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Earlier this week, Seattle-based Smartsheet (Nasdaq: SMAR) announced its fourth quarter results that surpassed market expectations. Despite the recent turmoil in the stock market, the results helped...

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Sramana Mitra: We make a distinction between fat startups and lean startups. Cyber security is a very good example of an area where some startups tend to be fat startups. It takes time to build the...

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According to a Fortune Business Insights report, the global digital signature market is estimated to grow to $6.1 billion by the end of 2026 from $879.6 million in 2018. DocuSign (Nasdaq: DOCU), a...

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With world events overtaking the tech world’s preferences to meet for coffees and convene at events, Y Combinator skipped its famous two-day live Demo event and went for a radical experiment: no demos at all, but instead a long list of the nearly 200 startups in its Winter 2020 batch, with links to their sites and one-page slides. We’ve done the legwork for you in giving you a full rundown of who does what, and we have also come together on a group video chat on Zoom to talk through our takeaways of the format this year (missed it? here’s the recording). Now, in no particular order, here is our shortlist of some of our overall favorites.

It’s been a bonkers week in the world, with markets gyrating, companies fretting, investors tweeting and founders re-cutting their 2020 forecasts. But for one collection of startups, the past few days weren’t about work crises or the latest Slack share price. Instead, for Y Combinator’s Winter batch, it was Demo Day week.

TechCrunch has covered Y Combinator companies since time immemorial. And we’ve been present throughout a number of format changes over the years. We’ve been around for things like the old single-day events in the South Bay computer history museum, and we’ve been around for the SF era. Hell, we were there for the two-stage concept.

But this year’s Demo Day brought with it something altogether new: No in-person pitches and demos. Yep, in response to COVID-19, Y Combinator made its demo day virtual, even scooting up its presentations by a full week. Obviously we tuned in en masse, writing a host of posts about the presenting companies (read them here, here, here and here). We also caught up with CEO of Y Combinator, Michael Seibel, to here his take on what’s ahead for the accelerator.

Given the scale of change, however, we weren’t content with just those entries. So, we gathered the TechCrunch crew, hopped on a Zoom, invited in our friends until our Zoom account maxed out (we didn’t know that that was a thing; more capacity coming) to chat over observations and the most interesting startups. We didn’t even miss the usual slew of Y Combinator live tweets — for the most part.

Hit the jump and we’ve got the recording for you. And see which companies the TechCrunch staff liked the most.

The Chat

Kimberly Shenk has been focused for a while now on “clean” products that are made without harmful chemicals. In 2017, Shenk and friend Jaleh Bisharat launched NakedPoppy, a site that curates and sells cosmetics that have been vetted by chemists (including some of its own products).

Interestingly, as the young startup was announcing $4 million in seed funding last summer from Cowboy Ventures, among others, Shenk — who remains on the board of Naked Poppy — was splitting off to launch a second company. Called Novi, it hopes to address the same need that Shenk and Bisharat discovered, but it plans to go much broader.

Specifically, Novi is developing a platform that it hopes will eventually become a go-to service for beauty brands, as well as a lot of other businesses that sell to the growing number of consumers concerned about what, exactly, is in their homes. Think carpet sellers, medical device makers, developers of house cleaning products like detergents. If it needs to be formulated, Novi wants to assess it and give it its stamp of approval.

It’s not an easy thing to pull together, concedes Shenk, a graduate of the United States Air Force Academy and MIT who spent several years as the head of Eventbrite’s data science operation. Just one of the many steps involved is building connections to far-flung and disparate raw suppliers, like makers of the surfactants used for cleansing, foaming, thickening and other special effects in cosmetics. The reason: Novi will need to learn about and certify as safe their manufacturing processes.

It’s a major piece of the overall puzzle, and it’s harder than it might sound to nail down, as many manufacturers are hesitant to share information that they view as proprietary.

Still, Novi thinks it can persuade them to be more forthcoming by touting an AI-driven platform that it says can ingest and manage manufacturers’ proprietary data at scale — and make it easier, in turn, for consumer companies that are focused on using vetted ingredients and chemicals to find them. Indeed, where Novi will really shine, suggests Shenk, is in data management.

Investors who know her seem to think she has what it takes. Brian Rothenberg, a partner at Defy Partners who helped scale Eventbrite across six years before he joined the world of venture capital, just led a $1.5 million seed round for Novi. (“We see a groundswell of consumer consciousness in this area,” Rothenberg said in an emailed statement to us.)

The startup further has the backing of Eventbrite co-founders Kevin and Julia Hartz.

Also working in its favor: Novi says it’s already working with a large beauty retailer that likes the results it has seen as a customer of Novi’s software-as-a-service. (Shenk declines to name the outfit, but she says another reason she had to split off from NakedPoppy was the high likelihood that Novi would be working with competitors to the company.)

It’s certainly progress, considering that Novi is still fairly nascent, with a team of just four people as it ramps up.

In addition to Shenk, it’s run by Bisharat, who remains CEO of NakedPoppy but is also a co-founder of Novi and a board member; an engineer; and a chemist who previously worked for another “clean” beauty company, called Beautycounter.

Back in 2017, a formerly hot, formerly profitable company called Blue Apron went public. It didn’t go well. Today as the global stock market continues to fall, shares in the former venture darling are soaring, up more than 140% in midday trading.

Before its IPO, the company had to reduce its price range from $15 to $17 per share to $10 to $11 per share. That pricing change limited the company’s worth, and reduced the capital it raised in its debut. The meal kit delivery company finally priced at $10 per share. It opened up a hair, but closed the day a mere penny above its IPO price.

Then things got worse. In fact, Blue Apron’s share price decline got so bad that in mid-2019 Blue Apron had to execute a 1-for-15 reverse split. In most stock splits, a company’s share price gets too high for comfort. So, the firm decides to give its investors the same value of the company, but in new, smaller chunks. So a concern trading for $1,000 per share that wanted to split would normally give, say, its investors 10 new shares worth $100 apiece in exchange for their single $1,000 share.

A reverse split is the other way. You get fewer shares at a higher per-share value. It’s what you do if you need to avoid slipping under $1 per share, or other, similar fates.

Time passed, and everyone forgot about Blue Apron in the same manner as they did Grubhub, companies that came, made an impact, went public and then slowly dissolved.

The latest

Until now. Suddenly Blue Apron is the hottest stock in the world, skyrocketing as other companies shed value. Today in regular trading, American indices fell so far that they triggered protective circuit breakers. At the same time, Blue Apron was doing this (via Google Finance):

Bear in mind that we are looking at the company after its reverse split. So, no, the company is not worth 60% more than its IPO price of $10 per share. It’s worth far less. Indeed, Blue Apron is worth just $211 million today including its day’s gains, according to Google Finance.

Blue Apron was worth about $1.9 billion when it went public, for reference.

Anyway, why is the company skyrocketing? TechCrunch thinks it figured it out. Walk with us:

Everyone is looking for something to buy that will go up as everything else goes downBlue Apron makes meal kits that folks can make at homeOver the weekend, many U.S. cities began shutting downThat meant less dine-in serviceSo people are now, putatively, cooking moreThat means Blue Apron might benefit!Enter a hilarious momentum trade in a low-cap stockKaboom goes its share price

Don’t pop the champagne. Blue Apron is still worth about what it raised as a private company; its market cap is only about 40% of the money it raised while private in addition to its IPO haul. This company is still priced like it’s on life support.

And that makes some sense. Here are some facts from its Q4 and full-year 2019 report:

1.62 million Q4 orders, down from both Q3 2019 (1.73 million) and Q4 2018 (2.42 million)$94.3 million in Q4 revenue, down 33% compared to the year-ago periodA net loss of $21.9 million

Not great! Perhaps Blue Apron will explode, beating guidance and earning its newly resurrected share price. Maybe. But before you pile into the company, pause, and then probably don’t.

You’d be excused for feeling that mid-2019 was in a different decade as far as venture-backed IPOs go.

Last year saw a number of successful flotations of venture-backed technology and technology-enabled companies, and most performed well after they began trading. But despite some early success, a number of the most famous 2019 IPOs have seen their valuations decline rapidly in ensuing quarters.

In some cases, once richly valued public unicorns are off more than twice the market’s recent declines, have given up all their gains earned as public companies, or fallen under their final private market valuations. It’s a stunning reversal for several of the most-lauded companies to come out of the venture capital machine in a decade.

Many companies have been designed to optimize productivity when everybody is in the office. As offices close due to the coronavirus outbreak, many people are experimenting with remote work at scale for the first time.

Employees have to learn what it means to work remotely — but managers also have to learn how to keep their teams on track. That’s why it’s interesting to talk about what it’s like to manage a remote team.

Some companies have chosen to give up on the office and work completely remotely. I interviewed Reedsy’s co-founder and CEO Emmanuel Nataf (pictured above, right) about the company’s current work culture. Reedsy operates a marketplace of professionals in the publishing industries: If you’re a writer, you can find editors, designers, marketing experts and more. And if you’re a freelancer in one of those fields, you can find clients.

The short answer: Managing a remote team takes discipline. The long answer is much more interesting as Reedsy has implemented many different processes to foster information transparency. The interview was translated from French and edited for clarity and brevity.

TechCrunch: What does it mean to have a remote culture?

Emmanuel Nataf: I think our case is quite specific. We’re 30 people and what we do cannot necessarily work for a bigger team. It works for smaller teams but maybe not above 50 people.

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Ashish Jain was recorded in February 2020. Ashish...

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This isn’t the first economic downturn All Raise CEO Pam Kostka has been through. 

“I was here during the dot-com bust and rush, and here during the financial fallout that happened, so we’re a little overdue for some corrective action in the market,” Kostka said. “While I’ve been through boom and bust cycles before, this one is more meaningful because life and death are associated with it.”

All Raise is a nonprofit that focuses on increasing diversity within venture capital, both from a decision-maker and a deal perspective. It recently released its annual report, and we covered how female-founded startups landed more deals than ever before in 2019, per PitchBook data.  

After our piece looking at the numbers came out, however, some readers weighed in that our coverage missed the mark: In the headline, did we focus too much on progress and not enough on what is left to be done?

Because we’re both social distancing, I caught up with Kostka on the phone and got her take on how to report numbers around diversity without glossing over the work that remains to be accomplished. We also discussed how to stay optimistic during a downturn, potential innovation that might come out of COVID-19 and why diversity matters now more than ever.

Quit Genius, the YC-backed startup that uses cognitive behavioral therapy to help folks quit smoking and vaping tobacco products, has today announced the close of an $11 million Series A round.

The new funding was led by Octopus Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, Startup Health and Triple Point Ventures.

Quit Genius was built by doctors — Yusuf Sherwani (co-founder and CEO), Maroof Ahmed (co-founder and COO) and Sarim Siddiqui (co-founder and head of product) — who met on the first day of medical school. They saw the terrible effects of smoking on patients’ health but didn’t see doctors giving those patients a clear path to quit smoking.

Cognitive behavioral therapy is seen as one of the more effective treatments for breaking addiction, helping patients focus on their thoughts, feelings and behaviors and understanding how one affects the others. The Quit Genius app helps users recognize when a negative thought or feeling pops up, and replace those triggering thoughts and emotions with more positive, healthier thoughts. This is done through various types of content, such as audio sessions, animated videos and interactive exercises.

The company also offers a device that can pair with the app to test users’ breath and help hold them accountable to their goal of quitting.

Quit Genius has already made headway with its smoking and vaping products, and is going to use the funding to expand into other types of addiction, such as alcohol and opioid addiction.

Alongside its consumer-facing product, Quit Genius also offers an enterprise product to businesses that are looking to foster a healthy workforce and also save money on healthcare for employees. Unlike most enterprise wellness programs that charge per person per year (regardless of utilization or engagement), Quit Genius only charges by engagement (employees who use the program) and offers a 25% quit rate guarantee.

In other words, if 25% of enrolled users don’t achieve their goal of quitting, Quit Genius will partially refund fees. Thus far, the company hasn’t had to do that, reports CEO Sherwani.

Sherwani added that the company has signed up 15 enterprise clients, split between self-insured employers and health plan providers.

Beyond the funding and expansion into other forms of addiction, Quit Genius is also trying to do its own part as the novel coronavirus pandemic spreads across the globe. Noting the high-risk status of smokers, Sherwani said that the company will offer its product for free to new sign-ups through April so that they can quit smoking immediately.

Founded by doctors, Quit Genius prioritizes efficacy. The company has enlisted independent research studies to show the success rate of its product, the results of which have been published in peer-reviewed journals. According to that research, more than 60,000 people have quit smoking, with a 53% quit rate, which is higher than other quit-smoking techniques.

The startup has raised a total of $13.6 million from investors listed above, as well as Eric Ries, Serena Williams’ Serena Ventures, Venus Williams and Instacart co-founder Max Mullen.

You have to actually get work done, not just video call all day, but apps like Zoom want to take over your screen. Remote workers who need to stay in touch while staying productive are forced to juggle tabs. Meanwhile, call participants often look and sound far away, dwarfed by their background and drowned in noise.

Today, Around launches its new video chat software that crops participants down to just circles that float on your screen so you have space for other apps. Designed for laptops, Around uses auto-zoom and noise cancelling to keep your face and voice in focus. Instead of crowding around one computer or piling into a big-screen conference room, up to 15 people can call from their own laptop without echo — even from right next to each other.

“Traditional videoconferencing tries to maximize visual presence. But too much presence gets in the way of your work,” says Around CEO Dominik Zane. “People want to make eye contact. They want to connect. But they also want to get stuff done. Around treats video as the means to an end, not the end in itself.”

Around becomes available today by request in invite-only beta for Mac, windows, Linux, and web. It’s been in private beta since last summer, but now users can sign up here for early access to Around. The freemium model means anyone can slide the app into their stack without paying at first.

After two years in stealth, Around’s 12-person distributed team reveals that it’s raised $5.2 million in seed funding over multiple rounds from Floodgate, Initialized Capital, Credo Ventures, AngelList’s Naval Ravikant, Product Hunt’s Ryan Hoover, Crashlytics’ Jeff Seibert, and angel Tommy Leep. The plan is to invest in talent and infrastructure to keep video calls snappy.

Not Just A Picturephone

Around was born out of frustration with remote work collaboration. Zane and fellow Around co-founder Pavel Serbajlo had built mobile marketing company M.dot that was acquired by GoDaddy by using a fully distributed team. But they discovered that Zoom was “built around decades-old assumptions of what a video call should be” says Zane. “A Zoom video call is basically a telephone connected to a video camera. In terms of design, it’s not much different from the original Picturephone demoed at the 1964 World’s Fair.”

So together, they started Around as a video chat app that slips into the background rather than dominating the foreground. “We stripped out every unnecessary pixel by building a real-time panning and zooming technology that automatically keeps callers’ faces–and only their faces–in view at all times” Zane explains. It’s basically Facebook Messenger’s old Chat Heads design, but for the desktop enterprise.

Calls start with a shared link or /Around Slack command. You’re never unexpectedly dumped into a call, so you can stay on task. Since participants are closely cropped to their faces and not blown up full screen, they don’t have to worry about cleaning their workspace or exactly how their hair looks. That reduces the divide between work-from-homers and those in the office.

As for technology, Around’s “EchoTerminator” uses ultrasonic audio to detect nearby laptops and synchronization to eliminate those strange feedback sounds. Around also employs artificial intelligence and the fast CPUs of modern laptops to suppress noise like sirens, dog barks, washing machines, or screaming children. A browser version means you don’t have to wait for people to download anything, and visual emotes like “Cool idea” pop up below people’s faces so they don’t have to interrupt the speaker.

“Around is what you get when you rethink video chat for a 21st-century audience, with 21st-century technology,” says Initialized co-founder and general partner Garry Tan. “Around has cracked an incredibly difficult problem, integrating video into the way people actually work today. It makes other video-call products feel clumsy by comparison.”

There’s one big thing missing from Around: mobile. Since it’s meant for multitasking, it’s desktop/laptop only. But that orthodoxy ignores the fact that a team member on the go might still want to chime in on chats, even with just audio. Mobile apps are on the roadmap, though, with plans to allow direct dial-in and live transitioning from laptop to mobile. The 15-participant limit also prevents Around from working for all-hands meetings.

Competing with video calling giant Zoom will be a serious challenge. Nearly a decade of perfecting its technology gives Zoom super low latency so people don’t talk over each other. Around will have to hope that its smaller windows let it keep delays down. There’s also other multitask video apps like Loom’s asynchronously-recorded video clips that prevent distraction.

With coronavirus putting a new emphasis on video technology for tons of companies, finding great engineers could be difficult. “Talent is scarce, and good video is hard tech. Video products are on the rise. Google and large companies snag all the talent, plus they have the ability and scale to train audio-video professionals at universities in northern Europe” Zane tells me. “Talent wars are the biggest risk and obstacle for all real-time video companies.”

But that rise also means there are tons of people fed up with having to stop work to video chat, kids and pets wandering into their calls, and constantly yelling at co-workers to “mute your damn mic!” If ever there was a perfect time to launch Around, it’s now.

“Eight years ago we were a team of locals and immigrants, traveling frequently, moving between locations and offices” Zane recalls. “We realized that this was the future of work and it’s going to be one of the most significant transformations of modern society over the next 30 years . . . We’re building the product we’ve wanted for ourselves.”

One of the best things about working remotely is you don’t have colleagues randomly bugging you about superfluous nonsense. But the heaviness of traditional video chat swings things too far in the other direction. You’re isolated unless you want to make a big deal out of scheduling a call. We need presence and connection, but also the space to remain in flow. We don’t want to be away or on top of each other. We want to be around.

Many of you are probably looking for ways to support the restaurants and small businesses that are being hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, going out to your favorite restaurant right now is a real risk to public health — and that’s assuming it’s still open.

A new website called Help Main Street is offering a simple way for people to pitch in by searching or browsing through local business listings, then purchasing gift cards (or making Square payments). That way you can contribute cash to help business owners get through this crisis, and then redeem the card whenever things return to normal.

The site was created by a team of activists and technologists, including restaurant ordering startup Lunchbox and seed investor Eniac Ventures. Eniac’s Nihal Mehta told me that for the team, “This was a way to do a small part to help immediate victims of COVID-19 while releasing some nervous anxiety working from home.”

To create the site, Lunchbox engineers have been scraping restaurant websites and validating gift cards. Help Main Street has 20,000 listings at launch, but Mehta is hoping that number will expand quickly as chambers of commerce, small business associations and individual users add new listings.

“We are hoping this will jumpstart a major crowdsourcing movement where merchants and customers alike will add,” he said.

Mehta added that the site will eventually introduce a way to offer “Patreon for merchants”-style recurring payments.

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

This morning we’re tracking Airbnb’s latest losses, its anticipated and real Q1 revenue growth, and what the company’s current situation likely means for its public debut, something the company has promised will occur in 2020.

Last September, Airbnb told its investors, employees, and the world that it would begin to trade publicly in 2020, with the company widely expected to pursue a direct listing instead of a traditional IPO. Since then, the company’s persistent deficits have continued. And, unexpectedly, the world’s travel industry has become troubled in light of the spread of COVID-19, the resulting border closures and reduction in personal and business travel. Mix in a broad stock market selloff, and Airbnb is in a tricky spot.

It is too early to say that Airbnb will not float in 2020, but it’s not too early to say that a public listing in the first half of the year is out. Let’s explore why.

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Deepak Jeevankumar was recorded in February 2020....

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Deepgram, a startup focused on high-quality, real-time speech recognition, announced a $12 million Series A this morning.

The startup, founded a half decade ago, according to Crunchbase data, with just a few million in raised capital, is interesting, as its success to date was founded on two consecutive experiments. The first dealing with its technology, and the second concerning its market.

Deepgram sits in the midst of our continuing conversation about AI-grounded companies, or at least companies that make use of deep learning. Let’s explore its round, and how the company got to where it is today.

Foundations

Speech recognition has come a long way since terrible ’90s headsets and trying to train Dragon Naturally Speaking to better let you dictate into Word documents. Startups like Otter.ai have taken speech recognition tooling and made it available to the masses. But, while Otter.ai is something that journalists love for its ease of use and modest price point, there’s still something missing in the modern world of speech recognition: improved accuracy.

Otter and other services can do a fine job gisting a sound file into words and paragraphs, even working to differentiate between speakers. But it’s only so good, and it’s retroactive. With most calls that I execute for TechCrunch, for example, I record the chat on my phone, export the audio, upload it to Otter.ai, leave it be and circle back later on to listen and clean up the text for use in an article. (Here’s one, for example.)

What Deepgram can do is a bit more heavy duty and is not aimed at journalists or other individuals. Instead, Deepgram has built a speech recognition tool that it claims is more accurate and can handle real-time text input. It sells the tech to large companies.

TechCrunch spoke with Deepgram CEO Scott Stephenson about his company’s product during our call about the round itself. Summarizing our chat, here’s what we found out. Instead of trying to improve existing tech — which doesn’t sport strong gross margins, the CEO said — Deepgram started from scratch, building a deep learning tool that, after a few years’ work, was a step ahead of other speech recognition technologies in terms of accuracy.

Its investors agree. In a call with TechCrunch, Nvida’s Jeff Herbst, who took part in the investment, said that Deepgram was “one of the best, if not the best” speech recognition companies around. Deepgram provides its services in two ways, hosted on its own hardware (the firm claims better margins by running its own metal, and, you now know why Nvidia is involved) and on-prem on client hardware. The startup is targeting enterprise call centers and voice platforms as customers.

It took time to prove the company’s tech, years in fact. Deepgram then spent another few years testing out its possible commercial appeal. It may seem obvious today that there would be demand for what Deepgram built, but Gong.io and other, similar services are only so old. Regardless, after about four years, the company was content that it had proven out its product and customer base. Or as Stephenson told TechCrunch, the “tech risk” that Deepgram faced is now behind it, as is its “market risk.”

That’s why the company raised now, so let’s talk about the round.

The round

Deepgram’s $12 million investment was led by Wing VC. Other firms took part, including Nvidia as mentioned, and Y Combinator and SAP.

What’s the money for? Adding staff, among other things. Deepgram has about 40 people today, but declined to tell TechCrunch how quickly it will scale personnel (oddly, as that’s a pretty standard question), saying instead that it’s hiring aggressively, with a focus on go-to-market and engineering. The firm also intends to use some of its Series A on hardware.

What’s fun is that Deepgram has what it considers to be a strong market position, now crossed with a pile of cash. How fast it can grow is now the question, and the first thing we’re asking the next time we speak with the firm.

Revolut is introducing Revolut Junior, a new product specifically targeted toward kids aged 7-17 years old. Revolut Junior is a new app and service that integrates directly with the main Revolut app on the parent’s side.

Parents or legal gardians who are also Revolut users can create a Revolut Junior account for their kid. After that, your kid can download the Revolut Junior app and get a Revolut Junior card.

The new app offers a limited set of features with an interface divided in two tabs: Account and Profile. Kids can see a list of transactions in real time in the Account tab. They can configure card settings in the Profile tab, and that’s about it.

On the other end, parents can control their kids’ spending from Revolut and they can transfer money to a Revolut Junior account instantly. Parents can also access balances and transactions as well as disable some card features, such as online payments. They can also choose to receive notifications when a child is using their card.

The reason why Revolut Junior can attract a ton of users is that Revolut itself already has over 10 million users. It’s going to be easier to convince existing Revolut customers to use Revolut Junior over a custom-made challenger bank for teens, such as Kard or Step. Arguably, the biggest competitor of challenger banks for teens is still cash.

As kids grow up, chances are they’ll switch to a full-fledged Revolut account if they’ve been using Revolut Junior for years. Revolut Junior represents a great acquisition funnel as well.

Revolut Junior is only available to Premium and Metal customers in the U.K. for now. The company will eventually roll it out to more users and more countries.

Revolut plans to add more features to Revolut Junior in the future. For instance, parents will be able to set a regular allowance and financial goals. Kids will get savings options, spending reports, spending limits and more.