Sramana Mitra: What happens in 2019? JB Kellogg: We built the third version and released at the end of 2019. We’re excited about that because it truly makes us more of a technology company than we’ve...
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Sramana Mitra: You expect people to be trained at a certain level to be part of your pool that you staff with. What is that qualification that you’re looking for? David Coppins: We employ Registered...
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Horizon Quantum is part of a new crop of startups that focus on building new tools for building software for quantum computers. The Singapore-based company, which is hardware-agnostic but also launched a close partnership with Rigetti Computing in 2018, today announced that it has raised a $3.23 million funding round led by Sequoia Capital India. Previous investors SGInnovate, Abies Ventures, DCVC, Qubit Protocol, Summer Capital and Posa CV also participated.
At its core, Horizon Quantum aims to democratize quantum development. Because there is very little about quantum computing that is intuitive, the company argues, it will take a new set of tools to help today’s developers tackle quantum. What makes Horizon unique is that it takes conventional source code and then automatically analyzes that to figure out where a quantum computer could speed up an algorithm. Right now, the company can identify potential speedups in code written for Matlab and Octave.
“The conventional approach to developing quantum applications is to explicitly specify the individual steps of a quantum algorithm, or to use a library where such explicit steps are specified. What makes our approach unique is that we construct quantum algorithms directly from conventional source code, automatically identifying places where it can be sped up,” explained Si-Hui Tan, the chief science officer at Horizon Quantum. “Everything that relates to quantum mechanics happens under-the-hood and on-the-fly in our compiler. This automation is what alleviates the need for any quantum knowledge. All our users have to do is to provide their program in a conventional programming language.”
At the same time, the company’s tools also make life for experienced quantum software developers easier by giving them the tools to write more succinct code that is also automatically optimized for the underlying quantum processors.
“We’re building a compiler that can go all the way from conventional, classical, code down to the control signals sent to the quantum hardware,” Quantum Horizon CEO Joe Fitzsimons told me in an email. “We’re still building, and we have a lot still to do, but we’ve demonstrated key parts of the technology, from identifying speedups in classical code down to characterising and mitigating errors in quantum processors. Our hope is that it will make quantum computing more easily accessible for the millions of software developers out there, and will allow us to leverage quantum computing in new domains (we specifically think about domains like geophysics for the energy sector and computational fluid dynamics for aerospace and automotive sectors).”
The company says it will use the new funding to help bring its technology to market and engage with its early customers.
Sramana Mitra: What do you think is going to happen? We are, on the one hand, over 30 million people in America that are unemployed. This could go up. At some point, it will come down. For the...
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Our inaugural TC Early Stage 2020 event takes place July 21-22, and we’re here to remind you to take advantage of early-bird savings while you still can. The price goes up on June 26, and that means you have just five days left to buy your ticket and keep $50 in your wallet.
We created TC Early Stage specifically for founders of early-stage startups — from pre-seed through Series A. Attendees can choose from more than 50 sessions that address vital issues that early founders wrestle with as they get their startups off the ground. Each session includes lively, interactive Q&A.
Experts spanning the startup spectrum will lead sessions on core topics ranging from fundraising, tech stack and growth marketing to term sheet construction, recruitment, product management and PR. You’ve got questions and you’ll get answers at Early Stage — along with actionable tips and advice that you can use to move your startup forward.
Here’s a small sample of the sessions you’ll find at Early Stage 2020 (check out the agenda here):
How to build a tech stack that can go the distance — The beautiful flower of your tech stack starts with a seed and a series of decisions. Which fertilizer will you use? How often should you water it? Where can you give it the right amount of sunlight? Every decision you make about your tech stack affects how it will hold up, and evolve, over time. Hear from HappyFunCorp’s co-founder and CEO Ben Schippers and CTO Jon Evans about how you can avoid regretting those decisions.
How to get your first yes — Fundraising can be a bit like dominoes. Once you get one investor on board, it’s much easier to bring others along for the ride. But getting that first “yes” can be the most difficult part. Hear the dos and don’ts of hyper-early-stage fundraising from Cyan Banister, seed-stage investor and partner at Founders Fund.
Here’s where you really need to pay attention. We’re limiting each session to 100 people, and it’s a first-come, first-serve situation. If you want to be in a session to get your burning questions answered, buy your ticket now to avoid getting shut out. On the upside, we’ll make videos of all the sessions available on demand after the event.
TC Early Stage takes place July 21-22, but your shot at an early-bird savings ends in just five days, on June 26. Buy your ticket, secure your $50 savings and get a leg up on moving your business forward!
Is your company interested in sponsoring TC Early Stage? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.
While we await a fresh IPO filing from heavily backed insurtech startup Lemonade, let’s talk a little more about its public offering.
Since our first dig into its S-1 filing, TechCrunch has spoken to a number of investors and operators in Lemonade’s space to find out if our initial read was off — were we being too generous or too kind to Lemonade after reading its somewhat complex financial results?
The Exchange is a daily look at startups and the private markets for Extra Crunch subscribers; use code EXCHANGE to get full access and take 25% off your subscription.
The short answer is not really, though there are some positive notes and themes worth highlighting. This morning, let’s ask three questions about Lemonade’s IPO filing that will help us understand what’s ahead for the SoftBank-backed unicorn.
1. How quickly can Lemonade accelerate its rental insurance graduation rate?
On the theme of things that bode well for Lemonade is its ability to “graduate” customers from low-cost rental insurance to more lucrative products.
In its S-1 filing, Lemonade noted this fact early on. After stating that a “an entry-level $60 a year [rental] policy [corresponds] to $10,000 of possessions,” the company said that as its customers age, they tend to buy more insurance and sometimes swap rental plans for homeowner policies. Moving from the former to the latter is graduating in the company’s parlance.
If many customers moved from rental insurance to homeowner insurance while keeping Lemonade as their provider, the company could do very well, as illustrated by this section of its SEC filing:
Technology has dramatically changed over the last decade, and so has how we build and deliver enterprise software.
Ten years ago, “modern computing” was to rely on teams of network admins managing data centers, running one application per server, deploying monolithic services, through waterfall, manual releases managed by QA and release managers.
Today, we have multi and hybrid clouds, serverless services, in continuous integration, running infrastructure-as-code.
SaaS has grown from a nascent 2% of the $450B enterprise software market in 2009, to 23% in 2020 and crossed $100B in revenue. PaaS and IaaS revenue represent another $50B in revenue, expecting to double to $100B by 2022.
With 77% of the enterprise software market — over $350B in annual revenue — still on legacy and on-premise systems, modern SaaS, PaaS and IaaS eating at the legacy market alone can grow the market 3x-4x over the next decade.
As the shift to cloud accelerates across the platform and infrastructure layers, here are four trends starting to emerge that will change how we develop and deliver enterprise software for the next decade.
Companies are building more dynamic, multiplatform, complex infrastructures than ever. We see the “-aaS” of the application, data, runtime and virtualization layers. Modern architectures are forcing extensibility to work with any number of mixed and matched services.
Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.
“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”
“Dear Sophie” columns are accessible for Extra Crunch subscribers; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off.
Dear Sophie,
What in the world is happening with all this immigration breaking news and speculation about H-1Bs and J-1s and L-1s? Are we actually going to see changes?! What should I be doing to prepare?
— Immigration Doomsday Prepper
Dear Prepper,
It is times like these that I sometimes wish I did not have so many incredible, intelligent and informed clients who are capable of utilizing the news for breaking information. Some attorneys are advising everybody with visas to return to the United States ASAP. I don’t know if this will end up being required. As an attorney, it is increasingly important to remember that giving unsolicited advice (especially advice regarding things that have yet to happen) is scary and a huge gamble.
Rich is building an authentic tech company from London and while the company could have become a so-called Unicorn by loading up on liquidation preferences, they have chosen not to do so. Excellent...
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Embodying the tensions that cities across the world face as they wrestle with controlling a pandemic in dense, urban environments, Urban-X, the accelerator for technology startups focused on the problems cities face, has launched its eighth, fully remote, cohort.
While the accelerator program backed by the BMW-owned Mini Cooper automaker and the venture capital firm Urban Us is based in Brooklyn, it’s conducting its latest program virtually, with participating startups coming from Atlanta, Sydney, San Francisco, Boston, Burlington and Los Angeles, according to a statement.
“Long term, we are bullish on cities. I think that COVID and climate change share some things in common. If we think that COVID is disruptive, and not only a threat to economic livelihood but human life, climate change, is certainly a much larger threat,” said Micah Kotch, the managing director of Urban-X. “I think that cities have withstood pandemics previously. I think that we will be moving forward. The clear things that we need are really good political leadership. We need to heed science and to act quickly based on the best possible science and we need collective action. And that’s where I see a lot of overlap between COVID and climate.”
The latest batch of companies that Urban-X will work with includes:
Adiona: a machine learning-based service to optimize hourly workforces in logistics and supply chain management Aquagenuity: a company providing search information about water quality for consumersClimate Robotics: a manufacturer of robots that produce carbon-sequestering and soil-improving biocharMobilyze: the developer of a data analytics service for electric vehicle charging station site optimizationResonant Link: the creator of a wireless charging service to power robots and electric vehiclesXtelligent: a company rethinking traffic signal technology“Not everyone can afford to move out to the suburbs and not everyone wants to. Cities are going to continue to be the epicenters of creativity and innovation,” said Kotch. “While these last three-and-a-half to four months have been a real challenge, particularly here in the U.S., we are deep believers in the vibrancy and necessity of cities.”
Later-stage investors think that the Urban-X thesis can create viable businesses, with about 85% of the accelerator’s companies going on to raise additional rounds of funding. Some of the most successful companies (in terms of capital raised) include Bowery Farming, Starcity, Mark43, One Concern, Future Motion, Skycatch, Seamlessdocs, Revivn, BRCK and Rachio.
“Technology, investment and mentorship have the power to advance the low carbon, resilient and high density future we need for our cities,” said Shaun Abrahamson, Urban-X Investment Committee and managing partner at Urban Us. “We are thrilled to have this new group of founders join Urban-X to build creative solutions that tackle climate change and the biggest issues facing our cities.”
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 short-form week-starter in which we go over the weekend, look to the week ahead, talk about some neat funding rounds and dig into what is stuck on our minds.
This morning, here’s what we talked about:
Equity is on Twitter! You can follow us on @EquityPodThe COVID-19 pandemic hit a new, worse milestone over the weekend. What is ahead for the global economy is not clear, but the horizon is not clear for startups big and small.Many tech firms in the U.S. took Juneteenth off, limiting recent news, and with WWDC starting today there’s going to be something akin to a Cupertino takeover for the next few days. If you don’t care about Apple, you can just take some time off.Stocks are heading up this morning, with tech shares testing new records.Mexico’s Heartbest raised a $2 million Series A to help develop plant-based dairy replacements, and San Francisco’s Acquire raised a $6.4 million Series A to help with its customer success service. Blue Horizon Ventures and Base10 led the rounds, respectively.And, finally, the Hey-Apple drama reaches WWDC today. Apple has signaled that no changes are coming, but the company is in water that feels fractionally hotter with each passing day. What Apple can do to repair relations with developers who are more than a little worried about the megacorp isn’t clear. But for startups, the final results of this scrap could really matter.And that is that. Equity is back Friday with more. Have a great week!
Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 a.m. PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
With more companies moving workers home, making sure your systems are up and running has become more important than ever. ServiceNow, which includes in its product catalog an IT Help Desk component, recognizes that help desks have been bombarded during the pandemic. To help stop configuration problems before they start, the company today acquired Sweagle, a configuration management startup based in Belgium.
The companies did not share the purchase price.
ServiceNow gets a couple of boosts in the deal. First of all, it gets the startup’s configuration management products, which it can incorporate into its own catalog, but it also gains the machine learning and DevOps knowledge of the company’s employees. (The company would not share the exact number of employees, but PitchBook pegs it at 15.)
RJ Jainendra, ServiceNow’s vice president and general manager of DevOps and IT Business Management, sees a company that has pioneered the IT configuration management automation space, and brings with it capabilities that can boost ServiceNow’s offerings. “With capabilities for configuration data management from Sweagle, we will empower DevOps teams to deliver application and infrastructure changes more rapidly while reducing risk,” Jainendra said in a statement.
ServiceNow claims that there can be as many as 50,000 different configuration elements in a single enterprise application. Sweagle has designed a configuration data management platform with machine learning underpinnings to help customers simplify and automate that complexity. Configuration errors can cause shutdowns, security issues and other serious problems for companies.
Sweagle was founded in 2017 and raised $4.05 million on a post-valuation of $11.88 million, according to PitchBook data.
The company is part of a growing pattern of early-stage startups being sucked up by larger companies during the pandemic, including VMware acquiring Ocatarine and Atlassian buying Halp in May and NetApp snagging Spot earlier this month.
This is the third acquisition for ServiceNow this year, all involving AI underpinnings. In January it bought Loom Systems and Passsage AI. The deal is expected to close in Q3 this year, according to ServiceNow.
Adobe (NASDAQ: ADBE) recently reported a mixed second quarter that missed revenue estimates. It had a strong quarter for its Digital Media segment but its Advertising Cloud revenue was impacted by...
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HashiCorp is well known in the developer community for offering a slew of open-source tools to help build and manage modern applications. Today the company announced a new cloud platform and plans to eventually offer managed versions of those tools, starting with Consul, a tool for connecting and securing services across platforms.
HashiCorp CEO Dave McJannet says that the pandemic has accelerated demand for cloud infrastructure, and he sees a growing role for his company in helping to build cloud native applications. The company offers open-source and commercial versions of several popular tools, including Terraform, Consul, Vault and Packer, among others. These can run on premises or in the cloud, but McJannet says customers have been hankering for SaaS versions of these tools.
“Our customers have told us that it’s a huge challenge running a central shared service like Consul. It requires them to keep it up and running, and they have asked for something they can consume from us where we manage it for them,” McJannet told TechCrunch.
The company has been offering a managed version of Terraform for some time, but it has been quietly working on a cloud platform that could allow it to plug in each of the company’s products over time and offer managed services of all the products.
“What we are announcing today is what we call the HashiCorp Cloud Platform, and you can think of it as just a common chassis to allow us to run our products on any cloud. The first of those products that we’re making available is Consul on Amazon,” he said.
By offering the company’s products as a set of cloud services, it will lower the barrier to entry for customers who want to use their tooling, but don’t have the resources to run and manage on their own. That could potentially increase the company revenue over time. As McJannet pointed out, it’s a lot like what MongDB did with its managed Atlas database service, but for a wider set of products.
Last Fall, HashiCorp announced a $175 million investment on an impressive $5 billion valuation. It has 1,000 employees and is continuing to hire as demand for its product continues through the pandemic. McJannet was not discussing specific customer numbers, but said the customer count has doubled over the last year. As it builds out the new cloud services, and introduces more customers to its products, there’s a good chance that number will keep growing.
Sramana Mitra: What was the revenue level in 2014? What was the split between product and service? JB Kellogg: $20 million at that point. The mix was somewhere around 20% product and 80% services....
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Deep01, a Taiwanese startup that develops software to help doctors interpret CT brain scans more quickly, announced today that it has raised $2.7 million. The funding was led by PC maker ASUSTek.
Deep01’s product has obtained clearance from both Taiwan and the United States’ Food and Drug Administrations, and the company received its first purchase order, worth about $700,000, in February.
Other investors included the Digital Economy Fund, which is co-funded by Taiwanese research organizations Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) and the Institute for Information Industry (III), and BE Capital.
Deep01’s software is currently used in two medical centers and four hospitals in Taiwan and has already helped doctors check more than 2,000 brain scans.
Created for use by emergency departments, Deep01 says its software can detect acute intracerebral hemorrhage with an accuracy rate of 93% to 95%, within 30 seconds.
The startup was launched in 2016 by founder and CEO David Chou, who earned his master’s degree in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and was a Harvard University research fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital between 2018 and 2019.
In a press statement, Albert Chang, ASUS corporate vice president and co-head of its AIoT Business Group, said “Deep01 is a leading startup in the AI medical area. The collaboration is promising for smart medical applications.”
This is a very important conversation about how unemployed retail workers can find their way to retraining and re-employment in the healthcare sector with the aid of technology. Sramana Mitra: Let’s...
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This feature from Wired looks at the major updates from Apple expected at this year’s virtual edition of Worldwide Development Conference. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph...
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Editor’s note: Get this free weekly recap of TechCrunch news that any startup can use by email every Saturday morning (7am PT). Subscribe here.
Which startups investors are actually first to backing the best companies? If you know this information before fundraising, you can avoid pitching investors who were always going to tell you that you’re “too early” anyway. The problem is that everyone claims credit for success, and by the time you pick through databases, investor sites, blogs, tweets and news clippings, you have no real idea who made what call when.
That’s why our solution is to just ask founders about who really made it happen. Our new product, The TechCrunch List, will feature the investors who wrote the first checks, to help any founder find the help they need when they need it. Here’s more, from Arman Tabatabai and Danny Crichton:
Over the next few weeks, we’re going to be collecting data around which individual investors are actually willing to write the proverbial “first check” into a startup’s fundraising round and help catalyze deals for founders — whether it be seed, Series A or otherwise (i.e. out of your Series A investors, the first person who was willing to write the check and get the ball rolling with other investors). Once we’ve collected, cleaned and analyzed the data, we’ll publish lists of the most recommended “first check” investors across different verticals, investment stages and geographies, so founders can see which investors are potentially the best fit for their company….
In all, The TechCrunch List will publish the most recommended “first check” writers across 22 different categories, ranging from D2C & e-commerce brands to space, and everything in between. Through some data analysis around total investments in each space, we believe our 22 categories should cover the entirety or majority of the venture activity today.
To make this project a success and create a useful resource for founders, we need your help. We want to hear from company builders and we want to hear from them directly. We will be collecting endorsements submitted by founders through the form linked here.
(Photo by Steven Damron used under Creative Commons).
Despite much discussion about investors pulling back en masse from startup investing, a new survey out from Silicon Valley tech law firm Fenwick & West about activity in the region over April says that valuations went up, markdown rounds did not grow as a percentage of deals, and the overall pace of deals actually increased. The catch, Connie Loizos writes for TechCrunch, is that much of this was due to later-stage rounds, and of course, it is generalized across industries that have been variously propelled or pummeled by the pandemic.
Alex Wilhelm then looks at a couple additional reports for Extra Crunch, from Docsend and NFX. They appear to show ongoing investor activity growth since April, as well as growing founder optimism — but early stage did in fact appear to be more turbulent, as, ahem, one might expect if one has experience in early-stage fundraising. He separately notes that the latest tracking data sources appear to show a decline in startup layoffs. Both are, by the way, written as part of The Exchange, his new daily column about the latest trends in the startup world for EC subscribers (use code EXCHANGE to get 25% off a subscription).
Image Credits: Klaud Vedfelt (opens in a new window) / Getty Images (Image has been modified)
Juneteenth has been celebrated since 1866 to mark the end of slavery after the American Civil War. But this year, it is being taken up by tech companies as an official holiday to help show their concern for structural discrimination in the wake of the George Floyd killing and ensuing global protests. What does it really mean though? Here’s Megan Rose Dickey for TechCrunch:
Recognition of such a historic day is good. But the way these companies are publicly announcing their plans, seeking press as they do, suggests their need for some affirmative pat on the back. It’s perfectly acceptable to do the right thing and not get credit for it. It shows humility. It shows that a company is more interested in doing right by its workers than it is in saving face….
Instead, as Hustle Crew founder Abadesi Osunsade has said, tech companies need to go beyond one-off actions and form habits around racial justice work. Forming habits around hiring Black people, promoting Black employees, paying Black employees fairly, funding Black founders and making room for Black people in leadership positions is what will lead to concrete change in this industry.
Meanwhile, given the ongoing issues in fundraising, Delali Dzirasa of Fearless writes about other resources Black entrepreneurs can use to get their companies off the ground, including equity crowdfunding, mentor programs, 8(a) programs, SBA resources, and your local commercial banker.
Image Credits: PipeCandy
Two marketing experts shared fresh data on what categories are winning and losing during the pandemic for Extra Crunch this week, perhaps revealing where some of the founder and investor enthusiasm is coming from? First, here’s Ethan Smith of Graphite, who provides an overview of how money is being spent online during the pandemic using data from Branch through mid-May:
The good news for vendors overall is that people are still shopping online, but they’re buying different things and in different volumes than they used to. Kid/pet-oriented mobile activity and associated purchases have skyrocketed. We’ve also seen spikes in the purchase of activewear, fashion items, shoes and arts and crafts items, as people wait out the lockdown and prepare for what they hope will be a summer of freedom.
To dig into the direct-to-consumer category in more detail, here’s Ashwin Ramasamy of PipeCandy, who uses a mix of data sources to look at subcategory trends versus what the year might have looked like without a pandemic:
Kids, cookware and kitchen tools, apparel, fine jewelry, fashion, women’s health, mattresses, furniture and skincare actually deviated negatively from the forecast. This is not to say that these categories declined. We are actually saying that these categories didn’t keep up with the growth trends they orchestrated in 2019. That said, the devil is in the details. For instance, within furniture, there is a category of D2C brands that sell shelves and office furniture. Consumers did invest in them heavily, presumably to allow participants in the Zoom call to absorb more the titles of the books stacked in those shelves than from the calls themselves. Wine/spirits, grocery, fitness, baby care, pets and nutraceuticals did better than anticipated. Basically, anything that helped numb the reality (alcohol), sweeten the reality (food), distract from the reality (baby care and pets), survive the reality (fitness) or hallucinate an alternative reality (nutraceuticals) did well. I will leave you with another interesting conclusion we arrived at, through further research that is currently underway: The spotlight category in e-commerce is not direct to consumer — it is the mid-market and large pure-play e-commerce companies. It is one segment where the compounded quarterly growth rate of active companies is better than the 2019 average.
Founders can reap long-term benefits after exhibiting in Disrupt’s Startup Alley
New sessions announced at TC Early Stage from Dell, Perkins Coie and SVB
HappyFunCorp’s Ben Schippers and Jon Evans will talk tech stacks at TC Early Stage
TechCrunch:
Despite pandemic setbacks, the clean energy future is underway
TikTok explains how the recommendation system behind its ‘For You’ feed works
Chris Sacca advises new fund managers to strike right now
Extra Crunch:
What’s next for space tech? 9 VCs look to the future
How Liberty Mutual shifted 44,000 workers from office to home
Investors based in San Francisco? That’s so 2019
How Reliance Jio Platforms became India’s biggest telecom network
4 months into lockdown, Eventbrite CEO Julia Hartz sees ‘exciting signs of recovery’
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
Your humble Equity team is pretty tired but in good spirits, as there was a lot to talk about this week…
Epic Games is looking to raise a huge stack of cash (Bloomberg, VentureBeat) at a new, higher valuation. We were curious about how its lower-cut store could help it gain inroads with developers big and small. That part of the chat, the take-rate of the Fortnite parent company on the work of others was very cogent to the other main topic of the day:Apple vs. DHH. So Hey launched this week, and the new spin on email quickly overshadowed its product launch by getting into a spat with Apple about whether it needs to add the ability to sign up for the paid service on iOS, thus giving Apple a cut of its revenue. DHH and crew do not agree. Apple is under fire for anti-competitive practices at home and abroad — of varying intensity, and from different sources — making this all the more spicy.Upgrade raises $40 million for its credit-focused neobank.Degreed raises $32 million for its upskilling platform.And, at the end, our take on the current health of the startup market. There have been a sheaf of reports lately about what is going on in startup land. We gave our take.And that’s that. Have a lovely weekend and catch up on some sleep.
Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
This one goes out to all the early-stage startup founders. Whether you’re overwhelmed by the state of the world, overworked — or procrastination is simply an intrinsic part of your DNA — it matters not. Here’s reason to smile. We’re giving you an extra week to apply to compete in Startup Battlefield during Disrupt 2020. Fill out your application before the new deadline expires on June 26 at 11:59 pm (PT).
This is your moment to grab a double fistful of opportunity and step into a global spotlight. The virtual Disrupt 2020 represents our largest viewing audience and our biggest launch platform ever — more investors, more media and more, well, everything. If you’re chosen to compete in our premier pitch-off, you’ll go up against some of the best early-stage startups around the world.
Here’s what’s at stake: Massive exposure that can — whether you win the battle or not — change the trajectory of your startup, a launch article on TC.com, a 6 week mini-training program with TC editorial, all the perks of a Digital Disrupt Digital Pro pass (and then some) and a shot at $100,000, the Disrupt cup and all the bragging rights.
You’re eligible to apply if your company is early stage, has an MVP with a tech component (software, hardware or platform) and hasn’t received much, if any, major media coverage. Note: TechCrunch does not charge any application or participation fees or take any equity. We accept founders from all backgrounds, geographies and industries.
Veteran TechCrunch Battlefield editors (such a picky bunch) review every application and select startups that meet their discerning standards for innovation and growth potential. The virtual competition takes place during Disrupt 2020, which runs from Sept. 14 – 18.
Feel that flop sweat building up? Don’t stress. All competing founders receive weeks of free expert coaching from TechCrunch. Your pitch, demo and business model will shine like never before on game day.
Startup Battlefield consists of two rounds. Each team has six minutes to pitch and demo to our panel of TC editors, expert VCs and top entrepreneurs. Each team also faces a six-minute Q&A. Out of the original cohort, a handful of teams will move to the finals — on the last day of Disrupt — and pitch again to a new set of judges. They’ll choose one team to take home the title, the cup and the $100,000 prize.
Let’s take a peek at what other opportunities Battlefield competitors enjoy.
Exhibit in Digital Startup Alley and demo your product to hundreds of peopleNetwork with CrunchMatch, our AI-powered platform. Use it to set up virtual 1:1 meetings with investors, media, potential customers or any other startup influencersExclusive access to Leading Voices Webinars: Hear top industry minds share their strategies for adapting and thriving during and after the pandemicA launch article featuring your startup on TechCrunch.comA YouTube video promoted on TechCrunch.comFree subscription to Extra CrunchFree passes to future TechCrunch eventsYou’ll also join the likes of Vurb, Dropbox, GetAround, Mint, Yammer, Fitbit and other members of the Startup Battlefield Alumni community. This impressive group, comprised (so far) of 902 companies, has collectively raised $9 billion and generated 115 exits.
Rejoice, you have one extra week to apply to compete in Startup Battlefield at Disrupt 2020. The new deadline expires on June 26 at 11:59 pm (PT). Don’t wait another minute. Make the most of this extended opportunity.
Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.
Copyright © 2020 iStart Valley.
