Habito, the London startup that has spent the last few years moving the mortgage process online, including offering its own mortgages beyond acting as a broker, has completed £35 million in Series C funding.

The newly disclosed round — comprising an earlier Series C equity raise and a more recent Series C extension in the form of a convertible loan note, was led by new investors Augmentum Fintech, SBI Group and mojo.capital, with participation from various existing investors including Ribbit Capital, Atomico and Mosaic Ventures.

The convertible loan was also matched by the U.K. taxpayer-funded Future Fund, set up by the government to help mitigate the coronavirus crisis’ affect on the country’s venture-backed startup ecosystem. It brings the total raised by Habito to just over £63 million since launching in 2016.

In a call, Habito founder Daniel Hegarty said the new investment will be used by the company to continue digitising aspects of home financing and buying, which still remain a pain-point for home buyers and sellers.

The fintech/proptech started out by offering a digital mortgage brokerage, promising to help you secure a new mortgage and monitor the competitiveness of your existing mortgage. The idea was to make applying for or switching mortgages as frictionless as possible.

In July 2019, Habito announced that it would begin direct lending via its own range of mortgages. Starting with “buy to let” mortgages, the move saw the company expand beyond brokerage after it received regulatory approval to become a mortgage lender. By doing so, the aim was to cut in half the time frame from mortgage application to offer, enabled in part by Habito’s integration with the conveyancing process to add more transparency for the home buyer, while the number of documents needed was also significantly reduced.

In January this year, Habito launched “Habito Plus,” something getting closer to an end-to-end home-buying service. It brings together a buyer’s mortgage application, conveyancing needs and surveys “under one roof” — which feels less vitamin pill and more actual painkiller for anyone who has ever experienced having to deal with and coordinate all of the various stakeholders and parties involved in buying or selling a property.

Most recently, Habito launched its broker portal, providing more than 3,000 external brokers access to its own buy-to-let mortgage products and “Instant Decision” technology capabilities. Hegarty tells me the company intends to develop a suite of “innovative” residential mortgage products for all types of homeowners, not just “buy to let.”

Notably, Habito recently become a “B Corp” certified company, meaning it has made a legal commitment to put “people and planet on the same level as profit.” Resembling somewhat of a movement, there are more than 3,000 accredited B Corp companies globally, including Ben & Jerry’s, Patagonia and WeTransfer.

Tomorrow’s a big day for early-stage startup founders preparing to exhibit in Digital Startup Alley at Disrupt 2020. We’re kicking off the first of three exclusive, interactive webinars to help exhibitors make the most of their Startup Alley experience.

Tune in tomorrow, August 12 at 1 p.m. PT/ 4 p.m. ET for The Dos and Don’ts of Working with the Press. Presenting your company to the media is both a skill and an art form. It takes thought and practice — and media training can help you craft a compelling story. Hundreds of journalists from around the world will be on the lookout for compelling stories at Disrupt 2020, and this workshop can help you catch their eye.

Positive media exposure is essential for early-stage startups. It can drop a spotlight on your business, help attract potential customers and jumpstart your funding. Or, as Luke Heron, CEO of TestCard and veteran Startup Alley exhibitor puts it:

“Coverage is the life blood of a startup. Cash at the beginning of the start-up journey is difficult to come by, and an article from a credible organization can help push things in the right direction.”

During tomorrow’s media training, TechCrunch writers and editors Greg Kumparak, Anthony Ha and Ingrid Lunden — experts at interviewing startup founders — will discuss best practices when it comes to talking with the press. You’ll learn what journalists look for and how to avoid pitfalls that could tank an interview.

If you’re still on the fence about exhibiting in Startup Alley, consider this: Disrupt 2020 spans five days and it’s the biggest, longest Disrupt ever. You’ll be able to network with thousands of attendees from around the world. And if you purchase your Disrupt Digital Startup Alley Package today, you can attend tomorrow’s media training.

You’ll also be able to attend two more webinars exclusively for Startup Alley exhibitors later this month. Check ’em out and mark your calendar now!

August 19 — COVID-19’s Impact on the Startup World with panelists Nicola Corzine, executive director of the Nasdaq Entrepreneurship Center, and Cameron Stanfill, a VC analyst at PitchBook.August 26 — Fundraising and Hiring Best Practices with panelists Sarah Kunst of Cleo Capital and Brett Berson of First Round Capital.

Got your Digital Startup Alley Package? Then tune in tomorrow for The Dos and Don’ts of Working with the Press and get ready to make your best possible impression with the press at Disrupt 2020.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

The automotive industry is knee deep in the vast transition to electric, but one place where gas is still going strong is out on the water. Seattle startup Zin Boats wants to start what you might call a sea change by showing, as Tesla did with cars, that an electric boat can be not just better for the planet, but better in almost every other way as well.

With a minimalist design like a silver bullet, built almost entirely from carbon fiber, the 20-foot Z2R is less than half the weight of comparable craft, letting it take off like a shot and handle easily, while also traveling a hundred miles on a charge — and you can fill the “tank” for about five bucks in an hour or so.

Waiting for the other shoe to drop? Well, it ain’t cheap. But then, few boats are.

Piotr Zin, the company’s namesake, has been designing racing sailboats for 20 years, while working in industrial design at BMW, GM and other major companies. Soon after settling down on a houseboat on Seattle’s Lake Union, he realized that the waterways he had enjoyed his whole life might not exist for the next generation.

(Disclosure: Zin actually moved in next door to my mother, and I happened to find out he was working on this while visiting her.)

“The reason I started working on electric boats specifically is because I had a kid, and I had a come to Jesus moment,” he told me. “I realized: If we’re not going to do something personally about the quality of the water we live in, it’s not going to be here when my kid is my age.”

Illustrious precursors

Traditional gas-powered boats are very much a product of the distant past, like running a ’70s-era car half underwater. Surprisingly, electric boats are equally old. Like electric cars, they enjoyed a brief vogue in the early 20th century. And likewise they were never considered viable for “real” boating until quite recently.

Like most things, it comes down to physics: “The power required to move a boat, versus the power to move a car, is absolutely enormous,” Zin explained. “It’s like driving a car in first gear at full throttle all the time.”

That level of draw limited electric boats to being the aquatic equivalent of golf carts — in fact, carts and some of the more popular old-school electric boats share many components. If you’ve ridden in one, it was probably a Duffy, which has made models for puttering around lakes at 3-4 knots since the ’60s. Perfectly pleasant, but not exactly thrilling.

What changed everything was the increasing density and falling cost of lithium-ion batteries. The Z2R uses BMW batteries mated to a custom Torqeedo engine, and at cruising speeds (say 15 knots) can go a hundred miles or more. It recharges using anything from an ordinary wall plug to the high-amperage charging cables found at most marinas, in which case it will put another 50 miles in the tank while you eat a sandwich.

Considering traditional boats’ fuel efficiency and the rising price of marine gas, going electric might save a boat owner thousands every year. (Maintenance is also practically non-existent; Zin advised hosing it down once in a while.)

But it’s also more than capable of going extremely fast.

“The top speed is way over 30 knots,” Zin noted. “We tested this boat to 55, but decided not to sell that to people. It’s just insane.”

Having ridden in it myself, I can confirm that the Z2R really jumps off the line in a level-bottomed way that, compounded by its near silence, seems impossible. Just as Tesla’s consumer sedans compete with Lamborghinis in 0-60 times, the instantaneous response is almost frightening.

“The boat was designed around the battery. The unique part of using an electric system is we can put the motor anywhere we want,” Zin said. By sitting it flat on the bottom, the center of gravity is lowered and weight distribution evened out compared to most speedboats. “You look at a lot of traditional boats’ builds, they kind of cram everything in the back. Then when you put the hammer down, you can’t see anything for five seconds. In this boat, there’s no bow rise — it sits flat.”

Being so level means there’s almost no risk of overturning it, or many of the other failure modes resulting from lopsided designs that misbehave at speed. Simplicity of operation and surprising performance seem to be a family characteristic of electric vehicles.

Design by wire

Zin is proud to have designed the boat himself from scratch, using both high-performance fluid dynamics software and scale models to work out the shape of the hull.

“Boat building is a very traditional business. Most builders aren’t about innovation, they’re about ‘this is how we do it.’ ” Zin said. “But there’s a huge advantage in being able to use these tools. The computing power that we have in video cards just in the last few years, mainly because of the gaming industry, has pushed what’s possible further and further.”

Previously, large computational fluid dynamics suites would have users submit their parameters and pick a few milestone speeds at X thousand dollars per data point — 10 knots, 20 knots, etc. The way the water would react to the boat and vice versa would be calculated at those speeds and extrapolated for speeds in between. But with increases in computing power, that’s no longer necessary, as Zin ended up proving to a commercial CFD software provider when he used a separate compute stack to calculate the water’s behavior continuously at all speeds and in high definition.

“Right now you can run the boat [in the simulation] at any speed you want and see the way the water will spray, including little droplets. And then you can tweak the shape of your hull to make sure those droplets don’t hit the passengers,” he said. “It’s not exactly the way most boat designers would do it. So utilizing high-end software that was not really being given its full potential was amazing.”

Building practically everything out of carbon fiber (an ordeal of its own) puts the whole boat at around 1,750 pounds — normally a 20-foot boat would be twice that or more. That’s crucial for making sure the boat can go long distances; range anxiety is if anything a bigger problem on the water than on the road. And of course it means it’s quick and easy to control.

Yet the boat hardly screams speed. The large open cockpit is flat and spacious, with only a steering wheel, throttle and screens with friendly readouts for range, media controls GPS and so on. There’s no vibration or engine roar. No aesthetic choices like stripes or lines suggest its explosive performance. The wood veneer (to save weight — and it’s tuned to the speakers to provide better sound) floor and cream leather upholstery make it feel more like a floating Mercedes.

That’s not an accident. Zin’s first customers are the type of people who can afford a boat that costs $250,000 or so. He compared it to Tesla’s Roadster: A showy vehicle aimed at the high end that will fund and prove out the demand for a more practical one — an open-bow tender model Zin is already designing that will cost more like $175,000.

Conscience with a wallet

The target consumer is one who has money and an eco-conscious outlook — either of their own or by necessity.

“There are a lot of inquiries from Europe, where the environmental restrictions are stricter than in North America. But we also have a number of pristine lakes that are electric-only for the purpose of keeping them clean,” Zin explained. “So if you live on a lake in Montana that’s electric-only, you have the option to go at five knots, and you can’t even cross the lake because the boat is so slow… or you can have a fully functional powerboat that you can water ski behind, the same speeds you get in a gas power boat, but it’s absolutely emissions free. I mean, this boat is as clean as it gets — there’s zero oil, zero gasoline, zero anything that will get into the water.”

It really made me wonder why the whole industry didn’t go electric years ago. And in fact there are a few competitors, but they tend to be even more niche or piecemeal jobs, mating an electric engine to an existing hull and saying it’s an electric boat that goes 50 knots. And it does — for five or 10 minutes. Or there are custom boat builders who will create something quite nice for a Zin-type customer — head on over to Monte Carlo and buy one at auction for a couple million bucks.

Zin sees his boat as the first one to check every box and a few that weren’t there before. As fast as a powerboat but nearly silent; same range but a fraction of the price to get there; handles like a dream but requires practically no maintenance. It’s as smart as the smartest car, limiting its speed based on the waterway, automatically adjusting itself to stay within range of a safe harbor or charger, over-the-air updates to the software anywhere in the world. I didn’t even get a chance to ask about its self-driving capabilities.

As a first-time founder, a technical one at that, of a hardware company, Zin has his work cut out for him. He’s raised seed money to get the prototype and production model ready, but needs capital to start filling his existing orders faster. Like many other startups, he was just gearing up to go all out when the pandemic struck, shutting down production completely. But they’re just about ready to start manufacturing again.

“I realized that there isn’t such a thing as a boat company any more,” said Zin. “Part of what we do is to build that shell that holds everything, and it happens to be moving through the water, which makes it a boat, but that’s really where the boating part of it ends. It’s really a technology hub, and my company is not just a boat company, it has to be a technology company.”

He said that his investors understand that this isn’t a one-off toy but the beginnings of an incredibly valuable IP that — well, with Tesla’s success, the pitch writes itself.

“We don’t only have a plan like, just make one really fast boat,” Zin concluded. “We know what we want to do with this technology right now, we know what we’re going to do with this technology in 24 months, and 48 months; I wish I could show you some of this stuff. It’s tough, and we need to survive this year, but this is just the start.”

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 498th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, August 13, 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...

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Sramana Mitra: What do you charge the retailers for this facility? Brad Paterson: It depends. Cash flow is king, especially today. The pricing starts from 3% for three installments. If the retailer...

