numbers as some sort of cumulative revenue parallel. To date, Hipcamp has helped people spend 2.5 million nights outside across 6,000 hosts in the United States, Australia and Canada.
In July 2019, Hipcamp got a tranche of new capital from investors, including but not limited to Andreessen Horowitz, Benchmark, Slow Ventures, Marcy Ventures (co-founded by Shawn Carter, or Jay-Z) and Dreamers Fund (co-founded by Will Smith). The round valued the startup at $127 million.
Hipcamp, which has been dubbed by The New Yorker the “Airbnb of the outdoors,” is more optimistic than it was in March, as shown by this appetite for acquisition. The progress mirrors what we’re seeing out of the actual Airbnb, which has found bookings increasing year over year as people look to stay at properties for local holidays.
Powered by WPeMatico
Red Antler’s Emily Heyward explains how to get people obsessed with your brand
If you’re currently building a startup, you know what product you want to build. But do you know if people are actually going to notice you? That’s the question I asked of Red Antler co-founder Emily Heyward during our virtual TechCrunch Early Stage event.
In case you’re not familiar with Red Antler, Heyward’s branding company has worked with some of the most iconic startups of the past decade, such as Casper, Allbirds, Brandless and Prose. She knows her topic so well that she just wrote a book on branding called “Obsessed.”
Let me break down the key takeaways of her presentation and responses to questions from our virtual audience — we’ve embedded a video below with our entire conversation.
Branding matters — anybody can launch a startup
It has never been easier to launch a startup. If it’s a software company, your infrastructure will be managed by a cloud hosting company. If you’re selling consumer goods, you can find manufacturing partners more easily than ever before.
“There are fewer traditional gatekeepers standing in your way. You don’t need to be able to afford a national TV campaign to get people to notice you and to hear about you. It’s a lot easier to get it out there and start selling directly to people,” Heyward said.
The result is that there are many companies competing in the same space, launching around the same time. Casper isn’t the only online mattress company anymore for instance. Brand obsession can set you apart from the rest of the crowd.
Powered by WPeMatico
Airbnb has confidentially filed to go public
In a turn of fortune, Airbnb today announced that it has filed to go public, albeit confidentially.
The move puts the home-sharing service on a path to a public offering sooner rather than later, and comes after reports that the company was prepping an IPO filing this month. Those same reports indicated that Airbnb could go public as soon as the end of the year.
A Q3 or Q4 Airbnb offering is therefore a distinct possibility.
Airbnb has mounted a comeback since COVID-19-related shutdowns slammed the travel market, tanking its revenues at the same time. Airbnb laid off nearly 2,000 workers, and took on expensive capital from external sources.
The company promised in 2019 that it would go public in 2020, but that pledge seemed far-off in the middle of the year. Since then, Airbnb has made noise about different parts of its business coming back to life, although changed by new travel and work and vacation patterns from its users.
If Airbnb has filed, we can presume that present results are good enough to get it life, else the firm would have not filed and would have simply gone public later. The question now becomes if its Q2 numbers were good enough to get it out the door, or if the company intends to update its S-1 filing with Q3 numbers, push the filing live and go public with more recovery time in its results.
Of course, such a course of action would put its public debut perilously close to the American election. And, Airbnb’s Q2 numbers are down not only from Q1 in revenue terms, but even more sharply from its year-ago results for the same calendar period. In short, Airbnb’s growth story may not be clear until Q3 numbers are tallied, a month and a half from now.
Airbnb joins other companies that have filed privately, like DoorDash, waiting in the wings for the right moment to go public, or the right set of results.
We’ll see, but the company’s public debut is back to being impending. Now the question becomes whether Airbnb intends to go public in an IPO, as the wording of its filing appears to suggest, or if a direct listing could still be in the cards. We think it’s more likely the former and not the latter, but, hey, in 2020 you never know.
