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Extra Crunch roundup: EU insurtech, 30 years of ‘Crossing the Chasm,’ embedded finance’s endgame
This morning, Anna Heim and Alex Wilhelm dug into the EU insurtech market, interviewing European VCs and collating the biggest recent rounds to take the temperature of the waters across the pond:
- Alex Timm, CEO, Root
- Dan Preston, CEO, MetroMile
- Luca Bocchio, partner, Accel
- Florian Graillot, investor, Astorya.vc
- Stephen Brittain, director and founder, Insurtech Gateway
Several European-based insurtech startups entered unicorn territory this year, such as Bought By Many, which offers pet insurance; London-based Zego; and Alan, a French startup that raised a $220 million round.
According to Brittain, EU startups in this sector are “still at the very early stages of innovation,” having only shown “a fraction of what’s possible” in a market that is “as large as banking.” Interestingly, he predicted that AI will play a larger role in the future as companies deploy it for fraud detection, improved customer experiences and processing claims more quickly.
“We are fully expecting the next generation of AI-driven business to unlock real-time risk analysis, pricing and claims resolution in the next few years,” he said.
Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch; I hope you have a safe, relaxing weekend.
Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist
What do these 4 IPOs tell us about the state of the market?
Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)
Earlier this week, The Exchange assessed the looming Monday.com IPO before reading the tea leaves about that flotation and three others to sum up the overall state of the market.
So what do the Marqeta, Monday.com, Zeta Global and 1stDibs debuts tell us? We may have been too conservative.
Toast’s Aman Narang and BVP’s Kent Bennett on how customer obsession is everything
Image Credits: Bessemer Venture Partners / Toast
On a recent episode of Extra Crunch Live, we spoke to Toast founder Aman Narang and Kent Bennett of Bessemer Venture Partners about how they came together for a deal, what makes the difference for both founders and investors when fundraising, and the biggest lessons they’ve learned so far.
The episode also featured the Extra Crunch Live Pitch-Off, where audience members pitched their products to Bennett and Narang and received live feedback.
Extra Crunch Live is open to everyone each Wednesday at 3 p.m. EDT/noon PDT, but only Extra Crunch members are able to stream these sessions afterward and watch previous shows on-demand in our episode library.
AI startup investment is on pace for a record year
Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)
Alex Wilhelm and Anna Heim solicited feedback from investors to get a temperature on the market for AI startup investments.
“The startup investing market is crowded, expensive and rapid-fire today as venture capitalists work to preempt one another, hoping to deploy funds into hot companies before their competitors,” they write. “The AI startup market may be even hotter than the average technology niche.”
But that’s not surprising. The Exchange was on it.
“In the wake of the Microsoft-Nuance deal, The Exchange reported that it would be reasonable to anticipate an even more active and competitive market for AI-powered startups,” Alex and Anna note. “Our thesis was that after Redmond dropped nearly $20 billion for the AI company, investors would have a fresh incentive to invest in upstarts with an AI focus or strong AI component; exits, especially large transactions, have a way of spurring investor interest in related companies.”
Their expectation is coming true: Investors reported a fierce market for AI startups.
Dear Sophie: What is a diversity green card and how do I apply for one?
Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch
Dear Sophie,
I started a tech company about two years ago, and ever since I’ve dreamed of expanding my company in the United States.
I would love to have a green card. Someone mentioned that I should apply for a diversity green card. Would you please provide me with more details about it and how to apply?
— Technical in Tanzania
How to start a company in 4 days
Image Credits: MediaProduction (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Pulley founder and three-time YC alum Yin Wu offers a tactical guide to getting a startup running in four days. Yes, just four days.
“The logistics of setting up a startup should be simple, because over the long run, complicated equity setups and cap tables cost more money in legal fees and administration time,” Wu notes.
Read on for guidance on how to get your business going in less than a week.
Health clouds are set to play a key role in healthcare innovation
Image Credits: Natali_Mis / Getty Images
Innovaccer founder and CEO Abhinav Shashank and CTO Mike Sutten write in a guest column that the U.S. healthcare industry is in the middle of a massive transformation.
This shift, they write, “is being stimulated by federal mandates, technological innovation, and the need to improve clinical outcomes and communication between providers, patients and payers.”
Improving healthcare now means we need to process tremendous amounts of healthcare data. How do we do it? The cloud, which “plays a pivotal role in meeting the current needs of healthcare organizations.”
What SOSV’s Climate Tech 100 tells founders about investors in the space
Image Credits: MrJub / Getty Images
SOSV’s Benjamin Joffe and Meghan Hind round up a “who’s who” from the venture capital firm’s SOSV Climate Tech 100, a list of the best startups addressing climate change that SOSV has supported from the very beginning.
“What can founders learn from the list about climate tech investors? In other words, who invested in the Climate Tech 100?” they ask.
The fintech endgame: New supercompanies combine the best of software and financials
Image Credits: Donald Iain Smith (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Now that we can transact from anywhere, a new, hybrid class of software companies with embedded financial services are scooping up consumers — and investors are following the action.
Using data from a Battery Ventures report about “the intersection of software and financial services,” this post examines why these companies can be so hard to value and offers a framework for better understanding their business models and investor appeal.
After 30 years, ‘Crossing the Chasm’ is due for a refresh
Image Credits: Grant Faint (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Geoffrey Moore’s “Chasm,” a framework for marketing technology products that has been one of the canonical foundational concepts to product-market fit for three decades, needs a bit of an upgrade, Flybridge Capital’s Jeff Bussgang writes.
“I have been reflecting on why it is that we venture capitalists and founders keep making the same mistake over and over again — a mistake that has become even more glaring in recent years,” he writes.
Bussgang goes on to consider the Chasm — and propose tweaks for thinking about market size in the modern era.
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May Mobility’s Edwin Olson and Nina Grooms Lee and Toyota AI Ventures’ Jim Adler on validating your startup idea
When a founder has a work history that includes the name of the parent company of one of their key investors, you probably assume that was one of the first deals to come together. Not so with May Mobility and Toyota AI Ventures, which connected for the company’s second seed round, after May went out and raised its original seed purely on the strength of its own ideas and proposed solutions.
That’s one of the many interesting things we learned from speaking to May Mobility co-founder and CEO Edwin Olson, as well as Chief Product Officer Nina Grooms Lee and Toyota AI Ventures founding partner Jim Adler on an episode of Extra Crunch Live.
Extra Crunch Live goes down every Wednesday at 3 p.m. EDT/noon PDT. Our next episode is with Sequoia’s Shaun Maguire and Vise’s Samir Vasavada, and you can check out the upcoming schedule right here.
Meanwhile, read on for highlights from our chat with Olson, Grooms Lee and Adler, and then stay tuned at the end for a recording of the full session, including our live pitch-off.
A different approach to corporate VC
One thing Adler brought up early in the chat is that Toyota AI Ventures likely takes a different approach than most traditional corporate VCs, which are often thought of as being more incentivized by strategic alignment than by venture-scale returns. Adler says the firm he founded within the automaker’s corporate umbrella actually does behave much more like a traditional VC in some ways than many would assume.
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Revel’s Frank Reig shares how he built his business and what he’s planning
It’s only been three years since they hit the streets and Revel’s blue electric mopeds have already become a common sight in New York, San Francisco and a growing number of U.S. cities. However, Revel founder and CEO Frank Reig has set his sights far beyond building a shared moped service.
In fact, since the beginning of 2021, Revel has launched an e-bike subscription service, an EV charging station venture and an all-electric rideshare service driven by a fleet of 50 Teslas.
So we caught up with Reig to talk about what he learned from building the company, how Revel’s business strategy has evolved, and what lies ahead.
Before we get to the good stuff, here’s some background:
The idea for Revel seems like it came from the classic entrepreneur’s guidebook: Reig had a need that no existing company addressed. He’d seen mopeds used as major, if not dominant, forms of transportation as he traveled around Europe, Asia and Latin America, and he wondered why this logical (and fun) mode of transport was largely absent from American cities in general, and in his hometown, New York City, in particular.
So in 2018, Reig quit his job, raised $1.1 million from 57 people, and launched a small pilot program involving 68 mopeds in Brooklyn. In May 2019, he raised $4 million in VC funding, which helped him expand to 1,000 electric mopeds across Brooklyn and Queens. Revel secured another $33.8 million in September 2019, in a round that included funding from Ibex Investments, Toyota Ventures, Maniv Capital, Shell and Hyundai, according to Reig. This has allowed the founder to execute a grander plan to build an electric mobility company.
The company now operates more than 3,000 e-mopeds in New York City, and has another 3,000 across Washington, D.C., Miami, Oakland, Berkeley and San Francisco.
TechCrunch: You’ve added three new business lines and told us previously that you have more on the way. That’s a lot.
Frank Reig: Yes, we have had a busy start to 2021! We began the year announcing our fast-charging stations across the city that will help fill the large gap in infrastructure to support the wide-scale adoption of EVs. We launched our e-bike subscription program to offer New Yorkers another way to navigate their city, and with our newly announced electric ride-sharing program, we are solving the “chicken and egg” problem of EV charging and demand. We are focused on building out these business lines and our moped business as well and very much looking forward to what is to come.
When shared micromobility companies expand, they often just offer different vehicles. You seem to be going, “Ok, we’ll offer a different vehicle — an e-bike, but it’s a subscription. And we’re also doing electric vehicle chargers, and let’s add an EV rideshare to the mix.” It’s pretty broad.
If we’re talking about electrifying mobility in major cities, it starts with infrastructure. And we’re the company rolling up our sleeves and doing it now by building that infrastructure and operating fleets. Because in a city like New York, the infrastructure does not exist for electric mobility.
There are a few Tesla superchargers around the city, usually behind parking paywalls, so you have to pay the garage to even use it. And, of course, you need a Tesla for that infrastructure to even be relevant. And when you think about other public fast-charging access points in the city, they are few and far between. We’re building 30 in one site and many more beyond that in 2021.
New York is a complicated city to operate in, so it’s easier for us to add e-bikes as a service because I already have the infrastructure and on-the-ground operations that we built with the mopeds. I have multiple warehouses throughout this city. I have full-time staff that I’ve employed, from field technicians to mechanics, and a fleet of over 3,000 vehicles on the streets in New York. So it’s a natural extension of the platform to be able to add another product to it, to reach a new type of user, or to supplement the use case of our current moped users. All we needed to do was finance some e-bikes, and then you have another line of business.
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Tyltgo’s same-day delivery platform lets small businesses compete with Amazon
Tyltgo wants to make it easier for restaurants and small businesses to compete with same-day delivery services offered by the likes of Amazon and HelloFresh. The Canadian company, which recently raised CAD $2.3 million (USD $1.8 million) in a seed round, is akin to a white label Uber Eats, providing businesses an on-demand delivery platform under their own branding that connects them to gig economy couriers.
“I think about us as a post-purchase experience company,” co-founder and CEO Jaden Pereira told TechCrunch. “The recipient goes directly onto the merchant’s platform and places orders through them, so it feels like they’re interacting with the brand they purchased from throughout the entire experience. Our messages, notifications, tracking pages and delivery are all customized under the merchant’s brand name, but it’s powered by Tyltgo.”
The necessity of having products delivered during the pandemic’s shelter-in-place orders combined with the massive reach of e-commerce giants like Amazon has created a society that expects same-day deliveries. Tyltgo recognized the exclusionary nature of that reality on smaller businesses with less time and fewer resources, and contrived to remedy the situation with some innovative tech and gig economy couriers.
In July 2018, Pereira, 22, co-founded the company with fellow student and developer Aaron Paul while studying at the University of Waterloo. Pereira originally did deliveries himself as a side hustle, while building up a consumer-facing service on Shopify. In October 2019, Pereira and Paul shifted focus to B2B, identifying the real problem as merchants struggling to offer quality same-day delivery at an affordable price.
From December 2019 to December 2020, Tyltgo’s revenue grew 2,000%, says Pereira. The company started 2020 with two staff members and ended with nine, including former head of Uber Eats Canada’s marketplace operations, Joe Rhew, and former director of engineering at Goldman Sachs-acquired fintech company Financeit, Adnan Ali.
Aided by funding from VC firm TI Platform Management, Y Combinator and angel investor Charles Songhurst, Tyltgo projects another 1,500% revenue growth for 2021. The company’s goal is to expand its team, develop an API and app-based platform and add 100 more merchants across Ontario.
Pereira said Tyltgo originally focused on florists, and occasionally pharmacies, but demand from the restaurant industry led to the company’s new target — meal kit deliveries.
Meal kit services that provide the culinarily challenged with perfectly portioned ingredients and cooking instructions were already gaining popularity in the before times. When the pandemic hit, services like HelloFresh and Blue Apron saw even more growth. As restaurants struggled to keep their businesses open, many started to get in on the action, delivering restaurant-quality meals with instructions for heating and serving.
The global meal kit delivery services market is expected to reach almost $20 billion by 2027, with heat-and-eat options taking a large share of that market. Tyltgo is counting on the success of this industry. It has already secured partnerships with restaurants like General Assembly Pizza and Crafty Ramen, as well as with more traditional meal kit delivery services from grocery stores and organic farms.
Pereira said working in the “quasi-perishable space” of flowers and meal kits is both a challenge and a differentiator for the company. Depending on the contents of the delivery, Tyltgo will determine its perishability window and make sure to match that window with a driver. It’s also got an advanced fleet management platform that assigns a number of deliveries to suit the size of a courier’s vehicle.
“In the earlier days, the hardest part was being able to match those perishability windows without causing damage to the products,” said Pereira. “We all know that in logistics, you have to account for traffic, weather conditions, all these other things, but you have an eight-hour delivery window to get out 35 deliveries.”
Another challenge is ensuring the top-quality service Tyltgo advertises while working in the gig economy. Selecting for reliable couriers has slowed the company down at points, but Tyltgo aims to grow capacity only if it can simultaneously maintain a low error threshold.
“We won’t bring on a merchant if we don’t think we have the capacity to handle their deliveries and meet those expectations,” said Pereira.
Whether or not Tyltgo’s meal kit focus will end up driving scalability in the long run, the platform itself has legs. Pereira’s goal is to see Tyltgo become a part of every post-purchase customer experience for all retail trade categories, and that includes expanding into customer service, branding and transactions on top of delivery.
“The main reason why we’re doing this is because a lot of these smaller, brick-and-mortar retailers don’t have the time and resources to be able to compete with the Amazons of the world,” said Pereira. “We want to be able to put that power in their hands.”
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Vietnamese electric motorbike startup Dat Bike raises $2.6M led by Jungle Ventures
Son Nguyen, founder and chief executive officer of Dat Bike
Dat Bike, a Vietnamese startup with ambitions to become the top electric motorbike company in Southeast Asia, has raised $2.6 million in pre-Series A funding led by Jungle Ventures. Made in Vietnam with mostly domestic parts, Dat Bike’s selling point is its ability to compete with gas motorbikes in terms of pricing and performance. Its new funding is the first time Jungle Ventures has invested in the mobility sector and included participation from Wavemaker Partners, Hustle Fund and iSeed Ventures.
Founder and chief executive officer Son Nguyen began learning how to build bikes from scrap parts while working as a software engineer in Silicon Valley. In 2018, he moved back to Vietnam and launched Dat Bike. More than 80% of households in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam own two-wheeled vehicles, but the majority are fueled by gas. Nguyen told TechCrunch that many people want to switch to electric motorbikes, but a major obstacle is performance.
Nguyen said that Dat Bike offers three times the performance (5 kW versus 1.5 kW) and 2 times the range (100 km versus 50 km) of most electric motorbikes in the market, at the same price point. The company’s flagship motorbike, called Weaver, was created to compete against gas motorbikes. It seats two people, which Nguyen noted is an important selling point in Southeast Asian countries, and has a 5000W motor that accelerates from 0 to 50 km per hour in three seconds. The Weaver can be fully charged at a standard electric outlet in about three hours, and reach up to 100 km on one charge (the motorbike’s next iteration will go up to 200 km on one charge).
Dat Bike’s opened its first physical store in Ho Chi Minh City last December. Nguyen said the company “has shipped a few hundred motorbikes so far and still have a backlog of orders.” He added that it saw a 35% month-over-month growth in new orders after the Ho Chi Minh City store opened.
At 39.9 million dong, or about $1,700 USD, Weaver’s pricing is also comparable to the median price of gas motorbikes. Dat Bike partners with banks and financial institutions to offer consumers twelve-month payment plans with no interest.
“These guys are competing with each other to put the emerging middle class of Vietnam on the digital financial market for the first time ever and as a result, we get a very favorable rate,” he said.
While Vietnam’s government hasn’t implemented subsidies for electric motorbikes yet, the Ministry of Transportation has proposed new regulations mandating electric infrastructure at parking lots and bike stations, which Nguyen said will increase the adoption of electric vehicles. Other Vietnamese companies making electric two-wheeled vehicles include VinFast and PEGA.
One of Dat Bike’s advantages is that its bikes are developed in house, with locally-sourced parts. Nguyen said the benefits of manufacturing in Vietnam, instead of sourcing from China and other countries, include streamlined logistics and a more efficient supply chain, since most of Dat Bike’s suppliers are also domestic.
“There are also huge tax advantages for being local, as import tax for bikes is 45% and for bike parts ranging from 15% to 30%,” said Nguyen. “Trade within Southeast Asia is tariff-free though, which means that we have a competitive advantage to expand to the region, compare to foreign imported bikes.”
Dat Bike plans to expand by building its supply chain in Southeast Asia over the next two to three years, with the help of investors like Jungle Ventures.
In a statement, Jungle Ventures founding partner Amit Anand said, “The $25 billion two-wheeler industry in Southeast Asia in particular is ripe for reaping benefits of new developments in electric vehicles and automation. We believe that Dat Bike will lead this charge and create a new benchmark not just in the region but potentially globally for what the next generation of two-wheeler electric vehicles will look and perform like.”
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Extra Crunch roundup: Clubhouse UX teardown, YC Demo Day favorites, proptech VC survey, more
Since the pandemic began, I have been pushing the limits of my imagination to try to picture what cities will look and feel like in the coming years.
If your town looks like San Francisco, where I live, it’s a pressing question: Our once-bustling financial district is a ghost town, but even in outer neighborhoods, the number of vacant storefronts is unsettling. People are starting to emerge after sheltering in place for a year, but we are a long way from fully restoring our shared spaces.
What’s going to happen to those semi-vacant office towers, some of which are still under construction? There’s been renewed talk of converting some skyscrapers into residential housing, but there are real economic/logistic hurdles to clear before that can be broadly applied. Scores of restaurants have closed in recent months; who will take over those spaces? I spend a lot of time walking around, and it’s been a long time since I’ve noticed a “Grand Opening” sign.
Seeking answers, Managing Editor Eric Eldon interviewed 10 VCs who are active in proptech and found that most were generally “optimistic.”
Several expressed genuine uncertainty about the future of offices, but most were bullish about prospects for remote work, the rebirth of physical retail and the emergence of “third spaces” that will fill the gap between work and home.
In a companion article on TechCrunch, Eric explores these broader shifts, concluding, “you can start to see a world emerging that sounds a lot more like the fantasies of a New Urbanist than the world before the pandemic.”
Here’s who he interviewed:
- Clelia Warburg Peters, venture partner, Bain Capital Ventures
- Christopher Yip, partner and managing director, RET Ventures
- Zach Aarons, co-founder and general partner, MetaProp
- Casey Berman, general partner, Camber Creek
- Vik Chawla, partner, Fifth Wall
- Adam Demuyakor, co-founder and managing partner, Wilshire Lane Partners
- Robin Godenrath and Julian Roeoes, partners, Picus Capital
- Stonly Baptiste, founding partner, and Shaun Abrahamson, managing partner, Urban Us
- Andrew Ackerman, managing director, Dreamit
Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch this week. Have a great weekend!
Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist
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It’s time to abandon business intelligence tools
Image Credits: Jon Feingersh Photography Inc / Getty Images
Ideally, BI transforms raw data into actionable information, but according to Charles Caldwell, VP of product management at Logi Analytics, “a gap exists between the functionalities provided by current BI and data discovery tools and what users want and need.”
Few BI tools actually integrate with existing workflows and most offer clunky user experiences, “leaving many individuals feeling like they need an advanced computer science degree to actually be able to pull insights out.”
Instead of requiring workers to abandon workflow applications to access data, embedded analytics are more efficient and easier to use, says Caldwell.
In short, “it’s time to abandon BI — at least as we currently know it.”
Pre-seed round funding is under scrutiny: Is VC pandemic posturing here to stay?
Image Credits: nadia_bormotova / Getty Images
Amid the pandemic, investors became laser-focused on sections of the pitch deck that address monetization and business viability — signs that founders need to come to the table with better-defined businesses in order to succeed.
Investors’ heightened expectations for monetization potential and a company’s positioning within its competitive landscape are unlikely to lessen in the years to come, even in a post-COVID economy.
Clubhouse UX teardown: A closer look at homepage curation, follow hooks and other features
Image Credits: Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Clubhouse’s hockey-stick growth is something most startups would kill for.
However, it also means that UX problems can only be addressed while in “full flight” — and that changes to the user experience will be felt at scale rather under the cover of a small, loyal and (usually) forgiving user base.
Our favorite companies from Y Combinator’s W21 Demo Day
We’re not investors, so we’re not pretending to sort the unicorns from the goats.
But TechCrunch reporters spend a lot of time talking with startups, hearing pitches and telling their stories; if you’re curious about which companies stood out from Y Combinator’s W21 Demo Day, read on.
A look at 4 IPO updates and 2 late-stage funding rounds
Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)
There’s a lot going on: The venture capital market is redlining its engines while public markets remain sympathetic to growing, unprofitable companies.
Let’s round up IPO news from DigitalOcean, Kaltura, Robinhood and Zymergen, and big rounds for Lattice and goPuff.
Dear Sophie: When can I finally come to Silicon Valley?
Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch
Dear Sophie:
I’m a startup founder looking to expand in the U.S. I was originally looking at opening an office in Silicon Valley to be close to software engineers and investors, but then … COVID-19 🙂
A lot has changed over the last year — can I still come?
— Hopeful in Hungary
Staying ahead of the curve on Google’s Core Web Vitals
Image Credits: Aleksei Naumov / Getty Images
Aside from improved SEO, small business websites optimizing for Google’s new Core Web Vitals will reap the rewards of an improved user experience for their site visitors.
While many are looking at the Core Web Vitals as a big hoop to jump through to please the search powers that be, others are seeing — and seizing — the opportunities that come along with this change.
Steady’s Adam Roseman and investor Emmalyn Shaw outline what worked (and what was missing) in the Series A deck
Image Credits: Steady
When it comes to Steady — the platform that helps hourly workers manage and maximize their income and access deals on things like benefits and financial services — the strengths of the business are clear.
But it took time for founder and CEO Adam Roseman to clearly define and communicate each of them in his quest for fundraising.
Discord’s reported $10B exit; Compass and Intermedia Cloud Communications set IPO price ranges
Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)
Alex Wilhelm dug into Discord’s possible $10 billion exit to Microsoft and explored IPO price ranges for real estate tech company Compass and Intermedia Cloud Communications, a unified-communications-as-a-service company.
“It’s a lot,” he noted, “but if we don’t get through it all now, we’ll fall behind and feel silly later.”
Will fading YOLO sentiment impact Robinhood, Coinbase and other trading platforms?
Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)
The consumer trading frenzy could be slowing.
What would happen to Robinhood and its cohorts if the apparent cooling in consumer trading demand continues?
How VC and private equity funds can launch portfolio-acceleration platforms
Image Credits: Miguel Navarro (opens in a new window) / Getty Images (Image has been modified)
Almost every private equity and venture capital investor now advertises that they have a platform to support their portfolio companies, “however, most of us don’t have the budget of an Andreessen Horowitz to support almost every major need” for each startup they’ve bet on, says Versatile VC founder David Teten.
If you’re prioritizing a platform buildout for your firm, consider using the framework he’s outlined.
Automakers, suppliers and startups see growing market for in-vehicle AR/VR applications
Image Credits: Bryce Durbin
Despite all of the pomp and promises about the potential for AR and VR, there isn’t a clear understanding of market demand for bringing the technology to cars, trucks and passenger vans.
Estimates of the global market range from $14 billion by 2027 to as much as $673 billion by 2025, showing just how nascent the market currently is and how much opportunity is present.
Amid pandemic, Middle East adtech startups play essential role in business growth
Image Credits: phototechno / Getty Images
The Middle East is a promising region with growing digital advertising solutions despite locals’ attachment to traditional means of advertising.
In recent years, there has been a shift to the active use of social media and online shopping, meaning the Middle East embodies great potential for adtech startups.
Social+ payments: Why fintechs need social features
Image Credits: Getty Images
Social+ products are seeing mass adoption because they marry community with functionality.
This applies even to fintech companies as taboos around money fall away.
The lightning-fast Series A that was 3 years in the making
Image Credits: Mironov Konstantin / Getty Images
It took Christine Tao, founder of Sounding Board, just over three years to recognize the value of executive coaching and get her company to a Series A.
Here’s how she did it.
NFTs could bridge video games and the fashion industry
Image Credits: Amber J. Dickinson (opens in a new window)
Music companies, celebrities and fashion brands are some of the latest entities to dip a toe into the burgeoning NFT market.
In part two of a three-part series, we take a look at why NFTs are “the next chapter of digital art history.”
Where is the e-commerce app ecosystem headed in 2021?
Image Credits: Charday Penn (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
The pandemic-induced growth of e-commerce is, by now, well documented.
What is happening in the app ecosystem that supports e-commerce? Is it growing, or are we more likely to see consolidations and IPOs?
Let’s explore.
ironSource is going public via a SPAC and its numbers are pretty good
Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)
You’ll want to pay attention to this one: Israel’s ironSource, an app-monetization startup, is going public via a SPAC.
It’s the second SPAC-led debut from an Israeli company in recent weeks worth more than $10 billion, and ironSource is actually a pretty darn interesting company from a financial perspective.
Coursera set to roughly double its private valuation in impending IPO
Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch
The market views Coursera’s edtech business warmly ahead of its impending public offering.
Coursera is being valued as a software company, likely a breathe-easy moment for still-private edtech companies, since the debut could be an industry bellwether.
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Startups book an expo booth at TC Sessions: Mobility 2021 to double down on connection and exposure
When it comes to fast-moving technology, mobility zooms ahead of the pack — both literally and figuratively. Early-stage startup founders and investors need to keep their fingers on the sector’s very rapid pulse and the best place to do that is, you guessed it, TC Sessions: Mobility 2021 on June 9.
If you’re eager to introduce your early-stage startup to the top leaders, investors, experts and policy makers across the mobility tech community, don’t just attend TC Sessions: Mobility — exhibit there. Double down on essential exposure and increase your opportunities.
Budget-friendly tip: The early-bird price remains active until May 5 at 11:59 pm (PST). Buy your Startup Exhibitor Package before the deadline hits and save 35 percent.
Talk about a rapt audience. One big reason people attend the show is to see and meet exciting, innovative new startups. A Startup Exhibitor Package lets you showcase your tech, build your network and expand your opportunities for growth and success. Here’s what your package includes (Note: They’re available only to pre-Series A, early-stage startups).
- Virtual booth space: Display your pitch deck, host a video display and demo your products.
- Lead generation: Track booth visitors for easy post-show follow-up.
- Event passes: The package price includes four passes to TC Sessions: Mobility. Bring your team and increase your networking opportunities.
- Full event access: You can tune in to all presentations on every stage.
- Video on-demand: No FOMO for you. You’ll have VOD access to all presentations after the show ends.
- Breakout sessions: Don’t miss these presentations, each with a special focus.
- Networking: Whether you connect on the fly using the virtual platform’s chat feature or find specific people and schedule meetings using CrunchMatch, our AI-powered networking platform, you’ll make connections to drive your mobile business forward.
Keeping with the networking theme, this is how Karin Maake, senior director of communications at FlashParking, described her experience.
“TC Sessions: Mobility isn’t just an educational opportunity, it’s a real networking opportunity. Everyone was passionate and open to creating pilot programs or other partnerships. That was the most exciting part. And now — thanks to a conference connection — we’re talking with Goodyear’s Innovation Lab.”
Don’t miss your chance to sashay your superior stuff in front of the mobility industry’s leading mover, shakers and makers. Buy a Startup Exhibitor Package now, save 35 percent and get ready for TC Sessions Mobility 2021.
Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Mobility 2021? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.
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Polestar, ChargePoint introduce seamless charging in new partnership
A new alliance between Swedish electric performance automaker Polestar and EV infrastructure startup ChargePoint takes aim at the charging experience with the debut of an in-car app that will let customers seamlessly charge their Polestar 2 model vehicles.
Seamless charging — being able to pull up to a charging station, plug in and let the vehicle handle billing and payment — has been dominated by Tesla through its branded Supercharger network. Most other EV drivers have to pay for charging using an RFID card or smartphone, and the convenience level is on-par with a traditional gas station. The partnership eliminates the need for these extra items at ChargePoint’s more than 130,000 stations. The app will embed directly into Polestar 2’s in-car “infotainment system,” which runs on Google’s Android Automotive OS.
There have been some inroads into seamless charging elsewhere, most notably by Electrify America, the entity established by Volkswagen as part of its settlement with U.S. regulators over its diesel-emissions scandal. It introduced an in-car payment technology dubbed Plug&Charge last November that will allow 2021 models of the Porsche Taycan, Ford Mustang Mach-E and Lucid Air to seamlessly charge at its stations.
The partnership also takes aim at the buying experience, another area that Tesla’s cornered with its branded Wall Connector home charger. Polestar 2 drivers will now be able to order the $699 ChargePoint Home Flex home charger alongside the purchase of a Polestar 2 and arrange for home installation prior to vehicle delivery.
It’s a blueprint for future collaboration between the two companies, ChargePoint senior VP Bill Loewenthal said in a statement. The partnerships may be the start of many more alliances between automakers and EV infrastructure companies who see user experience as a key part of their value proposition.
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5 key innovations taking e-scooters to a half-billion rides in 2021
Four years ago, shared e-scooters didn’t exist. Today, they’re on track to surpass half a billion rides globally by 2021, far outpacing early growth in the carbon-heavy ride-hailing industry founded by Uber in 2009.
That’s a dramatic shift in urban transportation by any measure, and it prompts a simple but important question: How did we get here?
Understanding the key developments that helped advance micromobility over the past several years can give us valuable insights not only into where the industry is headed, but about how we can successfully shape it to meet the needs of hundreds of millions of current and future riders around the world.
From vehicle design and data to safety reporting and infrastructure, these five innovative moments have helped fuel the global growth of shared e-scooters and are helping lead cities into a healthier, more sustainable future.
#1: Shared scooters launched (fall 2017)
The very first fleet of Bird e-scooters was launched in Santa Monica, California in September of 2017. Up until this point, the micromobility industry consisted almost entirely of docked and dockless bike sharing systems that were averaging approximately 35 million trips across the United States every year — more than half of them in New York City alone.
After an encouraging start, shared e-scooter riders in the U.S. took nearly 39 million trips in 2018 and another 86 million the following year. A similar trajectory is being seen across the Atlantic, as nations such as Italy, England and the Ukraine join a rapidly expanding list of countries including Germany, France, Israel, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Denmark, Poland and others who have chosen to supplement their urban transportation networks with modern micromobility alternatives.
Shared scooters can now be found in over 200 cities on almost every continent around the world.
#2: First custom-designed shared scooters released (fall 2018)
The first e-scooter programs taught us two things very quickly: There’s high demand for this type of micromobility offering, and custom-designed vehicles are necessary to successfully meet that demand.
The fact is, shared scooters are ridden more frequently, handle more diverse road surfaces and endure more varied weather conditions than privately owned ones. That’s why Bird’s vehicle team unveiled the industry’s first custom-designed e-scooter, the Bird Zero, in October of 2018. Equipped with more battery life, better lighting, enhanced durability and more advanced GPS technology, this was the first in a series of comprehensive vehicle evolutions intended to increase safety, sustainability and lifespan — and it worked. Tens of thousands of these scooters are still in use today, and every month of continued service reduces their already low per-mile lifetime carbon emissions even further.
Subsequent custom vehicle designs, including the Bird One and Bird Two, have added onto this foundation, introducing industry-first features such as:
- On-board diagnostic sensors capable of detecting over 200 faults.
- Vehicle intelligence systems capable of running and reporting millions of autonomous fault checks per day.
- IP67 or IP68 waterproofing on batteries.
- 14,000 mile (22,500 km) battery life, resulting in more than 10 years of average everyday use.
- Mechanical design independently tested to withstand more than 60,000 curbside impacts.
#3: Comprehensive industry safety report released (spring 2019)
Safety has rightly been the most important focus, and the most discussed aspect, of shared micromobility since its inception. It’s why Bird launched the industry’s earliest and most comprehensive free helmets for all riders campaign in January of 2018, along with a host of other safety initiatives.
In April of 2019, these programs culminated in a comprehensive e-scooter safety report. This was the first in-depth look at modern micromobility systems, using accident reports and other data to demonstrate that shared scooters have risks and vulnerabilities similar to bicycles. The report laid the groundwork for cooperative safety measures to be taken by both operators and cities to ensure that not only riders and pedestrians but all road users are protected.
Over the past year and a half, we’ve used the findings contained within the report, along with others that have since echoed its findings, to imagine and develop a series of product innovations that are helping set the standard for e-scooter safety across the industry. These include:
- Shared micromobility’s first Helmet Selfie feature to promote helmet use.
- Shared micromobility’s first Warm Up Mode feature to assist new riders.
- The first and most accurate geofencing for e-scooters to create reduced-speed and no-riding zones.
- Responsible data-sharing standards and practices to help cities build new infrastructure for bikes and scooters.
#4: Open Mobility Foundation created (summer 2019)
The last bullet above is particularly important. Cities have a crucial role to play in limiting the number of cars on the road and maximizing the amount of infrastructure available for bikes and scooters. It’s a proven strategy to improve the safety of all road users that depends heavily on one critical input: reliable, standardized data.
Since our first launch, Bird has been a strong proponent of responsible data sharing with cities. What was lacking, however, was a unified body to help guide and develop mobility data standards across the micromobility industry.
All of that changed in June of 2019, when cities like Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco came together with companies like Bird and Microsoft and a consortium of nonprofit organizations called OASIS to form the Open Mobility Foundation (OMF). As chairperson and general manager of the LADOT Seleta Reynolds wrote in Forbes, the OMF platform “helps us achieve important city goals like increasing safety, equity, and health outcomes, while lowering emissions, and reducing congestion.”
These collaborative efforts to manage micromobility systems using open-source code and shared data standards might seem wonky, but they’ve had some very tangible real-world effects. In Atlanta, shared e-scooter data has been used to quadruple the city’s protected bike lanes by 2021. Santa Monica recently used scooter data to draft and pass an amendment that will add 19 new miles of separated micromobility infrastructure.
#5: UK, NY e-scooter programs approved (spring 2020)
This year’s decisions by the UK and the state of New York to legalize shared e-scooters and launch respective pilot programs may not be an innovation, but it’s a crucial development that will ensure the industry tops 500 million rides in 2021.
From an environmental and urban mobility perspective, London and New York are two of the most important cities in the world. Combined, they’re home to 17 million people and more than 10 million daily car trips. The introduction of e-scooters into these two densely packed and highly mobile cities will have a dramatic impact on daily commuter habits, particularly at a time when public transit ridership is still suffering due to COVID-19. That’s good news for cities, citizens and the environment.
The data that will be gained from such a high volume of micromobility rides won’t just help inform infrastructure improvements in New York and London. It will be added to a growing body of research that’s rapidly influencing micromobility technology and accelerating its adoption around the world.
Looking forward
So what can we learn from all of this? What will the first four years and 500 million rides of the shared e-scooter industry tell us about the future of micromobility?
First, we should expect its growth to continue. Adaptable, environmentally friendly solutions to car congestion and urban pollution were in high demand even before the global spread of the coronavirus in 2020. Now they’re proving themselves to be a necessity. Look for the relationships between cities and operators to strengthen and become more cooperative as scooters transition from a perceived recreational vehicle to an essential part of the urban transportation grid. This will include dramatic, data-informed improvements in protected infrastructure for both cyclists and scooter riders.
Second, we should anticipate that e-scooter technology will continue to develop around two key pillars: safety and sustainability. This applies as much to the form and functionality of the vehicles themselves as it does to the daily operations that manage them. Longer lifespan, improved battery performance, increased durability and enhanced diagnostics will be the benchmarks by which we measure this progress.
Finally, we should anticipate that, as the data from hundreds of millions of annual rides continues to accumulate, our understanding of urban mobility needs will become much clearer and more nuanced. Urban planning decisions will be able to be made based on street and hour-specific needs, identifying potentially dangerous areas and taking low-cost, high-impact actions to remedy them.
If current trends continue, and there’s every reason to believe that they will, the time it takes to add another half-billion e-scooter rides to the global total will very soon shrink from four years to less than one.
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Virtual Mobility startup pitch night applications open
TechCrunch is on the hunt to feature 10 early-stage mobility startups at our virtual TC Sessions: Mobility 2020 pitch night. The pitch-off event, originally set for May, will now be held October 5th — the evening before Mobility 2020.
The top five companies from pitch night will take the stage at the main event with industry heavy hitters like Boris Sofman of Waymo, Nancy Sun of Ike and Trucks VC’s Reilly Brennan. Now we are shining a light on game changing startups — hardware and software breaking the mobility mold. From battery advancements to mapping, fuel processing to micromobility, TechCrunch wants the next generation of mobility’s brightest on stage. The process is simple:
Apply. TechCrunch editorial will review every application and demo video submitted. Companies will be reviewed based on innovation, scope of impact, uniqueness of product idea and potential for exit — IPO or acquisition. Selected companies will get to pitch onstage, receive two complimentary event tickets, an hour training with the Startup Battlefield Editor and a spot in CrunchMatch (TC’s meeting matching program).
Pitch Part I. The top 10 startups from around the world will be selected to pitch live to the TC audience on the virtual stage. After a private pitch coaching session, founders will have one minute to pitch, followed by a Q&A with our expert panel of investor and industry expert judges.
Pitch Part II. The top five companies from pitch night will get a prime slot to pitch and demo their product on the main stage at Mobility 2020 in front of thousands of TC viewers — press, industry leaders and VCs.
The deadline to apply is September 15th. Selections will occur on a rolling basis so get your application in ASAP!
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