The COVID-19 pandemic has shaken up the startup world, slowing some high-growth unicorns and promoting others onto the coveted list. In the earlier-stages of startup land, the same patterns of acceleration and braking can be found.

TechCrunch wanted to dig more deeply into the cohort of startups that are seeing acceleration, so we put together a list of investors who have put money to work in startups building remote-work tooling and sent them a raft of questions. We wanted to better understand if SaaS fatigue is real for the startups in question, where open-space still exists in the remote-work world and how the economics of the companies compare to other software shops.

And, yes, we did ask about valuations and intra-venture competition for the rounds that we keep hearing about. 

Not every deal from these venture capitalists fits the remote-work mold, but they and their firms and funds are involved with enough in our view to give them good perspective about what’s going on in the space as the world continues to get into shape regarding remote work. This week’s news from Google makes it plain that tech companies are prepping for a long run of forced remote work, let alone the more hybrid remote-and-office future that seems to be the new conventional expectation.

A lasting COVID-driven remote-work boom is predicated on remote-work services not only meeting the moment, but iterating to support a world that just got pushed into a faster digital transformation than anyone expected. It’s a busy space for good reason.

Here’s who TechCrunch collected notes from this time around:

As usual, we’re going to riff over some key trends and themes that stood out from the group’s collected answers, after which we’ll share their answers at length, edited for clarity and formatting.

Trends, themes

Picking through the answers we received, one thing that stood out was the simple fact that VCs do not believe that the remote-work services and tooling world is solved. In fact, the group was not shy of suggesting areas where there’s still more work to be done.

As you might expect, the issue of security came up a few times. Processes are being digitized across workplace verticals but there’s plenty of room for improvement in bringing security and compliance standards into the remote-work age.

“All the security [and] compliance while being remote is still largely untapped as companies are figuring out the answer,” said Techstars’ Cazalot, to pick one quote from a few.

Other items that popped up include front-of-office collaboration and personal remote process automation. Once basic communications are sorted, the sorts of tools and services that folks-at-a-distance need to work well both alone and and as a team will be varied.

It would be simple to presume that a growing library of apps and services would lead to software (SaaS) fatigue, but our VC group isn’t too worried about the concept.

Then there was the talk concerning economics and fundraising. TechCrunch wanted to know if remote-work startups have better or worse economics than other startups that are delivered along similar channels (SaaS, etc.). Our summary of answers it that their economics are at least as good, with some exceptions that their performance could in fact be better than other groupings of their business-model peers.

Regardless, the wave of companies hunting up new apps and services to fuel and empower their suddenly remote workforce is driving venture interest in the companies welcoming the demand. But notable is that prices, per our collected investors, are not as wild as you might think. Bessemer’s Robinson said prices were not low (“growth equity investors are paying high multiples to get a shot at the category defining [remote work-focused] app companies”), but most others offered some more tempered notes.

Reading their answers, it appears that the further an investor is from the Silicon Valley startup hub, the more reasonable prices look; that was likely true before the pandemic, mind, but that the pattern is holding up during COVID-19 implies that there is available price arbitrage available in the market that persists even into this hot niche.

That’s our first read, but there’s a lot more below.

Minn Kim, investor, Bloomberg Beta

It’s now common knowledge that the digital transformation has been accelerated by COVID-19. What portion of your active portfolio benefits from this change in pace?

Given our firm’s focus on the future of work, we’ve observed that a little over half of our portfolio companies have benefited from the digital transformation accelerated by COVID-19. These have been in areas like digital productivity, security, developer collaboration tools, network infrastructure and online education. This is also because several of our portfolio companies were built with a remote workforce in mind, including coaching platform Sounding Board and team success software Range.  

Will the influx of single-purpose remote-work apps and services lead to app fatigue, and thus a return of more bundled solutions?

For those of us fortunate enough to do most of our work online, the rise of single-purpose remote-work apps reflects the limitations of the tools that we relied on in our previous “work stack.” If there is new bundling, I believe we may see it on platforms we’re newly relying on heavily, such as those offering great ways to run online sprints, remote offsites, and collaborative screen sharing.  

Is there an upper limit to the number of tools that a single company may want to buy? Put another way, is SaaS fatigue real?

An upper limit for tool purchasing is more likely indication that a product is not yet hitting on the most important priority for its customer at the right time or price. SaaS fatigue is real until a solution comes along that addresses the user’s pain point in a clear, compelling and differentiated way. 

As companies begin to go back to the office, do you think they are going to trend back toward their old processes and ditch some of their new remote software?

For knowledge work, I believe some behaviors will naturally default back to old processes, such as in-person water cooler conversations in a shared common space. Even when companies begin to go back to the office, I imagine some people on our teams will continue to be remote, at least for awhile. With this in mind, I foresee an ongoing reliance on tools like Pinpoint, for helping software engineers collaborate more efficiently, and Bonusly, for ongoing encouragement and recognition to team members (in-person and remote).

Are there areas inside of the world of remote tools and services that you think are under-served, places where you’d like to place a bet?

I’d love to see more founders building solutions around lightweight automations (“personal RPA”), software for better decision-making and products that use digital nudges to make unstructured collaboration more effective, such as gesture recognition or sentiment notifications in video conversations. There are also many opportunities to build useful products that use the metadata in our online interactions to help us become more effective teammates. For example, we’re investors in a company called Cultivate that analyzes a team’s digital conversations to help leaders improve and get notified when they’re sending too many emails during evening hours or sharing recognition unevenly across a team. 

Does the availability of ample private capital give remote-tooling startups the flexibility to put off going up-market to the mid-market and enterprise areas?

It’s less about the flexibility of delaying moving up-market. It’s more about the freedom to experiment, iterate and get a product closer to product-market-fit with its earliest representative customer segment. 

Do remote-tooling-focused startups have similar, better or worse economics than the average venture-backed SaaS startup?

