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ChargeLab raises seed capital to be the software provider powering EV charging infrastructure
As money floods into the electric vehicle market a number of small companies are trying to stake their claim as the go-to provider of charging infrastructure. These companies are developing proprietary ecosystems that work for their own equipment but don’t interoperate.
ChargeLab, which has raised $4.3 million in seed financing led by Construct Capital and Root Ventures, is looking to be the software provider providing the chargers built by everyone else.
“You’ll find everyone in every niche and corner,” says ChargeLab chief executive Zachary Lefevre. Lefevre likens Tesla to Apple with its closed ecosystem and compares ChargePoint and Blink, two other electric vehicle charging companies, to Blackberry — the once dominant smartphone maker. “What we’re trying to do is be Android,” Lefevre said.
That means being the software provider for manufacturers like ABB, Schneider Electric and Siemens. “These guys are hardware makers up and down the value stack,” Lefevre said.
ChargeLab already has an agreement with ABB to be their default software provider as they go to market. The big industrial manufacturer is getting ready to launch their next charging product in North America.
As companies like REEF and Metropolis revamp garages and parking lots to service the next generation of vehicles, ChargeLab’s chief executive thinks that his software can power their EV charging services as they begin to roll out that functionality across the lots they own.
Lefevre got to know the electric vehicle charging market first as a reseller of everyone else’s equipment, he said. The company had raised a pre-seed round of $1.1 million from investors including Urban.us and Notation Capital and has now added to that bank account with another capital infusion from Construct Capital, the new fund led by Dayna Grayson and Rachel Holt, and Root Ventures, Lefevre said.
Eventually the company wants to integrate with the back end of companies like ChargePoint and Electrify America to make the charging process as efficient for everyone, according to ChargeLab’s chief executive.
As more service providers get into the market, Lefevre sees the opportunity set for his business expanding exponentially. “Super open platforms are not going to be building an EV charging system any more than they would be building their own hardware,” he said.
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The creator movement is entering prime time, and so is Circle with a fresh $4M
The creator movement has exploded in the last few years as platforms ranging from Substack to Clubhouse have made it easier than ever to reach an audience of willing readers and listeners. Yet the key to building sustainable creator businesses is the economics of these enterprises themselves. Get enough subscribers, and what often starts as a side hobby can quickly become a full-time job.
Circle was founded in January 2020 to make engaging with paying customers and thus building creator businesses as effortless as possible. We profiled the NYC-based startup last year when it announced its $1.5 million seed round in August, discussing how its founder DNA originates in the online course platform Teachable. Since then, all signs point to very strong early growth.
The company surpassed $1 million ARR last month, and it already has 1,000 paying customers and is heading toward 2,000 paying communities. Usage is also growing rapidly, expanding 40-50% per month for both DAUs and MAUs, according to the company. It also brought its iOS app out of beta last month.
CEO and co-founder Sid Yadav said that “we happened to catch the tide at the right time [with] the creator movement, the community movement.” So far, paying communities have been largely centered around “a lot of YouTubers, course creators, Twitch streamers, Patreon personalities,” with Yadav estimating that 60% of the platform’s communities are “personality-led.” That said, “a lot of brands are starting to think of this creatively.”
All that positive news can’t be ignored by VCs too long. The company announced today that it has raised a $4 million seed round at a valuation “north of” $40 million, which closed late last year. The round was officially led by Notation Capital, which led the company’s pre-seed round last year, but the firm only took a quarter of a round according to Yadav.
Circle’s team has grown to 20 across multiple continents. Photo via Circle.
Instead, much of the round’s allocations were handed out to the entrepreneurs building on the platform. “We had all of these offers from top-tier firms, but for the kind of product that we are — which is a creator platform — it made sense to allocate the round as much as possible to our customers,” Yadav said. According to the company, a majority of the round went to individual angels and community builders on the platform, among them Anne-Laure Le Cunff, David Perell, Tiago Forte and Nat Eliason.
Given the company’s early stage, product development remains the highest priority. “Our approach is like a Notion,” Yadav said, describing how Circle allows its communities to stitch together “building blocks” to lay out pages. Circle’s primary mode is through a Space, where community members can discuss topics with each other and the creator as well. Communities built on Circle can be white-labeled, with their own custom domains.
Circle’s community platform allows creators to publish content and engage with their community. Photo via Circle.
Circle’s ultimate goal is to integrate under one roof every tool a creator needs to engage with a customer, from publishing newsletters and podcasts to setting up streaming, event ticket sales, merchandise and event calendars — all buttressed by a payments layer. Many of those features remain to be built on top of the company’s core community platform, but Yadav and his team are certainly ambitious in their expansive scope.