Powered by WPeMatico
Airbnb could file to go public this month
According to The Wall Street Journal, Airbnb could file confidentially to go public as early as this month. The same report states that Airbnb could follow that filing with an IPO before year’s end. Morgan Stanley and Goldman are helping the former startup with its IPO process, the Journal writes.
The news that Airbnb’s IPO could be back on caps a tumultuous year for the home-sharing unicorn, which promised in 2019 to go public in 2020. The company was widely tipped to be considering a direct listing before COVID-19 arrived, crashing the global travel market, and with it, Airbnb’s financial health.
Airbnb declined to comment on its IPO plans.
As travelers stayed home, the company was forced to sharply cut staff and take on billions in capital at prices that, compared to its late 2019-momentum, looked rather expensive.
But since those blows, Airbnb has begun to make noise about positive progress regarding its platform usage, and, implicitly, its financial performance.
In June, Airbnb said that between “May 17 to June 6, 2020, there were more nights booked for travel to Airbnb listings in the US than during the same time period in 2019,” and that “globally, over the most recent weekend (June 5-7), we saw year-over-year growth in gross booking value” for “the first time since February.”
And in July, the company said that its users had “booked more than 1 million nights’ worth of future stays at Airbnb listings” globally in a single day, the first time since March 3rd that that had happened.
Precisely how far Airbnb has financially clawed its way back is not clear. But the company’s cost basis in the wake of its layoffs could lower the revenue base it needs to recover to reach something akin to profitability, a traditional IPO benchmark, though one that has lost luster in recent years.
And with local travel taking off — slowly-improving airline occupancy rates are, therefore, not indicative of Airbnb’s performance or health — the company could have retooled its business in the wake of COVID to something that can still put up attractive revenues at strong margins.
Needless to say, I am hyped to read the Airbnb S-1, so the sooner it drops the happier I’ll be. Getting an in-depth look at what happened to the unicorn during COVID-19 is going to be fascinating.
Airbnb joins DoorDash, Coinbase, Palantir and others on our IPO shortlist. More as we have it.
Powered by WPeMatico
Without desks and a demo day, are accelerators worth it?
As a result of the pandemic, accelerators have moved operations fully remote to abide by social distancing. The shift has forced well-known programs like 500 Startups, Y Combinator and Techstars to go fully online, while encouraging existing venture capital firms to launch new digital-only fellowships like Cleo Capital and NextView Ventures.
Before the pandemic, accelerators could advertise their value by lending desk space once used by Airbnb, Twilio and Brex’s co-founders, plus a glitzy demo day. Now, stripped of their in-person element, the actual value of an accelerator program — and the network they provide — is being tested in new ways.
So a question remains for participating founders: Are they getting the benefits of what they thought they signed up for?
In the Zoom where it happened
The last thing Michael Vega-Sanz wanted to do was was join another Zoom get-together for entrepreneurs. But the car-sharing company he co-founded with twin brother Matthew was in the middle of a pivot, so they joined NextView Ventures’ inaugural remote accelerator program.
“I envisioned an accelerator with awkward happy hours, mass Zoom calls,” Vega-Sanz said. Fast-forward one month into the program, he says it “has been quite the opposite.”
Before joining NextView’s accelerator, Vega-Sanz did an in-person incubator at Babson College in Boston, but there’s “a lot less fluff” in being virtual, he told TechCrunch.
“[With in-person] the reality was you’d go to lunch, and by the time you drove over there and had all your side talk, small talk, chit-chat and actually got into the nitty-gritty of the event, there was a lot of time loss,” he said. “You could have been working for your company during that time.”
If possible, Vega-Sanz still recommends that first-time founders attend a physical accelerator instead of a virtual one for the energy it brings, even with the downside of useless events.
Powered by WPeMatico
SaaS startup Swoop raises $3.2M to modernize mom-and-pop transportation companies
Chauffeured group transportation — the vehicles used for corporate outings, special events and even weddings — is a fragmented industry, with hundreds of small operators that rely on analog systems to book customers. Now in this era of COVID-19, these operators are being squeezed as travel and tourism have dwindled and companies have opted to have employees work from home.
