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Gamestry gets $5M to give games video creators a sweeter deal
Barcelona-based gaming video platform Gamestry has snatched up $5 million in seed funding, led by Goodwater Capital, Target Global and Kibo Ventures — turning investors’ heads with a 175x growth rate over the past 12 months.
While the (for now) Spanish-language gaming video platform launched a few years back, in 2018, last year the founders decided to shift away from an initial focus on curating purely learning content around gaming — allowing creators to upload and share entertainment-focused games videos, too.
The switch looks to have paid off as a growth tactic. Gamestry says it now has 4M monthly active users (MAUs) and 2,000 active creators in Spain and Latin America (its main markets so far) — and is gunning to hit 20M MAUs by the end of the year.
While Twitch continues to dominate the market for live-streaming games — catering to the esports boom — Gamestry, which says it’s focused on “non-live video content”, reckons there’s a gap for a dedicated on-demand video platform that better supports games-focused video creators and provides games fans with a more streamlined discovery experience than catch-all user-generated content giants like YouTube.
For games video creators, it’s dangling the carrot of a better revenue share than other UGC video platforms — talking about having “a fair ads revenue share model”, and a plan to add more revenue streams for creators “soon”. It also pledges “full transparency on how the monetization structure works”, and a focus on supporting creators if they have technical issues.
So, basically, the sorts of issues creators have often complained that YouTube fails them on.
For viewers, the pitch is a one-stop-shop for finding and watching videos about games and connecting with others with the same passion (gaming chat) — so the platform structures content around individual games titles.
The startup also claims to present viewers with better info about a video to help them decide whether or not to click on it (aka, tools to help them find “quality instead of clickbait”), beyond basics like title, thumbnail and videos. (Albeit to my admittedly unseasoned eye for assessing the calibre of games video content, there is no shortage of clickbaity-looking stuff on Gamestry. But I am definitely not the target audience here…). So the viewer pitch also sounds like another little dig at YouTube.
“Despite being the de-facto place for uploading content, YouTube is a generic platform that is not optimized for gaming and therefore doesn’t cater to the needs of gaming creators,” argue founders — brothers Alejo and Guillermo Torrens — adding: “Vertical or specialized platforms emerge whenever markets become large enough that current platforms can’t serve their users’ needs and we believe that’s exactly what’s happening today.”
Target Global’s Lina Chong led the international fund’s investment in Gamestry. Asked what piqued her interest here, she flagged the recent growth spurt and the platform having onboarded scores of highly engaged games content creators in short order.
“The problem Gamestry is addressing is that the vast majority of creators don’t make much money on those platforms because they are ads/eyeball driven businesses,” she told TechCrunch. “Gamestry provides a space where creators, despite audience size, can find new ways to engage with their audience and make a living. This problem among creators is so big that Gamestry now has over 2k highly engaged creators uploading multiple content pieces and millions of their viewers on the platform every month.”
It will surely surprise no one to learn that the typical Gamestry user is a male, aged between 18 and 24.
The startup also told us the “most trending” games on its platform are Minecraft, Free Fire, and Fortnite, adding that “IRL (In Real Life) content is also very successful”.
As well as YouTube Gaming, other platforms competing for similar games-mad eyeballs include Facebook Gaming and Booyah.
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Online learning platform CLASS101 bags $26M Series B to support growth
Everything is switching from offline to online mode, spurred by the pandemic, and that also has turned around things for the creative economy. Creative professionals continue to look for ways to monetize their talents and knowledge through online education platforms like CLASS101 that bring stable incomes and improve opportunities.
CLASS101, a Seoul-based online education platform, announced today it has closed $25.8 million (30 billion won) Series B funding to accelerate its growth in South Korea, the U.S. and Japan.
The Series B round was led by Goodwater Capital, with additional participation from previous backers Strong Ventures, KT Investment, Mirae Asset Capital and Klim Ventures.
In 2019, the company raised a $10.3 million (12 billion won) Series A round led by SoftBank Ventures Asia along with Mirae Asset Venture Investment, KT Investment, Strong Ventures and SpringCamp.
Co-founder and CEO of CLASS101 Monde Ko told TechCrunch that the company will use the proceeds to focus on hiring more talent, as well as expanding domestic business and overseas markets in the U.S. and Japan.
Ko and four other co-founders established CLASS101 in 2018, which was pivoted from a tutoring service platform that was founded in 2015, Ko said. It has 350 employees now.
“We will keep supporting creators to monetize their talents and we will also allow creators to expand their revenue streams by selling their goods, digital files and more products via our platform,” Ko said.
When asked about what differentiated it from other peers, CLASS101 provides and ships all the necessary tools and material “Class Kit”, Ko said.
The company offers more than 2,000 classes within a raft of categories, with drawing, crafts, photography, cooking, music and more. It also provides about 230 classes in the U.S. and 220 classes in Japan. There are approximately 100,000 registered creators and 3 million registered users as of August 2021.
CLASS101 launched its platform in the U.S. in 2019 and entered Japan last year. The company opened online classes for kids aged under 14 in 2020.
“CLASS101 is a company that combines the advantages of Patreon and YouTube, offering tailored support for creators while fulfilling users’ learning needs,” co-founder and managing partner at Goodwater Capital Eric Kim said, adding that it is the fastest growing company “in an economic phenomenon in which individuals follow their passions and do what they really enjoy while also making a living from it.”
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Jerry raises $75M at a $450M valuation to build a car ownership ‘super app’
Just months after raising $28 million, Jerry announced today that it has raised $75 million in a Series C round that values the company at $450 million.
Existing backer Goodwater Capital doubled down on its investment in Jerry, leading the “oversubscribed” round. Bow Capital, Kamerra, Highland Capital Partners and Park West Asset Management also participated in the financing, which brings Jerry’s total raised to $132 million since its 2017 inception. Goodwater Capital also led the startup’s Series B earlier this year. Jerry’s new valuation is about “4x” that of the company at its Series B round, according to co-founder and CEO Art Agrawal.
“What factored into the current valuation is our annual recurring revenue, growing customer base and total addressable market,” he told TechCrunch, declining to be more specific about ARR other than to say it is growing “at a very fast rate.” He also said the company “continues to meet and exceed growth and revenue targets” with its first product, a service for comparing and buying car insurance. At the time of the company’s last raise, Agrawal said Jerry saw its revenue surge by “10x” in 2020 compared to 2019.
Jerry, which says it has evolved its model to a mobile-first car ownership “super app,” aims to save its customers time and money on car expenses. The Palo Alto-based startup launched its car insurance comparison service using artificial intelligence and machine learning in January 2019. It has quietly since amassed nearly 1 million customers across the United States as a licensed insurance broker.
“Today as a consumer, you have to go to multiple different places to deal with different things,” Agrawal said at the time of the company’s last raise. “Jerry is out to change that.”
The new funding round fuels the launch of the company’s “compare-and-buy” marketplaces in new verticals, including financing, repair, warranties, parking, maintenance and “additional money-saving services.” Although Jerry also offers a similar product for home insurance, its focus is on car ownership.
Agrawal told TechCrunch that the company is on track to triple last year’s policy sales, and that its policy sales volume makes Jerry the number one broker for a few of the top 10 insurance carriers.
“The U.S. auto insurance industry is an at least $250 billion market,” he added. “The market opportunity for our first auto financing service is $260 billion. As we enter more car expense categories, our total addressable market continues to grow.”
Image Credits: Jerry
“Access to reliable and affordable transportation is critical to economic empowerment,” said Rafi Syed, Jerry board member and general partner at Bow Capital, which also doubled down on its investment in the company. “Jerry is helping car owners make the most of every dollar they earn. While we see Jerry as an excellent technology investment showcasing the power of data in financial services, it’s also a high-performing investment in terms of the financial inclusion it supports.”
Goodwater Capital Partner Chi-Hua Chien said the firm’s recurring revenue model makes it stand out from lead generation-based car insurance comparison sites.
CEO Agrawal agrees, noting that Jerry’s high-performing annual recurring revenue model has made the company “attractive to investors” in addition to the fact that the startup “straddles” the auto, e-commerce, fintech and insurtech industries.
“We recognized those investment opportunities could drive our business faster and led to raising the round earlier than expected,” he told TechCrunch. “We’re eager to launch new categories to save customers time and money on auto expenses and the new investment shortens our time to market.”
Agrawal also believes Jerry is different from other auto-related marketplaces out there in that it aims to help consumers with various aspects of car ownership (from repair to maintenance to insurance to warranties), rather than just one. The company also believes it is set apart from competitors in that it doesn’t refer a consumer to an insurance carrier’s site so that they still have to do the work of signing up with them separately, for example. Rather, Jerry uses automation to give consumers customized quotes from more than 45 insurance carriers “in 45 seconds.” The consumers can then sign on to the new carrier via Jerry, which can then cancel former policies on their behalf.
Jerry makes recurring revenue from earning a percentage of the premium when a consumer purchases a policy on its site from carriers such as Progressive.
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Novakid’s investors bet $35M that it can teach kids English
If you’re trying to develop fluency in a non-native tongue, language immersion is a crucial part of the learning process. Surrounding yourself with native speakers helps with pronunciation, context building, and most of all, confidence.
But what if you’re an eight-year-old kid in Spain learning English and can’t swing a solo trip to the United States for the summer?
Novakid, founded by Maxim Azarov, wants to be your next best option. The San Francisco-based edtech startup offers virtual-only, English language immersion for kids between the ages of four through 12, by combining a mix of different services from live tutors to gamification.
After closing its $4.25 million Series A round last December, Novakid announced today that it is back with a $35 million Series B financing, led by Owl Ventures and Goodwater Capital. Existing investors also participated in the round, including PortfoLion, LearnStart, TMT Investments, Xploration Capital, LETA Capital and BonAngels.
The startup is raising capital in response to an active start to its year. The company’s active client base grew 350% year over year, currently at over 50,000 paying students. The money will be used to get more students into its universe of tools, as well as help Novakid expand into international markets with high populations of speakers who want to learn English.
The company’s suite of services are built around two principles: First, that it can immerse early-age learners into the world of English at scale, and second, that it can actually be fun to use.
When a user signs up, they are first connected to one of Novakid’s 2,000 live tutors for their first class. Tutors must be native English speakers with a B.A. degree or higher, as well as an international teaching certificate such as DELTA, CELTA, TESOL or TEFL.
“One of the things that is really important, even psychologically, is to start listening to the language, start interacting with a live person, and remove being afraid of not understanding something,” Azarov said. The company wants to recreate the conditions of how a kid likely learned their first language.
In the class, the tutors only speak English, and users are encouraged to do the same to slowly build and mistake their way into confidence. While the live, video-based classes are a key part of Novakid’s product, Azarov said it was important that his company “was not just giving you access to a teacher” as its main value proposition.
“Most of the competitors are taking teachers and making them available remotely so you don’t have to travel and you have a bigger selection,” he said. But if you look at the industry in the bigger picture, guys like Oxford, Cambridge, Pearson who provide content for the language learning industry, their product basically sucks. It’s really bad.” So, Novakid puts most of its energy into rebuilding a curriculum that works with better design, and includes games.
Gamified content lives both in and out of classes. Within the classroom, a teacher may take a student on a VR-enhanced tour through famous landmarks and museums to practice vocabulary. Self-paced content could look like a multiplayer “battle” between two students answering questions within a certain time period to get a better score. Novakid has an entire team dedicated to game design and development.
Students are clicking in. Novakid users spend two-thirds of their time on the website with tutors, and one-third with self-paced content that the company built in-house. The company wants to switch those concentrations because more students are spending time with the asynchronous content around grammar and vocabulary, and teachers are reserved for more complex information like speaking and conversation.
Part of the difficulty of scaling up a language learning business is that users need to stay motivated. Gamification helps with engagement, but Novakid’s clientele of children could also be fast to churn compared to adult learners, simply due to priorities. Azarov said that he sees how some would view selling exclusively to children as a disadvantage, but he views their focus as differentiation.
“You get better brand equity when you’re more focused,” he said. “The way kids learn language is vastly different from the way adults learn language, and I don’t think the general players who do ‘everything from everybody’ will be able to do [the former] as well as we are.” Duolingo recently launched Duolingo ABC, a free English literacy app with hundreds of short-form exercises. While the now-public company has strong branding, Novakid’s strategy differs by adding in more services around live learning and speaking.
So far, the company has proven that its strategy is sticking. Its revenue in 2020 was $9 million, and in 2021 it is expected to hit between $36 million to $45 million in revenue. It declined to disclose the specifics around diversity of the team, but plans to kick off a quite intensive recruiting spree going forward. Azarov plans to add 200 people to his 300-person company in the next six months.
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Mark Cuban-backed Eterneva raises $10M to turn your loved one’s ashes into diamonds
The loss of a loved one is perhaps one of the most traumatic things a person can experience.
When it comes to memorializing someone after their death, most people think of planning funerals and/or picking out caskets or tombstones. And those things are typically done with the help of a funeral home.
Enter Austin-based Eterneva, which is building a rare direct-to-consumer brand in the end-of life space. The four-year-old startup creates diamonds from the cremated ashes or hair of people and pets. It’s a highly unusual business but one that seems to be resonating with people seeking a way to keep a piece of their loved ones close to them after their death.
Since its inception, Eterneva has seen triple-digit growth in sales — including in 2020, when it more than doubled its revenue, according to CEO and co-founder Adelle Archer. And today, the company is announcing an “oversubscribed” $10. million Series A funding round led by Tiger Management with participation from Goodwater Capital, Capstar Ventures, NextCoast Ventures and Dallas billionaire Mark Cuban. (For the unacquainted, Tiger Management is the hedge fund and family office of Julian Robertson from which Tiger Global Management descended.)
