Y Combinator
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Kapacity.io is using AI to drive energy and emissions savings for real estate
Y Combinator-backed Kapacity.io is on a mission to accelerate the decarbonization of buildings by using AI-generated efficiency savings to encourage electrification of commercial real estate — wooing buildings away from reliance on fossil fuels to power their heating and cooling needs.
It does this by providing incentives to building owners/occupiers to shift to clean energy usage through a machine learning-powered software automation layer.
The startup’s cloud software integrates with buildings’ HVAC systems and electricity meters — drawing on local energy consumption data to calculate and deploy real-time adjustments to heating/cooling systems which not only yield energy and (CO2) emissions savings but generate actual revenue for building owners/tenants — paying them to reduce consumption such as at times of peak energy demand on the grid.
“We are controlling electricity consumption in buildings, focusing on heating and cooling devices — using AI machine learning to optimize and find the best ways to consume electricity,” explains CEO and co-founder Jaakko Rauhala, a former consultant in energy technology. “The actual method is known as ‘demand response’. Basically that is a way for electricity consumers to get paid for adjusting their energy consumption, based on a utility company’s demand.
“For example if there is a lot of wind power production and suddenly the wind drops or the weather changes and the utility company is running power grids they need to balance that reduction — and the way to do that is either you can fire up natural gas turbines or you can reduce power consumption… Our product estimates how much can we reduce electricity consumption at any given minute. We are [targeting] heating and cooling devices because they consume a lot of electricity.”
“The way we see this is this is a way we can help our customers electrify their building stocks faster because it makes their investments more lucrative and in addition we can then help them use more renewable electricity because we can shift the use from fossil fuels to other areas. And in that we hope to help push for a more greener power grid,” he adds.
Kapcity’s approach is applicable in deregulated energy markets where third parties are able to play a role offering energy saving services and fluctuations in energy demand are managed by an auction process involving the trading of surplus energy — typically overseen by a transmission system operator — to ensure energy producers have the right power balance to meet customer needs.
Demand for energy can fluctuate regardless of the type of energy production feeding the grid but renewable energy sources tend to increase the volatility of energy markets as production can be less predictable versus legacy energy generation (like nuclear or burning fossil fuels) — wind power, for example, depends on when and how strongly the wind is blowing (which both varies and isn’t perfectly predictable). So as economies around the world dial up efforts to tackle climate change and hit critical carbon emissions reduction targets there’s growing pressure to shift away from fossil fuel-based power generation toward cleaner, renewable alternatives. And the real estate sector specifically remains a major generator of CO2, so is squarely in the frame for “greening”.
Simultaneously, decarbonization and the green shift looks likely to drive demand for smart solutions to help energy grids manage increasing complexity and volatility in the energy supply mix.
“Basically more wind power — and solar, to some extent — correlates with demand for balancing power grids and this is why there is a lot of talk usually about electricity storage when it comes to renewables,” says Rauhala. “Demand response, in the way that we do it, is an alternative for electricity storage units. Basically we’re saying that we already have a lot of electricity consuming devices — and we will have more and more with electrification. We need to adjust their consumption before we invest billions of dollars into other systems.”
“We will need a lot of electricity storage units — but we try to push the overall system efficiency to the maximum by utilising what we already have in the grid,” he adds.
There are of course limits to how much “adjustment” (read: switching off) can be done to a heating or cooling system by even the cleverest AI without building occupants becoming uncomfortable.
But Kapacity’s premise is that small adjustments — say turning off the boilers/coolers for five, 15 or 30 minutes — can go essentially unnoticed by building occupants if done right, allowing the startup to tout a range of efficiency services for its customers; such as a peak-shaving offering, which automatically reduces energy usage to avoid peaks in consumption and generate significant energy cost savings.
“Our goal — which is a very ambitious goal — is that the customers and occupants in the buildings wouldn’t notice the adjustments. And that they would fall into the normal range of temperature fluctuations in a building,” says Rauhala.
Kapacity’s algorithms are designed to understand how to make dynamic adjustments to buildings’ heating/cooling without compromising “thermal comfort”, as Rauhala puts it — noting that co-founder (and COO) Sonja Salo, has both a PhD in demand response and researched thermal comfort during a stint as a visiting researcher at UC Berkley — making the area a specialist focus for the engineer-led founding team.
At the same time, the carrots it’s dangling at the commercial real estate to sign up for a little algorithmic HVAC tweaking look substantial: Kapacity says its system has been able to achieve a 25% reduction in electricity costs and a 10% reduction in CO2-emissions in early pilots. Although early tests have been limited to its home market for now.
Its other co-founder, Rami El Geneidy, researched smart algorithms for demand response involving heat pumps for his PhD dissertation — and heat pumps are another key focus for the team’s tech, per Rauhala.
Heat pumps are a low-carbon technology that’s fairly commonly used in the Nordics for heating buildings, but whose use is starting to spread as countries around the world look for greener alternatives to heat buildings.
In the U.K., for example, the government announced a plan last year to install hundreds of thousands of heat pumps per year by 2028 as it seeks to move the country away from widespread use of gas boilers to heat homes. And Rauhala names the U.K. as one of the startup’s early target markets — along with the European Union and the U.S., where they also envisage plenty of demand for their services.
While the initial focus is the commercial real estate sector, he says they are also interested in residential buildings — noting that from a “tech core point of view we can do any type of building”.
“We have been focusing on larger buildings — multifamily buildings, larger office buildings, certain types of industrial or commercial buildings so we don’t do single-family detached homes at the moment,” he goes on, adding: “We have been looking at that and it’s an interesting avenue but our current pilots are in larger buildings.”
The Finnish startup was only founded last year — taking in a pre-seed round of funding from Nordic Makers prior to getting backing from YC — where it will be presenting at the accelerator’s demo day next week. (But Rauhala won’t comment on any additional fund raising plans at this stage.)
He says it’s spun up five pilot projects over the last seven months involving commercial landlords, utilities, real estate developers and engineering companies (all in Finland for now), although — again — full customer details are not yet being disclosed. But Rauhala tells us they expect to move to their first full commercial deals with pilot customers this year.
“The reason why our customers are interested in using our products is that this is a way to make electrification cheaper because they are being paid for adjusting their consumption and that makes their operating cost lower and it makes investments more lucrative if — for example — you need to switch from natural gas boilers to heat pumps so that you can decarbonize your building,” he also tells us. “If you connect the new heat pump running on electricity — if you connect that to our service we can reduce the operating cost and that will make it more lucrative for everybody to electrify their buildings and run their systems.
“We can also then make their electricity consumed more sustainable because we are shifting consumption away from hours with most CO2 emissions on the grid. So we try to avoid the hours when there’s a lot of fossil fuel-based production in the grid and try to divert that into times when we have more renewable electricity.
“So basically the big question we are asking is how do we increase the use of renewables and the way to achieve that is asking when should we consume? Well we should consume electricity when we have more renewable in the grid. And that is the emission reduction method that we are applying here.”
In terms of limitations, Kapacity’s software-focused approach can’t work in every type of building — requiring that real estate customers have some ability to gather energy consumption (and potentially temperature) data from their buildings remotely, such as via IoT devices.
“The typical data that we need is basic information on the heating system — is it running at 100% or 50% or what’s the situation? That gets us pretty far,” says Rauhala. “Then we would like to know indoor temperatures. But that is not mandatory in the sense that we can still do some basic adjustments without that.”
It also of course can’t offer much in the way of savings to buildings that are running 100% on natural gas (or oil) — i.e. with electricity only used for lighting (turning lights off when people are inside buildings obviously wouldn’t fly); there must be some kind of air conditioning, cooling or heat pump systems already installed (or the use of electric hot water boilers).
“An old building that runs on oil or natural gas — that’s a target for decarbonization,” he continues. “That’s a target where you could consider installing heat pumps and that is where we could help some of our customers or potential customers to say OK we need to estimate how much would it cost to install a heat pump system here and that’s where our product can come in and we can say you can reduce the operating cost with demand response. So maybe we should do something together here.”
Rauhala also confirms that Kapacity’s approach does not require invasive levels of building occupant surveillance, telling TechCrunch: “We don’t collect information that is under GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation], I’ll put it that way. We don’t take personal data for this demand response.”
So any guestimates its algorithms are making about building occupants’ tolerance for temperature changes are, therefore, not going to be based on specific individuals — but may, presumably, factor in aggregated information related to specific industry/commercial profiles.
The Helsinki-based startup is not the only one looking at applying AI to drive energy cost and emissions savings in the commercial buildings sector — another we spoke to recently is Düsseldorf-based Dabbel, for example. And plenty more are likely to take an interest in the space as governments start to pump more money into accelerating decarbonization.
Asked about competitive differentiation, Rauhala points to a focus on real-time adjustments and heat pump technologies.
“One of our key things is we’re developing a system so that we can do close to real-time control — very, very short-term control. That is a valuable service to the power grid so we can then quickly adjust,” he says. “And the other one is we are focusing on heat pump technologies to get started — heat pumps here in the Nordics are a very common and extremely good way to decarbonize and understanding how we can combine these to demand response with new heat pumps that is where we see a lot of advantages to our approach.”
“Heat pumps are a bit more technically complex than your basic natural gas boiler so there are certain things that have to be taken it account and that is where we have been focusing our efforts,” he goes on, adding: “We see heat pumps as an excellent way to decarbonize the global building stock and we want to be there and help make that happen.”
Per capita, the Nordics has the most heat pump installations, according to Rauhala — including a lot of ground source heat pump installations which can replace fossil fuel consumption entirely.
“You can run your building with a ground source heat pump system entirely — you don’t need any supporting systems for it. And that is the area where we here in Europe are more far ahead than in the U.S.,” he says on that.
“The U.K. government is pushing for a lot of heat pump installations and there are incentives in place for people to replace their existing natural gas systems or whatever they have. So that is very interesting from our point of view. The U.K. also has a lot of wind power coming online and there have been days when the U.K. has been running 100% with renewable electricity which is great. So that actually is a really good thing for us. But then in the longer term in the U.S. — Seattle, for example, has banned the use of fossil fuels in new buildings so I’m very confident that the market in the U.S. will open up more and quickly. There’s a lot of opportunities in that space as well.
“And of course from a cooling perspective air conditioning in general in the U.S. is very widespread — especially in commercial buildings so that is already an existing opportunity for us.”
“My estimate on how valuable electricity use for heating and cooling is it’s tens of billions of dollars annually in the U.S. and EU,” he adds. “There’s a lot of electricity being used already for this and we expect the market to grow significantly.”
On the business model front, the startup’s cloud software looks set to follow a SaaS model but the plan is also to take a commission of the savings and/or generated income from customers. “We also have the option to provide the service with a fixed fee, which might be easier for some customers, but we expect the majority to be under a commission,” adds Rauhala.
Looking ahead, were the sought-for global shift away from fossil fuels to be wildly successful — and all commercial buildings’ gas/oil boilers got replaced with 100% renewable power systems in short order — there would still be a role for Kapacity’s control software to play, generating energy cost savings for its customers, even though our (current) parallel pressing need to shrink carbon emissions would evaporate in this theoretical future.
“We’d be very happy,” says Rauhala. “The way we see emission reductions with demand response now is it’s based on the fact that we do still have fossil fuels power system — so if we were to have a 100% renewable power system then the electricity does nothing to reduce emissions from the electricity consumption because it’s all renewable. So, ironically, in the future we see this as a way to push for a renewable energy system and makes that transition happen even faster. But if we have a 100% renewable system then there’s nothing [in terms of CO2 emissions] we can reduce but that is a great goal to achieve.”
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Pry Financials raises $4.2M to make startup accounting more approachable
Pry Financials wants to make startup finances approachable for its entire team, not just the people in charge of its accounting spreadsheets. The Y Combinator alum announced today it has raised $4.2 million from Global Founders Capital, Pioneer Fund, NOMO VC, Liquid2 and Hyphen Capital.
Launched in March, Pry now has more than 200 customers and claims it has grown 35% month-over-month since YC’s Demo Day. It was founded by Alex Sailer, Tiffany Wong, Hayden Jensen and Andy Su.
Before starting Pry, Su was co-founder of InDinero, another YC alum that started as a “Mint for small businesses” before pivoting to a full-service accounting company. InDinero launched while he was still a student at UC Berkeley, and Su eventually became responsible for its financial planning.
Pry Financials’ team. Image Credits: Pry Financials
He told TechCrunch that most startups can’t afford accounting software like Workday Adaptive Planning. Instead, they sometimes work with outsourced CFO services, but mostly rely on spreadsheets for everything: three-way forecasts, predicting runway, hiring and contractor budgets and investor updates.
“I was the chief technical officer and over the years, I also took on the finance function, so it was kind of a dual CTO/CFO role. This was 2010 through 2020 and as technology grew, the engineering and product teams got all sorts of new tools every six months or so, whereas the finance team was just stuck in Excel,” he said.
Started as a side project while Su was still at InDinero, Pry starts at just $50 a month and replaces those spreadsheets with easy-to-understand dashboards for accounting, financial planning and scenario modeling. The dashboards connect to QuickBooks, Xero or bank accounts, so numbers are continuously updated.
Pry’s clients typically start using it after they raise seed funding, because “for most first-time founders, that’s the most amount of money you have ever received, so you need to spend more time managing it and reviewing it every month. And you’re spending a lot of time on payroll each month,” Su said. Second-time founders, meanwhile, sign up for Pry because they are sick of Excel spreadsheets.
“Reviewing a spreadsheet is mind-numbingly hard,” said Su. “If you see a number that’s off, you get this weird formula if you didn’t do it yourself. Then you basically have to write a long email to the financial analyst who wrote it and hope that they get back to you before closing time.” For founders who need to update lenders or investors every month, this means a lot of work.
Pry makes the process more efficient by turning three-way reports — combinations of balance sheets, profit and loss statements and cashflow — into Financial Report dashboards, and then adding features like hiring plans, financial modeling and scenario planning.
The scenario planning feature serves as a sandbox, giving startup teams and their investors a way to predict how different situations will impact finances: for example, how much runway they have if they raise a certain amount of funding or adjust product pricing.
Fundraising dashboards created with Pry Financials. Image credits: Pry Financials
“We’re improving upon and trying to make decisions about the company in a collaborative way. The analogy we have is Git branching, where you have your main plan, and want to try something like a new revenue model or acquiring a business, but don’t want to mess with your current strategy,” said Su. “What you can do is create a completely new branch with, say, a new pricing strategy. You can make all the changes you want and then switch back to your old branch without worrying about overriding or conflicting with it.”
Those speculative branches are also continuously updated with the company’s most recent bank account and payroll information, so founders don’t need to recreate them from scratch if they want to revisit a potential scenario later.
Pry plans to build more complex predictive tools and also integrate industry standards, like statistic and benchmarks, into templates to help founders understand what targets they should set.
Because Pry is easier to manage than a set of Excel spreadsheets, Su said it’s helped startups spot important things. For example, one founder was able to find a way to save $15,000 by catching a tax issue. Pry also helps everyone at a startup understand its finances’ even if they haven’t worked with accounting spreadsheets before. The platform will add roles and permissions soon, so founders can give or restrict access to different people, like leaders of specific departments.
Su said Pry does not compete with the accounting services many startups rely on until they can hire a head of finance, but makes it easier for startups to collaborate with them since they can share their dashboards.
“Usually early on, you can outsource to a CFO firm. That’s the norm in the business and it works pretty well for most companies. You get a part-time CFO to work really hard for a month and get your fundraising structure done,” said Su, adding “we fit into that ecosystem well.”
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Virtual dressing room startup Revery.ai applying computer vision to the fashion industry
Figuring out size and cut of clothes through a website can suck the fun out of shopping online, but Revery.ai is developing a tool that leverages computer vision and artificial intelligence to create a better online dressing room experience.
Under the tutelage of University of Illinois Center for Computer Science advisrr David Forsyth, a team consisting of Ph.D. students Kedan Li, Jeffrey Zhang and Min Jin Chong, is creating what they consider to be the first tool using existing catalog images to process at a scale of over a million garments weekly, something previous versions of virtual dressing rooms had difficulty doing, Li told TechCrunch.
Revery.ai co-founders Jeffrey Zhang, Min Jin Chong and Kedan Li. Image Credits: Revery.ai
California-based Revery is part of Y Combinator’s summer 2021 cohort gearing up to complete the program later this month. YC has backed the company with $125,000. Li said the company already has a two-year runway, but wants to raise a $1.5 million seed round to help it grow faster and appear more mature to large retailers.
Before Revery, Li was working on another startup in the personalized email space, but was challenged in making it work due to free versions of already large legacy players. While looking around for areas where there would be less monopoly and more ability to monetize technology, he became interested in fashion. He worked with a different adviser to get a wardrobe collection going, but that idea fizzled out.
The team found its stride working with Forsyth and making several iterations on the technology in order to target business-to-business customers, who already had the images on their websites and the users, but wanted the computer vision aspect.
Unlike its competitors that use 3D modeling or take an image and manually clean it up to superimpose on a model, Revery is using deep learning and computer vision so that the clothing drapes better and users can also customize their clothing model to look more like them using skin tone, hair styles and poses. It is also fully automated, can work with millions of SKUs and be up and running with a customer in a matter of weeks.
Its virtual dressing room product is now live on many fashion e-commerce platforms, including Zalora-Global Fashion Group, one of the largest fashion companies in Southeast Asia, Li said.
Revery.ai landing page. Image Credits: Revery.ai
“It’s amazing how good of results we are getting,” he added. “Customers are reporting strong conversion rates, something like three to five times, which they had never seen before. We released an A/B test for Zalora and saw a 380% increase. We are super excited to move forward and deploy our technology on all of their platforms.”
This technology comes at a time when online shopping jumped last year as a result of the pandemic. Just in the U.S., the e-commerce fashion industry made up 29.5% of fashion retail sales in 2020, and the market’s value is expected to reach $100 billion this year.
Revery is already in talks with over 40 retailers that are “putting this on their roadmap to win in the online race,” Li said.
Over the next year, the company is focusing on getting more adoption and going live with more clients. To differentiate itself from competitors continuing to come online, Li wants to invest body type capabilities, something retailers are asking for. This type of technology is challenging, he said, due to there not being much in the way of diversified body shape models available.
He expects the company will have to collect proprietary data itself so that Revery can offer the ability for users to create their own avatar so that they can see how the clothes look.
“We might actually be seeing the beginning of the tide and have the right product to serve the need,” he added.
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Y Combinator-backed Adra wants to turn all dentists into cavity-finding ‘super dentists’
Like other areas of healthcare, the dental industry is steadily embracing technology. But while much of it is in the orthodontic realm, other startups, like Adra, are bringing artificial intelligence into a dentist’s day-to-day workflow, particularly in finding cavities, of what will be a $435.08 billion global dental services market this year.
The Singapore-based company was founded in 2021, but was an idea that started last year. Co-founder Hamed Fesharaki has been a dentist for over a decade and owns two clinics in Singapore.
He said dentists learn to read X-rays in dental school, but it can take a few years to get good at it. Dentists also often have just minutes to read them as they hop between patients.
As a result, dentists end up misdiagnosing cavities up to 40% of the time, co-founder Yasaman Nematbakhsh said. Her background is in imaging, where she developed an artificial intelligence machine identifying hard-to-see cancers, something Fesharaki thought could also be applied to dental medicine.
Providing the perspective of a more experienced dentist, Adra’s intent is to make every dentist “a super dentist,” Fesharaki told TechCrunch. Its software detects cavities and other dental problems on dental X-rays faster and 25% more accurately, so that clinics can use that time to better serve patients and increase revenue.
Example of Adra’s software. Image Credits: Adra
“We are coming from the eye of an experienced dentist to help illustrate the problems by turning the X-rays into images to better understand what to look for,” he added. “Ultimately, the dentist has the final say, but we bring the experience element to help them compare and give them suggestions.”
By quickly pointing out the problem and the extent of it, dentists can decide in what way they want to treat it — for example, do a filling, a fluoride treatment or wait.
Along with third co-founder Shifeng Chen, the company is finishing up its time in Y Combinator’s summer cohort and has raised $250,000 so far. Fesharaki intends to do more formalized seed fundraising and wants to bring on more engineers to tackle user experience and add more features.
The company has a few clinics doing pilots and wants to attract more as it moves toward a U.S. Food and Drug Administration clearance. Fesharaki expects it to take six to nine months to receive the clearance, and then Adra will be able to hit the market in late 2022 or early 2023.
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Y Combinator, 500 Startups, Plug and Play invest in Odiggo’s $2.2M seed round
Servicing one’s car personally is a time-consuming, expensive and painstaking process. It’s a cycle that can lead to more expensive repairs and safety issues down the line, and no car owner likes that.
Egypt and Dubai-based auto tech startup Odiggo is a platform addressing this problem. It allows car owners to get the help they need by finding car services and parts suppliers from providers around them. Then for the suppliers, it increases their sales and reaches more customers without necessarily spending on marketing.
Odiggo is part of the current YC Summer batch and has secured a $2.2 million seed round before Demo Day. The rosters of existing investors participating in the round are Y Combinator, 500 Startups, and Plug and Play Ventures. Regional VCs like Seedra Ventures, LoftyInc Capital, and Essa Al-Saleh (CEO of Volta-Tucks) also took part.
Ahmed Omar and Ahmed Nasser launched Odiggo in December 2019. The company operates a marketplace that connects car owners with service providers who can solve their problems, from servicing and repair to washing and maintenance. A commission-based model is used and Odiggo charges the car suppliers 20% commission on every transaction.
Over 50,000 car owners across three markets — Egypt, the UAE and Saudi Arabia — use Odiggo. The company also works directly with over 300 merchants. It claims merchant numbers have grown 40% month-on-month while its user base has increased 200% since the start of the pandemic.
“We believe we are at a watershed moment. It is incredible that since COVID hit, Odiggo has experienced over 10 times growth in the last year,” said co-founder Omar.
CEO Omar said with this new round, Odiggo’s priority will be to attain consistent growth while expanding its team across the UEA, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
L-R: Ahmed Nassir (co-founder) & Ahmed Omar (co-founder and CEO)
He adds that since Odiggo taps into a mix of data sources — including car metrics and internal software, it will use that same information to provide more product offerings.
Odiggo will use part of the funding to continue developing its tech and dashboard software, he said.
“For example, the platform would be hooked up to the car owner’s vehicle and link the vehicle to the marketplace and provide frequent updates of your vehicle condition so you’ll be informed if the tires are low, the oil needs changing, or if a service is required.”
The pandemic has upended the mobility and logistics sectors, especially in MENA, making players like Odiggo gain much visibility from investors. In an industry today worth over $61 billion in the Middle East and Africa alone, Odiggo is looking to become a market leader. It has even more lofty plans to go public in the next three years.
“We are also aiming to be fully focused on spending more on our product and technology, as building an ecosystem to monetize requires more capital. Our target is to go for IPO by 2024 and achieve one billion services booked, and this requires a lot of network effects, infrastructure and technology,” the CEO said.
“We aim to be the first $100 billion company coming out of the region,” added Nasser.
Some of its investors, Idris Ayodeji Bello, managing partner at LoftyInc, and Essa Al-Saleh, are onboard with the startup’s plan despite early days.
“We are excited to back Odiggo through our Afropreneurs Funds in its quest to transform the automotive parts market and provide superior service to clients, starting from MENA. The leadership team of Omar and Nasser, supported by the rest of the employees, have been a joy to work with and we are on a countdown to the IPO,” said Bello in a statement.
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Rutter comes out of stealth with $1.5M in funding for its e-commerce API
Rutter, a remote-first company, is developing a unified e-commerce API that enables companies to connect with data across any platform.
On Friday the company announced it was emerging from stealth with $1.5 million in funding from a group of investors including Haystack, Liquid 2 and Basis Set Ventures.
Founders Eric Yu and Peter Zhou met in school and started working on Rutter, which Zhou called “Plaid for commerce,” in 2017 before going through the summer 2019 Y Combinator cohort.
They stumbled upon the e-commerce API idea while working in education technology last year. The pair were creating subscription kits and learning materials for parents concerned about how their children would be learning during the global pandemic. Then their vendor customers had problems listing their storefronts on Amazon, so they wrote scripts to help them, but found that they had to write separate scripts for each platform.
With Rutter, customers only need one script to connect anywhere. Its APIs connect to e-commerce platforms like Shopify, Walmart and Amazon so that tech customers can build functions like customer support and chatbots, Yu told TechCrunch.
Lan Xuezhao, founding and managing partner of Basis Set Ventures, said via email that she was “super excited” about Rutter first because of the founders’ passion, grit and speed of iteration to a product. She added it reminded her of another team that successfully built a business from zero to over $7 billion.
“After watching them (Rutter) for a few years, it’s clear what they built is powerful: it’s the central nervous system of online commerce,” Xuezhao added.
As the founders see it, there are two big explosions going on in e-commerce: the platform side with the adoption of headless commerce — the separating of front end and back end functions of an e-commerce site, and new companies coming in to support merchants.
The new funding will enable Yu and Zhou to build up their team, including hiring more engineers.
Due to the company officially launching at the beginning of the year, Yu did not disclose revenue metrics, but did say that Rutter’s API volume was doubling and tripling in the last few months. It is also supporting merchants that connect with over 5,000 stores.
Some of Rutter’s customers are building one aspect of commerce, like returns, warranties and checkouts, but Yu said that since Shopify represents just 10% of e-commerce, the company’s goal is to take merchants beyond the marketplace by being “that unified app store for merchants to find products.”
“We think that in the future, the e-commerce stack of a merchant will look like the SaaS stack of a software company,” Zhou added. “We want to be the glue that holds that stack together for merchants.”
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Roblox acquires Discord competitor Guilded
Roblox is using M&A to bulk up its social infrastructure, announcing Monday morning that they had acquired the team at Guilded that has been building a chat platform for competitive gamers.
The service competes with gaming chat giant Discord, with the team’s founders telling TechCrunch in the past that as Discord’s ambitions had grown beyond the gaming world, its core product was meeting fewer competitive gaming needs. Like Discord, users can have text and voice conversations on the Guilded platform, but Guilded also allowed users to organize communities around events and calendars, with plenty of specific functionality designed around ensuring that tournaments happened seamlessly.
The startup’s product supported hundreds of games, with specific functionality for a handful of titles, including League of Legends, Fortnite, CS: GO and, yes, Roblox. Earlier this year, the company launched a bot API designed to help nontechnical users build bots that could enrich their gaming communities.
Guilded had raised $10.2 million in venture capital funding to date according to Crunchbase, including a $7 million Series A led by Matrix Partners early last year. The company launched out of Y Combinator in mid-2017.
Terms of the Roblox deal weren’t disclosed. In an announcement post, Roblox detailed that the Guilded team will operate as an independent product group going forward. In a separate blog post, Guilded CEO Eli Brown wrote that existing stakeholders will be able to continue using the product as they have previously.
“Everyone – including communities, partners, and bot developers – will be able to keep using Guilded the same way you are now,” Brown wrote. “Roblox believes in our team and in our mission, and we’re going to continue to operate as an independent product in order to achieve it.”
Roblox has seen profound success and heightened investor attention in recent years as the pandemic has pushed more gamers online and brought more users into the fold, but that success has drawn the attention of competitors. In June, Facebook acquired a small Roblox competitor called Crayta, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg announcing just weeks ago that he planned to transform Facebook into a “metaverse” company, using a term many have come to associate closely with what Roblox has been building. Guilded represents an opportunity for Roblox to bring its user base deeper inside its own suite of products, creating a social infrastructure that keeps users engaged.
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Orchata raises $4M, aims to build a ‘Gopuff for Latin America’
Luis Mario Garcia grew up in Mexico making deliveries for the grocery stores in his neighborhood. After honing his startup skills in San Francisco, he returned to Mexico with the idea of building a software company.
That’s when he met his co-founder Javier Gonzalez and the pair started Orchata in 2020, a mobile app enabling consumers to get groceries delivered in 15 minutes, with no substitutes and at supermarket prices. Products delivered include fresh fruit, beverages, bread, medicine and household essentials, Garcia told TechCrunch.
Orchata does this by operating a network of micro fulfillment centers — it is already operating in two cities — with technology for efficient picking and hyperfast delivery.
Online food delivery sales in Latin America are projected to reach $9.8 billion by 2024, with the global pandemic driving demand for faster delivery, according to Statista. Garcia sees three different waves in this market: the first one being traditional supermarkets, where you can spend hours, which led to the second wave of food delivery companies, including some big players in the region — for example Rappi in Colombia, which in July raised $500 million in Series F funding at a $5.25 billion valuation in a round led by T. Rowe Price, and Cornershop in Chile, which was acquired by Uber in 2019.
However, Garcia said many of these services still take more than an hour from order to doorstep and may require phone calls if an item is not available. He wants to be part of a third wave — software that is integrated with inventory and delivery that is super fast, and no substitutions.
“This is similar to what is going on around the world, but there is a huge opportunity to bring convenience, to be the Gopuff for Latin America, and we want to build it first in the region,” Garcia said.
The Monterrey-based company was part of Y Combinator’s summer 2020 cohort and on Friday announced a $4 million seed round from a group of investors, including Y Combinator, JAM Fund, FJ Labs, Venture Friends, Investo and Foundation Capital, and angel investors Ross Lipson, Mike Hennessey, Brian Requarth and Javier Mata.
Jonathan Lewy, co-founder of Grin Scooters and founder of Investo, is also an investor in Rappi. He said Garcia was building a product for the end user, with the key being the building of the infrastructure and inventory. Lewy believes Garcia understands how quick delivery should be done and that it is not just about offering a mobile app, but building the technology behind it.
Meanwhile, Justin Mateen, general partner at JAM Fund, and co-founder of Tinder and an early-stage investor, met Garcia over a year ago and was one of the company’s first investors. He said Garcia’s and Gonzalez’s initial idea for the model of grocery stores was still not solving the problem, but then they pivoted to doing fulfillment and inventory themselves.
“He fits the mold of what I look for in a founder, and he is the type of founder that doesn’t give up,” Mateen said. “Luis finally agreed to let me double down on my investment. The model makes sense now, he is on to something and it is now going to be about execution of capital as he scales.”
Both Mateen and Lewy agree that there will be similar apps coming because food delivery is such a large market, but that Orchata has a clear advantage of owning the customer experience from beginning to end.
Having only launched four months ago, Orchata is already processing thousands of orders and is seeing 100% monthly growth. The new funding will enable Orchata to expand into three new cities in Mexico. Garcia is also eyeing Colombia, Brazil, Peru and Chile for future expansion.
The company is also targeting multiple use cases, including someone noticing a forgotten item while cooking to consumers shopping for the week or teenagers needing food for a party.
“We are going to be super convenient to customers, and we think every use case for food delivery will be this way in the future,” Garcia said. “We will eventually introduce our own brands and foods with the goal of being that app that is there anytime you need it.”
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Bite Ninja scoops up pre-seed funding to reimagine restaurant working environments
Will Clem knows all too well about restaurant workers not showing up for a shift. At least one person would have car trouble or need to stay home with sick children, and it became a common occurrence on the weekends for the co-founder of Memphis Meats and owner of Baby Jacks BBQ in Memphis.
Needing to fill a shift one Friday night, Clem decided to prop his laptop in the drive-thru lane of one of his restaurants and took orders from home by remoting into the system. No one noticed that he wasn’t actually taking orders from the kitchen itself. Thus came the idea for Bite Ninja, a remote hiring technology platform for restaurants.
Clem connected with Orin Wilson to start the company in 2020 and worked for a year on the technology before launching it in March. Today, the company announced $675,000 in pre-seed funding led by Y Combinator, AgFunder and Manta Ray.
With many restaurants unable to find workers as a result of the global pandemic, Clem and Wilson wanted to build a technology that would enable restaurants to go back to normal operating hours, or even reopen their stores. At the same time, the workers, or “Ninjas” as they are referred to, can work the drive-thru or counter for a lunch or dinner rush shift from home, but appear on-screen to customers via menu boards, Wilson said.
Bite Ninja drive-thru. Image Credits: Bite Ninja
“When a restaurant is slammed, you need an army of people to work the rush, but it is not reasonable to ask them to get in their uniform and get in their cars, last-minute, to clock in for just an hour or two,” he added. “They have control of their schedule and can pick the right shift for them. It is so popular that we typically have five to 10 people bidding on each shift.”
Bite Ninja is providing a better experience and reaches potential workers that would not necessarily have an interest in performing fast food work. Many of the 3,000 Ninjas already working with the company are stay-at-home moms and retirees with customer service experience, but who can’t physically come into a store, Clem said. In addition, the company is working with the Nurse-Family Partnership to help women get back into the workforce.
The company initially ran three pilot programs and has expanded services to curbside and front cashier stations. The funding will enable Bite Ninja to scale initiatives, hire additional software engineers and prepare for a rollout at national food chains.
Since launching earlier this year, Bite Ninja is already being used in a few thousand stores.
Manuel Gonzalez, partner at AgFunder, said restaurants are a big part of entrepreneurship, but the pandemic forced more than 110,000 of them out of business.
“Bite Ninja’s solution is one that decreases costs to restaurant owners, but increases the income of the worker,” he said. “It also helps entrepreneurs and the community because restaurants are important for economic, cultural, community and social points of view.”
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Pave gets Y Combinator to back better startup compensation tools, again
Pave, a San Francisco-based startup that helps companies benchmark, plan and communicate compensation to their employees, has raised a $46 million Series B. YC Continuity led the round, which also saw participation from Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer Venture Partners. The round comes eight months after Pave closed a $16 million Series A round. Today’s financing puts Pave’s valuation at $400 million, up from $75 million one year ago.
Pave launched with an ambitious goal: Can it measure pay across venture-backed tech companies in real time, and help startups move their comp table off of spreadsheets? AngelList and Glassdoor have already tried to build a similar benchmark-worthy data set, but Pave may have a built-in advantage over the companies that tried to fix the same problem before. Y Combinator, which helped incubate Pave and is now leading its most recent round through its later-stage capital vehicle, is one of the largest startup accelerators in the world. Of Pave’s 900 customers to date, one-third come from Y Combinator, and CEO Matthew Schulman only sees that number growing.
“Having YC’s deep support of Pave as the YC-stamped leader in the burgeoning [compensation technology] industry is and will continue to be game changing for our distribution and ability to have ample data coverage in our benchmarking product,” Schulman said. He compared Pave’s distribution trajectory as similar to what fintech company Brex, also backed by Y Combinator Continuity, managed. The founder estimates that 60% of YC companies are active Brex customers.
The reliance on YC could engender platform risk, considering how often the accelerator invests in competitors — often within the same batch. That said, an investment from Y Combinator Continuity, which does Series B rounds and higher, may be a signal that YC has found the comptech player it wants to back. Ali Rowghani, the managing director of the fund and former COO of Twitter, is joining Pave’s board.
Data is everything for the startup, supporting each of Pave’s three main services that it offers to companies. First, Pave uses market and partner data to help companies benchmark salaries for their employees. Second, the startup integrates with HR tools such as Workday, Carta and Greenhouse to give its customers a holistic picture on how employees are currently being compensated, and what makes sense for promotion cycles and salary bumps. And third, the data work culminates into formal offers and compensation packages that employers can then offer to new and old employees.
Pave’s current customers account for data on over 65,000 employee records. The first product serves as a free top of funnel service, while the last two are paid services offered up like any ol’ enterprise software contract.
The world of compensation is rife with inequity, leading to the gender wage gap, and the gaps we can see in the market regarding minority pay disparity.
Schulman views one of Pave’s goals as getting companies to go from doing their D&I analysis from once a year, to doing it consistently. The company plans to build diversity and inclusion-specific dashboards that allow companies to see inequities and access ways or suggestions to improve their breakdown.
“What gets measured, gets improved,” Schulman said. Pave has begun to track its own compensation and diversity metrics, in an effort to be more transparent with its employees and maybe inspire some companies to do the same. About 33% of Pave’s workforce identify as women, compared to an industry average of 28.8%. Half of Pave’s executives, and half of Pave’s board members, identify as women. The company has committed to having 50% of its client-facing roles, which include customer success managers and sales members, “to be female or persons from underrepresented groups.”
While Pave is starting to disclose its own internal benchmarks, transparency around diversity isn’t yet a standard within tech companies — it’s far easier to get valuations than to get specifics around the makeup of historically overlooked individuals within organizations. Pave recently launched the Pave Data Lab, which uses its data set to showcase compensation trends and inequities within how tech workers are paid. That said, Pave doesn’t currently require the companies it works with to upload gender and race information into their benchmarking tool, and didn’t disclose what specific percentage of companies on its platform share that data.
It is hoping noise will make a difference. Pave’s compensation benchmarking data is now free for all companies to use, which will bring more data underneath its umbrella, and more standards to the confusing world of compensation.
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