One Los Angeles-based transportation booking startup called Swoop aims to bring these small, local operators into the digital age with a new software-as-a-service platform that it says is helping them adapt in this COVID-19 era. The startup, loaded with an injection of capital, is ramping up its SaaS product in hopes of tapping into a marketplace where customers spend $40 billion annually.
Swoop has raised $3.2 million in a seed funding round led by Signia Venture Partners, South Park Commons and several angel investors, including former Uber CPO Manik Gupta; Kevin Weil, co-creator of Libra at Facebook; Kim Fennel, a former Uber executive; and Elizabeth Weil, former partner at Andreessen Horowitz and 137 Ventures.
“I’m fascinated about how operators are still running most of their business with pen and paper,” Swoop CEO and co-founder Amir Ghorbani said in a statement. Ghorbani has witnessed firsthand the constraints of these small operators. During high school and college, Ghorbani helped with his parents’ limousine business. The experience prompted him to seek a solution.
“I saw a huge opportunity to help these small mom and pop shops, in an under-digitized industry, where no operator has more than 1% market share,” Ghorbani added.
Ghorbani began by building a group transportation booking platform used by companies like Airbnb, Google and Nike. Through those bookings the companies saw an opportunity to build business management software for vehicle operators.
Swoop’s SaaS platform lets companies book and dispatch rides, track vehicles and communicate with customers. It also acts as a central hub for payments and other bookkeeping. The tool is designed to smooth out the booking process as well as increase vehicle utilization, which is currently at 4.9%, according to the company. Swoop also passes on to the operators using its SaaS tool leads from companies that use the booking platform.
For now, the focus is on local transportation companies, not public transit, which is a sector that Uber is chasing.
COVID-19, which has suspended most group outings, has upended these local transportation operators. Swoop says it has adjusted its platform to help these operators survive. The company told TechCrunch that it is helping operators repurpose their vehicles to ship goods rather than people. For instance, large vans once used for corporate outings can now be marketed to food wholesalers or companies that need local package delivery. The platform is also being used to connect operators with companies like Amazon that provide transportation to shuttle essential factory workers.
Swoop said COVID-19 might end up accelerating its business ramp as operators are being forced to evaluate their businesses and seek new ways to generate revenue and reduce costs.
Powered by WPeMatico
IPOs that could happen soon, cannot happen soon enough
Earlier today we took a look at two companies that have filed to go public, nCino and GoHealth. The pair join Lemonade in a march toward the public markets.
But those three firms are hardly alone. We know that DoorDash filed privately earlier this year (it also raised a pile of cash lately, so its IPO may not be in a hurry), and Postmates filed privately last year.
Even more, there are a number of companies whose IPOs we anticipate in short order. So, what follows is our incredibly scientific survey of impending IPOs, starting with those closest to the gate. This list is focused on companies that were at one point venture-backed startups, even if they have become behemoths in the intervening years.
We’ll start with companies that have filed and are moving toward debuts in the next few weeks:
- nCino: This SaaS company is growing nicely, and has pretty good overall economics. We covered its financial history here. Its debut will be a win for North Carolina.
- GoHealth: A Chicago success story that was swallowed by private equity last year, GoHealth is now an incredibly complicated company and offering that features lots of long-term indebtedness. But, its exit should provide reasonable returns to its current owner’s backers, who held onto the firm for less than a year before trying to flip it.
- Lemonade: Lemonade’s IPO is an important moment for a number of modern insurance companies like Root, MetroMile, Kin and others. Not that they all sell the same type of insurance, mind, they don’t. Lemonade does rental and home insurance, while Root and MetroMile are focused on autos, for example. But if Lemonade manages a strong offering, it could provide tailwind to its fellow neo-insurance providers all the same.
