The SPAC trash ticker is counting down

Published May 28, 2021

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week had the whole crew aboard to record: Grace and Chris making us sound good, Danny to provide levity, Natasha to actually recall facts and Alex to divert us from staying on topic. It’s teamwork, people — and our transitions are proof of it.

And it’s good that we had everyone around the virtual table, as there was quite a lot to get through:

The team felt all kinds of ways about the Amazon-MGM deal. Some of us are more positive than the rest, but what gists out from the transaction is that for Amazon, the purchase price is modest and the company is famously playing a supposedly long-game. Let’s see how James Bond fits into it. Alex receives four points for not bringing up F1 thanks to the Bond-Aston Martin connection.
Turning to the SPAC game, we chatted through the recent Lordstown Motors earnings results, and what we can parse from them regarding blank-check companies, promises and reality.
After launching last June with just $2 million, Collab Capital has closed its debut fund at its target goal: $50 million. The Black-led firm invests exclusively in Black-led startups, and got checks from Apple, PayPal and Mailchimp to name a few. We talk about this feat, and note a few other Black-led venture capital firms making waves in the industry lately.
We Resolved our transition puns and eventually spoke about the Affirm spin-out, which raised $60 million in a funding round for BNPL for businesses. There are bigger questions there around the accessibility and point of BNPL, and if it’s really re-inventing the wheel or just repackaging it with simpler UX.
Next up, we got into a can of worms about the future of meetings thanks to Rewatch, which raised a $20 million Series A this week led by Andreessen Horowitz. The startup helps other startups create internal, private YouTubes to archive their meetings and any video-based comms. We could only spend a second on this, so if you want our longer thoughts in the form of text, check out our three views on the topic on Extra Crunch! (Discount Code: Equity)

3 views on the future of meetings

From there we had Interactio and Fireflies.ai, two more startups that are tackling the complexities of meetings in the COVID-19 era, and whatever comes next. Both recently raised new funding, and Alex brought up Kudo to add one more upstart to the mix.
Noom, a weight loss platform, bulked up with $540 million in funding after nearly doubling its revenue from 2019 to 2020. The pandemic has made many people gain weight, but we chew into why Noom’s moment might be right now after a decade in the works.

Thanks for hanging out this week, Equity is back on Tuesday with our usual weekly kickoff, thanks to the American holiday on Monday. Chat then, unless you want to follow us on Twitter and get a first-look at all of Chris’ meme work.

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST, Wednesday, and Friday morning at 7:00 a.m. PST, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

Dogs of Lordstown

3 growth tactics that helped us surpass Noom and Weight Watchers

Published November 16, 2020

Henrik Torstensson
Contributor

Henrik Torstensson is CEO and co-founder of Lifesum. Previously, he was Head of Premium Sales at Spotify and SVP, Strategy at Stardoll.

Many consumers might think Noom or Weight Watchers are industry leaders with their nonstop commercials, but neither is the fastest-growing weight management program.

Over the past year, nutrition app Lifesum has acquired users at nearly twice the rate of both Noom and Weight Watchers, according to statistics from Sensor Tower, the independent market intelligence for the mobile app economy.

Over this past summer, we surpassed Noom on the global scale with 45 million users. More impressively, we accomplished this without any TV buys. That’s right — no multimillion dollar ad campaigns, allowing us to redistribute precious marketing dollars to other growth projects.

Here’s a closer look at the three growth marketing tactics I credit with helping us scale Lifesum over the last 36 months. It’s a strategy any startup can use, regardless of size or budget.

Understand the different generational lenses

Generations approach products differently. It’s important for startups to understand the different generational approaches of their customers. Startups that spend time thinking and strategizing about where generational trends are going will scale faster.

Here’s a closer look at the three growth marketing tactics I credit with helping us scale Lifesum over the last 36 months. It’s a strategy any startup can use, regardless of size or budget.

Millennials and Generation Z are now the largest consumer market in the world, so you can’t ignore them if you want to scale. With Lifesum these generations have helped our brand surpass the older and well-established competitors. We achieved this by intimately understanding how they view health and fitness.

Gen Z and millennials are all about empowerment. They grew up with Google and Facebook, having information at their fingertips. They are far less likely to be moved by a TV commercial since they desire to discover the world on their own.

In our industry, we’ve learned millennials and Gen Z don’t want a one-size-fits-all weight loss program or to count calories like their parents did 20 years ago. As millennials and Gen Z started embracing keto, intermittent fasting and pescatarian diets, our nutrition team had already created tailored programs to help them stick with it.

Bypass traditional marketing methods

As a brand, it’s important to look ahead and anticipate what is coming next. This also applies to marketing your product. If you get in early with emerging marketing platforms, you will save money and potentially reach more early adopters.

As 5 more startups join the $100M club, are we just making a pre-IPO list?

Published February 13, 2020

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

Today we’re adding five names to the $100 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) club and listing all preceding members in a single post. This series, which was a bit of an accident, if I’m being honest, has included more than a dozen companies that have reached $100 million ARR, along with a handful more that are close.

Today we’re adding Seismic, ThoughtSpot, Noom, Riskified and Moveable Ink to the list. As always, we have funding histories, growth metrics and interviews below on the new group. But at this juncture, as we head toward the two-dozen company mark, it’s a good time to ask, what is this list that we’re compiling?

At first, the goal of the jokingly-named “$100 million ARR club” was to highlight companies that were of real scale, an idea designed to gently push back against the “unicorn” moniker. As more and more unicorns were born and the private-capital world became adept at getting startups of all maturity levels over the requisite $1 billion valuation threshold, the term began to feel too diluted to have much signaling value.

While, in contrast, $100 million in ARR felt much more “hard” to the valuation metric’s comparable squishiness. But, since that first post, more and more companies have written in, sharing hard metrics and the series has continued. Perhaps we’re really just compiling an IPO watchlist, a grouping of firms that will probably go (or should go) public in the next 18 months.

Let’s dig into our new additions. Then, we’ll list all our prior entrants with links to our preceding coverage in case you are playing catch up. With that, here’s ~~the entire $100 million ARR club~~ a list of companies that we think could go public inside the next six quarters.

Health coaching app Noom will expand its product team after raising $58M led by Sequoia

Published May 6, 2019

Health coaching app developer Noom announced today that it has raised $58 million led by Sequoia Capital.

Other participants include Aglaé Ventures, the tech investment arm of French holding company Groupe Arnault, WhatsApp co-founder and former CEO Jan Koum, DoorDash co-founder and CEO Tony Xu, Oscar Health co-founder Josh Kushner, SB Project co-founder Scooter Braun and returning investor Samsung Ventures.

Headquartered in New York City with offices in Seoul and Tokyo, Noom is best known for its direct-to-consumer weight loss app, but it also develops enterprise products, including an app focused on diabetes and hypertension. Noom’s consumer app competes for users with Under Armour’s MyFitnessPal and Weight Watchers, but its closest rival is probably nutrition and weight loss app Rise because both offer personalized programs and coaching for a subscription fee.

Noom aims to set itself apart by focusing on long-term lifestyle and behavior changes, in addition to calorie, nutrition and exercise tracking. Users get access to 1:1 coaching and fitness programs personalized by an algorithm based on how they answer a questionnaire.

The company will use its new funding to hire more people for product development. In a press statement, Koum said he invested in Noom because it “has many of the same traits that helped WhatsApp disrupt the communications industry. Noom is so far ahead of the competition when it comes to technology, execution and brand recognition that it will be difficult for any company to catch up.”