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Bunch adds $1M to its seed round to flesh out its leadership learning app
This morning Bunch announced that it has closed a total of $4.4 million in seed capital, including a new $1 million infusion this week. The company’s product, a mobile app, focuses on teaching leadership skills to the younger generations more accustomed to learning in smaller chunks, often on the go.
Don’t roll your eyes, all ye who attended business school. The concept has traction.
Earlier this month TechCrunch covered Arist, for example, a startup that provides corporate training delivered to end-users via text. That company added $2 million to its prior raise, bringing its round to a total of $3.9 million. To see Bunch pick up some extra cash is therefore not too surprising.
TechCrunch caught up with Bunch CEO and co-founder Darja Gutnick and M13 partner and Bunch-backer Karl Alomar to chat about the round and what the startup is up to.
Bunch claims to be an “AI coach” that provides users with daily, short-form tips and tricks to become a better leader. Given that we have all either worked for a manager who could have used some more training, or been that manager ourselves, the idea isn’t a bad one.
As you would expect, Bunch tailors itself to individual users. Gutnick told TechCrunch that her company has partnered with academics to detail different leadership style “archetypes” as part of its foundation. The Bunch system also molds its out to a user’s style and leadership goals.
Notably when TechCrunch last covered Bunch, it was working on something a bit different. Back in 2017, the company was building what we described as “Google Analytics for company culture.” Since then the startup has shifted its focus to individuals instead of companies.
Bunch’s service launched in November, leading to around 13,000 signups by the start of the year. The startup now claims nearly 20,000. And it has big product plans for the next few months. That’s why the company raised more money, and why Alomar and his firm were willing to put more capital into the startup.
What’s ahead that got M13 sufficiently excited that it put more capital into Bunch? Alomar said that community and peer-review features are coming. It was a good time, he explained, to put more money into Gutnick’s company so that it can build, and then raise more capital later on after it gets some more work done.
The company plans to make money via a freemium offering. Gutnick told TechCrunch that related apps in her category tend to struggle with retention, so they charge up front and then don’t mind limited usage later on. She wants to flip that.
And there’s more to come from Bunch, like other categories of content. But the startup wants to focus and get its first niche done right. It now has another million dollars to prove that its early traction isn’t just that.
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Podz turns podcasts into a personalized audio newsfeed
Podz is the latest startup trying to solve the problem of podcast discovery, with backing from investors like M13, Katie Couric and Paris Hilton.
“Even though podcasts have gained a lot of momentum — there are 100 million folks in the U.S. who listen to podcasts — we still haven’t seen that crossover behavior, where audio becomes a part of everyday lives,” CEO Doug Imbruce argued. “We think that’s because the experience of discovering and consuming podcasts is ancient. It literally feels like browsing the web in 1997.”
Imbruce’s name may be familiar to longtime TechCrunch readers, as he was previously the chief executive at Qwiki, which won the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2010 (Cloudflare was one of the runners up), then acquired by Yahoo a few years later.
By Imbruce’s own admission, Qwiki never quite lived up to his hopes for remaking online media consumption, but he said that its vision of “machine-created media” offered “a taste of the future” — a future that he’s hoping to help usher in with Podz.
The problem the startup aims to solve is pretty straightforward. Because podcasts often consist of 30 or 60 minutes or more of spoken-word audio, they’re difficult to browse, and when you discover new ones, it’s usually through word-of-mouth recommendations or clunky search tools.
While tools like Headliner make it easier for podcasters to promote their content with short clips on social media, Podz automates that creation process and makes those clips the centerpiece of the listening experience.
Image Credits: Podz
In the Podz mobile app, users browse what the startup calls “the first audio newsfeed,” consisting of 60-second podcast clips. These clips are designed to highlight the best moment from each podcast, making it easier to sample a much wider array of titles than the ones to which you currently subscribe. Each clip should stand on its own, but if you want to dive deeper, you can save the full episode for listening later.
These clips are created automatically, and Imbruce said “the beating heart of the Podz platform” is a machine learning model that “identifies the most engaging parts of podcasts.” The model was trained on more than 100,000 hours of audio, in consultation with journalists and audio editors.
For example, here are the clips chosen from the three most recent episodes of the Original Content podcast — our reviews of “Soul,” “The White Tiger” and “Bridgerton.” Each clip seems reasonably self-contained, and although I was a little dismayed to discover that they all focused on me (rather than my more eloquent co-hosts), a Podz spokesperson explained that’s because the app focuses on “the highest density speakers.”
The Podz newsfeed is personalized to your interests (and, if you choose, it also can draw on the podcasts you follow in Apple Podcasts and the accounts you follow on Twitter). Imbruce said it should become smarter over time as it observes listener behavior.
He added that the team is hoping to introduce more creative and monetization tools for podcasters over time: “We are really hopeful that we can both increase amount of audio being created by 10x and increase the monetization of audio by 100x.”
In addition to Imbruce, the Podz founding team includes CTO Seye Ojumu, Head of Design Rasmus Zwickson and iOS lead Greg Page. The startup has raised $2.5 million in pre-seed funding from M13, Canaan Partners, Charge Ventures and Humbition, as well as notable angel investors like Couric, Hilton (who’s launching her own podcast) and Mara Schiavocampo (The Trend Reporter).
“We are living in a golden age of audio, but only 1% of podcasts reach an audience of 5,000+,” M13 General Partner Latif Peracha told me via email. “Podz plans to grow the audience for existing audio but the real focus will be on growing new audio by leveraging their creator tools. Already, the average podcast listener subscribes to seven podcasts but follows almost 30 on Podz. Early signals make us optimistic the team can build a transformative product in the category.”
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Tarform unveils Luna e-moto for folks who may not like motorcycles
Brooklyn-based EV startup Tarform unveiled its Luna electric motorcycle in New York last week — a model designed for an audience that may not actually like motorcycles.
The company’s first street-legal entrant starts at $24,000, does 0-60 mph in 3.8 seconds, has a city range of 120 miles, hits a top-speed of 120 mph and charges to 80% in 50 minutes — according to company specs.
The model was hatched out of the company’s mission to meld aesthetic design and craftsmanship to environmental sustainability in two-wheeled electric vehicles.
To that end, the Luna incorporates a number of unique, eco-design features. The bodywork is made from a flax seed weave and the overall motorcycle engineering avoids use of plastics. The Luna’s seat upholstery is made out of biodegradable vegan leather. Tarform is also testing methods to avoid paints and primers on its motorcycles, instead using a mono-material infused with algae and iron-based metallic pigments.
The company was founded by Swede Taras Kravtchouk — an industrial design specialist, former startup head and passionate motorcyclist. The Luna launch follows the debut of two concept e-motos in 2018.
Image Credits: Jake Bright
On Tarform’s target market, he explained the startup hopes to attract those who may be turned off by the very things that have turned people on to motorcycling over the last 50 years — namely gas, chrome, noise and fumes.
“It’s more for people who want a custom bike and the techies: people who wanted to have a motorcycle but didn’t want to be associated with the whole stigmatized motorcycle lifestyle,” Kravtchouk told TechCrunch.
Tarform enters the EV arena with competition from several e-moto startups — and on OEM — that are attempting to convert gas riders to electric and attract a younger generation to motorcycling.
One of the leaders is California company Zero Motorcycles, with 200 dealers worldwide. Zero introduced its $19,000 SR/F in 2019, with a 161-mile city range, one-hour charge capability and a top speed of 124 mph. Italy’s Energica is also expanding distribution of its high-performance e-motos in the U.S.
In 2020, Harley-Davidson became the first of the big gas manufacturers to offer a street-legal e-motorcycle for sale in the U.S., the $29,000 LiveWire.
And Canadian startup Damon Motors debuted its 200 mph, $24,000 Hypersport this year, which offers proprietary safety and ergonomics tech for adjustable riding positions and blind-spot detection.
On how Tarform plans to compete with these e-motorcycle players, Kravtchouk explained that’s not the company’s priority. “We’re not even close in production to Zero or the other big guys, but that’s not our intention. Think of the [Luna] as a custom production bike,” he said.
“We did not set out to build a bike that is fastest or has the longest range,” Kravtchouk added. “We set out to build a bike that completely revises the manufacturing and supply chain of e-motorcycles in a way where we ethically source our materials and create an ethical supply chain.”
For this mission, Tarform has obtained funding from several family offices and angel investors, including LA-located M13. The Brooklyn-based e-motorcycle company is taking pre-orders on its new Luna and is pursuing a Series A funding round for 2021, according to Kravtchouk.
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