Circle’s team is now 20 people, with team members in Europe, India, Australia and across the United States.
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Snap acquires location data startup StreetCred
Snapchat’s parent company Snap has acquired StreetCred, a New York City startup building a platform for location data.
Snap confirmed the news to TechCrunch and said the acquisition will result in four StreetCred team members — including co-founders Randy Meech and Diana Shkolnikov — joining the company, where they’ll be working on map and location-related products.
A big component of that strategy is the Snap Map, which allows users to view public snaps from a given area and to share their location with friends. Last summer, the Snap Map was added to Snapchat’s main navigation bar, and the company announced that the product was reaching 200 million users every month.
At the same time, Snapchat has been adding other products that tie into a user’s locations, such as Local Lenses, which allow developers to create geography-specific augmented reality lenses that interact with physical locations.
Meech and Shkolnikov should be bringing plenty of mapping experience to Snap — Meech was formerly CEO at Samsung’s open mapping subsidiary Mapzen, and before that the senior vice president of local and mapping products at TechCrunch’s parent company AOL (subsequently rebranded as Verizon Media). Shkolnikov, meanwhile, is the former engineering director at Mapzen.
StreetCred had raised $1 million in seed funding from Bowery Capital and Notation Capital. When I spoke to Meech in 2018, he said his goal was to “open up and decentralize” location data by building a blockchain-based marketplace where users are rewarded for helping to collect that data.
While the financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, the existing StreetCred platform will be shut down as part of the deal.
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StreetCred is building a blockchain-based marketplace for location data
While applications like Google Maps and Yelp seem to provide an inexhaustible source of information about local restaurants, stores and other points of interest, they also can come up short — moments when you arrive somewhere only to discover that the hours you had were wrong, or the store is closed for a holiday, or it’s just shut down altogether.
The team at StreetCred is trying to build a better system for gathering and selling that data. And it’s raised $1 million in seed funding from Bowery Capital and Notation Capital.
CEO Randy Meech explained that if someone wanted to build the next Uber or the next Pokémon GO, they’d need location data to make it work. And while they could buy that data now, it’s “very difficult, very expensive.”
Plus, he sees room for lots more data — while Foursquare has data about 105 million points of interest and Google has 100 million, Meech estimates that there are more than 1 billion POIs across the world, many of them in developing nations where the data is more spotty.
So StreetCred is building a marketplace where users should be rewarded for collecting this data, while interested companies should be able to buy the data more easily.
Meech has been working on mapping for years, serving as the CTO at MapQuest (which, like TechCrunch, is owned by Verizon/Oath) and then as CEO at Mapzen, an open-source mapping subsidiary of Samsung. That’s where Meech met his StreetCred co-founder Diana Shkolnikov — he said StreetCred was created partly in response to the disappointment of shutting down Mapzen earlier this year.
“If we can get this protocol and data economy right, it can’t be shut down,” Meech said. That means leveraging blockchain technology: “It’s a very natural way to open up and decentralize the data and also to build a payment mechanism around that.”
StreetCred is just starting to test the system out around New York City. The idea is that users can download an app and then collect location data around the city, earning crypto tokens as they do. (They take photos to validate their location, and the data is also verified by other users.) Then companies that want to buy the data can do so by purchasing tokens.
Meech drew parallels to Foursquare, which started as a location-sharing app before building a business around its data. StreetCred, on the other hand, won’t have any social component — Meech said the app will be “completely anonymous” and focus entirely on the collection of location data.
The team is still experimenting with the specific details of how contributions are incentivized and compensated, but Meech said users will be paid through an “anonymized wallet mechanism.” And while it’s important to make sure StreetCred’s tokens can be converted into “fiat currency” (i.e. regular money), Meech said this approach should also mean users are more invested in StreetCred’s success: “We want to build an asset where the value of the currency is tied to the value of the data,” Meech emphasized.
“Our thesis is that if you make the data much more accessible, much cheaper to buy … you’re going to make things a lot easier and enable things that don’t exist today,” he said.
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Uru finds the best places to introduce ads in online videos
New York City-based startup Uru is working on a new way for video publishers to make money. Imagine watching a normal-looking online video — except that on some of the surfaces (say, on the cabinet behind the stars of a cooking video), you’ll see logos or other art promoting a sponsor. Okay, that might actually sound a bit annoying, but Uru co-founder and CEO Bill Marino argued… Read More
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