- Agora: We’re catching up on the Agora debut. The China-based company’s IPO filing details a company that provides other companies and developers the ability to “embed real-time video and voice functionalities into their applications without the need to develop the technology or build the underlying infrastructure themselves” via APIs. This sounds a bit like what Daily.co is building, if you recall that round. Agora is a company that has good operating income and net income before “accretion on convertible redeemable preferred shares to redemption value.” With that in hand, the company’s earnings are sharply negative. Read that how you want. Agora wants to raise between $280 million and $315 million.
And, next, companies that have filed privately but are still hanging back:
- DoorDash: With lots of new money, DoorDash may not be in a rush to go public. That said, this offering is easily a top-three, most-anticipated offering. And as the company certainly wants to get out while the markets are recovered, perhaps there’s some ambient pressure on the firm to make its private IPO filing public.
- Postmates: Postmates filed privately to go public last year. Since then it has raised a bunch more money. It’s now just keeping along. Go public, Postmates! We want to see your numbers!
- Asana: Asana filed privately to go public earlier this year, which was exciting. Then it didn’t go public, which wasn’t. It’s doing some stuff with Microsoft lately, which is neat. But when we asked the company to stop messing about and give us that S-1, co-founder Dustin Moskovitz told us “No!” Adding to this particular trail of breadcrumbs, Asana crossed the $100 million ARR mark over a year ago, and added some new board members in the interim.
- BigCommerce: Bloomberg reported earlier today that the company is going public, and has filed privately to do so. BigCommerce is an Austin-based SaaS service that provides e-commerce tools to merchants. It’s like an American Shopify, kinda. And backed by over $200 million in venture capital, there’s a lot of bets riding on its eventual debut. Save us the wait, BigCommerce, and file publicly today.
And here are companies that are making the sort of noise that one might make before finally going public:
- Airbnb: Airbnb promised to go public, then COVID-19 happened, and the company had to raise a bunch of expensive capital and lay off around a quarter of its staff. But now it’s bouncing back, and could still go public this year, according to its CEO. Please do, Airbnb, I want to see your numbers.
- Palantir: I am loath to include Palantir in this list, as it’s been on future IPO lists since time immemorial (here’s an example); but, hey, maybe this time it will happen. Why do we think that? Here are two headlines to make it plain: “Palantir Notches $500M Ahead Of Potential IPO” from June 19th, and “Palantir to File IPO in Weeks For Possible Fall Debut” from June 11, 2020. So, yeah, this is a thing.
All of the above is a jam, and I am stoked to dig through the S-1 trenches with you.
Powered by WPeMatico
Why VCs say they’re open for business, even if they’re pausing new deals
This week Alexia Bonatsos of Dream Machine and Niko Bonatsos of General Catalyst swung by Extra Crunch Live to discuss where they are investing today and what the future might look like.
As expected, these seed and early-stage venture capitalists had a lot to say about their current investing cadence and what interests them in the world of edtech, Clubhouse and more. A big thanks to everyone who came out and submitted some great questions.
Going back through the chat today, a few sections jumped out. For this recap, I’ve gathered answers from the transcript regarding today’s fundraising climate, the future of AI and the possible impact of the downturn on VC-backed founder diversity.
And for everyone who couldn’t join us live, I’ve included the full video replay below. (You can get access here, if you need it.)
Today’s fundraising climate
Alexia:
It’s kind of a Rashomon; depending on whose perspective you’re getting the story, is just completely different.
Let’s see, are [VCs] being as active as they were in 2018? I’m gonna say no. I mean, look at your data, your data says no. But does that mean people [have] shut down the shop and are all in Montana? Also no, right?
We know that these kinds of “crisistunities” — and I’m not diminishing the crisis at all, it is very sad and very scary, and it’s something that I’m very privileged to be able to be experiencing from inside my apartment and not from outside within an emergency room or a food bank or any other place that it’s actually at the front lines, right?
Powered by WPeMatico