“It was an extremely competitive round,” Archer told TechCrunch. “We received three term sheets and were able to put together an all-star investment group.” That investment group included Capstar Managing DIrector Kathryn Cavanaugh, who also joined Eterneva’s board; Lydia Jett — one of the top female partners at Softbank overseeing their $100 billion Vision Fund and Kara Nortman, managing partner at Upfront Capital, one of the first women to make managing partner at a VC fund and co-founder of Angel City with actress Natalie Portman.
Archer and co-founder Garrett Ozar launched Eterneva in the first quarter of 2017 after working together at BigCommerce. The company’s origin story is a very personal one for Archer. Her close friend and business mentor, Tracey Kaufman, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and ended up passing away at the age of 47. With no next of kin, Kaufman left her cremated ashes to her aunt, best friend and Archer.
“We started looking into different options but all the websites we landed on were so lackluster, somber and overwhelming,” Archer recalls. “Tracey was the most amazing person, and I felt like when you lose remarkable people, you needed better options to honor and memorialize them.”
At the time, Archer was working on a lab-grown diamond startup. Over dinner with a diamond scientist during which she was discussing her mentor’s death, the scientist said, “Well, you know Adele, there is carbon in ashes, so we could get the carbon out of Tracey’s ashes and make a diamond.”
The thought blew Archer’s mind.
“I knew that I had to do that, 100%. Tracy was such a vibrant person, it suited her so perfectly,” she said. “And I’d have a part of her with me all the time.”
Eterneva co-founders Garrett Ozar and Adelle Archer. Image Credits: Eterneva
It was the first diamond ever created by Eterneva, and it gave Archer a chance to be a customer of her own product, which she believes has helped in building an experience for her other customers. Soon, she became “fully focused” on the idea, which she viewed as a way to give grieving people “brightness and healing and a beautiful way to honor their loved ones.”
Since inception, Eterneva has created nearly 1,500 diamonds for over 1,000 customers. It can do colorless or nearly any color including black, yellow, blue, orange and green. The entry price for an Eterneva diamond is $2,999 and that goes up based on the size and color. Pets make up about 40% of Eterneva’s business.
“We view ourselves as the complete opposite tone of everything else in this space,” Archer said. “A lot of people are trying to solve planning and logistics around the end of life. We’re about helping people move forward, and building a platform for the celebration of life.”
The process to create the diamond is intricate, according to Archer, taking 7 to 9 months. The intent is to bring the customer along the journey by sharing the process with them at each stage through videos and pictures.
“We do it in parallel with their processing grief, which is super isolating,” Archer said. “They are usually in a different place with their grief than when they first started.”
One of the plans with the new capital is to enable more people to participate in person with the process, such as starting the machine work, or telling the jeweler stories about their loved one and coming up with a custom design that might have little details that represent aspects of their loved one’s life.
The company also plans to use the money to scale their funeral home channel program nationwide via Enterprise partnerships and scaling its operations and capacity in Austin so it can keep up with demand.
Eterneva is banking on the fact that more and more “people don’t want traditional funerals anymore.”
“They want personalization and meaning,” said Archer. “We plan to evolve the platform with different products and services down the road.”
The startup also wants to continue to build awareness around its brand. Recently, it’s seen more than a dozen videos on TikTok about its diamonds go viral, according to Archer.
Prior to the Series A, Eterneva had raised a total of $6.7 million from angels and institutions. Its seed round was a $3 million financing led by Austin-based Springdale Ventures in 2020. Mark Cuban first became an investor in the company when Archer and Ozar appeared on “Shark Tank.” Cuban took a 9% stake in the company in exchange for a $600,000 investment. Despite claims that the company was a scam, Cuban has stood by the science behind it and put money in the latest round as well.
Via email, he told TechCrunch he views an Eterneva diamond as “a unique, socially responsible way to stay connected to loved ones.”
“There is still so much upside and growth in their future,” Cuban wrote. “So I doubled down.”
He went on to describe the creation of diamond from the hair or ashes of a loved one as “such an intense personal commitment.”
“Eternava takes a very emotional and difficult [time] and helps people walk through their journey in a trusted way that I don’t think anyone else can come close to,” Cuban added.
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Berlin’s Tier Mobility scoops up $60M as its scooter-based transportation service passes 10M rides
On the heels of Bird closing a $275 million round to help put itself in pole position in the electric scooter market, a smaller European rival has also raised some money to grow its own business. Tier Mobility, a Berlin-based startup that operates a fleet of 20,000 scooters across 40 cities in 12 countries, has raised $60 million, funding that Tier’s co-founder and CEO Lawrence Leuschner said it would invest in further geographical expansion and its technology.
Tier earlier this year started to describe itself as a “micro mobility” player, with plans to augment scooters with other transportation options, but in an interview Leuschner declined to say what those might be, or when they will come online. In the meantime, it’s been upgrading its fleet to a more robust hardware to cut down on maintenance costs (which has typically been one of the biggest strains on scooter startups): these newer scooters have lifespans of around 18 months and now make up some 80% of Tier’s current fleet, Leuschner said.
This latest funding, a Series B, is being co-led by Mubadala Capital and Goodwater Capital. Mubadala, for background, is the state fund for Abu Dhabi, which is currently the only non-European market where Tier operates. Mubadala made some headlines earlier this year when it was revealed that SoftBank was backing its $400 million fund for European investments. (Indirectly, this also means that SoftBank is backing Tier.)
“We firmly believe that micro-mobility as a form of transportation is here to stay, especially in Europe,” said Amer Alaily from Mubadala Capital in a statement. “We are confident that Tier Mobility is best positioned to become the leading player in Europe and globally. We are excited and look forward to building a global category leading company out of Europe.”
Others in this round include insurance giant Axa Germany, Evli Growth Partners, White Star Capital, Northzone, Speedinvest, Point9, Indico, Kibo Ventures, Market One Capital and — an ironic twist when you consider the reputation of scooter users being somewhat on the reckless side — Formula One racing champion Nico Rosberg. The valuation is not being disclosed.
The scooter market is a crowded one, but Tier’s rapid growth points both to the opportunity for those building services in it, and Tier’s own success.
Since raising its Series A (initially €25 million, but expanded to €32 million in February of this year), Tier has grown to 10 million rides, adding 8 million in the last four months both through its direct services and by way of partnerships with others, such as car rental company Sixt. That growth has led Tier to claim that it is currently the fastest-growing mobility company “in the world.” Leuschner — who co-founded the company with Matthias Laug (now CTO) — said the aggressive goal now is to hit between 3 million and 5 million rides weekly.
That’s impressive growth, but it comes with challenges. The funding today takes the total raised by Tier to around $95 million. However, relatively speaking, that is actually a modest amount when you consider the hundreds of millions raised by the likes of Bird (capital that it’s using in part to grow in Europe in direct competition with Tier) and Lime.
Tier has taken the view, so far, that big money isn’t the only way to build a big service.
“With our Series A funding of €32 million, we built the fastest-growing mobility company,” Leuschner said. “We achieved that with a fraction of the capital of Bird and Lime. That shows how efficiently we are operating. With this round we will now accelerate the growth based on our scalable infrastructure and positive unit economics.”
With the scooter market’s unit economics unlike that of car-based on-demand transportation (the vehicles are owned, and there are not drivers to pay out, for starters), he said that Tier is already profitable in some of its markets.
One of the other big sticking points that has hindered the growth of more scooter services has been regulation, and specifically safety concerns, with reports of faulty software and human error / reckless driving both contributing to a number of accidents.
Leuschner noted that Tier has had around 250 accidents to date across its 10 million rides, with “the vast majority minor accidents.”
“We continue to educate users, but I can’t see a significant safety issue compared to other vehicles,” he added. “I think Tier has taken a leadership role in safety with the safest scooter on the market, permanent education of our users and insurance for every driver in every city.”
In this regard, having an insurance company — Axa — now on board as a strategic investor will potentially see both more safety initiatives rolled out by Tier, but also potentially the emergence of insurance policies provided to customers as part of the service.
All told, the strong growth on the back of conservative capital, combined with the experience of the founders (Laug had also been the co-founder of Lieferando, one of the first big food delivery startups in Europe), and that interesting backing from big industry players, has all contributed to an optimistic outlook from investors.
“Tier Mobility is not only the fastest-growing mobility company in the world, but one of the fastest-growing companies in consumer tech history,” noted Chi-Hua Chien, the star investor and Goodwater Capital co-founder who had previously been at Kleiner Perkins and before that Accel.
“With phenomenal execution they have emerged as the leading micromobility provider in Europe on only a fraction of the invested capital of their competitors. This is a true testament to the uniquely capital efficient and profitable model the team chose to deploy from the outset. Tier’s unique approach to operations and partnerships yields superior unit economics and defensibility.”
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Wedding dress customizer Anomalie raises $13M as bridal stores crumble
David’s Bridal once owned 50% of the $36 billion wedding gown market before it filed for bankruptcy last year. Brides were growing sick of the lack of styles and sizes plus high prices at expensive brick & mortar shops. The industry was destined for disruption by software that would replace overhead costs and inflexibility with direct-to-consumer personalization.
That’s why I profiled a new custom wedding dress startup back in 2016 called Anomalie despite little funding or traction. The rise of Instagram meant every bride wanted to look unique on a budget, not pay $5000 for a cookie-cutter $200 dress that happened to be white. Anomalie was willing to embrace software to offer 4 billion design permutations and break the markup cartel by selling gowns starting at $1000.
2.5 years later, Anomalie has begun to prove that cheaper doesn’t have to look cheap and custom doesn’t have to cause a headache. 13% of US brides, 275,000 out of 2.1 million, created an Anomalie account in the last year. With David’s Bridal looking shaky and wedding dresses being a seven-times larger market than bedding and mattresses, investors eagerly proposed to Anomalie. Today the startup announces a $13.6 million Series A led by consumer product VC Goodwater Capital .
“I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of working with brides. Other companies would kill for this costumer. She’s so obsessed with every detail of her wedding dress. it’s just a perfect environment to collect data” says Anomalie co-founder and CEO Leslie Voorhees. “Long lead time, high margin, this industry that’s completely f*cked up — it’s the perfect place to start this mass customization engine beginning with the wedding dress” she tells me, hinting at the startup’s potential to customize other clothing too.
Anomalie is also flexing its tech muscle today with the launch of its new dress sketch visualizer. Choose between a few options on shape, cut, color, pattern, and fabric, and you’ll see an algorithmic sketch of your dream dress appear instantly. Anomalie then pairs you with a squad of its designers to finalize the details, ship swatches, and get you your gown with a 100% refund policy if it’s not right.
The startup’s nest egg will go towards hiring more engineers plus bringing more of production in-house to offer additional features like this. But Voorhees insists that “I don’t think we’ll ever completely automate away the stylists. Customer don’t care about AI or machine learning, but they want to trust us to pull the ideas out of their heads.”
Anomalie co-founder and CEO Leslie Voorhees
Anomalie was woven out of Voorhees’ frustrations picking her own wedding dress. She’d been managing factories and supply chains in Asia for Nike and Apple, and it made no sense why slapping “bridal” on a dress could make it up to ten-times more expensive.
Her investigation uncovered that most brands were outsourcing their manufacturing, so she did an end-run, contacted factories directly, and got her dress made custom for a fraction of the price. So many of her pals demanded help doing the same that the Harvard Business School grad soft-launched Anomalie with her husband Calley Means [Disclosure: who I know from college] in the summer of 2016.
The startup’s gowns now average $1,400. Growth has been swift since weddings are so photographed and shared, with Anomalie reaching an outstanding net promoter score of 91. A friend of mine recently bought her dess through the company and it looked stunning and one-of-a-kind without breaking the bank. And since they’re custom, Anomalie makes inclusivity and advantage by offering larger sizes absent elsewhere
Meanwhile, Anomalie’s incumbent competitors have struggled. Gap and J.Crew abandoned the wedding dress business in the last few years. David’s Bridal emerged from bankruptcy with its 300 retail stores still operating, but it’s slipped to 30 percent US market share. It’s now owned by lenders including Oaktree Capital Group, which is a bad omen given that firm was responsible for driving Toys”R”Us into liquidation instead of keeping it open. No other players have a sizable foot or well-known brand besides super high-end designer Vera Wang.
Anomalie capitalized on David’s troubles by poaching its head of bridal production Angela Ng, who now leads the startup’s Hong Kong team and relieves Voorhees of constant trips to China. It also hired former Sephora VP of digital Marcy Zelmar and former TrueCar VP of engineering Aaron Tavistock. Their goal is to sell more dresses to get Anomalie more data, more factory modularization, and more control over its manufacturing.
Anomalie’s dress visualizer turns a few style selections into a sketch of your potential gown
The new funding round that builds on its $4.5 million seed round was joined by Signia, SoGal Ventures, Lerer Hippeau’s BN Capital Fund, and Fin’s Sam Lessin also includes strategic angels like former Stitch Fix CTO Jeff Barrett and ThirdLove underwear CEO Heidi Zak. At Anomalie’s San Francisco headquarters, mannequins sporting design prototypes stand beside software teams optimizing the new dress visualizer. And when I say the dresses are custom, I mean they can get about as weird as you want. Anomalie is finishing up a dress with lyrics from the couple’s favorite song embroidered in a secret language from their favorite TV show…and it still looks beautiful.
“One of the coolest things about Anomalie is that they’re not just using digital as a distribution strategy, but to also deliver a differentiated product experience” says Goodwater partner Eric Kim. “Anomalie’s sketch-builder is a great expression of this emphasis on product and customer centricity.” Wedding dresses have been largely ignored by startups despite the market being bigger than luggage ($34 billion), or shaving ($21 billion), oral care ($10 billion) and hair loss ($4 billion) combined.
The challenge is that unlike those products, bridal gowns are “a zero failure game. This is like airplane engines and heart rate monitors” Voorhees stresses. Anomalie must maintain perfect quality, times, and customer experience to avoid ruining someone’s big day. “Never messing up a dress or losing a dress — we take this really, really seriously.” She knows a few viral disasters could sink the ship. It also has to stay ahead of fresh entrants like COUTURME, a new Y Combinator startup making custom evening gowns as well as wedding dresses.
Anomalie’s SF headquarters. Photo by Summer Wilson
Anomalie sees global demand for a better experience, and thinks it can apply its data set to wedding dresses for more cultures as well as additional types of clothing. “We are building up a large repository of female measurements and creating tech plus operational processes around ‘mass customization’ that can be applied to other garments” Voorhees reveals. “Our aspirations are around bringing more body inclusivity + customization to women’s fashion, not just bridal.”
And while Anomalie could always find a retail partner to get more exposure, it’s tough for brick & mortar brands to operate online without cannibalizing their sales. “We think the women’s closet of the future contains staples from Stitch Fix, rotating dresses from Rent the Runway, and signature custom garments from Anomalie.”
The Anomalie just needs to educate brides that they can actually have the dress of their dreams, and now it wants to inspire that dream on-site too. Full of ambition and verve, Voorhees concludes, “What’s Pinterest valued at when it’s basically a wedding dress search engine?”
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Youper, a chatbot that helps users navigate their emotions, raises $3 million in seed funding
Youper, a mental health app with a chatbot it calls an “emotional health assistant,” has raised $3 million in seed funding from Goodwater Capital. The funds will be used to accelerate development of Youper’s artificial intelligence-based capabilities and grow its user base.
Based in San Francisco, Youper was co-founded in 2016 by Dr. Jose Hamilton. For a decade, Hamilton worked as a psychiatrist in clinical settings, seeing more than 3,000 patients. While talking to them, he realized that a handful of barriers kept many people from seeking help earlier, even if they had dealt with anxiety or depression for years.
“The first one is fear, taking care of yourself, talking about your mental health, understanding your mental health,” he tells TechCrunch. “Seeing a therapist or psychiatrist is super intimidating. That’s why all of my patients used to say the same things. The second barrier is cost, of course. Psychiatrists and therapists are super expensive.”
Hamilton teamed up with co-founders Diego Couto, the startup’s chief product and growth officer, and Thiago Marafon, its CTO, to create an app that would make mental healthcare less intimidating and more accessible. They originally created an app that did not have a conversational interface. Instead, Hamilton says it took a similar approach to Calm and Headspace. But that resulted in a very low user engagement rate and, after a year, the team realized Youper needed to provide a more personalized experience, matching users to the right psychological techniques, including cognitive behavioral techniques and mindfulness, for their needs.
Youper is part of a growing roster of apps that use AI-based chatbots to help users improve their emotional health, including Woebot, Wysa and X2’s Tess. Hamilton says Youper wants to differentiate with its focus on personalization, combining mental health research and user data to match the right psychological techniques with users.
Screenshots from Youper, an app for emotional well-being.
The startup claims Youper has been downloaded more than one million times so far. Most of its users are young adults, and there are more women than men who use Youper.
“I think that’s because women are facing new challenges in our society by conquering new spaces and assuming new roles, and that poses an emotional toll. Another reason is that women are more tuned into self-care than men,” he says. “Sometimes I feel that we men wait for too long suffering in silence.”
For users who have never consulted with a provider, Youper provides a gentle introduction to the types of questions and exercises they might experience in therapy. The questions and exercises given by Youper’s chatbot are meant to help users achieve a better understanding of their emotions, thoughts and behavior.
Youper’s chatbot asks users to focus on their thoughts and identify how they are feeling from a menu of descriptive words. Then a scale lets them rate the strength of that emotion from “slightly” to “extremely.” More questions help them narrow down what is causing those feelings and track their mood. Users are also given options for mindfulness exercises and journaling prompts.
Hamilton says that the average time users spend during each session with its chatbot is about seven minutes, with 80% reporting a reduction in negative moods after one conversation. The startup also claims that after 30 days, a quarter of people who signed up for Youper are still active users.
Youper is currently free, though the company may test a freemium model in the future with premium features. It uses anonymized user data in its own research to improve Youper, but keeps it private and does not share or sell user data or information.
Of course, an app is not a replacement for seeing a therapist or psychiatrist, but Youper presents a much lower barrier to entry for people who worried about the stigma of seeing a professional. Hamilton says he hopes using Youper will encourage more people to seek medical treatment sooner if they need it by making them more comfortable with the idea of discussing their emotional health.
“On average, it takes 10 years for someone to finally talk to a health provider. This could become 10 minutes with an app like Youper,” Hamilton says. “Having an app with a super low barrier to entry, no stigma, something that is about emotional health and taking care of yourself, shows that you don’t need to be afraid.”
