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Home gym startup Tempo raises $220M to meet surge in demand for its workout device

Published April 13, 2021

When the pandemic forced everyone to stay at home last year, many gym-goers looked to at-home fitness makers to fill the void for their cardiovascular and strength-training workouts.

To help meet that demand, Tempo, the five-year-old fitness startup founded by Moawia Eldeeb and Josh Augustin, closed a $220 million Series C round led by SoftBank. The company plans to use the raise to shore up its supply chain, keep up with increased consumer demand and fuel efforts such as R&D and content. Other participants in the Series C round included Bling Capital, DCM, General Catalyst, Norwest Venture Partners and Steadfast Capital Ventures.

Tempo’s freestanding cabinet, which the company launched in February 2020, includes a 42-inch touchscreen with a 3D motion-tracking camera that consistently scans, tracks and coaches users as they work out.

It currently sells three hardware bundles, starting at $2,495, that include accessories like barbells, dumbbells, a folding bench, a kettlebell system, a squat rack, a workout mat, a recovery foam roller and a heart rate monitor, depending on which bundle customers spring for. Users also pay a $39 monthly subscription to access on-demand and live classes.

The concept for Tempo came about in 2015 when Eldeeb and Augustin developed SmartSpot, a computer vision-augmented smart screen they sold to gyms that helped trainers analyze and improve their clients’ form during workouts. With the trove of data generated and collected by SmartSpot, Eldeeb and Augustin developed a program that identified fitness users’ most common movement errors and utilized machine learning to offer unique recommendations for each individual user — a program that became part of the foundation for Tempo.

“Being a personal trainer once, I remember charging $150 an hour,” explains Eldeeb. “I want to create a better experience and offer it to many more people for a lot less. That means we’re going to continue to invest in the core technology that makes that possible.”

Tempo’s launch came during a particularly opportune time. With the pandemic unfolding, demand for at-home fitness solutions soared. The startup has seen sales surge 1,000% since it began taking pre-orders in early 2020, with delivery delays currently ranging between five to seven weeks — a common issue faced by other at-home fitness companies such as Peloton, Tonal and Echelon. Tempo users have collectively performed 5 million workouts, or clocked 40,000 hours on their devices to date, according to the company.

The Tonal EC-1

“That [supply chain] was definitely an issue,” acknowledges Eldeeb, pointing to production challenges posed by factories temporarily shutting down or reducing operations in 2020. “We were doing this for the first time at scale, and we’d made small quantities of the product before [launch]. But for our first year in the market, we had to solve all those problems and still ship the product, which was a huge undertaking. We basically had to reduce sales because I wanted the factory workers to be safe.”

For Tempo, the opportunity to scale is enormous, as the global market is estimated to reach $29.4 billion by 2025. With new funding in tow, Eldeeb wants to capitalize on surging demand, with plans of doubling down on logistics and its supply chain, growing employee headcount and expanding its content to offer yoga and boxing classes later this year.

With vaccinations across the U.S. steadily increasing and gyms reopening, the big question is whether people will stick with their at-home fitness workouts, throw themselves back into their old gym routines or adopt a hybrid model that marries the two. Eldeeb is betting that now that more people have acclimated to working out in their homes, they’ll stay the course out of sheer convenience, pointing to a Consumer Trends report from The New Consumer published earlier this year indicating that 81% of people under the age of 40 prefer to exercise at home.

If true, then companies like Tempo will continue to reap the benefits of this shift of fitness into the home.

Companies rush to replace the gym at CES

Manticore Games raises $100 million to build a ‘creator multiverse’

Published March 31, 2021

The gaming sector has never been hotter or had higher expectations from investors who are dumping billions into upstarts that can adjust to shifting tides faster that the existing giants will.

Bay Area-based Manticore Games is one of the second-layer gaming platforms looking to build on the market’s momentum. The startup tells TechCrunch they’ve closed a $100 million Series C funding round, bringing their total funding to $160 million. The round was led by XN, with participation from SoftBank and LVP alongside existing investors Benchmark, Bitkraft, Correlation Ventures and Epic Games.

When Manticore closed its Series B back in September 2019, VCs were starting to take Roblox and the gaming sector more seriously, but it took the pandemic hitting to really expand their expectations for the market. “Gaming is now a bona fide super category,” CEO Frederic Descamps tells TechCrunch.

Manticore’s Core gaming platform is quite similar to Roblox conceptually, the big difference is that the gaming company is aiming to quickly scale up a games and creator platform geared toward the 13+ crowd that may have already left Roblox behind. The challenge will be coaxing that demographic faster than Roblox can expand its own ambitions, and doing so while other venture-backed gaming startups like Rec Room, which recently raised at a $1.2 billion valuation, race for the same prize.

Rec Room raises at $1.25B valuation from Sequoia and Index as VCs push to find another Roblox

Like other players, Manticore is attempting to build a game discovery platform directly into a game engine. They haven’t built the engine tech from scratch; they’ve been working closely with Epic Games, which makes the Unreal Engine and made a $15 million investment in the company last year.

A big focus of the Core platform is giving creators a true drag-and-drop platform for game creation with a specific focus on “remixing,” allowing users to pick pre-made environments, drop pre-rendered 3D assets into them, choose a game mode and publish it to the web. For creators looking to inject new mechanics or assets into a title, there will be some technical know-how necessary, but Manticore’s team hopes that making the barriers of entry low for new creators means that they can grow alongside the platform. Manticore’s big bet is on the flexibility of their engine, hoping that creators will come on board for the chance to engineer their own mechanics or create their own path toward monetization, something established app stores wouldn’t allow them to.

“Creators can implement their own styles of [in-app purchases] and what we’re really hoping for here is that maybe the next battle pass equivalent innovation will come out of this,” co-founder Jordan Maynard tells us.

This all comes at an added cost; developers earn 50% of revenues from their games, leaving more potential revenue locked up in fees routed to the platforms that Manticore depends on than if they built for the App Store directly, but this revenue split is still much friendlier to creators than what they can earn on platforms like Roblox.

Building cross-platform secondary gaming platforms is host to plenty of its own challenges. The platforms involved not only have to deal with stacking revenue share fees on non-PC platforms, but some hardware platforms that are reticent to allow them all, an area where Sony has been a particular stickler with PlayStation. The long-term success of these platforms may ultimately rely on greater independence, something that seems hard to imagine happening on consoles and mobile ecosystems.

VCs discuss gaming’s biggest infrastructure investment opportunities in 2021

SoftBank-backed Indian insurance platform Policybazaar raises $75 million

Published March 17, 2021

Policybazaar has raised $75 million as the Indian online insurance platform looks to expand its presence in UAE and Middle East.

Sarbvir Singh, chief executive of Policybazaar, told TechCrunch that the startup had raised $75 million, but didn’t elaborate. Falcon Edge Capital led the new tranche of investment in the Indian startup, which has raised about $630 million to date, according to research firm Tracxn.

The 12-year-old startup, which counts SoftBank Group’s Vision Fund and Tiger Global among its investors, is among a handful of startups that is attempting to upend India’s insurance market, which is largely commanded by state and bank-backed insurers.

Policybazaar serves as an aggregator that allows users to compare and buy policies — across categories including life, health, travel, auto and property — from dozens of insurers on its website without having to go through conventional agents.

A screengrab of Policybazaar website

In India only a fraction of the nation’s 1.3 billion people currently have access to insurance and some analysts say that digital firms could prove crucial in bringing these services to the masses. According to rating agency ICRA, insurance products had reached less than 3% of the population as of 2017.

An average Indian makes about $2,100 in a year, according to World Bank. ICRA estimated that of those Indians who had purchased an insurance product, they were spending less than $50 on it in 2017.

In a recent report, analysts at Bernstein estimated that Policybazaar commands 90% of share in the online insurance distribution market. The platform also sells loans, credit cards and mutual funds. The startup says it sells over a million policies a month.

“India has an under-penetrated insurance market. Within the under-penetrated landscape, digital distribution through web-aggregators like Policybazaar forms <1% of the industry. This offers a large headroom for growth,” Bernstein analysts wrote to clients.

The startup, which is working on an initial public offering slated for next year, said it will use the fresh investment to expand its presence across the UAE and Middle East regions.

“PolicyBazaar has shown stellar innovation, execution, and relentlessness in establishing itself as the market leader in online insurance aggregation in India. We believe the playbook it has established over the last 10 years in being the most efficient sales channel for insurance manufacturers, can act as a catalyst to gain market leadership in the GCC,” said Navroz Udwadia, co-founder of Falcon Edge Capital, in a statement.

To fill funding gaps, VCs boost efforts to find India’s standout early-stage startups

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Coupang follows Roblox to a strong first day of trading

Published March 11, 2021

Another day brings another pubic debut of a multibillion dollar company that performed well out of the gate.

This time it’s Coupang, whose shares are currently up just over 46% to more than $51 after pricing at $35, $1 above the South Korean e-commerce giant’s IPO price range. Raising one’s range and then pricing above it only to see the public markets take the new equity higher is somewhat par for the course when it comes to the most successful recent debuts, to which we can add Coupang.

The company’s mix of rapid growth and slimming deficits appear to have found an audience among public money types, so let’s quickly explore the price they paid. What was the company worth at its IPO price, and what is worth now? And, of course, we’ll want to calculate revenue run rates for each figure.

Oh — we’ll also need to calculate how much money SoftBank made. Inverted J-Curve indeed!

Coupang’s IPO and current value

As Renaissance Capital notes, Coupang boosted its share allocation to 130 million shares from 120 million. This made the value of both primary and secondary shares in its public offering worth a total of $4.55 billion. That’s a lot of damn money.

At its IPO price of $35, the same source pegged the company’s fully diluted IPO valuation at $62.9 billion. By our accounting, the company’s simple valuation at its IPO price came to $60.4 billion. Those numbers are close enough that we’ll just stick with the diluted number out of kindness to the company’s fans.

Doing some quick math, Coupang is worth around $92 billion at the moment. That’s a huge number that nearly zero companies will ever reach. Some do, of course, but as a percentage of startups that start it’s an outlier figure.

Investors’ SPAC push could revamp the private market money game

Published February 15, 2021

Since last year, we’ve been tracking the growing list of capitalists who got into the SPAC game. You can read an interview we conducted with Amish Jani, the co-founder of FirstMark Capital, about his SPAC here. And if you need a refresher on all things SPAC, we have that for you as well.

This morning, I want to better understand the trend by parsing a few new venture capitalist SPACs. We’ll examine Lerer Hippeau Acquisition Corp. and Khosla Ventures Acquisition Co. I, II and III. The SPACs are, somewhat obviously, associated with New York-based Lerer Hippeau and Menlo Park’s Khosla Ventures. And all four dropped formal S-1 filings last week.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

Today’s topic may sound dry, but it really does matter. As we’ve reported, Lux Capital is in on the SPAC wager, along with Ribbit and, of course, SoftBank. Adding our latest names to the mix and you have to wonder if every VC worth a damn in the future will have their own raft of SPAC offerings.

In that way, as some late-stage venture capital funds invest earlier — and now later — full-service VC outfits will offer first check to final liquidity, will such a full-stack venture outfit be able to win more deals than a group offering a limited set of financing options? If so, the recent venture capital SPAC wave could become more of a rising tide in time, to torture a metaphor.

Regardless, let’s quickly parse what Khosla and Lerer Hippeau are telling public investors about why they will be great SPACers before working our way backward to what the resulting pitch must be to startups themselves.

Full-stack capital

The Lerer Hippeau SPAC is the most interesting of the two firms’ combined four offerings, so we’ll start there. That isn’t to diss Khosla, but the Lerer Hippeau blank check has some explicit wording I want to highlight.

From the Lerer Hippeau Acquisition Corp. S-1 filing, read the following (bolding: TechCrunch):

As our seed portfolio matured over the last decade, we added a growth strategy to our platform through our select funds. This capital enables us to continue providing financial support to our top performing early-stage companies as they scale, and to selectively make new investments in later-stage companies in the Lerer Hippeau network. With our portfolio now maturing to the stage at which many are considering the public markets, we view SPACs as a natural next step in the evolution of our platform.

After writing that it has had four portfolio companies “publicly announced business combination agreements with SPACs” and noting that it expects more of the same, Lerer Hippeau added that it considers its “expansion into the SPAC market as a highly complementary element of our strategy to support founders throughout their entrepreneurial journeys.”

Coupang files for mega US IPO

Published February 12, 2021

Earlier today, South Korean e-commerce and delivery giant Coupang filed to go public in the United States. As a private company, Coupang has raised billions, including capital from American venture capital firm Sequoia and Japanese telecom giant SoftBank and its Vision Fund.

Coupang’s revenue growth is nothing short of fantastic.

Coupang’s offering, coming amidst the public debut of a number of well-known technology brands, will be a massive affair. Its first S-1 filing indicates that its IPO will raise capital in the range of $1 billion, far larger than the $100 million placeholder that is more common.

But the company’s scale makes its lofty IPO fundraising goals reasonable. Coupang is huge, with revenues north of $10 billion in 2020 and in improving financial health as it scales. And its revenue growth has accelerated.

Perhaps that explains why the company is reportedly targeting a valuation of $50 billion.

This afternoon, let’s dig into the company’s historical growth, its improving cash flow and its narrowing losses. Coupang’s debut will create a splash when it lands, so we owe it to ourselves to grok its numbers.

And as there are other e-commerce brands with a delivery function waiting in the wings to go public — Instacart comes to mind — how Coupang fares in its IPO matters for a good number of domestic startups and unicorns.

Coupang’s surging scale

The company’s growth across the last half-decade is impressive. Observe its yearly revenue totals from 2016 through 2020:

2016: $1.67 billion.
2017: $2.4 billion (+43.7%).
2018: $4.05 billion (+68.8%).
2019: $6.27 billion (+54.8%).
2020: $11.97 billion (+90.9%).

Sure, some of that 2020 growth is COVID-19 related, but even taking that into account, Coupang’s revenue growth is nothing short of fantastic. And what’s better is that the company has cut its losses in recent years:

Does SoftBank have 20 more DoorDashes?

Published February 12, 2021

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

Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace were all here to chat through the week’s biggest tech happenings. This week felt oddly comforting from a tech news perspective: Facebook is copying something, early-stage startup data is flawed enough to talk about and sweet DoorDash is buying robots for undisclosed sums.

So, here’s a rundown of the tech news we got into (as always, jokes aren’t previewed so you’ll have to listen to the actual show to get our critique and Award Winning Analysis*):

Ethena raising $2 million more for corporate training that is not awful, and Zeta raising $1.5 million for couples’ banking. Natasha has been killing the early-stage beat lately.
How seed data could be getting harder and harder to parse from Alex’s desk, and why VC data in general is dicey, from Danny’s. We discuss if directional data is useful, and why the limited numbers could have a cultural impact on signal.
Reddit raises $250 million, but doesn’t tell us who the investors are and what the money is precisely going to. Still, the company has had quite a year so far, so the capital comes at an interesting time.
Justo, an online grocery based in Mexico, raises $65 million as the pandemic continues to shake up the way we live and shop.
DoorDash buys a salad robot, which brings Natasha nostalgia and Danny anger.
The inverted SoftBank J-Curve thesis is a must-listen and read.
And from the world of dating, a big M&A deal that caught our attention, and the latest from the Bumble IPO.

In good news, long-time Equity producer Chris Gates is back starting next week, which means we’ll have our biggest crew ever helping get the show put together. And, in other good news, there’s going to be more Equity than ever for you to hear. Coming soon.

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST and Thursday afternoon as fast as we can get it out, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

*OK, so not award-winning yet. But soon enough, because manifestation works.

PSA: Most aggregate VC trend data is garbage

Brazilian lending company Creditas raises $255 million as Latin America’s fintech explosion continues

Published December 18, 2020

Creditas, the Brazilian lending business, has raised $255 million in new financing as financial services startups across Latin America continue to attract massive amounts of cash.

The company’s credit portfolio has crossed 1 billion reals ($196.66 million) and the new round will value the company at $1.75 billion thanks to $570 million raised in outside financing over five rounds.

Creditas is the latest company to benefit from a boom in financial services startup investing across the region. As the year dawned, venture investments into fintech startups in Latin America had grown from $50 million in 2014 to top $2.1 billion in 2020 across 139 deals, according to a report from CB Insights.

Investors in the round include new investors like LGT Lightstone, Tarsadia Capital, Wellington Management, e.ventures and an affiliate of Advent International, Sunley House Capital. Previous investors including SoftBank Vision Fund 1, SoftBank Latin America DFund, VEF, Kaszek and Amadeus Capital Partners also returned to put more money into the company.

“Creditas is still in the early innings of penetrating the huge untapped secured lending market in Brazil and Mexico” says Paulo Passoni, managing partner of SoftBank Latam fund, in a statement.

The company’s growth is a testament both to the need for new lending products across Latin America and the perspicacity of investors like Kaszek Ventures, whose portfolio has included several massive wins from bets on startups tackling financial services in Latin America.

“The journey since our investment in the Series A has been absolutely extraordinary. The team has executed on its vision, and Creditas has evolved into an asset-light ecosystem that resolves key financial needs of its customers throughout their lifetimes,” says Nicolas Szekasy, managing partner of Kaszek Ventures, in a statement.

Another big winner is Redpoint’s e.ventures fund, which has focused on investments in Latin America for the last several years.

“By empowering Brazilians to take control of their lending needs at reasonable rates, Creditas creates a beloved consumer product that will drive significant value for customers and investors. Having been involved since the seed stage through Redpoint e.ventures, we’re thrilled to support the company with our Global Growth Fund as well, as they change the Brazilian fintech landscape,” said Mathias Schilling, co-founder and managing partner of e.ventures.

Creditas has plans to use the cash to expand its home and auto lending as well as a payday lending service based on customers’ salaries and a retail option to sell through buy now, pay later loans based on a customer’s salary.

The company is also looking to expand to other markets, with an eye toward establishing a foothold in the Mexican market.

Founded in 2012, when the founders worked out of a five-square-meter office on Berrini Avenue in São Paulo, the company now boasts a robust business with hundreds of employees and a business resting on a secured lending marketplace and independent home and auto lending operations.

The company also released quarterly results for the first time, showing losses narrowing from 74.9 million Brazilian reals to 40.5 million reals in the year ago quarter.

HealNow raises $1.3 million to bring online payments to pharmacies

Published December 9, 2020

As the health tech landscape rapidly evolves, another startup is making its presence known. HealNow has closed a $1.3 million round of funding from SoftBank Opportunity Fund and Alabama Futures Fund.

The company was founded by Halston Prox and Joshua Smith. Prox has worked in healthcare for more than a decade with major organizations such as Providence Health, Mount Sinai and Baylor Scott & White, mostly focused on digitizing health records and designing and implementing software for doctors, nurses, etc. Smith, CTO at the company, has been a developer since 2012.

The duo founded HealNow to become the central nervous system for order and delivery of prescriptions, according to Prox. Your average payments processing system isn’t necessarily applicable to pharmacies large and small because of the complexities of health insurance and the regulatory landscape.

Not only is it costly to facilitate online payments for pharmacies, but they also have their own pharmacy management systems and workflows that can be easily disrupted by moving to a new payments system.

HealNow has built a system that’s specifically tailored to pharmacies of any shape or size, from grocery stores to mom and pop pharmacies and everything in between. It’s a white label solution, meaning that any pharmacy can put their brand language on the product.

“We’re embedded in their current workflows and pharmacies don’t have to do anything manual, even if they’re using a pharmacy management system,” said Prox.

When a user looks to get a prescription from their pharmacy, they are sent a link that allows them to securely answer any questions that may be necessary for the pickup, enter insurance info, make a payment and schedule a curbside pickup or a delivery. The tech also integrates with third-party delivery services for pharmacies that offer deliveries.

This technology has been particularly important during the COVID-19 pandemic, giving smaller pharmacies the chance to compete with bigger chains who have digital solutions already set up that allow for curbside pick up. This is especially true now that Amazon has gotten into the space with the launch of Amazon Pharmacy.

Amazon launches Amazon Pharmacy, a delivery service for prescription medications

HealNow is a SaaS company, charging a monthly subscription fee for use of the platform, as well as a service fee for prescriptions purchased on the platform. However, that service fee is a flat rate that never changes based on the cost of the prescription.

The space is crowded and growing more crowded, with competitors like NimbleRX and Capsule offering their own spin on simplifying and digitizing the pharmacy. One big difference for HealNow, says Prox, is that the startup has no intention of ever being a pharmacy, but rather serving pharmacies in a way that doesn’t disrupt their current workflow or system.

“We’re not a pharmacy, and we want to enable all these pharmacies to be online,” said Prox. “To do that we have to do that in an unbiased way by focusing on being a complete tech company.”

The funding is going primarily toward building out the sales and marketing arms of the company to continue fueling growth. HealNow has a foothold in the West, Southwest and Middle America, and is opening an office in Birmingham to sprint across the East Coast. Prox says the company is processing thousands of orders a day and tens of thousands of orders each month.

HealNow launched in 2018 after graduating from the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator .

SoftBank, Volvo back Flock Freight with $113.5M to help shippers share the load

Published December 1, 2020

Everyday thousands of trucks carry freight along U.S. highways, propelling the economy forward as consumer goods, electronics, cars and agriculture make their way to distribution centers, stores and eventually households. It’s inside these trucks — many of which sit half empty — where Flock Freight, a five-year-old startup out of San Diego, believes it can transform the industry.

Now, it has the funds to try and do it.

Flock Freight said Tuesday it has raised $113.5 million in a Series C round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. Existing investors SignalFire, GLP Capital Partners and Google Ventures also participated in the round, in addition to a new minority investment by strategic partner Volvo Group Venture Capital. Ervin Tu, managing partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, will join Flock Freight’s board. The company, which has raised $184 million to date, has post-funding valuation of $500 million, according to a source familiar with the deal who confirmed an earlier report by Bloomberg.

A slew of startups have popped up in the past several years all aiming to use technology to transform trucking — the backbone of the U.S. economy that moves more than 70% of all U.S. freight — into a more efficient machine. Most have focused on building digital freight networks that connect truckers with shippers.

Flock Freight has focused instead on the shipments themselves. The company created a software platform that helps pool shipments into a single shared truckload to make carrying freight more efficient. Flock Freight says its software avoids the traditional hub-and-spoke system, which is dominated by trucks with less than a full load, known in the industry as LTL. Flock Freight says that by pooling onto one truck shipments that are going the same direction, freight-related carbon emissions can be reduced by 40%.

Improving the logistics of trucking, San Diego’s Flock Freight raises $50 million

The funds will be used to hire more employees; it has 129 employees to date.

“Unlike the digital freight-matching category that uses technology to simply improve efficiency as workflow automation, Flock Freight uses technology to power a new shipping mode (shared truckload) that makes freight transportation more efficient. The impact of Flock Freight’s algorithms is that shippers no longer need to adhere to LTL constraints for freight that measures up to 44 linear feet; instead, they can classify it as ‘shared truckload,’ ” Oren Zaslansky, founder and CEO of Flock Freight said in a statement. “Shippers can use Flock Freight’s efficient shared truckload solution to accommodate high demand and increased urgency.”

Their pitch has been compelling enough to attract a diverse mix of venture firms and corporate investors such as Volvo and SoftBank.

“Flock Freight is improving supply chain efficiency for hundreds of thousands of shippers. Our investment is intended to accelerate the company’s ability to scale its business and capture a greater share of the market,” said Tu, managing partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers.