Hello and welcome back to Startups Weekly, a weekend newsletter that dives into the week’s noteworthy startups and venture capital news. Before I jump into today’s topic, let’s catch up a bit. Last week, I noted Peloton’s secret weapons. Before that, I wrote about a new e-commerce startup, Pietra.

The big story

In one fell swoop, Stripe may disrupt the entire financial services ecosystem.

The $22 billion payments behemoth announced Stripe Capital this week, a provider of quick and easy to obtain loans for internet businesses. The company is expected to launch a card as well, according to TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden. What does that mean for recent upstarts like Clearbanc, a business that provides revenue-share agreements to help startups forgo selling equity to VCs, or Brex, which has created a credit card tailored for startups? Stiff competition ahead.

Led by brothers Patrick and John Collison, Stripe is known for developing payment processing software to facilitate online purchases. Doubling down on financial services, the company seeks to become the go-to capital provider to its millions of customers. In a vacuum, it’s no threat to Brex, which has quickly become a fintech darling (with a multibillion-dollar valuation to prove it) — but coupled with Stripe’s massive network, resources and the soon-to-be-announced card, it’s worth concern.

I reached out to both Brex and Clearbanc. Here’s what they had to say.

Clearbanc: “Stripe is one of our close partners because we’re both deeply committed to empowering founders. There’s a huge demand amongst founders for flexible funding that allow them to grow while retaining equity in their company, so it’s encouraging to see the growth of alternative funding options. We’re seeing this first hand — we’re investing an average of $100,000 of growth capital per brand, with other companies taking up to $10 million. New funding alternatives not only open more doors for more businesses, but data-driven platforms can also help to reduce bias and promote entrepreneurship outside of VC capitals like Silicon Valley and New York.”

Brex CEO Henrique Dubugras: “We have created a new financial stack for tech companies, and this has resulted in a very innovative product experience with lots of adoption, so it makes sense that Stripe would also pursue this fast-growing opportunity.”

We’ll share more details on the card as soon as possible.

WeWork slashes expectations

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that the company formerly known as WeWork is considering slashing its valuation as it looks to woo public market investors. The co-working biz may hit the public markets at a valuation of somewhere in the $20 billion range for its initial public offering, a figure that’s far less than the $47 billion valuation it received when it raised its last round of private funding. Yikes…

TechCrunch Disrupt

We are just weeks away from our flagship conference, TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco. We have dozens of amazing speakers lined up. In addition to taking in the great line-up of speakers, ticket holders can roam around Startup Alley to catch the more than 1,000 companies showcasing their products and technologies. And, of course, you’ll get the opportunity to watch the Startup Battlefield competition live. Past competitors include Dropbox, Cloudflare and Mint… You never know which future unicorn will compete next.

You can take a look at the full agenda here. Here’s a look at the panels I personally will be onstage moderating.

Deals, deals, deals

Listen

This week, we recorded Equity on location at TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise in San Francisco. Our special guest was Emergence Capital founder Jason Green, who joined us to talk about the firm’s specialty: enterprise investments! Danny Crichton, the esteemed leader of TechCrunch’s Extra Crunch, was on hand to co-lead the episode with me. Listen here. And remember, Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Downcast and all the casts.

Pagerduty‘s CEO Jennifer Tejada and Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie both guided their companies to successful IPOs, with Box going public in 2015 and Pagerduty listing its stocks only a few months ago. Both of them will join us on the first day of TechCrunch Disrupt SF (October 2) to talk about their experiences in getting their companies to this point and managing the changes that come with being a public company.

It took both companies about 10 years to get to their IPOs. Levie co-founded the content management and file sharing service Box in 2005 and Pagerduty first launched as a basic notification tool for on-call developers in 2009, with Tejada joining as CEO in 2016. Box has already experienced its share of ups and downs in the stock market and Pagerduty’s IPO in April launched its stock right into one of the more volatile markets in recent years.