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Pinterest prices IPO above range
Pinterest priced shares of its stock, “PINS,” above its anticipated range on Wednesday evening, CNBC reports. The company will sell 75 million shares of Class A common stock at $19 apiece in an offering that will attract $1.4 billion in new capital for the visual search engine.
The NYSE-listed business had planned to sell its shares at between $15 to $17 and didn’t increase the size of its planned offering prior to Wednesday’s pricing.
Valued at $12.3 billion in 2017, the initial public offering gives Pinterest a fully diluted market cap of $12.6 billion.
The IPO has been a long time coming for the nearly 10-year-old company led by co-founder and chief executive officer Ben Silbermann . Given Wall Street’s lackluster demand for ride-hailing company Lyft, another consumer technology stock that recently made its Nasdaq debut, it’s unclear just how well Pinterest will perform in the days, weeks, months and years to come. Pinterest is unprofitable like its fellow unicorns Lyft and Uber, but its financials, disclosed in its IPO prospectus, illustrate a clear path to profitability. As for Lyft and Uber, Wall Street analysts, among others, still question whether either of the businesses will ever achieve profitability.
Eric Kim of consumer tech investment firm Goodwater Capital says despite the fact that Pinterest and Lyft are very different companies, Lyft’s falling stock has undoubtedly impacted Pinterest’s offering.
“They are so close together, it’s hard for those not to influence one another,” Kim told TechCrunch. “It’s a much different category, but they are still both consumer tech and they will both be trading at a double-digital revenue multiple.
The San Francisco-based company posted revenue of $755.9 million in the year ending December 31, 2018 — 16 times less than its latest decacorn valuation — on losses of $62.9 million. That’s up from $472.8 million in revenue in 2017 on losses of $130 million.
The stock offering represents a big liquidity event for a handful of investors. Pinterest had raised a modest $1.47 billion in equity funding from Bessemer Venture Partners, which holds a 13.1 percent pre-IPO stake, FirstMark Capital (9.8 percent), Andreessen Horowitz (9.6 percent), Fidelity Investments (7.1 percent) and Valiant Capital Partners (6 percent). Bessemer’s stake is worth upwards of $1 billion. FirstMark and a16z’s shares will be worth more than $700 million each.
Zoom — another tech company going public on Thursday that, unlike its peers, is actually profitable — priced its shares on Wednesday too after increasing the price range of its IPO earlier this week. The price values Zoom at roughly $9 billion, nearly surpassing Pinterest, an impressive feat considering Zoom was last valued at $1 billion in 2017 around when Pinterest’s Series H valued it at a whopping $12.3 billion.
Profitability, as it turns out, may mean more to Wall Street than Silicon Valley thinks.
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Dote raises $12M and introduces live-streamed Shopping Parties
Mobile shopping startup Dote is announcing $12 million in new funding, as well as a new feature called Shopping Party.
Founder and CEO Lauren Farleigh said her initial goal was to create “a truly native mobile experience” that made it “easy to check out across a lot of different stores.”
Over time, recommendations from social media influencers have become a big part of the app. With Shopping Party, they’re taking center stage — the feature allows them to share live video while browsing different products on Dote and chatting with fans.
Farleigh said the idea came from a trip she took with Dote influencers to Fiji last fall. She described watching them shop and talk together at the airport, and in what she said was an “ah-ha moment,” she realized that there’s an experience that was “lost when we stopped going to the mall with our friends.”
She added that influencers embraced the idea, with some telling her, “We love going live on Instagram [but] it’s challenging because there’s no shared experience for us to have that meaningful interaction over. It usually turns into the same Q&A over and over again.”
Dote CEO Lauren Farleigh
Shopping Party offers one solution to that issue, because you’re actually browsing and talking about specific products in the Dote app. Apparently this was a real technical challenge — Shopping Party is leveraging Apple’s ReplayKit 2 framework to deliver two live streams (one from the phone camera, one from the Dote app) while also incorporating live chats.
Farleigh, who previously worked as a product manager at mobile gaming company Pocket Gems, also compared this to game streaming on Twitch, except for shopping.
To kick things off, Dote plans to host two Shopping Parties every hour from 6am to 10am Pacific time for the next two weeks. (The company says the average Shopping Party lasts about 15 minutes.) There also will be Shopping Parties sponsored by specific brands.
As for the funding, it was led by Goodwater Capital, with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Harrison Metal. Dote has now raised a total of $23 million.
“[Dote’s] customer-centric shopping platform uniquely blends innovative technologies such as live-streaming with relevant and fun social features, setting the standard for how all major brands and retailers will connect with Gen Z,” said Goodwater Managing Partner Eric Kim in a statement. “We’re thrilled to partner with them to accelerate this transformation.”
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