Spark Capital
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Zeal banks $13M to offer employers a ‘build your own’ payroll product infrastructure
Embedded fintech company Zeal secured $13 million in Series A funding to continue developing its platform for building individualized payroll products.
Spark Capital led the Series A, with participation from Commerce Ventures and a group of individual investors, including Marqeta CEO Jason Gardner and CRO Omri Dahan, Robinhood founder Vlad Tenev, UltimateSoftware executives Mitch Dauerman and Bob Manne and Namely founder Matt Straz. The latest round now gives the company $14.6 million in total funding, which includes a $1.6 million seed round in 2020, CEO Kirti Shenoy told TechCrunch.
The Bay Area company’s origin was as Puzzl, a payment processing startup for the gig economy, founded in 2018 by Shenoy and CTO Pranab Krishnan. It was part of Y Combinator’s 2019 cohort. The pair had to pivot the company after needing to move some of its thousands of 1099 contractors to W2 employee status.
They went looking for payroll processors that could handle high volumes of payroll automatically, like ADP or Paycor, but found they didn’t match some of the capabilities Shenoy and Krishnan wanted, including to pay workers daily and customize earning components.
To ensure other companies didn’t run into the same problem, they decided to build a payroll API that enables their customers to build their own payroll products, even being able to pay their workers everyday. Traditionally, companies would layer together antiquated third-party payroll tools and spend millions of dollars on consulting fees. Zeal’s API tool modernizes the payroll process and takes on the payroll liability while managing the back-end payment logistics, Shenoy said.
Currently, enterprises use Zeal to pay large volumes of workers and keep payment data on their own native systems, while software platforms that sell business-to-business services use Zeal to build their own payroll product to sell to their customers.
“Our mission is to touch every American paycheck with our tax and payment technology, ensuring that American employees are paid correctly and efficiently,” Krishnan said.
And that is a complex goal: there are 200 million American employees, over $8.8 trillion of payroll is processed annually in the U.S. and the country’s 11,000 tax jurisdictions produce over 25,000 income tax code changes a year.
Meanwhile, Shenoy cited IRS data that showed more than 40% of small and medium businesses pay at least one payroll penalty per year. That was one of the drivers for Zeal’s latest product, the Abacus gross-to-net calculator, which payroll companies can use to ensure they are compliant in paying their income taxes.
The co-founders intend to use the new funding to build out their team and strengthen compliance measures to ensure its track record with enterprises.
“We are starting to win more enterprise deals and moving millions of dollars each day,” Shenoy said. “This has been a legacy space for so long, so companies want to work with a provider to move fast.”
Shenoy predicts that more companies will shift to hyper-customized experiences in the next five to 10 years. Whereas the default was a company like ADP, companies will want to control their own data and build products so their customers can do everything payroll-related from one platform.
As part of the investment, Spark Capital’s partner Natalie Sandman has joined Zeal’s board of directors. The firm previously invested in other embedded fintech companies like Affirm and Marqeta, and she thinks there are new experiences in the sector that APIs can unlock.
Sandman felt the payroll-building pain points herself when she worked at Zenefits. At the time, the company was trying to do the same thing, but there were no APIs to connect with. There were all of these spreadsheets to transfer data, but one wrong deduction would trickle down and cause a tax penalty.
Shenoy and Krishnan are both “customer-obsessed,” she said, and are balancing speed with thoughtfulness when it comes to understanding how their customers want to build payroll products.
She is seeing a macro shift to audience-driven human resources where bringing new employees online will mean embedding them into products that will be more valuable versus the traditional spreadsheet.
“To me, it is a no-brainer that APIs provide flexibility in the way wages and deductions need to be made,” Sandman said. “You can lose trust in your employer. Payroll is at the deepest trust point and where you want transparency and a robust solution to solve that need.”
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Spinn taps into $40M to create better coffee brewing, discovery experiences
When you are a coffee lover, taste matters, and Spinn is brewing up some fresh funding in the way of a $20 million funding round, led by Spark Capital, to bring connected coffee to new customers through its hardware-enabled coffee marketplace.
