Despite being one of the earliest adopters of using the world wide web to disrupt how its business is done and connect with more potential customers, the recruitment industry ironically remains one of the more fragmented and behind the times when it comes to using new, cloud-based services to work more efficiently. A new startup is hoping to change that, and it’s picked up some funding on strong, early signs of traction.

Dover, which has built what CEO and co-founder Max Kolysh describes as a “recruitment orchestration platform” — aimed at recruiters, it helps them juggle and aggregate multiple candidate pools to source suitable job candidates automatically, and then manage the process of outreach (including using tools to automatically re-write job descriptions, as well as to write recruitment and rejection letters) — has raised $20 million from an impressive list of investors.

Tiger Global led the Series A round, with Founders Fund, Abstract Ventures and Y Combinator also investing. Dover was part of YC’s Summer 2019 class (which debuted in August 2020), and Founders Fund led its seed round. Since leaving the incubator, it has picked up more than 100 customers, mostly from the world of tech, including ClearCo, Lattice, Samsara and others, even larger companies that you might have assumed would have their own in-house orchestration and automation platforms in place already.

“Orchestration” in the world of business IT is commonly used for software built for the fields of sales and marketing: In both of these, there is a lot of fragmentation and work involved in sourcing good leads to become potential customers, and so tech companies have built platforms both to source interesting contacts and handle some of the initial steps needed to reach out to them, and get them engaged.

That, it turns out, is a very apt way to think of the recruitment industry, too, not least because it also, to a degree, involves a company “selling” itself to candidates to get them interested.

“I would say recruiting is sales and marketing,” Kolysh said. “We’re comparable to sales ops, but sales is five-10 years ahead in terms of technology.”

Recruiters and hiring managers, especially those working in industries where talent is at a premium and therefore proactively hiring good people can be a challenge, are faced with a lot of busy work to find interesting candidates and engage them to consider open jobs, and subsequently handling the bigger process of screening, reaching out to them and potentially rejecting some while making offers to others.

This is mainly because the process of doing all of these is typically very fragmented: Not only are there different tools built to handle these different processes, but there is an almost endless list of sources today where people go to look for work, or get their names out there.

Dover’s approach is based on embracing that fragmentation and making it easier to handle. Using AI, it taps platforms like LinkedIn, Indeed and Triplebyte — a likely list, given its initial focus on tech — to source candidates that it believes are good fits for a particular opening at a company.

Dover does this with a mix of AI and understanding what a recruiter is looking for, plus any extra parameters if they have been set by the recruiter to carry this out (for example, diversity screening, if the employer would like to have a candidate pool that is in line with a company’s inclusion targets).

Dover also uses data science and AI to help calibrate a recruiter’s communications with would-be candidates, from the opening job description through to job offer or rejection letters. (Why dwell on rejection letters? Because these candidates are already in a short list, and so even if they didn’t get one particular job, they are likely good prospects for future roles.)

“No human wants to write 100 cold emails per week, but on the other hand, there are many people to hit up and connect with,” Kolysh said of the challenges that recruiters face. “When a company is seeing a lot of growth, it needs to scale fast. You just can’t do that without technology anymore.” Kolysh — who co-founded the company with Anvisha Pai (CTO) and George Carollo (COO) — said all three founders experienced that firsthand working at previous startups and trying to recruit while also building the other aspects of the business. (They are pictured above, along with founding engineer John Holliman.)

Given how much orchestration has caught on in the world of sales, there is a strong opportunity here for Dover to bring a similar approach to recruitment, based on what seems to be a very close understanding of the flawed recruitment process as it exists today. Whether that brings more competitors to the space — or more tools from some of the bigger players in, say, candidate sourcing — will be one factor to watch, as will how and if Dover manages to make the leap to other industries beyond tech.

But for now, its usefulness for a particular segment of the market is also what caught the eye of Tiger Global.

John Luttig, the partner who led the investment for Founders Fund, noted in an interview that most recruiting tools in the market today might best be described as point solutions, addressing scheduling or interviews, for example.

“It’s the full stack here that is appealing,” he told me. “And it’s automated, which is particularly valuable for early and mid-stage tech companies, to keep candidates from falling through the cracks. It also saves time from having to build up big recruiting departments. And because Dover owns all that work, those working in recruitment can instead focus on culture building, or assessing the candidates.”

Updated to note that Luttig is at Founders Fund, and to correct that the customer is ClearCo.

Robinhood released an S-1/A filing detailing its first IPO price range this morning. The company first filed to go public in early July after raising billions earlier in the year.

The well-known U.S. consumer fintech giant intends to sell shares in its public market debut at a price between $38 and $42 per share. Robinhood is selling 52,375,000 in its IPO, worth $2.0 billion to $2.2 billion. Another 2,625,000 are being offered by existing shareholders, while its underwriting banks have the option to purchase a further 5,500,000 shares in the transaction.

All told, Robinhood could see shares trade hands worth just over $2.5 billion in its IPO at the top end of its initial price range.

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We want to know Robinhood’s simple and diluted IPO valuation ranges, and we want to dig into the company’s newly released preliminary Q2 2021 results. Then we’ll do some fun math to better understand just how rich, or not, Robinhood’s current price range seems to be. From there, we’ll discuss whether we expect to see Robinhood raise its price range before it debuts.

Sound good? Let’s get into it.

What’s Robinhood worth?

We’ll start by calculating a few valuation marks for Robinhood to help put its $38 to $42 per-share IPO price range into context.

First, Robinhood’s post-IPO simple share count is expected to be 835,675,280, not including shares reserved for possible underwriter purchase. That share count values Robinhood at $31.8 billion at $38 per share and $35.1 billion at $42 per share. Those figures rise by $209 million and $231 million, respectively, if we count the 5.5 million shares that its banks may purchase as part of the IPO.

But what folks will want to chat on Twitter about is the company’s fully diluted valuation. At the midpoint of its price range, Robinhood is worth more than $38 billion when shares tied up in vested RSUs and options are counted. That figure lands around $40 billion at the top end of Robinhood’s price range.

Robinhood would therefore be worth $35 billion, calculated using a simple share count, or as much as $40 billion if more equity is counted. Both numbers are fucking huge and indicate that Robinhood’s ascent in the last 18 months from breakout unicorn to category-defining upstart is about to be embraced by the public market, provided that it prices at least in range.

How do those prices feel, given our read of today’s market dynamics?

How is Robinhood doing?

Music app Breakr this week announced a $4.2 million seed round, led by Slow Ventures. The latest raise follows $700,000 in funding led by Andreessen Horowitz’s TxO fund –a round the people behind the service considered a sort of proof of concept as they worked to get the idea off the ground.

It’s clear why Breakr’s offering is an appealing one for investors. The product serves as a way to connect up and coming musicians with social media influencers. Musicians get exposure and the influencers get paid to effectively host an office hours listening session. Breakr, meanwhile, gets a 10% cut from the revenue.

It’s a unique approach in an overcrowded music marketplace, where discovering music and being discovered have both proven difficult codes to crack. Though it’s less about tweaking the algorithm for music listeners than it is getting undiscovered music in front of the right set of ears. Speaking with two of the startup’s six founders, we reminisced about the days rappers stood outside of record stores, attempting to sell mixtape CD-Rs for $5 a pop — things have come a long way since then, but no one has fully solved the problem of music discovery.

“Breakr is a needed tool to efficiently connect artists, influencers and brands. I know from first hand experience that this process manually is too time consuming to not only find an array of diverse influencers but activate them as well,” AMP Technologies’ Marc Byers said in a release. “They’ve created what I call a mall of influential marketers, where all you have to do is shop what talent fits the taste of your campaign needs.”

And while the medium has changed to social media, the hustle and feelings of futility haven’t. Not everyone gets their Mobb Deep story with Q-Tip stopping and listening to a few bars after coming out of the Def Jam offices. Obviously we need a lot more Q-Tips in the world, just as a general rule. With human cloning technology still lacking, however, Breakr is hoping to offer some approximation of the experience, with added financial incentive.

“If you’re a world-renowned DJ or A&R at a major label, these artists are already in your emails, and DMS, trying to get your attention,” says CEO Tony Brown, who previously worked for financial giant Goldman Sachs. “We give them a unique URL, they send that unique URL and say, ‘hey, stay out of my DMS, meet me here. Here’s the cost. And let’s talk about it.’ ”

Influencers charge artists on a sliding scale — likely commanding more based on their following. Breakr says around 12,000 users have signed up for influencer accounts, which the company is currently in the process of vetting. Between 3,000-4,000 accounts have been approved.

“We’ve worked with companies as big as Warner and Sony, as small as the SoundCloud rapper, and everybody in between,” adds inventor and head of Product Ameer Brown, who was formerly with Adobe.

Rapper, influencer and long-time friend Tobe Nwigwe is also on the long list of co-founders and has been active in helping spread the brand through social media, including hosting his own listening sessions.

“As soon as I saw the vision for what the Breakr team was building, essentially the tech-middle-man between influencers and artists, I immediately knew Breakr would be the future,” says Nwigwe. “Having cultural icons like Erykah Badu and Dave Chapelle rock with my music, and organically amplify me on their platforms, was major for me. Now, with Breakr, we make this happen authentically for artists and influencers of all levels.”

On the subject of cultural icons, Nas is also among the notable investors. “We loved the company before we knew the connection but that coincidence really made doing this deal even more special,” the rapper said in a comment provided to TechCrunch.

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When you hire a marketing consultant, you don’t necessarily expect to wind up discussing your life’s purpose. Yet, that is what Spanish marketing expert and entrepreneur Alex Barrera often ends up doing with startup founders who hire him to help improve their pitch. They think they are going to get help convincing investors, and they do, but the byproduct of the process is that they reframe their startup’s vision.

In this context, ethical and philosophical considerations aren’t that far away, because more often than not, this includes a deep look at how their company impacts society. “The days where you could do whatever you wanted and dive into grey legal or moral areas are dwindling,” Barrera says. “Growth companies need to be careful about the potential fallouts of pursuing such strategies. While there are still plenty of investors that push for “growth at any cost,” the social pressure is changing and it’s suddenly becoming costlier to take such stances.”

You may have spotted Barrera’s cowboy hat at one of the many startup conferences he is involved with as a mentor, judge, host or speaker — and he does wear many hats.

Having previously co-founded two startup accelerators and Europe-focused tech publication Tech.eu, he now authors The Aleph Report, a periodical publication on cutting-edge technology and its implications. But it is through his Press42 venture that he collaborates with startups and corporations on organizational storytelling and strategic communications, and it is also what we discussed in the interview below (which has been edited for length and clarity).

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What do people often misunderstand about pitch training?

Well, it depends on their experience level. When first-time entrepreneurs hear about pitching, they immediately think of the infamous “elevator pitch,” roll their eyes and moan. For those with a bit more experience, pitching is about a set of slides to achieve a certain goal, mostly funding. However, seasoned managers end up discovering that telling the story of their product or service is not a one-way street. Having to sell a future vision of where the company is heading invariably affects your conception of the product in the now and what you need to build to achieve it. The vision impacts the product, because you need consistency between the product and storytelling.

What type of companies do you help?

I have been helping startups with pitching for years. This used to be mostly early-stage startups, and in groups, with accelerators and startup competitions calling me to help their entire batch or portfolio. I still provide that sort of training, but these days I will more often work one-on-one with a single client that is at a later stage. And I also sometimes work with tech companies getting ready for M&As, as well as large corporations.

What is your sweet spot for startups you work with?

For one-on-one work, I have a preference for David versus Goliath, and less sexy spaces. I love these companies that were built without the noise: There’s a lack of hubris, they are really humble, but the numbers are there — the founders could be obnoxious, but it’s the opposite. I don’t work with companies that sell smoke and mirrors or hurt society because they shamelessly disregard any responsibility for their impact on others.

Luckily, that’s rarely the case of people who call me. Usually, they are a bit out of the circuit, and they often have impostor syndrome. So my work is also about helping them understand what they can be proud of what they do, and then how to show that in their pitch. They value talking to someone who understands them and their challenges. I spend a lot of time doing research on all verticals and thinking about the future, so the conversation will typically go like this: “Dude, you get it!”

What is one of your favorite things about one-on-one pitch-related consulting work?

I find it very fulfilling to see how much value it brings to those involved. I am also a developer, and I do project management, but most of the consulting I do is not the kind of growth marketing stuff that takes more time to show results. When you do growth hacking at the product level, it takes time to see the impact, and even then, it’s not always easy to connect the dots.

When we work together on their pitch, CEOs can instantly see if the new pitch resonates or not; and they also know if the exercise itself worked for them. Working on a pitch requires a lot of reflection and it entails a lot of tension between you and the CEO.

This is especially true at the beginning, when you keep questioning why they did this or that, what the product provides and to whom, or why it grew here and not there. All these questions force many founders and managers to stop and think hard about the product, the market or the roadmap. Sometimes it pushes them to provide data to back up certain claims. The process pushes them to revisit old biases, beliefs or even myths around their company. Many people are surprised by how much clarity they gain into their company when they work on a pitch.

Do you only work with founders and executives?

Sometimes, the clarity and the strategic insight that working on a pitch provides to founders or CXOs becomes a trigger for them wanting to provide that level of understanding to other areas of the company, like sales, customer support or even the product team. In my case, being a developer myself enables me to switch and adapt my process to any layer of the organization, including the development team.

This is rare, but it eventually turns me into a kind of translator of the challenges of different parts of an organization, acting ultimately as the connector bridging different perceptions. In the end, that’s exactly what storytelling provides. It’s not just a tool for pitching, it’s a brutally effective way to communicate between humans, especially around challenging topics.

How would you describe the value that executives get from your collaboration?

One of the usual and even surprising values for most executives is the insight the process provides. When someone is running either a big company or a scaleup, their day to day is all about growing. They rarely have time to sit down and think about where they’re heading in terms of future product. They do have a roadmap, and their KPIs, but I rarely see a strong future vision broken down into steps.

The pitching process provides them with two valuable things: time and perception. Time because as they’re paying me, they’re stuck with me and need to allocate time for our sessions. That bubble, and the need to build a coherent story that tells why the company is at that particular point, create tremendous insight for most. And then, there’s perception. It’s funny because they’re the ones that provide all the pieces of the picture, I just help them put them together and then point at the obvious.

This process is very rewarding at a personal level for them. It helps them build a confidence that, while it was always there, it rarely shone through the pitch before. It also makes them reflect on where they want to go next, not just from a product perspective, but from a mission’s perspective. It reconnects them with that side that most of us care about, and the personal questions we ask ourselves about life and meaning.

How do you bridge the gap between what your clients already know and what’s next?

My clients already know how to grow a company. I always keep this in mind, not just with startups, but also with big corporations — too often, I see consultants talking to them and starting by telling: “You are doing it wrong!” Well, they got to where they are, didn’t they? It doesn’t mean that they don’t need help, but you can make them see that, you don’t have to dismiss what they have achieved. I see myself as the person that helps them get to the next level and build on top of what they have already done. Sometimes it takes some bruising to get there, but there is always massive respect for their achievements.

These people are very good professionals. It’s not that they don’t see or can’t see the vision. It’s that the need to connect the dots in detail allows for the emergence of a strategic vision of the organization. Now, here is where the real “coaching” kicks in. When such a picture emerges, many founders or executives tend to shy away from it. They have a hard time believing that they might be onto something groundbreaking or actually winning in their respective markets.

This is especially true for many scaleup companies. They’ve been fighting, first for market fit, and later on for market share, that they freeze at the possibility that they might be doing a fantastic job. Part of my role is precisely to break through their impostor syndrome and encourage them to be bolder, to believe in themselves, to trust the data.

How do you promote your services?

Well, it would be very hard for me to do cold calling. I wouldn’t be able to say: “It’s not just about pitching, you are going to see the future of your company!” — so I stopped even trying to market that. My best marketing tool is word of mouth from my clients, or even from people that see me perform on stage. But even then, people call for help with a specific milestone, like raising a round. It’s only through the process that they see that there’s way more to it. They begin to understand other parts about themselves that either enhance their capacity to raise more funds, or even take them to the next level like an acquisition or the development of a major breakthrough.

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What do you end up actually working on with founders?

Going higher up the chain, the pitch becomes a very powerful tool not just for fundraising, but also for thinking about your company strategically. It’s a place where founders can reach clarity about their strategy and what really matters — questions they don’t have time for on a day-to-day basis. They allocate time to it because they think it will help with fundraising, and then they find out that it helps them understand their company.

So typically, they will call me because they are raising a Series B round, or a very large A round. They realize that to unlock the next milestone, they need to fine-tune what they say. The game is different; it’s not about market fit anymore, or just about gaining market share, and what worked for them just no longer works — especially if they were semi-bootstrapped up to that point. They need to talk to someone who understands them and can help them prepare for the future, for instance by researching certain pitfalls or trends. I’m not just the guy that “pitches” but the guy that’s going to provide you with ammo to help you build a compelling case for your audience, whatever it is. The pitch is just an excuse!

What’s your take on comparing your startup to another one when pitching; for instance, calling yourself the “Uber for X”?

Analogies are very powerful. The major challenge when you are pitching any company, even a late-stage one, is that people have a tendency to put you in a box. So you have two options: either you let them do it, or you provide the tools to put you in a box. That’s where analogies work really well.

But then, who do you compare yourself to? It’s a challenge, because two elements are becoming increasingly important: capturing the right trends of the moment, and the ethics of how you do what you do. You want to control which box they place you, ideally one that’s trendy but at the same time one that doesn’t position you in apparently direct competition with someone you don’t want to be associated with.

Why do startups need to be careful when communicating?

Over the last few years, we have seen how startups are no longer seen as innocent by society; they no longer have “carte blanche,” and society is becoming a lot more sensitive. There’s a polarization issue around many topics, and we are increasingly going to see a clash between society and startups. It is even going to increase post-COVID, with tensions around automation versus jobs. And the thing is, scaleups and growth-stage startups have a choice in how they market themselves; so they need to be aware of ethical concerns that may arise sooner than later.

Society is going to ask you for responsibility. What’s happening with big brands is trickling down, and scaleups are hitting that threshold sooner. Typically, it catches them unprepared, because they reach that stage only knowing local feelings about what they do, and suddenly getting national or regional blowback. Or they expand internationally with local operations led by really young people with no experience in dealing with politics, who suddenly face strong local blowback.

All of this has a lot to do with pitching, because it’s not about product anymore. So for instance, it’s about convincing public authorities at different levels to let you operate, when their incentives are very different from investors. It’s B2G2C — business to government to consumer. And we are seeing more and more startups, with regulation as a factor in their operations.

How can you talk to public authorities, customers and investors in a unified pitch?

The major pitch needs to bring all elements together. It needs to be clear on what you do, and hit the right notes on ethical concerns. It’s important both for regulators and for fundraising; because from the investors’ perspective, it also reduces uncertainty around your business. As a scaleup, your ability to scale is a concern, so it helps to show that you are thinking and planning around societal impact.

I have to say that an increasing amount of investors do genuinely care about this. It may be because they have been burned, for instance from seeing regulatory blowback firsthand, or just because they are growing conscious. There are still some investors that have the “Uber mindset” and only care about muscle — grow first, and only then, deal with regulators — but more and more, VCs are aware that this might not fly, because society is changing. The pandemic is just highlighting this even more.

What about startups? Do they also care more about their societal impact?

I think it’s a pendulum, and the current generation is a child of the previous regulatory blowback. Crypto might still be on the other side, but increasingly, startups are aware that there are societal implications they will have to deal with. I also try to bring that message across when I prepare my clients to pitch — and warn that it sometimes happens very quickly: We’ve seen how one prohibition in one place can spread like wildfire. So you need to regulate your initial message and also be prepared to adapt quickly.

The fintech sector has been hugely successful (and hugely profitable) for much of the last decade, and even more so during the pandemic. But it might come as a surprise to learn that many in the industry believe that the story is just beginning and the sector is poised to achieve much more, with fintech’s next decade expected to be radically different from the last 10 years.

Long before the pandemic, the way in which banks were regulated was changing. Initiatives like Open Banking and the Revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2) were being proposed as a way to promote competition in the banking industry — allowing smaller challenger firms to break into a market that has long been dominated by corporate titans.

Now that these initiatives are in place, however, we’re seeing that their effect goes way beyond opening up a gap for challenger banks. Since open banking requires that banks make valuable data available via APIs, it is leading to a revolution in the way that small and mid-size enterprises (SMEs) are funded — one in which data, and not hard capital, is the most important factor driving fintech success.

Open banking and data freedom

In order to understand the changes that are sweeping fintech and reconfiguring the way that the industry works with small businesses, it’s important to understand open banking. This is a concept that has really taken hold among governmental and supranational banking regulators over the past decade, and we are now beginning to see its impact across the banking sector.

At its most fundamental level, open banking refers to the process of using APIs to open up consumers’ financial data to third parties. This allows these third parties to design, build and distribute their own financial products. The utility (and, ultimately, the profitability) of these products doesn’t rely on them holding huge amounts of capital — rather, it is the data they harvest and contain that endows them with value.

Open-banking models raise a number of challenges. One is that the banking industry will need to develop much more rigorous systems to continually seek consumer consent for data to be shared in this way. Though the early years of fintech have taught us that consumers are pretty relaxed when it comes to giving up their data — with some studies indicating that almost 60% of Americans choose fintech over privacy — the type and volume shared through open-banking frameworks is much more extensive than the products we have seen up until now.

Despite these concerns, the push toward open banking is progressing around the world. In Europe, the PSD2 (the Payment Services Directive) requires large banks to share financial information with third parties, and in Asia services like Alipay and WeChat in China, and Tez and PayTM in India are already altering the financial services market. The extra capabilities available through these services are already leading to calls for the U.S. banking system to embrace open banking to the same degree.

Serving SMEs

If the U.S. banking industry can be convinced of the utility of open banking, or if it is forced to do so via legislation, several groups are likely to benefit:

Consumers will be offered novel banking and investment products based on far more detailed data analysis than exists at present.The fintech companies who design and build these products will also see the use of their products increase, and their profit margins alongside this.Arguably, even banks will benefit, because even in the most open models it is banks who still act as the gatekeepers, deciding which third parties have access to consumer data, and what they need to do to access.

By far the biggest beneficiary of open banking, however, will be SMEs. This is not necessarily because open-banking frameworks offer specific new functionality that will be useful to small and medium-sized businesses. Instead, it is a reflection of the fact that SMEs have historically been so poorly served by traditional banks.

SMEs are underserved in a number of ways. Traditional banks have an extremely limited ability to view the aggregate financial position of an SME that holds capital across multiple institutions and in multiple instruments, which makes securing finance very difficult.

In addition, SMEs often have to deal with dated and time-consuming manual interfaces to upload data to their bank. And (perhaps worst of all) the B2B payment systems in use at most banks provide very limited feedback to the businesses that use them — a lack of information that can cost businesses dearly.

New capabilities

Given these deficiencies, it’s not surprising that fintech startups are keen to lend to small businesses, and that SMEs are actively looking for novel banking products and services. There have, of course, already been some success stories in this space, and the kinds of banking systems available to SMEs today (especially in Europe) are leagues ahead of the services available even 10 years ago.

However, open banking promises to accelerate this transformation and dramatically improve the financial services available to the average SME. It will do this in several ways. Allowing third parties access to the data held at banks will allow the true financial position of SMEs to be assessed, many for the first time.

Via APIs, fintech companies will be able to access information on different types of accounts, insurance, card accounts and leases, and consolidate data from multiple countries into one overall picture.

This, in turn, will have major effects on the way that credit-worthiness is assessed for SMEs. At the moment, there is a funding gap facing many SMEs, largely because banks have been hesitant to move away from the “balance sheet” model of assessing credit risk. By using real-time analytics on an SME’s current business activities, banks will be able to more accurately assess this risk and lend to more businesses.

In fact, this is already happening in countries where open banking is well advanced – in the U.K., Lloyds’ Business ToolBox offers unlimited credit checks on companies and directors in addition to account transaction data.

Open banking will also allow peer comparison analytics far ahead of what we have seen until now. APIs can be used to provide SMEs real-time feedback on how they are performing within their market sector. Again, this ability is already available in the U.K., with Barclays’ SmartBusiness Dashboard offering marketing effectiveness tools as part of a customizable business dashboard.

These capabilities will be so useful to SMEs that they are likely to drive the popularity of any fintech product that offers them. For SMEs, this value will lie mainly in intelligent data-analytics-based insights, recommendations and automatic prompts that can be built on top of account aggregation.

Then, additional insights generated from these same monitoring tools could enable banks and alternative lenders to be more proactive with their lending — offering preapproved lines of credit, in a timely manner, to SMEs that would have previously found it difficult to access funding.

The bottom line

Crucially for the fintech sector, it’s almost a certainty that SMEs will be willing to pay fees for data-analytics-based value-added services that help them grow. This is why some startups in this space are already attracting huge levels of funding, and why open banking is at the heart of the relationship between tech and the economy.

So if fintech has had a good year, this is likely to be just the start of the story. Backed by open-banking initiatives, the sector is now at the forefront of a banking revolution that will finally give SMEs the level of service they deserve and unleash their true potential across the economy at large.

After a record year for biotech investment in 2020 — during which the industry saw $28.5 billion invested across 1,073 deals — the market for new innovations remains strong. What’s more, these innovations are increasingly coming to market by way of early-stage startups and/or their scientific founders from academia.

In 2018, for instance, U.S. campuses conducted $79 billion worth of sponsored research, much of it thanks to the federal government. That number spiked amid the pandemic and could increase even more if President Biden’s infrastructure plan, which includes $180 billion to enhance R&D efforts, passes.

Since 1996, 14,000 startups have licensed technology out of those universities, and 67% of licenses were taken by startups or small companies. Meanwhile, the median step-up from seed to Series A is now 2x — higher than all other stages, suggesting that biotech startups are continuing to attract investment at earlier stages.

For biotech startups and their founders, these headwinds signal immense promise. But initial funding is only one part of a long journey that (ideally) ends with bringing a product to market. Along the way, founders will need to procure additional investments, develop strategic partnerships and stave off competition. All of which starts by protecting the fundamental asset of any biotech company: its intellectual property.

Here are three key considerations for startups and founders as they get started.

Start with an option agreement

Most early-stage biotechnology starts in a university lab. Then, a disclosure is made with the university’s tech transfer office and a patent is filed with the hopes that the product can be taken out into the market (by, for instance, a new startup). More often than not, the vehicle to do this is a licensing agreement.

A licensing agreement is important because it shows investors the company has exclusive access to the technology in question. This in turn allows them to attract the investments required to truly grow the company: hire a team, build strategic partnerships and conduct additional studies.

But that doesn’t mean jumping right to a full-blown licensing agreement is the best way to start. An option agreement is often the better move.

Ants and camels are famously resilient, but when it was time to select a name for a startup that offers open-source, cloud-based distributed database architecture, you can imagine why “Cockroach Labs” was the final candidate.

Database technology is fundamental infrastructure, which partially explains why it’s so resistant to innovation: Oracle Database was released in 1979, and MySQL didn’t reach the market until 1995.

Since hitting the market six years ago, CockroachDB has become “a next-generation, $2-billion-valued database contender,” writes enterprise reporter Bob Reselman, who interviewed the company’s founders to write a four-part series:

Part 1: Origin story: From the creation of the popular open-source image editor GIMP to some of Google’s most well-known infrastructure products.

Part 2: Technical design: Analyzes the key differentiation that CockroachDB offers, particularly its focus on geography and data storage.

Part 3: Developer relations and business: How CockroachDB engages with developers while pivoting to the cloud at a key inflection point.

Part 4: Competitive landscape and future: A look at the fierce competition, and what possible exit routes might look like.

Full Extra Crunch articles are only available to members.
Use discount code ECFriday to save 20% off a one- or two-year subscription.

Our ongoing search for the best startup growth marketers is yielding results: reporter Anna Heim interviewed SaaS and early-stage startup marketing consultant Lucy Heskins to learn more about the mistakes her clients are most likely to make before they seek her help.

“The first is hiring a marketer too soon,” said Heskins. “I’ve come into startups thinking I was coming in to set up their in-house function. However, very quickly you realize that they’ve jumped the gun and think they’ve got product-market fit when they are nowhere near it.”

Heskins shared a few pages from her early-stage marketing playbook, in which she recommends aligning content marketing with the customer experience — as opposed to just putting pages up that score well in search results.

Because their conversation contains a lot of strategic advice for startups that haven’t yet made a marketing hire, we made it available on TechCrunch.

If you know of a skilled growth marketer, please share your recommendation in this quick survey.

Thanks very much for reading!

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

Here are 3 things you should do with your stock options

Congratulations: You’ve joined a startup and received an Incentive stock option grant! You now own a percentage of the company, and there’s no telling how much it could be worth one day.

A few questions: Do you know your 409A valuation? What’s your strike price? Surely, you know the preferred share price and which type of options you were granted?

No?

It’s complicated stuff, and for most ISO recipients, this may be the first time they start thinking seriously about how federal tax laws impact them personally.

To break things down, Vieje Piauwasdy, Secfi’s director of equity strategy, recently shared a post with Extra Crunch.

“If you’ve ever been confused about your equity, or haven’t thought much about it, you’re not alone.”

Where is suptech heading?

First of all, what is suptech?

“The emergence of purpose-built technologies to facilitate regulator oversight has, over the past few years, garnered its own moniker of supervisory technology, or suptech,” Marc Gilman, the general counsel and VP of compliance at Theta Lake, writes in a guest column.

Gilman notes that “nearly every financial services regulator is engaged in some type of suptech activity.”

But as a primer, he focused on three areas: regulatory reporting, machine-readable regulation, and market and conduct oversight.

Superhuman’s Rahul Vohra explains how to optimize your startup’s products for lasting growth

Superhuman co-founder and CEO Rahul Vohra joined us last week at TechCrunch Early Stage to provide an in-depth look at how he and his company worked to optimize and refine their product early to create a version of “growth hacking” that would not only help Superhuman attract users, but serve them best and retain them, too.

Vohra articulated a system that other entrepreneurs should be able to apply to their own businesses, regardless of area or focus.

Dear Sophie: Tell me more about the EB-1A extraordinary ability green card

Dear Sophie,

I’m a postdoc engineer who started STEM OPT in June after failing to get selected in the H-1B lottery.

A colleague suggested that I apply for an EB-1A for extraordinary ability green card, but I have not won any major awards, much less a Nobel Prize. Would you tell me more about the EB-1A?

Thanks!

— Bashful in Berkeley

India poised for record VC year as unicorns head for decisive IPOs

Alex Wilhelm and Anna Heim dialed in on India for today’s Exchange, noting that the country is a good example of the global trend of booming venture capital dollars invested.

“The country’s venture capital haul thus far in 2021 has nearly matched its 2020 total and is on pace for a record year,” they write. “But as the third quarter gets underway, something perhaps even more important is going on: public-market liquidity.”

They looked at recent venture capital results and considered what Zomato’s flotation means for the country’s IPO pipeline. Don’t miss this analysis of an explosive startup market.

How to navigate an acquisition without alienating your current employees

Now that COVID-19 vaccines are encouraging the world to reopen, two trends are underway:

In the first half of 2021, mergers and acquisitions increased by more than 150% YOY to $2.4 trillion; in several surveys, an overwhelming majority of workers said they intend to seek employment elsewhere.

If your startup is angling toward an exit, the promise of a big payday may not be enough to retain employees who feel burned out or dissatisfied.

Many founders don’t have prior management experience, and, frankly, the uncertainty associated with an exit makes it a poor time for on-the-job learning. With that in mind, here are several communication strategies that can help you keep your winning team intact.

Emergence Capital’s Doug Landis explains how to identify (and tell) your startup story

How do you go beyond the names and numbers with your startup pitch deck? For Doug Landis, the answer is one simple compound gerund: storytelling. It’s a word that gets thrown around a lot of late in Silicon Valley, but it’s one that could legitimately help your startup stand out from the pack amid the pile of pitches.

Landis joined the TechCrunch Early Stage: Marketing and Fundraising event to offer a presentation about the value of storytelling for startups, whittling down the standard two-hour conversation to a 30-minute version.

Though he still managed to rewind things pretty far, opening with, “400,000 years ago, men and women used to sit around the fire pit and tell stories about their day, about their hunt, about the one that got away.”

Khosla’s Adina Tecklu breaks down how to nail your pitch

We kicked off our TechCrunch Early Stage 2021: Marketing and Fundraising event with a deep dive on all the tips and tricks required to get the most out of pitching and slide decks. On hand was Adina Tecklu, a principal at Khosla Ventures, and who formerly built out Canaan Beta, the consumer seed practice at Canaan Partners.

We talked about the importance of knowing your customer (aka your potential investor), focusing on story, typical slides in a deck, the appendix slides, formatting, and then alternative formats and which to avoid in a pitch deck.

What impact will Apple’s buy now, pay later push have on startups?

News that Apple plans to get into the buy now, pay later game had Alex Wilhelm wondering about the impact on startups in the space.

Shares of public competitors Affirm and Afterpay dropped on the news, but it doesn’t mean a death knell for those looking to jump into the BNPL game, Alex notes.

“Provided that Apple’s BNPL solution is rolled out over time to the same markets where Apple Pay is present, the … company could consume market shares — and therefore oxygen — from generalized rival BNPL services,” he writes.

“Those startups building more niche or targeted solutions will likely enjoy some shelter from the competitive storms.”

How to make the math work for today’s sky-high startup valuations

So how does the math work out for all these startups with minimal revenue, tons of cash and sky-high valuations?

Alex Wilhelm ran through the numbers, explaining why the current state of the venture capital market makes sense for startups and investors alike.

“Today we can make super-expensive startup math work out, provided that growth rates stay generally strong and public-market multiples stay rich,” he writes in The Exchange. “If the latter dips, the former has to improve, and vice versa.”

Norwest’s Lisa Wu explains how to think like a VC when fundraising

At the TechCrunch Early Stage: Marketing and Fundraising event last week, Norwest Venture Partners‘ Lisa Wu took the stage to discuss how founders can think like venture capitalists in all facets of their business.

The overlapping in job roles is uncanny: The best investors and founders have to find focus through the noise, understand the weight of due diligence and pitch others with conviction.

Wu used anecdotes and exercises — such as the eyebrow test — in the tactical, engaging chat.

Revolut’s 2020 financial performance explains its big new $33B valuation

Alex Wilhelm weeds through Revolut’s 2020 financial results again to determine if the U.K.-based consumer fintech player’s $33 billion valuation makes sense.

“The picture that emerges is one of a company with a rapidly improving financial image, albeit with some blank spaces regarding recent customer growth,” he writes.

How we got 75% more e-commerce orders in a single A/B test for this major brand

Jasper Kuria, the managing partner of The Conversion Wizards, breaks down how the CRO consultancy ran an A/B test to boost the conversion rates of a multibillion-dollar company.

“Radical redesigns that incorporate a large number of variables (instead of single-element tests) are more likely to provide substantial gains,” Kuria writes. “Another advantage to doing this is it requires much less time and traffic for your tests to reach statistical significance.”

Here’s a rundown of all the changes that led to a 75% bump in orders.

Mortgages may not be considered sexy, but they are a big business.

If you’ve refinanced or purchased a home digitally lately, you may not have noticed the company powering the software behind it — but there’s a good chance that company is Blend.

Founded in 2012, the startup has steadily grown to be a leader in the mortgage tech industry. Blend’s white label technology powers mortgage applications on the site of banks including Wells Fargo and U.S. Bank, for example, with the goal of making the process faster, simpler and more transparent. 

The San Francisco-based startup’s SaaS (software-as-a-service) platform currently processes over $5 billion in mortgages and consumer loans per day, up from nearly $3 billion last July.

Today, Blend made its debut as a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange, trading under the symbol “BLND.” As of early afternoon, Eastern Time, the stock was trading up over 13% at $20.36.

On Thursday night, the company had said it would offer 20 million shares at a price of $18 per share, indicating the company was targeting a valuation of $3.6 billion.

That compares to a $3.3 billion valuation at the time of its last raise in January — a $300 million Series G funding round that included participation from Coatue and Tiger Global Management. Also, let’s not forget that Blend only became a unicorn last August when it raised a $75 million Series F. Over its lifetime, Blend had raised $665 million before Friday’s public market debut.

In filing its S-1 on June 21, Blend revealed that its revenue had climbed to $96 million in 2020 from $50.7 million in 2019. Meanwhile, its net loss narrowed from $81.5 million in 2019 to $74.6 million in 2020.

In 2020, the San Francisco-based startup significantly expanded its digital consumer lending platform. With that expansion, Blend began offering its lender customers new configuration capabilities so that they could launch any consumer banking product “in days rather than months.”

Looking ahead, the company had said it expects its revenue growth rate “to decline in future periods.” It also doesn’t envision achieving profitability anytime soon as it continues to focus on growth. Blend also revealed that in 2020, its top five customers accounted for 34% of its revenue.

Today, TechCrunch spoke with co-founder and CEO Nima Ghamsari about the company’s decision to go with a traditional IPO versus the ubiquitous SPAC or even a direct listing.

For one, Blend said he wanted to show its customers that it is an “around for a long time company” by making sure there’s enough on its balance sheet to continue to grow.

“We had to talk and convince some of the biggest investors in the world to invest in us, and that speaks to how long we’ll be around to serve these customers,” he said. “So it was a combination of our capital need and wanting to cement ourselves as a really credible software provider to one of the most regulated industries.”

Ghamsari emphasized that Blend is a software company that powers the mortgage process and is not the one offering the mortgages. As such, it works with the flock of fintechs that are working to provide mortgages.

“A lot of them are using Blend under the hood, as the infrastructure layer,” he said.

Overall, Ghamsari believes this is just the beginning for Blend.

“One of the things about financial services is that it’s still mostly powered by paper. So a lot of Blend’s growth is just going deeper into this process that we got started in years ago,” he said. As mentioned above, the company started out with its mortgage product but just keeps adding to it. Today, it also powers other loans such as auto, personal and home equity.

“A lot of our growth is actually powered by our other lines of business,” Ghamsari told TechCrunch. “There’s a lot to build because the larger digitization trends are just getting started in financial services. It’s a relatively large industry that has lots of change.”

In May, digital mortgage lender Better.com announced it would combine with a SPAC, taking itself public in the second half of 2021.

 

Visualping, a service that can help you monitor websites for changes like price drops or other updates, announced that it has raised a $6 million extension to the $2 million seed round it announced earlier this year. The round was led by Seattle-based FUSE, a relatively new firm with investors who spun out of Ignition Partners last year. Prior investors Mistral Venture Partners and N49P also participated.

The Vancouver-based company is part of the current Google for Startups Accelerator class in Canada. This program focuses on services that leverage AI and machine learning, and, while website monitoring may not seem like an obvious area where machine learning can add a lot of value, if you’ve ever used one of these services, you know that they can often unleash a plethora of false alerts. For the most part, after all, these tools simply look for something in a website’s underlying code to change and then trigger an alert based on that (and maybe some other parameters you’ve set).

Earlier this week, Visualping launched its first machine learning-based tools to avoid just that. The company argues that it can eliminate up to 80% of false alerts by combining feedback from its more than 1.5 million users with its new ML algorithms. Thanks to this, Visualping can now learn the best configuration for how to monitor a site when users set up a new alert.

“Visualping has the hearts of over a million people across the world, as well as the vast majority of the Fortune 500. To be a part of their journey and to lead this round of financing is a dream,” FUSE’s Brendan Wales said.

Visualping founder and CEO Serge Salager tells me that the company plans to use the new funding to focus on building out its product but also to build a commercial team. So far, he said, the company’s growth has been primarily product led.

As a part of these efforts, the company also plans to launch Visualping Business, with support for these new ML tools and additional collaboration features, and Visualping Personal for individual users who want to monitor things like ticket availability for concerts or to track news, price drops or job postings, for example. For now, the personal plan will not include support for ML. “False alerts are not a huge problem for personal use as people are checking two-three websites but a huge problem for enterprise where teams need to process hundreds of alerts per day,” Salager told me.

The current idea is to launch these new plans in November, together with mobile apps for iOS and Android. The company will also relaunch its extensions around this time, too.

It’s also worth noting that while Visualping monetizes its web-based service, you can still use the extension in the browser for free.

Dayna Grayson has been in venture capital for more than a decade and was one of the first VCs to build a portfolio around the transformation of industrial sectors of our economy.

At NEA, where she was a partner for eight years, she led investments in and sat on the boards of companies including Desktop Metal, Onshape, Framebridge, Tulip, Formlabs and Guideline. She left NEA to start her own fund, Construct Capital, that focuses exclusively on early-stage startups, with a portfolio that includes Copia, ChargeLab, Tradeswell and Hadrian.

It should come as no surprise, then, that we’re absolutely thrilled to have Grayson join us at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 in September.

Grayson has more than proven that she has a keen eye for transformational technology. Desktop Metal went public in 2020 — she still sits on the board as chair of the compensation committee. Onshape, another NEA-era investment, was acquired by PTC in 2019 for a whopping $525 million. Framebridge was also acquired by Graham Holdings in 2020.

Grayson saw an opportunity to develop a venture brand more hyperfocused on the types of deals she was doing at NEA, which centered around manufacturing and digitizing industrial verticals. That’s where Construct Capital came in. It’s a $140 million fund helmed by Grayson and former Uber exec Rachel Holt.

At Disrupt, Grayson will serve as a Startup Battlefield judge. The Battlefield is one of the world’s most prestigious and exciting startup competitions. Twenty+ early-stage startups hop on our stage and present their wares to a panel of expert VC judges, who then grill the founders on everything about the business, from the revenue model to the go-to-market strategy to the team to the technology itself.

The winner walks away with $100,000 in prize money and the glory of being a Battlefield winner. Households names in tech have gotten their start in the Battlefield, from Dropbox to Mint.

Grayson joins plenty of other seasoned investors on the Battlefield stage, including Camille Samuels, Deena Shakir, Terri Burns, Shauntel Garvey and Alexa Von Tobel.

Disrupt 2021 goes down from September 21 to 23 and is virtual. Snag a ticket here starting under $100 for a limited time!

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