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Tiger Global leads $30M investment into Briq, a fintech for the construction industry
Briq, which has developed a fintech platform used by the construction industry, has raised $30 million in a Series B funding round led by Tiger Global Management.
The financing is among the largest Series B fundraises by a construction software startup, according to the company, and brings Briq’s total raised to $43 million since its January 2018 inception. Existing backers Eniac Ventures and Blackhorn Ventures also participated in the round.
Briq CEO and co-founder Bassem Hamdy is a former executive at construction tech giant Procore (which recently went public and has a market cap of $10.4 billion) and Canadian software giant CMiC. Wall Street veteran Ron Goldshmidt is co-founder and COO.
Briq describes its offering as a financial planning and workflow automation platform that “drastically reduces” the time to run critical financial processes, while increasing the accuracy of forecasts and financial plans.
Briq has developed a toolbox of proprietary technology that it says allows it to extract and manipulate financial data without the use of APIs. It also has developed construction-specific data models that allows it to build out projections and create models of how much a project might cost, and how much could conceivably be made. Currently, Briq manages or forecasts about $30 billion in construction volume.
Specifically, Briq has two main offerings: Briq’s Corporate Performance Management (CPM) platform, which models financial outcomes at the project and corporate level, and BriqCash, a construction-specific banking platform for managing invoices and payments.
Put simply, Briq aims to allow contractors “to go from plan to pay” in one platform with the goal of solving the age-old problem of construction projects (very often) going over budget. Its longer-term, ambitious mission is to “manage 80% of the money workflows in construction within 10 years.”
The company’s strategy, so far, seems to be working.
From January 2020 to today, ARR has climbed by 200%, according to Hamdy. Briq currently has about 100 employees, compared to 35 a year ago.
Briq has 150 customers, and serves general and specialty contractors from $10 million to $1 billion in revenue. They include Cafco Construction Management, WestCor Companies and Choate Construction and Harper Construction. The company is currently focused on contractors in North America but does have long-term plans to address larger international markets, Hamdy told TechCrunch.
Some context
Hamdy came up with the idea for Santa Barbara, California-based Briq after realizing the vast amount of inefficiencies on the financial side of the construction industry. His goal was to do for construction financials what Procore did to document management, and PlanGrid to construction drawing. He started Briq with his own cash, amassed through secondary sales as Procore climbed the ranks of startups to become a construction industry unicorn.
Briq CEO and co-founder Bassem Hamdy. Image Credits: Briq
“I wanted to figure out how to bring the best of fintech into a construction industry that really guesses every month what the financial outcomes are for projects,” Hamdy told me at the time of the company’s last raise — a $10 million Series A led by Blackhorn Ventures announced in May of 2020. “Getting a handle on financial outcomes is really hard. The vast majority of the time, the forecasted cost to completion is plain wrong. By a lot.”
In fact, according to McKinsey, an astounding 80% of projects run over budget, resulting in significant waste and profit loss.
So at the end of a project, contractors often find themselves having doled out more money and resources than originally planned. This can lead to negative cash flow and profit loss. Briq’s platform aims to help contractors identify outliers, and which projects are more at risk.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Briq has proven to be “extremely valuable” to contractors, Hamdy said.
“In an industry where margins are so thin, we have given contractors the ability to truly understand where they stand on cash, profit and labor,” he added.
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Extra Crunch roundup: Jam City SPAC, startup PR, telemedicine market map, more
For this morning’s edition of The Exchange, Alex Wilhelm studied information recently released by mobile gaming studio Jam City as it prepares to go public in a $1.2 billion blank-check deal with DPCM Capital.
“Jam City is a bit like Zynga, but unless you are a mobile-gaming aficionado, you might not have heard of it,” he writes.
Since its launch, Jam City has raised upwards of $300 million, including a $145 million round in 2019. At the time, the company was riding high after signing a deal with Disney to adapt some of the media giant’s intellectual property, which includes brands like Marvel, Fox and Pixar.
Almost half of all Americans play mobile games, so Alex reviewed Jam City’s investor deck, a transcript of the investor presentation call and a press release to see how it stacks up against Zynga, which “has done great in recent quarters, including posting record revenue and bookings in the first three months of 2021.”
(Full disclosure: the second time I worked at a startup founded by Mark Pincus, Zinga slept behind my desk and I was one of her favorite dog-sitters.)
Thanks for reading Extra Crunch; I hope you have an excellent weekend!
Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist
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5 ways to raise your startup’s PR game
Image Credits: Andrii Yalanskyi (opens in a new window)/ Getty Images
The ability to effectively communicate can make or break your launch. It will play a role in determining who wins a new space — you or a competitor.
So how do you make a splash? How do you stay relevant?
For one, you have to stop thinking that what you are up to is interesting.
Every early-stage startup must identify and evaluate a strategic advantage
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Whether you’re building a company or thinking about investing, it’s important to understand your strategic advantage.
In order to determine one, you should ask fundamental questions: What’s the long-term, sustainable reason that the company will stay in business?
As M&A accelerates, deal-makers are leveraging AI and ML to keep pace
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The global pandemic has changed the way we work, including how and where we work. For those involved in the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) industry, a notoriously relationship-driven business, this has meant in-person boardroom handshakes have been replaced by video conference calls, remote collaboration and potentially less travel in the future.
The pandemic has also accelerated digital transformation, and deal-makers have embraced digital tools to help them execute effectively.
The quickening pace of digital transformation is no longer about ensuring a competitive edge. Today, it’s also about business resilience. But what’s on the horizon, and how else will technology evolve to meet the needs of companies and deal-makers?
There are still many inefficiencies in managing M&A, but technologies such as artificial intelligence, especially machine learning, are helping to make the process faster and easier.
New Relic’s business remodel will leave new CEO with work to do
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Lew Cirne, New Relic’s founder and CEO, is stepping into the executive chairman role. He will be replaced by Bill Staples on July 1.
Cirne spent the last several years rebuilding the company’s platform and changing its revenue model, aiming for what he hopes is long-term success.
TechCrunch decided to dig into the company’s financials to see just what challenges Staples may face as he moves into the corner office. The resulting picture is one that shows a company doing hard work for a more future-aligned product map and business model, albeit one that may not generate the sort of near-term growth that gives Staples ample breathing room with public investors.
Fast growth pushes an unprofitable no-code startup into the public markets: Inside Monday.com’s IPO filing
Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)
At long last, the Monday.com crew dropped an F-1 filing to go public in the United States. TechCrunch has long known that the company, which sells corporate productivity and communications software, has scaled north of $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR).
The countdown to its IPO filing — an F-1, because the company is based in Israel, rather than the S-1s filed by domestic companies — has been ticking for several quarters.
The Exchange has been riffling through the document since it came out, and we’ve picked up on a few things to explore.
The battle for voice recognition inside vehicles is heating up
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Until recently, integrating affordable voice-recognition software into an automobile was something from science fiction.
But last year, the percentage of vehicles offering in-car connected services reached 45%. By 2024, analysts predict cars with voice recognition will comprise 60% of the market.
Considering how much time many of us spend behind the wheel, there’s an infinite number of applications for the technology. For our latest Extra Crunch market map, we sized up the general market opportunity before creating a roster of major players and reaching out to investors to see where they’re placing bets.
Industrial automation startup Bright Machines hauls in $435M by going public via SPAC
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Bright Machines is going public via a SPAC-led combination that will see the 3-year-old company merge with SCVX, raising gross cash proceeds of $435 million in the process.
After the transaction is consummated, the startup will sport an anticipated equity valuation of $1.6 billion.
The Bright Machines news indicates that the great SPAC chill was not a deep freeze. And the transaction itself, in conjunction with the previously announced Desktop Metal blank-check deal, implies that there is space in the market for hardware startup liquidity via SPACs. Perhaps that will unlock more late-stage capital for hardware-focused upstarts.
We took a look at what Bright Machines does, and then the financial details that it shared as part of its news.
Want to double your rate of return? Seek counsel from experienced executives
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As a rule of thumb, it takes 7-8 years for a successful startup to achieve an exit. But there’s a simple way to speed up the clock: Bring in one or more founders who have previous executive experience.
According to data gathered by Rob Olson, partner and head of data strategy at venture engine M13, startups that have two or more experienced founders tend to exit 33% faster and raise 34% less capital.
“Combined, these two improvements can nearly double an investor’s rate of return,” says Olson.
Should startups build or buy telehealth infrastructure?
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Digital health in the U.S. got a huge boost from COVID-19 as more people started consulting physicians and urgent care providers remotely in the midst of lockdowns. So much so that McKinsey estimates that up to $250 billion of the current healthcare expenditure in the U.S. has the potential to be spent virtually.
The prominence of digital health is undoubtedly here to stay, but how it looks and feels from provider to provider is still a debate among sector startups.
But for providers who want to deliver care virtually across the country, it’s not as simple as adding a Zoom invite to an annual check-up. The process requires intention every step of the way — right from the clinicians delivering remote care to the choice of payment processor.
Help TechCrunch find the best email marketers for startups
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Email marketing has been with us for decades, but today it has been refined to a science and an art form.
If you’re an early-stage founder, it is one of the best ways to build and grow your direct relationship with your customer. You know how fickle the platforms can be. You can’t afford to mess this up.
So when and how should you think about doing email marketing, versus all of your other frantic priorities?
Here at Extra Crunch, we’re helping you find the answers. We launched a survey of founders who want to recommend a great email marketer or agency they have worked with to the rest of the startup world.
For companies that use ML, labeled data is the key differentiator
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When a company chooses supervised learning, it needs to have a strategy that allows it to label data as quickly as it acquires it.
Supervised learning is currently the most practical approach for most ML challenges, but it requires the crucial additional step of making raw data smart by labeling it.
How Expensify got to $100M in revenue by hiring ‘stem cells’ and not ‘cogs in a wheel’
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The influence of a founder on their company’s culture cannot be overstated. Everything from their views on the product and business to how they think about people affects how their company’s employees will behave, and since behavior, in turn, informs culture, the consequences of a founder’s early decisions can be far-reaching.
So it’s not surprising that Expensify has its own take on almost everything it does when you consider what its founder and CEO David Barrett learned early in his life: “Basically everyone is wrong about basically everything.”
As we saw in part 1 of this EC-1, this led him to the revelation that it’s easier to figure things out for yourself than finding advice that applies to you. Eventually, these insights would inform how he would go about shaping Expensify.
Inside Marqeta’s fascinating fintech IPO
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Marqeta, long a darling of the fintech market though less well known than some companies in its sector due to its infrastructure nature, filed to go public late last week
If you are not familiar with Marqeta, it powers the payment card tech behind products that you use, like Square, a key customer and driver of the unicorn’s growth. Marqeta exhibits a number of fascinating fintech characteristics (majority revenue from interchange, a rabidly competitive market) that make it very interesting to unspool.
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.
WalkMe is going public: Let’s stroll through its numbers
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WalkMe is the second Israel-based technology company to file to go public this week: No-code startup Monday.com is also pursuing an American IPO.
WalkMe’s software provides visual overlays on websites that help users navigate the product in question. Per the company’s F-1 filing, other elements of its service that matter include its onboarding system, Workstation, or its “single interface to the applications within an enterprise and simplifies task completion through a natural language conversational interface and automation.” We’re including that last feature because it says “automation,” which, in the wake of the UiPath IPO, is a word worth watching. Investors are.
At a high level, WalkMe is a SaaS business, which means that when we digest its results we are digging into a modern software company. Let’s do just that.
Can Squarespace dodge the direct-listing value trap?
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Squarespace’s reference price has been set at $50 per share.
We went over Squarespace’s recently disclosed Q2 and full-2021 guidance and asked how its expectations compare to its reference-price-defined pre-trading valuation. Then, we set some stakes in the ground regarding historical direct-listing results and what we might expect from the company as it adds a third set of data to our quiver.
Let’s get into the numbers!
Mapping out one edtech company’s $200M bet on lifelong learning
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Mumbai-based Emeritus, an edtech company that works with universities to create online upskilling courses for employed folks, just spent a big chunk of cash to break into K-12.
Emeritus, which is part of the Eruditus group, announced this week that it plans to acquire iD Tech, a STEM education service for children. The acquisition, which has not yet closed, is estimated to be around $200 million and leaves iD Tech operating as an independent brand for now.
ID Tech brings a whole different set of customers to its umbrella: The startup offers courses for elementary through high-school students across the globe taught by college students in the U.S.
5 innovative fundraising methods for emerging VCs and PEs
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According to Versatile VC founder David Teten, five new strategies are gaining traction among fund managers looking to raise capital from family offices and high-net-worth individuals:
- Online communities and virtual events.
- Platforms that help other investors access your fund.
- Soliciting under the 506(c) designation.
- Launching a rolling fund.
- Crowdfunding from retail investors into a general partnership.
In a summary of a class he taught for the Oper8r VC fund accelerator, Teten offers actionable advice for anyone who wants to connect with pre-qualified investors.
Dear Sophie: What’s happening with visa application receipt notices?
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Dear Sophie,
Our startup employs several individuals who are on work visas or have employment authorization. Many of them have been waiting for quite a while for the government to tell them their applications have been received.
Why? When will things be back on track? We have a few employees who are waiting for green cards, and a few F-1 visa holders who will be extending their OPT to STEM OPT.
Is there anything we can do?
— Patient in Pasadena
Arrival’s Denis Sverdlov on the new era of car manufacturing
Image Credits: Bryce Durbin
Electric vehicle company Arrival wants to break the current auto manufacturing model. Instead of one giant factory and an assembly line, Arrival’s commercial electric vans, buses and cars are robotically built in small, regional microfactories, of which the company wants to open 31 by the end of 2025.
If you want to achieve something radically more efficient, you have to go deeper, into complex, high-level computational algorithms that are not normally used in consumer-facing products.
The London-based company, founded in 2015, joined the ranks of EV companies going public via SPAC, merging with blank-check company CIIG Merger Corp. in March. UPS has already ordered 10,000 of Arrival’s robotically engineered vans, and the company recently signed a deal with Uber to create purpose-built EVs for ride-hail drivers.
Arrival founder Denis Sverdlov has been at the intersection of technological advancement and societal change before.
Chasing hype is human nature: The tyranny of startup trends
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The fear of missing out (FOMO) spreads faster than wildfire and often overwhelms rational decision-making.
In the VC community, investors look for lessons from disruptive startups they can use to identify other potential winners. But hype leads to bad decision-making, rushed due diligence and wishful thinking.
When and if those startups actually do well, “irrational FOMO takes over” because the initial assessment was based on bad information, says Victor Echevarria, a partner at Jackson Square Ventures. “Trends are addictive; to remain disciplined and avoid hype is to deny our innate instincts.”
It’s natural for investors to follow the crowd, but in the race to the bottom, FOMO can be high-octane fuel.
Robinhood’s epic Q1 growth explains its fundraising boom
Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)
The Exchange explores Robinhood’s financial results using the lens of payment for order flow (PFOF) income, which the company said during a congressional hearing constitutes the majority of its revenues.
This particular revenue growth — or the lack thereof — is a good way to understand not only Robinhood’s own results but also its larger market. If Robinhood is seeing rapid growth and strong trading volumes, we can infer with some confidence that others in its space are enjoying a related, if not similar, level of interest.
For Public.com, eToro and others like Freetrade (as well as our own understanding), how Robinhood performed recently is key. So, let’s explore the data.
How to ensure data quality in the era of Big Data
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A little over a decade has passed since The Economist warned us that we would soon be drowning in data. The modern data stack has emerged as a proposed life-jacket for this data flood — spearheaded by Silicon Valley startups such as Snowflake, Databricks and Confluent.
Today, any entrepreneur can sign up for BigQuery or Snowflake and have a data solution that can scale with their business in a matter of hours. The emergence of cheap, flexible and scalable data storage solutions was largely a response to changing needs spurred by the massive explosion of data.
Currently, the world produces 2.5 quintillion bytes of data daily (there are 18 zeros in a quintillion). The explosion of data continues in the roaring ‘20s, both in terms of generation and storage — the amount of stored data is expected to continue to double at least every four years. However, one integral part of modern data infrastructure still lacks solutions suitable for the Big Data era and its challenges: Monitoring of data quality and data validation.
Investors help Procore build a decacorn valuation in public debut
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Watching construction tech software company Procore go public Thursday after pricing above its range makes the IPO slowdown look like the deceleration that wasn’t.
Investors quickly bid up the company’s value in trading, giving Procore a higher valuation than it might have anticipated, along with a boost of confidence for the IPO market in general.
Construction tech may not be as glamorous as space travel, but it’s a massive industry that’s fraught with inefficiencies.
Procore initially set an IPO range of $60 to $65 per share before pricing at $67 per share Wednesday night. Its debut was worth gross proceeds north of $600 million and a fully diluted valuation of $9.6 billion. As of early afternoon Thursday, shares were trading at a solid $85.25.
In light of Procore’s debut, TechCrunch is digging quickly into the company’s new valuation and its resulting revenue multiples.
Telemedicine startups are positioning themselves for a post-pandemic world
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It’s impossible to predict how healthcare institutions will operate post-pandemic, but with so many people now accustomed to telemedicine, startups that provide services around virtual care continue to be poised for success.
Telemedicine has faced an uphill battle to become more relevant in the U.S., with challenges such as meeting HIPAA compliance requirements and insurance companies unwilling to pay for virtual visits. But when COVID-19 began raging across the globe and people had to stay home, both the insurance and healthcare industries were forced to adapt.
Now that people see the benefits and conveniences of “dialing a doc” from the kitchen table, healthcare has changed forever.
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As the IPO market warms, Accolade targets billion-dollar debut
As the IPO market heats up, one offering slipped beneath our radar. This morning, then, we’ll catch up on Accolade’s initial public offering and what its proposed pricing may tell us about the state of the IPO market.
The Exchange is a daily look at startups and the private markets for Extra Crunch subscribers; use code EXCHANGE to get full access and take 25% off your subscription.
Catching everyone back up, Accolade sells its service to employers who in turn offer it to their employees; the company’s tech provides a portal for individuals to “better understand, navigate and utilize the health care system and their workplace benefits,” Accolade states in its S-1 filings.
The firm goes on to point out that the U.S. health care system is complex, which puts “significant strain on consumers.” Correct. Its solution? To help “consumers make better, data-driven health care and benefits-related decisions” through its service by selling a “platform to support and influence consumer decision-making that is built on a foundation of mission-driven people and purpose-built technology.”
Yeah.
Regardless of that verbiage, Accolade’s business has proven sufficiently attractive to allow the firm to file to go public in late February, around when Procore filed. Both companies delayed their offerings, but Procore raised more private capital, a $150 million round that values it at around $5 billion. Accolade, to our knowledge, did not raise more funds. So, its IPO is back on and today we have its pricing interval.
Let’s unpack its pricing range, write some notes on its recent financial results and try to figure out how ambitious Accolade is being in terms of its expected valuation as it counts down to trading publicly.
Accolade’s S-1/A
According to Accolade’s June 24th S-1/A, the company expects a $19 to $21 per-share IPO price range. The company intends to sell 8.75 million shares in its debut, not counting a 1,312,500 share greenshoe option offered to its underwriters. Discounting the extra shares, Accolade would raise between $166.3 million to $183.8 million in its debut; inclusive of greenshoe shares, the total fundraise grows to a range of $191.2 million to $211.3 million.
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IPOs, crypto funds and other things I missed this week
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.
What a week it’s been. I’m exhausted. Not only are we another cycle deeper into the COVID-19 quarantine, but there seems to be more news than ever to sift through. I’ve fallen behind. So, today, this little column is taking look back at things that it missed but wanted to cover. (There may come a day when we run out of stuff to talk about, but it’s not coming any time soon.)
So let’s talk about a16z’s new crypto fund, recent economic data, the Ebang F-1, Lime’s layoffs, Procore’s IPO delay and fresh valuation, stocks, Luckin, and, if we have time, Twitter’s changing jobs data. Let’s get this all out of our heads and into the world.
Odds, ends
To annoy my editors, we’re using bullet points this morning. Bullet points are great way to convey a bloc of information in a neat format. Let the haters hate, we have a lot of ground to cover:
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Handle.com helps independent construction workers get paid on time
From long payment cycles to antiquated processes on how to bill workers, the hefty inefficiencies of the construction industry are long overdue for innovation.
Enter startups such as the large venture-backed Katerra and recently public companies such as Procore. Still, independent contractors or workers from small family businesses often can’t afford hefty fees from SaaS platforms promising better management. Or, they don’t have a parent company behind them to foot the bill.
To help the Bob’s Plumbings and Nicky Roofings of the world get paid on time, Handle.com has raised $4.5 million in known venture capital funding and $20 million in debt financing. The startup was a YC grad, born from a trio of founders: Blake Robertson, Chris Woodard and Patrick Hogan.
The startup uses a mix of software and a financing line to help construction workers get paid on time, a weakness in the current industry, per co-founder Hogan.
“Construction is one of the largest operations in the country in terms of amount spent,” co-founder Hogan said. “We have a contractor that we work with, that if he does a job for Hilton Hotels and has a $200,000 invoice, it takes over one year for them to pay him back. The impact on his business is substantial.”
In the construction industry, workers often have to submit their own billing, which is lengthy, and there’s room for error. Using software, the startup helps workers automate invoices to limit mistakes, and get documentation to clients on time.
In a legacy industry, oftentimes it’s hard to get both parties to adopt. So that’s why Handle.com made it so only the workers need to use the platform. Along with small businesses, it also helps larger contractors handle massive influxes of invoices.
“It’s not a two-way street: it only requires the party who is going to be receiving the payment to use it,” Hogan said. “If you have to get two parties to agree to use a solution, it’s very difficult, because you have a two-sided marketplace type of problem. In construction, one party has more leverage than the other party. You may have reasons for one party to not have things more efficient.”
Now on to Handle.com’s financing side of its business. As every startup ever becomes a bank, Handle.com differs from the group in that it had a software fintech mix since launching out of YC. And in this case, Handle.com secured $20 million in debt equity so credit financing could be part of its business model.
Handle.com uses a credit line to become a lender to construction workers who are waiting for a check to process and need capital before they can head to their next project. The startup claims that construction workers traditionally have a hard time securing capital loans from banks. “Contractors and subcontractors, Woodard said, “don’t have access [to capital], and it’s the ceiling on their business because they can only grow as fast as they’re getting paid back.”
The startup says that of the customers that use its software, “a growing portion” use the financing option too.
As for growth, when Handle.com left YC it was six weeks in and collected $22,800 in monthly revenue. The startup declined to share revenue and growth statistics on the cuff of this funding round, beyond that it has been increasing its customer base by “an average of 30% month over month over the past year.”
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Unpacking Procore’s S-1 filing
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.
Today we’re in for a treat, as we get to dig into Procore’s S-1 filing. In case you aren’t familiar, Procore sells software that helps manage construction projects, but it offers more than a single app: Procore’s service allows other apps to plug into it, making it a platform of sorts. The company filed to go public last Friday, meaning that we have endless new numbers to delve into.
Even better for us, Procore is a SaaS company, which means we can understand its numbers.
Procore lists $100 million as its IPO placeholder raise, intends to list on the NYSE as PCOR and its debut is being underwritten by Goldman, J.P. Morgan, Barclays and Jefferies.
Why do we care about this particular IPO? A few reasons. First, Procore filed to go public after the worst week in the stock market since the 2008 crash. That’s either calculated bravery, unbridled hubris or accidental folly. We’ll see. And second, the company’s backers are well-known: Bessemer, Greater Pacific Capital, ICONIQ, Dragoneer and Tiger, according to Crunchbase.
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Equity Monday: Surprise IPOs, Briza’s $3M round, and are we worried about unicorn liquidity?
Good morning friends, and welcome back to TechCrunch’s Equity Monday, a short-form audio hit to kickstart your week. Regular Equity episodes still drop Friday morning, so if you’ve listened to the show over the years don’t worry — we’re not changing the main show. (Here’s last week’s episode with Danny Crichton, going over the huge Roblox round and what is going on with no-code startups.)
What to say about this Monday other than it feels a bit like last Monday. The markets aren’t doing well, coronavirus is a worry, and we have a cool early-stage round to talk about.
After the stock market took a beating last week, the weekend brought more news concerning the novel coronavirus, with more infections being discovered in the United States. It’s not been the best time to check your 401k if you saving for the long-term.
But in better news, DoorDash’s filing was followed by one from Procore, meaning that IPO season isn’t dead, it’s just glacial, slow, slothful, and far too measured compared to our prior hopes.
