TechCrunch Startup News

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

Red Cat, a startup that wants to store drone flight data on the blockchain to guarantee immutability, announced the second Beta of its drone data platform today. Jeff Thompson, CEO of Red Cat says in 2017 he was looking at what was holding back the commercial drone business and the need for a black-box kind of system became apparent to him. The so-called black box is really a flight recorder that tracks data about a flight. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For a long time, it was the norm for founders to haul their hardware to the 3000 block of Sand Hill Road, where the venture capitalists of “Silicon Valley” would be awaiting their pitches. Today, many of the investors that touted the exclusivity of “The Valley” have moved north to San Francisco, where they have better access to top entrepreneurs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Eargo wants to become the ultimate consumer hearing brand. The company’s small and virtually invisible direct-to-consumer hearing aids, which come in an AirPods-style chargeable case, are designed to help destigmatize hearing loss. One month after revealing its newest product — the Eargo Neo ($2,550), which can be customized remotely via the case’s Bluetooth connectivity — the startup has closed a $52 million Series D, bringing its total raised to date to $135 million. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Jupiter raises $23 million to tell businesses and governments how climate change will destroy them Whether it’s by flood, fire or the fury of a storm, climate-related catastrophes are now impacting most cities and towns across the country. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Glossier, known for its line of understated makeup products and a cult-following of millennial Instagrammers, is getting colorful with the launch of its first spin-off brand, Glossier Play. The company — led by founder and chief executive officer Emily Weiss, who built the nearly $400 million business from a makeup blog called Into The Gloss — has raised a total of $92 million in venture capital funding from top-tier consumer investors Forerunner Ventures, Index Ventures and IVP. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Cerosallows marketers to create animated, interactive content — but don’t call it a content marketing company. “We think content is just a dry, bland, over-leveraged, oversaturated space,” said founder and CEO Simon Berg. “The goal is not to hack the system, the goal is to make a great experience for your customers.” That’s why he describes Ceros as a platform for creating experiences. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Forget the office ping pong table,Cherry, a startup in Y Combinator’s latest batch, wants to let employees take company perks into their own hands. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Customer experience management platform Medallia has filed to raise up to $70 million in Series F funding, according to regulatory documents obtained by the Prime Unicorn Index. The new shares were priced at $15 apiece, valuing the nearly two-decades-old business at $1.7 billion. We’ve reached out to Medallia for comment. Medallia is expected to finally transition to the public markets in 2019, a year chock-full of high-profile unicorn IPOs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Botify, a search engine optimization company that works with customers like Expedia and Nike, announced today that it has raised $20 million in Series B funding. Co-founder and CEO Adrien Menard said that the opportunity in SEO is “even bigger now than in the past,” and that the problem ismuch broader problem than many realize. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

French startup Blade, the company behind Shadow, is launching a new set-top box to access its cloud gaming service — the Shadow Ghost. I’ve been playing with the device for a couple of weeks and here’s my review. The Shadow Ghost is a tiny little box that doesn’t do much. The true magic happens in a data center near your home. When you sign up to Shadow, you don’t even have to get a box. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For a monthly subscription fee, this startup will send out customized gifts to current and prospective clients at scale In today’s noisy, fast-paced world, finding a way to let clients and potential customers know that they are top of mind can be a major challenge for companies. Enter Sendoso, a 2.5-year-old, San Francisco-based online-to-offline startup that promises to source, store and ship anything a business ever needs to send — and track its return on investment, to boot. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Google’s Gradient Ventures, the search giant’s dedicated AI fund, is casting its eye to Asia after it led a $7 million Series A round for Elsa, a startup that operates an app for English language learners. The deal is Gradient’s first in Asia, and it includes participation from existing investors Monk’s Hill Ventures and SOSV. Elsa has now raised $12 million to date. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Last month I wrote about Ubiquitilink, which promised, through undisclosed means, it was on the verge of providing a sort of global satellite-based roaming service. But how, I asked? (Wait, they told me.) Turns out our phones are capable of a lot more than we think: they can reach satellites acting as cell towers in orbit just fine, and the company just proved it. 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 Companies raising supergiant VC aren’t getting any younger Coastal startups don’t have a monopoly on raising big at early-stage It takes a lot more than a good idea and the right timing to build a billion-dollar company. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Delivery company DoorDash is announcing that it has raised $400 million in Series F financing. Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported that the company was looking to raise $500 million at a valuation of $6 billion or more. In fact, DoorDash now says the funding came at a $7.1 billion valuation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When I interviewed Parrot founder and CEO Henri Seydoux at TechCrunch Disrupt back in 2016, he surprised everyone when he said he was working on a new kind of T-shirt —nobody knew for sure whether he was joking or not. But the connected T-shirt is real, and it’s called wearTRBL. While the project started as a Parrot subsidiary, the company was spun off in July 2018. Seydoux is still credited as co-founder and Olivier Levy acts as co-founder and CEO. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Entrepreneur First (EF), the London-headquartered “talent investor” that recruits and backs individuals pre-team and pre-idea to enable them to found startups, has raised a new fund of its own to continue scaling globally. The $115 million first close was led by a number of leading (mostly unnamed) institutional investors across the U.S., Europe and Asia, including new anchor LP Trusted Insight. A number of well-known European entrepreneurs also invested. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

SendBird, a San Francisco area startup, helps developers add messaging to their apps with a couple of lines of code. It’s an idea similar to Stripe for payments or Twilio for communications. Today, the company announced a $52 million Series B investment. The round was led by Iconiq Capital. Existing investors Shasta Ventures, August Capital, Y Combinator, and Funders Club also participated. Today’s investment brings the total raised to over $70 million, according to Crunchbase. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Greetings from Chittorgarh, one of my stops on a two-week excursion through Goa and Rajasthan, India. I’ve been a little too busy exploring, photographing cows and monkeys and eating a lot of delicious food to keep up with *all* the tech news, but I’ve still got the highlights. For starters, if you haven’t heard yet, TechCrunch launched Extra Crunch, a paid premium subscription offering full of amazing content. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Paris-based startup Alan has raised a Series B round of funding of $45 million (€40 million). Index Ventures is once again leading the round, with partners of DST Global also participating. The company had raised a $28 million funding round only ten months ago. Alan is a software-as-a-service startup tackling a very specific industry — the health insurance market in France — and soon across Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

3DEN is building spaces for what it calls the “in-between moments” of your day. The name (pronounced “Eden”) comes from the idea of the “third place” — a space that’s neither home nor work. Founder and CEO Ben Silver told me the idea is to create a space that people can use if, say, they’ve got 45 minutes to fill between meetings, or if they’ve just gotten off a red eye flight and need somewhere to freshen up. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

WeWork has made a big name for itself in a short period of time as a global co-working space. In fact, WeWork is now the largest private office tenant in all of Manhattan. But whether the real estate play alone can support its reported $47 billion valuation still remains to be seen. That might explain the company’s 2018 acquisition spree, as well as today’s newly announced changes to the WeWork app. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices