Weav raises $4.3M to knit together a universal API for commerce platforms

Weav, which is building a universal API for commerce platforms, is emerging from stealth today with $4.3 million in funding from a bevy of investors, and a partnership with Brex.

Founded last year by engineers Ambika Acharya, Avikam Agur and Nadav Lidor after participating in the W20 YC batch, Weav joins the wave of fintech infrastructure companies that aim to give fintechs and financial institutions a boost. Specifically, Weav’s embedded technology is designed to give these organizations access to “real time, user-permissioned” commerce data that they can use to create new financial products for small businesses.  

Its products allow its customers to connect to multiple platforms with a single API that was developed specifically for the commerce platforms that businesses use to sell products and accept payments. Weav operates under the premise that allowing companies to build and embed new financial products creates new opportunities for e-commerce merchants, creators and other entrepreneurs. 

Left to right: Co-founders Ambika Acharya, Nadav Lidor and Avikam Agur; Image courtesy of Weav

In a short amount of time, Weav has seen impressive traction. Recently, Brex launched Instant Payouts for Shopify sellers using the Weav API. It supports platform integrations such as Stripe, Square, Shopify and PayPal. (More on that later.) Since its API went live in January, “thousands” of businesses have used new products and services built on Weav’s infrastructure, according to Lidor. Its API call volume is growing 300% month over month, he said.

And, the startup has attracted the attention of a number of big-name investors, including institutions and the founders of prominent fintech companies. Foundation Capital led its $4.3 million seed round, which also included participation from Y Combinator, Abstract Ventures, Box Group, LocalGlobe, Operator Partners, Commerce Ventures and SV Angel. 

A slew of founders and executives also put money in the round, including Brex founders Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi; Ramp founder Karim Atiyeh; Digits founders Jeff Seibert and Wayne Chang; Hatch founder Thomson Nguyen; GoCardless founder Matt Robinson and COO Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas; Vouch founder Sam Hodges; Plaid’s Charley Ma as well as executives from fintechs such as Square, Modern Treasury and Pagaya.

Foundation Capital’s Angus Davis said his firm has been investing in fintech infrastructure for over a decade. And personally, before he became a VC, Davis was the founder and CEO of Upserve, a commerce software company. There, he says, he witnessed firsthand “the value of transactional data to enable new types of lending products.”

Foundation has a thesis around the type of embedded fintech that Weav has developed, according to Davis. And it sees a large market opportunity for a new class of financial applications to come to market built atop Weav’s platform.

“We were excited by Weav’s vision of a universal API for commerce platforms,” Davis wrote via email. “Much like Plaid and Envestnet brought universal APIs to banking for consumers, Weav enables a new class of B2B fintech applications for businesses.”

How it works

Weav says that by using its API, companies can prompt their business customers to “securely” connect their accounts with selling platforms, online marketplaces, subscription management systems and payment gateways. Once authenticated, Weav aggregates and standardizes sales, inventory and other account data across platforms and develops insights to power new products across a range of use cases, including lending and underwriting; financial planning and analysis; real-time financial services and business management tools.

For the last few years, there’s been a rise of API companies, as well as openness in the financial system that’s largely been focused on consumers, Lidor points out.

“For example, Plaid brings up very rich data about consumers, but when you think about businesses, oftentimes that data is still locked up in all kinds of systems,” he told TechCrunch. “We’re here to provide some of the building blocks and the access to data from everything that has to do with sales and revenue. And, we’re really excited about powering products that are meant to make the lives of small businesses and e-commerce, sellers and creators much easier and be able to get them access to financial products.”

In the case of Brex, Weav’s API allows the startup to essentially offer instant access to funds that otherwise would take a few days or a few weeks for businesses to access.

“Small businesses need access as quickly as possible to their revenue so that they can fund their operations,” Lidor said.

Brex co-CEO Henrique Dubugras said that Weav’s API gives the company the ability to offer real-time funding to more customers selling on more platforms, which saved the company “thousands of engineering hours” and accelerated its rollout timeline by months.

Clearly, the company liked what it saw, considering that its founders personally invested in Weav. Is Weav building the “Plaid for commerce”? Guess only time will tell.

Investors, founders report hot market for API startups

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To be frank, I do not know how to value Honest Company

The Honest Company, a heavily venture-backed consumer goods company, announced an IPO price range this morning, telling investors that it expects to sell shares in its debut at $14 to $17 apiece. The former startup is selling 6,451,613 shares in its debut, while existing shareholders are letting 19,355,387 shares go.

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Honest’s IPO is not very large. The company’s own offered shares are worth $109.7 million at the top end of its range. Furthermore, because the company’s final private raise was worth $200 million back in 2018, it’s a comparatively modest sum.

