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Extra Crunch roundup: RapidSOS EC-1, how to prep for an M&A exit, inside Genki Forest
According to one estimate, Americans call 911 about 240 million times every year.
Sending emergency services to the right location sounds straightforward, but each 911 call is routed through one of thousands of call centers known as public safety answering points (PSAPs).
“Every 911 center is very different and they are as diverse and unique as the communities that they serve,” said Karin Marquez, senior director of public safety at RapidSOS.
One PSAP that serves New York City is a 450,000-square-foot, blast-resistant cube set on nine acres, but you also have “agencies in rural America that have one person working 24/7 and they’re there to answer three calls a day,” Marquez noted.
Founded eight years ago, RapidSOS processes more than 150 million emergencies each year across approximately 5,000 PSAPs. The company’s technology helps call centers integrate requests from cell phones, landlines and IoT devices.
“Its technology is almost certainly integrated into the smartphone you’re carrying and many of the devices you have lying around,” Managing Editor Danny Crichton writes in a four-part series that studies the company’s origins and ensuing success:
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- Part 1: The early years and why a consumer app company turned to govtech and integrated services for technology and device companies.
- Part 2: How RapidSOS made its pivot and why its current business model has performed so well.
- Part 3: To transform 911 services, RapidSOS established dozens of corporate and individual partnerships.
- Part 4: Examines the future of 911 and RapidSOS in light of limited infrastructure funding.
“I’ve honestly never met a company like RapidSOS with so many signed partnerships,” says Danny, who initially wrote about the firm six years ago.
“It’s closed dozens of partnerships and business development deals, and with some of the biggest names in tech. How does it do it? This story is about how it built a successful BD engine.”
Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch this week!
Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist
How to prepare for M&A, your most likely exit avenue
Image Credits: Reinhard Krull / EyeEm (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
The headlines might be littered with mega deals, IPOs and SPACs, but in all likelihood, you will exit your startup via a relatively smaller merger or acquisition, Ben Boissevain writes in a guest column.
“The IPO market is healthy again, but M&A still represents 88% of exits: So far this year, there were 503 IPOs and 5,203 deals,” writes Boissevain, founder of Ascento Capital.
“While it is good to strive for a billion-dollar-plus sale, a successful IPO or a SPAC deal, it is practical to prepare your startup for a smaller transaction.”
Duolingo boosts IPO price target in boon to edtech startups
Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)
U.S. edtech company Duolingo bumped up its IPO price range Monday morning, targeting $95 to $100 per share, up from previous guidance of $85 to $95 per share.
“The fact that Duolingo is raising its IPO price range indicates that we are more likely on the path for a strong offering than a weak one,” Alex Wilhelm notes.
Data-driven iteration helped China’s Genki Forest become a $6B beverage giant in 5 years
Image Credits: VCG (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Many Extra Crunch readers will not have heard of China’s fastest-growing bottled beverage company: Genki Forest is a direct-to-consumer startup that started selling its sodas, milk teas and other products just five years ago.
Today, its products are available in 40 countries and the company hopes to generate revenue of $1.2 billion in 2021. After closing its latest funding round, Genki Forest is valued at $6 billion.
Industry watchers frequently compare the upstart to giants like PepsiCo and Coca-Cola, but founder Binsen Tang comes from a tech background, having funded ELEX Technology, a social gaming company that found success internationally.
“China doesn’t need any more good platforms,” Tang told his team in 2015, “but it does need good products.”
Leveraging China’s robust distribution network, lighting-fast manufacturing capabilities and a vast pool of data that enables holistic digitization, Genki Forest sells more than 30% of its products online.
“Everything feels right about the company,” said VC investor Anna Fang. “The space, the founder, the products and the back end … they exemplify the new Chinese consumer brand.“
Sequoia’s Mike Vernal outlines how to design feedback loops in the search for product-market fit
Sequoia’s Mike Vernal joined us on TechCrunch Early Stage: Marketing and Fundraising to discuss how founders should approach product-market fit, with a specific focus on tempo.
It doesn’t mean fast in the kind of uncontrolled, reckless, crashing sense. It means fast in a sort of consistent, maniacal, get-a-little-bit-better-each-day kind of way. And it’s actually one of the top things that we look for, at least when evaluating a team: How consistently fast they move.