This week will see a few sets of earnings that we care about some (JD.com), less, (HPE), and lots (Zoom). When Zoom reports on March 4th it will be carrying the torch for recent, venture-backed IPOs, SaaS companies more broadly, and future-of-work startups specifically. Other than that, no one will be watching what happens to the video conferencing startup that is caught in a rare COVID19 updraft.
Briza
Next, we talked about Briza, a very neat early-stage startup that is working in the commercial insurance API space. Yes, this the fusion of several things I love to write about. Namely insurance-tech and API-infra companies. What would you get if you crossed the insurance marketplaces we’ve been writing about with Plaid? Something like Briza, I reckon.
The 500 Startups-backed company has put together $3 million in capital to date, has 10 people on-staff, is looking to double its personnel, and is heading to the market soon on the back of some notable momentum. With more insurance providers hitting Briza up for inclusion in its product, the startup has good pace heading into its impending Demo Day. And it already has the cash it needs to grow.
Infra is hot because it’s the digital equivalent of selling picks and shovels. And APIs are hot because they are the SaaS of infra.
Infra APIs? So hot right now.
Wrapping
I’m stoked beyond belief that Equity turns three this month. Who would have thought that our little show that started life as a few Facebook Lives with myself, Katie Roof (WSJ) and Matthew Lynley (ex-Brex and now a solo operator) would make it this far. I’m lucky to still be a part of it.
Ok! Back Friday. Stay cool.
Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
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Procore brings 3D construction models to iOS
Today, Procore, a construction software company, announced Procore BIM (Building Information Modeling), a new tool that takes advantage of Apple hardware advances to bring the 3D construction model to iOS.
Dave McCool, senior product manager at Procore, says that for years architects and engineers have been working with 3D models of complex buildings on desktop computers and laptops, but these models never made it into the hands of the tradespeople actually working on the building. This forced them to make trips to the job site office to see the big picture whenever they ran into issues, a process that was inefficient and costly.
Procore has created a 3D model that corresponds to a virtual version of the 2D floor plan and runs on an iOS device. Touching a space on the floor plan opens a corresponding spot in the 3D model. What’s more, Procore has created a video game-like experience, so that contractors can use a virtual joystick to move around a 3D representation of the building, or they can use gestures to move around the rendering.
Procore BIM running on an iPhone (Photo: Procore)
The app has been designed so that it can run on an iPhone 7, but for optimal performance, Procore recommends using an iPad Pro. The software takes advantage of Apple Metal, which gives developers “near direct” access to the GPU running on these devices. This ability to tap into GPU power speeds up performance and allows this level of sophisticated rendering quickly on iOS devices.
McCool says that this enables tradespeople to find the particular area on the drawing where their part of the project needs to go much more easily and intuitively, whether it’s wiring, duct work or plumbing. As he pointed out, it can get crowded in the space above a ceiling or inside a utility room, and the various teams need to work together to make sure they are putting their parts in the correct spot. Working with this tool helps make that placement crystal clear.
It’s essentially been designed to gamify the experience in order to help tradespeople who aren’t necessarily technically savvy operate the tool themselves and find their way around a drawing in 3D, while reducing the number of trips to the office to have a discussion with the architects or engineers to resolve issues.
This is the latest tool from a company that has been producing construction software since 2002. As a company spokesperson said, early on the company founder had to wire routers on the site to allow workers to use the earliest versions. Today, it offers a range of construction software to track financials, project, labor and safety management information.
Procore BIM will be available starting next month.
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What washing dishes, driving a truck and working in a cemetery taught me about the power of ‘blue-collar’ software
I work in VC. But it wasn’t long ago that I stocked shelves, drove a truck, washed dishes, waited tables and even hauled dirt at a cemetery. This isn’t the usual route to a job in tech and VC, but it opened my eyes to a corner of the tech world I think has the chance to create the next Salesforce, Oracle or LinkedIn: software targeting those who do their jobs outside corporate offices. Read More
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How Bassem Hamdy aims to disrupt the construction industry
Construction – the actual process of putting brick on brick to build something – is still in the dark ages. While there is plenty of technology out there to help plan massive projects few people are thinking hard about what it takes to actually build. Luckily Bassem Hamdy is one the case. Hamdy works for Procore Technologies where he and his team build products to help… Read More
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