Today, we’re digging into the Honest Company’s IPO pricing: We’ll calculate its IPO valuation range across a few different share counts, bring to bear its final private valuations and compare the entire dataset to its preliminary Q1 2021 numbers.

We care because IVP and Fidelity, Lightspeed and General Catalyst, ICONIQ and M13, Dragonner and others put capital into the Jessica Alba-founded company worth just over $500 million while private, according to Crunchbase. That’s an enormous bet.

Per its filings, Alba remains the company’s chief creative officer and chairs its board.

We owe it to our general understanding of the venture market to better understand what Honest is worth and why. Is this a company going public while markets are hot so it can try to limp across the finish line? Or is Honest something honestly more exciting? Let’s find out.

Honest Company’s IPO worth

Using a simple share count of 90,518,137 outstanding after its IPO, Honest is worth $1.27 billion to $1.54 billion at $14 to $17 per share. On a fully diluted basis, Renaissance Capital calculates that the former startup is worth $1.6 billion at its midpoint value, a figure that we estimate rises to around $1.75 billion at the top end of its anticipated price range.

Are those strong numbers? There are two ways to measure: against the company’s final private price, or we can use its recent financial performance as a yardstick.

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Insurgent UK broadband startup Cuckoo Internet raises $6M round led by RTP Global, with JamJar Investments

Cuckoo Internet, which is aiming to be an insurgent startup in the broadband provider space in the U.K., has closed a $6 million investment round led by RTP Global, along with participation from JamJar Investments. It will also launch on price-comparison site uSwitch.

RTP Global was an early backer of Yandex, Delivery Hero and Datadog. JamJar has backed Bulb, Deliveroo, Tails and Oatly. Other individual investors in the round included former executives of Monzo and Stripe,

Cuckoo’s pitch is that it has a simple broadband offering, suppling a single 67 Mb/s fibre deal on a monthly rolling contract with “no hidden fees,” it says.

In a statement, Alexander Fitzgerald, founder and CEO at Cuckoo, said: “The broadband market is broken and consumers are being ripped off every day. The importance of fast, reliable and affordable broadband has come into sharper focus with millions of people working from home over the past year. We’re excited that this funding will enable us to help tens of thousands of people across the country make their broadband simple, for good.”

Gareth Jefferies, partner at RTP Global, said: “Consumer broadband is one of the largest markets yet one of the most poorly served. Consumers are fatiguing of customer-hostile pricing practices, inflexible contracts and deliberately awful customer service, and just as we have seen in insurance, energy and banking, we will see a number of challenger providers come in to eat incumbents’ lunch with differentiated product packagings and a fresh respect for their customers.”

Cuckoo Internet closes seed funding to disrupt UK broadband market

Who’s funding privacy tech?

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AI startup Faculty wins contract to predict future requirements for the UK’s NHS

Faculty, a VC-backed artificial intelligence startup, has won a tender to work with the NHS to make better predictions about its future requirements for patients, based on data drawn from how it handled the COVID-19 pandemic.

In December 2019, Faculty raised a $10.5 million Series A funding round from U.K.-based VCs Local Globe, GMG Ventures, and Jaan Tallinn, one of Skype’s founding engineers, giving it a valuation of around $100 million.

Faculty will work with NHS England and NHS Improvement to build upon the Early Warning System (EWS) it developed for the service during the pandemic. Based on Bayesian hierarchical modeling, Faculty says the EWS uses aggregate data (for example, COVID-19 positive case numbers, 111 calls and mobility data) to warn hospitals about potential spikes in cases so they can divert staff, beds and equipment needed. This learning will now be applied across the whole of the service, for issues other than the pure pandemic response, such as improving service delivery and patient care and predicting A&E demand and winter pressures.

Faculty also worked with NHSX as a partner for the NHS AI Lab, which developed the National COVID-19 Chest Imaging Database (NCCID).

Faculty has also reportedly worked with the U.K. Home Office to apply AI to its database of terrorists, as well as the BBC and easyJet.

I asked Richard Sargeant, COO of Faculty, if he thought Faculty was the “Palantir for the U.K.” (Palantir has also worked with the NHS during the pandemic.) “We are, I believe, a really effective and scalable AI company, not just for the U.K. but we’re working in the U.S. and in Europe, Asia. I think we will continue to scale. We’re growing, and we’re going to grow because I believe that AI can make things better for the citizens, for customers. Palantir doesn’t really do AI, they do data engineering in a big way. And we’ve seen them be effective in the NHS. I think Faculty kind of stands on its own.”

He said that Faculty has a different role to Palantir. “Palantir has helped with the data pipelines, and they’re using their software to pull a lot of data together, but really they’re not a machine learning organization, their specialism is in gathering data together. Data across the NHS is rather an archipelago. It’s in hundreds of different places, and being able to gather together makes it much easier to do machine learning, both centrally and at a local level. One of the things that sets the early warning system apart is not just the use of machine learning, but the use of explainability to give clinicians and managers, some understanding of why the models are forecasting the results that they are, which is relatively cutting edge stuff, and that’s the stuff that Faculty specializes in that Palantir doesn’t.”

I asked him why Faculty had attracted VC when, typically, VCs invest in startups that have scalable products. “It’s a good question and it’s something that we often get asked. I see Faculty as a little bit different from your classic software as a service business, and from a consultancy. AI isn’t a ‘once and done’ product, and neither is it something that people create from scratch every time. But there are core components of what we do, that we can use again and again, but also the models themselves are always bespoke… it’s a combination of the bespoke, and the common, or generic together, that makeup Faculty, and that’s a bit different.”

Faculty is not a stranger to controversy over its government contracts. Last year it was revealed that a a U.K. cabinet minister owned £90,000 of shares in Faculty when it was awarded a £2.3 million contract from NHSX to help run the NHS COVID-19 Data Store.

8 VCs agree: Behavioral support and remote visits make digital health a strong bet for 2021

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Equity Monday: Social media crackdowns, earnings, and a funding deluge

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here.

This weekend had a key story, earnings are on the way, and there is a huge number of funding rounds to talk about. Ready?

• The Indian government’s move to remove a number of social media posts critical of its handling of COVID-19 was the key news item this weekend. As the country’s healthcare system buckles, and deaths spike, the move by the current administration to censor the Internet was just about as bad a look you could imagine. At least in terms of a tech response.
• Also this weekend conversation continued about Substack’s recent push to hire away well-known writers from traditionally-respected publications continued, with Insider reporting that six-figure offers to join the paid newsletter platform are the norm.
• This morning we’re focused on the impending earnings deluge. Major American tech companies, along with some key social media and ecommerce names will report, giving us a look into how tech companies performed in the first quarter of 2021. We already know that the venture market was hot during the period. How business fared, however, is less clear.
• On the funding round beat, Mighty Networks raised $50 million, LEAD School raised $30 million, Kidato raised $1.4 million, StashAway stashed away $25 million, and Kyligence put together a $70 million Series D of its own.

The Honest Company also set an early IPO price range after we stopped recording. More to come on the IPO front. Chat Wednesday!

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

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There is no cybersecurity skills gap, but CISOs must think creatively

Lamont Orange Contributor

Lamont Orange is Netskope’s chief information security officer. He has more than 20 years of experience in the information security industry, having previously served as vice president of enterprise security for Charter Communications (now Spectrum) and as senior manager for the security and technology services practice at Ernst & Young.

Those of us who read a lot of tech and business publications have heard for years about the cybersecurity skills gap. Studies often claim that millions of jobs are going unfilled because there aren’t enough qualified candidates available for hire.

I don’t buy it.

The basic laws of supply and demand mean there will always be people in the workforce willing to move into well-paid security jobs. The problem is not that these folks don’t exist. It’s that CIOs or CISOs typically look right past them if their resumes don’t have a very specific list of qualifications.

In many cases, hiring managers expect applicants to be fully trained on all the technologies their organization currently uses. That not only makes it harder to find qualified candidates, but it also reduces the diversity of experience within security teams — which, ultimately, may weaken the company’s security capabilities and its talent pool.

At Netskope, we take a different approach to staffing for security roles. We know we can teach the cybersecurity skills needed to do the job, so instead, there are two traits we consider more important than specific technical expertise: One is a hunger to learn more about security, which suggests the individual will take the initiative to continuously improve their skills. The other is possession of a skill set that no one else on our security team has.

Overemphasis on technical skills creates an artificial talent shortage

To understand why I believe our approach has helped us build a stronger security team, think about the long-term benefits of hiring someone with a specific security skill set: How valuable will that exact knowledge be in several years? Probably not very.

The problem is not that these folks don’t exist. It’s that CIOs or CISOs typically look right past them if their resumes don’t have a very specific list of qualifications.

Even the most basic security technologies are incredibly dynamic. In most companies, the IT infrastructure is currently in the midst of a massive transition from on-premises to cloud-based systems. Security teams are having to learn new technologies. More than that, they are having to adopt an entirely new mindset, shifting from a focus on protecting specific pieces of hardware to a focus on protecting individuals and applications as their workloads increasingly move outside the corporate network.

