TechCrunch Startup News

Pinterest priced shares of its stock, “PINS,” above its anticipated range on Wednesday evening, CNBC reports. The company will sell 75 million shares of Class A common stock at $19 apiece in an offering that will attract $1.4 billion in new capital for the visual search engine. The NYSE-listed business had planned to sell its shares at between $15 to $17 and didn’t increase the size of its planned offering prior to Wednesday’s pricing. Valued at$12. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Airbase is a startup with a plan to change the way you think about accounting around spending. Instead of multiple workflows, it wants to create a simpler one involving, well, Airbase. It’s a bold move for any startup to take on something as entrenched as financials, but it’s giving it a shot, and today the company launched with a $7 million Series A investment. First Round Capital was lead investor. Maynard Webb, Village Global, BoxGroup and Quiet Capital also participated. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Victor Basta Contributor Victor Basta is the founder of the boutique investment firm Magister Advisors. More posts by this contributor Venture investing in the US and Europe are totally different industries If you’re hoping to create a unicorn on a budget, look to the European technology sector for inspiration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

KZen is about to release ZenGo, a mobile app to manage your cryptocurrencies securely and more easily. There are already countless crypto wallets out there, but the startup thinks they’re all either too complicated or too insecure. If you own cryptocurrencies, chances are they’re sitting on an exchange, such as Coinbase or Binance. If somebody manages to log in to your account, nothing is stopping them from sending those assets to other wallets and stealing everything. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Airbnb has completed its acquisition of the last-minute hotel booking application, HotelTonight, the company announced on Monday. The deal is Airbnb’s largest M&A transaction yet and will accelerate the home-sharing giant’s growth as it gears up for an initial public offering. Airbnb reportedly began talks to acquire HotelTonight months ago and finally confirmed its intent to acquire the business in early March. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Every year around this time, Uber drivers, Wag dog walkers, Bird scooter chargers, social media influencers and other gig economy workers face the unsightly challenge of paying their taxes. Companies like Uber and Lyft classify their drivers as independent contractors, which means you aren’t given any benefits and the company doesn’t withhold any of your taxes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Armis is helping companies protect IoT devices on the network without using an agent, and it’s apparently a problem that is resonating with the market, as the startup reports 700 percent growth in the last year. That caught the attention of investors, who awarded them with a $65 million Series C investment to help keep accelerating that growth. Sequoia Capital led the round with help from new investors Insight Venture Partners and Intermountain Ventures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The SoftBank Vision Fund has been screaming from the venture headlines the last few months, driven by eye-popping rounds (and valuations!) into some of the most notable startups around the world. Yet, SoftBank isn’t the only player rapidly buying up the cap tables of top startups. Indeed, another firm, more than a century old, has been fighting for that late-stage equity crown. Baillie Gifford . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Redpoint Ventures has led a $65 million Series B in Cityblock, a healthcare company focused on providing improved care to low-income neighborhoods. The business launched roughly 18 months ago out of Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs, an urban innovation incubator known for projects like mobility data startup Coord, which itself raised a $5 million round in October. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Online used car startup Shift Technologies has tacked on another $40 million in equity funding, hired a new COO with Amazon and Enjoy roots and scaled up its engineering staff — all in the past several months — as the company aims to double its revenue this year. The recent activity, along with what executives have told TechCrunch is a diligent focus on unit economics, is all directed toward a larger objective to take the company public sometime in 2021. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Klaviyo, a Boston-based email marketing firm founded in 2012, went about building its email marketing business the old fashioned way. First it built a profitable company, then it went looking for funding to accelerate the growth. Today, it announced a massive $150 million Series B with the entire sum coming from Summit Partners. The company had raised just $8.5 million before today’s announcement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Jumbo could be a nightmare for the tech giants, but a savior for the victims of their shady privacy practices. Jumbo saves you hours as well as embarrassment by automatically adjusting 30 Facebook privacy settings to give you more protection, and by deleting your old tweets after saving them to your phone. It can even erase your Google Search and Amazon Alexa history, with clean up features for Instagram and Tinder in the works. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It’s been a year since All Raise emerged with the support of dozens of venture capital’s most powerful women. The 34 founding members had a lofty goal: Double the capital going to female founders in five years and double the representation of female VCs in 10 years. After a few experiments, some trial and error and the first-of-its-kind Women Who Venture Summit, All Raise cemented its reputation as a force for change in Silicon Valley. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The San Francisco-based startup Branch International, which makes small personal loans in emerging markets, has raised $170 million and announceda partnership with Visa to offer virtual, pre-paid debit cards to Branch client networks in Africa, South-Asia and Latin America. Branch — which has 150 employees in San Francisco, Lagos, Nairobi, Mexico City and Mumbai — makes loans starting at $2 to individuals in emerging and frontier markets. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Women-focused co-working space The Wing has hired Rachel Racusen as vice president of communications. Racusen has been the director of communications at Snap, the developer of Snapchat, since late 2016. Racusen’s exit represents the latest in a series of departures at the “camera company.” Earlier this year, the company’s chief financial officer Tim Stone stepped down. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When everyone always tells you ‘yes’, you can become a monster. Leaders especially need honest feedback to grow. “If you look at rich people like Donald Trump and you neglect them, you get more Donald Trumps” says Torch co-founder and CEO Cameron Yarbrough about our gruff president. His app wants to make executive coaching (a polite word for therapy) part of even the busiest executive’s schedule. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Raising venture capital isn’t easy; for some, it’s impossible. Clearbanc offers startups a fundraising alternative — despite itself being well-capitalized by VCs — and is today launching a new campaign to back 2,000 businesses with $1 billion in non-dilutive capital by the end of 2019. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What happens when you’re working behind the scene with French President Emmanuel Macron and you suddenly become a minister? This is what’s happening to Cédric O this week who was appointed Minister for the Digital Economy on Sunday. I was the first journalist to interview him after his appointment. While Cédric O has been talking with the French tech ecosystem for years, he usually stays away from cameras and microphones. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, investors took off their rose-colored glasses (and pink-colored mustaches) and looked at Lyft’s shares with fresh eyes after Friday’s ebullient debut. And — judging by the company’s share price at the end of the day — what they saw wasn’t exactly to their liking. Lyft’s shares suffered a pretty blue Monday in trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange today, closing down $9.28 (or 11.85 percent). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

FireHydrant, a NYC startup wants to help companies recover from IT disasters more quickly, and understand why they happened with the goal of preventing similar future scenarios from happening again. Today, the fledgling startup announced a $1.5 million seed investment from Work-Bench, a New York City venture capital firm that invests in early stage enterprise startups. In addition to the funding, the company announced it was opening registration for its FireHydrant incident management platform. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In 2007, Stefania Mallett and Briscoe Rodgers conceived of ezCater, an online marketplace for business catering, and began building the company in Mallet’s Boston home, mostly at her kitchen table. Recently, sitting at that same table, Mallett negotiated with Brad Twohig of Lightspeed Venture Partners the final terms of a $150 million Series D-1 at a $1.25 billion valuation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The internet is often lauded for the potential to increase the impact of a range of primary services in emerging markets, including education, commerce, banking and healthcare. While many of those platforms are now being built, a few are finding that a hybrid approach combining online and offline is advantageous. That’s exactly what Jio Health, a “full stack” (forgive the phrase) healthcare startup is bringing to consumers in Southeast Asia, starting in Vietnam. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you took the photos and videos out of pornography, could it appeal to a new audience? Caroline Spiegel’s first startup Quinn aims to bring some imaginationto adult entertainment. Her older brother, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel, spent years trying to convince people his app wasn’t just for sexy texting. Now Caroline is building a website dedicated to sexy text and audio. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Jason Rowley Contributor Jason Rowley is a venture capital and technology reporter for Crunchbase News. More posts by this contributor To get big faster, younger unicorns start buying startups sooner Small VC funds continue to raise, despite pressure from above After years of fierce competition as private companies, Uber and Lyft aregoing publicon U.S. markets. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Lyft raised more than $2 billion Thursday afternoon after pricing its shares at $72 apiece, the top of the expected range of $70 to $72 per share, per reports. This gives Lyft a fully-diluted market value of $24 billion. The company will debut on the Nasdaq stock exchange Friday morning, trading under the ticker symbol “LYFT. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dutch news organization The Correspondent surprised some of its supporters earlier this week, when co-founder and CEO Ernst Pfauth posted an update on Medium saying that the company would not be opening a newsroom in New York City. Which was odd, since the organizationraised $2.6 millionin a crowdfunding campaign last fall with the express purpose of launching in the United States. At least, that’s what I thought. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There are better employee perks than a ping-pong table. 70 percent of Americans graduate college with student loan debt. That’s 45 million people who owe $1.6 trillion. So when employers useGoodly to offer $100 per month in student loan payback for a $6 fee, talent sticks around. The startup found 86 percent of employees said they’d stay with a company for at least five years if their employer helped pay down their student loans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In Silicon Valley, investors don’t expect their portfolio companies to be profitable. “Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies,” a bible for founders, instead calls for heavy spending on growth to scale in an Amazon -like fashion. As for Wall Street, it’s shown an affinity for stock in Jeff Bezos’ business, despite the many years it spent navigating a path to profitability, as well as other money-losing endeavors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As I’m sure everyone reading this knows, female-founded businesses receive just over 2 percent of venture capital on an annual basis. Most of those checks are written to early-stage startups. It’s extremely difficult for female founders to garner late-stage support, let alone cash $100 million checks. Maybe that’s finally changing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome back toEquity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week Kate Clark and Alex Wilhelm took us through an IPO, a big round, 943 startup pitches, two new unicorns, and some scooter news. A very 2019 mix, really. Up first we took a peek at the latest from the Lyft IPO saga. Recall that Lyft is beating Uber to the public markets, and we can report that it’s having a good time doing so. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

UiPath, a robotics process automation platform targeting IT businesses, is raising more than $400 million in Series D funding from venture capital investors at a valuation north of $7 billion, sources have confirmed to TechCrunch following a report from Business Insider. We’ve reached out to the company for comment. UiPath, founded in 2005, has raised $409 million to date, meaning the new round of capital will double the total capital invested in the startup, as well as its valuation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Want to star in your favorite memes and movie scenes? Upload a selfie to Morphin, choose your favorite GIF, and your face is grafted in to create a personalized copy you can share anywhere. Become Tony Stark as he suits up like Iron Man. Drop the mic like Obama, dance like Drake, or slap your mug on Fortnite characters. Now after three years in a stealth developing image mapping technology, Morphin is ready to launch its put-you-in-a-GIF maker. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ride-hailing firm Lyft will make its Nasdaq debut as early as next week at a valuation of up to $23 billion, The Wall Street Journal reports. The business will reportedly price its shares at between $62 and $68 apiece, raising roughly $2 billion in the process. With a $600 million financing, Lyft was valued at $15.1 billion in June. Lyft filed paperwork in December for an initial public offering, mere hours before its competitor Uber did the same. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For a long while, you couldn’t swing a bag of cats around without hitting a retailer looking to create a digital presence. Now, the inverse is growing in popularity, with many digital-first retail brands looking to set up a brick-and-mortar shop. The latest is Framebridge, a custom framing startup that has raised more than $67 million. The company is launching two new retail stores in the D.C. area, one downtown and one in Bethesda. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Patreon couldn’t survive charging all creators just a 5 percent rake on the monthly subscriptions they earn from fans while building commerce tools like CRMs and merchandise to try to stay ahead of Twitch, YouTube and Google. But it also didn’t want to screw all its loyal early creators. So today, Patreon is overhauling its pricing. Any creator can still get a 5 percent rate, but just for a Lite version without bonus tools or different fan tiers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The past few years have been a bit of a dark age for budding social media startups. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snap and messenger apps took up all the time of their users, leaving little room for yet another social media platform. But the tide is shifting. Privacy scandals have shaken some users’ faith giants like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and users have grown fatigued by the constant onslaught of #content. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Meet eFounders’ next batch of startups that want to redefine the future of work European startup studio eFounders has been relentlessly building new startups over the past few years. In 2019, the company plans to launch Bonjour, a demo tool for sales teams, Chilli, a recommandation service to help small and medium companies leverage modern software-as-a-service products, and Swan, a banking API to generate banking services on demand. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We’ve decided to step back from the breaking news for a minute to conduct a review of seed and early-stage funding trends over the last decade for U.S.-based companies. I’m fairly certain we can all agree that the environment for startups has changed dramatically in the past 10 years, specifically in two major ways: The development of seed funding as its own class and; The expansion of growth stage investing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Nested, the London-based “data-driven” estate agency that provides a cash advance to help you buy a new home before you’ve sold your old one, has laid off 20 percent of its workforce, TechCrunch has learned. According to sources, the more than 15 staff being let go were informed earlier today. The majority of departures are within Nested’s operations team, including sales, although I understand they also include a number of engineers and other product people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