This answer will vary depending on what you’re comparing. Because many of the newer remote-tooling-focused companies offer freemium business models to encourage new users, the sustainability of a company comes down to the cost to serve each new customer. We’ve seen that remote-tooling-focused startups that are laser-focused on a specific use case and narrow the pool of potential early customers are often in a better position to understand their unit economics. 

How competitive are remote-work tooling venture rounds now? Are prices out of control?

It feels like the right time to build and raise for a Zoom competitor was at the beginning of 2020. Now, we’re seeing competitive rounds for companies building on top of Zoom or around workflow-specific features, such as event and community management or meeting analytics. That said, prices at the pre-seed and seed stages haven’t changed dramatically since pre-Covid-19. 

Elliott Robinson, growth equity partner, Bessemer

Buildots, a Tel Aviv and London-based startup that is using computer vision to modernize the construction management industry, today announced that it has raised $16 million in total funding. This includes a $3 million seed round that was previously unreported and a $13 million Series A round, both led by TLV Partners. Other investors include Innogy Ventures, Tidhar Construction Group, Ziv Aviram (co-founder of Mobileye & OrCam), Magma Ventures head Zvika Limon, serial entrepreneurs Benny Schnaider and  Avigdor Willenz, as well as Tidhar chairman Gil Geva.

The idea behind Buildots is pretty straightforward. The team is using hardhat-mounted 360-degree cameras to allow project managers at construction sites to get an overview of the state of a project and whether it remains on schedule. The company’s software creates a digital twin of the construction site, using the architectural plans and schedule as its basis, and then uses computer vision to compare what the plans say to the reality that its tools are seeing. With this, Buildots can immediately detect when there’s a power outlet missing in a room or whether there’s a sink that still needs to be installed in a kitchen, for example.

“Buildots have been able to solve a challenge that for many seemed unconquerable, delivering huge potential for changing the way we complete our projects,” said Tidhar’s Geva in a statement. “The combination of an ambitious vision, great team and strong execution abilities quickly led us from being a customer to joining as an investor to take part in their journey.”

The company was co-founded in 2018 by Roy Danon, Aviv Leibovici and Yakir Sundry. Like so many Israeli startups, the founders met during their time in the Israeli Defense Forces, where they graduated from the Talpiot unit.

“At some point, like many of our friends, we had the urge to do something together — to build a company, to start something from scratch,” said Danon, the company’s CEO. “For us, we like getting our hands dirty. We saw most of our friends going into the most standard industries like cloud and cyber and storage and things that obviously people like us feel more comfortable in, but for some reason we had like a bug that said, ‘we want to do something that is a bit harder, that has a bigger impact on the world.’ ”

So the team started looking into how it could bring technology to traditional industries like agriculture, finance and medicine, but then settled upon construction thanks to a chance meeting with a construction company. For the first six months, the team mostly did research in both Israel and London to understand where it could provide value.

Danon argues that the construction industry is essentially a manufacturing industry, but with very outdated control and process management systems that still often relies on Excel to track progress.

Construction sites obviously pose their own problems. There’s often no Wi-Fi, for example, so contractors generally still have to upload their videos manually to Buildots’ servers. They are also three dimensional, so the team had to develop systems to understand on what floor a video was taken, for example, and for large indoor spaces, GPS won’t work either.

The teams tells me that before the COVID-19 lockdowns, it was mostly focused on Israel and the U.K., but the pandemic actually accelerated its push into other geographies. It just started work on a large project in Poland and is scheduled to work on another one in Japan next month.

Because the construction industry is very project-driven, sales often start with getting one project manager on board. That project manager also usually owns the budget for the project, so they can often also sign the check, Danon noted. And once that works out, then the general contractor often wants to talk to the company about a larger enterprise deal.

As for the funding, the company’s Series A round came together just before the lockdowns started. The company managed to bring together an interesting mix of investors from both the construction and technology industries.

Now, the plan is to scale the company, which currently has 35 employees, and figure out even more ways to use the data the service collects and make it useful for its users. “We have a long journey to turn all the data we have into supporting all the workflows on a construction site,” said Danon. “There are so many more things to do and so many more roles to support.”

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Small to medium-sized companies that do a lot of international business have to deal with two big headaches: high foreign exchange fees and corporate expense tracking. Volopay, a Singapore-based financial tech startup with offices in Bangalore, wants to help by integrating into one free-to-use platform prepaid multi-currency corporate cards, expense tracking and accounting tools.

Volopay is currently taking part in Y Combinator and is also part of Antler and Nium’s Bolt, two other accelerator programs. It now has about 40 clients in Singapore, mostly tech startups like Dathena, Tookitaki and Appknox, and plans to launch in Indonesia and Australia within the next six months.

The company was founded last year by chief executive officer Rajith Shaji and chief technology officer Rajesh Raikwar, who met while working at MoneySmart, a financial services comparison platform. Before joining MoneySmart, Shaji held positions at fintech companies like CompareAsiaGroup, MatchMove and BankBazaar.com.

Shaji spent most of his time working in India, but often traveled to offices abroad. Dealing with corporate expenses after every trip was a “nightmare,” Shaji told TechCrunch.

“Each time I went back home, I had to make a list of all my expenses on behalf of the company. First of all, it often ran up to a few thousand dollars and I had to put in all these receipts and everything,” he said.

Shaji did not have access to most of the accounting software used by the companies’ accounting departments and communicating with them across different time zones made the process even more cumbersome and time-consuming.

Volopay addresses those issues by combining prepaid multi-currency corporate cards (available as physical or virtual cards), domestic and international bank transfers, automated payments and expense and accounting software on one platform. Volopay’s app lets employees ask for more funds for their prepaid cards from managers, who can approve or reject the request instantly.

Shaji said this saves companies money on foreign exchange fees, which are typically about 3% of a transaction on a traditional credit card, and gives them real-time visibility into spending.

Volopay is free to use and earns money through the interchange fees credit cards charge merchants. Interchange fees also enable Volopay to offer perks like cashback deals.

Shaji said the company aspires to be the “Brex of Southeast Asia.” Like Brex, it offers an alternative to traditional financial services for startups and other small to mid-sized businesses. But it needs to compete with several companies that also want to solve some of the same problems, like high fees for cross-border banking and corporate expense tracking. For example, TransferWise and Revolut both have operations in Singapore, while Neat and Aspire, based in Hong Kong and Singapore respectively, offer online business accounts.

Shaji said Volopay’s integration of multiple services on one platform gives it a competitive edge, adding that a better comparison to his startup is YouTrip, a multi-currency wallet for consumers that is popular in Singapore.

With accounts linked to a prepaid Mastercard, YouTrip users can make payments in 150 currencies without fees and it also supports in-app foreign currency exchanges. When explaining Volopay to potential clients, Shaji often refers to it as “YouTrip for companies.”

“YouTrip is a well-known brand [in Singapore], everyone knows they can load their money on it and save money on foreign exchange,” he said. Volopay gives the same functionality to companies, with accounting software added.

Volopay currently focuses on serving small businesses with 25 or more employees, especially tech startups that are scaling their operations and therefore need to manage increasing numbers of online payments and expenses. Shaji said Volopay has also signed up several marketing agencies, because many work on multiple projects, and therefore have to juggle multiple budgets at once.

After raising $15 million in financing from one of technology’s most successful global investment firms, the Los Angeles-based consumer goods rental company Joymode is selling itself to an early-stage retail investment firm out of New York, XRC Labs.

Joymode’s founder Joe Fernandez will continue on as an advisor to Joymode as the company moves to pivot its business to focus on retail partnerships.

The relationship with XRC Labs’ Pano Anthos began after a small pilot integration between Joymode and Walmart launched in late 2019. “[It] became obvious that we should go all in on retail partnerships,” according to Fernandez. And as the company cast about for partners to pursue the strategy, Anthos and his firm, XRC, kept being mentioned, Fernandez said.

The precise terms of the deal with XRC Labs were undisclosed, but Joymode will become a wholly owned business of XRC and could potentially return to market to raise additional funds from additional investors, according to Fernandez.

“We could never crack growth at the scale we needed,” said Fernandez of the company’s initial business. “From day one, my belief was Joymode was going to be huge or dead. We grew, but given the cost structure of our business it put a lot of pressure on the business to grow exponentially fast. Everyone loved the idea but the actual growth was slower than we needed it to be.”

Though Joymode wasn’t a success, Fernandez said he can’t fault his investors or his team. “We got to iterate through every possible idea we had. Literally every idea we had was exhausted… We failed and that’s a bummer, but we got a fair shot,” he said.

What remains of the company is an inventory management system on the back end and a service that will allow any retailer to get involved in the rental business going forward.

“Part of the thesis was that by making things available for rental, people would want to do more stuff,” said Fernandez, but what happened was that consumers needed additional reasons to use the company’s service, and there weren’t enough events to drive demand.

“I believe that the inventory management system we made was incredible and it will be a standard for retailers doing rentals going forward,” he said. 

 As the company turned to retailers, the rental option became a way to generate revenue through additional products. “All the accessories that made the event even better,” said Fernandez. “Add-ons, try before you buy, experiential things that are just much more complete in a retail environment.”

At Joymode, the problem was that the company was owning the inventory, which created a high fixed cost. “We never felt confident with the growth in LA to justify the expense of opening in another city,” Fernandez said. “If we had cracked user acquisition in LA we would have rolled it out in a bunch of places.”

Ultimately, Joymode members saved $50 million by using Joymode to rent products rather than buying them. In all, the company acquired 2,000 unique products — from beach and camping equipment to video games, virtual reality headsets to cooking appliances. On a given weekend, roughly 30,000 products would ship from the company’s warehouse to locations across Southern California.

At XRC Labs, a firm launched in 2015 to support the consumer goods and brand space, Joymode will complement an accelerator that raises between $6 million and $9 million every two years and manages a growth fund that could reach $50 million in assets under management.

For Anthos, the best corollary to Joymode’s business could be the rental business at Home Depot. “Home Depot’s rental business is over $1 billion per year,” Anthos said. “There’s going to be this enormous component of our society and for them renting will be not just a more sustainable but reasonable option. They’re going to want to rent because they don’t want to own it.”

Joymode was backed by TenOneTen, Wonder, Struck Ventures, Homebrew and Naspers (now Prosus).

From Airbnb to Zapier, and Coinbase to Instacart, many of the tech world’s most valuable companies spent their earliest days in Y Combinator’s accelerator program.

Steering the ship at Y Combinator today is its president, Geoff Ralston . We’re excited to share that Ralston will be joining us on Extra Crunch Live tomorrow at noon pacific.

Extra Crunch Live is our virtual speaker series, with each session packed with insight and guidance from the top investors, leaders and founders. This live Q&A is exclusive to Extra Crunch members, so be sure to sign up for a membership here.

Ralston took on the YC President role a little over a year ago shortly after Sam Altman stepped away to focus on OpenAI.

In the months since, Y Combinator has had to reimagine much about the way it operates; as the pandemic spread around the world, YC (like many organizations) has had to figure out how to work together while far apart. In the earliest weeks of the pandemic, this meant quickly shifting their otherwise in-person demo day online; later, it meant adapting the entire accelerator program to be completely remote.

While still relatively new to the president seat, Ralston is by no means new to YC. He joined the accelerator as a partner in 2012, and his edtech-focused accelerator Imagine K12 was fully merged into YC’s operations in 2016.

As offices worldwide shift to remote work, our interactions with customers and colleagues have evolved in tandem. Professionals who once relied on face-to-face communication and firm handshakes must now close deals in a world where both are rare. Coworkers we once sat beside every day are now only available over Slack and Zoom, changing the nature of internal communication as well.

While this new reality presents a challenge, the advancement of key technologies allows us to not just adapt, but thrive. We are now on the precipice of the biggest revolution in workplace communication since the invention of the telephone.

It’s not enough to simply accept the new status quo, particularly as the overall economic climate remains tenuous. Artificial intelligence has much to offer in improving the way we speak to one another in the social distance era, and has already seen wide adoption in certain areas. Much of this algorithmic work has gone on behind the scenes of our most-used apps, such as Google Meet’s noise-canceling technology, which uses an AI to mute certain extraneous sounds on video calls. Other advances work in real-time right before our eyes — like Zoom’s myriad virtual backgrounds, or the automatic transcription and translation technology built into most video conferencing apps.

This kind of technology has helped employees realize that, despite the unprecedented shift to remote work, digital conversations do not just strive to recreate the in-person experience — rather, they can improve upon the way we communicate entirely.

It’s estimated that 65% of the workforce will be working remotely within the next five years. With a more hands-on approach to AI — that is, using the technology to actually augment everyday communications — workers can gain insight into concepts, workflows and ideas that would otherwise go unnoticed.

Your customer service experience

Roughly 55% of the data companies collect falls into the category of “dark data”: information that goes completely unused, kept on an internal server until it’s eventually wiped. Any company with a customer service department is invariably growing their stock of dark data with every chat log, email exchange and recorded call.

When a customer phones in with a query or complaint, they’re told early on that their call “may be recorded for quality assurance purposes.” Given how cheap data storage has become, there’s no “maybe” about it. The question is what to do with this data.

The fortunes of startups that leverage artificial intelligence have soared dramatically in recent years.

These AI-powered startups have seen quarterly investment totals rise from a few hundred rounds and a few billion dollars each quarter to 1,245 rounds and $17.3 billion in the second and third quarters of 2019, according to data from CB Insights. The rise in dollars chasing AI startups has been huge, demonstrating strong venture capital interest in the cohort.

But in recent quarters, the trend has slowed as VC deals for AI-powered startups fell off.

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

A new report from the business-data company looking at the second quarter of venture capital results for global AI startups shows historically strong but declining investing rates for the upstart firms. During a pandemic and widespread recession, this is not a complete surprise; other areas of VC investment have also fallen in recent quarters. This is The Exchange’s second look at quarterly data in the startup category, something partially spurred by our interest in the economics of the startups that make up the group.

The scale of decline is notable, however, as is the national breakdown of VC investment into AI. (The United States is doing better than you probably guessed, if you have only listened to politicians lately.)

Let’s unpack the latest results, determine how investing patterns have changed by stage and examine how different countries compare when it comes to deal and dollar volume for AI-powered startups.

Global declines, US dominance

In the second quarter of 2020, global investment into AI startups fell to 458 deals worth $7.2 billion. According to the CB Insights dataset, the deal volume is the lowest for 12 quarters, or since Q2 2017 when 387 investments into AI startups were worth $4.7 billion.

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2020 has been all but normal. For businesses and brands. For innovation. For people.

The trajectory of business growth strategies, travel plans and lives have been drastically altered due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a global economic downturn with supply chain and market issues, and a fight for equality in the Black Lives Matter movement — amongst all that complicated lives and businesses already.

One of the biggest stories in emerging technology is the growth of different types of voice assistants:

With so many assistants proliferating globally, voice will become a commodity like a website or an app. And that’s not a bad thing — at least in the name of progress. It will soon (read: over the next couple years) become table stakes for a business to have voice as an interaction channel for a lovable experience that users expect. Consider that feeling you get when you realize a business doesn’t have a website: It makes you question its validity and reputation for quality. Voice isn’t quite there yet, but it’s moving in that direction.

Voice assistant adoption and usage are still on the rise

Adoption of any new technology is key. A key inhibitor of technology is often distribution, but this has not been the case with voice. Apple, Google, and Baidu have reported hundreds of millions of devices using voice, and Amazon has 200 million users. Amazon has a slightly more difficult job since they’re not in the smartphone market, which allows for greater voice assistant distribution for Apple and Google.

But are people using devices? Google said recently there are 500 million monthly active users of Google Assistant. Not far behind are active Apple users with 375 million. Large numbers of people are using voice assistants, not just owning them. That’s a sign of technology gaining momentum — the technology is at a price point and within digital and personal ecosystems that make it right for user adoption. The pandemic has only exacerbated the use as Edison reported between March and April — a peak time for sheltering in place across the U.S.

Time to get your binge on at Disrupt 2020, startup fans. Tune in and engage September 14-18 — that’s five days of nonstop opportunity to expand your network, learn the latest tech and investment trends, exhibit your startup, pump up your portfolio and grow your business.

If you want to get the best bang for your buck, listen up. Early-bird pricing evaporates in just three days. Buy your pass before the deadline expires on July 31 at 11:59 p.m. PDT, and you can save up to $300.

Thousands of people from around the world attend Disrupt because it’s the place where startup magic happens. You never know who you’ll meet or where a chance introduction might lead. But don’t take our word for it. Listen to your peers.

Going to Disrupt introduced me to engineers and new technologies I never would have been exposed to in Tennessee. I met manufacturing experts from India, Costa Rica and Korea who talked to me about materials to make a better product for less money. The connections I made were unreal. — Felicia Jackson, inventor and founder of CPRWrap.

Disrupt gave our company and technology invaluable exposure to potential customers and partners that we would not have met otherwise. A company that does $15 billion in annual sales thinks our tech is a fit for their ecosystem, and we’re excited to continue building that relationship. — Joel Neidig, founder of SIMBA Chain.

Navigating a 100% virtual Disrupt is a new experience for all of us, but we have the right tools ready to help you find, connect and meet with the people who align with your interests and business goals. The Disrupt online platform provides an interactive window to the programming across all the Disrupt stages — speakers, panel discussions, interviews, breakouts and Q&A sessions.

CrunchMatch, our AI-powered networking platform, boasts an upgraded algorithm for faster, more precise matching. Simply log in and start expanding your business opportunities when the platform opens next week. Use it to explore hundreds of startups from around the world in Digital Startup Alley, schedule 1:1 video calls to meet prospective customers, pitch investors or recruit new talent.

Get ready to binge on the nonstop opportunity at Disrupt 2020, and don’t miss out on serious savings. The early-bird pricing disappears in just three days. Buy your pass before 11:59 p.m. PDT on July 31 and save up to $300.

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

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According to data pipeline startup Hevo, many small- to medium-sized companies juggle more than 40 different applications to manage sales, marketing, finance, customer support and other operations. All of these applications are important sources of data that can be analyzed to improve a company’s performance. That data often remains separate, however, making it difficult for different teams to collaborate.

Hevo enables its clients’ employees to integrate data from more than 150 different sources, including enterprise software from Salesforce and Oracle, even if they don’t have any technical experience. The company announced today that it has raised an $8 million Series A round led by Singapore-based venture capital firm Qualgro and Lachy Groom, a former executive at payments company Stripe.

The round, which brings Hevo’s total raised so far to $12 million, also included participation from returning investors Chiratae Ventures and Sequoia Capital India’s early-stage startup program Surge. The company was first covered by TechCrunch when it raised seed funding in 2017.

Hevo’s Series A will be used to increase the number of integrations available on its platform, and hire sales and marketing teams in more countries, including the United States and Singapore. The company currently has clients in 16 markets, including the U.S., India, France, Australia and Hong Kong, and counts payments company Marqeta among its customers.

In a statement, Puneet Bysani, tech lead manager at Marqeta, said, “Hevo saved us many engineering hours, and our data teams could focus on creating meaningful KPIs that add value to Marqeta’s business. With Hevo’s pre-built connectors, we were able to get data from many sources into Redshift and Snowflake very quickly.”

Based in Bangalore and San Francisco, Hevo was founded in 2017 by chief executive officer Manish Jethani and chief technology officer Sourabh Agarwal. The two previously launched SpoonJoy, a food delivery startup that was acquired by Grofers, one of India’s largest online grocery delivery services, in 2015. Jethani and Agarwal spent a year working at Grofers before leaving to start Hevo.

Hevo originated in the challenges Jethani and Agarwal faced while developing tech for SpoonJoy’s order and delivery system.

“All of our team members would come to us and say, ‘hey, we want to look at these metrics,’ or we would ask our teams questions if something wasn’t working. Oftentimes, they would not have the data available to answer those questions,” Jethani told TechCrunch.

Then at Grofers, Jethani and Agarwal realized that even large companies face the same challenges. They decided to work on a solution to allow companies to quickly integrate data sources.

For example, a marketing team at a e-commerce company might have data about its advertising on social media platforms, and how much traffic campaigns bring to their website or app. But they might not have access to data about how many of those visitors actually make purchases, or if they become repeat customers. By building a data pipeline with Hevo, they can bring all that information together.

Hevo is designed to serve all sectors, including e-commerce, healthcare and finance. In order to use it, companies sign up for Hevo’s services on its website and employees enter their credentials for software supported by the platform. Then Hevo automatically extracts and organizes the data from those sources and prepares it for cloud-based data warehouses, such as Amazon Redshift and Snowflake. A user dashboard allows companies to customize integrations or hide sensitive data.

Hevo is among several “no code, low code” startups that have recently raised venture capital funding for building tools that enable non-developers to add features to their existing software. The founders say its most direct competitor is Fivetran, an Oakland, California-based company that also builds pipelines to move data to warehouses and prepare it for analysis.

Jethani said Hevo differentiates by “optimizing our product for non-technical users.”

“The number of companies who need to use data is very high and there is not enough talent available in the market. Even if it is available, it is very competitive and expensive to hire that engineering talent because big companies like Google and Amazon are also competing for the same talent,” he added. “So we felt that there has to be some democratization of who can use this technology.”

Hevo also focuses on integrating data in real-time, which is especially important for companies that provide on-demand deliveries or services. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Jethani says e-commerce clients have used Hevo to manage an influx in orders as people under stay-at-home orders purchase more items online. Companies are also relying on Hevo to help organize and manage data as their employees continue to work remotely.

In a statement about the funding, Qualgro managing partner Heang Chhor said, “Hevo provides a truly innovative solution for extracting and transforming data across multiple data sources–in real time with full automation. This helps enterprises to fully capture the benefit of data flowing though the many databases and software they currently use. Hevo’s founders are the type of globally-minded entrepreneurs that we like to support.”

Founders pitch venture capitalists at every available chance, which is why most of them quickly develop the skills required to identify whether someone is offering them an opportunity or wasting their time.

At TechCrunch Early Stage, I chatted with NFX Managing Partner James Currier about how founders can find the right investors and what they need to show to win an investment. Currier has been on both sides of the deal table and founded several startups before devoting himself to early-stage investing, where he has backed companies like Lyft, Houzz and Houseparty .

“One of the ways that investors are similar is that whenever they look at all the companies coming to them, most of them get into a quick ‘no’ situation, some of them get into the ‘maybe’ and very few get into the quick ‘yes,’ ” Currier says.

He shared six reasons investors might give a founder the rare and highly coveted “quick yes,” an effort to lock down a deal that’s either perfect for them or too enticing to pass up. Realizing what exactly investors are seeking can help founders understand how to pitch at the first meeting and what they should leave for follow-ups. For those who couldn’t virtually attend TechCrunch Early Stage, check out the link below.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity. 

1. Traction

“So the first thing that they’re looking for is traction. Look, even if they don’t like you, if they don’t like the market, but you’re making a ton of money, what are they going to say? Like if it’s growing really quickly and you’re profitable, you’ve got high margins and everyone wants to work for you, and there’s this buzz around you. What are they going to say? They’re gonna have to invest because you’ve got traction.”

In March, Brooklynite Jeremy Cohen achieved minor internet fame when he launched an elaborate scheme to court Tori Cignarella, a cute stranger living in a nearby building.

After spotting Cignarella across an air shaft, Cohen used drones, Venmo, texting and FaceTime to interact with his socially distanced crush. But it was on their second date when Cohen pulled out all the stops. He purchased a gigantic plastic bubble, sealed himself inside and invited his new friend to go on a touchless walk. As Cohen wrote on Instagram, “just because we have to social distance doesn’t mean we have to be socially distant.”

