Salt Lake City’s Spiff has announced a $10 million round of funding to expand the sales and marketing efforts for its service that automates commission payments for sales people.

Some of the biggest names in startup tech are using the service to pay their sales force, including Brex, Workfront, Algolia and the publicly traded startup Qualys.

The idea at Spiff is to create a new software category around sales compensation management, and it’s gotten buy-in from investors at Norwest Venture Partners, Next World Ventures and Epic Ventures. Seed investors, including Kickstart Album Ventures, Pipeline Capital and Peterson Ventures, returned to invest in the company as well.

“Commissions are a major cause of anxiety for teams who don’t understand or trust their incentive plan and many waste hours every month correcting mistakes or arguing with finance, which hits bottom lines,” said Spiff chief executive, Jeron Paul. “Norwest’s investment will help us automate commission calculations so sales teams have one less thing to worry about in these challenging times.”

Paul, a serial entrepreneur whose most recent business, Capshare, was sold to Solium in 2017, has spent the better part of his professional career developing services businesses for enterprises.

“The world of sales compensation software is long overdue for a revamp,” said Sean Jacobsohn, partner at Norwest Venture Partners, in a statement. “With 85 percent of companies still calculating sales commissions manually in Google Sheets or Excel, I’m excited to partner with Spiff to help transform the way people think about sales compensation and provide  sales teams with a deeper level of  visibility into their commissions.”

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Deborah Quazzo, Managing Partner at GSV Ventures, a fund focused on Online Education ventures. This is a very good discussion on patterns of success...

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Karat is a new startup promising to build better banking products for the creators who make a living on YouTube, Instagram, Twitch and other online platforms. Today it’s unveiling its first product — the Karat Black Card.

The startup, which was part of accelerator Y Combinator’s Winter 2020 batch, is also announcing that it has raised $4.6 million in seed funding from Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin, SignalFire, YC, CRV and Coatue.

Co-founder and co-CEO Eric Wei knows the creator world well, thanks to his time as product manager for Instagram Live. (His co-founder Will Kim was previously an investor with seed fund Lucky Capital.) Wei told me that although many creators have significant incomes, banks rarely understand their business or offer them good terms when they need capital.

“Traditional banks care a lot about FICO [credit scores],” he said. “A lot of YouTubers, when they’re blowing up, they don’t have time to think: Let me make sure my FICO is awesome as well.”

At the same time, he argued that creators have become suspicious of potentially scammy financial offers, to the point that if you were to attend a pre-COVID VidCon and tried to give out $3,000, “The good creators will not take it, even if you tell them there are no strings behind it.”

With the Karat Black Card, the startup is giving creators a credit card that they can use for their business-related expenses. When creators are approved, they receive a $250 bonus that can be applied to any future purchases of electronics or equipment. The card also comes with custom designs, 2% to 5% cash back on purchases and it even offers advances on sponsorship payments.

Underlying it, Wei said Karat has developed an underwriting model that works for creators. Instead of looking at credit scores, Karat focuses on the size of a creator’s following, their current revenue and whether or not they’re “business savvy.”

“It’s not just the number of followers you have, but what platforms,” Wei added. “I would rather have 100,000 subscribers on YouTube than 1 million on TikTok, because on TikTok, it’s all algorithmically driven.”

Karat has already provided the card to an initial group of creators, including TheRussianBadger, TierZoo and Nas Daily. Wei said the model is working so far, with no defaults.

For now, the card is aimed at professional, full-time creators who have at least 100,000 followers. Wei estimated that that’s a potential customer base of 1 million creators. Eventually, he wants to provide those creators with more than a black card.

“We’re building a vertical financial and biz ops experience,” he said. “People in earlier stages, we do want to get to them eventually, but only after we feel like we’ve developed enough of an underwriting model.”

Earlier today, insurtech unicorn Lemonade filed an S-1/A, providing context into how the former startup may price its IPO and what the company may be worth when it begins to trade.

According to its new filing, Lemonade expects its IPO to price at $23 to $26 per share. As the company intends to sell 11 million shares in its debut, the rental and home insurance-focused unicorn would raise between $253 million and $286 million at those prices.

Counting an additional 1.65 million shares that it will make available to its underwriting banks, the company’s fundraise grows to $291 million to $328.9 million. Including shares offered to underwriters, Lemonade’s implied valuation given its IPO price range runs from $1.30 billion to $1.47 billion.

That’s the news. Now, is that expected valuation interval strong, and, if not, what might it portend for other insurtech startups? Let’s talk about it.

Not great, not terrible

TechCrunch is speaking with the CEOs of Hippo (homeowner’s insurance) and Root (car insurance) later today, so we’ll get their notes in quick order regarding how Lemonade’s IPO is shaping up, and if they are surprised by its pricing targets.

But even without external commentary, the pricing range that Lemonade is at least initially targeting is not terribly impressive. That said, it’s stronger than I anticipated.

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Sramana Mitra: By the time you raised money, what did you have? Rich Waldron: We raised a $2.2 million round in December of 2014. That was the first institutional check. Prior to that, we had some...

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According to a MarketsandMarkets report, the global Human Capital Management (HCM) market is expected to grow from $17.6 billion in 2020 to $24.3 billion by 2025 at a CAGR of 6.7%. Paylocity (Nasdaq:...

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Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about geography. You talked about this bus tour being the catalyst to founding this firm. Talk about what is your philosophy on location. Tony Olivito: For us, it’s the...

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Api.video, a “developer-first” video platform that makes it easier for websites and apps to video features, has raised $5.5 million, in a seed round led by London venture capital firm Blossom Capital. Also participating is Kima Ventures and a number of angel investors.

Previous backers include Octave Klaba (founder of OVH), Eduardo Ronzano (founder of KelDoc), Thibaud Elzière (founder of Fotolia), Nicolas Steegmann (founder of Stupeflix), Julien Romanetto & Frédéric Montagnon (co-founders of Teads) Florian Douetteau (founder of Dataiku) and Michaël Benabou and Dominique Romano (Veepee).

Founded in 2019 by Cédric Montet, the former founder and CEO of Libcast’s live streaming and on-demand SaaS video platform, api.video aims to do a lot of the heavy lifting required to incorporate modern video functionality into websites and mobile apps, and in turn help grow the market for what it calls “transactional video communications”.

“This could include video reviews filmed by holidaymakers uploaded to the likes of airbnb; clips posted to peer-learning, educational sites that help explain complex parts of a curriculum; or audiovisual contents in collaborative platforms that are usually text-oriented,” explains the French company.

To make this possible, api.video’s platform promises to abstract the multi-step processes of modern online video into a a single API that offers transcoding, hosting, delivery and analytics. Or, put simply, the startup wants to become the Twilio for video.

“Most apps and websites today are based around sharing text and images, because video – until now – has simply been too complex to implement,” Montet tells me. “Whether it’s for hotel reviews, dating sites, e-learning, collaborative and customer service platforms or online marketplaces, video offers the ability to convey depth beyond what text and images can”.

However, the problem that many companies, particularly those that don’t have video at the core of the business, have held back from introducing such features due to complexity and despite increasing demand from audiences.

“Api.video solves these problems by not only enabling developers within any company, of any size and type, to unlock the potential of video with only a few lines of code. But it offers a complete end-to-end solution with a transparent pricing plan and a single bill,” explains Montet.

The result is that developers can build transactional video communications “at scale,” he says, regardless of the systems their companies use or the type of content they need.

To that end, Montet says the funding from Blossom Capital and Kima Ventures will be used to grow the api.video team internationally and to “penetrate new markets”.

“We’re also looking to hire the best talent to achieve our tech goals of ultra-low latency streaming and building a global EDGE Infrastructure. We’ll add open-source plugins for popular platforms, such as WordPress, e-learning environments and collaborative platforms. We aim to keep providing an excellent documentation and native SDK in the most popular languages to help our users to integrate video without hassle”.

Earlier today we took a look at two companies that have filed to go public, nCino and GoHealth. The pair join Lemonade in a march toward the public markets.

But those three firms are hardly alone. We know that DoorDash filed privately earlier this year (it also raised a pile of cash lately, so its IPO may not be in a hurry), and Postmates filed privately last year.

Even more, there are a number of companies whose IPOs we anticipate in short order. So, what follows is our incredibly scientific survey of impending IPOs, starting with those closest to the gate. This list is focused on companies that were at one point venture-backed startups, even if they have become behemoths in the intervening years.

We’ll start with companies that have filed and are moving toward debuts in the next few weeks:

nCino: This SaaS company is growing nicely, and has pretty good overall economics. We covered its financial history here. Its debut will be a win for North Carolina.GoHealth: A Chicago success story that was swallowed by private equity last year, GoHealth is now an incredibly complicated company and offering that features lots of long-term indebtedness. But, its exit should provide reasonable returns to its current owner’s backers, who held onto the firm for less than a year before trying to flip it.Lemonade: Lemonade’s IPO is an important moment for a number of modern insurance companies like Root, MetroMile, Kin and others. Not that they all sell the same type of insurance, mind, they don’t. Lemonade does rental and home insurance, while Root and MetroMile are focused on autos, for example. But if Lemonade manages a strong offering, it could provide tailwind to its fellow neo-insurance providers all the same.Agora: We’re catching up on the Agora debut. The China-based company’s IPO filing details a company that provides other companies and developers the ability to “embed real-time video and voice functionalities into their applications without the need to develop the technology or build the underlying infrastructure themselves” via APIs. This sounds a bit like what Daily.co is building, if you recall that round. Agora is a company that has good operating income and net income before “accretion on convertible redeemable preferred shares to redemption value.” With that in hand, the company’s earnings are sharply negative. Read that how you want. Agora wants to raise between $280 million and $315 million.

And, next, companies that have filed privately but are still hanging back:

DoorDash: With lots of new money, DoorDash may not be in a rush to go public. That said, this offering is easily a top-three, most-anticipated offering. And as the company certainly wants to get out while the markets are recovered, perhaps there’s some ambient pressure on the firm to make its private IPO filing public.Postmates: Postmates filed privately to go public last year. Since then it has raised a bunch more money. It’s now just keeping along. Go public, Postmates! We want to see your numbers!Asana: Asana filed privately to go public earlier this year, which was exciting. Then it didn’t go public, which wasn’t. It’s doing some stuff with Microsoft lately, which is neat. But when we asked the company to stop messing about and give us that S-1, co-founder Dustin Moskovitz told us “No!” Adding to this particular trail of breadcrumbs, Asana crossed the $100 million ARR mark over a year ago, and added some new board members in the interim.BigCommerce: Bloomberg reported earlier today that the company is going public, and has filed privately to do so. BigCommerce is an Austin-based SaaS service that provides e-commerce tools to merchants. It’s like an American Shopify, kinda. And backed by over $200 million in venture capital, there’s a lot of bets riding on its eventual debut. Save us the wait, BigCommerce, and file publicly today.

And here are companies that are making the sort of noise that one might make before finally going public:

Airbnb: Airbnb promised to go public, then COVID-19 happened, and the company had to raise a bunch of expensive capital and lay off around a quarter of its staff. But now it’s bouncing back, and could still go public this year, according to its CEO. Please do, Airbnb, I want to see your numbers.Palantir: I am loath to include Palantir in this list, as it’s been on future IPO lists since time immemorial (here’s an example); but, hey, maybe this time it will happen. Why do we think that? Here are two headlines to make it plain: “Palantir Notches $500M Ahead Of Potential IPO” from June 19th, and “Palantir to File IPO in Weeks For Possible Fall Debut” from June 11, 2020. So, yeah, this is a thing.

All of the above is a jam, and I am stoked to dig through the S-1 trenches with you.

In 2019, the global fertility services industry was estimated to be worth $14.8 billion with demand driven by the significant growth in the median age of first-time mothers, according to a Research & Markets report.

Gina Bartasi, founder and CEO of NYC-based fertility center Kindbody, has pointed to macroeconomic trends responsible for the industry’s consistent growth, such as the increase in single mothers by choice and the fact that “heterosexual couples are waiting to have children and waiting to get married, and more and more same-sex couples are having children, which is relatively new.”

Regardless of the increasing demand, disasters can disrupt fertility services: On March 17, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine directed U.S.-based fertility clinics to avoid initiating new treatments, push back nonemergency surgeries and shift care to telemedicine.

Now reopened, it’s undeniable that COVID-19’s national impact could alter the space as different types of crises have in the past. In looking back, we can find a better understanding of what the future holds.

After the terror attacks on September 11, 2001, a University of Louisville study found that there was “a prompt and significant increase in births and birthrates in the post-9/11 period” in New York City. Relatedly, when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in August 2005 and created the nation’s costliest natural disaster, it was also one of five times since 1987 that frozen embryos were evacuated and protected during a natural disaster.

According to a study done by University of Wisconsin, “following Katrina, displacement contributed to a 30% decline in birth cohort size. Black fertility fell, and remained 4% below expected values through 2010. By contrast, white fertility increased by 5%.” The communities were so ravaged that the area’s Black population has remained substantially smaller.

After what felt like winter, investors say startup deals are back on — although the numbers suggest they never stopped. As Semil Shah of Haystack VC phrased it in a blog post, “It’s game on, pandemic or bust.”

This is good news for founders and big funds, but the investment landscape becomes more complicated when it comes to up-and-coming venture capitalists. “My impression of the current mood amongst traditional limited partners is that most have slowed down considerably in terms of net new investments, new relationships,” Shah told TechCrunch.

So rebound or not, we’re in a volatile time, and first-time fund managers are looking for unique ways to de-risk themselves.

One route: Put liquidity up high in your pitch deck. Moore Ventures, a new fund focused on investing in diverse teams working on sustainability, is experimenting with an unconventional fund structure. Instead of traditional ventures where returns come from multiple rounds of financing and an exit either through acquisition or IPO, Moore is concentrating on successful liquidity strategies throughout a portfolio company’s life.

Constant commercialization, if it works, could be music to a limited partner’s ears.

“Some will fall into the licensing model, some will be developing the product and then selling the design and manufacturing process to an existing company before expanding marketing and sales. Only if a company has the ability to expand its product base and scale will we plan to commercialize through the traditional company development process,” said Darius Sankey, a general partner at Moore Ventures.

Rich Waldron: Deep down, we weren’t that passionate about solving email. Email wasn’t a thing we had a problem with. We were being pushed to think through how you want to spend the next 20 years of...

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Does your elevator pitch lack traction? Could it do with a serious makeover? We’re here to help. Tune into Pitchers & Pitches, an interactive pitch-off and feedback session, on July 1 at 4 p.m. ET / 1 p.m. PT. This event is 100% free — simply register here to attend.

Pitchers & Pitches — part pitch-off, part masterclass — features startups (all exhibitors in Digital Startup Alley during Disrupt 2020) delivering their best 60-second pitch to a panel of judges. The panel for this session consists of two TechCrunch editors — Jordan Crook and Kirsten Korosec — and two VCs — Matthew Hartman of Betaworks Ventures and Dayna Grayson of Construct Capital.

The panel will critique each presentation, offer advice and suggest ways to forge a pitch for the ages. Take their tips, adapt them your specific situation and get ready to super charge your elevator pitch.

Note: The Pitchers & Pitches webinar series is free and open to all, but only companies that purchased a Disrupt Digital Startup Alley Package are eligible to pitch. We randomly chose these startups to compete on July 1st:

Cognidna – provides DNA insights on cognitive traits, helping parents make more informed educational decisions for their children.

Munch –