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Vaayu’s carbon tracking for retailers raises $1.6M, claims it could cut CO2 in half by 2030
Carbon tracking is very much the new hot thing in tech, and we’ve previously covered more generalist startups doing this at scale for companies, such as Plan A Earth out of Berlin.
But there’s clearly an opportunity to get deep into a vertical sector and tailor solutions to it.
That’s the plan of Vaayu, a carbon tracking platform aimed specifically at retailers. It has now raised $1.57 million in pre-seed funding in a round led by CapitalT. Several angels also took part, including Atomico’s Angel Program, Planet Positive LP, Saarbrücker 21, Expedite Ventures and NP-Hard Ventures.
Carbon tracking for the retail fashion industry, in particular, is urgently needed. Unfortunately, the fashion industry remains responsible for 10% of annual global carbon emissions, which ads up to more than all international flights and maritime shipping combined.
Vaayu says it integrates with various point-of-sale systems, such as Shopify and Webflow. It then pulls in data on logistics, operations and packaging to monitor, measure and reduce their carbon emissions. Normally, retailers calculate emissions once a year, which is obviously far less accurate.
Vaayu was founded in 2020 by Namrata Sandhu (CEO), former head of Sustainability at fashion retailer Zalando, as well as Anita Daminov (CPO) and Luca Schmid (CTO). Vaayu currently has 25 global brand customers, including Missoma, Armed Angels and Organic Basics.
Commenting on the fundraise, Sandhu said: “We have only nine short years left to achieve the UN’s goal of reducing carbon emissions by 50% by 2030 and as the third-largest contributor to global emissions, retailers need to take action — and fast. Vaayu is here to help retailers measure, monitor, and reduce their carbon footprint at scale across the entire supply chain — something that I know from my own experience can be complex and expensive.”
Speaking to me over a call, Sandhu told me: “Putting the focus on retail basically allows us to automate the calculation, which means in three clicks you can get your carbon footprint right away. That then allows us to really get accurate data, and with that, we can basically do reductions specific to the business but using software, rather than any kind of manual intervention or a kind of ‘intermediate’ state where you need to put together an Excel sheet. Because we focus on retail we can automate the entire process and also automate the reductions.”
“We are delighted to be backed by female-led CapitalT who understood us and our vision right from the start. We look forward to developing Vaayu further in the coming months so we can reach as many retailers as possible and help put the brakes on the impending climate crisis,” she added.
Janneke Niessen, founding partner, CapitalT commented: “We are very excited to join Vaayu on their mission to reduce carbon emission for retailers worldwide. The Vaayu product is very scalable and its quick and easy implementation allows for fast adoption. We are confident that with this experienced team, Vaayu will soon be one of the fastest-growing climate tech companies in Europe and the world.”
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Eco-conscious car subscription platform finn.auto raises $24.2M, with White Star and Zalando founders
Finn.auto — which allows people to subscribe to their car instead of owning it, and offsetting their CO₂ emissions — has raised a $24.2 million / €20 million Series A funding round. White Star Capital (which has also invested in Tier Mobility), and the Zalando co-CEOs Rubin Ritter, David Schneider and Robert Gentz, are new investors in this round. All previous investors participated.
The funding comes just under a year since the company launched, after selling just 1,000 car subscriptions. It’s also partnered with Deutsche Post AG and Deutsche Telekom AG.
A number of car manufacturers have launched similar subscription services powered by various providers, such as Drover, LeasePlan and Wagonex.
U.K.-based startup Drover has raised a total of $40 million in funding over five rounds. Their latest Series B funding round was with Shell Ventures and Cherry Ventures . Plus, there are branded services which include Audi on Demand, BMW, Citroën, DS, Jaguar Carpe, Land Rover Carpe, Mini, Volkswagen and Care by Volvo.
Digitally led subscription services have the potential to disrupt the traditional car sales model, and new startups are entering the market all the time.
The finn.auto model is proving to appeal to environment-conscious millennials. For each car subscription, the company is offsetting the CO₂ emissions of its vehicles, meaning subscribers can drive their cars in a climate-neutral manner. It’s now expanding its range of fully electric vehicles and, in cooperation with ClimatePartner, is supporting selected regional climate protection and development projects.
Key to the Munich-based startups’ play is the automation of fleet management processes and customer interactions, meaning it’s much easier and cheaper to run this kind of subscription operation.
Max-Josef Meier, CEO and founder of finn.auto, said: “We are delighted to have been able to bring such high-caliber investors on board and that our existing investors are cementing their confidence with the current round. Mobility with your own car becomes as easy as buying shoes on the internet. We already offer a large selection of different car brands, whose cars can be ordered online on our platform in just five minutes and at flexible runtimes. The delivery is then conveniently made to the front door.”
Nicholas Stocks, general partner at White Star Capital added: “There is a huge opportunity globally to streamline outdated customer experiences in the automotive retail space and become the Amazon of the automotive industry. This is something finn.auto is excellently placed to capitalize on with its offering of convenience, flexibility, value and sustainability.”
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Tinder founder funds sex tips app Lover
Want to spice up the bedroom without paying for pills or awkward visits to a sex therapist? A new app called Lover lets you take a sexual personality quiz, explore carnal knowledge tutorials and discretely figure out which turn-ons you share with your partner. Built by board-certified sexual medicine clinical psychologist Dr. Britney Blair, Lover launches today on iOS with $5 million in seed funding from Tinder founder Sean Rad and other investors.
“It is strange that there are such taboos around sex when it is something we all do…whether we enjoy ourselves or not. We think it is time to start the conversation around this important aspect of our health,” says Dr. Blair. “We believe Lover can help build confidence, facilitate communication, improve partner connection and just raise consciousness about sex and sexuality.”
A solid portion of Lover’s content is free for the first seven days, including audio guides to oral sex, video explainers on how to be generous in bed and multi-step “playlists” of content like “Getting Hard, Made Easy.” Lover charges $9.99 per month or $59.99 per year for continued access to themed educational materials like “Coreplay Not Foreplay” and “Fantasy To Reality” that are recommended based on the results of your sexual questionnaire.
“Almost 50% of women and 40% of men have a sexual complaint . . . [but] most people don’t realize how common and treatable their issues are,” Dr. Blair tells me. “In our [pre-launch tests] focused purely on erectile dysfunction, 62% of users reported improvements to their erections within three weeks of using the app. That’s pretty wild when you think Viagra’s efficacy rate is approximately 65% and it lasts only five hours.”
Startups like digital pharmacy Ro have scored $500 million valuations just 18 months after launch by prescribing and selling men’s health drugs like Viagra. Lover sees a market for education-based alternative approaches to sexual wellness.
Lover co-founders (from left): Jas Bagniewski, Dr. Britney Blair and Nick Pendle
Dr. Blair got interested in the space a decade ago after a Stanford grad school lecture illuminated how prevalent sexual problems are but how quickly they can be resolved with learning and communication. She teamed up with her CEO Jas Bagniewski, who’d been the manager of Europe’s largest e-commerce business, Zalando in the U.K., and a founder of City Deal that sold to Groupon. Bagniewski and fellow Lover co-founder Nick Pendle started European Casper mattress competitor Eve Sleep and brought it to IPO.
The plan is to combine Dr. Blair’s educational materials with Bagniewski and Pendle’s e-commerce chops to monetize Lover through subscriptions and eventually recommending products like sex toys for purchase. Now they have $5 million in seed funding led by Lerer Hippeau, and joined by Manta Ray Ventures, Oliver Samwer’s Global Founders Capital, Fabrice Grinda and Jose Marin. The cash will go toward building out an Android app and adding games that partners can play together in bed.
There are plenty of random sex tip websites out there. Lover tries to differentiate itself by personalizing content based on the results of a Myers-Briggs-esque quiz. This asks you how adventurous, communicative and assertive you are. You then receive a classification like “The Muse” with a few pages of explanation, for example, revealing how you like to inspire others while being the center of attention.
From there, Lover can suggest guides for mastering your own sexual personality or branching out into new behavior patterns. There’s also a feature copied from another app called XConfessions for figuring out what you and your partner like. You connect your apps and then separately swipe yes or no on questions about whether you’d like “having your partner drip candle wax on you” or “your partner dressing as a strict cop.” If you and they match, the app tells you both so you can try it out.
Overall, Lover’s content is a lot higher quality and more compassionate than where most people learn about sex: pornography. Having a real sexual medicine doctor overseeing the app lends credibility to Lover. And the design and tone throughout make you feel empowered rather than sleazy.
Still, Dr. Blair admits that “it’s hard to motivate people into behavioral change, people already have subscription apps on their phones and we may run into ‘subscription fatigue.’ ” People might feel natural paying for Viagra because the impact is obvious. The value of a subscription to sex tips might seem too vague or redundant to what’s free online.
To get a lot of users opening their wallets, not just their pants, Lover will need to do a better job of previewing what’s behind the paywall, and offering more interactivity that online content lacks. But if it can give users one unforgettable night thanks to its advice, it may be able to seduce them for the long-run.
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Sisense nabs $100M at a $1B+ valuation for accessible big data business analytics
Sisense, an enterprise startup that has built a business analytics business out of the premise of making big data as accessible as possible to users — whether it be through graphics on mobile or desktop apps, or spoken through Alexa — is announcing a big round of funding today and a large jump in valuation to underscore its traction. The company has picked up $100 million in a growth round of funding that catapults Sisense’s valuation to over $1 billion, funding that it plans to use to continue building out its tech, as well as for sales, marketing and development efforts.
For context, this is a huge jump: The company was valued at only around $325 million in 2016 when it raised a Series E, according to PitchBook. (It did not disclose valuation in 2018, when it raised a venture round of $80 million.) It now has some 2,000 customers, including Tinder, Philips, Nasdaq and the Salvation Army.
This latest round is being led by the high-profile enterprise investor Insight Venture Partners, with Access Industries, Bessemer Venture Partners, Battery Ventures, DFJ Growth and others also participating. The Access investment was made via Claltech in Israel, and it seems that this led to some details of this getting leaked out as rumors in recent days. Insight is in the news today for another big deal: Wearing its private equity hat, the firm acquired Veeam for $5 billion. (And that speaks to a particular kind of trajectory for enterprise companies that the firm backs: Veeam had already been a part of Insight’s venture portfolio.)
Mature enterprise startups have proven their business cases are going to be an ongoing theme in this year’s fundraising stories, and Sisense is part of that theme, with annual recurring revenues of over $100 million speaking to its stability and current strength. The company has also made some key acquisitions to boost its business, such as the acquisition of Periscope Data last year (coincidentally, also for $100 million, I understand).
Its rise also speaks to a different kind of trend in the market: In the wider world of business intelligence, there is an increasing demand for more digestible data in order to better tap advances in data analytics to use it across organizations. This was also one of the big reasons why Salesforce gobbled up Tableau last year for a slightly higher price: $15.7 billion.
Sisense, bringing in both sleek end user products but also a strong theme of harnessing the latest developments in areas like machine learning and AI to crunch the data and order it in the first place, represents a smaller and more fleet of foot alternative for its customers. “We found a way to make accessing data extremely simple, mashing it together in a logical way and embedding it in every logical place,” explained CEO Amir Orad to us in 2018.
“We have enjoyed watching the Sisense momentum in the past 12 months, the traction from its customers as well as from industry leading analysts for the company’s cloud native platform and new AI capabilities. That coupled with seeing more traction and success with leading companies in our portfolio and outside, led us to want to continue and grow our relationship with the company and lead this funding round,” said Jeff Horing, managing director at Insight Venture Partners, in a statement.
To note, Access Industries is an interesting backer which might also potentially shape up to be strategic, given its ownership of Warner Music Group, Alibaba, Facebook, Square, Spotify, Deezer, Snap and Zalando.
“Given our investments in market leading companies across diverse industries, we realize the value in analytics and machine learning and we could not be more excited about Sisense’s trajectory and traction in the market,” added Claltech’s Daniel Shinar in a statement.
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