Cohen’s quirky, DIY approach made for fun clickbait for a few days. But it’s also a somewhat unflattering metaphor for the kinds of touch-centric entrepreneurialism that has proliferated in the age of COVID-19. From dating to banking, education to retail, the virus has pushed everyone to rethink how touch and proximity factor into daily interactions. Businesses besieged by the uncertainty of shutdown orders, partial re-openings, remote work, disease spikes and changing consumer behavior have been forced to test-drive solutions on the fly.

Amid that confusion, a few common approaches have emerged. Some are rushing to return to normalcy, adopting quick fixes at the expense of more broad-based solutions. Others are using the pandemic as an excuse to accelerate technological shifts, even those that may be unwelcome, impractical or both. Still others are enforcing guidelines selectively or not at all, tempting consumers back, in part, through the promise of “normal” (read: non-distanced and non-regulated) interactions.

Enter haptics. Investment in touch technologies had been on the rise before COVID-19, with virtual reality fueling fresh interest in haptic gloves and full-body suits, and haptics for mobile devices like wearables and smartwatches infusing the field with new resources. While it is difficult to capture the health and growth of the haptics industry with a single number, one estimate puts the global haptics market at US$12.9 billion in 2020, projected to grow to US$40.9 billion by 2027.

In addition to established players like Immersion Corporation, founded in 1993 and active working on haptics applications ranging from gaming and automotive to medical, mobile and industrial, Sony, Apple, Microsoft, Disney and Facebook each have dedicated teams working on new haptics products. Scores of startups, too, are currently bringing new hardware and software solutions to market: Ultraleap (formerly Ultrahaptics), a Bristol-based company that develops midair haptics, has secured $85 million in funding; HaptX, which makes exoskeleton force feedback gloves for use in VR and remote manipulation, has raised $19 million in funding; and Neosensory, focused on routing sound through the skin with a wrist-based wearable Buzz, has received $16 million in funds. A recent industry-wide initiative intended to make it easier to embed haptics in multimedia content suggests that we could soon see growth in this area accelerate even further.

Despite these trends, the business of touch isn’t heading in one clear direction. And with such variety in business responses, customers have responded with confusion, frustration, anxiety and defiance. More than disgruntlement, though, COVID-19 shines a light on a longstanding debate over whether the future will have more touch or less. Tensions around touch were already high, but rapid changes, Band-Aid solutions and short-term thinking are making the problems worse.

What’s needed now is a longer view: serious, systematic thinking about where we — as consumers, citizens, humans — want and need touch, and where we don’t. To get there, we need greater investment not just in technologies that sound good, but ones that will deliver on real needs for connection and safety in the days ahead.

Plexiglass is the new mask

While the mask may be the most conspicuous symbol of the COVID-19 pandemic in much of the world, the new normal has another, clearer symbol: plexiglass.

Plexiglass leads the way as our environments are retrofitted to protect against the virus. In the U.S., demand began rising sharply in March, driven first by hospitals and essential retailers like grocery stores. Traditional sectors like automotive are using much less of the stuff, but that difference is more than made up for by the boom among restaurants, retail, office buildings, airports and schools. Plexiglass is even popping up in temples of bodily experience, surrounding dancers at strip clubs, clients at massage parlors and gymgoers in fitness centers.

Like plexiglass itself, the implications for touch are stark, if invisible. Plexiglass may communicate sterility and protection — though, truth be told, it dirties often and it’s easy to get around. More to the point, it puts up a literal barrier between us.

The story of plexiglass — like that of single-use plastic, ventilation systems, hand sanitizer and ultraviolet light — underscores how mundane interventions often win the day, at least initially. It is much easier for a grocery store to install an acrylic sneezeguard between cashiers and customers than it is to adopt contactless shopping or curbside pickup. At their best, interventions like plexiglass are low-cost, effective and don’t require huge behavior changes on the part of customers. They are also largely reversible, should our post-pandemic lifestyles revert back to something more closely resembling our previous behaviors.

Besides their obvious environmental consequences, plasticized approaches can erode our relationship to touch and thereby to each other. In Brazil, for example, some nursing homes have installed “hug tunnels” to allow residents to embrace family members through a plastic barrier. Given that “when will I be able to hug my loved ones again?” is a common and heart-wrenching question these days, the reunions hug tunnels facilitate are, well, touching. But as a shadow of the real thing, they amplify our desperate need for real connection.

The same with circles on the floor in elevators or directional arrows down store aisles: In expecting us to be our best, most rational and most orderly selves, they work against cultural inclinations toward closeness. They indicate not so much a brave new future as a reluctant present. And without proper messaging about their importance as well as their temporariness, they are bound to fail.

Touch tech to the rescue

To feed our skin hunger, futurists are pushing haptic solutions — digital technologies that can replicate and simulate physical sensations. Haptics applications range from simple notification buzzes to complex whole-body systems that combine vibration, electricity and force feedback to re-create the tactile materiality of the physical world. But although the resurgence of VR has rapidly advanced the state of the art, very few of these new devices are consumer-ready (one notable exception is CuteCircuit’s Hug Shirt — released for sale earlier this year after 15+ years in development).

Haptics are typically packaged as part of other digital techs like smartphones, video game controllers, fitness trackers and smartwatches. Dedicated haptic devices remain rare and relatively expensive, though their imminent arrival is widely promoted in popular media and the popular technology press. Effective haptic devices, specially designed to communicate social and emotional touch such as stroking, would seem particularly useful to re-integrate touch into Zoom-heavy communication.

Even with well-resourced companies like Facebook, Microsoft and Disney buying in, these applications will not be hitting home offices or teleconferencing setups anytime soon. Though it would be easy to imagine, for example, a desktop-mounted system for facilitating remote handshakes, mass producing such devices would prove expensive, due in part to the pricey motors necessary to accurately synthesize touch. Using cheaper components compromises haptic fidelity, and at this point, what counts as an acceptable quality of haptic simulation remains ill-defined. We don’t have a tried and tested compression standard for haptics the way we do with audio, for instance; as Immersion Corporation’s Yeshwant Muthusamy recently argued, haptics has been held back by a problematic lack of standards.

Getting haptics right remains challenging despite more than 30 years’ worth of dedicated research in the field. There is no evidence that COVID is accelerating the development of projects already in the pipeline. The fantasy of virtual touch remains seductive, but striking the golden mean between fidelity, ergonomics and cost will continue to be a challenge that can only be met through a protracted process of marketplace trial-and-error. And while haptics retains immense potential, it isn’t a magic bullet for mending the psychological effects of physical distancing.

Curiously, one promising exception is in the replacement of touchscreens using a combination of hand-tracking and midair haptic holograms, which function as button replacements. This product from Bristol-based company Ultraleap uses an array of speakers to project tangible soundwaves into the air, which provide resistance when pressed on, effectively replicating the feeling of clicking a button.

Ultraleap recently announced that it would partner with the cinema advertising company CEN to equip lobby advertising displays found in movie theaters around the U.S. with touchless haptics aimed at allowing interaction with the screen without the risks of touching one. These displays, according to Ultraleap, “will limit the spread of germs and provide safe and natural interaction with content.”

A recent study carried out by the company found that more than 80% of respondents expressed concerns over touchscreen hygiene, prompting Ultraleap to speculate that we are reaching “the end of the [public] touchscreen era.” Rather than initiate a technological change, the pandemic has provided an opportunity to push ahead on the deployment of existing technology. Touchscreens are no longer sites of naturalistic, creative interaction, but are now spaces of contagion to be avoided. Ultraleap’s version of the future would have us touching air instead of contaminated glass.

Touch/less

The notion that touch is in crisis has been a recurring theme in psychology, backed by scores of studies that demonstrate the negative neurophysiological consequences of not getting enough touch. Babies who receive insufficient touch show higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which can have all kinds of negative effects on their development. In prisons, for example, being deprived of touch through restraint or solitary confinement is a punishment tantamount to torture. As technology continues to make inroads into our lives, interactions that once required proximity or touch have become mediated instead, prompting ongoing speculation about the consequences of communicating by technology rather than by touch.

The coronavirus pandemic intensifies this crisis by demanding a sudden, collective withdrawal from physical contact. The virus lays a cruel trap: the longer we’re apart, the more we crave togetherness and are willing to take dangerous risks. But giving in to the desire to touch not only exposes us and those we care about to a potentially mortal danger, it also extends the amount of time before we can resume widespread touching.

The pandemic has already revealed important lessons about touch, haptics and humanity. First is that while circumstances can change quickly, true social and behavioral change takes longer. The many examples of Americans acting as though there is no pandemic going on should give pause to anyone thinking touch-free futures are just around the corner. Atop this, there is plain-old inertia and malaise, which suggests some pandemic-era interventions will stick around while others will disappear or slacken over time. Consider 9/11 — nearly two decades later, though we still can’t greet our loved ones at their gate, most airports don’t strictly monitor our liquids and gels.

By the same token, one can imagine unfilled hand sanitizer stations as the ultimate hangover from these times. We may begin to like the plexiglass barriers between ourselves and our fellow subway passengers, but hate them at restaurants and sporting events. We may encounter more motion-detecting sliding doors and hand-tracking options, but when they falter we may revert to revolving doors, handles and push-buttons.

A second and equally important insight is that the past and the future exist side by side. Technological development takes even longer than behavioral change, and can be bedeviled by momentary trends, expense and technological limitations. For example, there are a lot of pressures right now to transform stores and restaurants into “last-mile” fulfillment centers, to embrace AR and VR and to reimagine space as contact-free. In these scenarios, objects could be touched and handled in virtual showrooms using high-fidelity digital touch technologies. But some of this pressure is based on promises that haptics have yet to fulfill. For instance, being able to touch clothing through a mobile phone may be possible in theory, but would be difficult in practice and would mean other trade-offs for mobile phones’ functionality, size, weight and speed.

Touch/more?

But just as the coronavirus pandemic did not create making us miss touching, it also did not create all the problems with touching. Some of the touch we were used to — like the forced closeness of a crowded subway car or the cramped quarters of airline seats — is dehumanizing. Social movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter have drawn attention to how unwanted touch can have traumatic consequences and exacerbate power imbalances. We must think broadly about the meaning of touch and its benefits and drawbacks for varying types of people, and not rush toward a one-size-fits-all solution. Although touch may seem like a fundamentally biological sense, its meaning is continually renegotiated in response to shifting cultural conditions and new technologies. COVID-19 is the most rapid upheaval in global practices of touching that we’ve seen in at least a generation, and it would be surprising not to see a corresponding adoption of technologies that could allow us to gain back some of the tactility, even from a distance, that the disease has caused us to give up.

Too often, however, touch technologies prompt a “gee whiz” curiosity without being attentive to the on-the-ground needs for users in their daily lives. Businesses looking to adopt haptic tech must see through the sales pitch and far-flung fantasies to develop a long-term plan for where touch and touch-free make the most sense. And haptic designers must move from a narrow focus on solving the complex engineering problem touch presents to addressing the sorts of technologies users might comfortably incorporate into their daily communication habits.

A useful exercise going forward is to consider how would we do haptic design differently knowing we’d be facing another COVID-19-style pandemic in 2030? What touch technologies could be advanced to satisfy some of the desires for human contact? How can firms be proactive, rather than reactive, about haptic solutions? As much as those working in the field of haptics may have been motivated by the noble intention of restoring touch to human communication, this mission has often lacked a sense of urgency. Now that COVID-19 has distanced us, the need for haptics to bridge that physical gap, however incompletely, becomes more obvious and demanding.

Businesses feel it too, as they attempt to restore “humanity” and “connection” to their customer interactions. Yet as ironic as it might feel, now is the time not to just stumble through this crisis — it’s time to prepare for the next one. Now is the time to build in resilience, flexibility and excess capacity. To do so requires asking hard questions, like: do we need VR to replicate the sensory world in high fidelity, even if it’s costly? Or would lower-cost and lower-fidelity devices suffice? Will people accept a technologized hug as a meaningful proxy for the real thing? Or, when touch is involved, is there simply no substitute for physical presence? Might the future have both more touch and less?

These are difficult questions, but the hardship, trauma and loss of COVID-19 proves they demand our best and most careful thinking. We owe it to ourselves now and in the future to be deliberate, realistic and hopeful about what touch and technology can do, and what they can’t.

This week has brought with it two tasty pieces of IPO news — Rackspace’s return to the public markets and BigCommerce’s debut will be far more interesting now that we know what a first-draft valuation for each looks like.

But amidst the numbers is a question worth answering: Why aren’t cloud-focused Rackspace and e-commerce-powering BigCommerce worth more?

Using a basic share count and the top end of their initial ranges, Rackspace is targeting a roughly $4.8 billion valuation, and BigCommerce a $1.3 billion price tag. Given that Rackspace had $652.7 million in Q1 2020 revenue and BigCommerce reaped $33.2 million in the same period, we have a puzzle on our hands.

Let me explain. At its IPO price, Rackspace is worth around 2x its current revenue run rate. For a company we associate with the cloud, that feels cheap at first glance. BigCommerce is targeting a valuation of around a little under 10x its current annual run rate, which feels light compared to its competitor Shopify’s current price/sales ratio of of 66.4x (per YCharts data).

We did some maths to hammer away at what’s going on in each case. The mystery boils down to somewhat mundane margin and growth considerations. Let’s dive into the data, figure out what’s going on and ask ourselves if these companies aren’t heading for a second, higher IPO price range before they formally price and begin trading.

Margins and growth

Let’s unpack Rackspace’s IPO pricing first and BigCommerce’s own set of numbers second.

Rackspace

While Rackspace has a public cloud component, its core business is service-driven, so it isn’t a major cloud platform that competes with Microsoft’s Azure, Google’s GCP or Amazon’s AWS.  This isn’t a diss, mind, but a point of categorization.

The company has three reporting segments:

Disrupt 2020 doesn’t arrive until September, but the countdown clock to early-bird savings winds to a halt in just four days. Grab this opportunity to attend one of the best tech conferences for all-things startup, cross this task off your to-do list and save up to $300. Simply buy your pass before the offer expires on July 31 at 11:59 p.m. PT.

What can you expect from attending Disrupt 2020? Opportunity and lots of it. It starts with five days of non-stop programming focused on — and delivered by — the people determined to shape the future of technology. This event draws thousands of entrepreneurs, founders, investors, developers and other players across the startup ecosystem and around the world looking to connect, collaborate, invest and drive their businesses forward.

You’ll hear leading voices from the tech, business and investment worlds share their insight and experience from the Main Stage. Folks like pioneering CRISPR researcher Jennifer Doudna, Zoom founder Eric Yuan and Sequoia Capital’s Roelof Botha. That’s just a taste of what’s on tap, and along with the agenda we’re announcing more speakers every week.

Take part in dozens of workshops and smaller breakout sessions that offer in-depth, knowledge-building experiences. Check out the Extra Crunch Stage for information every early-stage startup founder needs to know, like how to pivot in the face of a crisis and how to build a sales team. Engage in interactive Q&As and come away with actionable tips and tricks from experts in marketing, business development and investing.

Our virtual Disrupt platform lets you explore Digital Startup Alley where you’ll find hundreds of early-stage startups showcasing their tech products, platforms and services. Connect with the founders, ask questions, check out their pitch decks and use CrunchMatch, our AI-powered networking platform to schedule 1:1 video meetings.

Digital Startup Alley is also home to the TC Top Picks — a group of outstanding startups representing a range of technologies. They earned this coveted designation in our highly selective pre-conference competition. We’ll announce which companies made the grade this year soon, but take a look at last year’s TC Top Picks.

And of course, you’ll want to watch the cadre of the world’s best startups compete in the Startup Battlefield pitch competition. All of them will receive global investor and media exposure, but only one will win the $100,000, serious bragging rights and the Disrupt Cup. More than 900 companies have competed over the year including Vurb, Trello, Mint, Dropbox, Yammer and Tripit to name just a few.

This is your shot to access every opportunity Disrupt 2020 offers and save up to $300. The early-bird deal ends in just four days at 11:59 p.m. (PT) on July 31. What are you waiting for? Go buy your pass right now.

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

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Looking for ways to keep your business moving forward? Exhibiting in Startup Alley at Disrupt 2020 can be one of the smartest investments you’ll ever make. But don’t take our word for it. Instead, register to attend our Ask Me Anything Session (Startup Alley Edition) scheduled for July 30 at 4 p.m. ET/ 1 p.m. PT.

Open to startup founders across the globe, this event is your chance to hear from your peers who showed their stuff in the Alley. They’ve been there, done that — and got a whole lot more than a t-shirt (not that there’s anything wrong with swag). You’ve got questions — they’ve got answers.

This Ask Me Anything session will be live streamed from the TechCrunch LinkedIn page. We will begin with a brief overview of Disrupt and Startup Alley followed by a panel discussion moderated by the Startup Alley team. Panelists include veteran exhibitors Felicia Jackson, inventor and founder of CPRWrap, Khrys Hatch, Capital Program Manager at Launch Tennessee and Luke Heron, Founder and CEO of Testcard — who, as a TC Top Picks select in 2019, got to exhibit in the Startup Alley.

The panelists will share their experiences, the value and opportunities they found in Startup Alley, and how they’re doing one year later. They’ll also offer advice on maximizing your Startup Alley experience and take questions from the virtual audience (that means you).

Our Director of Events, Emma Comeau, will join the AMA session towards the end and give some insight into what the Disrupt community can expect at this year’s conference. She’ll provide some clarity. You’ll get to ask her a few questions.

TechCrunch Ask Me Anything Session (Startup Alley Edition) takes place on July 30 at 4 p.m. ET/ 1 p.m. PT. RSVP on the TechCrunch LinkedIn page for this free event.  Get answers to your burning questions and keep your business moving forward.

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