This feature from CNET follows the annual Game Developers Conference held in San Francisco last week. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links. Tech Posts India’s Droom in the Fast Lane...
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Rahul Chowdhri, Investor at Stellaris Venture Partners, shares some fascinating examples of consumer ventures catering to the next 400 million consumers in India.
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Price is probably the biggest consideration for most people, and the iPhone XR has the iPhone XS beat in terms of price.
The iPhone XR starts at $749 for 64 GB of storage. It can cost up to $899 for 256 GB of storage.
The iPhone XS starts at $999 for 64 GB of storage. It can cost up to $1,349 for 512 GB of storage.
The iPhone XS Max starts at $1,099 for 64 GB of storage. It can cost up to $1,449 for 512 GB of storage.
Not many people need 512 GB of storage on their phones â I'm only using 62 GB of my available 256 GB on my iPhone X, and I have over 200 apps, plus tons of old photos and texts. Even if you opt for less storage though, you're still saving more money with the iPhone XR compared to the iPhone XS.
The Corsair One is already small at only 12 liters, but the MSI Trident X is even smaller. With an internal volume of only 10 liters, the Trident X is one of the smallest gaming PCs on the market, making for a suitable console replacement or high-powered media center. It's cheaper than the One, too, at around $2,000.
It has a long, slender chassis, outfitted with RGB accent lighting. On the front, there are three light bars with individual controls that you can adjust using MSI's software. There's also an RGB light strip internally that shows off the graphics card, as well as an RGB ring around the CPU fan. All of that lighting is shown off, too. MSI has a vented side panel that slightly exposes the graphics card, as well as a tempered glass side panel for the CPU cooler.
Because of that design, the thermals are quite good. The power supply, graphics card, and CPU all have vented grilles directly above them, allowing air to move throughout the system. The tempered glass side panel is slightly raised, too, allowing air to freely move into the case and cool your components.
The specs aren't as high end as the Corsair One, but at around $1,500 less, the tradeoff is worth it. With an Intel Core i7-9700K, Nvidia RTX 2070, and 16GB of RAM, the Trident X can easily handle modern titles, including any VR gaming or 4K gaming that you might want to do.
Furthermore, most of the components are the same parts you could buy off the shelf. The motherboard and graphics card are both retail versions of MSI boards, meaning you can always upgrade the Trident X down the line.
Pros: Compact, solid specs, beautiful case
Cons: Difficult to upgrade
Over the weekend, Jordan Peele cemented his thrillers into the hall of box office crazes.
After Peele's writing-directing debut, "Get Out," earned over $225 million worldwide on a $4.5 million budget in 2017 (Peele also won a best original screenplay Oscar), his follow-up, "Us," has hit theaters and is already breaking box office records.
The $20 million horror movie that follows a family as they are terrorized by a group of people who look exactly like them has blasted through industry projections (which early in the week was around $45 million) to have the highest opening weekend ever for an original horror movie, with an estimated $70.3 million.
That tops the previous record holder, 2018's "A Quiet Place," which had a $50.2 million opening (it would go on to earn over $340 million worldwide).
Things were looking good for Peele's movie on Thursday when "Us" took in $7.4 million at preview screenings. That's better than "Get Out," "A Quiet Place," and another recent horror hit, "The Nun." The $7.4 million was part of the $29 million "Us" took in on Friday. It then took in $25.5 million on Saturday.
Read more: "Shazam!" is an irresistibly fun mix of "Big," "The Goonies," and a superhero movie
The record-breaking performance by "Us" continues the strong year Universal is having so far at the movies.
Peele's movie joins "Glass" and "How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World" as Universal releases that topped the domestic box office this year. Even more impressive is how the studio maneuvered around Disney's "Captain Marvel" to maximize its gross.
The studio announced it would move the "Us" release date back a week after getting the opening night spot at early March's SXSW Film Festival. That move allowed the studio to ride the good word out of the SXSW screening and give it some cushion from "Captain Marvel," which originally was to open the weekend after the latest Marvel Studios release. The plan worked perfectly.
Though "Marvel" still played on over 4,200 screens in its third week, Universal was able to squeeze "Us" in 3,700 screens (a thousand more than "Get Out") and not only made the movie widely available for the Peele/horror fans, but the moviegoers who wanted something different after seeing "Marvel" the last two weekends.
"Captain Marvel" came in second place this weekend, earning $35 million, and now has a global gross of over $900 million.
Average demand expressions: 23,570,326
Description: "DOOM PATROL reimagines one of DC's most beloved groups of Super Heroes: Robotman aka Cliff Steele (BRENDAN FRASER), Negative Man aka Larry Trainor (MATT BOMER), Elasti-Woman aka Rita Farr (APRIL BOWLBY) and Crazy Jane (DIANE GUERRERO), led by modern-day mad scientist Niles Caulder aka The Chief (TIMOTHY DALTON). Each member of the Doom Patrol suffered a horrible accident that gave them superhuman abilities, but also left them scarred and disfigured. Traumatized and downtrodden, the team found their purpose through The Chief, coming together to investigate the weirdest phenomena in existence. Following the mysterious disappearance of The Chief these reluctant heroes will find themselves in a place they never expected to be, called to action by none other than Cyborg (JOIVAN WADE), who comes to them with a mission hard to refuse. Part support group, part Super Hero team, the Doom Patrol is a band of superpowered freaks who fight for a world that wants nothing to do with them."
Rotten Tomatoes critic score (Season 1): 94%
What critics said: "Doom Patrol is a worthy third entry into DC Universe's library of originals, and it stands out as the most fun of the three so far." â Laura Hurley, Cinemablend
Season 2 premiered on DC Universe February 15.
Over the past century, the advent of air travel has changed the way humanity interacts. It's broken down borders and has effectively made the world a smaller place.
The growth of airline travel in recent years has been particularly impressive.
"In 2000, the average citizen flew just once every 43 months," Alexandre de Juniac, the International Air Transport Association's director general and CEO, said in a statement. "In 2017, the figure was once every 22 months."
"Flying has never been more accessible. And this is liberating people to explore more of our planet for work, leisure and education. Aviation is the business of freedom," the former CEO of Air France went on to say.
Read more:The 20 biggest airlines in the world, ranked.
The latest passengers figures released by IATA show that a whopping 4.1 billion people around the world took to the skies in 2017, up 7.3% over the previous year.
The arrival of jet-powered passenger flight in the mid-1950s really kicked things into the high gear.
As passenger figures skyrocket, so has the number of gripes about the shortcomings of modern air travel. In fact, many reminiscences about the "good old days" of the early era of jet air travel.
So, we here at Business Insider decided to take a closer look at how flying in the economy cabin compares to the past:
Silicon Valley's power players are already preparing for the grim spectre of mortality.
Pinterest's S-1 paperwork, filed publicly Friday, disclosed an unusual stipulation that retains full voting rights for CEO Ben Silbermann's shares in the company from 90 days to 540 days after his "death or permanent incapacity."
That phrase is part of Pinterest's description of its planned dual-class stock structure, which gives 20 votes per share to select Class B shareholders â which will likely include the founding team and some of the company's earliest investors. When investors buy Pinterest's stock after the IPO, they will buy Class A shares, which have just one vote per share.
The clause means that after Silbermann dies, whoever inherits his shares will retain his super-voting powers for a period of time.
Tom Holden, a securities lawyer with the firm Ropes & Gray, said it's uncommon to see language like this in an S-1, and added that expanded rights such as super-voting shares are often requested by the founders directly.
"It's typically driven by the founder's desire to have meaningful influence on the vote post-IPO," he said.
In the case of the death clause, Holden suspects Silbermann was motivated by the nuances of estate planning, rather than a posthumous power grab. It's unlikely that Silbermann's future beneficiaries could have a real impact on the company's operations within 90 days, he says.