As China shakes up regulations, tech companies suffer
Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)
Alex Wilhelm spent the end of last week and the beginning of this one looking at Chinese regulations targeting its edtech sector, aiming to understand “precisely what is going on with the various regulatory changes.”
“For startups, the regulatory changes aren’t a death blow; indeed, many Chinese tech startups won’t be affected by what we’ve seen thus far,” he writes. “But on the whole, it feels like the risk profile of doing business in China has risen.”
Automakers have battery anxiety, so they’re taking control of the supply
Image Credits: Porsche AG
To ensure a steady supply of batteries, automakers are increasingly looking to joint ventures.
“Like if you’re VW, and you say, ‘We’re going to go 50% electric by whatever year,’ but then the batteries don’t show up, you’re bankrupt, you’re dead,” Sila Nano CEO Gene Berdichevsky said in a recent interview.
“Their scale is so big that even if their cell partners have promised them to deliver, automakers are scared that they won’t.”
Pro tips from the team behind Kickstarter’s most funded app
Image Credits: AndreyPopov / Getty Images
The team at memoryOS “spent countless hours researching down the rabbit hole of crowdfunding tips and tricks” before it successfully became the most-funded app on Kickstarter, the company’s CEO, Alex Ruzh, writes in a guest column.
“We’re sharing our approach (and secrets) to building a successful crowdfunding campaign because we know just how tough it can be to launch your own product,” he writes.
SOSV partners explain how deep tech startups can fundraise successfully
Startups developing so-called deep tech often find it challenging to raise capital for various reasons.
At TechCrunch Early Stage: Marketing and Fundraising, two experienced investors, SOSV partners Pae Wu and Garrett Winther, spoke on the subject and advised startups facing a challenging fundraising path.
Checkout is the key to frictionless B2B e-commerce
Image Credits: Dilok Klaisataporn (opens in a new window)
Processing payments, credit and authorizations for B2B purchases is all handled electronically, but that’s not a panacea.
For example, volume sellers prefer to work through traditional accounts payable systems instead of paying the service fees smaller companies accept as the cost of doing business.
However, the combination of fraud and identity protection with credit handling and digital payments “creates a powerful network, the type that can not only build trust but enable one-click transactions at scale,” says Andrew Steele, an investor at Activant Capital.
Cowboy Ventures’ Ted Wang: CEO coaching is ‘about having a second set of eyes’
At TechCrunch Early Stage: Marketing and Fundraising, Cowboy Ventures’ Ted Wang spoke about why he encourages founders in his portfolio to work with executive coaches.
I don’t think you need to limit advice from people who are “been there, done that.” I think it is really important to get input from those people, but in terms of personal development, I think you want insight from people who understand how human beings listen and learn and grow.
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RapidSOS learned that the best product design is sometimes no product design
Sometimes, the best missions are the hardest to fund.
For the founders of RapidSOS, improving the quality of emergency response by adding useful data, like location, to 911 calls was an inspiring objective, and one that garnered widespread support. There was just one problem: How would they create a viable business?
The roughly 5,700 public safety answering points (PSAPs) in America weren’t great contenders. Cash-strapped and highly decentralized, 911 centers already spent their meager budgets on staffing and maintaining decades-old equipment, and they had few resources to improve their systems. Plus, appropriations bills in Congress to modernize centers have languished for more than a decade, a topic we’ll explore more in part four of this EC-1.
Who would pay? Who was annoyed enough with America’s antiquated 911 system to be willing to shell out dollars to fix it?
People obviously desire better emergency services — after all, they are the ones who will dial 911 and demand help someday. Yet, they never think about emergencies until they actually happen, as RapidSOS learned from the poor adoption of its Haven app we discussed in part one. People weren’t ready to pay a monthly subscription for these services in advance.
So, who would pay? Who was annoyed enough with America’s antiquated 911 system to be willing to shell out dollars to fix it?
Ultimately, the company iterated itself into essentially an API layer between the thousands of PSAPs on one side and developers of apps and consumer devices on the other. These developers wanted to include safety features in their products, but didn’t want to engineer hundreds of software integrations across thousands of disparate agencies. RapidSOS’ business model thus became offering free software to 911 call centers while charging tech companies to connect through its platform.
It was a tough road and a classic chicken-and-egg problem. Without call center integrations, tech companies wouldn’t use the API — it was essentially useless in that case. Call centers, for their part, didn’t want to use software that didn’t offer any immediate value, even if it was being given away for free.