At Disrupt, though, we’ll focus on what these two CEOs did to get their companies ready to go public and the process of listing a company — and what, in hindsight, they would’ve done differently.

Box’s road, especially, was rather long and winding. It took the company nine months from filing its S-1 to actually IPOing — in part because the reaction to the numbers it disclosed in its S-1 was pretty negative at the time.

Pagerduty, on the other hand, had a more straightforward path, in part thanks to its strong financial position before it filed.

Disrupt SF runs October 2 to October 4 at the Moscone Center in the heart of San Francisco. Tickets are available here.

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With the scheduled 2020 shutdown of Google Hire, the tech giant’s applicant tracking system, there’s more room for startups to emerge as the go-to tool for hiring managers. Agave, which has $1 million in funding from SV Angel, Box Group and others, is aiming to serve that need.

Agave is a free hiring platform that offers job postings, hosted career pages, customer relationship management tools and full API read and write access. Agave also offers two paid tiers, ranging from $2 per user a month to $6 per user a month, which offer features like automated e-mail follow-up services, interview scheduling or pre-formulated offer letters. It’s available today, but it’s still early days in invite-only mode.

Similar to Google Hire, Agave is focused on small- to medium-sized businesses — anywhere from 20 to 500 employees.

“That’s the sweet spot,” Agave founder Jared Tame told TechCrunch. “After 20 people, companies tap out their referral networks and need to get more active about sourcing talent. After a certain point, it makes sense to use an ATS because the processes start to break down.”

[gallery ids="1878446,1878467,1878468"]

Tame started the company because of his own experience working as a hiring manager and feeling frustrated with some of the products out there, he said.

Despite Google Hire’s impending shutdown, Agave still faces other competitors in the space, including Lever, which has $72.8 million in funding and Greenhouse, which has $110.1 million in funding. Right now, Agave has a handful of startups using its platform but is hoping to entice additional customers with its 48-hour guarantee for migrations from Google Hire to Agave.

While the software revolution started out slowly, over the past few years it’s exploded and the fastest-growing segment to-date has been the shift towards software as a service or SaaS.

SaaS has dramatically lowered the intrinsic total cost of ownership for adopting software, solved scaling challenges and taken away the burden of issues with local hardware. In short, it has allowed a business to focus primarily on just that — its business — while simultaneously reducing the burden of IT operations.

Today, SaaS adoption is increasingly ubiquitous. According to IDG’s 2018 Cloud Computing Survey, 73% of organizations have at least one application or a portion of their computing infrastructure already in the cloud. While this software explosion has created a whole range of downstream impacts, it has also caused software developers to become more and more valuable.

The increasing value of developers has meant that, like traditional SaaS buyers before them, they also better intuit the value of their time and increasingly prefer businesses that can help alleviate the hassles of procurement, integration, management, and operations. Developer needs to address those hassles are specialized.

They are looking to deeply integrate products into their own applications and to do so, they need access to an Application Programming Interface, or API. Best practices for API onboarding include technical documentation, examples, and sandbox environments to test.

APIs tend to also offer metered billing upfront. For these and other reasons, APIs are a distinct subset of SaaS.

For fast-moving developers building on a global-scale, APIs are no longer a stop-gap to the future—they’re a critical part of their strategy. Why would you dedicate precious resources to recreating something in-house that’s done better elsewhere when you can instead focus your efforts on creating a differentiated product?

Thanks to this mindset shift, APIs are on track to create another SaaS-sized impact across all industries and at a much faster pace. By exposing often complex services as simplified code, API-first products are far more extensible, easier for customers to integrate into, and have the ability to foster a greater community around potential use cases.

Billion-dollar businesses building APIs

Whether you realize it or not, chances are that your favorite consumer and enterprise apps—Uber, Airbnb, PayPal, and countless more—have a number of third-party APIs and developer services running in the background. Just like most modern enterprises have invested in SaaS technologies for all the above reasons, many of today’s multi-billion dollar companies have built their businesses on the backs of these scalable developer services that let them abstract everything from SMS and email to payments, location-based data, search and more.

Simultaneously, the entrepreneurs behind these API-first companies like Twilio, Segment, Scale and many others are building sustainable, independent—and big—businesses.

Valued today at over $22 billion, Stripe is the biggest independent API-first company. Stripe took off because of its initial laser-focus on the developer experience setting up and taking payments. It was even initially known as /dev/payments!

Stripe spent extra time building the right, idiomatic SDKs for each language platform and beautiful documentation. But it wasn’t just those things, they rebuilt an entire business process around being API-first.

Companies using Stripe didn’t need to fill out a PDF and set up a separate merchant account before getting started. Once sign-up was complete, users could immediately test the API with a sandbox and integrate it directly into their application. Even pricing was different.

Stripe chose to simplify pricing dramatically by starting with a single, simple price for all cards and not breaking out cards by type even though the costs for AmEx cards versus Visa can differ. Stripe also did away with a monthly minimum fee that competitors had.

Many competitors used the monthly minimum to offset the high cost of support for new customers who weren’t necessarily processing payments yet. Stripe flipped that on its head. Developers integrate Stripe earlier than they integrated payments before, and while it costs Stripe a lot in setup and support costs, it pays off in brand and loyalty.

Checkr is another excellent example of an API-first company vastly simplifying a massive yet slow-moving industry. Very little had changed over the last few decades in how businesses ran background checks on their employees and contractors, involving manual paperwork and the help of 3rd party services that spent days verifying an individual.

Checkr’s API gives companies immediate access to a variety of disparate verification sources and allows these companies to plug Checkr into their existing on-boarding and HR workflows. It’s used today by more than 10,000 businesses including Uber, Instacart, Zenefits and more.

Like Checkr and Stripe, Plaid provides a similar value prop to applications in need of banking data and connections, abstracting away banking relationships and complexities brought upon by a lack of tech in a category dominated by hundred-year-old banks. Plaid has shown an incredible ramp these past three years, from closing a $12 million Series A in 2015 to reaching a valuation over $2.5 billion this year.

Today the company is fueling an entire generation of financial applications, all on the back of their well-built API.

Then and now

Accel’s first API investment was in Braintree, a mobile and web payment systems for e-commerce companies, in 2011. Braintree eventually sold to, and became an integral part of, PayPal as it spun out from eBay and grew to be worth more than $100 billion. Unsurprisingly, it was shortly thereafter that our team decided to it was time to go big on the category. By the end of 2014 we had led the Series As in Segment and Checkr and followed those investments with our first APX conference in 2015.

Plaid, Segment, Auth0, and Checkr had only raised Seed or Series A financings! And we are even more excited and bullish on the space. To convey just how much API-first businesses have grown in such a short period of time, we thought it would be useful perspective to share some metrics over the past five years, which we’ve broken out in the two visuals included above in this article.

While SaaS may have pioneered the idea that the best way to do business isn’t to actually build everything in-house, today we’re seeing APIs amplify this theme. At Accel, we firmly believe that APIs are the next big SaaS wave — having as much if not more impact as its predecessor thanks to developers at today’s fastest-growing startups and their preference for API-first products. We’ve actively continued to invest in the space (in companies like, Scale, mentioned above).

And much like how a robust ecosystem developed around SaaS, we believe that one will continue to develop around APIs. Given the amount of progress that has happened in just a few short years, Accel is hosting our second APX conference to once again bring together this remarkable community and continue to facilitate discussion and innovation.

When Medal.tv first launched on the scene, the company was an upstart trying to be the social network for the gaming generation.

Since its debut in February, the clipping and messaging service for gamers has amassed 5 million total users with hundreds of thousands of daily active users. And now it has a $9 million new investment from firms, led by Horizons Ventures, the venture capital fund established by Hong Kong multi-billionaire Li Ka-shing.

“We’re seeing sharing of short-form video emerge as a means of self-expression and entertainment for the current generation. We believe Medal’s platform will be a foundation for interactive social experiences beyond what you can find in a game,” says Jonathan Tam, an investor with Horizons Ventures .

Medal sees potential both in its social network and in the ability for game developers to use the platform as a marketing and discovery tool for the gaming audience.

“Friends are the main driver of game discovery, and game developers benefit from shareable games as a result. Medal.tv is trying to enable that without the complexity of streaming,” says Matteo Vallone, the former head of Google Play games in Europe and an angel investor in Medal.

It’s a platform that saw investors willing to fork over as much as $20 million for the company, according to chief executive Pim de Witte. “There are still too many risks involved to take capital like that,” de Witte says.

Instead, the $9 million from Horizons, and previous investors like Makers Fund, will be used to steadily grow the business.

“At Medal, we believe the next big social platform will emerge in gaming, perhaps built on top of short-form content, partially as a result of gaming publishers trying to build their own isolated gaming stores and systems,” said de Witte, in a statement. “That drives social fragmentation in the market and brings out the need for platforms such as Medal and Discord, which unite gamers across games and platforms in a meaningful way.”

As digital gaming becomes the social medium of choice for a generation, new tools that allow consumers to share their virtual experiences will become increasingly common. This phenomenon will only accelerate as more events like the Marshmello concert in Fortnite become the norm.

“Medal has the exciting potential to enable a seamless social exchange of virtual experiences,” says Ryann Lai, an investor from Makers Fund.

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:

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Yesterday at TechCrunch’s Enterprise event in San Francisco, we sat down with three venture capitalists who spend a lot of their time thinking about enterprise startups. We wanted to ask what trends they are seeing, what concerns they might have about the state of the market and, of course, how startups might persuade them to write out a check.

We covered a lot of ground with the investors — Jason Green of Emergence Capital, Rebecca Lynn of Canvas Ventures and Maha Ibrahim of Canaan Partners — who told us, among other things, that startups shouldn’t expect a big M&A event right now, that there’s no first-mover advantage in the enterprise realm and why grit may be the quality that ends up keeping a startup afloat.

On the growth of enterprise startups:

Jason Green: When we started Emergence 15 years ago, we saw maybe a few hundred startups a year, and we funded about five or six. Today, we see over 1,000 a year; we probably do deep diligence on 25.

We’re in a price-hike homestretch, startup fans. Early-bird savings head south, and ticket prices head north in just a few short hours. Want to save up to $1,300 on passes to Disrupt San Francisco 2019? Buy your passes by 11:59 p.m. (PST) tonight, September 6 — avoid the costly stroke of midnight.

Wring even more savings out of the waning early-bird hours. How? Buy in bulk and score a group discount. Bring your entire squad and/or impress valued clients.

Here’s the 411 on group discounts:

Whether you bring your team or arrive solo, you’ll find incomparable networking opportunities at Disrupt SF. Head for Startup Alley to meet and greet our TC Top Picks. TechCrunch editors selected 45 companies they felt represented the best early-stage startups in these categories: AI/Machine Learning, Biotech/Healthtech, Blockchain, Fintech, Mobility, Privacy/Security, Retail/E-commerce, Robotics/IoT/Hardware, SaaS and Social Impact & Education.

You’ll find hundreds of other stellar startups exhibiting their tech and talent, and we’re here to help you make networking as painless as possible. First, get a jump on your research by reviewing our directory of exhibiting startups. Once you get a vetted handle on who you’d like to meet, take advantage of CrunchMatch, our free business match-making platform.

Available to attendees with Innovator, Founder or Investor passes, CrunchMatch automatically suggests suitable prospects based on profiles each user submits. Use it to send, accept or decline meeting requests. And you can use the service to reserve dedicated meeting spaces.

There’s so much more: Don’t miss Startup Battlefield as a group of standout startups compete for $100,000 on a world stage. And look at our conference agenda to see which of the many, many presentations, interviews, workshops and panel discussions we have on tap. So many choices and so little time.

So little time — just a few hours left to save up to $1,300 on passes to Disrupt San Francisco 2019. Avoid the price hike. Beat the deadline and buy your early-bird passes before 11:59 p.m. (PST) tonight, September 6.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt San Francisco 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

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During this week’s roundtable, we had a very active Q&A session with entrepreneurs from around the world sharing their projects. Vawsum.com As for the pitches, we had Aditya Maheswari from...

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Huboo, a U.K. startup that operates a multi-channel fulfillment service for e-commerce businesses of varying sizes, has raised £1 million in seed funding. Backing the majority of the round is London venture capital firm Episode 1, alongside a number of unnamed private individual investors.

Launched in November 2017 by Martin Bysh and Paul Dodd after the pair had run a number e-commerce experiments, Huboo aims to solve the fulfillment pain point that most online stores face. The service promises to store your stock, and then “pick, pack and deliver it” automatically as customer orders are placed.

The idea is that by outsourcing fulfillment, online shops can focus on the parts of the business where most value is added, such as customer service and choosing which products to develop and/or sell.

However, according to Huboo’s founders, except for larger e-commerce stores, the market is woefully underserved, with most fulfillment providers too expensive and uninterested in servicing smaller businesses. The only other option, they claim, is Amazon’s “Fulfillment by Amazon” (FBA), which they say is viable only for goods sold on Amazon because of discounts the e-commerce giant offers.

“Packing boxes and queuing in the post office were a horrible side effect of our [e-commerce] experimentation, and we needed to offload this if we weren’t to waste hours each day or abandon the whole e-commerce research project,” says Bysh.

“Luckily this is a solved problem, or so we thought… but we called around some fulfillment companies and discovered that they had no interest in our business, our items were too cheap and our volumes too low. And they weren’t very tech savvy, often basing their business on third-party warehouse management software, and limited marketplace integrations.”

The pair decided to change tack. Instead of attempting to find the next pure e-commerce opportunity, as their e-commerce experiments had intended, they began trying to figure out a way to “shatter the traditional economics of fulfillment.” The potential prize is a “huge chunk” of what Bysh frames as a “multi-billion, largely uncontested” market.

“We did some research on the market opportunity and determined that in the U.K. alone the opportunity was around £1 billion of more or less uncontested fulfillment business,” he says.

The key was to build systems that are flexible enough for Huboo to work with sellers, regardless of what they sell, how much they sell and whether or not the goods are sold new or “re-commerced.” “We have clients that ship a couple of items a day and other that ship thousands. Items range in price for a few pounds to hundreds,” explains Bysh.

Products fulfilled by Huboo already span items such as vitamins, CBD oils, headphones, bingo tickets, electronic bagpipes, antiques, coffee, electronics, clothes (new and used) and beauty products. Clients include startups, subscription businesses and individuals selling niche or boutique products.

Bysh says that serving this part of the fulfillment market is made possible via a combination of bespoke technology and algorithms, leading to “massive process optimisation” and reducing client management costs through SaaS sign-ups, on-boarding and support.

But it’s not just about tech-driven optimised processes. Part of Huboo’s proposition is achieved through something as simple as a modular approach the company has designed to organise its warehouses. This sees every client given a designated space within a hub and a hub manager who understands their business.

From a revenue model perspective, Huboo is attempting to align its own interests with that of sellers. The startup provides two months of free storage to all clients for every new inventory shipment, so if sellers manage and maintain turnover they won’t need to pay for storage again.

“When a seller sells, we fulfill, which means they pay us primarily when they are earning. That’s where 80% of the revenue comes from,” explains Bysh.

Meanwhile, Huboo generates additional revenue from a small administrative subscription and optional services, such as packaging. The latter will grow when “Hubstore” is launched later this year, offering upgrades and customisations in a single click. This will include related services, such as tech to help expand to additional channels and increase sales.

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

This week, we recorded on location at TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise in San Francisco, a show that saw talks from Box’s Aaron Levie, Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar and venture capitalists Maha Ibrahim, Rebecca Lynn and Jason Green. The latter, the founder of Emergence Capital, joined us before his panel for a special episode of Equity focused almost entirely on enterprise tech. Danny Crichton, the esteemed leader of TechCrunch’s Extra Crunch, was on hand to co-lead the episode with Kate.

Before we jumped too deep into the enterprise pool, we had to review some news from one of the most-talked about companies. The co-working giant, legally known as The We Company, is said to have halved its IPO exceptions to a minuscule $20 billion! OK, that’s not really that small, but compared to its most recent valuation of $47 billion, we’re a bit shocked.

Next, we ran through the IPO pipeline. Cloudflare is expected to go public next Friday. Datadog will come after that. WeWork is reportedly kicking off its roadshow next week, but given this week’s reports, that could be delayed.

After that, Green gave us his take on Box, the file sharing business in which he was an early investor. If you haven’t heard, activist investor Starboard Value took a 7.5% stake in the business this week. Green explains what that means and what he think is next for the company. Levie, of course, spoke onstage at the enterprise event. In short, the executive said his goal is to continue building a sustainable business.

Finally, we dove into the latest trends in startups. Enterprise still isn’t sexy, but it’s much sexier than it has been in the past. Why? Because all the enterprise startups want to build consumer-friendly tools. Tune in to hear what Green thinks of the consumerization of the enterprise and all the startup madness.

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The last few hours of serious euro-savings are upon us, startuppers. In the States, we’d say it’s time to fish or cut bait. What we’re trying to tell you is that super early-bird pricing for Disrupt Berlin 2019 ends tonight at 11:59 p.m. (CEST). Buy your passes now and save up to €600 or pay more tomorrow. Note that staying home is not an option.

Come to Berlin and join more than 3,000 of your kindred startup spirits from more than 50 countries. You’ll benefit from the words and wisdom of tech’s most influential leaders, investors, makers and shakers. Folks like these…and lots more phenomenal speakers.

Enjoy a fireside chat with Oscar Pierre, the CEO and co-founder of Glovo. Pierre’s bona fides are fascinating — he got his start as an aerodynamics engineer for Airbus. We can’t wait to hear how he transitioned to lead a major on-demand delivery platform with more than 1,000 employees and service in 124 cities across 21 countries.

​Quick, what company single-handedly changed the tech startup investment game? If you said SoftBank Vision Fund, well good on ya, mate. Fund partner David Thevenon will join us onstage, and we can’t wait to hear his take on ride-hailing and mobile transportation platforms. We also want to know if SoftBank board members are hands-on or hands-off when it comes to letting executive teams make decisions.

There are plenty more reasons and ways to attend Disrupt Berlin. Why not take a shot at startup glory? One application form is all it takes to apply to both Startup Battlefield and the TC Top Picks program.

Think you have what it takes to compete in Startup Battlefield and launch your company on the world’s most famous startup stage? It won’t cost you anything to apply or to participate. If you’re chosen, you’ll receive rigorous pitch coaching, so you’ll be ready to go head-to-head against some of the best early-stage startups. Who will win the $50,000 prize?

Not ready for a pitch competition quite yet? No worries. Apply to be a TC Top Pick. If you make the cut, you’ll get a free Startup Alley Exhibitor Package, a VIP experience and loads of investor and media attention.

Disrupt Berlin 2019 takes place on 11-12 December, but the super early-bird ticket pricing disappears in just a few hours. Buy your passes now before the deadline strikes tonight at 11:59 p.m. (CEST). Remember, staying home  is not an option.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt Berlin 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.