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Recently Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) announced its second quarter results that surpassed market expectations. However, the COVID crisis is hitting Google as well. Advertising revenues fell and Google...

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Sramana Mitra: How did you reach those people? Mareza Larizadeh: Andy and Mark served on my board for a few years. I met them at Stanford business school. Sramana Mitra: They were teachers? Mareza...

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Running a startup accelerator comes with a number of occupational hazards, but “skepticism is the easiest thing to fall into when you’ve seen too many companies,” said Y Combinator President Geoff Ralston, “and it’s the thing you have to avoid the most.”

Ralston joined me last week for an hour-long Extra Crunch Live interview where we talked about several topics, including how YC has adapted its program during the pandemic, why he has “never stopped coding” and what he sees changing in tech.

“We try to not be too smart, because great founders often see things beyond what you’re seeing,” he said. “If you try to be too smart, you’ll miss the Airbnbs of the world. You’ll say ‘Airbeds in peoples houses? That’s stupid! I’m not going to invest in that,’ and you could’ve bought 10% of Airbnb for like nothing back then… 10% of that company… you can do your own math.”

Extra Crunch Live is our new virtual event series where we sit down with some of the top founders, investors and builders in tech to glean every bit of insight they care to share. We’ve recently been joined by folks like Hunter Walk, Kirsten Green and Mark Cuban.

To watch the entire interview with Geoff Ralston, sign up for ExtraCrunch — but once you’ve got that covered, you can find it (and a bunch of key excerpts from the chat!) below.

Advice for getting into YC

I prefer it when an Extra Crunch Live conversation starts out with actionable advice, so we kicked things off with any suggestions Ralston had for folks looking to apply to YC. And he had plenty! Such as:

Mind the deadline, but all hope is not lost if you miss it: “If you miss the deadline, it’s not the end of the world,” says Ralston. “Don’t tell anyone on the admissions team that I said this, but it’s a little bit of a soft deadline. We would never turn down the next epic company because you missed the deadline… although your odds go down of getting in if you don’t make it in by [the deadline]. Why shouldn’t your odds be as high as possible?”Don’t change things up for YC’s sake: “Do whatever you can do to make your company as successful, as real as possible… but don’t try to like, pretty up your company for YC,” he says. “That’s never smart [to do] for an investor. Don’t make bad short-term decisions because you think there’s a deadline that you should do wrong things for. Instead, build your company for the long term, and do the best you can possibly do to find product market fit, to build the right product, to build the right technology, to build the right software or whatever it is you’re building.”

Later in the video (around the 40:55 mark), a question from the audience leads Ralston back to the topic, and he has a few more pieces of advice:

Stick to the instructions: “The instructions are fairly clear. It says: do a one-minute video, have all the founders there, and talk to us. That’s a good idea! Don’t give us some marketing video, we’re not interested in that. That’s not how we’re making our decision.”Hone your pitch: “Think about expressing yourself concisely, with great clarity. It does not help to write a book in the application. Be kind to us! We’re reading, you know, hundreds of applications. Get your idea across as clearly as you can. That’s actually a really good signal to us, if you can describe what you’re doing with a minimum of words. That helps us a ton.”Tell your story: “Do not skimp on talking about yourselves!” Ralston notes. “We are super interested in you, who you are, and why you’re doing what you’re doing.”

The team at DoubleVerify, a company that helps advertisers eliminate fraud and ensure brand safety, said that it’s recently identified a new tactic used by ad fraudsters seeking to make money on internet-connected TVs.

Senior Vice President of Product Management Roy Rosenfeld said that it’s harder for those fraudsters to create a legitimate-looking TV app — at least compared to the web and mobile, where “you can just put up a site [or app] to generate content.” For a connected TV app, you need lots of video, which can be costly and time-consuming to produce.

“What these guys have started to do is take old content that’s in the public domain and package that in fancy-looking CTV apps that they submit to the platform,” Rosenfeld said. “But at the end of the day, no one is really watching the old westerns or anything like that. This is just a vehicle to get into the app stores.”

As noted in a new report from the company (which will soon be available online), DoubleVerify said it has identified more than 1,300 fraudulent CTV apps in the past 18 months, with more than half of that coming in 2020.

The report outlined a process by which fraudsters create an app from this content (often old TV and movies from the ’50s and ’60s that has fallen into the public domain); submit the app for approval from Roku, Amazon Fire or Apple TV; then, with the additional legitimacy of an app store ID, generate fake traffic and impressions.

Rosenfeld compared this to a previous boom in flashlight apps for smartphones: “Are there legit flashlight apps? Absolutely. But most of them were not.” In the same way, he argued, “This is not a testament about public domain content overall, it’s not to say that there aren’t legit channels and apps out there that people are consuming and enjoying” — it’s just that many of the public domain apps being submitted are used for ad fraud.

To avoid paying for fake impressions, DoubleVerify recommends that advertisers advocate for transparency standards, buy from platforms that support third-party verification and, of course, buy through ad platforms certified by DoubleVerify.

Angel funding, seed investing and generally focusing on earlier stage investing is a huge business in the world of startups these days — it helps investors get in early to the most promising companies, and (because of the smaller size of the checks) allows for even the less prolific to spread their bets.

There was a time when it was immensely difficult for a founder to get a first check, not least because there were fewer people writing them. However, Jeff Clavier was an exception to that rule.

As the founder of Uncork Capital (formerly known as SoftTech VC), he has been in the business of angel and seed investing for 16 years, popularizing the opportunity and highlighting the need for more support at this stage — well before it was cool. You could say he was early to early stage.

Clavier said that at the end of 2019, it was estimated that there were more than 1,000 firms focusing on seed investing in the market, but by the end of this year, there will be about 2,000. “Don’t ask me whether it makes any sense because when I started 16 years ago, I didn’t think would be a big deal,” he said. “But certainly that creates a bit of a conundrum for founders to try and understand.”

As of now, Clavier has made nearly 230 investments and counting.

TechCrunch Early Stage, our virtual conference highlighting that stage of startup life, was the perfect venue to hear from him on all things seed investing and building startups today. Below are some highlights, a link to the video and a pitch deck he put together for the chat. Questions were edited for space and clarity.

Not all VCs are created equal (so know who you are pitching)

First thing to understand is that not all VCs are created equal. There are a bunch of different firms, tons of them out there, and you as a founder need to understand what are the specifics of your pitch opportunity, how to match with the right firm, and to figure out what stage of “early” you happen to be.

Startups can be super early, or mid-stage, which is typically what we refer to as pre-seed. Then there’s the seed stage, where you have developed a product, with a demo. And there is post-seed, where you have product but are not quite ready to raise a Series A. So who are the firms that can actually be the right fit for me at those different stages? The qualification part of the targeting is really important. Especially in a COVID environment when you can’t spend the same kind of time with each other.

It’s useful for founders to try and understand investors better, maybe asking a couple of questions like, “When is the last time you made a brand new investment at seed stage?” And “How has your investment process changed as a result of COVID?”

For investors, you want to understand how you’re going to evolve your process to cope with the fact that you don’t spend time with those founders face-to-face. Some firms are still struggling with that.

At Uncork, we’re now past the point of portfolio triage that we had in the first few weeks of of the pandemic. What was surprising to me was the speed and velocity at which some deals actually.

Find an investment lead

At the end of 2019, I had published Cloud Stocks: Top 20 for 2020 with a summary of which SaaS companies are succeeding on the basis of a strong PaaS strategy, AI, and robust developer...

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Tech stocks retain their highs as the second quarter’s earnings season begins to fade into the rearview mirror, and there are still a number of companies looking to go public while the times are good. It looks like a smart move, as public investors are hungry for growth-oriented shares — which is just what tech and venture-backed companies have in spades.

The companies currently looking to go public are diverse. China-based real-estate giant KE Holdings — a hybrid listings company and digital transaction portal for housing — is looking to raise as much as $2.3 billion in a U.S. listing. Xpeng, another China-based company that builds electric vehicles, is looking to list in the U.S as well. Xpeng has the distinction of being gross-margin negative in every key time period detailed in its S-1 filing.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. You can read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

And then there’s Duck Creek Technologies, a domestic tech company looking to go public on the back of growing SaaS revenues. This morning let’s quickly spin through Duck Creek’s history, peek at its financial results, calculate its expected valuation and see how its pricing fits compared to current norms.

Duck Creek is a Boston-based software company that serves the property and casualty (P&C) insurance market. Its customers include names like AIG, Geico and Progressive, along with smaller players that aren’t as well known to the American mass market.

The KE IPO will be a big affair because the company is huge and profitable with $3.86 billion in H1 2020 revenue leading to $227.5 million in net income. The Xpeng IPO will be interesting because Tesla’s strong share price has given float to a great many EV boats. But Duck Creek is a company slowly letting go of perpetual license software sales and scaling its SaaS incomes while still generating nearly half its revenues from services. It’s a company we can understand, in other words.

So let’s get under the skin of the Boston-based company that also claims low-code functionality. This will be fun.

Duck Creek by the numbers

This morning, Mux, a startup that provides API-based video streaming tooling and analytics, announced that it has closed a $37 million Series C round of capital.

Andreessen Horowitz led the round, which included participation from Accel and Cobalt. Prior to this funding round, Mux most recently raised a roughly $20 million round in mid-2019. In total, the company had raised a hair under $32 million before its Series C, according to PitchBook data.

The Mux round lands amidst a number of trends that we’re tracking here at TechCrunch, namely API-based startups, which are hot as a group at the moment, and startups that are serving an accelerating digital transformation.

Let’s explore a bit of Mux’s history, and then dig into how the startup’s current pace of revenue growth explains its fresh infusion of capital.

From exits to analytics to APIs

TechCrunch spoke with Mux’s founder Jon Dahl about the round, curious about how the company came to be. Dahl was a co-founder of Zencoder back in the early 2010s, which sold to Brightcove. When Zencoder launched, TechCrunch said that it wanted “to be the Amazon Web Services of video encoding.” It wound up selling for $30 million, a figure that stood a bit taller in 2012, when the transaction was announced.

Dahl stuck around Brightcove for a few years while angel investing. Then in late 2015 he founded Mux. The new startup first built an analytics tool called Mux Data. Dahl said the analytics product was needed because more conventional tooling like Google Analytics don’t work well with online video.

Mux Data is a SaaS product. But what made Mux even more interesting is its on-demand infra play, namely Mux Video.

Mux Video is delivered via an API, supporting both live and on-demand video for other companies. The startup likes to argue that it’s doing for video what Stripe has done for payments, namely take a bundle of complexity and headache, wrestle it into shape, then offer it via a developer-friendly hook.

Delivering video, we’ve seen via the bootstrapped growth of Cloudinary and recent Daily.co round, is growing work in 2020.

That fact shows up in Mux’s numbers, which are somewhat bonkers. The company’s aggregate revenue numbers are growing at a pace that Dahl described as 4x, while Mux Video’s revenues are growing at a pace of 8x, he said. Dahl shared a few other metrics — startups: if you want folks to care about your funding round, follow this example — including that Mux Video’s LTV/CAC ratio is somewhere around 5x-6x, and that its net retention is around 160%.

The collected performance data that Mux shared explain why a16z wanted to put its capital into the company.

But to better understand that all the same, I caught up with Kristina Shen, a general partner at the venture firm. Shen stressed that Mux was heading in the right direction before the pandemic, but that COVID has accelerated the importance of video in how humans interact with one another — an accelerating secular shift for Mux to surf, in other words.

COVID has bolstered Mux, with a release regarding its new investment, noting that its “social media customers [have seen] an increase of 118% in video streaming since mid-February while fitness and health streaming surged by 162%, e-learning grew by 230% and religious streams jumped nearly 3 orders of magnitude.”

Shen said during our call that Mux is one of the fastest-growing enterprise SaaS companies that her firm has seen.

Finally, when asked about Mux’s gross margins, Shen said the company would eventually look similarly to other companies in the infra space, like Twilio and Stripe. This matches what Dahl told this publication, though the founder included a fun wrinkle. Remember Mux Data, the analytics product? Its margins more closely resembles SaaS economics, while Mux Video is more similar to other API, infra plays. So Mux has a bit of SaaS and a bit of infra in it, which should give it a super interesting blended gross margin profile.

Fun. The next time we talk to the firm we’ll be curious to see how far into the double-digit millions it can stretch its run rate.

At last month’s Early Stage virtual event, channel growth experts joined TechCrunch reporters and editors for a series of conversations covering the best tools and strategies for building startups in 2020. For this post, I’ve recapped highlights of talks with:

Ethan Smith, founder and CEO, GraphiteSusan Su, startup growth advisor, executive-in-residence, Sound VenturesAsher King-Abramson, founder, Got Users

If you’d like to hear or watch these conversations in their entirety, we’ve embedded the videos below.

Ethan Smith: How to build a high-performance SEO engine

Relying on internet searches to learn about growth topics like search engine optimization leads to a rabbit hole of LinkedIn thinkfluencer musings and decade-old Quora posts. Insights are few and far between, because SEO has changed dramatically as Google has squashed spammy techniques “specialists” have pushed for years.

Ethan Smith, owner of growth agency Graphite, says Google didn’t kill SEO, but the channel has evolved. “SEO has built a negative reputation over time of being spammy,” Smith says. “The typical flow of an SEO historically has been: I need to find every single keyword I possibly can find and auto-generate a mediocre page for each of those keywords, the user experience doesn’t really matter, content can be automated and spun, the key is fooling the bot.”

Artificial intelligence has disrupted this flow as algorithms have abandoned hard-coded rules for more flexible designs that are less vulnerable to being gamed. What SEO looks like today, Smith says, is all about trying to “figure out what the algorithm is trying to accomplish and try to accomplish the same thing.” Google’s algorithms aren’t looking for buckets of keywords, they’re looking to distill a user’s intent.

The key to building a strategy around SEO as a company breaks down into six steps surrounding intent, says Smith:

Target by intent

In a world economy devastated by Covid, threatened by climate change, ravaged by simultaneous natural disasters like tropical cyclone Amphan, the need for philanthropy has never been higher. This is...

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Entrepreneurial creators have to do a lot with limited time. They need to, well, create, but then they also need to build their marketing funnels, convert users to their paid products, and manage business operations. Yet, perhaps the most important task they face is keeping their existing fans engaged, because ultimately, that engagement ties directly to the health of their brand long-term.

Social tools are abysmal on platforms like YouTube and Instagram, particularly when it comes to creators owning their own communities and building deeper relationships with them. Other products like Discord have been used to some success, although Discord was built with a different focus in mind and is being hammered in to fix the problem.

Circle believes there is a better way. The New York City-based startup officially launched today for creators (following eight months of product beta testing). The platform is designed from the bottom-up to offer better community building and engagement tools for creators, while also integrating with other software typical in the creator toolkit.

The key DNA for the company is another NYC-based startup called Teachable. Two of Circle’s three founders, Sid Yadav and Andrew Guttormsen, hail from the edtech platform, which helps entrepreneurial teachers setup online storefronts for their classes. Teachable was sold to Hotmart earlier this year for what was reported to be a quarter of a billion dollars. Yadav was VP of Product there, and Guttormsen was VP of Growth and Marketing. Their third co-founder, Rudy Santino, knew Yadav from previous work.

Yadav spun out of Teachable and actually got his start as a contractor for Sahil Lavingia, the founder of Gumroad we were just talking about last week because he launched a new seed fund. He worked part-time as a product and design consultant, allowing him the flexibility to begin spending time thinking about new product ideas.

“I always knew that my next startup was going to be in [the creator] space,” Yadav said. “I just loved what they’re all about, which is about making an income from what they love doing.”

Teachable’s rapid growth in a small slice of the creator space taught Yadav some of the key challenges that creators face, and what a new product needed to solve in order to help them. With his co-founders, he enlisted a group of creators — including Pat Flynn at Smart Passive Income and Anne-Laure Le Cunff, who operates a newsletter called Ness Labs — to actively build communities on Circle to prove out their various design and product decisions.

The growth of the platform and the engagement of potential customers attracted the attention of Notation Capital, a NYC-based pre-seed fund that just announced its third fund late last month. Notation led a $1.5 million seed round into Circle, which also included Lavingia, Ankur Nagpal (the founder and CEO of Teachable), Dave Ambrose and Matthew Ziskie, among others.

There is a growing movement of software designed to help creators start their businesses. Substack of course has gotten the most attention in Silicon Valley, with a platform designed mostly around email newsletter subscriptions. Pico, meanwhile, has focused on building out more of the infrastructure of the creator business through a CRM that integrates with most other platforms. Patreon handles more of the payments and revenue engagement of fans.

Circle may end up touching on those areas, but today, wants to be the destination where you send all your creators in between newsletters or blog posts or Instagrams. It’s a smart part of the creator stack to play in, and with strong early customer enthusiasm and a chunk of funding, seems ready to make a mark in this burgeoning market.

Skillshare CEO Matt Cooper said 2020 has been a year of rapid growth — even before the pandemic forced large swaths of the population to stay home and turn to online learning for entertainment and enrichment.

Cooper (who became CEO in 2017) told me that the company decided last year to “focus on our strength,” leading to a “brand relaunch” in January 2020 to emphasize the richness of its creativity-themed content. At the same time, Cooper said the company defines creativity very broadly, with classes divided into categories like animation, design, illustration, photography, filmmaking and writing.

“It’s not Bob Ross,” he said. “And I love Bob Ross, but that’s a very narrow definition of creativity. Creativity can come in lots of different forms — art, design, journaling, creative writing, it can be culinary, it can be crafts.”

Cooper added that daily usage was already up significantly by mid-March, when the pandemic led to widespread social distancing orders across the United States. That created some challenges, particularly for the more polished Skillshare Originals that the company offers alongside its user-taught classes. (For example, Originals include a color masterclass taught by Victo Ngai, a class on “discovering your creative voice” taught by Shantell Martin and a creative nonfiction class by Susan Orlean.)

But of course the pandemic also meant that, as Cooper put it, “A lot more people had a lot more free time at home and were looking for a constructive way to spend it.” In fact, the company said that since its rebranding, new membership sign-ups have tripled, with existing members watching three times the number of lessons.

And Skillshare has continued producing Originals by sending instructors “a huge box of gear” and then supervising the shoot remotely. In fact, Cooper suggested that this has “opened up a whole new world” for the Originals team, allowing them to “look at parts of the world where we probably weren’t going to fly a camera crew to go shoot.”

The company now has 12 million registered members, 8,000 teachers and 30,000 classes — all accessible for $99 a year or $19 a month. And it’s announcing that it has raised $66 million in new funding led by OMERS Growth Equity, with managing director Saar Pikar joining the board of directors. Previous investors Union Square Ventures, Amasia, Burda Principal Investments and Spero Ventures also participated.

“Skillshare serves the needs of professional creatives and everyday creative hobbyists alike, which presents a highly-innovative value proposition for the online learning market,” Pikar said in a statement. “We look forward to deepening our partnership with Skillshare, and our fellow investors, in order to help Matt Cooper and his team scale up the company’s international reach – and help Skillshare achieve the full potential of its unique approach to online learning.”

Cooper added that the company (which had previously raised $42 million) was cash-flow positive for the first half of 2020, so it raised the new round to invest in growth — particularly in the Skillshare for Teams enterprise product, which allows customers like GM Financial, Vice, AWS, Lululemon, American Crafts and Benefit to offer Skillshare as a perk for their employees.

Cooper is also hoping to expand internationally. Apparently two-thirds of new member sign-ups are coming from outside the United States, with India as Skillshare’s fastest growing market, and that’s with “no local language content, no local language teachers.” While Cooper plans to remain focused on English content for the near future, he noted there are other steps Skillshare can take to encourage global viewership, like accepting payments in different currencies and supporting subtitles in different languages.

“Just by making it a little easier for those international users to get value from the platform, we expect to see dramatic growth in these international markets,” he said.

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

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest big news, chats about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here, and myself here, and don’t forget to check out last Friday’s episode.

This morning was a bit of a grab-bag of news, but of course we had to start off with the biggest story from the past few weeks:

It’s TikTok around the clock: News broke recently that Twitter could be interested in TikTok after Apple came and somewhat went as a possible suitor. What matters is that Microsoft is not a full-lock on TikTok’s exit. No word lately on whether the Trump administration’s decision to try to extort a chunk of the sale price will go through. (It won’t.)TikTok may sue the Trump administration as early as this week over its possible forced sale.Do startup culture, venture capital and mental health mix well?Amazon is talking about turning some malls into fulfillment centers; TechCrunch has more.The huge wealth of major tech companies is only growing, meaning that a rising share of the public market run is based on a handful of big-tech results.Flipkart is building an accelerator.Expert System has raised $29.4 million, while Palmetto has raised $29 million, and Silverfort put together a $30 million round. How’s that for three rounds of the same size?

All that and earnings season is largely behind us, leaving tech companies generally unscathed. So, the good times will persist for a while yet. Have a great week!