Startups Weekly: With Asana, JFrog, Palantir, Snowflake, Sumo and Unity, we’re in peak season for tech IPOs

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Pandemic numbers are looking better, it’s still a couple months before U.S. elections and a growing line of tech companies have already ventured out into public markets successfully this summer. Hard to imagine conditions beating the present any time soon, whether you’re traditionally banked, going with a direct listing or getting inside a SPAC vehicle.

We covered the frenzy this week with an eye toward what other startups can learn about the way these companies have arrived at this point. Here are the headlines for each, from Asana to Unity.

But first, consider this special episode of our Equity podcast from Wednesday, where the team reviews the news. And for a faster(ish) read, Extra Crunch subscribers should also check out Alex Wilhelm’s “super-long roundup” of the companies.

The IPOs:

As losses expand, Asana is confident it has the ticket for a successful public listing

Palantir and the great revenue mystery
The bullish case for Palantir’s direct listing (EC)
Leaked S-1 says Palantir would fight an order demanding its encryption keys
Palantir’s S-1 alludes to controversial work with ICE as a risk factor for its business

Unpacking the Sumo Logic S-1 filing (EC)

A quick peek at Snowflake’s IPO filing
Industry experts say it’s full speed ahead as Snowflake files S-1

Unity’s IPO numbers look pretty … unreal?
Sequoia strikes gold with Unity’s IPO filing

Regarding that last one, EC members should be sure to check out our popular deep dive from last year detailing how Unity came to be a leading gaming engine.

Finally, here’s one last EC headline to get you ready for what is sure to be another week of official S-1s, leaked filing information, rumors of imminent IPO dates, controversies over methods of going public, etc.:

SaaS stocks survive earnings, keeping the market warm for software startups, exits

Image Credits: Getty Images

You don’t know SPACs

Special purpose acquisition companies are an older model of financial vehicle used to take companies public that has become a hot trend in recent years as more tech startups try to figure out liquidity events. Here’s Connie Loizos, who put together a long list of questions and answers about SPACs, concluding that the trend is here for the long-term:

[One] investment banker says he’s seeing less interest from VCs in sponsoring SPACs and more interest from them in selling their portfolio companies to a SPAC. As he notes, “Most venture firms are typically a little earlier stage investors and are private market investors, but there’s an uptick of interest across the board, from PE firms, hedge funds, long-only mutual funds.”

That might change if [A* SPAC founder] Kevin Hartz has anything to do with it. “We’re actually out in the Valley, speaking with all the funds and just looking to educate the venture funds,” he says. “We’ve had a lot of requests in. We think we’re going to convert [famed VC] Bill Gurley  from being a direct listings champion to the SPAC champion very soon.”

In the meantime, asked if his SPAC has a specific target in mind already, Hartz says it does not. He also takes issue with the word “target.”

Says Hartz, “We prefer ‘partner company.’” A target, he adds, “sounds like we’re trying to assassinate somebody.”

Image Credits: Dougal Waters / Getty Images

Inside the nearly 200 companies of Y Combinator’s Summer 2020 demo day

After YC’s first remote-only demo day this spring, the seed-stage venture firm switched from recorded pitches to live ones. The TechCrunch team was on hand to cover the 192 presentations over Monday and Tuesday this week. We’ve written up these two handy guides to help you find your newest competitors, employers or maybe investment:

The 98 companies from Y Combinator’s Summer 2020 Demo Day 1
The 94 companies from Y Combinator’s Summer 2020 Demo Day 2

The staff also picked out their dozen or so favorites from each day, for Extra Crunch subscribers:

Our 11 favorite companies from Y Combinator’s S20 Demo Day: Part 1
Our 12 favorite startups from Y Combinator’s S20 Demo Day: Part 2

(Check out this special demo day edition of Equity for a free audio rundown.)

One company wasn’t in the mix — a startup called Trove, that provides internal compensation SaaS tools, and has just raised a huge new round from Andreessen Horowitz. Natasha Mascarenhas has more.

What investors are saying about startup cities in 2020: Chicago edition

Cities around the world have developed strong tech scenes, but these startup hubs are at the center of potential disruption from pandemic problems plus the possibilities of remote work. We’re surveying investors around the world about what’s next for their home bases. This week, Matt Burns checks in with top Chicago investors about the tech future of the biggest Midwestern city. Here’s Constance Freedman of proptech-oriented fund Moderne Ventures, who is investing in the middle of all these changes:

World-class startups still need world-class feeders, so I don’t expect expansion to reach all that far, but perhaps density or proximity to work becomes less important for those who work there. This may give more cities a change to rise, including Chicago.

So what does this mean for Chicago startup ecosystem? I think Chicago is poised to come out well. The city is affordable to begin with … like 50% more affordable than the West or East Coast hubs. If I live in Chicago I can afford space, I can enjoy my city and I have good transportation if I want to bail out of the city and move to the suburbs. Chicago has a strong ecosystem of universities and capital that can sustain it and may become more appealing to those (tech people and investors) who moved out to go to the coasts in the first place and now realize they don’t need to be there. As people migrate to live where they really want to live, with the lifestyle they want to have, near family they want to be with, they begin to look for more local opportunities and that may bring some great talent back to Chicago and other markets outside of the coasts.

Chicago has long been known for banking, real estate, health care and insurance. I think these sectors and others are poised to do well. The largest opportunity for us (and any major city) is how to close the education gap, which leads to closing the income gap and from there — the sky is the limit!

Meanwhile, Mike Butcher is working on surveys across Europe, and would like to hear from you if you are an investor in Paris or Warsaw.

Around TechCrunch (Disrupt Time)

Conan is coming to Disrupt 2020

Meet the Disrupt 2020 ‘TC10’

Presenting TechCrunch Disrupt’s Asia sessions

Learn how to scale social impact startups at Disrupt with Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins and Jessica O. Matthews

Benchmark’s Peter Fenton is joining us at Disrupt

Learn why embedded finance is the future of fintech at Disrupt

Laura Deming, Frederik Groce, Amish Jani, Jessica Verrilli and Vanessa Larco are coming to Disrupt

Carbon Health’s Eren Bali and Color’s Othman Laraki will join us at Disrupt 2020

Black founders can get tactical advice at Disrupt

Five real reasons to attend Disrupt 2020 online

Hear from experienced edtech investors on the market’s overnight boom at Disrupt 2020

Startup Alley exhibitors: Register for VC-led Fundraising & Hiring Best Practices webinar

Here’s how you can get a second shot at Startup Battlefield

Two weeks left on early-bird pricing for TC Sessions: Mobility 2020

Grab your student discount pass for TC Sessions: Mobility 2020

Register for our last pitch-off next week on September 2

Extra Crunch discount now available for military, nonprofits and government employees

Across the week

TechCrunch

The pandemic has probably killed VR arcades for good

Femtech poised for growth beyond fertility

Five proven ways to attract and hire more diverse talent

Will automation eliminate data science positions?

Eduardo Saverin on the ‘world of innovation past Silicon Valley’

The H-1B visa ban is creating nearshore business partnership opportunities

Meet the startups from Brinc’s first online Demo Day

Extra Crunch

What can growth marketers learn from lean product development?

Alexa von Tobel: Eliminating risk is the key to building a startup during an economic downturn

As DevOps takes off, site reliability engineers are flying high

How to establish a startup and draw up your first contract

COVID-19 is driving demand for low-code apps

Synthetic biology startups are giving investors an appetite

Funding for mental health-focused startups rises in 2020

Box CEO Aaron Levie says thrifty founders have more control

#EquityPod

From Alex Wilhelm:

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This is the fourth episode of the week, pushing our production calendar to the test. Happily, we’ve managed to hold it together amidst the news deluge that the last few days have brought. It was a good week for our scheduling change, with the main episode of the show coming to you on Thursday afternoon versus Friday morning.

Change is good.

But unchanging this time around was our hosting lineup, with Natasha Mascarenhas and Danny Crichton and myself yammering with Chris Gates on the mix. Here’s what we got into:

• The CEO of TikTok is out, bids are swirling and who will wind up owning a piece of all of TikTok’s global operations is not clear. Walmart is in the mix, apparently, which feels very 2020.
• The New York Stock Exchange has gotten approval from the SEC for a new type of direct listing, one in which the company going public can sell a bloc of shares during the normal price discovery process. This means that all the banker-faff of setting a price and roadshowing to various investor groups could be going the way of the buffalo.
• About time, maybe? That was our take after reading this Bill Gurley note and the latest SEC news.
• But while the direct listing world is getting more interesting, the SPAC world is taking flight. Desktop Metal is going public via a SPAC which is all sorts of fascinating. A younger, Boston-based unicorn going public in this manner is eye catching!
• And then two funding rounds, the first from Finix, which can’t stop adding to its Series B. And Mural, which raised the largest Series B we can recall.

And with that, we’re all going to bed. We’re tired. No more news, thanks!

Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

https://ift.tt/3ltT25b Startups Weekly: With Asana, JFrog, Palantir, Snowflake, Sumo and Unity, we’re in peak season for tech IPOs https://ift.tt/34JbMI1

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TikTok’s rivals in India struggle to cash in on its ban

For years, India has served as the largest open battleground for Silicon Valley and Chinese firms searching for their next billion users.

With more than 400 million WhatsApp users, India is already the largest market for the Facebook-owned service. The social juggernaut’s big blue app also reaches more than 300 million users in the country.

Google is estimated to reach just as many users in India, with YouTube closely rivaling WhatsApp for the most popular smartphone app in the country.

Several major giants from China, like Alibaba and Tencent (which a decade ago shut doors for most foreign firms), also count India as their largest overseas market. At its peak, Alibaba’s UC Web gave Google’s Chrome a run for its money. And then there is TikTok, which also identified India as its biggest market outside of China.

Though the aggressive arrival of foreign firms in India helped accelerate the growth of the local ecosystem, their capital and expertise also created a level of competition that made it too challenging for most Indian firms to claim a slice of their home market.

New Delhi’s ban on 59 Chinese apps on June 30 on the basis of cybersecurity concerns has changed a lot of this.

Indian apps that rarely made an appearance in the top 20 have now flooded the charts. But are these skyrocketing download figures translating to sustaining users?

An industry executive leaked the download, monthly active users, weekly active users and daily active users figures from one of the top mobile insight firms. In this Extra Crunch report, we take a look at the changes New Delhi’s ban has enacted on the world’s second largest smartphone market.

TikTok copycats

Scores of startups in India, including news aggregator DailyHunt, on-demand video streamer MX Player and advertising giant InMobi Group, have launched their short-video format apps in recent months.

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/eA8V8J TikTok’s rivals in India struggle to cash in on its ban Manish Singh https://ift.tt/2YG3zAr
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Apple terminates Epic Games’ App Store account

{rss:content:encoded} Apple terminates Epic Games’ App Store account https://ift.tt/34JWhzM https://ift.tt/2YLRFoZ August 28, 2020 at 11:40PM

Epic Games has been removed from Apple’s App Store.

If you’ve already downloaded Fortnite to your Mac or iOS device, it should still work, but Epic’s termination means the Fortnite developer will no longer be able to submit new apps or updates.

MacStories Managing Editor John Voorhees noted the termination on Twitter, as well as the fact that the App Store is currently featuring Fortnite competitor PUBG.

Apple confirmed the move in a statement:

We are disappointed that we have had to terminate the Epic Games account on the App Store. We have worked with the team at Epic Games for many years on their launches and releases. The court recommended that Epic comply with the App Store guidelines while their case moves forward, guidelines they’ve followed for the past decade until they created this situation. Epic has refused. Instead they repeatedly submit Fortnite updates designed to violate the guidelines of the App Store. This is not fair to all other developers on the App Store and is putting customers in the middle of their fight. We hope that we can work together again in the future, but unfortunately that is not possible today.

You missed your chance. Epic is off the App Store now.

Also, this fight has gotten very petty. Today’s featured app? PUBG https://t.co/evp2R6qRxC pic.twitter.com/2vyRj6Oy1U

— John Voorhees (@johnvoorhees) August 28, 2020

Apple also said that Epic has been creating support issues by directing frustrated users toward AppleCare.

This is the latest development in the Epic-Apple dispute, which began earlier this month when the developer introduced support for direct payments in Fortnite, attempting to circumvent the 30% cut that Apple takes on App Store payments. This prompted Apple to boot Fortnite from the App Store, with Epic immediately launching a lawsuit and a publicity campaign that accused Apple of abusing its market power.

Earlier this week, a federal district court judge ordered Apple not to block access to Epic’s Unreal Engine for developers, but she said that Fortnite could stay out of the App Store until it complied with the rules.

Today’s removal should not affect the Unreal Engine, which Epic manages through a separate account.

Apple ordered to not block Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, but Fortnite to stay off App Store

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TikTok’s rivals in India struggle to cash in on its ban

For years, India has served as the largest open battleground for Silicon Valley and Chinese firms searching for their next billion users.

With more than 400 million WhatsApp users, India is already the largest market for the Facebook-owned service. The social juggernaut’s big blue app also reaches more than 300 million users in the country.

Google is estimated to reach just as many users in India, with YouTube closely rivaling WhatsApp for the most popular smartphone app in the country.

Several major giants from China, like Alibaba and Tencent (which a decade ago shut doors for most foreign firms), also count India as their largest overseas market. At its peak, Alibaba’s UC Web gave Google’s Chrome a run for its money. And then there is TikTok, which also identified India as its biggest market outside of China.

Though the aggressive arrival of foreign firms in India helped accelerate the growth of the local ecosystem, their capital and expertise also created a level of competition that made it too challenging for most Indian firms to claim a slice of their home market.

New Delhi’s ban on 59 Chinese apps on June 30 on the basis of cybersecurity concerns has changed a lot of this.

Indian apps that rarely made an appearance in the top 20 have now flooded the charts. But are these skyrocketing download figures translating to sustaining users?

An industry executive leaked the download, monthly active users, weekly active users and daily active users figures from one of the top mobile insight firms. In this Extra Crunch report, we take a look at the changes New Delhi’s ban has enacted on the world’s second largest smartphone market.

TikTok copycats

Scores of startups in India, including news aggregator DailyHunt, on-demand video streamer MX Player and advertising giant InMobi Group, have launched their short-video format apps in recent months.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J TikTok’s rivals in India struggle to cash in on its ban https://ift.tt/2YG3zAr

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Steno raises $3.5 million led by First Round to become an extension of law offices

The global legal services industry was worth $849 billion dollars in 2017 and is expected to become a trillion dollar industry by the end of next year. Little wonder that Steno, an L.A.-based startup, wants a piece.

Like most legal services outfits, what it offers are ways for law practices to run more smoothly, including in a world where fewer people are meeting in conference rooms and courthouses and operating instead from disparate locations.

Steno first launched with an offering that centers on court reporting. It lines up court reporters, as well as pays them, removing both potential headaches from lawyers’ to-do lists.

More recently, the startup has added offerings like a remote deposition videoconferencing platform that it insists is not only secure but can manage exhibit handling and other details in ways meant to meet specific legal needs.

It also, very notably, has a lending product that enables lawyers to take depositions without paying until a case is resolved, which can take a year or two. The idea is to free attorneys’ financial resources — including so they can take on other clients — until there’s a payout. Of course, the product is also a potentially lucrative one for Steno, as are most lending products.

We talked earlier this week with the company, which just closed on a $3.5 million seed round led by First Round Capital (it has now raised $5 million altogether).

Unsurprisingly, one of its founders is a lawyer named Dylan Ruga who works as a trial attorney at an L.A.-based law group and knows first-hand the biggest pain points for his peers.

More surprising is his cofounder, Gregory Hong, who previously cofounded the restaurant reservation platform Reserve, which was acquired by Resy, which was acquired by American Express. How did Hong make the leap from one industry to a seemingly very different one?

Hong says he might not have gravitated to the idea if not for Ruga, who was Resy’s trademark attorney and who happened to send Hong the pitch behind Steno to get Hong’s advice. He looked it over as a favor, then he asked to get involved. “I just thought, ‘This is a unique and interesting opportunity’ and said, ‘Dylan, let me run this.'”

Today the 19-month-old startup now has 20 full-time employees and another 10 part-time staffers. One major accelerant to the business has been the pandemic, suggests Hong. Turns out tech-enabled legal support services become even more attractive when lawyers and everyone else in the ecosystem is socially distancing.

Hong suggests that Steno’s idea to marry its services with financing is gaining adherents, too, including amid law groups like JML Law and Simon Law Group, both of which focus largely on personal injury cases.

Indeed, Steno charges — and provides financing — on a per-transaction basis right now, even while its revenue is “somewhat recurring” in that its customers constantly have court cases.

Still, a subscription product is being considered, says Hong. So are other uses for its videoconferencing platform. In the meantime, says Hong, Steno’s tech is “built very well” for legal services, and that’s where it plans to remain focused.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Steno raises $3.5 million led by First Round to become an extension of law offices https://ift.tt/2YG1Riv

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Banks aren’t as stupid as enterprise AI and fintech entrepreneurs think

Simon Moss Contributor

Simon Moss is CEO of Symphony AyasdiAI, an enterprise artificial intelligence company for financial services.

Announcements like Selina Finance’s $53 million raise and another $64.7 million raise the next day for a different banking startup spark enterprise artificial intelligence and fintech evangelists to rejoin the debate over how banks are stupid and need help or competition.

The complaint is banks are seemingly too slow to adopt fintech’s bright ideas. They don’t seem to grasp where the industry is headed. Some technologists, tired of marketing their wares to banks, have instead decided to go ahead and launch their own challenger banks.

But old-school financiers aren’t dumb. Most know the “buy versus build” choice in fintech is a false choice. The right question is almost never whether to buy software or build it internally. Instead, banks have often worked to walk the difficult but smarter path right down the middle — and that’s accelerating.

Two reasons why banks are smarter

That’s not to say banks haven’t made horrendous mistakes. Critics complain about banks spending billions trying to be software companies, creating huge IT businesses with huge redundancies in cost and longevity challenges, and investing into ineffectual innovation and “intrapreneurial” endeavors. But overall, banks know their business way better than the entrepreneurial markets that seek to influence them.

First, banks have something most technologists don’t have enough of: Banks have domain expertise. Technologists tend to discount the exchange value of domain knowledge. And that’s a mistake. So much abstract technology, without critical discussion, deep product management alignment and crisp, clear and business-usefulness, makes too much technology abstract from the material value it seeks to create.

Second, banks are not reluctant to buy because they don’t value enterprise artificial intelligence and other fintech. They’re reluctant because they value it too much. They know enterprise AI gives a competitive edge, so why should they get it from the same platform everyone else is attached to, drawing from the same data lake?

Competitiveness, differentiation, alpha, risk transparency and operational productivity will be defined by how highly productive, high-performance cognitive tools are deployed at scale in the incredibly near future. The combination of NLP, ML, AI and cloud will accelerate competitive ideation in order of magnitude. The question is, how do you own the key elements of competitiveness? It’s a tough question for many enterprises to answer.

If they get it right, banks can obtain the true value of their domain expertise and develop a differentiated edge where they don’t just float along with every other bank on someone’s platform. They can define the future of their industry and keep the value. AI is a force multiplier for business knowledge and creativity. If you don’t know your business well, you’re wasting your money. Same goes for the entrepreneur. If you can’t make your portfolio absolutely business relevant, you end up being a consulting business pretending to be a product innovator.

Who’s afraid of who?

So are banks at best cautious, and at worst afraid? They don’t want to invest in the next big thing only to have it flop. They can’t distinguish what’s real from hype in the fintech space. And that’s understandable. After all, they have spent a fortune on AI. Or have they?

It seems they have spent a fortune on stuff called AI — internal projects with not a snowball’s chance in hell to scale to the volume and concurrency demands of the firm. Or they have become enmeshed in huge consulting projects staggering toward some lofty objective that everyone knows deep down is not possible.

This perceived trepidation may or may not be good for banking, but it certainly has helped foster the new industry of the challenger bank.

Challenger banks are widely accepted to have come around because traditional banks are too stuck in the past to adopt their new ideas. Investors too easily agree. In recent weeks, American challenger banks Chime unveiled a credit card, U.S.-based Point launched and German challenger bank Vivid launched with the help of Solarisbank, a fintech company.

What’s going on behind the curtain

Traditional banks are spending resources on hiring data scientists too — sometimes in numbers that dwarf the challenger bankers. Legacy bankers want to listen to their data scientists on questions and challenges rather than pay more for an external fintech vendor to answer or solve them.

This arguably is the smart play. Traditional bankers are asking themselves why should they pay for fintech services that they can’t 100% own, or how can they buy the right bits, and retain the parts that amount to a competitive edge? They don’t want that competitive edge floating around in a data lake somewhere.

From banks’ perspective, it’s better to “fintech” internally or else there’s no competitive advantage; the business case is always compelling. The problem is a bank is not designed to stimulate creativity in design. JPMC’s COIN project is a rare and fantastically successful project. Though, this is an example of a super alignment between creative fintech and the bank being able to articulate a clear, crisp business problem — a Product Requirements Document for want of a better term. Most internal development is playing games with open source, with the shine of the alchemy wearing off as budgets are looked at hard in respect to return on investment.

A lot of people are going to talk about setting new standards in the coming years as banks onboard these services and buy new companies. Ultimately, fintech firms and banks are going to join together and make the new standard as new options in banking proliferate.

Don’t incur too much technical debt

So, there’s a danger to spending too much time learning how to do it yourself and missing the boat as everyone else moves ahead.

Engineers will tell you that untutored management can fail to steer a consistent course. The result is an accumulation of technical debt as development-level requirements keep zigzagging. Laying too much pressure on your data scientists and engineers can also lead to technical debt piling up faster. A bug or an inefficiency is left in place. New features are built as workarounds.

This is one reason why in-house-built software has a reputation for not scaling. The same problem shows up in consultant-developed software. Old problems in the system hide underneath new ones and the cracks begin to show in the new applications built on top of low-quality code.

So how to fix this? What’s the right model?

It’s a bit of a dull answer, but success comes from humility. It needs an understanding that big problems are solved with creative teams, each understanding what they bring, each being respected as equals and managed in a completely clear articulation on what needs to be solved and what success looks like.

Throw in some Stalinist project management and your probability of success goes up an order of magnitude. So, the successes of the future will see banks having fewer but way more trusted fintech partners that jointly value the intellectual property they are creating. They’ll have to respect that neither can succeed without the other. It’s a tough code to crack. But without it, banks are in trouble, and so are the entrepreneurs that seek to work with them.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Banks aren’t as stupid as enterprise AI and fintech entrepreneurs think https://ift.tt/3joMtPM

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What does GPT-3 mean for the future of the legal profession?

Rudy DeFelice Contributor

Rudy is co-founder and CEO of Keesal Propulsion Labs, a digital transformation company serving the law departments of the Fortune 500. Rudy is an attorney, technology entrepreneur, TEDx speaker and best-selling author. He is a an alumnus of Harvard Business School and the University of Connecticut School of Law.

One doesn’t have to dig too deep into legal organizations to find people who are skeptical about artificial intelligence.

AI is getting tremendous attention and significant venture capital, but AI tools frequently underwhelm in the trenches. Here are a few reasons why that is and why I believe GPT-3, a beta version of which was recently released by the OpenAI Foundation, might be a game changer in legal and other knowledge-focused organizations.

GPT-3 is getting a lot of oxygen lately because of its size, scope and capabilities. However, it should be recognized that a significant amount of that attention is due to its association with Elon Musk. The OpenAI Foundation that created GPT-3 was founded by heavy hitters Musk and Sam Altman and is supported by Mark Benioff, Peter Thiel and Microsoft, among others. Arthur C. Clarke once observed that great innovations happen after everyone stops laughing.

Musk has made the world stop laughing in so many ambitious areas that the world is inclined to give a project in which he’s had a hand a second look. GPT-3 is getting the benefit of that spotlight. I suggest, however, that the attention might be warranted on its merits.

Why have some AI-based tools struggled in the legal profession, and how might GPT-3 be different?

1. Not every problem is a nail

It is said that when you’re a hammer, every problem is a nail. The networks and algorithms that power AI are quite good at drawing correlations across enormous datasets that would not be obvious to humans. One of my favorite examples of this is a loan-underwriting AI that determined that the charge level of the battery on your phone at the time of application is correlated to your underwriting risk. Who knows why that is? A human would not have surmised that connection. Those things are not rationally related, just statistically related.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J What does GPT-3 mean for the future of the legal profession? https://ift.tt/32BC5gC

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Facebook tests linking your FB account to your news subscriptions

Facebook is testing out a new feature that could help news publishers create a better experience for paying subscribers on the social network.

The idea is that when Facebook identifies a subscriber from one of its publisher partners, that subscriber will be invited to link their news account to their Facebook account. Once they’re linked, if they encounter a paywalled article on Facebook, they’ll be able to read it without hitting the paywall or having to log-in again.

Facebook also says that when subscribers link their accounts, it will show them more content from that publisher, and that it’s “developing and [plans] to introduce additional subscriber experiences over time.”

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Athletic and the Winnipeg Free Press have already been testing the feature out. Facebook says subscribers who linked their accounts made an average of 111% more article clicks compared to those who weren’t part of the test group, and that those subscribers increased their rate of following a publisher from 34% to 97%.

“Account linking with Facebook has offered a convenient, easy way for The Athletic’s subscribers to access our in-depth storytelling while they are spending time on their favorite social media platform,” said The Athletic’s vice president of product marketing Charlotte Winthrop in a statement. “This enhances the experience for our subscribers, keeping them engaged with The Athletic and up-to-date on their favorite teams, leagues and players.”

Facebook has had a complicated relationship with news publishers, many of whom have gotten burned by the company’s shifting strategy in the past.

When news organizations rely on outside platforms for distribution, one of the big issues is who owns the subscriber. So Facebook’s approach here may be more acceptable to publishers, since it still requires readers to subscribe to a given publication (rather than subscribing through Facebook itself).

The social network’s current news strategy is focused on Facebook News, a separate tab for journalism in the main Facebook app that has only recently begun to expand internationally. The company also offers support for subscriptions in Instant Articles, and s part of its broader efforts to fund journalism, Facebook also launched a Local News Subscription Accelerator.

Facebook reveals early results from its subscription-focused local news accelerator

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Facebook tests linking your FB account to your news subscriptions Anthony Ha https://ift.tt/3jtuPdL
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Xiaomi plans to bring under-screen cameras to its smartphones next year

{rss:content:encoded} Xiaomi plans to bring under-screen cameras to its smartphones next year https://ift.tt/2D6IKqq https://ift.tt/2YLDzE6 August 28, 2020 at 05:00PM

The front-facing camera has been a pretty constant bugbear for phone makers for a number of years now. Xiaomi certainly isn’t the first to offer a clever technological solution to the problem — and it’s also certainly not the only company to have show off under-screen camera tech — but next year, it’s committed to bringing that technology to market.

The manufacturer noted its plans today as part of its earnings report, stating that it will begin manufacturing handsets using the latest version of the technology it’s been working on for a number of years now. This actually represents the third generation of the tech. The first didn’t exist outside of the lab and the second was shown off to the public but never made it into production.

There are no doubt all sorts of practical reasons for that. Among them seems to be the issue of pixel density. For reasons that ought to be pretty obvious, there’s a big question of how to maintain a consistent pixel density in the area of the screen that sits on top of the front-facing camera. Xiaomi claims to have solved the problem, however.

“The self-developed pixel arrangement used in Xiaomi’s 3rd Generation Under-Display Camera Technology allows the screen to pass light through the gap area of ​​sub-pixels, allowing each single pixel to retain a complete RGB subpixel layout without sacrificing pixel density,” it writes in a blog post.

Xiaomi says it’s been able to effectively double the pixel density of competing technology, letting light through to the camera, without sacrificing the uniformity of the screen. It looks good in the side-by-side videos the company has released, but obviously it’s worth reserving judgement until mass production starts next year.

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SaaS stocks survive earnings, keeping the market warm for software startups, exits

We’re on the other end of nearly every single SaaS earnings report that you can name, with the exception of Slack, and shares of software companies are holding onto their year’s gains. Which means SaaS and cloud companies have made it through a somewhat steep gauntlet largely unscathed.

There were exceptions, of course, but when we consider public software and cloud companies, the tale of the tape is somewhat clear. And it appears to indicate that today’s huge revenue multiples will stick around for a while yet.

 

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

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This is great news for startups, given that delivering software as a managed service (SaaS) has become the most popular business model for upstart tech companies. If the set of public SaaS companies are richly valued, it reflects well on their private peers. Warm public markets can help with exit valuations and provide encouragement to private investors to keep investing in SaaS startups.

The most recent earnings reports tell a somewhat simple story: Generally strong growth, and generally good forecasts. A few weeks back, Appian beat on revenue growth and profitability and guided a bit above market expectations. Given the nearly 50% run company’s stock that it has enjoyed in 2020, the results were welcome.

https://ift.tt/2YAJc8v SaaS stocks survive earnings, keeping the market warm for software startups, exits https://ift.tt/3jmtBRh

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Femtech poised for growth beyond fertility

The market for female-focused health products (aka ‘femtech’) is set for growth via segmentation, per an analyst note from PitchBook which identifies opportunities for entrepreneurs to target a growing number of health issues that specifically affect women or affect women in a specific way — broadening out from a traditional focus on reproductive health.

Femtech remains a “significantly underdeveloped” slice of healthtech, according to the analysis, which highlights the disparity between how much women spend annually on medical expenses — estimated at ~$500BN — vs how little healthcare R&D is targeted specifically at women’s health issues (a mere 4%).

Last year the global market for female-focused health products generated $820.6M, per the note, and is estimated to reach at least $3BN by the end of 2030. While it says femtech posted $592.1M in VC investment in 2019, slightly down on 2018’s $620.3M. But so far this year it’s racked up $376.2M in VC across 57 deals — putting it on pace to match 2019’s funding levels.

Areas of growth opportunity PitchBook sees for femtech outside its traditional focus on reproductive health are: Endometriosis, a painful disorder of the womb lining affecting one in 10 women; what it calls “personalized and female-oriented approaches to general health & disease management”, with a specific focus on heart health, pain management, and diabetes and weight management within that; and the life-stage transition of the menopause.

“While we still view femtech as a niche industry, we believe secular drivers could help propel new growth opportunities in the space,” write analysts Kaia Colban and Andrew Akers. “These include the increasing representation of women in the venture-backed technology community, rising awareness and acceptance of women’s health issues, and the growing prevalence of infectious diseases among women in some countries in Africa and Asia.

“Furthermore, while the majority of femtech products have traditionally focused on reproductive health, we believe new approaches to women’s health research will help open the door to new products and services.”

Expansion of the vertical is being driven by universal growth of the personalized medicine industry — which PitchBook notes is expected to reach $3.2TR by 2025, registering a CAGR of 10.6% over the forecast period.

While the massive underrepresentation of women in the venture community goes a long way to explaining the relative lack of attention investors have paid to products addressing women’s health — with the note acknowledging pitching to male investors remains a challenge for femtech startups — it suggests investors have also been cool on the subcategory because of a relatively poor track record of “sizable” exits.

“Only six femtech exits were completed in 2019; however, this still represents a 64% increase in exit value compared to 2018,” it writes. “The largest exits in recent years include Progyny’s $130M IPO and Procter & Gamble’s acquisition of This is L. for $100M. Progyny’s stock has roughly doubled in the eight months since it went public.”

PitchBook says it expects just 14% of VC to go toward female-founded startups this year — further noting that only 17% of startups have at least one female founder. (For femtech startups the figure is considerably higher — yet still only 69% of those PitchBook tracks; NB, this does not include startups building products targeted at women where there isn’t a medical need, such as skincare & beauty etc.)

“However, we believe these barriers may be subsiding as male investors begin to recognize the femtech market opportunity and as the VC world becomes more gender-diverse,” it adds, noting that female-founded companies deliver over twice as much per dollar invested than their male-owned counterparts which it reckons could help to turn more investors’ heads.

Other key industry growth drivers the note points to are a conducive regulatory environment; a rise in preventative medicine & holistic health; and advancements in health technology that have made personalized products more accessible and affordable, such as AI and “cloud-based infomatics”.

On the M&A front, PitchBook notes this is most common for femtech startups in the general health & wellness category. And while most remain single-product companies it says it expects a maturing femtech industry to lead to product diversification — “potentially driven by M&A” — noting recent examples of pregnancy-focused apps tapping into the menopause market, which it says suggests an expanding opportunity for fertility startups.

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Undermyfork scores $400K seed for its diabetes tracking app and US launch

Undermyfork, a diabetes tracking app designed to help people with the disease improve “time-in-range” and better manage their condition, has raised $400,000 in seed funding.

Investment comes from AltaIR Capital and Runa Capital. Undermyfork co-founder Mike Ushakov’s previous company, Metabar (the maker of the browser add-on Sovetnik), was also backed by Runa, before being acquired by Yandex several years ago.

The Undermyfork app combines meal photos with glucose data coming from a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) device. The aim is to let users correlate meals with changes in blood glucose levels. Specifically, it focuses on “time-in-range” — the percentage of time that a person spends with their blood glucose levels in a target range, considered the most important metric in modern diabetes management.

“With our app, we want to help people with diabetes correct their lifestyle and eating habits, and improve their time-in-range,” Ushakov tells me. “Undermyfork is a very simple tool now: it combines meal photos and insulin data with glucose data, and allows the users to clearly see which meals are driving them out of the safe blood glucose range.

“We help people with diabetes not just to see their blood glucose data, but to interpret the data and make useful conclusions that could improve their life. You can say it’s like ‘Google analytics for blood sugar.’ ”

More broadly, Undermyfork is betting that continuous glucose monitoring devices will replace traditional finger-pricking blood glucose meters in the coming years. The strategy is to establish itself as the default companion app for CGMs, but to do so it will need to gain access to CGM-generated data.

“Undermyfork relies on CGM data, so we need to have the partners to provide us with this data,” explains Ushakov. “This month, simultaneously with closing our round, we partnered with Dexcom, which is the leading CGM manufacturer in the U.S. We now have access to Dexcom’s retrospective API, letting users stream data directly from their Dexcom cloud to the Undermyfork app.”

This also sets up Undermyfork for a U.S. launch. Noteworthy, the mostly Europe-based team is entirely remote. Ushakov is in Amsterdam, co-founder Eugene Molodkin is in St.Petersburg and other team members are in Germany, Netherlands, Russia, Slovenia and Israel.

https://ift.tt/3b5JrNu Undermyfork scores $400K seed for its diabetes tracking app and US launch https://ift.tt/2EMldvh

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Daily Crunch: TikTok’s CEO resigns

{rss:content:encoded} Daily Crunch: TikTok’s CEO resigns https://ift.tt/31wZ8Kj https://ift.tt/2CoAoqu August 28, 2020 at 12:10AM

Turmoil continues at TikTok, Salesforce lays off 1,000 people and Warby Parker is now valued at $3 billion. This is your Daily Crunch for August 27, 2020.

The big story: TikTok’s CEO resigns

Kevin Mayer, the former Disney executive who joined TikTok as CEO just over 100 days ago, announced yesterday that he’s resigning. While Mayer was likely brought on to reassure U.S. legislators about the app’s Chinese owners, it seems he wasn’t expecting this level of conflict, with President Donald Trump signing an executive order that would ban TikTok in the U.S. unless it’s sold to another company.

“We appreciate that the political dynamics of the last few months have significantly changed what the scope of Kevin’s role would be going forward, and fully respect his decision,” a TikTok spokesperson said in a statement. “We thank him for his time at the company and wish him well.”

As for which company might acquire TikTok, Walmart has confirmed that it’s interested in teaming up with Microsoft to acquire the popular video app.

The tech giants

Salesforce confirms it’s laying off around 1,000 people in spite of monster quarter — Salesforce says it’s “reallocating resources to position the company for continued growth.”

Google Assistant app now uses your searches to make personalized recommendations — Those recommendations could include podcasts, restaurants, recipes and more.

Facebook isn’t happy about Apple’s upcoming ad tracking restrictions — The company says Audience Network revenue could decline by more than 50%.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Warby Parker, valued at $3 billion, raises $245 million in funding — The eyewear startup has launched a telehealth service for New York customers, allowing them to extend an existing glasses or contacts prescription.

Instacart faces lawsuit from DC attorney general over ‘deceptive’ service fees — The suit alleges that Instacart misled customers into thinking the 10% service fee was a tip for the delivery person.

Narrative raises $8.5 million as it launches a new data marketplace — The goal is to make buying data as easy as buying something on Amazon.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

Alexa von Tobel: Eliminating risk is the key to building a startup during an economic downturn — Von Tobel says that one of the most important exercises in forming LearnVest was writing out a business plan.

To reach scale, Juni Learning is building a full-stack edtech experience — The startup’s path to $10 million in annual recurring revenue is inspired by Peloton, not Kumon.

What can growth marketers learn from lean product development? — Andrea Fryrear argues that marketers should begin creating minimum viable campaigns.

(Reminder: Extra Crunch is our subscription membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

A faster, easier, cheaper way of going public — The latest episode of Equity discusses direct listings and SPACs.

Here’s how you can get a second shot at Startup Battlefield — Your second chance comes in the form of two Wild Card entries for the upcoming Battlefield at Disrupt.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

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Facebook sues developers who violated terms to collect user data, sell fake ‘likes’

Facebook announced today it’s suing multiple developers in the U.S. and, for the first time, in the U.K., for violations of its policies. In the U.K., both Facebook Inc. and Facebook Ireland are suing MobiBurn, parent company OakSmart Technologies and its founder Fatih Haltas, in the High Court of Justice for failing to comply with Facebook’s audit request, after security researchers flagged the company’s technology for collecting data from Facebook users through its malicious software. Separately, Facebook Inc. and Instagram Inc. sued Nikolay Holper in federal court in San Francisco for operating a fake engagement service.

Facebook has been cracking down on malicious developers following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which saw the personal data of 87 million Facebook users compromised. Since then, Facebook introduced more protections over how app developers could access data, as well as punitive actions. Earlier this year, Facebook also introduced new Platform Terms and Developer Policies that gave it permission to audit third-party apps by requesting either remote or physical access to developers’ systems, if need be, to ensure compliance.

According to Facebook’s announcement, MobiBurn failed to “fully comply” with Facebook’s audit request, where it was attempting to investigate the company’s use of a malicious Software Development Kit (SDK) to harvest user data.

News of MobiBurn’s activities first circulated in security research circles in late 2019. In November, both Facebook and Twitter announced that the personal data of hundreds of users may have been improperly accessed after they used their social accounts to log in to certain third-party apps that had malicious SDKs installed by MobiBurn and another company, One Audience. Facebook said it had issued cease and desist letters to those companies.

In MobiBurn’s case, it also took enforcement action, disabled its apps and requested its participation in an audit, as its policies now allow for. MobiBurn “failed to fully cooperate,” Facebook says.

MobiBurn, in November, had responded that it didn’t collect, share or monetize data from Facebook. The company hasn’t yet responded to a request for comment today.

Facebook’s lawsuit alleges that MobiBurn paid third-party app developers to install its SDK into their apps. Once installed, MobiBurn collected information from the devices and requested data from Facebook, including the person’s name, time zone, email address and gender, explains Facebook, in its announcement of the lawsuit.

The suit is looking for an injunction against MobiBurn; the ability to audit the company’s systems; an account of the data it accessed, payments made to developers, and payments received; damages and other relief.

Facebook vs MobiBurn by TechCrunch on Scribd

Meanwhile, in the U.S. lawsuit, Facebook is taking on developer Nikolay Holper, who operated a fake engagement service. Facebook alleges Holoper used a network of bots and automation software to “distribute fake likes, comments, views and followers on Instagram.” Several different websites were used to sell the fake engagement service to Instagram users, the suit says.

Complaint and Exhibits-conformed by TechCrunch on Scribd

This is not the first time Facebook has cracked down on fake engagement services. Last year, it filed a U.S. lawsuit to shut down a follower-buying service in New Zealand. Instagram in 2019 also shut down the accounts of 17 fake engagement services that promise more followers to Instagram users.

Facebook had previously shut down the engagement service and formally warned the developer he was in violation, and sent a cease and desist letter.

While Facebook’s attempts to crack down on developers violating its terms of service, users have found other ways to inauthentically grow their follower base. Many Instagram users, for example, participate in “pods” where they systematically coordinate liking and commenting on each others’ posts as a way to game Instagram algorithms.

“Today’s actions are the latest in our efforts to protect people who use our services, hold those who abuse our platform accountable, and advance the state of the law around data misuse and privacy,” said Facebook, in a statement.

 

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Facebook sues developers who violated terms to collect user data, sell fake ‘likes’ Sarah Perez https://ift.tt/32qU7SM
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A faster, easier, cheaper way of going public

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This is the fourth episode of the week, pushing our production calendar to the test. Happily we’ve managed to hold it together amidst the news deluge that the last few days have brought. It was a good week for our scheduling change, with the main episode of the show coming to you on Thursday afternoon versus Friday morning.

Change is good.

But unchanging this time around was our hosting lineup, with Natasha Mascarenhas and Danny Crichton and myself yammering with Chris Gates on the mix. Here’s what we got into:

• The CEO of TikTok is out, bids are swirling, and whom will wind up owning a piece of all of TikTok’s global operations is not clear. Walmart is in the mix, apparently, which feels very 2020.
• The New York Stock Exchange has gotten approval from the SEC for a new type of direct listing, one in which the company going public can sell a bloc of shares during the normal price discovery process. This means that all the banker-faff of setting a price and roadshowing to various investor groups could be going the way of the buffalo.
• About time, maybe? That was our take after reading this Bill Gurley note and the latest SEC news.
• But while the direct listing world is getting more interesting, the SPAC world is taking flight. Desktop Metal is going public via a SPAC which is all sorts of fascinating. A younger, Boston-based unicorn going public in this manner is eye catching!
• And then two funding rounds, the first from Finix, which can’t stop adding to its Series B. And Mural, which raised the largest Series B we can recall.

And with that, we’re all going to bed. We’re tired. No more news, thanks!

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PT and Friday at 6:00 a.m. PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

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To reach scale, Juni Learning is building a full-stack edtech experience

 Juni Learning connects kids with math and science tutors, but co-founder Vivian Shen would prefer not to be lumped in with other edtech startups, despite the sector’s pandemic-born boom.

“We’re not just in the middle to take a few percentage points off of each side and pretend like we’re delivering value,” said Shen. “That’s not scalable.”

Semantics aside, Shen’s words underscore a truth about live tutoring businesses: Anyone can start one. All it takes is smart friends, eager students and a platform to bring them together.

The low barrier of entry has given rise to a slew of new startups. Some view edtech as a marketplace play, others go the gig economy route, and some are trying to make tutoring as simple as calling an Uber — on-demand and only when you need it.

Juni Learning, co-founded by Shen and Ruby Lee, is entering a fragmented and fatigued market full of better-funded and well-known startups. The startup views itself as a consumer play instead of an edtech startup and raised a $10.5 million Series A back in February to prove it can take a slice of the market.

With only 4,000 active subscribers, Juni Learning is bringing in $10 million in annual run revenue (ARR), compared to $2 million of ARR in March, according to my calculations.

So how is it faring?

A word of warning

In 2005, Andrew Geant was thinking about two-sided gig economy marketplaces. He applied the model to tutoring, thinking he could grow a business from connecting students and tutors online to meet offline. So, Geant and Mike Weishuhn, both recent Princeton graduates, founded Wyzant.

http://ifttt.com/images/no_image_card.png To reach scale, Juni Learning is building a full-stack edtech experience https://techcrunch.com/2020/08/27/to-build-scale-juni-learning-is-building-a-full-stack-edtech-experience/

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Black founders can get tactical advice at Disrupt

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death and widespread protests for racial justice, a number of venture capitalists made public statements about wanting to improve diversity in the tech industry — and more specifically to fund more diverse founders.

Their comments are certainly worth applauding, but actual change is a lot harder. And if it comes at all, it will take time. In the meantime, how can Black founders navigate a tech and venture capital industry where they have historically been underrepresented, overlooked and worse?

To answer that question, we’ll bring three Black founders together at Disrupt 2020 from September 14-18 who can speak directly about their experience raising funding and launching startups.

One of our speakers, Michael Seibel, is now funding startups himself as partner and CEO of startup accelerator Y Combinator. Before that, however, he was co-founder and CEO at Justin.tv (which became game streaming giant Twitch) and then at its spin-off, Socialcam (which was acquired by Autodesk). So he can talk about both sides, as both a founder and investor.

Joining Seibel will be two YC startup founders — Reham Fagiri of furniture marketplace AptDeco and Songe LaRon of barbershop software maker Squire. We’ll talk to all three of them on the Extra Crunch stage, getting as specific and tactical as possible about what Black founders can expect and what steps they can take to succeed.

Learn more at Disrupt 2020, which runs from September 14-18. Buy the Disrupt Digital Pro Pass, or if you’re an early-stage founder a Digital Startup Alley Exhibitor Package, today and get access to all the interviews on our Main Stage, workshops over on the Extra Crunch Stage, where you can get actionable tips, as well as CrunchMatch, our free, AI-powered networking platform. As soon as you register for Disrupt, you will have access to CrunchMatch and can start connecting with people. Use the tool to schedule one-on-one video calls with potential customers and investors or to recruit and interview prospective employees.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Black founders can get tactical advice at Disrupt https://ift.tt/3jo97Yz

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