WeWork Labs, the coworking giant’s startup program that relaunched just over a year ago, is announcing a new initiative focused on food and agriculture startups — WeWork Food Labs. Roee Adler, the global head of WeWork Labs, told me that there will be two main pieces to the Food Labs program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On-demand food delivery startup DoorDash has been under fire as of late for its practices around paying drivers. In an email to drivers today, obtained by TechCrunch, DoorDash said drivers received an average of $17.50 or more per hour on a delivery in 2018. That figure, of course, does not take into account cost of mileage, payroll taxes for 1099 independent contractors and other expenses. Sage Wilson, an organizer at non-profit labor group Working Washington, explained to TechCrunch how that $17. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Venture capitalists’ latest on-demand delivery bet is in the pharmaceutical space. Truepill, an online pharmacy powering delivery for the likes of Hims, Nurx, LemonAID and other direct-to-consumer healthcare brands, has nabbed a $10 million Series A from early-stage VC fund Initialized Capital. The investment brings the Y Combinator graduate’s total raised to $13.4 million. Y Combinator, Sound Ventures, Tuesday Capital and others participated in the round. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When the bubble burst in the year 2000, Tanya Van Court lost over $1 million in stock and options over the course of a few minutes. Then and there she vowed to never let something like that happen to her children. Five years later, her daughter Gabrielle was born. At the time, she was a VP of Digital Product Dev at ESPN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Dubler Studio Kit lets you use your voice to control synths, drum machines and other MIDI gear Vochlea Music, a U.K. startup and alumni of Abbey Road Red, the music tech incubator from Abbey Road Studios, is launching a crowdfunding campaign today for “Dubler Studio Kit,” a new device and app that turns your voice into a MIDI controller for synths, drum machines, DAWs and other music gear. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you’re like me, you let out a heavy sigh every month or so when you reach out and unexpectedly find an empty bag of coffee. Bottomless, one of the 200-plus startups in Y Combinator’s latest batch, has a solution for us caffeine addicts. For a $36 annual membership fee, a cost which co-founder Michael Mayer says isn’t set in stone, plus $11.29 per order depending on the blend, Bottomless will automatically restock your coffee supply before you run out. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Where to begin… Netflix darling Marie Kondo is hitting up Sand Hill Road in search of $40 million to fund an ecommerce platform, Y Combinator is giving $150,000 to a startup building a $380,000 flying motorcycle (because why not) and Jibo, the social robot, is calling it quits, speaking to owners directly of its imminent shutdown. It was a hectic week in unicorn land so, I’m just going to get right to the good stuff. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome back toEquity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. We’re back to basics this week with Kate Clark at the helm, Alex Wilhelm in the sidecar, and a stack of venture capital news and happenings to get through. And to make everyone feel included, we kicked off the episode with a roll-call of new VC funds. Then, of course, we dug into the recent news out of Y Combinator . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Bird launches platform to let entrepreneurs manage their own fleet of scooters Bird is launching its new program, Bird Platform, in New Zealand, Canada and Latin America in the coming weeks. First up is New Zealand, where Bird has partnered with a local entrepreneur to manage a fleet of Bird electric scooters. Residents of New Zealand will start to see Bird scooters on the streets next week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Many things are better said than read, but the best voice tech out there seems to be reserved for virtual assistants, not screen readers or automatically generated audiobooks. WellSaid wants to enable any creator to use quality synthetic speech instead of a human voice — perhaps even a synthetic version of themselves. There’s been a series of major advances in voice synthesis over the last couple years as neural network technology improves on the old highly manual approach. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Clari started out as a company that wanted to give sales teams more information about their sales process than could be found in the CRM database. Today, the company announced a much broader platform, one that can provide insight across sales, marketing and customer service to give a more unified view of a company’s go-to-market operations, all enhanced by AI. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices