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Mattress startup Casper valued at $1.1B with new funding
Direct-to-consumer mattress business Casper has secured a $100 million Series D investment from existing investors Target, NEA, IVP and Norwest Venture Partners.
The fresh infusion of capital values Casper at $1.1 billion, Bloomberg first reported and Casper confirmed.
“We are in the very early chapters of our growth story as demand for Casper products continues to expand across the globe,” Casper chief executive officer and co-founder Philip Krim said in a statement. “Today’s financing accelerates Casper’s vision to become the world’s largest end-to-end sleep company. Our growth will continue to be catalyzed by state-of-the-art sleep products, best-in-class customer experiences, and world-class leadership.”
Casper posted $373 million in net revenue in 2018, according to leaked financials published by The Information this week. In a press release issued today, however, Casper said 2018 revenue topped $400 million. The company, of course, isn’t profitable, with losses reaching $64 million last year, again per The Information. According to Casper’s projections, it will become profitable on an EBITDA basis in 2019 and is expecting revenues of $556 million this year.
Casper has previously raised $240 million in equity funding from celebrity investors Leonardo DiCaprio and 50 Cent, as well as institutional investors, including Lerer Hippeau .
Founded in 2014, the New York business will use the latest investment to expand overseas and open additional brick-and-mortar stores. Competing with other well-funded startups in the business of sleep, like the publicly traded Purple and the VC-backed Leesa Sleep, Casper has taken to physical retail to augment its following. The company opened its first store in New York City in 2018 and has detailed additional plans to open another 200 stores.
An initial public offering is likely the next step for the sleep products retailer, which sells pillows and an $89 sleep-friendly light, in addition to mattresses. Per a recent Reuters report, Casper is in the process of hiring underwriters for its IPO.
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Vangst just raised $10 million to plug more people into the fast-growing cannabis industry
People are increasingly interested in finding a way to participate in the cannabis industry, and for good reason. It’s growing like a weed (yes, we said it). According to a San Francisco-based research company, Grand View Research, the global legal marijuana market is expected to reach $146.4 billion by the end of 2025.
Still, it isn’t easy for potential recruits to know where to look for both temporary and permanent jobs, and it’s just as challenging for companies to find candidates who understand their business. Enter Vangst, a now three-year-old, Denver-based startup that just raised $10 million in Series A funding from earlier backers Casa Verde Capital and Lerer Hippeau to become the go-to recruiting platform for the industry, even while going up against several older entrants, including Seattle-based Viridian Staffing and Ganjapreneur, in Bellingham, Wash.
Yesterday, we with chatted with the CEO and founder of the now 70-person company, Karson Humiston, about launching the platform in college, and why she isn’t so worried about the competition. She also shared some interesting stats around how much cannabis jobs pay.
TC: Some people launch startups in college. Not many of them grow them into sustainable companies. How did Vangst get going?
KH: I went to St. Lawrence [University] and while there, I’d started a student travel company and compiled a database of students and recent grads — people who’d gone on trips through the startup or expressed an interest in going on trips. The spring of my senior year, in 2015, I sent an email to all of them asking what jobs they were interested in, and more than 70 percent said the cannabis industry.
TC: Wow, interesting.
KH: That was my reaction, but living in upstate New York where recreational cannabis isn’t yet legal, I didn’t know a lot about it. So I took a weekend off from school to go to a trade show in Colorado, where I saw everything from cultivation to extraction to retail to ancillary businesses. And when I asked what jobs they were looking to fill, they said, essentially, everything: a director of cultivation, retail dispensary store managers, HR, marketing. They all said it was their top pain point because if they posted on a traditional jobs board — and remember, this was 2015 — the listing would often get taken down. Meanwhile, there was no industry-specific resource because [marijuana] is federally illegal.
TC: So you dropped the travel startup idea and pursued this. Where did you start?
KH: First, I rushed back to St. Lawrence and made an inexpensive site on Wix and started connecting people in my database with summer internships. I’d told the companies I’d met with that I could find them employees for $500 and I called this new company Graduana, [with the tagline] green jobs for grads. My thought was, I’ll go to Colorado and do Graduana for six months and see where the industry really is.
By the spring of 2016, I realized that demand far exceeded interns and recent grads and that we needed to find recruiters who know what they’re doing. We brought on recruiters who were just focused on cultivation, for example, and who know the difference between someone who can grow cannabis in the garage and someone who has done large-scale agricultural growing. They they started pulling in people from the tomato and tulip and big commercial ag who’ve grown [plants] in big state-of-the-art greenhouses and could bring important skills to the table. We also brought in recruiters to just focus on the retail side of things.
It became this profitable, 25-person, boutique staffing agency. But we also saw an opportunity for on-demand labor, because of the seasonality of the industry. Cannabis grows, then it needs to be trimmed and packaged. . .
TC: So it was time for venture capital?
KH: When you’re talking about temporary staffing, it’s really been done manually in this industry, so we wanted to build a platform that would notify candidates that a certain company needs 20 trimmers and is willing to pay $12 an hour and where, meanwhile, employers could see that someone has trimmed for 2,000 hours. And each could rate each other. So we needed to hire engineering and a customer success team and legal, and our revenue wasn’t going to cover those costs.
Thankfully, a founder friend in the space, Ryan Smith of LeafLink, introduced us to Lerer Hippeau when he heard were raising a seed round. We received a warm intro to Casa Verde, too. And both have been amazingly helpful to us.
TC: Are you still doing high-end hiring, too?
KH: We are. Revenue from that piece of our business, where we’re helping companies find maybe COOs or a director of cultivation or extraction, more than doubled last year and continues to be profitable. We get 1,000 resumes some days. We now have 200,000 job candidates on the platform.
TC: Obviously, you’re charging employers different amounts depending on the the type of role that you’re filling. Can you share some specifics?
KH: Right. On the direct hire side, we take a percentage of their first year’s salary. On the gig side, a company tells us how much they’d like to pay for gig workers, and there’s a mark-up on that that we keep.
TC: No matter how long that person works for your client?
KH: It’s usually for a matter of weeks. If it’s longer than that, we charge them a buyout fee [to step out of the relationship].
TC: I take it you’re marketing the service to college students largely.
KH: We market the service through career fairs that we throw in different states, and at trade shows in and out of the industry. We also spend time going to college campuses. But our acquisition costs have been relatively low. Everyone who gets placed with us is known as an original Vangster and we do Vangster nights, where anyone in our network can bring a friend and we can help turn them into employees, too.
TC: More states are legalizing recreational cannabis; how are you drumming up workforces in different places?
KH: We have a team now in Denver, in Santa Monica and a small team in Oakland, and as we launch additional cities for Vangst gigs, we’re hiring managers and people who can do client outreach and candidate vetting and onboarding. We just hired an early employee of Uber, Will Zinsmeister, who helped oversee the launch of cities in Texas for Uber, so we’re excited to have Will and others thinking through supply-and-demand issues as we launch more widely.
TC: Out of curiosity, how much do cannabis jobs pay, and how many people work in the industry right now — do you have any idea?
KH: I think there’s more than 160,000 employees across the cannabis industry right now, and by 2022, the industry is expected to grow to around 340,000 full-time employees.
We did survey 1,500 people to put together a salary guide and one of the questions we asked was how much of their labor needs are seasonable versus otherwise, and they said about 30 percent.
As for the salaries, the on-demand jobs are very in line with other industries. When it comes to full-time jobs, outside sales jobs pay on average a salary of $73,000, which is in line with other outside sales jobs. On the higher end, a compliance manager can make $149,000, a director of extraction makes on average $191,000, and a director of cultivation on the high end can make $250,000.
TC: I think that’s more than people might have imagined. Who is landing these higher-end jobs other than people with backgrounds in traditional large-scale farming?
KH: You’re seeing people graduating with a degree in botany who’ve maybe worked for a cannabis company for six years and are seen as having very unique experience. We’re seeing a lot of clients in Maryland and other places saying they want candidates from Colorado.
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K Health raises $25M for its AI-powered primary care platform
K Health, the startup providing consumers with an AI-powered primary care platform, has raised $25 million in Series B funding. The round was led by 14W, Comcast Ventures and Mangrove Capital Partners, with participation from Lerer Hippeau, BoxGroup and Max Ventures — all previous investors from the company’s seed or Series A rounds. Other previous investors include Primary Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners.
Co-founded and led by former Vroom CEO and Wix co-CEO Allon Bloch, K Health (previously Kang Health) looks to equip consumers with a free and easy-to-use application that can provide accurate, personalized, data-driven information about their symptoms and health.
“When your child says their head hurts, you can play doctor for the first two questions or so — where does it hurt? How does it hurt?” Bloch explained in a conversation with TechCrunch. “Then it gets complex really quickly. Are they nauseous or vomiting? Did anything unusual happen? Did you come back from a trip somewhere? Doctors then use differential diagnosis to prove that it’s a tension headache versus other things by ruling out a whole list of chronic or unusual conditions based on their deep knowledge sets.”
K Health’s platform, which currently focuses on primary care, effectively looks to perform a simulation and data-driven version of the differential diagnosis process. On the company’s free mobile app, users spend three-to-four minutes answering an average of 21 questions about their background and the symptoms they’re experiencing.
Using a data set of two billion historical health events over the past 20 years — compiled from doctors’ notes, lab results, hospitalizations, drug statistics and outcome data — K Health is able to compare users to those with similar symptoms and medical histories before zeroing in on a diagnosis.
With its expansive comparative approach, the platform hopes to offer vastly more thorough, precise and user-specific diagnostic information relative to existing consumer alternatives, like WebMD or, what Bloch calls “Dr. Google,” which often produce broad, downright frightening and inaccurate diagnoses.
Ease and efficiency for both consumers and physicians
Users are able to see cases and diagnoses that had symptoms similar to their own, with K Health notifying users with serious conditions when to consider seeking immediate care. (K Health Press Image / K Health / https://www.khealth.ai)
In addition to pure peace of mind, the utility provided to consumers is clear. With more accurate at-home diagnostic information, users are able to make better preventative health decisions, avoid costly and unnecessary trips to in-person care centers or appointments with telehealth providers and engage in constructive conversations with physicians when they do opt for in-person consultations.
K Health isn’t looking to replace doctors, and, in fact, believes its platform can unlock tremendous value for physicians and the broader healthcare system by enabling better resource allocation.
Without access to quality, personalized medical information at home, many defer to in-person doctor visits even when it may not be necessary. And with around one primary care physician per 1,000 people in the U.S., primary care practitioners are subsequently faced with an overwhelming number of patients and are unable to focus on more complex cases that may require more time and resources. The high volume of patients also forces physicians to allocate budgets for support staff to help interact with patients, collect initial background information and perform less-demanding tasks.
K Health believes that by providing an accurate alternative for those with lighter or more trivial symptoms, it can help lower unnecessary in-person visits, reduce costs for practices and allow physicians to focus on complicated, rare or resource-intensive cases, where their expertise can be most useful and where brute machine processing power is less valuable.
The startup is looking to enhance the platform’s symbiotic patient-doctor benefits further in early-2019, when it plans to launch in-app capabilities that allow users to share their AI-driven health conversations directly with physicians, hopefully reducing time spent on information gathering and enabling more-informed treatment.
With K Health’s AI and machine learning capabilities, the platform also gets smarter with every conversation as it captures more outcomes, hopefully enriching the system and becoming more valuable to all parties over time. Initial results seem promising, with K Health currently boasting around 500,000 users, most having joined since this past July.
Using access and affordability to improve global health outcomes
With the latest round, the company has raised a total of $37.5 million since its late-2016 founding. K Health plans to use the capital to ramp up marketing efforts, further refine its product and technology and perform additional research to identify methods for earlier detection and areas outside of primary care where the platform may be valuable.
Longer term, the platform has much broader aspirations of driving better health outcomes, normalizing better preventative health behavior and creating more efficient and affordable global healthcare systems.
The high costs of the American healthcare system and the impacts they have on health behavior has been well-documented. With heavy co-pays, premiums and treatment cost, many avoid primary care altogether or opt for more reactionary treatment, leading to worse health outcomes overall.
Issues seen in the American healthcare system are also observable in many emerging market countries with less medical infrastructure. According to the World Health Organization, the international standard for the number of citizens per primary care physician is one for every 1,500 to 2,000 people, with some countries facing much steeper gaps — such as China, where there is only one primary care doctor for every 6,666.
The startup hopes it can help limit the immense costs associated with emerging countries educating millions of doctors for eight-to-10 years and help provide more efficient and accessible healthcare systems much more quickly.
By reducing primary care costs for consumers and operating costs for medical practices, while creating a more convenient diagnostic experience, K Health believes it can improve access to information, ultimately driving earlier detection and better health outcomes for consumers everywhere.
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