Katana raises $11M Series A to be the SaaS powering ‘manufacturing entrepreneurs’

Katana, an Estonian startup that has built manufacturing-specific enterprise resource planning (ERP) software for SMBs, has raised $11 million in Series A funding.

Leading the round is European venture capital firm Atomico, with participation from angel investors Ott Kaukver (Checkout.com CTO), Sten Tamkivi (CPO Topia, formerly Skype), Sergei Anikin (CTO, Pipedrive) and Kairi Pauskar (former TransferWise HR Architect). Previous backer 42Cap also followed on, bringing the total investment raised by the company to date to $16 million.

Founded in 2017 by Kristjan Vilosius (CEO), Priit Kaasik (engineering lead) and Hannes Kert (CCO), Katana positions itself as the “entrepreneur manufacturer’s secret weapon” with a plug-and-play ERP for small to medium-sized manufacturers. The idea is to wean companies off existing antiquated tools such as spreadsheets and legacy software to manage inventory and production. The startup is also playing into macro trends, such as the advent of online marketplaces and D2C e-commerce, that are resulting in an explosion of independent makers, spanning cosmetics to home décor, electronics to apparel, and food and beverages.

“We are seeing a global renaissance of small manufacturing driven by the rise of e-commerce tools and consumer demand for bespoke products produced locally,” says Vilosius. “Just walk around any big city from London to San Francisco, and you’ll see workshops all around you. Someone’s making organic cosmetics here; over there, someone is making electric bikes. These companies are run by passionate entrepreneurs selling through traditional channels, but also selling through direct-to-consumer channels, e-commerce stores and marketplaces, etc. This is a massive boom of makers wanting to create products and sell them globally, and it is not a trend that will disappear tomorrow”.

The problem, however, is that small and medium-sized manufacturers don’t have the right software to support workflows necessary to sell through multiple channels — and this is where Katana comes in. The plug-and-play software claims a superior UX designed specifically to power boutique manufacturing, including functionality supporting the workflows of modern manufacturers, i.e. inventory control and optimization, and purchasing materials, managing bill-of-materials, tracking costs and more. It also offers an API and integrations with popular e-commerce sales channels and accounting tools such as Shopify, Amazon, WooCommerce, QuickBooks, Xero and others.

Meet the makers of modular

“We have built the world’s most self on-board-able manufacturing ERP, and that’s a very important differentiation between us and competitors,” explains Vilosius. “Implementation is so simple that more than half of Katana’s users self-onboard. It takes less than a week on average to get Katana up and running, compared to months for competitors”.

As an example of how a company might use Katana, imagine a boutique manufacturer using Shopify as their main sales channel. Once configured, Katana pulls in orders from Shopify and knows whether or not the product is available so it can be shipped immediately. If it’s unavailable, Katana displays if the necessary raw materials needed to manufacture are in stock and by when the product could be finished. “We handle the entire process from getting the raw materials in the warehouse to planning manufacturing activities, executing and shipping when the product is done,” says Vilosius.

Image Credits: Katana

Cue statement from Atomico partner Ben Blume, who joins the Katana board: “Atomico has always believed in the strength of Estonian-built engineering and product, and as we got to know the team at Katana, we saw a familiar pattern: a relentlessly product-focussed team with the incredible ability to build and think from their customer’s point of view, and an unwavering belief that a new generation of manufacturers with big ideas shouldn’t have to settle for less than world-class technology to support them.”

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Eat this, exercise now; new personalized software predicts and helps prevents blood sugar spikes

Not everyone has Type 2 diabetes, the disease that causes chronically high blood sugar levels, but many do. Around 9% of Americans are afflicted, and another 30% are at risk of developing it.

Enter software by January AI, a four-year-old, subscription-based startup that in November began providing personalized nutritional and activity-related suggestions to its customers based on a combination of food-related data the company has quietly amassed over three years, and each person’s unique profile, which is gleaned over that individuals’s first four days of using the software.

Why the need for personalization? Because believe it or not, people can react very differently to every single food, from rice to salad dressing.

The tech may sound mundane but it’s eye-opening and potentially live-saving, promises cofounder and CEO Nosheen Hashemi and her cofounder, Michael Snyder, a genetics professor at Stanford who has focused on diabetes and pre-diabetes for years.

Investors like the idea, too. Felicis Ventures just led a $21 million Series A investment in the company, joined by HAND Capital and Salesforce founder Marc Benioff. (Earlier investors include Jerry Yang’s Ame Cloud Ventures, SignalFire, YouTube cofounder Steve Chen, and Sunshine cofounder Marissa Mayer, among others.) Says Felicis founder Aydin Senkut, “While other companies have made headway in understanding biometric sensor data—from heart rate and glucose monitors, for example—January AI has made progress in analyzing and predicting the effects of food consumption itself [which is] key to addressing chronic disease.”

To learn more, we talked this afternoon with Hashemi and Snyder. Below is part of our chat, edited for length and clarity.

TC: What have you built?

NH: We’ve built a multiomic platform where we take data from different sources and predict people’s glycemic response, allowing them to consider their choices before they make them. We pull in data from heart rate monitors and continuous glucose monitors and a 1,000-person clinical study and an atlas of 16 million foods for which, using machine learning, we have derived nutritional values and created nutritional labeling [that didn’t exist previously].

[The idea is to] predict for [customers] what their glycemic response is going to be to any food in our database after just four days of training. They don’t actually have to eat the food to know whether they should eat it or not; our product tells them what their response is going to be.

TC: So glucose monitoring existed previously, but this is predictive. Why is this important?

NH: We want to bring the joy back to eating and remove the guilt. We can predict, for example, how long you’d have to walk after eating any food in our database in order to keep your blood sugar at the right level. Knowing what “is” isn’t enough; we want to tell you what to do about it. If you’re thinking about fried chicken and a shake, we can tell you: you’re going to have to walk 46 minutes afterward to maintain a healthy [blood sugar] range. Would you like to do the uptime for that? No? Then maybe [eat the chicken and shake] on a Saturday.

TC: This is subscription software that works with other wearables and that costs $488 for three months.

NH: That’s retail price, but we have an introductory offer of $288.

TC: Are you at all concerned that people will use the product, get a sense of what they could be doing differently, then end their subscription?

NH: No. Pregnancy changes [one’s profile], age changes it. People travel and they aren’t always eating the same things. . .

MS: I’ve been wearing [continuous glucose monitoring] wearables for seven years and I still learn stuff. You suddenly realize that every time you eat white rice, you spike through the roof, for example. That’s true for many people. But we are also offering a year-long subscription soon because we do know that people slip sometimes [only to be reminded] later that these boosters are very valuable.

TC: How does it work practically? Say I’m at a restaurant and I’m in the mood for pizza but I don’t know which one to order.

NH: You can compare curve over curve to see which is healthier. You can see how much you’ll have to walk [depending on the toppings].

TC: Do I need to speak all of these toppings into my smart phone?

NH: January scans barcodes, it also understands photos. It also has manual entry, and it takes voice [commands].

TC: Are you doing anything else with this massive food database that you’ve aggregated and that you’re enriching with your own data? 

NH: We will definitely not sell personal information.

TC: Not even aggregated data? Because it does sound like a useful database . . .

MS: We’re not 23andMe; that’s really not the goal.

TC: You mentioned that rice can cause someone’s blood sugar to soar, which is surprising. What are some of the things that might surprise people about what your software can show them? 

NH: The way people’s glycemic response is so different, not just between by Connie and Mike, but also for Connie and Connie. If you eat nine days in a row, your glycemic response could be different each of those nine days because of how much you slept or how much thinking you did the day before or how much fiber was in your body and whether you ate before bedtime.

Activity before eating and activity after eating is important. Fiber is important. It’s the most under overlooked intervention in the American diet. Our ancestral diets featured 150 grams of fiber a day; the average American diet today includes 15 grams of fiber. A lot of health issues can be traced to a lack of fiber.

TC: It seems like coaching would be helpful in concert with your app. Is there a coaching component?

NH: We don’t offer a coaching component today, but we’re in talks with several coaching solutions as we speak, to be the AI partner to them.

TC: Who else are you partnering with? Healthcare companies? Employers that can offer this as a benefit?

NH: We are selling to direct to consumers, but we’ve already had a pharma customer for two years. Pharma companies are very interested in working with us because we are able to use lifestyle as a biomarker. We essentially give them [anonymized] visibility into someone’s lifestyle for a period of two weeks or however long they want to run the program for so they can gain insights as to whether the therapeutic is working because of the person’s lifestyle or in spite of a person’s lifestyle. Pharma companies are very interested in working with us because they can potentially get answers in a trial phase faster and even reduce the number of subjects they need.

So we’re excited about pharma. We are also very interested in working with employers, with coaching solutions, and ultimately, with payers [like insurance companies].

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Daily Crunch: Spotify announces a high-end subscription

{rss:content:encoded} Daily Crunch: Spotify announces a high-end subscription https://ift.tt/37GHFBU https://ift.tt/2CoAoqu February 23, 2021 at 12:10AM

Spotify makes a bunch of announcements, Netflix introduces an intriguing new feature and Clubhouse faces security concerns. This is your Daily Crunch for February 22, 2021.

The big story: Spotify announces a high-end subscription

Spotify listeners will get the chance to pay for higher-quality audio when the streaming service launches a new tier that it says will offer “CD-quality, lossless audio.” The pricing and launch date have yet to be announced, but Spotify HiFi will, unsurprisingly, cost more than Spotify Premium and be marketed as a Premium add-on.

That was probably the biggest news that Spotify made at today’s “Stream On” event, where it also announced an audience development tool for artists, an audio ad marketplace, continued international expansion, a podcast co-hosted by Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen and a test of paid podcast subscriptions.

The tech giants

Netflix launches ‘Downloads for You,’ a new feature that automatically downloads content you’ll like — After turning on the feature for the first time, you’ll be able to select the amount of storage space you want to dedicate for these recommended downloads.

Twitter explored buying India’s ShareChat and turning Moj into a global TikTok rival — According to sources, Twitter offered to buy the five-year-old Indian startup for $1.1 billion.

Startups, funding and venture capital

EquityBee raises $20M to help startup employees actually afford their stock options — EquityBee CEO Oren Barzilai says his company’s mission is to help educate startup employees on the meaning of their stock options, as well as provide them with funds to be able to purchase those options.

Splice gets $55M for its software bringing beats from bedrooms to bandstands — Splice gained a following for its ability to help electronic dance music creators save, share, collaborate and remix music.

A race to reverse-engineer Clubhouse raises security concerns — The fact that it takes programmers little effort to reverse-engineer and fork Clubhouse is sounding an alarm about the app’s security.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

If Coinbase is worth $100B, what’s a fair valuation for Stripe? — We dig into Coinbase’s 2019 and 2020 financial performance.

Bain’s Matt Harris and Justworks’ Isaac Oates to talk through the Series B deal that brought them together — All the way back in 2016, Bain Capital Ventures caught a whiff of Justworks’ potential for success.

Winning enterprise sales teams know how to persuade the Chief Objection Officer — Many enterprise software startups have at some point faced the invisible wall.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

Watch Perseverance’s harrowing descent to the surface of Mars — NASA has released video taken by the Perseverance landing module and rover showing the famous “seven minutes of terror.”

Calling Oslo VCs: Be featured in The Great TechCrunch Survey of European VC — TechCrunch is embarking on a major project to survey the venture capital investors of Europe, and their cities.

Original Content podcast: Apple’s ‘Ted Lasso’ is all about relentless optimism — This will be our last episode on TechCrunch, as Original Content goes independent!

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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India’s Zomato valued at $5.4 billion in new $250 million investment

Zomato has raised $250 million, two months after closing a $660 million Series J financing round, as the Indian food delivery startup builds a war-chest ahead of its IPO later this year.

Kora (which contributed $115 million), Fidelity ($55 million), Tiger Global ($50 million), Bow Wave ($20 million) and Dragoneer ($10 million) pumped the new capital into the 12-year-old Gurgaon-headquartered startup, Info Edge, a publicly listed investor in Zomato, disclosed in a filing (PDF) to a local stock exchange. The new investment gives Zomato a post-money valuation of $5.4 billion, up from $3.9 billion in December last year, said Info Edge, which owns 18.4% stake in the Indian startup.

The new investment reinforces the strong confidence investors have in Zomato, which struggled to raise money for much of last year. Zomato, which acquired the Indian food delivery business of Uber early last year, competes with Prosus Ventures-backed Swiggy (valued at about $3.6 billion) in India. Together they work with over 440,000 delivery partners, a larger workforce than that employed by Indian Department of Posts.

Indian food delivery giant Zomato secures $660 million

A third player, Amazon, also entered the food delivery market in India last year, though its operations are still limited to parts of Bangalore.

At stake is India’s food delivery market, which analysts at Bernstein expect to balloon to be worth $12 billion by 2022, they wrote in a report to clients. With about 50% of the market share, Zomato is the current leader among the three, Bernstein analysts wrote.

“We find the food-tech industry in India to be well positioned to sustained growth with improving unit economics. Take-rates are one of the highest in India at 20-25% and consumer traction is increasing. Market is largely a duopoly between Zomato and Swiggy with 80%+ share,” wrote analysts at Bank of America in a recent report, reviewed by TechCrunch.

Zomato and Swiggy have improved their finances in recent years, which is especially impressive because making money with food delivery is very often more challenging in India. Unlike Western markets such as the U.S., where the value of each delivery item is about $33, in India, a similar item carries the price tag of $3 to $4, according to research firms.

Both the startups eliminated hundreds of jobs last year as the coronavirus pandemic hit their businesses. Zomato co-founder and chief executive Deepinder Goyal said in December that the food delivery market was “rapidly coming out of COVID-19 shadows.”

A glint of hope for India’s food delivery market as Zomato projects monthly cash burn of less than $1M

“December 2020 is expected to be the highest ever GMV month in our history. We are now clocking ~25% higher GMV than our previous peaks in February 2020. I am supremely excited about what lies ahead and the impact that we will create for our customers, delivery partners and restaurant partners,” he said.

In an email to employees in September last year, Goyal said Zomato was working on its IPO for “sometime in the first half” of 2021 and was raising money to build a war-chest for “future M&A, and fighting off any mischief or price wars from our competition in various areas of our business.”

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Huawei launches its next foldable in China

{rss:content:encoded} Huawei launches its next foldable in China https://ift.tt/3uylHea https://ift.tt/37BXRnM February 22, 2021 at 10:50PM

Huawei’s first foldable feels like a distant memory. Announced in 2019, the company went back to the drawing board prior to release, as Samsung ran into its own much publicized issues with the innovative form factor.

The Mate X was well-received among journalists — I had the opportunity to spend some time with it at the company’s HQ in China and was impressed with the build quality. But for various reasons, it never made its way outside of China. And there’s some reason to believe that the newly announced X2 will suffer a similar fate.

The new handset has already drawn its share of comparisons to Samsung’s early models — and rightfully so, to be honest. The X2’s form factor appears to share much more in common with the Galaxy Fold from a design standpoint than its own predecessor. And while Samsung’s model got off to a rocky start or two, the company was also the first to get things fairly right after a bit of public trial and error.

And like Samsung, Huawei is leading with improvements to the hinge mechanism as a big selling point here. It’s the sort of meat and potatoes thing that would be glossed over in most other devices, but the hinge has proven one of the major pain points for these devices — and as much as a company might test behind the scenes, there’s no replacing real-world usage.

Huawei set to debut a new, improved Mate X

The primary, foldable display is eight inches, with a 6.45-inch screen on the outside — a bit more than the Galaxy Fold 2, in both cases (at 7.6 and 6.2 inches, respectively). In the rendering, the front screen occupies most of the device, with a bit of a bezel and a camera cut out. There’s 5G on board, too, paired with Huawei’s proprietary Kirin 9000 chip and a 4,400mAh battery.

The system is, of course, missing a pretty significant feature, courtesy of all of those blacklists. The company is pushing the presence of the Android 10-based EMUI 11.0 (Based on Android 10). Likely the device will also feature Huawei’s own HarmonyOS, in lieu of Android. The company’s been building out its operating system in recent years with the understanding that it would likely become a flashpoint in U.S./China tensions.

We have yet to see a full version of the software, but it’s hard to imagine it being as complete or robust as Google’s 12-year-old mobile OS — not to mention Google’s various apps.

The Mate X2 arrives in China on February 25, starting at around $2,800.

Huawei files suit over security threat designation

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Chief community officer is the new CMO

Community isn’t a single Slack group or event or newsletter. It’s an aggregation of all of these touch points, and includes both customers, eventual customers and one-time users. Despite this nebulous, disconnected reality, companies are paying more attention to various channels as remote work and digital communication powers our days. My recent tweet underscored the chord community strikes even in sectors such as edtech, which often have to sell to fragmented customer bases.

who is building the best community in edtech right now?

— natasha (@nmasc_) February 16, 2021

A conversation that I’ve been having over the last week is that startups are finally investing in community in a meaningful way, dedicating actual budgets to community instead of simply stealing a few dollars away from the sales and marketing team.

As one founder told me, “chief community officer is the new CMO.” That piqued my interest, especially because I had just talked to Commsor founder Mac Reddin about his recent funding, a $16 million Series A led by Felicis and Seven Seven Six Ventures.

As the “aha” moment of community continues, Commsor is a solution to help community managers prove that they’re not wasting the budget, and outcomes. Commsor, he says, is the operating system for communities, helping companies distill how their different communities look, and feel, which could eventually trickle down into generating sales leads and revenue. Commsor could pull an insight like, “here are three engineers that are using your platform from Google, maybe it’s time to approach Google and ask if they want an enterprise contract.” Finding those sweet spots, and bottoms-up community adopters, is Commsor’s bread and butter.

Commsor, which is still in private beta, says that over the last year there has been a “huge increase” in startups that have a community budget or increase in community budget. To be a startup aiming to disrupt a category that still has a tone of gray in it comes with its own challenges.

5 creator economy VCs see startup opportunities in monetization, discovery and much more

Commsor launched C School to help aspiring community managers learn the trade, as well as a fund to back companies in the space. It also posted a memo with signatures from companies like Hopin, Lattice and Notion to show the commitment to defining the community space.

“We are kind of what Customer Success was 10 years ago, or what Revenue Operations was 300 years ago,” Reddin said. “People care about it and there are roles, but there’s still a lot of defining and growth to be done.”

Market map of community tools. Image Credits: Commsor

In the rest of this newsletter, we’ll get into early-stage startup competition, the pipeline problem and Bitcoin breaking barriers. As always, you can find me on Twitter @nmasc_ or e-mail me natasha.m@techcrunch.com. Want Startups Weekly in your inbox every Saturday. Sign up here.

Will your investor put money into a competitor?

When an investor backs a startup, they ideally think that the company will be the winner in said category, whether it’s CBD gummies, financial plumbing or peer-to-peer car-sharing. So, if they place a bet in a competing startup the investment could serve as both a negative signal and a reputation hit.

Here’s what to know, via Alex Wilhelm: As software markets mature, maybe the investing playing field is opening up to investing in competitors? Call it conveniently complementary investments.

Etc: In this week’s Equity episode, we talked about the complexity of competition within startups, and how one firm’s investments seem to all perfectly and conveniently fit into each other. I’ll make you listen to the episode to figure out who, but here’s a hint: Is there a world where Dispo creators track monetization from Clubhouse through Stir?

Image Credits: TechCrunch

An Olive startup competes with Amazon

Ambitious early-stage founders often have to answer a common question from investors and journalists: What if Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix or Google built your startup? The idea behind the question is figuring out why a founder is specifically and uniquely qualified to solve a problem, even if a behemoth business throws millions of dollars and a team of engineers at it.

Here’s what to know via Jet co-founder Nate Faust: He sold his business to Walmart for $3 billion in 2016, and now he’s back to compete with Amazon with a sustainable e-commerce play. Olive consolidates a shopper’s purchases into a single weekly delivery in a reusable package.

Faust acknowledged that Olive runs counter to the “arms race” between Amazon and other e-commerce services working to deliver purchases as quickly as possible. But he said that the startup’s consumer surveys found that shoppers were willing to wait a little longer in order to get the other benefits.

Etc: If you were wondering when it makes sense to compete with Zoom, these four edtech startups and Google might have some information for you.

Image via Getty Images / alashi

Bust the myth of the pipeline problem

The lack of diversity in Silicon Valley, from the check-writers to the employees, has often been chalked up to the pipeline problem: the idea that there isn’t enough diverse, qualified talent to fill roles. But recent research underscores how aged, and flawed, this mindset might be. Reporter Megan Rose Dickey interviewed Dr. Joy Lisi Rankin, a research lead for gender, race and power in artificial intelligence at the AI Now Institute.

Here’s what to know, according to Rankin:

The pipeline is a way to silo all of that out and say, ‘we just need to get more Black women in tech,’ as opposed to saying, ‘actually, these companies are and have been racist and white supremacist and misogynist, and it’s those institutions and larger societal and global capitalist structures that need to change.

Rankin adds that transparency around hiring and corporate recruiting could help combat biases and signal important information to talent.

Examining the ‘pipeline problem’

Etc: At TC Sessions: Justice next month, we’ll be talking about how research like this, as well as structures within venture capital, impacts early-stage founders. Speakers include Arlan Hamilton, the founder of Backstage Capital; Brian Brackeen of Lightship Capital; and others. Get your tickets here for $5.

Around TechCrunch

TC Sessions: Justice 2021 kicks off in two weeks

Announcing the TC Early Stage Pitch-Off

TC Sessions: Justice 2021 kicks off in two weeks

Across the week

Seen on TC

Bitcoin breaks the $50,000 barrier as Coinbase’s direct listing looms

Clubhouse has topped 8 million global downloads, per report

YC-backed Queenly launched a marketplace for formalwear

Uber extends work from home policy through mid-September

Why two startups are betting on debt instead of equity

Why two startups are betting on debt instead of equity

Seen on EC

Pandemic-era growth and SPACS are helping edtech startups graduate early

Investors’ SPAC push could revamp the private market money game

Dear Sophie: Tips for filing for a green card for my soon-to-be spouse

Why do SaaS companies with usage-based pricing grow faster

Paying $115B for Stripe or $77B for Coinbase might be quite rational

And for dessert, read this piece on how 10 investors predict MaaS, on-demand delivery and EVs will dominate mobility’s post-pandemic future.

10 investors predict MaaS, on-demand delivery and EVs will dominate mobility’s post-pandemic future

See y’all next week,

Natasha

 

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Spotify to test paid podcast subscriptions this spring via new Anchor feature

{rss:content:encoded} Spotify to test paid podcast subscriptions this spring via new Anchor feature https://ift.tt/2ZFmgo5 https://ift.tt/2ZH0dO0 February 22, 2021 at 09:33PM

During its live-streamed event today, Spotify officially confirmed its plans to launch paid podcast subscriptions on its platform. As a first step, the company will this spring begin beta testing a new feature in its Anchor podcast creation tool that will allow U.S. creators to publish paid podcast content aimed at their “most dedicated fans.” It also opened up signups for this and other new features, starting today.

Spotify had hinted at its plans for paid podcast content during its fourth-quarter earnings call earlier this month, when it said it was exploring ideas like paid podcast subscriptions and à la carte payments. But it didn’t detail when these new options would go live or how they would work.

At its online event today, Spotify more formally announced its plans to enter the market of paid podcasts, initially with a new service that would allow Anchor creators the ability to offer paid podcast subscriptions supported by their listeners.

This sort of idea is not new, to be clear. Already, some podcasters offer paid access to bonus material — for example, through a service like Stitcher Premium, which promises both an ad-free experience and bonus episodes. Some creators may even independently offer paid feeds through their own platforms.

But until now, a similar option was not available to Spotify creators.

Anchor co-founder Michael Mignano said the company believes paid bonus material can work well as a means of podcast monetization, in addition to ads.

Image Credits: Spotify

“We have found that, through our research, it seems to work especially well for creators who have really engaged and dedicated audiences — regardless of the audience size,” he told TechCrunch in an interview following Spotify’s event. “We’ve also found that podcast listeners do tend to be open to financially supporting the shows they love,” he added.

The company was hesitant to detail some of the specifics of how paid subscriptions would work at launch, but did say that the model would involve a revenue share between creators and Anchor, where creators keep the majority of the earnings. Anchor will also allow creators to determine what price to charge their listeners for the paid experience and what that experience would include — like bonus episodes or interviews, or even ad-free content, if they prefer.

It will then use its understanding of what creators actually do with paid subscriptions to inform its product product launch and its “best practices” recommendations in the future.

We also understand the offering will be limited to those who use Anchor to record and publish across podcast platforms. However, it will more immediately benefit creators with a strong Spotify presence and a loyal listenership.

But Mignano points out that creators may be able to grow their paid subscriber base thanks to Spotify’s tools for podcast discovery.

“The problem is the system for doing this type of paid subscription so far in podcasts has been really disjointed,” he explained. “It hasn’t been a really seamless experience for the listener, and it hasn’t really been a great experience for the creator. We feel like that’s really held this model back and hindered creators’ reach and ability to gain paid subscribers,” he said.

Image Credits: Spotify/Anchor

In other words, users may be open to the idea of paid bonus material, but they don’t necessarily want to switch between apps to gain access, nor do they want to figure out how to get paid RSS feeds into some third-party podcast listening app.

Spotify, meanwhile, will try to make discovery easier. It will highlight the paid content alongside the free material on the podcast’s main page, for example. Plus, in the same way that Spotify today helps users discover new podcasts they may like to try, it will also point to paid subscription-based podcasts in the future as the new model rolls out further.

Anchor says it will initially open up the beta test in the U.S. to a small number of creators, but aims to expand access to more creators as soon as reasonably possible. The test, for the time being, will only focus on paid subscriptions, but Mignano told us the company may explore the à la carte model in the future.

Paid podcasts were only one of several new features Anchor announced today at the Spotify event.

The company also announced the launch of a WordPress partnership that makes it easier for bloggers to turn their posts into posts, either by reading the blog posts themselves or leveraging third-party text-to-speech technology Anchor provides.

Anchor will also expand beta testing of video podcasts, which so far have been tested by only a handful of creators, including Higher Learning from The Ringer.

And it will begin beta testing new, interactive features, like polls and Q&A, with a small number of creators in the months ahead.

These features could potentially overlap with paid subscriptions. For example, some podcast creators may choose to make their videos a paid feature, or perhaps other interactive features. It remains to be seen how they’re put to use.

But more broadly, features like polls and Q&As could help Spotify better differentiate an interactive podcast from a live audio program, like those popularized by the buzzy new app Clubhouse. The advantage of the latter is that it allows for audience participation in the “show,” rather than being a one-way street where hosts control the experience. But on the flip side, Clubhouse rooms can also have folks who drone on and on, or they can become boring, when not carefully managed.

Anchor says it doesn’t intend to charge creators for access to its tools, beyond taking a rev share on subscriptions.

“I think our vision with Anchor and Spotify has always been to really empower creators. In the Anchor suite of tools, we’ve never charged creators for any features because we believe that charging creators can often represent friction that stands in the way of them trying to actually make something and getting it out into the world,” Mignano said. “We want to enable creators to do whatever they want, as far as expressing themselves through these new tools,” he added.

 

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EquityBee raises $20M to help startup employees actually afford their stock options

EquityBee, a stock option marketplace startup, has raised $20 million in a Series A round of funding.

Group 11 led the financing, which also included participation from Oren Zeev Ventures, Battery Ventures and ICON Continuity Fund. It brings the company’s total raised to over $28 million since its 2018 inception.

EquityBee CEO and co-founder Oren Barzilai says his company’s mission is to help educate startup employees on the meaning of their stock options, as well as provide them with funds to be able to purchase them.

“I have seen many of my friends and colleagues negotiate a $500 salary increase, but completely disregard their stock options package, from lack of knowledge due to the whole field of startup stock options being opaque,” said Barzilai, who also founded Tapingo, which was acquired by Grubhub in 2018 for $150 million. “As a founder I saw my team members who helped build the company not take part in our success because they left prematurely and didn’t exercise their stock options.”

The way it works is fairly straightforward. EquityBee provides capital to startup employees so they can purchase stock options. The employees get money to cover the cost of exercising their stock options and the taxes. The investors who helped provide the funding so they could do that get a return, or a share of the profit, if there’s “a liquidity event.” EquityBee makes money by charging an upfront fee from the investor on the investment day, as well as any carried interest upon a successful exit or IPO.

Barzilai said that many employees don’t realize they have about 90 days to exercise options before they expire once they leave a company. And even if they do, they may not always have the money to exercise them. That’s where EquityBee wants to help.

The company was originally founded in Israel before launching in the U.S. market, and moved its headquarters to Silicon Valley in February 2020. Since then, it’s funded employees from “hundreds” of companies, including Airbnb, Palantir, DoorDash and Unity, with capital provided by family offices, funds and high-net individuals. Its investor community is made up of 8,000 funds, family offices and high-net worth individuals.

2020 was a good year for EquityBee, according to Barzilai, who says it grew by more than 560% the amount of money it raised to fund employee stock options. It also saw a 360% increase in the number of individual employees funded through its platform.

Looking ahead, the 33-person company plans to use the money toward hiring and expanding product offerings.

Dovi Frances, founding partner of Group 11, said it doubled down on EquityBee after backing the company in its $6.6 million funding round in February 2020 because it’s impressed by what it described as the company’s “perfect product market fit” and triple-digit growth.

WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann led the company’s $1.5 million seed round in September of 2018.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J EquityBee raises $20M to help startup employees actually afford their stock options https://ift.tt/3ul1atf

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Splice gets $55 million for its software bringing beats from bedrooms to bandstands

Splice, the New York-based, AI-infused, beat-making software service for music producers created by the founder of GroupMe, has managed to sample another $55 million in financing from investors for its wildly popular service.

The GitHub for music producers ranging from Hook N Sling, Mr Hudson SLY, and Steve Solomon to TechCrunch’s own Megan Rose Dickey, Splice gained a following for its ability to help electronic dance music creators save, share, collaborate and remix music.

The company’s popularity has made it from bedroom DJs to the Goldman Sachs boardroom as the financial services giant joined MUSIC, a joint venture between the music executive Matt Pincus and boutique financial services firm Liontree  in leading the company’s latest $55 million round.  The company’s previous investors include USV, True Ventures, DFJ Growth and Flybridge.

“The music creation process is going through a digital transformation. Artists are flocking to solutions that offer a user-friendly, collaborative, and affordable platform for music creation,” said Stephen Kerns, a VP with Goldman Sachs’ GS Growth, in a statement. “With 4 million users, Splice is at the forefront of this transformation and is beloved by the creator community. We’re thrilled to be partnering with Steve Martocci and his team at Splice.”

Splice’s financing follows an incredibly acquisitive 2020 for the company, which saw it acquiring music technology companies Audiaire and Superpowered.

In addition to the financing, Splice also nabbed Kakul Srivastava, the vice president of Adobe Creative Cloud Experience and Engagement as a director for its board.

The funding news comes on the heels of Splice’s recent acquisitions of music-tech companies Audiaire and Superpowered, creating more ways to improve and inspire the audio and music-making process. Splice is also pleased to announce that Kakul Srivastava has joined the company’s board.

Steve Martocci at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2016. Image Credits: Getty Images

Splice’s beefed up balance sheet comes as new entrants have started vying for a slice of Splice’s music-making market. These are companies like hardware maker Native Instruments, which launched the Sounds.com marketplace last year, and there’s also Arcade by Output that’s pitching a similar service. 

Meanwhile, Splice continues to invest in new technology to make producers’ lives easier. In November 2019 it unveiled its artificial intelligence product that lets producers match samples from different genres using machine learning techniques to find the matches.

Splice teaches AI to sell Similar Sounds as users double

“My job is to keep as many people inspired to create as possible,” Splice founder and chief executive Steve Martocci told TechCrunch.

It’s another win for the serial entrepreneur who famously sold his TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon chat app GroupMe to Skype for $85 million just a year after launching.

https://ift.tt/2KXjq7d Splice gets $55 million for its software bringing beats from bedrooms to bandstands https://ift.tt/3boD6x2

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Why I felt fine about not disclosing my pregnancy to investors

Kathy Hannun Contributor

Kathy Hannun is president and co-founder of Dandelion Energy. Prior to Dandelion, Kathy worked at X, Google Alphabet’s innovation lab. In May 2017, Kathy launched Dandelion as an independent startup. She graduated from Stanford with a B.S. in Civil Engineering and M.S. in Computer Science.

I closed two major rounds of funding for my geothermal energy startup, Dandelion Energy, while pregnant. I did not disclose either pregnancy to my investors during the fundraising process either time. I felt fine doing this, and I believe other founders should feel free to keep their pregnancies private as well if they’d prefer to.

No one would think twice about a male founder who declined to share the details of his health or family status with investors during an initial fundraising meeting. On the contrary, it would be an unusual move for him to do so.

For some context, my co-founder and I spun our startup, Dandelion Energy, out of Alphabet’s X in April 2017 and raised our first small round of outside funding that summer. Our goal was to set up a commercial pilot and start selling and installing heat pumps to demonstrate that our product worked and show that there was demand for affordable geothermal before we raised a larger round. We had to prove that our business was viable.

No one would think twice about a male founder who declined to share the details of his health or family status with investors during an initial fundraising meeting.

That same summer, in 2017, I became pregnant.

Round one

As summer turned to fall, I had to figure out how to approach being pregnant while raising Dandelion’s second round of funding. I was lucky to be able to choose whether to tell people I was pregnant because it turned out I didn’t end up looking visibly pregnant until about seven months in, and even then I could dress to make it nonobvious. Without knowing anyone who’d gone through a similar experience, I had to decide how I would handle my status as a pregnant person when speaking with investors.

At first, it worried me that I would be hiding something if I didn’t disclose my pregnancy. But I really didn’t want to. I was a first-time entrepreneur with no real track record. Oh yeah, and I was a woman. And almost all of the investors were men who typically funded men.

Especially early on in a startup’s life, these investors are judging the founder as much as the business. Making an impression is key, and “pregnant” didn’t strike me as accretive in any way to my ability to deliver the type of impression that would lead to investment in my business (I hope this changes over time, but I am being honest about how things seemed to me).

And then there was this: Even if I had decided to tell investors I was expecting, how could I broach the topic in a way that wouldn’t threaten to derail the entire tenor of the meeting? I was meeting most of these people for the first time and had a limited amount of time to spend explaining payback periods and vapor compression refrigeration cycles. It seemed like the best-case scenario was if disclosing pregnancy made the meeting no worse than it would otherwise have been. In no world could I imagine it would be a net positive.

Given all of this, I made the decision to not talk about it. It worked out for me. As soon as I started showing, around seven months in, everyone left their offices for the holidays, and so I was never forced to address what was becoming visibly obvious.

But of course there was a downside to my approach. I would have to tell them eventually, and I’d pushed it off so long that by the time I finally got around to it we basically had to have a conversation like this:

Me: “Some happy news to share: I’m pregnant!”

Investors: “Congratulations! We are so thrilled for you! When’s the due date?”

Me: “Ahhh … Next month.”

Happily, all of them were extremely supportive and gracious when I told them. Their uncomplicated and positive acceptance of the news even made me wonder if all my internal wrangling about whether to tell investors had been unnecessary. I gave birth to my daughter literally one day after the money was wired.

Round two

Time passed and it became clear we were ready to raise our next round of funding. Also, I become pregnant again. This time, most of the fundraising happened in the early stages of my pregnancy. Early enough that I hadn’t even really told my friends, so it was obvious to me I wouldn’t be telling investors I was just meeting. After having gone through it once before, it was an easier decision the second time around.

Looking back

Reflecting on my experience, I do think it helped that I got to know my investors throughout the fundraising process, so by the time I told them I was pregnant, they already knew me and I had already established my credibility as an entrepreneur. Being pregnant was just something going on in my life; it didn’t define who I was to them. That is one advantage of introducing it later: It did not define me because they knew so much else about me by that point.

In many ways, I am a stereotypical founder: I have a CS degree from Stanford, I worked as a PM at Google, I have an engineering background. I have many advantages. Yet, more present in my mind during fundraising were the parts of my identity that seemed atypical, and the primary aspect here was my being a woman.

Because there is so much conversation about how women receive so much less investment, I was worried that being a woman would be a disadvantage, and there’s nothing like being pregnant to highlight in the strongest possible way that you’re a woman.

I now feel lucky to know other founders who have raised money while visibly pregnant, and so I’ve seen firsthand that it’s possible. But it is not something that a pregnant founder should feel obligated to disclose. I hope that it becomes common for women to start businesses and raise capital for those businesses in every stage of their lives, including when they’re pregnant.

Because as soon as the pregnant woman and the guy with the hoodie both seem equally probable as startup founders, it will suddenly matter much less whether to talk about your pregnancy.

Startup fundraising is the most tangible gender gap. How can we overcome it?

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Why I felt fine about not disclosing my pregnancy to investors https://ift.tt/3aGMOeU

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Snack, where TikTok meets dating, gets $3.5 million in funding

After online dating’s tremendous 2020 growth that culminated in last week’s epic Bumble IPO, a new entrant has tossed its hat into the dating app ring.

Snack, founded by Kimberly Kaplan, looks to merge the popularity and format of TikTok with the dating world. Kaplan hails from Plenty of Fish, where she was one of the earliest employees at the dating site. She led product, marketing and revenue and was on the executive team that eventually sold PoF to Match Group for $575 million in 2015.

Kaplan said that she noticed a specific user behavior among folks using dating apps, particularly the coveted Gen Z demographic. Essentially, folks would match on Bumble or Tinder and immediately move the connection over to apps like Snap and Instagram, where they would watch each others’ stories and more casually flirt, rather than carrying on in a more high-pressure DM conversation on the dating apps.

Around the same time, TikTok surged in popularity, showing a shift in the average consumer’s attitude toward creating short-form video on the web.

Snack is a video-first dating app that asks users to create a video and post it to a feed. Other users can scroll through a feed (à la Instagram) rather than swipe right or left on individual profiles, and when someone likes a video, it opens up the ability to comment. Once two users have liked each others’ videos, DMs are open.

The app is still in its early days, so there is no location filtering yet to ensure that everyone who joins the app has a full feed of videos to browse through. Kaplan said that Snack is also working on video editing features similar to that of TikTok to let people get super creative with their profiles.

Thus far, Snack has received $3.5 million in funding, led by Kindred Ventures and Coelius Capital, with participation by Golden Ventures, Garage Capital, Panache Ventures and N49P.

Though we’re still a ways away from monetization, Kaplan says her experience in the dating space should be beneficial when looking to generate revenue at Snack, and that the startup will likely follow the same playbook as other dating apps, employing premium subscriptions and potentially ads.

There are 10 people on the Snack team, and Kaplan says that the team is 60% diverse with 40% of employees being visible minorities.

“The biggest challenge is going up against big players that have a lot of capital,” said Kaplan. “Starting out is hard and getting that initial foothold is hard. I fundamentally believe in our product and I see this open opportunity in the market. I very much believe someone will come in and usurp Tinder, and it’s going to be around video.”

Bumble prices IPO at $43 per share

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Snack, where TikTok meets dating, gets $3.5 million in funding https://ift.tt/37CCToM

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Nanit raises another $25M for its AI-powered baby monitor

Nanit’s nursery camera pairs computer vision with specially patterned clothing to help answer the question that most new parents ask themselves roughly every 90 seconds: “Is my baby still breathing?”

This morning the company is announcing that it has raised an additional $25 million in a Series C round led by GV.

As part of the deal, GV’s Frederique Dame will join Nanit’s board of directors.

The company raises this Series C on the momentum of a strong year. While declining to share exactly how many cameras the company had sold to date, Nanit CEO Sarah Dorsett tells me that camera sales were up 130% in 2020 versus 2019.

Earlier this month Nanit debuted the Nanit Pro, an upgraded model ($299 versus $249 for the Nanit Plus) that increases the camera’s resolution while improving things like the built-in night light and overall usability. It also launched a line of “smart sheets,” complete with a custom black-and-white pattern the camera reads to help measure and record your baby’s height between doctor visits.

Dorsett tells me the company plans to expand its lineup into a broader ecosystem of nursery items, mentioning things like changing pads and nightlights as things “that exist today, but that [Nanit] could really amplify because of the app experience.”

This Series C brings Nanit’s total raised to $75 million. While round-leader GV is a new investor here, it was backed by existing investors Jerusalem Venture Partners, RRE Ventures, Upfront Ventures and Rho Capital Partners.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Nanit raises another $25M for its AI-powered baby monitor https://ift.tt/3pFEHnb

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