This is the story of how RapidSOS just plowed ahead against those headwinds from 2017 onward, ultimately netting itself hundreds of millions in venture funding, thousands of call agency clients, dozens of revenue deals with the likes of Apple, Google and Uber, and partnerships with more software integrators than any startup has any right to secure. Smart product decisions, a carefully calibrated business model and tenacity would eventually lend the company the escape velocity to not just expand across America, but increasingly across the world as well.
In this second part of the EC-1, I’ll analyze RapidSOS’ current product offerings and business strategy, explore the company’s pivot from consumer app to embedded technology and take a look at its nascent but growing international expansion efforts. It offers key lessons on the importance of iterating, how to secure the right customer feedback and determining the best product strategy.
The 411 on a 911 API
It became clear from the earliest stages of RapidSOS’ journey that getting data into the 911 center would be its first key challenge. The entire 911 system — even today in most states — is built for voice and not data.
Karin Marquez, senior director of public safety at RapidSOS, who we met in the introduction, worked for decades at a PSAP near Denver, working her way up from call taker to a senior supervisor. “When I started, it was a one-man dispatch center. So, I was working alone, I was answering 911 calls, non-emergency calls, dispatching police, fire and EMS,” she said.
RapidSOS senior director of public safety Karin Marquez. Image Credits: RapidSOS
As a 911 call taker, her very first requirement for every call was figuring out where an emergency is taking place — even before characterizing what is happening. “Everything starts with location,” she said. “If I don’t know where you are, I can’t send you help. Everything else we can kind of start to build our house on. Every additional data [point] will help to give us a better understanding of what that emergency is, who may be involved, what kind of vehicle they’re involved in — but if I don’t have an address, I can’t send you help.”
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Blameless raises $30M to guide companies through their software lifecycle
Site reliability engineering platform Blameless announced Tuesday it raised $30 million in a Series B funding round, led by Third Point Ventures with participation from Accel, Decibel and Lightspeed Venture Partners, to bring total funding to over $50 million.
Site reliability engineering (SRE) is an extension of DevOps designed for more complex environments.
Blameless, based in San Mateo, California, emerged from stealth in 2019 after raising both a seed and Series A round, totaling $20 million. Since then, it has turned its business into a blossoming software platform.
Blameless’ platform provides the context, guardrails and automated workflows so engineering teams are unified in the way they communicate and interact, especially to resolve issues quicker as they build their software systems.
It originally worked with tech-forward teams at large companies, like Home Depot, that were “dipping [their toes] into the space and now [want] to double down,” co-founder and CEO Lyon Wong told TechCrunch.
The company still works with those tech-forward teams, but in the past two years, more companies sought out resident SRE architect Kurt Anderson to advise them, causing Blameless to change up its business approach, Wong said.
Other companies are also seeing a trend of customers asking for support — for example, in March, Google Cloud unveiled its Mission Critical Services support option for SRE to serve in a similar role as a consultant as companies move toward readiness with their systems. And in February, Nobl9 raised a $21 million Series B to provide enterprises with the tools they need to build service-level-objective-centric operations, which is part of a company’s SRE efforts.
Blameless now has interest from more mainstream companies in the areas of enterprise, logistics and healthcare. These companies aren’t necessarily focused on technology, but see a need for SRE.
“Companies recognize the shortfall in reliability, and then the question they come to us with is how do they get from where they are to where they want to be,” Anderson said. “Often companies that don’t have a process respond with ‘all hands on deck’ all the time, but instead need to shift to the right people responding.”
Lyon plans to use the new funding to fill key leadership roles, the company’s go-to-market strategy and product development to enable the company to go after larger enterprises.
Blameless doubled its revenue in the last year and will expand to service all customer segments, adding small and emerging businesses to its roster of midmarket and large companies. The company also expects to double headcount in the next three quarters.
As part of the funding announcement, Third Point Ventures partner Dan Moskowitz will join Blameless’ board of directors with Wong, Accel partner Vas Natarajan and Lightspeed partner Ravi Mhatre.
“Freeing up engineering to focus on shipping code is exactly what Blameless achieves,” said Moskowitz in a written statement. “The Blameless market opportunity is big as we see teams struggle and resort to creating homegrown playbooks and point solutions that are incomplete and costly.”
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Nium crosses $1B valuation with $200M Riverwood Capital-led round
Business-to-business payments platform Nium announced Monday that it raised more than $200 million in Series D funding and saw its valuation rise above $1 billion.
The company, now Singapore-based but shifting to the Bay Area, touted the investment as making it “the first B2B payments unicorn from Southeast Asia.”
Riverwood Capital led the round, in which Temasek, Visa, Vertex Ventures, Atinum Capital, Beacon Venture Capital and Rocket Capital Investment participated, along with a group of angel investors like DoorDash’s Gokul Rajaram, FIS’ Vicky Bindra and Tribe Capital’s Arjun Sethi. Including the new funding, Nium has raised $300 million to date, Prajit Nanu, co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch.
The B2B payments sector is already hot, yet underpenetrated, according to some experts. To give an idea just how hot, Nium was seeking $150 million for its Series D round, received commitments of $300 million from eager investors and settled on $200 million, Nanu said.
“This is our fourth or fifth fundraise, but we have never had this kind of interest before — we even had our term sheets in five days,” he added. “I believe this interest is because we’ve successfully managed to create a global platform that is heavily regulated, which gives us access to a lot of networks. This is an environment where payment is visible, and our core is powering frictionless commerce and enabling anyone to use our platform.”
Nium’s new round adds fuel to a fire shared by a number of companies all going after a global B2B payments market valued at $120 trillion annually: last week, Paystand raised $50 million in Series C funding to make B2B payments cashless, while Dwolla raised $21 million for its API that allows companies to build and facilitate fast payments. In March, Higo brought in $3.3 million to do the same in Latin America, while Balance, developing a B2B payments platform that allows merchants to offer a variety of payment methods. raised $5.5 million in February.
Nium’s approach is to provide access to a global payment infrastructure, including card issuance, accounts receivable and payable, and banking-as-a-service through a single API. The company’s network enables customers to then send funds to more than 100 countries, pay out in more than 60 currencies, accept funds in seven currencies and issue cards in more than 40 countries, Nanu said. The company also boasts money transfer, card issuances and banking licenses in 11 jurisdictions.
Francisco Alvarez-Demalde, co-founding partner and managing partner at Riverwood, said in an email that the combination of software — plus regulatory licenses — and operating a fintech infrastructure platform on behalf of neobanks and corporates is a global trend experiencing hyper-growth.
Riverwood followed Nium for many years, and its future vision was what got the firm interested in being a part of this round. Alvarez-Demalde said that “Nium has the incredible combination of a great market opportunity, a talented founder and team, and we believe the company is poised for global growth based on underlying secular technology trends like increasing real-time payment capabilities and the proliferation of cross border commerce.
“As a central payment infrastructure in one API, Nium is a catalyst that unlocks cross-border payments, local accounts and card issuance with a network of local market licenses, partners and banking relationships to facilitate moving money across the world,” he added. “Enterprises of all types are embedding financial services as part of their consumer experience, and Nium is a key global enabler of this trend.”
Nanu said the new funding enables the company to move to the United States, which represents 3% of Nium’s revenue. He wants to increase that to 20% over the next 18 months, as well as expand in Latin America. The investment also gives the company a 12- to 18-month runway for further M&A activity. In June, Nium acquired virtual card issuance company Ixaris, and in July acquired Wirecard Forex India to expose it to India’s market. He also plans to expand the company’s payments network infrastructure, invest in product development and add to Nium’s 700-person headcount.
Nium already counts hundreds of enterprise companies as clients and plans to onboard thousands more in the next year. The company processes $8 billion in payments annually and has issued more than 30 million virtual cards since 2015. Meanwhile, revenue grew by over 280% year over year.
All of this growth puts the company on a trajectory for an initial public offering, Nanu said. He has already spoken to people who will help the company formally kick off that journey in the first quarter of 2022.
“Unlike other companies that raise money for new products, we aim to expand in the existing sets of what we do,” Nanu said. “The U.S. is a new market, but we have a good brand and will use the new round to provide a better experience to the customer.”
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As China shakes up regulations, tech companies suffer
The Exchange spent a little time on Friday ruminating on the impact of then-rumored regulation in China targeting its edtech sector. News that the Chinese government intended to crack down further on the education technology market hit shares of public, China-based edtech companies. It was a mess.
Then over the weekend, the rumors became reality, and the impact is still being felt today in the global markets.
But there’s more. China is also bringing new regulatory pressure on food-delivery companies and Tencent Music. More precisely, we’ve seen successive market-dynamic-changing moves from the Chinese government in the last few days, coming as 2021 had already proved to be a turbulent environment for China-based technology companies.
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.
Read it every morning on Extra Crunch or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.
Today we have to do a little bit of work to understand precisely what is going on with the various regulatory changes. Why? Because the Chinese venture capital market is a key player in the global venture scene. And Chinese startups have gone public on both Chinese, Hong Kong and U.S. exchanges; there’s a lot of capital tied up in companies impacted today — and possibly tomorrow.
For startups, the regulatory changes aren’t a death blow; indeed, many Chinese tech startups won’t be affected by what we’ve seen thus far. And upstart tech companies in sectors less likely to be targeted by central authorities may become more attractive to investors than they were before the regulatory onslaught kicked off. But on the whole, it feels like the risk profile of doing business in China has risen. That could curb the pace at which capital is invested, cut valuations and lower interest in the Chinese startup market from private-market investors able to invest globally.
Let’s parse what’s changed, examine market reactions and then consider what could be next. We want to better understand today’s Chinese startup market and what its new form could mean for existing players and future performance.
Changes
The edtech clampdown did not start last week. China’s edtech sector started to rack up penalties and fines in June, which led to what the Asia Times called “warning bells” in the sector. From there, things went from penalties to punishing regulatory changes.
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SoftBank-backed Embark Veterinary valued at $700M after $75M Series B
Now that you have that COVID dog, Embark Veterinary wants to help him or her be in your life for a long time by offering DNA testing with the goal of curbing preventable diseases and increasing the lifespan of dogs by three years within the next decade.
The Boston-based dog genetics company raised $75 million in Series B funding in what the company is calling “the biggest Series B for a pet startup to date.” SoftBank Vision Fund 2 was the lead investor and was joined by existing investors F-Prime Capital, SV Angel, Slow Ventures, Freestyle Capital and Third Kind Venture Capital.
The new round boosts Embark’s total funding to $94.3 million since the company was founded in 2015, according to Crunchbase data. It also gives it a post-money valuation of $700 million, Embark founder and CEO Ryan Boyko told TechCrunch.
Boyko has been a dog lover all his life, and also interested in biology and evolution. Dogs, in particular, are fascinating to him because of their variety: they can be bred to be two pounds or 200 pounds, and come in all shapes and sizes. His interest led him to study dogs in order to understand their evolution.
“I began to think about health problems, and honestly, dogs are a better system for using genetics to better their health than humans,” Boyko said. “You can breed them, so genetics has as much power to cause health problems as it can improve quality and life.”
Embark’s dog DNA test retails for $199 and enables dog owners, breeders and veterinarians to personalize care plans based on a dog’s unique genetic profile. It can test for over 350 breeds and 200 genetic health risks, as well as physical traits. Similar to a 23andMe test, test users can learn characteristics about breed, health and ancestry.
For example, the test could show that a healthy dog may have a gene that predisposes them to slipped discs. If the dog has that, then weight management would be an important factor in their care regime, as would not allowing them to jump off the couch. Another common genetic risk is HUU, or Hyperuricosuria, which is elevated levels of uric acid in urine that could lead to bladder stones due to the way dogs process minerals. By changing the dog’s diet, it could reduce the risk for developing the stones, which are painful and expensive to treat, Boyko said.
The test’s technology revolves around proprietary genotyping technology that analyzes more than 200,000 genetic markers, currently two times more information than any other dog DNA test on the market, Boyko said. This gives Embark the world’s largest database of canine health and biological information, enabling the company to provide insights into certain conditions and make new discoveries about health risks, traits and breeds.
Embark aims to become the standard of care for dog owners and vets. It grew 235% between 2019 and 2020 and saw five times the sales over the past two years. To support that growth, the company intends to use the new funding to bring on key hires and expand its database. Boyko anticipates adding more than 100 employees between 2021 and 2022.
Boyko said the opportunity in the pet startup space is huge. Indeed, U.S. spending on pets reached nearly $100 billion in 2020, up from $95.7 billion in 2019, according to the American Pet Products Association.
At the same time, venture capital interest in U.S. pet-focused companies, from nutrition to travel to healthcare, grew 29.5% from 2019 and 2020, according to Crunchbase data. In addition to Embark’s funding, 2021 was good to other pet startups as well, including pet insurance company Wagmo, raising $12.5 million, connected pet collar company Fi received $30 million and Rover, which announced plans to go public via SPAC.
Lydia Jett, partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, told TechCrunch that this was her first pet-based investment, and what Embark is doing brings advances to a category right now where people care about their pets enough that they want to do something that will expand their value of life.
Jett said the management team being dedicated to DNA-based analytics is the future, and Embark is starting this big curve when it comes to pets and the convergence of real emotional ties to pets and the ability to improve their lives.
“This company is a driver of change to happen,” she added. “We are the largest consumer investor in the world, and Embark is very much aligned with what we are seeing across our portfolio that consumers are revisiting priorities and choices. That is a major trend, but still early in the cycle of personalization for their pets.”
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Mark Cuban-backed Eterneva raises $10M to turn your loved one’s ashes into diamonds
The loss of a loved one is perhaps one of the most traumatic things a person can experience.
When it comes to memorializing someone after their death, most people think of planning funerals and/or picking out caskets or tombstones. And those things are typically done with the help of a funeral home.
Enter Austin-based Eterneva, which is building a rare direct-to-consumer brand in the end-of life space. The four-year-old startup creates diamonds from the cremated ashes or hair of people and pets. It’s a highly unusual business but one that seems to be resonating with people seeking a way to keep a piece of their loved ones close to them after their death.
Since its inception, Eterneva has seen triple-digit growth in sales — including in 2020, when it more than doubled its revenue, according to CEO and co-founder Adelle Archer. And today, the company is announcing an “oversubscribed” $10. million Series A funding round led by Tiger Management with participation from Goodwater Capital, Capstar Ventures, NextCoast Ventures and Dallas billionaire Mark Cuban. (For the unacquainted, Tiger Management is the hedge fund and family office of Julian Robertson from which Tiger Global Management descended.)
“It was an extremely competitive round,” Archer told TechCrunch. “We received three term sheets and were able to put together an all-star investment group.” That investment group included Capstar Managing DIrector Kathryn Cavanaugh, who also joined Eterneva’s board; Lydia Jett — one of the top female partners at Softbank overseeing their $100 billion Vision Fund and Kara Nortman, managing partner at Upfront Capital, one of the first women to make managing partner at a VC fund and co-founder of Angel City with actress Natalie Portman.
Archer and co-founder Garrett Ozar launched Eterneva in the first quarter of 2017 after working together at BigCommerce. The company’s origin story is a very personal one for Archer. Her close friend and business mentor, Tracey Kaufman, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and ended up passing away at the age of 47. With no next of kin, Kaufman left her cremated ashes to her aunt, best friend and Archer.
“We started looking into different options but all the websites we landed on were so lackluster, somber and overwhelming,” Archer recalls. “Tracey was the most amazing person, and I felt like when you lose remarkable people, you needed better options to honor and memorialize them.”
At the time, Archer was working on a lab-grown diamond startup. Over dinner with a diamond scientist during which she was discussing her mentor’s death, the scientist said, “Well, you know Adele, there is carbon in ashes, so we could get the carbon out of Tracey’s ashes and make a diamond.”
The thought blew Archer’s mind.
“I knew that I had to do that, 100%. Tracy was such a vibrant person, it suited her so perfectly,” she said. “And I’d have a part of her with me all the time.”
Eterneva co-founders Garrett Ozar and Adelle Archer. Image Credits: Eterneva
It was the first diamond ever created by Eterneva, and it gave Archer a chance to be a customer of her own product, which she believes has helped in building an experience for her other customers. Soon, she became “fully focused” on the idea, which she viewed as a way to give grieving people “brightness and healing and a beautiful way to honor their loved ones.”
Since inception, Eterneva has created nearly 1,500 diamonds for over 1,000 customers. It can do colorless or nearly any color including black, yellow, blue, orange and green. The entry price for an Eterneva diamond is $2,999 and that goes up based on the size and color. Pets make up about 40% of Eterneva’s business.
“We view ourselves as the complete opposite tone of everything else in this space,” Archer said. “A lot of people are trying to solve planning and logistics around the end of life. We’re about helping people move forward, and building a platform for the celebration of life.”
The process to create the diamond is intricate, according to Archer, taking 7 to 9 months. The intent is to bring the customer along the journey by sharing the process with them at each stage through videos and pictures.
“We do it in parallel with their processing grief, which is super isolating,” Archer said. “They are usually in a different place with their grief than when they first started.”
One of the plans with the new capital is to enable more people to participate in person with the process, such as starting the machine work, or telling the jeweler stories about their loved one and coming up with a custom design that might have little details that represent aspects of their loved one’s life.
The company also plans to use the money to scale their funeral home channel program nationwide via Enterprise partnerships and scaling its operations and capacity in Austin so it can keep up with demand.
Eterneva is banking on the fact that more and more “people don’t want traditional funerals anymore.”
“They want personalization and meaning,” said Archer. “We plan to evolve the platform with different products and services down the road.”
The startup also wants to continue to build awareness around its brand. Recently, it’s seen more than a dozen videos on TikTok about its diamonds go viral, according to Archer.
Prior to the Series A, Eterneva had raised a total of $6.7 million from angels and institutions. Its seed round was a $3 million financing led by Austin-based Springdale Ventures in 2020. Mark Cuban first became an investor in the company when Archer and Ozar appeared on “Shark Tank.” Cuban took a 9% stake in the company in exchange for a $600,000 investment. Despite claims that the company was a scam, Cuban has stood by the science behind it and put money in the latest round as well.
Via email, he told TechCrunch he views an Eterneva diamond as “a unique, socially responsible way to stay connected to loved ones.”
“There is still so much upside and growth in their future,” Cuban wrote. “So I doubled down.”
He went on to describe the creation of diamond from the hair or ashes of a loved one as “such an intense personal commitment.”
“Eternava takes a very emotional and difficult [time] and helps people walk through their journey in a trusted way that I don’t think anyone else can come close to,” Cuban added.
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Sila banks $13M to offer single API for developing financial products, services
Sila announced Monday it raised $13 million in Series A funding for its banking and payment platform that gives software teams tools to build the next generation of financial products and services.
Revolution Ventures led the round and was joined by existing investors Madrona Venture Group, Oregon Venture Fund and Mucker Capital, as well as Wise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus. The funding brings the total investment to date for Portland, Oregon-based Sila to $20 million.
The company was founded in 2018 by Shamir Karkal, Angela Angelovska, Isaac Hines and Alex Lipton to simplify digital payments and storage in a regulatory compliant way and build on blockchain technology. CEO Karkal has a long history in the fintech space, co-founding Simple, an app unifying various accounts into one accessible bank card, in 2009. It was acquired by BBVA in 2014 for $117 million and shuttered earlier this year.
Karkal told TechCrunch that the idea for Sila was born out of frustration while starting another bank. He saw a need for financial application development, but was hindered by a banking system “still stuck in the 20th century.” He thought consumers expected a different level of service, which is why many flock to fintechs.
However, whenever a business tried to connect existing banking systems, fintechs and cryptocurrency innovators, as it built and scale, would always run into technology and compliance issues, Karkal said.
“The problem with working with banks, is that you have to figure out how to integrate with their mainframe,” he added. “In the process, you end up having to also be compliance experts just to be able to do it.”
Whereas it took Karkal three years to get bank processes set up for other companies, it took Sila 18 months. Its banking APIs enable developers to create their own digital wallets, replacing the need to integrate with legacy financial institutions. Sila also has partnerships with fintech platforms, including Plaid, Alloy, Lithic and Arcus to move money, and is backed by Evolve Bank and Trust.
Sila can now get customers up-and-running in six to eight weeks. And unlike competitors that focus almost exclusively on e-commerce, most of Sila’s customers are doing regulated payments within the fintech, insurtech, commercial real estate and cryptocurrency spaces that tend to be more complex from a compliance basis, Karkal said.
Since the company launched its platform, business was building steadily, and took off in the second half of 2020. The company raised a $7.7 million seed round earlier in the year. In the last 12 months, Sila grew its revenue 10 times and customers’ end users grew over 500% in the last seven months.
Sila will use the new funding to increase headcount, target additional partners and expand product features, including its Ethereum MainNet stablecoin issuance and interoperability between FedWire and the Nacha Automated Clearing House network.
“There is a massive wave of fintechs emerging in the U.S., and we have barely scratched the surface,” Karkal said. “Places like India, Africa and Latin America could accelerate at the same time because they are mainly starting from zero. We are here to ‘arm the rebels’ and help those innovators build applications to give all end users a much better financial experience.”
As part of the investment, Clara Sieg, partner at Revolution Ventures, is joining the company’s board. She told TechCrunch she met the company’s co-founders through the Portland ecosystem.
Revolution tends to look at fintech startups from a consumer angle. Recognizing that the problem with building infrastructure meant dealing with banks, the firm set out how to find a company building the pipes to solve it, she said.
In the landscape of fintech, she considers Dwolla to be a competitor to Sila. Last week, the company raised $21 million to continue developing its API that allows companies to build and facilitate fast payments, specifically with a focus on ACH. However, it comes down to actually signing up customers, and that competitive landscape is pretty thin, Sieg added.
“Sila is building an easy way for people to program money and taking a regulatory eye to things,” Sieg said. “When Shamir was building Simple, he could see how challenging it was for incumbents to provide the tools developers need to embed financial services, and this is why we have confidence in his ability to win.”
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NotCo gets its horn following $235M round to expand plant-based food products
NotCo, a food technology company making plant-based milk and meat replacements, wrapped up another funding round this year, a $235 million Series D round that gives it a $1.5 billion valuation.
Tiger Global led the round and was joined by new investors, including DFJ Growth Fund, the social impact foundation, ZOMA Lab; athletes Lewis Hamilton and Roger Federer; and musician and DJ Questlove. Follow-on investors included Bezos Expeditions, Enlightened Hospitality Investments, Future Positive, L Catterton, Kaszek Ventures, SOSV and Endeavour Catalyst.
This funding round follows an undisclosed investment in June from Shake Shack founder Danny Meyer through his firm EHI. In total, NotCo, with roots in both Chile and New York, has raised more than $350 million, founder and CEO Matias Muchnick told TechCrunch.
Currently, the company has four product lines: NotMilk, NotBurger and NotMeat, NoticeCream and NotMayo, which are available in the five countries of the U.S., Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Colombia.
The company is operating in the middle of a trend toward eating healthier food, as more consumers also question how their food is made, resulting in demand for alternative proteins. In fact, the market for alternative meat, eggs, dairy and seafood products is predicted to reach $290 billion by 2035, according to research by Boston Consulting Group and Blue Horizon Corp.
NotCo’s proprietary artificial intelligence technology, Giuseppe, matches animal proteins to their ideal replacements among thousands of plant-based ingredients. It is working to crack the code in understanding the molecular components and food characteristics in the combination of two ingredients that could mimic milk, but in a more sustainable and resourceful way — and that also tastes good, which is the biggest barrier to adoption, Muchnick said.
“Our theory is that there is a crazy dynamic among people: 60% who are already eating plant-based are not happy with the taste, and 30% of those who drink cow’s milk are waiting to change if there is a similar taste,” he added. “Our technology is based in AI so that we can create a different food system, as well as products faster and better than others in the space. There are 300,000 plant species, and we still have no idea what 99% of them can do.”
In addition to a flow of investments this year, the company launched its NotMilk brand in the United States seven months ago and is on track to be in 8,000 locations across retailers like Whole Foods Market, Sprouts and Wegmans by the end of 2021.
Muchnick plans to allocate some of the new funding to establish markets in Mexico and Canada and add market share in the U.S. and Chile. He expects to have 50% of its business coming from the U.S. over the next three years. He is also eyeing an expansion into Asia and Europe in the next year.
NotCo also intends to add more products, like chicken and other white meats and seafood, and to invest in technology and R&D. He expects to do that by doubling the company’s current headcount of 100 in the next two years. Muchnick also wants to establish more patents in food science — the company already has five — and to explore a potential intelligence side of the business.
Though NotCo reached unicorn status, Muchnick said the real prize is the brand awareness and subsequent sales boost, as well as opening doors for quick-service restaurant deals. NotBurger went into Burger King restaurants in Chile 11 months ago, and now has 5% of the market there, he added.
Sales overall have grown three times annually over the past four years, something Muchnick said was attractive to Tiger Global. He is equally happy to work with Tiger, especially as the company prepares to go public in the next two or three years. He said Tiger’s expertise will get NotCo there in a more prepared manner.
“NotCo has created world class plant-based food products that are rapidly gaining market share,” said Scott Shleifer, partner at Tiger Global, in a written statement. “We are excited to partner with Matias and his team. We expect continued product innovation and expansion into new geographies and food categories will fuel high and sustainable growth for years to come.”
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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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