"It doesn't strike me that he's trying to gain something substantive," Holden said.
While it's rare, Silbermann is not the first CEO to seek such controls. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg's famously extra-powerful voting shares, which give him total sway over corporate decisions despite owning a minority stake in the company, are slated to persist for three years after his death, at which point they would convert to normal shares.
Similarly, super-voting shares owned by Snapchat's founders Evan Spiegel and Robert Murphy would keep their extra powers up to nine months after their deaths.
Dual-class structures aren't often found in newly-public companies, but are becoming increasingly common at companies with prominent founders at the head, both inside and out of tech.
The clothing company Canada Goose, for example, which went public in 2017, also had a dual class structure. Zoom, which also filed its S-1 on Friday, also has a dual-class structure â to the benefit of founding CEO Eric S. Yuan, who owns 22% of the company.
Read more:Hot video meeting startup Zoom filed to go public, and it's profitable
Typically in companies with dual-class structures, founders and early investors own Class B stock, which can have anywhere from 10 to 100 times the number of votes-per-share as the Class A stock, the type issued to retail investors after the IPO.
In the case of Pinterest, the Class B stock has 20 votes to every one vote held by the Class A stock. Pinterest didn't disclose what percent of the voting power will be held by Class B shareholders.
The way Pinterest is set up, Class B shareholders will lose their super-voting powers in 2026 if they have sold off more than half of their stake in the company. Those high-vote Class B shares will automatically convert into low-vote Class A shares seven years after the IPO, under those conditions.
Notably, if Silbermann were to sell more than 50% of his shares in Pinterest, he would be subject to the same provision â meaning that he, and his heirs, would lose the super-voting powers that come with his current stock.
Pinterest hasn't disclosed what percentage of the company is owned by who, though those details will likely come out in an amended version of its S-1.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai isn't a "big gamer."
He admitted as much when to took to the stage at the Game Developers Conference 2019 in San Francisco last week to announce "Stadia," a big new project from Google to run games on its servers then stream them to users' devices.
It's an ambitious goal, and the lack of clarity around pricing, availability, and launch dates didn't stop it from stealing the show at GDC this year â even if the Google CEO himself wasn't the perfect spokeperson for it.
That said, Pichai does play some games â and he revealed two of his favourites at the event. What are they?
The first is "FIFA 19," the latest iteration of publisher EA Sports' immensely popular soccer game. It was awarded a "great" 8.2 score by games site IGN, which described it as "a distinct improvement upon last year's effort ... "FIFA 19's" simply more fun than recent entries with a level of variety that should only increase its longevity."
And then there's "Ashes Cricket," a cricket simulator game. The 2017 title got a lukewalm 7.0 review from Gamespot, which observed that "very few sports struggle to survive the transition from real-life to video game like cricket does. Cricket is perceived as slow and long; some might even call it a little bit boring. Cricket video games have often suffered similar problems ... Ashes Cricket suffers some of these inherent problems as well as a few of its own making, but also manages to capture the heart of the game in a way that few have achieved before."
Still, it's no surprise Pichai is a fan of these titles â he's a self-confessed "huge" fan of both sports, and as a kid he dreamt of being a professional cricketer. As Pichai quipped at GDC: "For those of you who are wondering what cricket is, it's kind of like baseball, but better."
Sramana Mitra: In selecting customers to go after, what is the positioning of your company? Are you going after large enterprises? Are you going after mid-market? Are you going after small...
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Iâm been looking around for software to help me manage an increasing number of affinity networks. These are networks that Iâve created around different topics, such as the books Iâve written â like Startup Communities and Venture Deals â as well as topics Iâm exploring with small to medium sized groups of people.
So far Iâve tried a bunch of stuff and have ended up back at email groups, which is the least common denominator. Iâve tried a few different products for email groups and always end up back at Google Groups, which is fine, but extremely uninspiring in terms of anything beyond âcreating the groupâ and âsending around emails.â
Iâve tried Facebook, LinkedIn, and Slack. None of them work. Iâm now completely off Facebook, so thatâs not really an option anymore. LinkedIn is way too LockedIn and has serious limitations. Slack is a messy nightmare that has a geometric decline curve of activity.
Any suggestions out there?
One year after a $38 million Series B valued on-demand aviation startup Blade at $140 million, the company has begun taxiing the Bay Area’s elite.
As part of a new pilot program, Blade has given 200 people in San Francisco and Silicon Valley exclusive access to its mobile app, allowing them to book helicopters, private jets and even seaplanes at a moments notice for $200 per seat, at least.
Blade, backed by Lerer Hippeau, Airbus, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and others, currently flies passengers around the New York City area, where it’s headquartered, offering the region’s wealthy $800 flights to the Hamptons, among other flights at various price points. According to Business Insider, it has worked with Uber in the past to help deep-pocketed Coachella attendees fly to and from the Van Nuys Airport to Palm Springs, renting out six-seat helicopters for more than $4,000 a pop.
Its latest pilot seems to target business travelers, connecting riders to the San Francisco International Airport and Oakland International Airport to Palo Alto, San Jose, Monterey and Napa Valley. The goal is to shorten trips made excruciatingly long due to bad traffic in major cities like New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Recently, the startup partnered with American Airlines to better establish its network of helicopters, a big step for the company as it works to integrate with existing transportation infrastructure.
New work with @flybladenow pic.twitter.com/eONvKU3rhM
— Tyler Babin (@Tyler_Babin) March 11, 2019
Blade, led by founder and chief executive officer Rob Wiesenthal, a former Warner Music Group executive, has raised about $50 million in venture capital funding to date. To launch at scale and, ultimately, to compete with the likes of soon-to-be-public transportation behemoth Uber, it will have to land a lot more investment support.
Uber too has lofty plans to develop a consumer aerial ridesharing business, as do several other privately-funded startups. Called UberAIR, Uber will offer short-term shareable flights to commuters as soon as 2023. The company has raised billions of dollars to turn this sci-fi concept into reality.
Then there’s Kitty Hawk, a company launched by former Google vice president and Udacity co-founder Sebastian Thrun, which is developing an aircraft that can take off like a helicopter but fly like a plane for short-term urban transportation purposes. Others in the air taxi or vertical take-off and landing aircraft space, including Volocopter, Lilium and Joby Aviation, have raised tens of millions to eliminate traffic congestion or, rather, to chauffer the rich.
Blade’s next stop is India, the Financial Times reports, where it will conduct a pilot connecting travelers in downtown Mumbai and Pune. The company tells TechCrunch they are currently exploring one additional domestic pilot and one additional international pilot.
Rebecca Kaden, General Partner at Union Square Ventures, discusses her firm’s capital efficient investment thesis and debates the pros and cons of blitzscaling.
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Nandini Mansinghka: I think what has happened is that even in our portfolio, once in a while we do come across a company that looks like a potential unicorn. And that’s when you finally see a...
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I’m publishing this series on LinkedIn called Colors to explore a topic that I care deeply about: the Renaissance Mind. I am just as passionate about entrepreneurship, technology, and business, as I...
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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. This week, not one but two female-founded and led companies, Glossier and Rent The Runway, raised nine-figure rounds and cemented their status as unicorn companies. According to PitchBook data from 2018, there are only about 15 unicorn startups with female founders. Though I’m sure that number has increased in the last year, you get the point: There are hundreds of privately held billion-dollar companies and shockingly few of those have women founders (even fewer have female CEOs)…
Moving on…
I spent a good part of the week at San Francisco’s Pier 48 in a room full of vest-wearing investors. We listened to some 200 YC companies make their 120-second pitch and though it was a bit of a whirlwind, there were definitely some standouts. ICYMI: We wrote about each and every company that pitched on day 1 and day 2. If you’re looking for the inside scoop on the companies that forwent demo day and raised rounds, or were acquired, before hitting the stage, we’ve got that too.
Lyft: This week, Lyft set the terms for its highly-anticipated initial public offering, expected to be completed next week. The company will charge between $62 and $68 per share, raising more than $2 billion at a valuation of ~$23 billion. We previously reported its initial market cap would be around $18.5 billion, but that was before we knew that Lyft’s IPO was already oversubscribed. Here’s a little more background on the Lyft IPO for those interested.
Uber: The global ride-hailing business flew a little more under the radar this week than last week, but still managed to grab a few headlines. The company has decided to sell its stock on the New York Stock Exchange, which is the least surprising IPO development of 2019, considering its key U.S. competitor, Lyft, has been working with the Nasdaq on its IPO. Uber is expected to unveil its S-1 in April.
Ben Silbermann, co-founder and CEO of Pinterest, at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2017.
Pinterest: Pinterest, the nearly decade-old visual search engine, unveiled its S-1 on Friday, one of the final steps ahead of its NYSE IPO, expected in April. The $12.3 billion company, which will trade under the ticker symbol “PINS,” posted revenue of $755.9 million in the year ending December 31, 2018, up from $472.8 million in 2017. It has roughly doubled its monthly active user count since early 2016, hitting 265 million last year. The company’s net loss, meanwhile, shrank to $62.9 million in 2018 from $130 million in 2017.
Zoom: Not necessarily the buzziest of companies, but its S-1 filing, published Friday, stands out for one important reason: Zoom is profitable! I know, what insanity! Anyway, the startup is going public on the Nasdaq as soon as next month after raising about $150 million in venture capital funding. The full deets are here.
General Catalyst, a well-known venture capital firm, is diving more seriously into the business of funding seed-stage business. The firm, which has investments in Warby Parker, Oscar and Stripe, announced earlier this week its plan to invest at least $25 million each year in nascent teams.
Earlier this week, Opendoor, the SoftBank -backed real estate startup, filed paperwork to raise even more money. According to TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden, the business is planning to raise up to $200 million at a valuation of roughly $3.7 billion. It’s possible this is a Series E extension; after all, the company raised its $400 million Series E only six months ago. Backers of OpenDoor include the usual suspects: Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, General Atlantic, GV, Initialized Capital, Khosla Ventures, NEA and Norwest Venture Partners.
Startup capital
UiPath is raising $400M at a more than $7B valuationOla raises $300M as part of a new EV deal with Hyundai and KiaMusic startup Splice raises $57.5M to sell samplesIterable lands $50M to expand its cross-channel marketing platformGuesty, meant for property managers on Airbnb, raises $35MTravis Kalanick invests in Kargo, the ‘Uber for Trucks’Catch emerges from Y Combinator with $5.1MBackstage Capital founder and managing partner Arlan Hamilton, center.
Axios’ Dan Primack and Kia Kokalitcheva published a report this week revealing Backstage Capital hadn’t raised its debut fund in total. Backstage founder Arlan Hamilton was quick to point out that she had been honest about the challenges of fundraising during various speaking engagements, and even on the Gimlet “Startup” podcast, which featured her in its latest season. A Twitter debate ensued and later, Hamilton announced she was stepping down as CEO of Backstage Studio, the operations arm of the venture fund, to focus on raising capital and amplifying founders. TechCrunch’s Megan Rose Dickey has the full story.
This week, TechCrunch’s Connie Loizos revisited a long-held debate: Pro rata rights, or the right of an earlier investor in a company to maintain the percentage that he or she (or their venture firm) owns as that company matures and takes on more funding. Here’s why pro rata rights matter (at least, to VCs).
If you enjoy this newsletter, be sure to check out TechCrunch’s venture-focused podcast, Equity. In this week’s episode, available here, Crunchbase News editor-in-chief Alex Wilhelm and I chat about Glossier, Rent The Runway and YC Demo Days. Then, in a special Equity Shot, we unpack the numbers behind the Pinterest and Zoom IPO filings.
Want more TechCrunch newsletters? Sign up here.
Sramana Mitra: One point I will double-click on which comes up a lot is that we have a huge overlap in the Indian market. 1Mby1M has a big presence in the Indian market and we’ve been present...
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Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
What a Friday. This afternoon (mere hours after we released our regularly scheduled episode no less!), both Pinterest and Zoom dropped their public S-1 filings. So we rolled up our proverbial sleeves and ran through the numbers. If you want to follow along, the Pinterest S-1 is here, and the Zoom document is here.
Got it? Great. Pinterest’s long-awaited IPO filing paints a picture of a company cutting its losses while expanding its revenue. That’s the correct direction for both its top and bottom lines.
As Kate points out, it’s not in the same league as Lyft when it comes to scale, but it’s still quite large.
More than big enough to go public, whether it’s big enough to meet, let alone surpass its final private valuation ($12.3 billion) isn’t clear yet. Peeking through the numbers, Pinterest has been improving margins and accelerating growth, a surprisingly winsome brace of metrics for the decacorn.
Pinterest has raised a boatload of venture capital, about $1.5 billion since it was founded in 2010. Its IPO filing lists both early and late-stage investors, like Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Fidelity and Valiant Capital Partners as key stakeholders. Interestingly, it doesn’t state the percent ownership of each of these entities, which isn’t something we’ve ever seen before.
Next, Zoom’s S-1 filing was more dark horse entrance than Katy Perry album drop, but the firm has a history of rapid growth (over 100 percent, yearly) and more recently, profit. Yes, the enterprise-facing video conferencing unicorn actually makes money!
In 2019, the year in which the market is bated on Uber’s debut, profit almost feels out of place. We know Zoom’s CEO Eric Yuan, which helps. As Kate explains, this isn’t his first time as a founder. Nor is it his first major success. Yuan sold his last company, WebEx, for $3.2 billion to Cisco years ago then vowed never to sell Zoom (he wasn’t thrilled with how that WebEx acquisition turned out).
Should we have been that surprised to see a VC-backed tech company post a profit — no. But that tells you a little something about this bubble we live in, doesn’t it?
Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Downcast and all the casts.
Heathcare kiosks, a home-cooked food marketplace, and a way for startups to earn interest on their funding topped our list of high-potential companies from Y Combinator’s Winter 2019 Demo Day 2. 88 startups launched on stage at the lauded accelerator, though some of the best skipped the stage as they’d already raised tons of money.
Be sure to check out our write-ups of all 85 startups from day 1 plus our top picks, as well as the full set from day 2. But now, after asking investors and conferring with the TechCrunch team, here are our 9 favorites from day 2.
Two months ago, California passed the first law in the country legalizing the sale of home cooked food. Shef creates a marketplace where home chefs can find nearby customers. Shef’s meals cost around $6.50 compared to $20 per meal for traditional food delivery, and the startup takes a 22 percent cut of every transaction. It’s been growing 50 percent week over week thanks to deals with large property management companies that offer the marketplace as a perk to their residents. Shef wants to be the Airbnb of home cooked food.
Why we picked Shef: Deregulation creates gold rush opportunities and Shef was quick to seize this one, getting started just days after the law passed. Food delivery is a massive megatrend but high costs make it unaffordable or a luxury for many. If a parent is already cooking meals for their whole family, it takes minimal effort to produce a few extra portions to sell to the neighbors at accessible rates.
This startup automates the collection process of unpaid construction invoices. Construction companies are often forced to pay for their own jobs when customers are late on payments. According to Handle, there are $104 billion in unpaid construction invoices every year. Handle launched six weeks ago and is currently collecting $22,800 in monthly revenue. The founders previously launched an Andreessen Horowitz-backed company called Tenfold.
Why we picked Handle: Construction might seem like an unsexy vertical, but it’s massive and rife with inefficiencies this startup tackles. Handle helps contractors demand payments, instantly file liens that ensure they’re compensated for work or materials, or exchange unpaid invoices for cash. Even modest fees could add up quickly given how much money moves through the industry. And there are surely secondary business models to explore using all the data Handle collects on the construction market.
This pediatric telemedicine company provides medical care instantly to families. Blueberry provides constant contact, the ability to talk to a pediatrician 24/7 and at-home testing kits for a total of $15 per month. They’ve just completed a paid consumer pilot and say they were able to resolve 84 percent of issues without in-person care. They’ve partnered with insurance providers to reduce ER visits.
Why we picked Blueberry: Questionable emergency room visits are a nightmare for parents, a huge source of unnecessary costs, and a drain on resources for needy patients. Parents already spend so much time and money trying to keep their kids safe that this is a no-brainer subscription. And the urgent and emotional pull of pediatrics is a smart wedge into telemedicine for all demographics.
Led by a team of YC alums behind Raven, an AI startup acquired by Baidu in 2017, rct studio is a creative studio for immersive and interactive film. The platform provides a real time “text to render “engine (so the text “A man sits on a sofa” would generate 3D imagery of a man sitting on a sofa) that supports mainstream 3D engines like Unity and Unreal, as well as a creative tool for film professionals to craft immersive and open-ended entertainment experiences called Morpheus Engine.
Why we picked rct studio: Netflix’s Bandersnatch was just the start of mainstream interactive film. With strong technology, an innovative application, and proven talent, rct could become a critical tool for creating this kind of media. And even if the tech falls short of producing polished media, it could be used for storyboards and mockups.
Provides “Apple level” treasury services to startups. Startups are raising a lot of money with no way to manage it, says Interprime. They want to help these businesses by managing these big investments by helping them earn interest on their funding while retaining liquidity. They take a .25 percent advisory fee for all the investment they oversee. So far, they have $10 million in investment capital they are servicing.
Why we picked Interprime: The explosion of early stage startup funding evidenced by Y Combinator itself has created new banking opportunities. Silicon Valley Bank is ripe for competition and Interprime’s focus on startups could unlock new financial services. With Interprime’s YC affiliation, it has access to tons of potential customers.
Nabis is tackling the cannabis shipping and logistics business, working with suppliers to ship out goods to retailers reliably. It’s illegal for FedEx to ship weed so Nabis has swooped in and is helping ship and connect while taking cuts of the proceeds, a price the suppliers are willing to pay due to their 98 percent on-time shipping record.
Why we picked Nabis: Quirky regulation creates efficiency gaps in the marijuana business where incumbents can’t participate since they’re not allowed to handle the flower. As more states legalize and cannabis finds its way into more products, moving goods from farm to processor to retailer could spawn a big market for Nabis with a legal moat. It’s already working with many top marijuana brands, and could sell them additional services around business intelligence and distribution.
This startup measures weather damage for insurance companies. WeatherCheck has secured $4.7 million in annual bookings in the five months since it launched to help insurance carriers reduce their overall claims expense. To use the service, insurers upload data about their properties. WeatherCheck then monitors the weather and sends notifications to insurance companies, if, for example, a property has been damaged by hail.
Why we picked WeatherCheck: Extreme weather is only getting worse due to climate change. With 10.7 million US properties impacted by hail damage in 2017, WeatherCheck has found a smart initial market from which to expand. It’s easy to imagine the startup working on flood, earthquake, tornado, and wildfire claims too. Insurance is a fierce market, and old-school providers could get a leg up with WeatherCheck’s tech.
Upsolve wants to help low-income individuals file for bankruptcy more easily. The non-profit service gets referral fees from pointing non low-income families to bankruptcy lawyers and is able to offer the service for free. The company says that medical bills, layoffs and predatory loans can leave low-income families in dire situations and that in the last 6 months, their non-profit has alleviated customers from $24 million in debt.
Why we picked Upsolve: Financial hardship is rampant. With the potential for another recession and automation threatening jobs, many families could be at risk for bankruptcy. But the process is so stigmatized that some people avoid it at all costs. Upsolve could democratize access to this financial strategy while inserting itself into a lucrative transaction type.
This startup makes health kiosks for India, meant to be installed in train stations. Co-founder Joginder Tanikella says that there are 600,000 preventable deaths in India as many in the region don’t get regular doctor checkups. “But everyone takes trains,” he says. Their in-station kiosk measures 21 health parameters. The company made $28,000 in revenue last month. Charging $1 per test, Tanikella says each machine pays for itself within 3 months. In the future, the kiosks will allow them to sell insurance and refer users to doctors.
Why we picked Pulse: Telemedicine can’t do everything, but plenty of people around the world can’t make it in to a full-fledged doctor’s office. Pulse creates a mid-point where hardware sensors can measure body fat, blood pressure, pulse, and bone strength to improve accuracy for diagnosing diabetes, osteoarthritis, cardiac problems, and more. Pulse’s companion app could spark additional revenue streams, and there’s clearly a much bigger market for this than just India.
-Allo, a marketplace where parents can exchange babysitting and errand-running
-Shiok, a lab-grown shrimp substitute
-WithFriends, a subscription platform for small retail businesses
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More Y Combinator coverage from TechCrunch:
Additional reporting by Kate Clark, Lucas Matney, and Greg Kumparak
A couple of years ago, Clark, a New York-based startup, appeared on the scene with tutoring software that aimed to both make it easier for educators to start and manage a tutoring business by handling on its platform all the work that tutors struggle to find time to do, from drumming up students, to managing scheduling and payments, to making it far simpler to communicate with parents.
Today the company is announcing a bit of a shift, moving away from simply selling access to its business software for a monthly subscription fee to now helping tutors set up their very own storefronts, replete with websites, certifications, marketing materials and even clients, which Clark will help them find.
How it will work, from a dollars standpoint: Clark will charge an upfront fee for setting up the business and getting it off the ground, then charge a smaller monthly fee for use of its software, which is 15 percent of sessions fees for students who are referred by Clark for the initial year, and then 15 percent of all sessions after that.
Called its “business in a box” product, it’s an interesting twist and part of a broader wave of startups that are capitalizing on the growing number of people who are self-employed, or who want to be, or who simply want to supplement their income with a “side hustle.” Bird’s recent decision to partner with local entrepreneurs in other parts of the world who will manage their own fleets of its electric scooters (and pay Bird a cut of their revenue), is another recent example. Clark may also have drawn inspiration from Wonderschool, a venture-backed startup that’s empowering early childhood educators to open their own in-home preschools or day cares while it handles the administration and logistics.
What teachers get with this new product, specifically, is support in building their business from the ground up, including website creation and branding, building a presence on review sites, marketing the business (including through search engine optimization), and a kind of bootcamp for managing a business that covers things like setting rates and managing clients, according to co-founder and CEO Megan O’Connor.
She also tells us that once a business is off the ground, customers will get access to the company’s software, which should allow them to schedule tutoring sessions, manage payments and invoices, give session feedback to parents through a communications tool and match with new students. Not least, Clark has a dedicated customer success team based in New York, says O’Connor, so clients have somewhere to turn.
According to Clark, the startup has so far facilitated roughly 20,000 tutoring sessions and it has hundreds of businesses across the country using its existing service. It’s because many of these clients weren’t sure how to get their businesses off the ground that Clark adopted this new model, which will also strive to connect parents with educators that match their children’s needs (parents have final say over who they ultimately hire).
Clark has raised $3.5 million to date, including from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Rethink Education, Flatworld Partners and Winklevoss Capital.
Whether its new direction speeds up its momentum remains an open question, but the company is operating in a huge market. According to some new market research on the global private tutoring opportunity, the market was valued at $96 billion in 2017, and it’s expected to generate more than $177 billion by 2026.
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