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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Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all.
The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019. People are now spending 3 hours and 40 minutes per day using apps, rivaling TV. Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus.
In this Extra Crunch series, we help you keep up with the latest news from the world of apps, delivered on a weekly basis.
This week we’re continuing to look at how the coronavirus outbreak is impacting the world of mobile applications, including the latest news about COVID-19 apps, Facebook and Houseparty’s battle to dominate the online hangout, the game that everyone’s playing during quarantine, and more. We also look at the new allegations against TikTok, the demise of a popular “Lite” app, new apps offering parental controls, Telegram killing its crypto plans and many other stories, including a hefty load of funding and M&A.
Rather than focusing on robots that will replace human workers outright, the company has created a semi-autonomous robotic cart that saves pickers a long trip.
Entrepreneurs are invited to the 486th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, May 21, 2020, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur,...
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Energize Colorado, working with Coloradoâs Office of Economic Development and International Trade (OEDIT), has just released business templates that offer best practices, direction, and information on how businesses can restart operations safely and effectively.
These templates are based on OEDITâs recommendations along with input from Kroger who has been a leader in evolving better practices as an essential business.
Next week, WorkBright and Energize Colorado are doing a four-part webinar series on Reopening Your Business.
Part One: Letâs Keep COVID-19 Out of Your Workplace: Best practices in screening your workers and customers and how they need to be balanced with privacy and HIPAA concerns.Part Two: Letâs Not Pass it Along: Learn the underlying principles of social distancing to support creation of specific guidelines for your business and industry.Part Three: Letâs Plan for When it Does Happen: COVID-19 will come to virtually every business. Learn how to limit the impact and spread through your workforce.Part Four: Letâs Care for Our People: Special programs to check in frequently with workers and tools to respond to what you learn.As businesses start opening up in Colorado, we are entering a very tricky phase of the Covid crisis. I appreciate the work that the 200+ volunteers at Energize Colorado are doing to help the companies with less than 500 employees navigate things.
By March 16, founder Janine Yancey was tired of playing the waiting game. After watching the stock market take yet another unprecedented nosedive due to coronavirus, she called up a potential investor.
“If this isn’t going to happen, let’s call it now,” Yancey said, referring to the close of her Series A round, the first capital her culture tech company, Emtrain, would have accepted in 14 years. “At that point, I put my nose to the grindstone; I didn’t have a lot of bandwidth in engaging in conversation that wasn’t going anywhere.”
She had the conversation on Monday, and the deal closed on Friday. “I remember thinking, ‘this is the only deal that is happening this month,’ ” she recalled.
As lockdowns extend to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, investors and startups are searching for new ways to connect with each other. At this moment, deals are happening between screens instead of over drinks at The Battery or coffee at The Creamery. A number of investors have already cut fully remote checks, saying it impacts everything from the due diligence process, to appetite, to who gets to access capital in the first place.
During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Parthib Srivathsan, Co-founder and Head of Platform at Companyon Ventures. Vittas International As for entrepreneur pitches, Sulav Singh from...
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Lilia Stoyanov, CEO of Transformify, has built a virtual company with zero employees, all freelancers and scaled it without outside financing. Read on for more. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by...
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Sramana Mitra: Is there any other category that we should discuss in a bit more detail? Brandon Colby: The third use case deals with bioinformatics companies. Even though there is test data that is...
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Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.
After spending perhaps more time than we should have recently trying to figure out what’s going on with the public markets, let’s return to the private markets this morning, focusing in on venture capital itself. New data out today details how U.S.-based VCs fared in Q1 2020, giving us a window into how flush the financial class of startup land was heading into the COVID-19 era.
The short answer is that big funds raised lots of cash, while smaller funds appear to have put in a somewhat lackluster quarter.
That big funds performed well in Q1 shouldn’t surprise. We’ve seen NEA stack $3.6 billion in March and Founders Fund raised $3 billion for its own investing work earlier in the quarter, to pick two examples TechCrunch covered.
The impact of these mega-raises, according to a report from Prequin and First Republic Bank, was to push up the total amount of capital raised by American venture capital firms in the quarter, while the decline in the number of funds that raised $50 million or less led to a slim number of total funds raised. It’s hard to call a surge in dry powder bearish, but the fall-off on smaller funds could limit seed capital in the future.
Notably, there have been warning signs since at least 2019 that seed volume was slowing; recent data from the U.S. underscores the trend. So what we’re seeing this morning in data-form is a summation of what we’ve previously reported in a more piecemeal fashion.
Let’s pick over the data to see what we can learn about how much spare capital the venture classes are sitting on today.
The whole report is worth reading if you have time. Aside from the data concerning how much money VCs are raising themselves, it includes several interesting bits of information. For example, there were just 960 venture deals closed in the U.S. in Q1 — a pace that would make 2020 the slowest year since 2009 if it held steady.
Per the listed data, 83 U.S.-based venture capitalists closed (“held a final close”) a fund in Q1 2020. This was off about 24% from the Q1 2019 result of 109. However, while the number of funds raised was lackluster, they made up for it in dollar-scale. According to Preqin and First Republic Bank, the “funds that closed raised $27 [billion], a substantial total representing over half of the capital raised in 2019 ($50 [billion]).”
The way we invest is changing. Technology makes investing easy and more accessible than ever. Meanwhile, Millennials and Gen Z are gravitating away from public equity investments.
These changes have led to the rise of alternative assets. People are increasingly looking for new and innovative ways to approach investing. But are alternative assets truly the new frontier of modern investing?
As the name suggests, alternative assets are an alternative to traditional assets, like stock, bonds and cash. The term usually describes unconventional investments. That can include anything from a Honus Wagner baseball card to bottles of fine wine. However, it can also apply to more familiar investments, like real estate and private mortgages.
Simply put: alternative assets are the things that probably wouldn’t come up when you meet with your financial advisor. They are not easily categorizable, which makes them more difficult to manage. Often, people invest in alternative assets because of a passion for the asset rather than the immediate ROI.
Investors will go wherever there is money to be made. That includes alternative assets. In addition to higher potential returns, alternative assets have distinct characteristics from traditional assets. Here are a couple of factors to consider when looking at alternative assets:
The entrepreneurial and investor focus of the last decade has largely been centered on increased convenience and consumerism, and has encouraged companies to prioritize scaling, with little care for how it affects stakeholders, employees, consumers and even the environment. We have been talking about a shift for some time, but now more than ever, it has become obvious that companies have to take humanity into account as they build and scale in this new paradigm.
The last 10 years of startup growth have been about building and investing in these “nice to haves.” We believe the next 10 years will be focused on building and investing in “need to haves,” and the greatest business opportunities will be found in what we at Human Ventures call The Human Needs Economy — products and services that have material impact on basic needs and livelihoods and address a core draw on a consumer’s time, money or energy. For 2020, we are focusing on solving problems within three categories that we believe will have a huge impact on the Human Needs Economy: health and wellness, the future of work and community.
As the first category of the Human Needs Economy, we outline the opportunity within health and wellness and specific areas in which we are excited to build and invest.
Looking back at a decade focused on scaling nice to haves, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that we are living with unaddressed health and wellness issues. And the statistics are staggering. In 2019, an estimated 47.6 million adults (19% of the country) had a mental illness, but only 43% received any kind of mental health care. When it comes to sexual and reproductive health, whole populations of minorities and underrepresented groups receive subpar care and face stigma around health issues. And we’re on track for a shortage of 120,000 doctors in the U.S. by 2030, a signal that these issues are set to get worse. (The United States’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted how dangerous this is in a crisis.)
These challenges and others represent what we call the wellness deficit — the sum of human needs that have gone unmet in the areas of health and wellness. And even though it may seem that every block has a new boutique fitness studio popping up or everyone you know has the latest wearable to measure their sleep, we believe we are just at the starting line when it comes to making up ground and building great businesses that tackle these issues.
Below are 10 areas that are poised to make up this wellness deficit:
Chris and Alex Naoumidis came to hypnotherapy through dresses.
As The New York Times reported last year, the two brothers initially started their careers as startup entrepreneurs with a peer-to-peer dress-sharing app for women. The Australian natives were overcome with doubt about their ability to succeed in startupland; when apps didn’t work, their father suggested they try hypnotherapy.
Those sessions led the brothers to launch Mindset Health and raise $1.1 million in funding from investors including Fifty Years, YC, Gelt VC, Giant Leap VC and angel investors across the U.S. and Australia.
It’s a lot of backers for a small round that closed in November of 2019, but it’s indicative of the kind of bets that investors are willing to take in the mental health space these days.
A whole slew of apps have come to market to treat the mental disorders that seemingly accompany living in the modern world. There are companies that facilitate matching with therapists, companies that provide mental wellness tools in the form of cognitive behavioral therapies, billion-dollar companies that offer mindfulness and meditation and companies that offer hypnotherapy.
The hypnotherapy sessions that Alex and his brother took gave them an idea. “Could we do this similar to meditation and bring this to market in a way that would be helpful?” Alex Naoumidis told me.
Meditation is a multi-million-dollar business, with apps like Calm and Headspace raking in millions of dollars in venture financing and giving them billions of dollars in perceived valuation.
Alex Naoumidis stresses that the app isn’t therapy — the company can’t pitch it that way under current regulations. “It’s more of a self-management tool,” he said. “Helping people with anxiety or [irritable bowel syndrome] to manage those symptoms at home to complement the work they’re doing.”
The goal, according to Alex Naoumidis, is to have a number of apps under the Mindset umbrella that deal with specific conditions. While it began as a more general mental wellness app, the company now has Nerva, its IBS-focused product, alongside its general mental wellness Mindset toolkit.
Nerva’s not a cheap subscription. There’s an upfront payment of $99 and then an $88 three-month subscription. The Mindset subscription service costs $11 (priced to sell in the COVID-19 era) down from $64 when the Times’ writer, Nellie Bowles first tried the product.
Here’s how she described it:
As a first step, the app suggested that I text a friend or tweet to the public the quote “He who conquers himself is the mightiest warrior.” For the next 19 minutes, a soft male voice told me that my mind can slow down. It can convert concerns to decisions. The process can even become second nature. And if it does, I can be a person of action. A person of action.
I did another module, Increase Productivity, which is voiced by a peppy younger man — a start-up bro right in my ear asking me to repeat after him: “I give myself permission to know what I want to be and what I want to do and do it efficiently.”
These mental health apps, or any app, supplement or business that’s promoting wellness need to have some clinical studies to back up their claims, and Mindset is working with doctors on the products. The initial Mindset app was designed in concert with Dr. Michael Japko, while the IBS app was designed with Dr. Simone Peters.
Both receive revenue share with the company for their work developing the course of therapies.
The company’s co-founder says that they’re unscientifically seeing successes come from the service. People self-report their symptoms at the start and at the end of the program. For people who complete the program, 90% have reduced symptoms (I’m not sure what percentage of signups complete the program).
“Our idea is we want to help researchers who develop these amazing programs deliver them digitally,” said Alex Naoumidis. “We worked with world-leading researchers to make it more accessible.”
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
Are you a regular Equity listener? Take our survey here! We talk about it on the show, and it’s embedded below in case you don’t want to click a link.
From home once again this week, Danny, Natasha, Alex and Chris got together to pull the show together. But unlike last week’s episode (catch up here if you are behind), this week’s show features a game that actually worked. It’s at the end, as you’ll see.
But before that piece of the puzzle, there was a bunch of news to go over. We had to leave SaaS valuations, the Liftoff List, Brex and FalconX on the floor, but there was still so much good stuff to cover:
Slice raised $43 million from KKR, making us all rather hungry — and curious. Where does Slice fit into the food-delivery market, and does its restaurant-friendly model give it enough room to grow revenue so that its new valuation makes sense?The Uber Eats-Grubhub deal was an unavoidable topic this week, given that it has the chance to remake the food delivery landscape. What room would be left in the market for Postmates? And would it pass regulatory scrutiny? We’re curious.Sticking to the on-demand theme, Instacart has grown bonkers-quick in the last few months, even making some money in the process. We’re impressed.It’s not the only thing out there growing like hell — Shopify is also putting up insane numbers, as reflected in its share price. TechCrunch took a look back through its history the other day.The secondary markets saw some consolidation this week, which brought back some fond memories.Quizlet raised $30 million at a $1 billion valuation, causing some consternation among the hosts. And Vise raised a more modest $14.5 million in a round that Danny covered.Then we played our game. Please hold us to account. And if you have listened to the show for a while, take our survey! It’s right after this next sentence.
Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
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Taking care of your emotional well-being is as important as physical health, but in Asia, the topic is often stigmatized. Intellect, a Singapore-based startup, wants to make the idea of mental health more approachable with an app that offers self-guided exercises based on cognitive behavioral therapy techniques.
The company develops consumer and enterprise versions of the app (for employers to offer as a benefit) and now has users in several countries, including Singapore, Indonesia, India and China.
Since its beta launch earlier this year, co-founder and CEO Theodoric Chew says Intellect has signed up about 10,000 users, as well as 10 companies ranging in size from startups to large corporations. The startup plans to launch Mandarin and Bahasa Indonesian versions, and is currently working with researchers to develop localized versions of its exercises, which include guided journaling, behavioral exercises and “rescue sessions” with short audio clips about topics like stress, low self-esteem, emotional burnout and sleep issues.
The company has raised a pre-seed round that included Enterprise Singapore, a government agency that supports entrepreneurship.
In the United States and Europe, there is a growing roster of self-help apps that teach users coping strategies for common mental health issues, including Headspace, MoodKit, Moodnotes, Sanvello and Happify, to name a few examples. But the space is still nascent in Asia.
Before launching Intellect, Chew was head of affiliate growth and content marketing at Voyagin, a travel-booking marketplace that was acquired by Rakuten in 2015. He became interested in the mental health space because of his own experiences.
“I’ve been to therapy quite a bit for anxiety and in Asia, there is still a lot of social stigma and there aren’t a lot of tools. A lot of work is being done in the U.S. and Europe, but in Asia, it’s still developing,” Chew told TechCrunch.
He added that “most people shy away when you mention mental health. We see a lot of that in Asia, but if we frame it in other ways, like how to work on personal problems, like low self-esteem or confidence, we see a huge shift in people opening up.”
Intellect was developed with feedback from mental healthcare professionals, but Chew emphasizes it is not a replacement for professional therapy. Instead, it is meant to give people an accessible way to take care of their mental health, especially in cultures where there is still a lot of stigma around the topic. The app’s exercises address low mood and anxiety, but also common workplace and interpersonal issues, like developing assertiveness and handling criticism.
The enterprise version of the app can be customized with exercises tailored to people in different industries. It is meant for startups and other SMEs that don’t have the kind of employee assistance programs (EAP) that bigger companies can offer, which often include mental health resources, like support hotlines and referrals to mental healthcare providers.
The consumer app usually charges a flat monthly fee that gives unlimited access to all its features, but Intellect is making it free during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Eventually, the startup hopes to develop a network of mental health professionals that users can connect to within the app.
“The way we approach this is that therapy is not solely for clinically depressed people, but for everyone,” said Chew. “In three to five years, we want to make therapy commonplace to address every day problems. We want to tackle more clinical issues as well, but we believe most people can benefit from framing it as a way to tackle every day issues using CBT-based methods.”
“In general, the consumer has proven to be more resilient than I would have thought,” said Kirsten Green, founder of Forerunner Ventures, which has investments in breakout D2C stars like Glossier, Hims and Bonobos.
She joined us for an Extra Crunch Live conversation to help us better understand buying habits in the COVID-19 era. With tens of millions out of work and uncertainty all around, people are spending less, but Green showed up with a healthy dose of optimism — while acknowledging that her worst-case scenario planning was wrong.
Take a cautious approach, be prepared to make hard decisions, but be thoughtful about that. Don’t just make a knee jerk-reaction, which is “this is the apocalypse, we all need 36 months of runway, fire half your staff and go to the bunker.” I think the biggest opportunity for companies right now in many ways is to create value by demonstrating their flexibility.
Ettitude, the Los Angeles-based, direct-to-consumer startup making sustainable bedding and sleepwear from bamboo fibers, has raised a sustainably sized round that should keep the company going even in the face of an economic recession.
Co-founded by the Melbourne, Australia native Phoebe Yu and serial entrepreneur Kat Dey, ettitude sells high-end bamboo bedding made using a process she first heard about in her old job working as an exporter helping chain stores source textiles in China.
Sourced from a factory in Zhejiang, China, near Shanghai, the bamboo textiles are made using non-toxic solvents and a closed-loop system that reuses water for the process, according to Yu.
Yu started selling the cleanBamboo-branded bedding under the ettitude label in Melbourne first, but when she saw the orders begin to pick up from the U.S. she relocated and took her company with her.
Upon arrival, Yu realized she’d need a strong co-founder with experience in branding to help her navigate the massive market in the U.S. So Yu turned to AngelList, which is where she found Dey.
A serial entrepreneur with a background in retail, whose first company TryTheWorld was acquired by EarthBox in 2017, Dey was looking for her next project.
“Phoebe sent me a sample and I had the best night of sleep in my life,” Dey said. From then on the two co-founders began the long, hard slog of marketing their business.
Sales are growing, according to the two women, and the company’s chances have certainly been improved by the capital infusion from Drumbeat Ventures and TA Ventures, a European female-founded fund focusing on technology innovation.
The $1.6 million financing will be used to boost sales and marketing as the company expands beyond bedding — with an average price of $178 for a queen-sized sheet set — and into sleepwear and other categories.
“Phoebe, Kat and their brand, ettitude, are as genuine a combination of passion, purpose, and proprietary product that I’ve seen in the marketplace in my 20 years,” said Drumbeat Ventures founder, Adam Burgoon, in a statement. “They are perfectly positioned to bring their mission of sustainability and comfort to a broader audience.”
For immigrants in the United States, representation can feel complex, celebrated and oftentimes a mix of the two. And that’s exactly why sister duo Vanessa and Kim Pham launched Omsom, a seed-stage food startup that sells packaged “starters” to recreate authentic Asian dishes at home. The starter contains sauce, spices and aromatics, and the co-founders say consumers can make a dish in 30 minutes or less.
“As we were seeing Asian Americans claim their voices in media and in culture more broadly, we then would juxtapose it with walking down this ethnic aisle in the grocery store and see the way Asian flavors were being represented,” Vanessa told me.
The existence of the ethnic aisle itself has drawn criticism for “othering” cultures that have long been within the United States. It was enough to make Vanessa, who worked at Bain & Company, and Kim, who has spent time in venture at Frontline Ventures and Dorm Room Fund NYC, join forces to create Omsom.
“The ethnic aisle feels super outdated,” Vanessa said. “Flavors have been diluted, branding and design have been stereotypical in nature. How can you boil a cuisine down into one sad jar of sauce?”
The aisle, also named the international aisle, currently contains bottles of never-to-expire thai pastes. Walk a little farther and you’ll find microwavable containers of high-fat butter chicken. And there in the corner is a bottle that boils down one of the world’s most diverse cuisines simply: “curry sauce.”
While progress is pitiful in grocery store representation, the founders are optimistic that they can change that. Omsom, from the flavors to the meaning behind its name (it means rowdy in Vietnamese) to the cap table it has at the moment, is another story waiting to be told about immigrant culture. This is theirs.
Omsom launched today with an undisclosed amount of pre-seed money. The early-stage startup’s ownership group is 50% women of color, including Reshma Saujani, the founder of Girls Who Code, and Brita Rosenheim, a partner at Better Food Ventures. It also raised investment from Peter Livingston, the founder and partner at Unpopular Ventures, a fund dedicated to entrepreneurs who are aiming at unconventional niches.
Livingston said that he invested in Omsom despite not actually being a “food tech investor at all” because it covers an unconventional category.
“Venture capital as an industry is so homogeneous, is clustered in a handful of geographies, prefers to invest close to home, and tends to invest within a small number of the same themes,” Livingston said. “Historically, ethnic food essentials hasn’t really been a ‘VC category,’ which to me, smells like opportunity.”
Saujani said her investment is “betting on the team and a product designed for a vastly underserved market, and the current circumstances make consumer appetite for pantry staples even larger,” referring to COVID-19 forcing more people to cook from home since restaurants are closed.
Recreating authentic dishes with “mom’s ingredients” is not an easy goal, so the Pham sisters focused heavily on sourcing and chef collaboration and spent over a year in research and development of the recipes.
The sisters teamed up with three chefs — Jimmy Ly of Madame Vo, Nicole Ponseca of Jeepney and Chat and Ohm Suansilphong of Fish Cheeks — to create the first line of products. The chefs will get a tiered royalty on sales depending on volume.
“We made sure our ingredients, 90% of them, are unique to Asian food products and sourced directly from Asia,” said Vanessa. “We bent over backwards to get just the right kind of chili.”
But beyond authenticity, the Pham sisters also had another misconception to overcome: the oily and processed reputation of Americanized international dishes, like your favorite Chinese orange chicken takeout or a creamy bowl of butter chicken.
These flagship dishes that are so often associated with those cultures are often multitudes unhealthier than what an immigrant family within, say, the Indian culture, might serve on a day to day basis. Omsom flips that by offering dishes that have no preservatives, no high-fructose corn syrup, and are shelf stable for up to a year. It’s “acceptable for users trying to be generally health conscious, in line with something you would find at Whole Foods.”
Now, the Pham sisters just need to see if they can deliver on the promise of providing uncompromising dishes amid a pandemic. They think it will be a welcomed change for people stuck at home and looking to experiment with cooking.
“We grew up south of Boston in a predominantly white suburb and there was a bit of shame associated with our food,” said Kim Pham . “But as I went through the process of stepping into myself as a woman of color, I started to use food as the first stop in engaging with my identity.”
“I moved away from home, I don’t speak Vietnamese as I used to, but I turned to food,” she continued. “Even if it was a bowl of pho.”
Kim and Vanessa Pham (from L to R)
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