Joining Spark in the round were Amazon’s Alexa Fund, Bar 9 Ventures and existing investors. It gives the Los Angeles-based company a total of $37 million in funding to date, CEO Roderick de Rode told TechCrunch. He isn’t defining this round, but said Spinn previously raised both Series A and B rounds.
“SPINN is doing for coffee what Dyson did for vacuums and what Nest did for homes, rethinking technology and connectivity for better results,” said Kevin Thau, general partner at Spark Capital, in a written statement. “Their approach, from machine design to roaster assortment, is elevating the entire industry and delivering what consumers seek today: delicious tasting coffee brewed to their personal preferences, with the smallest impact on the planet.”
Spinn debuted its centrifugal brewing method at TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield in 2016. The connected coffee maker uses centrifugal force to spin, instead of press, coffee grounds. De Rode says this results in a cup of coffee tasting how it was intended by the roaster. The machines can be controlled via voice command from Amazon’s Alexa or a single tap on the machine or from a mobile app.
A survey released in April by National Coffee Association USA found that the global pandemic was the driver for 85% of Americans drinking at least one cup of coffee at home, up 8% from January 2020. Nearly 60% of Americans drink coffee every day, and one-quarter purchased a new home coffee machine over the past year.
In addition to Spinn, other startups are coming out with machines aimed at making a better cup; for example, Osma is a new coffee-making technique to make a strong espresso-like drink at any temperature, including icy cold.
Spinn itself has three coffee makers to choose from that retail for $479 to $799, according to its website. The machines don’t require any filters or coffee pods and make a variety of styles, including espresso, Americano, drip and cold brew.
The marketplace offers over 1,500 different kinds of coffee from more than 500 artisan roasters around the world. Customers add their coffee choices to a playlist of sorts, which can be specifically curated to ship or scheduled randomly, de Rode said. Drinkers can leave reviews and get recommendations, as well as take a quiz to match with various coffees.
He plans to use the new funding to further grow and develop its patented brewing technologies, and complete delivery of outstanding pre-orders.
Though de Rode wouldn’t go into specifics about Spinn’s growth metrics, he said there has been triple-digit growth from home users. He aims to do for coffee what Vivino did with wine: provide educational content about the coffee options and the roasters themselves.
“The coffee industry is becoming a food thing just like wine,” de Rode said. “People want to understand the different kinds of beans to make more sophisticated choices. We try to bridge the gap between the coffee shop and home.”
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Daily Crunch: Investors back away from Dispo
Dispo is in the midst of a sexual assault controversy, Zoom introduces an SDK and Android owners will have to continue waiting for Clubhouse access. This is your Daily Crunch for March 22, 2021.
The big story: Investors back away from Dispo
After a recent story in Business Insider brought allegations to light that a member of David Dobrik’s vlog squad had sexually assaulted an extra during a shoot, Spark Capital announced that it would “sever all ties” with Dobrik’s photo-sharing startup Dispo, as did fellow investors Unshackled Ventures and Seven Seven Six.
“We have stepped down from our position on the board and we are in the process of making arrangements to ensure we do not profit from our recent investment in Dispo,” said Spark, which led a $20 million Series A in Dispo less than a month ago. That means any potential profits will be donated to organizations supporting survivors of sexual assault.
Dobrik, meanwhile, has stepped down from the Dispo board and left the company.
The tech giants
Zoom introduces new SDK to help developers tap into video services — The company envisions application developers embedding video in social, gaming or retail applications.
Next Billion Users head Caesar Sengupta is leaving Google — Sengupta, who also led the company’s payments business, is leaving the firm after nearly 15 years.
Tim Cook and Tim Sweeney among potential witnesses for Apple/Epic trial — A proposed witness list filed by Apple for its upcoming trial against game-maker Epic reads like a who’s who of executives from the two companies.
Startups, funding and venture capital
Side raises $150M at $1B valuation to help real estate agents go it alone — Side works to turn agents and independent brokerages into boutique brands and businesses.
Indonesian savings and investment app Pluang gets $20M in pre-Series B funding — The company offers proprietary savings and investment products that allow users to make contributions starting from 50 cents USD.
Clubhouse says its Android launch will take ‘a couple of months’ — Clubhouse co-founder Paul Davison said the company is working “really hard” to come to Android, but said it’s going to take a “couple of months” to make that happen.
Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch
NFTs could bridge video games and the fashion industry — Real-life fashion brands use NFTs for marketing in virtual worlds like Minecraft, as well as in several Atari and Microsoft video games.
ironSource is going public via a SPAC and its numbers are pretty good — Before you tune out to avoid reading about yet another blank-check company taking a private company public, you’ll want to pay attention to this one.
Where is the e-commerce app ecosystem headed in 2021? — Superapps are likely to emerge, according to PipeCandy’s Ashwin Ramasamy.
(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)
Everything else
US privacy, consumer, competition and civil rights groups urge ban on ‘surveillance advertising’ — Nearly 40 organizations expressed their concern in an open letter.
Five reasons you should attend TC Early Stage 2021 in April — We’re just days away from kicking off TC Early Stage 2021: Operations & Fundraising on April 1-2.
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.
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Noyo raises $12.5M Series A to keep building its health insurance API business
This morning, Noyo, a startup that provides APIs that link players in the health insurance space, announced that it has closed a $12.5 million Series A round of funding.
The new capital comes less than a year after the startup disclosed that it had raised around $4 million in pre-seed and seed capital, and that its product was already in the market.
At the time it was clear that Noyo had a laser focus on its part of the healthcare world. Now, nearly a year later, the company confirmed to TechCrunch during conversations surrounding its new capital raise that it’s keeping its focus for now.
Linking the carriers and platforms of other insurance verticals, or varietals, will have to wait.
But Noyo is working in an enormous market, namely the U.S. health insurance universe, one that could provide it with space to grow for years to come. The startup sells the use of its application programming interfaces, or APIs, which in Noyo’s case allow customers to “execute, track, and confirm the fulfillment of member transaction requests to carriers,” citing the startup’s documentation.
The company’s product was born out of frustration that Noyo co-founders Shannon Goggin and Dennis Lee dealt with while working for Zenefits, an HR tech unicorn that ran into problems with regulators and customers alike. For more on that story, our prior reporting is useful. (Notably, AgentSync is another API startup play under construction by Zenefits alums.)
The American healthcare market is enormous, lucrative and fraught with inefficiencies and antiquated technology. And the insurance portion of the healthcare market is similarly titanic and broken, providing an outsize opportunity for a startup that can navigate its politics and unique needs with a technology solution able to help incumbents speed up, and save money.
The Series A
Noyo’s new funding event was led by Costanoa Ventures and Spark Capital. Prior investors Core Innovation Capital, Garuda Ventures, the Webb Investment Network, Precursor Ventures and Homebrew upped their investment in the new round.
Homebrew’s Satya Patel was effusive about the company in a comment provided to TechCrunch, saying that Noyo’s “technology and strategic vision have convinced major industry leaders to get on board right out of the gate.” This tracks with what the company has said, including that it has lined up new partnerships with insurance providers Ameritas and Humana.
Patel also noted that “Noyo is helping connect insurance companies and the growing ecosystem of insurtechs,” a portion of the startup market that TechCrunch has worked to track in the last year as it has raised piles of capital, seen notable liquidity and continues to drive headlines more recently.
A good question to ask startups that don’t run their cash accounts near zero before raising new funds is why they raised now. In Noyo’s case, I was curious what was the catalyzing factor for it to go out and raise more capital.
Goggin said that Noyo had found “really good signal and pickup from our early clients and partners.” That, combined with what she described as a “very clear sense of what we needed to do, and how we could accelerate bringing our future vision to life” were enough for her team to say “alright, let’s settle down, this is working, let’s be able to take the big swings.”
And thus the Series A came together.
Noyo has plans to keep hiring, with Goggin telling TechCrunch that her company is currently around 20 people, but will be around 30 by the time 2021 kicks off. She added that “the nice thing” about her new capital raise is that her startup won’t have “a staffing constraint” when it wants to “roll out a new product.”
The pace at which Noyo builds, then, should accelerate.
Which, in turn, should yield more revenue growth. Goggin cautioned that Noyo is not aiming for profitability but is, at the same time, “a real business with a viable model.” The Series A stage is generally a bit early to press founders on growth metrics, as most won’t share unless they are outlier-good. But happily, by the time that Noyo raises a Series B, it should have enough revenue history for some useful year-over-year comparisons, and we will ask for them.
The Noyo round is another data point that API-delivered startups are seeing good market traction, and that investors are taking notice. Expect to hear from a few more related companies in the next few weeks if my inbox is any indicator of what’s coming up.
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Postmates cuts losses in Q2 as it heads towards tie-up with Uber
Popular food delivery service Postmates is in the process of merging with Uber in a blockbuster $2.65 billion deal that would see it join forces with its food delivery competitor, Uber Eats. The deal remains under antitrust scrutiny, and has not yet been approved for closing. The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2021.
However, a new SEC filing posted after hours this Friday gives us a glimpse into how Postmates is faring in the new world of global pandemics and sit-in dining closures across the United States.
Postmates posted a loss of just $32.2 million in Q2, compared to a loss of $73 million in Q1, nearly cutting its cash burning in half. That compares to Uber Eats’ results, which showed a loss of $286 million in the first quarter of 2020 and a loss of $232 million in the second quarter — an improvement of roughly 20%, according to Uber’s most recent financial reports.
Altogether, Postmates lost $105.2 million in the first half of 2020, compared to a loss of $239 million in the same period of 2019.
Uber through its filing today also disclosed the cap table for Postmates in full detail for the first time. On a fully diluted basis, the largest shareholder in Postmates is Tiger Global, which owns 27.2% of the company. Following up is Founders Fund with 11.4%, Spark Capital with 6.9% and GPI Capital with 5.3%. At Uber’s $2.65 billion all-stock deal, that nets Tiger Global roughly $720 million and Founders Fund roughly $302 million, not including some stock preferences and dividends that certain owners of the company hold.
While Postmates and Uber continue to go through the antitrust review process at the federal level, the companies also face legal pressure in their own backyards. Uber noted in its filing today that it and Postmates face headwinds due to California’s AB 5 bill, which is designed to give additional employment protections to freelance workers. However, the company notes that such litigation “may not, in and of itself, give rise to a right of either party to terminate the transaction.”
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Tatch raises $4.25M to build a patch that helps diagnose sleep disorders
Sleep apnea is a huge problem, but is often under-diagnosed because getting a diagnosis often involves getting hooked up to numerous machines and sleeping under the supervision of a doctor. There are at-home solutions, but most are still clunky options with plenty of wires, straps and tubes being used to gather key health markers.
Tatch is a New York startup that’s building a flexible, lightweight patch that can help users gather the data needed to diagnose sleep disorders, including sleep apnea.
Tatch’s team tells TechCrunch that the startup has just closed a $4.25 million round of seed funding led by Spark Capital . Abstract Ventures and Correlation Ventures also participated in the fund. The startup has raised $5.6 million to date. The startup is looking to scale up its engineering and business teams with the new cash, doubling the team overall by year’s end.
Just yesterday, Apple unveiled a sleep tracking application for the Apple Watch. Other consumer electronics like Fitbits and the Oura ring have also long offered sleep analysis. What Tatch is building isn’t meant to help users track their sleep night after night, they’re building a device to help users quickly diagnose their sleep problems and connect them with people who understand the data.
“This is not a sleep tracker that you need to decipher,” CEO Amir Reuveny tells TechCrunch. “We are targeting users at the next step, where you know that something is wrong and now you really want to understand what’s going on.”
Users attach the flexible patch to their torso and wear it through the night. The sensor measures a variety of signals, including respiratory effort, breathing airflow, oxygen levels, body position and more, with the goal of gaining a crystal clear picture of how your body is operating during a bad night of sleep. After a few such nights of gathering data, you’ll be connected with a specialist who can help interpret the data, diagnose your problems and offer users some helpful next steps.
Image Credits: Tatch
The Tatch sensor will be able to diagnose disorders like sleep apnea, as well restless leg syndrome, insomnia and some respiratory illnesses, the startup says. Tatch wants to build a company around sleep health and help ensure that users who get a diagnosis aren’t left searching endlessly for help with their disorder. Reuveny hope the startup will be able to connect users with treatment or facilitate the connection with a sleep specialist who can talk them through improving their sleep.
Tatch isn’t available for sale quite yet, as the company is targeting a commercial rollout in early 2021. The company says they’re in early conversations with the FDA to receive clearance for the device. Right now, they’re gearing up for a pilot program that they’re commencing in the next few months.
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Rewarding civic pride and boosting the local economy? Akron, Ohio is trying out a startup for that
Akron, Ohio, the hometown of LeBron James; the seat of the U.S. tire industry; the 127 largest city in the U.S.; and the home of America’s first toy company, is now the latest site of a global experiment in whether cities can use behavioral economics to help foster good citizenship.
Thanks to the work of the city’s deputy mayor for integrated development, James Hardy, Akron is the first city to roll out services from an Israeli-based company called Colu. A startup backed by just over $20 million in financing from American and Israeli investors, the company has developed an app-based rewards service that cities can roll out to provide perks to users.
In Akron’s case, the initiative rewards points for shopping at local businesses that can be redeemed for discounts at those stores. The initial effort, which includes a platform for businesses to market directly to the app’s users, focuses on businesses owned by women and minorities (a response to the movement for racial justice that has sprung up in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis).
Akron is the first city of what Colu founder Amos Meiri expects to be a nationwide rollout throughout the U.S. The company already has managed to ink another agreement with the city of Chula Vista, Calif.
Colu, which has raised its capital from investors associated with blockchain technologies like Barry Silbert’s Digital Currency Group; the Boston-based venture capital firm, Spark Capital; New York’s Box Group and the Israeli corporate conglomerate, IDB Group, has deep ties to the cryptocurrency world of alternative financial instruments through Meiri.
One of the original architects of the Color coin blockchain experiment, Meiri’s work with Colu is in some ways an extension of that effort to create new kinds of economies powered by alternative financial mechanisms.
Meiri said cities typically pay for Colu out of their marketing budgets as a new way to communicate and attempt to influence civic behavior.
For Akron’s government officials, the company’s services are a way to boost locally owned businesses that have been hit hard by the state’s attempts to contain the COVID-19 outbreak.
“Our locally owned small businesses are facing enormous challenges and we need out-of-the-box ideas that safely connect them to consumers and turn local spending into a source of pride for residents,” said Akron Mayor Dan Horrigan, in a statement. “Our partnership with Colu will enable the city to reward customers for shopping local, improving revenues for our small businesses while helping folks stretch their dollars.”
Earlier work with the municipal government in Tel Aviv promoted sustainable business practice and encouraged businesses to do more to manage their waste and carbon footprint by introducing a “green label.” Businesses that followed the city’s guidelines were given the label and shoppers were encouraged to frequent those merchants.
Colu envisions itself as more than just a marketing and rewards platform for businesses. The company hopes it can draw users into a kind of social networking platform for civic engagement where users can share their own stories about city-life and their interactions with local business owners and the community.
In some ways, it’s a kinder, gentler version of China’s social credit scoring system, which is also designed to influence civic behavior. In this formulation, there’s a rewards system, but no mechanisms to punish citizens for bad behavior.
“Akron has a long history of innovation within our economy — this initiative draws on that legacy,” said Deputy Mayor Hardy, in a statement. “By putting the future of Akron’s locally owned small businesses in the palm of our citizens’ hands, we hope to make it easy for consumers to keep their money local and continue to strengthen our incredible community.”
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Clyde raises $14 million Series A to help e-commerce businesses offer extended warranty plans
Four years ago, Brandon Gell was an architecture student who spent most of his time working on 3D printing modular housing. Now, he’s the founder of Clyde, an extended warranty startup that wants to help small e-commerce businesses offer product protection.
Today, the company announced it has raised a $14 million Series A led by Spark Capital with participation from Crosslink, RRE, Rea Sea Ventures and others.
How do you go from being a product person to the founder of an insurance startup? According to Gell: a stint at a four-person 3D scanner startup in Columbus, Ohio.
Because the team and resources were small, Gell was put in charge of finding an insurance company to work with to protect their expensive end product of scanners.
“I spent six months trying to find a company,” he said. After seeing how seamless it was to work with fintech customer support tools from companies like Stripe, Shopify, Affirm and others, he said it was clear that insurance, and especially the extended warranty space, wasn’t as mature. So he set up an office in his grandma’s New York apartment.
Clyde is a platform that connects small retailers to insurance companies to launch and manage product protection programs.
Using Clyde, customers can access a dashboard and e-commerce apps to manage their protection programs. For example, a user can see how many contracts were sold, how much revenue total those bring and gross profit in real time. It also can see which products are most often purchased with an extended warranty contract.
“It’s a similar type of offering as Affirm or Stripe,” he said. “We give you access to large insurance companies and we enable you to launch the program live on your website or physical point of sale and store wherever you sell.” It has plugins with Shopify, BigCommerce, Salesforce, Magento, Woocommerce, and more so store owners on the site can add Clyde to their small businesses.
Clyde’s most critical metric is that it has an 18% attachment rate on average, which means that 18% of people that go through a Clyde-powered purchasing path end up purchasing extended warranties or protection plans.
The reason businesses care about extended warranty is two-fold. First, insurance benefits the customer experience. Second, insurance purchases are often the highest-margin product that companies sell to their customers. Product protection alone is a $50 billion market. Gell said that Best Buy drives about 2% of its annual revenue from the sale of extended warranties, but that generates more than half of its profit.
Clyde helps small businesses, like a four-person startup in Columbus Ohio, get a bite of this profitable pie. Most e-commerce businesses have to work with Amazon, thus giving a lot of that cash to the big company versus putting it in their own pocket, per Gell. He says that when Amazon sells an extended warranty on a seller’s product, it doesn’t share any revenue with the seller on how the product performs, which prevents a seller from both a stream of revenue and data analytics.
“Our sort of mantra is that the retailers that we work with are basically everybody that’s not Amazon and Walmart,” he said.
Clyde’s goal is different from Upsie, another venture-backed startup focusing on warranties. Upsie is looking to be a direct-to-consumer warranty replacement, while Clyde works on behalf of the retailer and insurance company to connect the two parties.
Closer competitors to the startup include Mulberry and Extend, which were both founded after Clyde and have raised less in venture capital funding. Gell thinks his competitive advantage is partnerships with top insurance companies, and a strong product-focused platform. Clyde’s entire founding team is made up of product people.
Startups right now need to prove that they are viable in both a pre-coronavirus and post-coronavirus world. And Clyde might be exactly in that sweet spot, as it focuses on e-commerce businesses.
The Series A round closed a few weeks ago, before the COVID-19 craziness began, but he said that the pandemic has led to more inbounds and interest than ever before. Gell says it’s a mix of e-commerce being more important than ever, and customer behavior.
“It’s a shift of customers that want to buy online more, but also protect their purchases more than ever,” he said. “Companies are realizing how important it is.”
New cash in hand, Clyde’s growing while its customer-base is looking for new ways to bring in revenue and take care of customers. If the startup can handle the influx of attention and importance right, sticky harmony will follow.
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With $8 million to consolidate Amazon’s top marketplace sellers, Perch makes its first deals
After raising $8 million in November to roll up top Amazon marketplace companies, the new Boston-based startup Perch has begun putting that money to work in its first few deals.
The brainchild of Chris Bell, formerly Wayfair’s head of logistics and a Bain & Co. principal, Perch is well-positioned to serve as unifier of a bevy of disparate products in one nest.
The company’s recent acquisitions include brands selling a sand anchor for beach umbrellas (Beachr), a waterproof apron for cooking, a hip sciatica brace (Bodymate) and other similar products that wouldn’t be out of place in a late-night infomercial or on the Home Shopping Network.
“We believe that the future of product R&D is entrepreneurs that are closest to the problems,” says Bell in an interview. “We look for products that are top three in their niche… [Their founders] want some liquidity and we can bring that onto our platform and add price optimization, ad-spend optimization and cross-geography marketing.”
In a way, Perch is tapping into a similar urge to give America’s huge population of tinkerers and inventors better access to market and a chance to monetize their ideas à la Quirky, the failed attempt by GE to turn gadget ideas into new product lines for GE.
By contrast, Perch waits for the businesses to gain traction, then offers to buy the products from their owners and give them up to two years of participation in any upside that the product generates at certain milestones that Perch sets for the participating entrepreneurs.
“Three years ago I would not have started this business,” says Bell. “Amazon has made this a much more defensible place.”
The Amazon marketplace remains somewhat of the Wild West, where intellectual property rights are often ignored and successful products are copied at lightning speed by vendors with access to the same commoditized supply chains. It’s really marketing muscle and an ability to get better margins through scale that creates winners, it seems, and Perch is using its technical know-how to get to the top.
Acquisitions can range from $750,000 to $2 million upfront with the upside on the back end still to come, according to Bell. Financing this operation is a $4.5 million equity round and $3.5 million in debt financing by some of the nation’s leading venture firms. Perch won’t buy any company that’s doing less than $250,000 in revenue.
Spark Capital led the deal for Perch, with general partner Alex Finkelstein taking a seat on the company’s board of directors. Tectonic Ventures also participated. Finkelstein, who led Spark’s investment in Wayfair, was introduced to Bell through Wayfair’s chief operating officer. He immediately saw the potential in Perch’s pitch.
“If you look at it from a macro standpoint. Amazon is growing very quickly and the third-party marketplace is growing very quickly. Within the next year we’re going to have a large portfolio and it’ll do well in any environment,” Finkelstein said.
Amazon’s third-party sellers are a $200 billion market and the largest single vendor is a $500 million seller, Bell noted, and that is an opportunity that a well-capitalized company can exploit.
“We’re going to be managing hundreds of micro-brands and the only way to do that is through a technology platform,” Bell said. “They’re generally niche products that are not big enough that Amazon Basics would come into that category. We’re competing in smaller categories, but even some of these niche categories are tens of millions to hundreds of millions in revenue.”
While Perch has seen some impacts from the economic shutdown caused by the government response to the COVID-19 epidemic, the company expects the shift in consumer behavior to be the wind beneath its wings, rather than against its branches.
“Medium-term it’s pushing more people to buy online,” says Bell. And Perch isn’t slowing its pace of acquisitions. “We made two acquisitions in March and we’re likely going to close another two in the next two weeks.”
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VCs warn coronavirus will impact fundraising for the next 2 quarters
As of this writing, COVID-19 has killed more than 3,400 people around the globe and the coronavirus has infected tens of thousands more. But its impact has gone much further, causing major disruptions in public markets and leading corporations to pull out of conferences and delay travel. Big tech companies are asking workers to stay home and investors are now urging startups to prepare accordingly.
Coronavirus fears are now affecting fundraising for startups. I am seeing advice that tells any company that might run out of cash in 2020 to start raising now before things might get a lot tighter. RIPGoodTimes?
— Josh Elman (@joshelman) March 1, 2020
Sequoia Capital sent a letter to its founders on Thursday warning that the coronavirus was a “black swan” event and startups should “brace themselves for turbulence” by considering if they have enough cash and preparing to face supply chain disruptions. The letter also warned they could have a harder time fundraising, similar to the market downturns of 2001 and 2009.
The coronavirus effect is rippling throughout the tech world. Seattle, which has seen a cluster of cases, seems almost a ghost town in some parts, according to entrepreneur and former Madrona Capital partner Shauna Causey. She told TechCrunch that many of the coffee shops and co-working spaces popular among VCs have gone empty in the last week and all of her fundraising meetings are conducted via Zoom.
Given that fundraising can take several months, if their cash out date is 2020, they should be fundraising soon anyway
also hearing from founders it’s already getting hard
— Evelyn Rusli (@EvelynRusli) March 2, 2020
A Singapore-based VC firm told a startup I’m working with that they’re not going to wire the entire $2m investment they committed to in the Series A, which has been in closing the last few weeks. The rationale was to conserve capital due to coronavirus. The funding risk is real.
— Tommy Leep (@leepnet) March 4, 2020
And already there’s some chatter that funding might be drying up for early-stage startups, though Bloomberg Beta’s Roy Bahat tells TechCrunch that startups should always be fundraising as soon as they can to protect themselves from this type of calamity.
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