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Founded by Australia’s national science agency, Main Sequence launches $250M AUD deep tech fund

Main Sequence’s team (top row from left to right) Viringa Crawter, Bill Bartee, Mike Nicholls, Phil Morle; (bottom row from left to right) Stella Xu, Mike Zimmerman and Jen Baxter

Main Sequence, the venture firm founded by Australia’s national science agency, announced today a new $250 million AUD (about $194.3 million USD) fund to invest in deep-tech startups. This is Main Sequence’s second fund and its oversubscribed raised included returning investors Horizons Ventures, Hostplus, Lockheed Martin, Temasek, private investors from Morgan Stanley Wealth Management and Mutual Trust, and family offices.

Launched in 2017 by government agency CSIRO (the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation), Main Sequence now manages a total of $490 million AUD, including the CSIRO Innovation Fund. The firm works closely with scientists and researchers to commercialize their technology through its “venture science” model.

It starts by identifying challenges, then brings together scientists, a team, industry partners and investors to launch startups. Main Sequence’s second fund will look at issues including healthcare accessibility, increasing the world’s food supply, industrial productivity and space. One major focus will be decarbonization and addressing climate change, and that investment area will be led by Main Sequence partner Martin Duursma.

“Especially in the deep tech space, you don’t always have a company for every problem you’re trying to solve. So in addition to backing great founders who are working in one of our thesis areas, we will create companies to solve the problems and we do that as a partnership instead of on our own,” Main Sequence partner Mike Zimmerman told TechCrunch. Its works with universities, CSIRO’s networks of 3,500 scientists across different sectors and other research agencies to find potential founders.

What do we mean when we talk about deep tech?

“We’ll work with a research organization, get an entrepreneur-in-residence in and work with them. Something that is quite different is we’ll also work with industry partners,” Zimmerman added. “We’ll partner with an industry leader and get them fully committed and on the cap table from day one. The idea is that you can go faster when you have all these parties together and everyone is on the cap table.”

For example, Main Sequence helped launched v2food, a plant-based meat company, in January 2019. By October 2019, v2food had started shipping its products to Burger King in Australia, after spending about $2 million AUD. V2food’s other investors include Horizons Ventures, Temasek, Sequoia Capital China and China Renaissance.

Subterranean drone mapping startup Emesent raises $2.5M to autonomously delve the deep

“Companies are moving very quickly out of Australia and into China and other parts of Asia, all from the venture science model,” said Zimmerman. “Now that we have locked that down as a methodology, we’ve done several venture science deals already and will be a doing a lot more of that.”

Other Main Sequence portfolio companies include telehealth software platform Coviu, subterrenean drone technology developer Emesent, IoT satellite connectivity startup Myriota and quantum computing firmware designer Q-CTRL.

Main Sequence’s close relationship with CSIRO also gives its startups access to the agency’s ecosystem of research and facilities, including ones that can be used to produce new food tech, synthetic biology or laser tuning. Some of the things the new fund will focus on include ingredients and flavorings for plant-based meat, reversing climate change, agricultural tech for more sustainable farming practices, and synthetic biology like enzymes that can be used for the “circular economy,” or breaking down waste products into new materials.

Myriota raises $19.3 million to expand its IoT satellite constellation

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Thoma Bravo buys cybersecurity vendor Proofpoint for $12.3B in cash

Moree M&A activity is underway in the red-hot field of cybersecurity. In the latest development, private equity giant Thoma Bravo is buying Proofpoint, the SaaS security vendor, for $12.3 billion in cash.

Proofpoint is traded publicly on the Nasdaq exchange and as of its closing price on Friday, it had a market cap of $7.5 billion. This bid, which will see the company go private, is a big hike on its latest share price. The deal has been endorsed by Proofpoint’s board. If approved by shareholders, it will close in Q3 of this year.

The news comes at the same time that Proofpoint had released its Q1 earnings, in which it reported revenues of $287.8 million, up 15% versus $249.8 million for the quarter a year ago — and also beating analysts’ expectations, which on average were expecting revenues of $281.6 million, according to Yahoo Finance data.

It also however reported a GAAP net loss of $45.3 million, working out to a loss per share of $0.79. That’s narrowed from a net loss of $66.8 million a year ago, but is still a net loss. Non-GAAP net income for the first quarter of 2021 was $31.5 million, or $0.49 per share, the company said.

The acquisition news is coming in the wake of Proofpoint making a number of acquisitions of its own over the years. Its deals have included Cloudmark, Weblife, OberserveIT, and Meta Networks, all deals valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars. But at the same time, it also facing up against not only a growing pool of cybersecurity competitors, but also cyber threats — exacerbated in no small part by the huge shift the world has seen to cloud services, remote working and more transactions carried out online.

