When starting a tech company, there seems to be a playbook that most entrepreneurs follow. While some may start with a bit of bootstrapping, most will dive straight into raising seed money through investors. In many cases, this is a great path. It’s a path I’ve taken twice myself, first with GroupMe, and then again with Fundera.

Ironically, though, my second venture-backed company is a business focused on helping entrepreneurs find debt financing—a process I’ve gone through only once myself. But after five years of building and scaling this business, it’s made me take a step back and consider the question of when and where debt financing might be a better option for a business than equity financing, and vice versa.

I view these financing vehicles differently now than I did half a decade ago, and think it’s time we start to think a bit wider and diversely about how we finance our growing endeavors.

After all, when entrepreneurs take venture capital, they usually sign up to provide a 10x return on an investor’s capital. This expectation ultimately influences how they operate their business in the short-term. Maybe they’re not always ready for that expectation.

Or maybe they know they need to focus on building a good business before a great one. In this case, debt may be the better vehicle, where the only expectation is to pay it back.

Whether it’s money to get your business off the ground, capital to fuel additional growth, or cash to cover a gap, and whether you’re guiding the growth of a burgeoning startup, a smaller business, or even consulting firm helping other entrepreneurs, you should think critically about how you finance your business.

Here’s what to consider.

The power of debt

There’s lots of data in the world these days, and there are a number of companies vying to store that data in data warehouses or lakes or whatever they choose to call it. Old-school companies have tended to be on prem, while new ones like Snowflake are strictly in the cloud. Yellowbrick Data wants to play the hybrid angle, and today it got a healthy $81 million Series C to continue its efforts.

The round was led by DFJ Growth with help from Next47, Third Point Ventures, Menlo Ventures, GV (formerly Google Ventures), Threshold Ventures and Samsung. New investors joining the round included IVP and BMW i Ventures. Today’s investment brings the total raised to a brisk $173 million.

Yellowbrick sees a world that many of the public cloud vendors like Microsoft and Google see, one where enterprise companies will be living in a hybrid world where some data and applications will stay on prem and some in the cloud. They believe this situation will be in place for the foreseeable future, so its product plays to that hybrid angle, where your data can be on prem or in the cloud.

The company did not want to discuss valuation in spite of the high amount of raised dollars. Neither did it want to discuss revenue growth rates, other than to say that it was growing at a healthy rate.

Randy Glein, partner at DFJ Growth, did say one of the things that attracted his company to invest in Yellowbrick was its momentum along with the technology, which in his view provides a more modern way to build data warehouses. “Yellowbrick is quickly providing a new generation of ultra-high performance data warehouse capabilities for large enterprises. The technology is a step function improvement on every dimension compared to legacy solutions, helping modern enterprises digest and interpret massive data workloads in a fraction of the time at a fraction of the cost,” he said in a statement.

It’s interesting that a company with just 100 employees would require this kind of money, but as company COO Jason Snodgress told TechCrunch, it costs a lot of money to build out a data warehouse. He’s not wrong. Snowflake, a company that’s building a cloud data warehouse, has raised almost a billion dollars.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s take SaaS for a moment. If you were to look at a SaaS company, what would you look for? Would you look for MRR metrics? Would you look for just a proof, just a minimum viable...

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Exercise tech darling and service provider Peloton has filed for an IPO with a confidential draft submission of its S-1 statement to the SEC on Wednesday. The company announced the news in a press release, and did not disclose the terms of its initial public offering in the release.

Peloton’s entry into the market was via its smart exercise bike, which is custom hardware paired with a large interactive display, through which users can access courses and streamed classes and coaching.

Earlier in the year, Peloton released its latest product, a connected treadmill with similar service offerings for members. The company, which last raised a round of $550 million in funding in August and has a valuation at around $4 billion, has inspired similar home health and fitness businesses, including smart mirror “Mirror,” which caters to more generalist home exercise routines and which recently raised at a nearly $300 million valuation.

Peloton responded to an inquiry from TechCrunch that they’re unable to provide comment beyond the release at this time due to the quiet period.

The houses along the tree-lined blocks of Josina Avenue in Palo Alto, with their big back yards, swimming pools and driveways are about as far removed from the snarls of traffic, sputtering diesel engines, and smoggy air of South America’s major metropolises as one can get.

But it was in one of those houses, about a twelve-minute bicycle ride from Stanford University, that the seed was planted for what has become a renaissance in technology entrepreneurship in Latin America.

Back in 2010, when Adeyemi Ajao, Carlo Dapuzzo, and Juan de Antonio were students at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business they could not predict that they would be counted among the vanguard of investors and entrepreneurs transforming Latin America’s startup economy.

At the time, Ajao was negotiating the sale of his first business, the Spanish social networking company, Tuenti, to Telefonica (in what would be a $100 million exit). Carlo Dapuzzo was in Palo Alto taking a break from his job at Monashees, which at that time was a small, early-stage investment fund based in Brazil focused on investing in Latin America. Juan de Antonio had left a job as a consultant at BCG to attend Stanford’s business school on a Fulbright scholarship.

In just two years, Ajao would be a founding investor in de Antonio’s ride-hailing business, Cabify, focused on Latin America and Europe; and Dapuzzo would be seeding the ride-hailing service 99Taxis. Today, Cabify is worth over $1 billion and has focused its business primarily on Latin America while 99 was sold to the Chinese ride-hailing company Didi for $1 billion — making it one of the largest deals in Latin America’s young startup history.

The three men are now at the center of a vast web of startups whose intersection can, in many cases, be traced back to the house on Josina Avenue where Dapuzzo and de Antonio lived and where Ajao spent much of his free time.

“It’s the same dynamics as the PayPal Mafia,” says Ajao. “The new unicorn batches which started in Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil. Although they’re all trans-national, they all know each other and literally they are all friends and all co-investors in each other’s companies and they all have links to Silicon Valley… and… more importantly… to Stanford.”

Stalled economic engines

If Ajao’s enthusiasm sounds familiar, that’s because it is. There was another wave of interest in Latin America that started surging nearly a decade ago, but crashed nearly five years into what was supposed to be the time of the region’s explosive growth in the global scene.

Back in 2008, as the U.S. was sliding into recession, global economists cast about for countries whose economic might could potentially provide some antidote to the toxic assets that were poisoning the global financial system in America and Western Europe. It was then that the concept coined by a Goldman Sachs economist back in 2001 (in the aftermath of another financial shock) baked Brazil, Russia, India and China into a BRIC — a group of nations that, as a bloc, could create enough growth to keep the global economy moving upwards.

All of them were growing at a rapid clip, albeit at different speeds and from different starting trajectories. But they were still all humming. Investment — from large financial institutions, private equity and venture capital firms — all began flowing into the four countries.

In Brazil and across Latin America, companies from the U.S. began to cast their eyes South for growth. That’s when Groupon began to make inroads into the region. When Groupon acquired the Chilean company ClanDescuento, it served as a starting gun for activity across multiple geographies.

Two years after that acquisition by Groupon, Redpoint’s Brazilian investment vehicle, Redpoint eVentures was able to close on a $130 million fund for Brazilian and Latin American investments in just under four months. While Brazil held the bulk of the capital, many of the largest startup companies were being launched out of Buenos Aires in Argentina.

Globant, Despegar, MercadoLibre, and OLX were all lucrative deals for the investors who made them. Today, they remain solid companies, but they didn’t create the ecosystem that both local investors and entrepreneurs were hoping for. Brazil’s Peixe Urbano was also a rising star at the time, but it too wound up selling, in its case to Chinese internet Baidu. Indeed, the Peixe Urbano funding gave investors like Benchmark’s Matt Cohler their first exposure to the region.

A 2012 default on Argentinian debt derailed the economy and Brazil’s economy began seizing up at around the same time. Then, in 2014, Brazil was hit by both an economic and political collapse that shook the country’s stability and ushered in a two-year-long recession.

Ultimately, the Brazilian component of the BRIC miracle, that would have potentially ushered in a brighter future for the broader region, didn’t materialize.

The next starting gun

Ajao began investing in Latin America as an angel investor during the beginnings of the downturn in Brazil and when Argentina was also seizing up. It’s also when Dapuzzo made the initial bet on 99Taxis — bringing Ajao in as an investor — and Cabify launched, eventually bringing its service to Mexico and seeing huge growth in the Latin American market.

500 Startups expanded to Mexico around the same period, in what turned out to be a prescient move. Because even as the broader economies were slowing, technology adoption — fueled by rising smartphone sales and new internet-enabled mobile services — was speeding up.

Groupon’s push into the region taught a new consumer market about the pleasures of venture-backed e-commerce, but it was ride-hailing that truly paved the way for Latin America’s future success. Many factors played a role, from the rise of smartphones to the stabilization and growth of economies in the region outside of Argentina and Brazil and the return of a generation of founders who gained exposure and experience in Silicon Valley.

Here again, the house on Josina Street and the friends that were made over the course of the two-year grad school program at Stanford would play a critical role.

“99 was the second start and this new generation of founders,” said one investor with a deep knowledge of the region.

A herd of unicorns

Ajao also sees 99 as ground zero for the network that has spawned a unicorn stampede in Latin America. It’s a group of companies that covers everything from financial services, mobility and logistics, food delivery and even pet care.

In some ways it’s an extension and culmination of the American on-demand thesis, with allowances for the unique characteristics of the region’s varied economies and cultural experience, investors and entrepreneurs said.

“In my mind 99 had a lot to do with what is happening right now with the current PayPal mafia [of Latin America] because they became the first big new exit on the continent,” Ajao says.

Entrepreneurs from 99 spun out to form Yellow, a dockless scooter and bike-sharing company that was initially backed by Monashees, Grishin Robotics and Base10 Partners — the venture firm that Ajao co-founded and which closed a $137 million venture fund just nine months ago.

Monashees and Base10 also co-invested in Grin, a Mexico City-based dockless scooter company. Together the two companies managed to raise over $100 million before merging into one company earlier this. That deal ultimately provided a challenger to the automotive-based ride-sharing businesses that were beginning to encroach on the scooter business.

The growth of 99Taxis and the rise of startups in Latin America ultimately convinced David Velez, a former venture investor with Sequoia Capital to return to Brazil and try his hand at entrepreneurship as well. A year behind Ajao, de Antonio and Dapuzzo at Stanford, Velez was also friendly with the group.

Velez worked at Sequoia Capital and saw the opportunity that Latin America presented as an investment environment. After starting Sequoia Capital Latin America he transitioned into an entrepreneurial role and became the co-founder of Nubank, which would be Sequoia’s first Latin America investment. Now a $4 billion financial technology powerhouse, the Nubank deal was yet another proof point that the Latin American market had come of age — and another branch on a tree that has its roots in Stanford’s business school and the Silicon Valley venture community.

The final piece of this intersecting web of investments and relationships is Rappi — the Colombian delivery service business that was also backed by Monazhees and Base10. The first company from Latin America to enter YCombinator and the first investment from the new Silicon Valley power player, Andreessen Horowitz, Rappi epitomizes the new generation of Latin American startups.

“The way we think about this part of the world is as a massive market with 700 million people living on the continent and really dense cities,” says Rappi co-founder and president, Sebastian Mejia. “And it’s a region where the tech stack hasn’t been built, which gives you an opportunity to solve problems and create digital champions that look more similar to China than the U.S.”

Mejia epitomizes what Ajao calls a new breed of startup entrepreneur that doesn’t necessarily look to other markets for inspiration or business models, but solves local problems for a local customer, rather than a global one.

“Being local was more of a competitive advantage than a disadvantage and we can solve problems in a better way than a Silicon Valley company or a Chinese company could,” says Mejia. “What we’re starting to see now is that those changes in perspective allow us to build bigger companies.”

In all, Monashees and Base10 have invested in companies operating in Latin America that have a combined valuation of over $6 billion between them. Through the extended network of Stanford connections and the startups that Velez has brought to the table that number is higher than $10 billion.

The next $10 billion

If the Latin American market was once overlooked by venture investors like Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Benchmark or Accel, that’s certainly no longer the case.

Funds are pouring into the region at an unprecedented clip, driven by SoftBank and its interest on the continent following its commitment to launching a new $2 billion fund in the region and its subsequent $1 billion investment in Rappi.

“Latin America is on the cusp of becoming one of the most important economic regions in the world, and we anticipate significant growth in the decades ahead,” said Masayoshi Son, chairman and CEO of SBG, in a statement when SoftBank launched its fund.

“SBG plans to invest in entrepreneurs throughout Latin America and use technology to help address the challenges faced by many emerging economies with the goal of improving the lives of millions of Latin Americans,” he added.

Son is likely thinking about the 375 million internet users in Latin America and the 250 million smartphone users across the region. It’s also worth noting that retail e-commerce has been a huge driver of economic growth despite other economic obstacles. The region’s e-commerce has grown to $54 billion in 2018 up from $29.8 billion in 2015.

Even more critically, there are some key areas where innovation and new services are still sorely needed. Access to transportation isn’t great for the roughly 79% of the 700 million people across South America who live in cities. Then there are 400 million people across Latin America who are either unbanked or underbanked. Healthcare is another area where a lack of investment to date could create potential opportunities for new startups.

More generally, poor infrastructure remains a significant problem that companies like Rappi and another SoftBank investment, Loggi, are looking to make inroads into.

“Latin America was for many years, underinvested,” says de Antonio, whose Cabify business has managed to score a valuation of over $1 billion largely based on the opportunities ahead of it in the Latin American market. “You will see a bit more money to catch up. The market is big… and potentially huge… I’m a big believer that it’s a good moment now to invest.”

For de Antonio, Cabify, Rappi, and other startups are only now hitting their stride. In the future, they stand to enable a host of other opportunities, he believes.

“The entrepreneurial mindset is really ingrained in Latin America… the difference is maybe there wasn’t an ecosystem to help these ideas to scale.. .there are huge fortunes in the region but they typically… they have a lot of their assets invested in the region… but they need to diversify,” said de Antonio. “Until recently there hasn’t been an active funding market for all of these startups.”

For de Antonio and Ajao, one of the critical lessons that they learned from their time at Stanford and being exposed to the broader Silicon Valley ecosystem was the notion of collaboration.

“This is something we learned from San Francisco,” de Antonio said. “The way companies help each other is something that we haven’t seen people do before. And usually when you are a young company this can be the difference between being successful or a failure.

Aaron Rodgers is an athlete, an influencer and now, a venture capitalist.

The football star, Super Bowl champion and long-time quarterback for the Green Bay Packers has teamed up with ROTH Capital Partners’ Nate Raabe and Byron Roth to launch Rx3 Ventures. Today, the trio are announcing a $50 million debut fund focused on the consumer market.

The fund is supported by influencers in the sports and entertainment market, with a goal of giving them a stake in the companies for which they are hired to be spokespeople. Influencer marketing continues to gain traction; Rx3 wants to ensure authentic, equitable relationships between brands and public figures.

“As professional athletes, we’re constantly approached with investment opportunities,” Rodgers said in a statement. “With more and more access to deal flow, it’s hard for any athlete or high-profile individual to adequately evaluate each opportunity. We are in a unique position to help drive positive outcomes for companies, particularly consumer brands, but the relationship needs to be authentic. With Rx3, I saw the opportunity to create an investment platform that brings together a group of like-minded influential investors and their respective networks with the backing of institutional resources.”

Rx3 has invested in a number of startups already, including VICIS, known for its $950 Zero1 football helmet designed for adult players. The startup raised a $28.5 million Series B in November, with participation from Rodgers, as well as other pro footballers, including Roger Staubach, Jerry Rice, Russell Wilson and Doug Baldwin.

Rx3, which invests alongside consumer private equity and growth capital funds, has also backed Hims, CorePower Yoga, glasses retailer Privé Revaux and Hydrow, a maker of indoor rowing machines.

For the third year in a row, cloud-based financial and human resources enterprise services provider Workday (NASDAQ: WDAY) was ranked as the leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Cloud Core...

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Getsafe, the German insurance startup targeting millennials, has raised $17 million (€15m) in a Series A funding.

The round is led by Earlybird, with CommerzVentures and other existing investors also participating, while the capital will be used for European expansion. Notably, the company plans to launch in the U.K. by the end of the year.

Founded in May 2015 by Christian Wiens (CEO) and Marius Blaesing (CTO), Getsafe initially launched as a digital insurance broker but has since pivoted to a direct to digital consumer insurance offering of its own (its brokerage business was sold to Verivox).

The startup claims it is the market leader in the digital-first 20 to 35-year-old segment, with 60,000 customers, although competitors such as Wefox’s One may disagree.

Getsafe customers can take out renters insurance and liability insurance. The latter includes bike and drone coverage, with additional products to be added soon.

More broadly, Getsafe says it is “reinventing insurance”. The insurtech startup, based in Heidelberg, says its tech uses AI to help customers identify the insurance protection they might need. “With a few clicks, customers can learn about, buy, and manage insurance on their smartphone,” says the company. Claims can be done entirely digitally, too, via the Getsafe app and chatbot.

As part of the investment, Getsafe plans to grow its team from the current 50 employees to more than 100. The recruitment drive will span customer care, software development and data science. The startup also plans to raise further funds over next twelve months.

The big social networks and video games have failed to prioritize user well-being over their own growth. As a result, society is losing the battle against bullying, predators, hate speech, misinformation and scammers. Typically when a whole class of tech companies have a dire problem they can’t cost-effectively solve themselves, a software-as-a-service emerges to fill the gap in web hosting, payment processing, etc. So along comes AntiToxin Technologies, a new startup that wants to help web giants fix their abuse troubles with its safety-as-a-service.

It all started on Minecraft. AntiToxin co-founder Ron Porat is cybersecurity expert who’d started ad blocker Shine. Yet right under his nose, one of his kids was being mercilessly bullied on the hit children’s game. If even those most internet-savvy parents were being surprised by online abuse, Porat realized the issue was bigger than could be addressed by victims trying to protect themselves. The platforms had to do more, research confirmed.

A recent Ofcom study found almost 80% of children had a potentially harmful online experience in the past year. Indeed, 23% said they’d been cyberbullied, and 28% of 12 to 15-year-olds said they’d received unwelcome friend or follow requests from strangers. A Ditch The Label study found of 12 to 20-year-olds who’d been bullied online, 42% were bullied on Instagram.

Unfortunately, the massive scale of the threat combined with a late start on policing by top apps makes progress tough without tremendous spending. Facebook tripled the headcount of its content moderation and security team, taking a noticeable hit to its profits, yet toxicity persists. Other mainstays like YouTube and Twitter have yet to make concrete commitments to safety spending or staffing, and the result is non-stop scandals of child exploitation and targeted harassment. Smaller companies like Snap or Fortnite-maker Epic Games may not have the money to develop sufficient safeguards in-house.

“The tech giants have proven time and time again we can’t rely on them. They’ve abdicated their responsibility. Parents need to realize this problem won’t be solved by these companies” says AntiToxin co-founder and CEO Zohar Levkovitz, who previously sold his mobile ad company Amobee to Singtel for $321 million. “You need new players, new thinking, new technology. A company where ‘Safety’ is the product, not an after-thought. And that’s where we come-in.” The startup recently raised a multimillion-dollar seed round from Mangrove Capital Partners and is allegedly prepping for a double-digit millions Series A.

AntiToxin’s technology plugs into the backends of apps with social communities that either broadcast or message with each other and are thereby exposed to abuse. AntiToxin’s systems privately and securely crunch all the available signals regarding user behavior and policy violation reports, from text to videos to blocking. It then can flag a wide range of toxic actions and let the client decide whether to delete the activity, suspend the user responsible or how else to proceed based on their terms and local laws.

Through the use of artificial intelligence, including natural language processing, machine learning and computer vision, AntiToxin can identify the intent of behavior to determine if it’s malicious. For example, the company tells me it can distinguish between a married couple consensually exchanging nude photos on a messaging app versus an adult sending inappropriate imagery to a child. It also can determine if two teens are swearing at each other playfully as they compete in a video game or if one is verbally harassing the other. The company says that beats using static dictionary blacklists of forbidden words.

AntiToxin is under NDA, so it can’t reveal its client list, but claims recent media attention and looming regulation regarding online abuse has ramped up inbound interest. Eventually the company hopes to build better predictive software to identify users who’ve shown signs of increasingly worrisome behavior so their activity can be more closely moderated before they lash out. And it’s trying to build a “safety graph” that will help it identify bad actors across services so they can be broadly deplatformed similar to the way Facebook uses data on Instagram abuse to police connected WhatsApp accounts.

“We’re approaching this very human problem like a cybersecurity company, that is, everything is a Zero-Day for us” says Levkowitz, discussing how AntiToxin indexes new patterns of abuse it can then search for across its clients. “We’ve got intelligence unit alums, PhDs and data scientists creating anti-toxicity detection algorithms that the world is yearning for.” AntiToxin is already having an impact. TechCrunch commissioned it to investigate a tip about child sexual imagery on Microsoft’s Bing search engine. We discovered Bing was actually recommending child abuse image results to people who’d conducted innocent searches, leading Bing to make changes to clean up its act.

One major threat to AntiToxin’s business is what’s often seen as boosting online safety: end-to-end encryption. AntiToxin claims that when companies like Facebook expand encryption, they’re purposefully hiding problematic content from themselves so they don’t have to police it.

Facebook claims it still can use metadata about connections on its already encrypted WhatApp network to suspend those who violate its policy. But AntiToxin provided research to TechCrunch for an investigation that found child sexual abuse imagery sharing groups were openly accessible and discoverable on WhatsApp — in part because encryption made them hard to hunt down for WhatsApp’s automated systems.

AntiToxin believes abuse would proliferate if encryption becomes a wider trend, and it claims the harm that it  causes outweighs fears about companies or governments surveiling unencrypted transmissions. It’s a tough call. Political dissidents, whistleblowers and perhaps the whole concept of civil liberty rely on encryption. But parents may see sex offenders and bullies as a more dire concern that’s reinforced by platforms having no idea what people are saying inside chat threads.

What seems clear is that the status quo has got to go. Shaming, exclusion, sexism, grooming, impersonation and threats of violence have started to feel commonplace. A culture of cruelty breeds more cruelty. Tech’s success stories are being marred by horror stories from their users. Paying to pick up new weapons in the fight against toxicity seems like a reasonable investment to demand.

A startup that is attempting to significantly improve the way how Indians rent or buy an apartment just raised a substantially big amount to further pursue its mission. Bangalore-based real estate property operator NoBroker said today it has raised $51 million in a new round of funding.

The Series C financing round for the five-year-old startup was led by General Atlantic . It valued NoBroker at about $200 million, a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. Existing investors SAIF Partners and BEENEXT also participated in the round. NoBroker has raised about $71 million in capital to date, it said in a statement.

NoBroker, which operates in Bengaluru, Chennai, Gurgaon, Mumbai and Pune, has quickly emerged as one of the largest players in the real estate business. It operates over 2.5 million properties on its website and has already served more than 6 million users to date — up from 1.5 million customers two years ago. The startup helps Indians looking for an apartment avoid the brokers  — hence the name NoBroker — and connects them directly to property owners.

Real estate brokers in India, as is true in other markets, help people find properties. But they can charge up to 10 months worth of rent (leasing) — or a single-digit percent of the apartment’s worth if someone is buying the property — in urban cities as their commission.

Amit Kumar, CEO and cofounder of NoBroker, told TechCrunch in an interview that the startup will use the fresh capital to expand its operations in the nation. “This current funding round will support us in our plans to expand our operations. Our objective is to accelerate customer and deal-closure growth and continue to deliver value to customers across the country. We will also invest in our home store and financial services products,” he said.

Kumar said the startup, which generates revenue in two ways, is increasingly reaching profitability. First, it lets non-paying users get in touch with only nine property owners. Those who wish to contact more property owners are required to pay a fee. Second, property owners can opt to pay NoBroker to have its representatives deal with prospective buyers — in a move that ironically makes the startup serve as a broker.

As noble as NoBroker’s mission sounds, its path to expansion is filled with challenges. The startup is competing with a number of players including heavily backed NestAway, which counts Goldman Sachs and Tiger Global among its investors. NestAway operates in eight cities and has raised north of $100 million to date. Budget hotel startup Oyo, which now counts Airbnb as an investor, also entered this space with Oyo Living. India’s real estate industry is estimated to grow to $1 trillion in worth by 2030.

Besides, there are some other local challenges. Brokers are unsurprisingly not happy with startups such as NoBroker and have grown hostile in recent years. They continue to attack and harass NoBroker employees. So much so that the startup had to delist its address from Google Maps.

“We have been extremely impressed by the strength of the NoBroker team and their relentless focus on using technology to create an improved user experience in the large real estate market in India. We look forward to supporting them in their journey of making real estate transactions easier and convenient,” said Sharad Bhojnagarwala, VP of General Atlantic, in a prepared statement.

Sramana Mitra: What about other channels like eBay? Ethan McAfee: We’ve always focused on the Amazon channel because Amazon is 12 times the size of Walmart and Jet combined. A lot of the products on...

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Mirakl is launching a new product called Mirakl Connect. As the name suggests, this central dashboard lets you control which marketplace you’re working with, and which seller you want to list on your marketplace.

Mirakl is a French startup that recently raised a $70 million funding round. The company works with e-commerce platforms so that they can add a marketplace of third-party sellers in addition to their own inventory.

Marketplaces are increasingly popular on e-commerce websites, and Mirakl powers the marketplaces for Darty, Office Depot, Best Buy in Canada, etc. The company also powers B2B marketplaces.

But now that marketplaces are booming, it becomes increasingly complicated for sellers to list their products on different marketplaces and reach as many clients as possible.

Thanks to Mirakl Connect, sellers can create a company profile and promote products on multiple marketplaces at once. On the other side, e-commerce platforms that are just starting can find third-party sellers more easily.

If you’re running a small e-commerce website, third-party sellers don’t want to waste time and efforts to list products if it doesn’t lead to a lot of sales. By minimizing efforts, it should boost smaller marketplaces.

Sellers and marketplace owners can discuss together on Mirakl Connect with a built-in chat feature. Yes, Mirakl Connect sounds a bit like a marketplace of marketplaces — double marketplaces all the way.

Tier, the Berlin-based e-scooter rental startup that competes with the likes of Voi, Lime, Wind, Circ and a host of others, is rolling out new hardware today in a bid to further improve the usability and unit economics of its service.

The new Tier scooters produced via a strategic partnership with Okai utilise a “modular” design — something that Voi is also doing — so that they can be customised for different (regulated) markets, iterated more frequently and for easier maintenance.

Previously, the startup was using off-the-shelf-models, namely the Segway Ninebot ES2 and ES4, which aren’t explicitly designed to withstand the wear and tear endured by being shared commercially, with multiple users and rides per day.

On that note, Tier co-founder and CEO Lawrence Leuschner tells me the startup recently ratcheted up 2 million rides. The company operates in over 20 cities across Europe, with around 10,000 Tier scooters on the streets. Noteworthy, Leuschner says Tier is already profitable “in several key cities”.

He also talked up what he claims is Tier’s better unit economics and more capital efficient model. This sees the startup shun the gig economy-style model where competitors utilise freelance workers for charging e-scooters, often in their own homes. Instead, Tier employs a centralised team of professionals for pick up, charging, maintenance and repair processes, meaning that problems in the hardware can be spotted earlier and maintenance can be more proactive, increasing the lifetime of each device and ensuring more scooters remain in circulation. That’s the argument, anyway.

Leuschner tells me this “professionalised” model is born out of his previous experience as CEO and co-founder of reBuy, the European online used electronics and media retailer, a company he says was dedicated to extending the life cycle of over 100 million products. His point is, how do you ensure quality of service if you don’t frequently touch your own products, in a thinly veiled critique of competing e-scooter services.

The new more rugged Tier e-scooters are designed to last at least 12 months in operation, more than twice Tier’s current average device lifetime. Other improved features include 10″ tires and improved suspension (variants include double or single suspension), plus an increased range of 35-40 kilometres. The IoT, bell and cables are now integrated, and thus less susceptible to vandalism.

Safety is said to be significantly improved, too, including more powerful brakes. Variants feature one mechanic and one electric brake, or two mechanic and one electric brake. This is especially important given concerns over how safe e-scooters are, whether used on sidewalks or on the road. Just last week, Sweden saw its first e-scooter rental fatality, leading to the Swedish transport agency reportedly calling for a ban on all electric scooters.

Meanwhile, along with most competitors, such as Circ, Tier is keen to position itself beyond e-scooters alone and is now calling itself a “micro-mobility” company. I’m told “new exciting vehicles” that go beyond scooters are in the pipeline and that the Tier software platform has been built to cover various “shared urban mobility,” with the ability to integrate all kinds of urban mobility categories, not limited to the startup’s own assets.

To date, Tier has raised around €30 million. Its backers include Whitestar, Northzone, Speedinvest and Point Nine. Most recently, Formula 1 World Champion Nico Rosberg (pictured) became an investor. I’m also hearing the company is in the midst of raising a large round.

Uber’s best hope to beat all its ride sharing and food delivery competitors is that it does both. Through cross-promotion, it can combine activities people might only do a few times per week or month into a product they open daily.

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said cryptically on the company’s first earnings call last month that “Suffice it to say we are starting to experiment in ways in which we can upsell our ride customers to Eats deals in a way that — you know, to be plain spoken — isn’t annoying . . . I will tell you that we are very, very early in the stages of exploring the many, many ways in which our Ride business can help continue to build our Eats business and vice versa by the way . . . I don’t want to give away too much.”

But TechCrunch has discovered that specifically, Uber is starting to make a web view of Uber Eats accessible from its main app. A tipster in Boston first clued us in to the feature and now Uber confirms that it’s merging a fully functional web version of Uber Eats into its ride-hailing product. Uber quietly began rolling out a pilot of the merged app in late April. Uber Eats app will remain available as a standalone app.

The move could give Uber a customer acquisition and retention edge on single-product competitors like Lyft or DoorDash, while helping it keep up with multi-product peers like Careem and Bolt (which recently added food delivery), and its biggest global foe Didi from China which just launched food delivery in Uber stronghold Mexico. Combining functionality means Uber’s ride hailing customers could see a promotion for Eats and instantly try it without downloading a new app as their tummy rumbles. It could also get the 50% of Eats customers who don’t ride in Ubers to try it for transportation.

“We’re rolling out a new way to order Eats directly in the Uber app on Android (we’ve already been experimenting on iOS)” an Uber spokesperson tells me. “This cross-promotion gives riders who are new to Eats a seamless way to order a meal via a webview instead of opening up the App Store for download.”

The merged app is now available to all iOS users in cities where Uber doesn’t offer bikes and scooters that already clutter the interface of its car service app such as SF, LA, and NYC. The Android version is out to 17% of riders in Uber Eats’ 500 other markets with the goal of the cross-promotional tool being available to all riders.

“We believe our platform model allows us to acquire, engage and retain customers with the cost, as well as efficiency and effectiveness advantage over our rivals, typically monoline competitors” Khosrowshahi said on the earnings call. “What we found is that with Rides and Eats . . . we are seeing early signal where essentially you can have very little if any cannibalization of a Ride and throw a significant amount of potential demand onto the Eats side.”

The CEO also mentioned Uber’s loyalty and subscription programs are vital to cross-promotion. Its Uber Rewards that rolled out in January earns users points for both rides and food orders, and higher reward tiers score users free Eats deliveries that could get them hooked on the convenience. And last month, TechCrunch broke the news of Uber prototyping a $9.99 Uber Eats Pass subscription that offers unlimited free Eats deliveries.

“Really what we are looking to do is significantly increase the percentage of our MAPCs [monthly active platform consumers] that use both products [ride-hailing and Eats] and when we see customers using more than one product, their engagement with the platform more than doubles” Khosrowshahi concluded on the call. “So not only does engagement with Uber increase, but the engagement with our individual products increases as well, so it’s kind of a win, win, win.”

Uber’s market is all about lifetime value. If it can lock users in now, it could earn a fortune off them in the decades to come. That’s why it’s spending so much on marketing and expansion now even if it means racking up earnings losses. But its best (and cheapest) marketing channel is likely cross-promotion through the apps it’s already gotten people to install.

Slack wants to be the new operating system for teams, something it has made clear on more than one occasion, including in its recent S-1 filing. To accomplish that goal, it put together an in-house $80 million venture fund in 2015 to invest in third-party developers building on top of its platform.

Weeks ahead of its direct listing on The New York Stock Exchange, it continues to put that money to work.

Troops is the latest to land additional capital from the enterprise giant. The New York-based startup helps sales teams communicate with a customer relationship management tool plugged directly into Slack. In short, it automates routine sales management activities and creates visibility into important deals through integrations with employee emails and Salesforce.

Troops founder and chief executive officer Dan Reich, who previously co-founded TULA Skincare, told TechCrunch he opted to build a Slackbot rather than create an independent platform because Slack is a rocket ship and he wanted a seat on board: “When you think about where Slack will go in the future, it’s obvious to us that companies all over the world will be using it,” he said.

Troops has raised $12 million in Series B funding in a round led by Aspect Ventures, with participation from the Slack Fund, First Round Capital, Felicis Ventures, Susa Ventures, Chicago Ventures, Hone Capital, InVision founder Clark Valberg and others. The round brings Troops’ total raised to $22 million.

Launched in 2015 by New York tech veterans Reich, Scott Britton and Greg Ratner, the trio weren’t initially sure of Slack’s growth trajectory. It wasn’t until Slack confirmed its intent to support the developer ecosystem with a suite of developer tools and a fund that the team focused its efforts on building a Slackbot.

“People sometimes thought of us, at least in the early days, as a little bit crazy,” Reich said. “But now Slack is the fastest-growing SaaS company ever.”

“We think the biggest opportunity in the [enterprise SaaS] category is going to be tools oriented around the customer-facing employee (CRM), and that’s where we are innovating,” he added.

Troops’ tools are helpful for any customer-facing team, Reich explains. Envoy, WeWork, HubSpot and a few hundred others are monthly paying subscribers of the tool, using it to interact with their CRM in a messaging interface and to receive notifications when a deal has closed. Troops integrates with Salesforce, so employees can use it to search records, schedule automatic reports and celebrate company wins.

Slack, in partnership with a number of venture capital funds, including Accel, Kleiner Perkins and Index, has also deployed capital to a number of other startups, like Lattice, Drafted and Loom.

With Slack’s direct listing afoot, the Troops team is counting on the imminent and long-term growth of the company’s platform.

“We think it’s still early days,” Reich said. “In the future, we see every company using something like Troops to manage their day-to-day.”

Since 2013, SparkLabs Group has invested in more than 230 companies, and my general advice to our founders and portfolio companies hasn’t changed: I always tell them not to overthink valuation, know what they need in terms of capital for their seed round and how there is “good dilution” and “bad dilution.” Whether your dilution ends up being good or bad (or ugly) generally depends on how well you execute.

To solidify my advice, I sometimes go through the math of possible seed rounds and how future rounds can play out. To keep the discussion simple and focus on my core points, I keep the amount of investment the same and assume the company is starting with a 20% stock option pool, which venture capital firms typically require by a startup’s Series A round.

Three scenarios

I map out three valuations, representing a standard Silicon Valley startup with a pre-money valuation of $5 million (Scenario “A”), a “hot” startup with an $8 million pre-money valuation (Scenario “B”) and an outlier with a pre-money valuation of $12 million (Scenario “C”).

Let’s look at the typical pathway where the founders raise a $2 million seed round on a pre-money valuation of $5 million. They build their product, launch, gain great momentum and successfully raise an $8 million Series A, where even though they don’t get that many lead interests, they get a decent $20 million pre-money valuation.

Let’s assume this startup is in a mature startup space where investors are looking for good revenue traction.  With the $8 million raised, a startup team can face “The Good,” which I define as executing on all cylinders, or “The Bad,” which I would define as a struggle.

Sometimes it’s not about executing poorly or mismanagement. A product can be too early, deal with longer than expected sales cycles or face other factors outside a startup team’s control. Regardless, “The Bad” situation can be where a company isn’t able to raise their Series B at all — or struggles to find investors that still believe in the product and team, and gets funding but not at the best valuation for the founders and team ($15 million raised on a post-money valuation of $50 million).

“The Good” would be a startup hitting traffic, revenues, clients sales or whatever metrics help drive success.  Here the same startup raises a $15 million Series B on a post-money valuation of $95 million.

Scenario “C” was the startup with the outlier valuation at their seed stage that raised a $2 million seed round with a post-money valuation of $14 million. Probably a company founded by a co-founder of Twitter or a hot YC company. Their Series A continues on a similar trajectory, raising $8 million with a post-money valuation of $38 million. Their fork in the road is similar to the prior situation. “The Good” is a Series B that raises $15 million with a post-money valuation of $115 million, while the “The Bad” raises the same amount but has a post-money valuation of $85 million, and the founders owning 39.9% of the company versus 45.1%.

Don’t overthink or overplan your fundraising rounds

The easy conclusion is that it is really hard for founders and a team to predict and plan their fundraising rounds over the next several years, much less how well their product will turn out.

But you can make sure you’re better prepared as entrepreneurs by asking yourself some basic questions:

How much capital do you really need to last you 12-18 months?Will this amount allow you to hit milestones to raise your Series A or Series B?

Some startups don’t need much capital to take off, while others need more. An entrepreneur’s problem can be raising too little or too much capital.

During my second startup in 2000 — during the first internet boom when money was flowing easier than today — we raised $7 million as our first round. I would describe that experience as “big rounds are like meth for entrepreneurs,” which typically ends in “The Ugly.” Money burns quicker than most entrepreneurs think. It’s not paper, it’s paper soaked in kerosene. Luckily, while facing bankruptcy, we closed an additional $7.5 million and the company became profitable — but not without a lot of pain and torment.

We have seen a fair number of our founders underestimate their cash needs at the seed round. Then they have to raise additional seed capital, which isn’t easy. Some might have been too confident in their sales ability or how efficient they would be with their capital. Investors might assume those were issues, plus question whether the market is really there, or whether the management team made too many missteps. Be prepared to answer these types of questions if you need to raise additional seed capital.

Pitching the valuation game

We typically remind our founders that the best way to increase their valuation is to execute well and gain enough interest to be offered at least two term sheets.

If you are raising a Series A and your seed round was a convertible note or a SAFE, that cap really isn’t your valuation, so don’t get fixated on that as a minimum. We’ve had portfolio companies with valuation caps of over $30 million pre-money, but their Series A was priced above $20 million. We’ve also had a founder overzealously focused on their valuation cap from their seed round on, who ruined negotiations with a top 10 VC firm because they wouldn’t go lower than their cap.

If you have one potential lead, I generally recommend knowing your value and negotiating reasonably. If your lead lowballs you, of course you should walk away. But if it’s within range, don’t nickel and dime on the valuation.

Your goal is to create investor interest from multiple firms while generating the least amount of friction to quickly close your round. It might be a difficult balance between knowing your value but respecting what investors are looking for, but don’t kill your fundraising efforts by not being flexible on valuation. Remember, it’s not all about the money and your ownership percentage. If one of our portfolio companies had a term sheet for a $10 million pre-money valuation from an unknown family office or an $8 million pre-money valuation from a top-tier venture capital firm, we would tell them to take the lesser valuation, even if it’s a smaller gain on our books.

Although raising money while navigating dilution can be tricky, with the right preparation and mindset, it’s possible to close your round with the best value for your company.

Whole Biome has pulled in $35 million in Series B financing from a list of investing titans, including Sequoia, Khosla, True Ventures, the Mayo Foundation and AME Ventues — just to name a few. The goal? To heal what ails you using microscopic bugs.

Medical science has caught on in the last few years about the importance of gut health using these bugs (also known as probiotics). Now startups are pitching in using venture money to come up with new and novel ideas.

“We’re at a unique point in time as the field of microbiome biology converges with enabling cutting-edge technologies and bioinformatics that will open up a whole new world of innovative health products,” said Colleen Cutcliffe, Whole Biome’s co-founder and chief executive officer.

Cutliffe, who hails from DNA sequencing company Pacific Biosciences, along with her partners Jim Bullard and John Eid, built a platform able to compute information from varying populations and compare microbiome sequencing to get a clear picture of what’s missing in a patient’s flora for overall health.

The next step is to use the raised funds to launch a product for the management of Type 2 Diabetes.

Many of the prescription diabetes medications out on the market today can come with a load of side effects like upset stomach, dizziness, rashes or inability to consume alcohol. However, Whole Biome says their product will not have any side effects.

Slated for release in early 2020, the startup has conducted double-blinded, placebo-controlled, randomized clinical trials for a product that releases special probiotics into your gut with the goal of reducing glucose spikes.

“Whole Biome is creating novel, disease-targeting microbiome interventions that have the potential to improve the course of many of the significant health issues facing people today,” said Sequoia partner Roelof Botha. “They have built an integrated approach and a multi-disciplinary team across research, development and commercialization to unlock complex microbiome biology and create products with both clinical efficacy and unparalleled safety.”

To date, Whole Biome has now raised $57 million in funding.

Bell Curve founder Julian Shapiro describes his team as talented growth marketers who have a long tail expertise of various channels and who aren’t afraid to play part-time therapists. As an agency, they’re comfortable grounding founder expectations by explaining “No, virality isn’t a dependable growth strategy,” but “Hey, we can come up with a better strategy together.”

Bell Curve, the agency, also runs Demand Curve, a remote growth marketing training program that teaches students (and marketing professionals) the ins and outs of performance marketing.

For a glimpse of how Bell Curve thinks about growth marketing, check out Julian’s guest posts about how startups can actually get content marketing to work and how founders can hire a great growth marketer.

What makes Bell Curve different:

“We run a program where we train companies to run ads on every channel. So, what makes Bell Curve unique is that we, by necessity, have a deep understanding of many more channels than the average agency. We have an archive of tactics and approaches that we’ve accumulated for how to do them just as well as the big ad channels.

In effect, companies come to us when they need expertise beyond Facebook, Google and Instagram, which we still bring to the table, but when they also need to figure out how to make Quora ads profitable, how to get Reddit working, how to get YouTube videos working, Snapchat, Pinterest, etc. These are channels people don’t specialize in enough and so we also bring that long tail of expertise.”

On common misconceptions about growth:

“A common mistake people make coming into growth is thinking that growth hacks are a meaningful thing. The ultimate growth hack is having the self-discipline to pursue growth fundamentals properly and completely. So, things like properly A/B testing, identifying your most enticing value propositions and articulating them clearly and concisely, bringing in deep channel expertise for Facebook, Instagram, Google Search, and a couple of other channels. These are the tenants of making digital growth work. Not one-off hacks.”

Below, you’ll find the rest of the founder reviews, the full interview, and more details like pricing and fee structures. This profile is part of our ongoing series covering startup growth marketing agencies with whom founders love to work, based on this survey and our own research. The survey is open indefinitely, so please fill it out if you haven’t already.

Interview with Bell Curve Founder Julian Shapiro

Yvonne Leow: Can you tell me a little bit about how you got into this game of growth?

Julian Shapiro: I actually started by running growth for friends’ companies because they had a hard time finding experienced growth marketers. After a year and a half of doing this, I realized it’d be a more stable source of income if I formed an agency. It’d also allow me to pattern match so I could exchange learnings among clients and have a better net performance.

It all came together very quickly. Once Bell Curve hit about 10 clients, we had enough strategic and customer acquisition overlap that we were able to share tactics, double our volume of A/B testing, and get better results. It also gave us the ability to hire out a full-fledged team so we could start specializing, whereas, as a contractor, I was too much of a generalist. I wasn’t able to go deep on certain channels, like Snapchat or Pinterest ads.

Sramana Mitra: Before we get into that, let’s get the fund specifics. How big is your fund? What is your preferred investment criteria. Bill Bice: We’re an early-stage fund. My partner was the first...

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