blackbird ventures
Auto Added by WPeMatico
NewView Capital leads $22.3M Series B in Australian telehealth platform Eucalyptus
Telehealth platform Eucalyptus raised a $22.3 million Series B round of funding to build a digital health portfolio for primary care in Australia.
NewView Capital led the round with participation from existing investors Blackbird Ventures and W23, and new investor AirTree Ventures. As part of the investment, Ravi Viswanathan, NewView founder and managing partner, will be joining the Eucalyptus board.
The new round gives the Sydney-based company a total of $32.8 million raised since it was founded in 2019 by Tim Doyle, Benny Kleist, Alexey Mitko and Charlie Gearside.
Australia’s healthcare system is a two-payer model, where most of the care is paid for by the government, and there is a smaller insurance coverage that is owned by individuals. Eucalyptus fits into these models as a private-pay option selling directly to consumers. In some cases, the company is able to charge lower copays for care than the average $25 per doctor visit, Doyle told TechCrunch.
He touts the company as the “largest vertically integrated telehealth platform in Australia,” serving more than 200,000 patients across four demographic-focused brands: contraception and fertility, skincare, men’s health and sexual wellness. Each brand has its own core platform of healthcare providers, patient data repository, remote monitoring tools and partnerships with pathology labs and pharmacies.
All of that results in a higher touch and higher quality relationship between doctor and patient, Doyle said.
“We are seeing an opportunity to shorten the amount of time between identification of a condition and diagnosis,” he added. “We also want to go more in-depth into diabetes, heart conditions and mental health. People are dropping out of diabetes and mental care because there are not enough touch points that are easy to use. If we can build a hub, it will make it easier to treat those conditions.”
In addition to product development, the new funding enables Eucalyptus to build toward being a major player in the telehealth industry. The company will introduce new brands in the next year around chronic care like behavioral health, weight management and diabetes.
Eucalyptus grew its revenue between 200% to 300% year over year since 2019, Doyle said. This is not unlike other startups in the digital health sector, where 2020 saw another record year for venture capital investment. He expects similar growth in 2021, including adding about 20 employees to be over 100 by the end of the year.
Meanwhile, Doyle said he is excited to work with NewView, especially with Viswanathan and principal Christina Fa, who said Eucalyptus is proving that Australia can lead in digital healthcare.
“The team is impressive in terms of clarity of vision and execution, especially in the way they brought in people to manage the brands,” she told TechCrunch. “It is unique being based in Australia where they don’t have Teledoc and other digital health companies. Instead, Eucalyptus had to build all of that in-house and do the hard work upfront. In addition, they curated a network of health providers and four brands, each with their own personalities. This allows them to be fully vertically integrated and own the customer journey.”
Powered by WPeMatico
How to raise your first VC fund
Charles is a principal at Bling Capital and manages his own angel investment vehicle. Previously, he was an investor at TI Platform Management and Manhattan Venture Partners. He has quarterbacked investments in nine unicorns over the course of his career.
As a founding member of TI Platform Management, I have quarterbacked more than $200 million in investments into first-time fund managers around the world. That portfolio includes being one of the first institutional checks into Atomic Labs ($170+ million, SaaStr ($160+ million) and Entrepreneur First ($140+ million), among many others.
Having seen successful returns as a fund manager and an early-stage VC (as well as recently raising my own angel fund), I’ve formulated several best practices and strategies for investing in fund managers. If you want to raise your first fund, here’s how.
Understand the mentality of an LP
Just as VCs bucket startup founders into categories, limited partners (the investors in your venture fund, also known as “LPs”) have an unwritten way of categorizing venture managers. The vast majority fit one of three archetypes:
- Former founder/operator turned VC
- Spin-off manager from a mega fund
- Angel investor with a strong track record
Here’s how each is perceived by institutional LPs and the unique blockers they have to overcome:
Former founder/operator turned VC
Having been through the journey of starting a company, former founders/operators often have strong intuition in identifying founders and an empathy/rapport that raises their win-rate on deals. Additionally, having built an innovative company, they can bring special insights in where the market is headed. Building a company, however, requires different skills from founding a fund.
If you’re a former founder/operator turned VC, expect LPs to ask questions that suss out:
Powered by WPeMatico
Canva raises $60 million on a $6 billion valuation
Sydney-based Canva, the design platform for non-designers, has today announced the close of a $60 million funding round, bringing its valuation to $6 billion, according to the company.
The startup has raised a total of more than $300 million, including this latest round of financing, from investors like Bond, General Catalyst, Sequoia Capital China, Felicis Ventures and Blackbird Ventures .
Canva COO and co-founder Cliff Obrecht explained that the round was 10x oversubscribed with interest from angels and new VCs, but that the company resisted taking extra capital.
“At our stage, investors are looking to deploy $50 million+ in capital,” said Obrecht. “Even our existing investors were looking to deploy between $50 million and $100 million, but we said ‘Oh, gee, we really don’t want to be diluted that much because we have a lot of conviction in the business and we don’t need that much money.’ ”
He also said the company wanted to remain with existing investors — Blackbird and Sequoia Capital China led this round — because those investors bet on the company when it was in its infancy, founded by three people in an isolated part of the world with no technical chops.
At the beginning of the pandemic, Canva made a commitment to continue paying all of its contracted workers, but froze hiring. The company also made quick moves to shut down the office and move to remote work. However, Canva is one of the few companies that is getting a boost from the world moving to work from home.
The company has seen a 50% uptick in shared designs, and around a 25% increase in designs created each month. Overall, Canva is growing 100% year over year in both revenue and users, with 30 million monthly active users across 190 countries.
Canva was founded in 2012 with the mission of democratizing design tools. While many non-designers can navigate their way around Google Slides or PowerPoint, or maybe even crop an image, going more in-depth on a design project can be daunting, as the suite of tools provided to designers can be incredibly complex.
The company’s tools are meant to simplify the design process for folks who don’t work in the design department, whether it’s the sales team putting together sales materials, marketers working on content or other departments working on internal materials to send to the broader organization. The drag-and-drop interface gives folks a way to create something beautiful and impressive without having to learn Photoshop.
The product started out as a freemium product for individual consumers but eventually started offering enterprise products, as well as a video editing tool that comes complete with video templates, easy-to-use animation tools and a library of stock video, music, etc.
The company has also launched an educational platform called Canva for Education, which integrates with G Suite and Google Classroom to get students started on design early. Canva also offers a developer platform for startups that want to integrate with the company, which currently includes Dropbox, Google Drive, PhotoMosh and Instagram, among others.
Most recently, Canva partnered with FedEx Office to offer easy design-to-print products that let users pick up print designs from one of more than 2,000 locations in the U.S. as the Sydney-based company looks to secure a foothold in this market.
Canva plans on using the funding to grow the company, make a push into collaboration and continue making acquisitions.
On the heels of the funding, Canva is looking to hire — the company currently has 1,000+ employees, of which more than 40% are female. (Canva did not disclose the percentage of its workforce that are non-white.)
Obrecht says that one of the greatest challenges for the company and for leadership personally is the burden of not feeling like they’re doing enough to make the world a better place. He explained that the company has a number of initiatives focused on this core tenet, including free access to the platform for more than 50,000 nonprofit organizations, education initiatives, anti-discrimination policies within its TOS and more.
“But it just never really feels like enough,” said Obrecht. “You see what’s happening and it’s a bit of a shit show and it’s not aspirational at all. It doesn’t look like it’s getting fixed quickly by the adults who are in government. They’re not doing the right thing, and if they’re not, who will? So we really believe we should have a heavy part in trying our best to make sure the shit show doesn’t continue.”
Powered by WPeMatico