Proofpoint CEO Gary Steele said in a statement the acquisition to go private will allow the company to be “more agile with greater flexibility to continue investing in innovation, building on our leadership position and staying ahead of threat actors.”

The company is probably best known for email-based security tools, which remains a very significant business, especially when you consider how so many breaches start with what appear to be innocent emails but are in reality malicious intent vectors, hiding bad actors, dodgy links and more for malicious hackers to worm their way into bigger networks via unassuming individuals.

But as those who watch the security space know, the threat goes well beyond those kinds of breaches, and so Proofpoint has also increasingly moved into other applications and services managed in the cloud.

Its competitors include the likes of Symantec, Mimecast, Trend Micro and Barracuda. Analysts project that security-as-a-service (the other kind of SaaS) will be worth some $26 billion by 2025, growing at a rate of 19% on average in the years between now and then.

Thoma Bravo has tapped into that trend, as a significant acquirer of security businesses over the years. It will be worth watching how and if it leverages that in relation to this latest deal to acquire Proofpoint.

Its acquisitions have included the likes of Sophos for $3.9 billion, a majority stake in LogRhythm, and paying $544 million for Imprivata — an asset it planned to exit last year reportedly for $2 billion until it called off the sale (it had been proceeding just as the Covid-19 pandemic was taking off).

Alongside Silver Lake, Thoma Bravo tool SolarWinds private in a $4.5 billion deal before listing it again. It also attracted some controversy for selling shares just ahead of SolarWinds disclosing its major security breach but Thoma Bravo said it was unaware of the information at the time.

“Proofpoint has achieved tremendous outcomes for customers around the world, and we’re excited to partner with this talented team at a moment when organizations need innovative solutions to navigate an increasingly treacherous cybersecurity environment,” said Seth Boro, a managing partner at Thoma Bravo, in a statement. “Proofpoint’s opportunity as a privately held company is incredibly compelling, and we look forward to working closely with them to drive continued business growth and deliver world-class advanced threat protection to even more customers in even more ways.”

“Proofpoint has established itself as a true powerhouse in the cybersecurity sector due to its innovative suite of market-leading products and impressive customer base of leading companies around the world,” added Chip Virnig, a partner at Thoma Bravo. “As the sophistication of cyberattacks continues to increase, Proofpoint is delivering the most effective solutions to help organizations protect their data and people across digital platforms. We look forward to partnering with the talented Proofpoint team and leveraging Thoma Bravo’s significant security and operational expertise to help accelerate the Company’s growth.”

More to come.

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Facebook introduces a new miniplayer that streams Spotify within the Facebook app

Facebook announced last week an expanded partnership with streaming music service Spotify that would bring a new way to listen to music or podcasts directly within Facebook’s app, which it called Project Boombox. Today, the companies are rolling out this integration via a new “miniplayer” experience that will allow Facebook users to stream from Spotify through the Facebook app on iOS or Android. The feature will be available to both free Spotify users and Premium subscribers.

The miniplayer itself is an extension of the social sharing option already supported within Spotify’s app. Now, when Spotify users are listening to content they want to share to Facebook, they’ll be able to tap the existing “Share” menu (the three dot-menu at the upper right of the screen) and then tap either “Facebook” or “Facebook News Feed.”

When a user posts an individual track or podcast episode to Facebook through this sharing feature, the post will now display in a new miniplayer that allows other people who come across their post to also play the content as they continue to scroll, or reshare it. (Cue MySpace vibes!)

Spotify’s paid subscribers will be able to access full playback, the company says. Free users, meanwhile, will be able to hear the full shared track, not a clip . But afterwards, they’ll continue to listen to ad-supported content on Shuffle mode, just as they would in Spotify’s own app.

One important thing to note here about all this works is that the integration allows the music or podcast content to actually play from within the Spotify app. When a user presses play on the miniplayer, an app switch takes place so the user can log into Spotify. The miniplayer activates and controls the launch and playback in the Spotify app — which is how the playback is able continue even as the user scrolls on Facebook or if they minimize the Facebook app altogether.

This setup means users will need to have the Spotify mobile app installed on their phone and a Spotify account for the miniplayer to work. For first-time Spotify users, they’ll have to sign up for a free account in order to listen to the music shared via the miniplayer.

Spotify notes that it’s not possible to sign up for a paid account through the mini-player experience itself, so there’s no revenue share with Facebook on new subscriptions. (Users have to download the Spotify app and sign up for Paid accounts from there if they want to upgrade.)

The partnership allows Spotify to leverage Facebook’s reach to gain distribution and to drive both sign-ups and repeat usage of its app just as the Covid bump to subscriber growth may be wearing off. However, it’s still responsible for the royalties paid on streams, just as it was before, the company told TechCrunch, because its app is the one actually doing the streaming. It’s also fully in charge of the music catalog and audio ads that play alongside the content.

For Facebook, this deal means it now has a valuable tool to keep users spending time on its site — a metric that has been declining over the years, reports have indicated.

Spotify and Facebook have a long history of working together on music efforts. Facebook back in 2011 had been planning an update that would allow music subscription users to engage with music directly on Facebook, much like this. But those plans were later dialed back, possibly over music rights’ or technical issues. Spotify had also been one of the first media partners on Facebook’s ticker, which would show you in real-time what friends were up to on Facebook and other services. And Spotify had once offered Facebook Login as the default for its mobile app. Today, as it has for years, Spotify users on the desktop can see what their Facebook friends are streaming on its app, thanks to social networking integrations.

The timing for this renewed and extended partnership is interesting. Now, both Facebook and Spotify have a mutual enemy with Apple, whose privacy-focused changes are impacting Facebook’s ad business and whose investments in Apple Music and Podcasts are a threat to Spotify. As Facebook’s own music efforts in more recent years have shifted towards partnership efforts — like music video integrations enabled by music label agreements — it makes sense that it would turn to a partner like Spotify to power a new streaming feature that supports Facebook’s broader efforts around monetizable tools and services aimed at the creator economy.

The miniplayer feature had been tested in non-U.S. markets, Mexico and Thailand, ahead of its broader global launch today.

In addition to the U.S., the integration is fully rolling out to users in Argentina, Australia, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, South Africa, Thailand, and Uruguay.

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Facebook introduces a new miniplayer that streams Spotify within the Facebook app

{rss:content:encoded} Facebook introduces a new miniplayer that streams Spotify within the Facebook app https://ift.tt/3nlxOYJ https://ift.tt/3xolewo April 26, 2021 at 03:00PM

Facebook announced last week an expanded partnership with streaming music service Spotify that would bring a new way to listen to music or podcasts directly within Facebook’s app, which it called Project Boombox. Today, the companies are rolling out this integration via a new “miniplayer” experience that will allow Facebook users to stream from Spotify through the Facebook app on iOS or Android. The feature will be available to both free Spotify users and Premium subscribers.

The miniplayer itself is an extension of the social sharing option already supported within Spotify’s app. Now, when Spotify users are listening to content they want to share to Facebook, they’ll be able to tap the existing “Share” menu (the three dot-menu at the upper right of the screen) and then tap either “Facebook” or “Facebook News Feed.”

When a user posts an individual track or podcast episode to Facebook through this sharing feature, the post will now display in a new miniplayer that allows other people who come across their post to also play the content as they continue to scroll, or reshare it. (Cue MySpace vibes!)

Spotify’s paid subscribers will be able to access full playback, the company says. Free users, meanwhile, will be able to hear the full shared track, not a clip . But afterwards, they’ll continue to listen to ad-supported content on Shuffle mode, just as they would in Spotify’s own app.

One important thing to note here about all this works is that the integration allows the music or podcast content to actually play from within the Spotify app. When a user presses play on the miniplayer, an app switch takes place so the user can log into Spotify. The miniplayer activates and controls the launch and playback in the Spotify app — which is how the playback is able continue even as the user scrolls on Facebook or if they minimize the Facebook app altogether.

This setup means users will need to have the Spotify mobile app installed on their phone and a Spotify account for the miniplayer to work. For first-time Spotify users, they’ll have to sign up for a free account in order to listen to the music shared via the miniplayer.

Spotify notes that it’s not possible to sign up for a paid account through the mini-player experience itself, so there’s no revenue share with Facebook on new subscriptions. (Users have to download the Spotify app and sign up for Paid accounts from there if they want to upgrade.)

The partnership allows Spotify to leverage Facebook’s reach to gain distribution and to drive both sign-ups and repeat usage of its app just as the Covid bump to subscriber growth may be wearing off. However, it’s still responsible for the royalties paid on streams, just as it was before, the company told TechCrunch, because its app is the one actually doing the streaming. It’s also fully in charge of the music catalog and audio ads that play alongside the content.

For Facebook, this deal means it now has a valuable tool to keep users spending time on its site — a metric that has been declining over the years, reports have indicated.

Spotify and Facebook have a long history of working together on music efforts. Facebook back in 2011 had been planning an update that would allow music subscription users to engage with music directly on Facebook, much like this. But those plans were later dialed back, possibly over music rights’ or technical issues. Spotify had also been one of the first media partners on Facebook’s ticker, which would show you in real-time what friends were up to on Facebook and other services. And Spotify had once offered Facebook Login as the default for its mobile app. Today, as it has for years, Spotify users on the desktop can see what their Facebook friends are streaming on its app, thanks to social networking integrations.

The timing for this renewed and extended partnership is interesting. Now, both Facebook and Spotify have a mutual enemy with Apple, whose privacy-focused changes are impacting Facebook’s ad business and whose investments in Apple Music and Podcasts are a threat to Spotify. As Facebook’s own music efforts in more recent years have shifted towards partnership efforts — like music video integrations enabled by music label agreements — it makes sense that it would turn to a partner like Spotify to power a new streaming feature that supports Facebook’s broader efforts around monetizable tools and services aimed at the creator economy.

The miniplayer feature had been tested in non-U.S. markets, Mexico and Thailand, ahead of its broader global launch today.

In addition to the U.S., the integration is fully rolling out to users in Argentina, Australia, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, South Africa, Thailand, and Uruguay.

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Mighty Networks raises $50M to build a creator economy for the masses

Mighty Networks, a platform designed to give creators and brands a dedicated place to start and grow communities, has closed on $50 million in a Series B funding round led by Owl Ventures.

Ziff Capital Partners and LionTree Partners also participated in the financing, along with existing backers Intel Capital, Marie Forleo, Gretchen Rubin, Dan Rosensweig, Reid Hoffman, BBG Ventures and Lucas Venture Group. The investment brings Palo Alto-based Mighty Networks’ total raised since its 2017 inception to $67 million. 

Mighty Networks founder and CEO Gina Bianchini — who started the company with Tim Herby and Thomas Aaron — is no stranger to building nurturing environments for community building. Previously, she was the CEO and co-founder of Ning, where she led the company’s rapid growth to three million Ning Networks created and about 100 million users around the world in three years. 

With Mighty Networks, Bianchini’s goal is to build “a creator middle class” founded on community memberships, events and live online courses.  

“Basically we have a platform for people to create communities the way that they would create e-commerce stores,” she told TechCrunch. “So what Shopify has done for e-commerce, we’re doing for digital subscriptions and digital payments where the value is around a community that is mastering something interesting or important together, and not just content alone.”

The company’s flagship Business Plan product is aimed at new creators with the goal of giving them an easy way to get started with digital subscriptions, Bianchini said. Established brands, organizations and successful creators use the company’s Mighty Pro plan to get everything Mighty Networks offers on their own branded iOS, iPad and Android apps. 

Mighty Networks — which operates as a SaaS business — has seen impressive growth. In 2020, ARR climbed by “2.5x” while annual customer growth climbed by 200%. Customers are defined as paying creators who host their community, courses and events on their own Mighty Network. The company also saw a 400% annual growth in payments, or rather in subscriptions and payments where a creator or brand will sell a membership or an online course.

The pandemic was actually a boon to the business, as well as the fact that it launched live events last year.

“We were able to help many businesses quickly move online — from yoga studios to leadership speakers and consultants — and now that the world is coming back, they’ll be able to use the features that we’ve built into the platform from day one around finding members, events and groups near them, as well as making everything via not just the web but mobile apps,” Bianchini said.

One of the startup’s goals is to help people understand that they don’t need massive amounts of followers (such as 1 million followers on TikTok) to be successful creators. For example, a creator charging 30 people for a subscription that amounts to around $1,000 a year can still pull in $30,000 a year. So while it’s not huge, it’s certainly still substantial — hence the company’s intent to build a “creator middle class.”

Mighty Networks has more than 10,000 paying creators, brands and coaches today. Users include established creators and brands such as YouTube star Adriene Mishler, Xprize and Singularity University founder Peter Diamandis, author Luvvie Ajayi Jones, comedian Amanda Seales, Girlboss founder Sophia Amoruso and brands such as the TED conference and wellness scheduling platform MINDBODY.

“Content alone will kill the creator economy,” Bianchini said. “We can’t build a thriving creator movement on an exhausting, unfair dynamic where content creators rent audiences from big tech platforms, are required to produce a never-ending stream of content and get paid pennies for it, if they get paid at all. Creators need to own their own community on the internet, where members meet each other and get results and transformation.” 

Owl Ventures Managing Director Amit Patel said his firm was impressed by Mighty Networks before it even met the company.

“No company in this space has more loyal, passionate believers, and when we saw firsthand that creators could successfully build paid communities and online courses on a Mighty Network with as few as 30 members, we wanted to be a part of unlocking this creator middle class for a million more creators,” Patel said in a written statement.

The company plans to use its new capital on product development across media types, payment options and expansion into new markets. 

Earlier this month, Pico, a New York startup that helps online creators and media companies make money and manage their customer data, announced that it had launched an upgraded platform and raised $6.5 million in new funding. Essentially, the company is building what it considers to be an operating system for the creator market.

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

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Mighty Networks raises $50M to build a creator economy for the masses https://ift.tt/3vkyccN

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Robo-advisor StashAway gets $25M Series D led by Sequoia Capital India

Investment app StashAway has raised a $25 million Series D led by Sequoia Capital India, with participation from returning investors Eight Roads Ventures and Square Peg. After regulatory approvals for the funding are completed, Sequoia Capital India managing director Abheek Anand will join StashAway’s board of directors as part of the round.

StashAway does not disclose how many investors use its robo-advisor app, but it surpassed $1 billion assets under management in January. It currently has operations in in five markets: Singapore, Malayasia, the United Arab Emirates and Hong Kong, and is preparing to launch in Thailand.

Its Series D brings StashAway’s total paid-up capital to about $61.4 million. The new funding will be used on expanding StashAway’s product and engineering teams to continue feature and product development. Founded in September 2016, the company will also offer to buy back up to $3 million in stock options from its employees. Co-founder and chief executive officer Michele Ferrario told TechCrunch that many of StashAway’s employees have been with the company since the start, so this gives its team members a chance to cash out stock options that have vested while creating a more compelling compensation package for recruiting talent.

StashAway’s products include services for retail investors that focus on wealth-building or specific goals like retirement or buying a house and StashAway Simple, a cash account that can earn a projected rate of 1.2% per annum and allows funds be withdrawn within one to three business days. Its management fees are between 0.2% to 0.8% a year.

Ferrario said that StashAway’s core market is people aged 30 to 45, who are earning enough money to save or invest, but also have obligations like saving for retirement or their childrens’ education. People under 30 account for a smaller portion of StashAway’s assets under management, but are still a significant part of its user base because the app doesn’t require minimum investments, making it accessible to people who recently graduated or are just starting their careers. While StashAway has built an reputation for attracting first-time investors, about 20% of its assets under management come from high-net-worth individuals.

“This is something we didn’t think would happen at the beginning, but then we realized that some of the problems we’re solving are also significant problems for high-net-worth individuals as well,” said Ferrario. “If you have less than $10 million to $15 million in wealth, the services you receive from private banks are not particularly sophisticated or personalized. So we offer a more sophisticated investment at a lower cost.”

At the end of last year, the company launched StashAway WorkPlace, a platform for employers to provide benefits like pensions and vesting schedules. StashAway WorkPlace grew out of the Financial Wellness Program, a set of seminars and workshops on financial planning and investing that has been used in Singapore by about 200 companies, including Salesforce, Twitter, Netflix and LinkedIn.

Since StashAway launched its app in 2017, more robo-advisors have emerged in the same markets it serves. For example, Syfe also caters to new investors. Other investment apps in Singapore include Endowus, Kristal.AI and AutoWealth.

Singapore-based Syfe, a robo-advisor with a human touch, raises $18.6 million led by Valar Ventures

 

One of the main ways StashAway differentiates is its proprietary asset allocation framework, which looks at how each asset class performs under specific economic conditions, measures uncertainty with leading indicators and patterns in economic data, and adjustments to expected returns based on an asset’s valuation relative to its economic fair value. The company says it has outperformed benchmarks since launching in 2017. At the end of March, its portfolios outperformed their same-risk benchmarks (proxied by MSCI World Equity Index and FTSE World Government Bond Index), with annualized returns ranging from 16.5% (for the highest-risk portfolio) to 4% (the lowest-risk portfolio).

Ferrario said the app also emphasizes customer service, with phone calls typically answered in less than eight seconds, and an in-app WhatsApp link that connects users to a human service representative instead of sending them through a chatbot first.

But StashAway’s main competitor is still traditional banks instead of other investment apps. “In the five countries we are in, there is approximately $5 trillion of personal financial wealth. In Singapore alone, it is around $1.1 trillion,” Ferrario said. A large portion of that cash, or about $400 billion, sits in savings accounts. “That’s money that’s not working for whoever owns it,” he added.

In a press statement, Anand said, “StashAway is growing rapidly as it fulfills an obvious gap in the digital wealth management space, especially in areas where its competitors may be lacking: an easy-to-use platform, robust client relationships and a very sophisticated investing framework. StashAway has built trust with its client base by navigating them through market volatility while providing strong returns.”

As investing apps boom, Public doubles down on its social focus

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Robo-advisor StashAway gets $25M Series D led by Sequoia Capital India https://ift.tt/3etx5AB

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