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Last year, during the pandemic, a free browser extension called Netflix Party gained traction because it enabled people trapped in their homes to connect with far-flung friends and family by watching the same Netflix TV shows and movies simultaneously. It also enabled them to dish about the action in a side bar chat.

Yet that company — later renamed Teleparty — was just the beginning, argue two young companies that have raised seed funding. One, a year-old upstart in London that launched in December, just closed its round this week led by Craft Ventures. The other, a four-year-old, Bay Area-based startup, has raised $3 million in previously undisclosed seed funding, including from 500 Startups.

Both believe that while investors have thrown money at virtual events and edtech companies, there is an even bigger opportunity in developing a kind of multiplayer browsing experience that enables people to do much more together online. From watching sports to watching movies to perhaps even reviewing X-rays with one’s doctor some day, both say more web surfing together is inevitable, particularly for younger users.

The companies are taking somewhat different approaches. The startup on which Craft just made a bet, leading its $2.2 million seed round, is Giggl, a year-old, London-based startup that invites users of its web app to tap into virtual sessions, which it calls “portals,” to which they can invite friends to browse content together, as well as text chat and call in. The portals can be private rooms or switched to “public” so that anyone can join.

Giggl was founded by four teenagers who grew up together, led by 19-year-old CEO Tony Zog. It only recently graduated from the LAUNCH accelerator program. Still, it already has enough users — roughly 20,000 of whom use the service on an active monthly basis — that it’s beginning to build its own custom server infrastructure to minimize downtime and reduce its costs.

The bigger idea is to build a platform for all kinds of scenarios and to charge for these accordingly. For example, while people can chat for free while web surfing or watching events together like Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, Giggl plans to charge for more premium features, as well as to sell subscriptions to enterprises that are looking for more ways to collaborate. (You can check out a demo of Giggl’s current service below.)

Hearo.live is the other “multiplayer” startup — the one backed by 500 Startups, along with numerous angel investors. The company is the brainchild of Ned Lerner, who previously spent 13 years as a director of engineering with Sony Worldwide Studios and a short time before that as the CTO of an Electronic Arts division.

Hearo has a more narrow strategy in that users can’t browse absolutely anything together as with Giggl. Instead, Hearo enables users to access upwards of 35 broadcast services in the U.S. (from NBC Sports to YouTube to Disney+), and it relies on data synchronization to ensure that every user sees the same original video quality.

Hearo has also focused a lot of its efforts on sound, aiming to ensure that when multiple streams of audio are being created at the same time — say users are watching the basketball playoffs together and also commenting — not everyone involved is confronted with a noisy feedback loop.

Indeed, Lerner says, through echo cancellation and other “special audio tricks” that Hearo’s small team has developed, users can enjoy the experience without “noise and other stuff messing up the experience.” (“Pretty much we can do everything Clubhouse can do,” says Lerner. “We’re just doing it as you’re watching something else because I honestly didn’t think people just sitting around talking would be a big thing.”)

Like Giggl, Hearo Lerner envisions a subscription model; it also anticipates an eventual ad revenue split with sports broadcasters and says it’s already working with the European Broadcasting Union on that front.

While interesting in their respective ways, the startups aren’t the first to focus on watch-together type experiences. Rabbit, a company founded in 2013, enabled people to remotely browse and watch the same content simultaneously, as well as to text and video chat all the while.

Notably, Rabbit eventually ran aground. Lerner says that’s because the company was screen-sharing other people’s copyrighted material and so couldn’t charge for its service. (“Essentially,” he notes, “you can get away with some amount of piracy if it’s not for your personal financial benefit.”)

Still, the the degree to which people are interested in “online watch parties” isn’t yet clear, even if Hearo and Giggl have more compelling tech and viable paths to generating revenue.

Like Giggl, Hearo’s users numbers are conservative by most standards, with 300,000 downloads to date of its app for iOS, Android, Windows, and macOS, and 60,000 actively monthly users. While the company has been hard at work building its tech and not marketing, it’s probably fair to wonder in what direction those numbers will move, particularly as people reintegrate into the physical world post-pandemic.

For his part, Lerner isn’t worried about at all about demand. He points to a generation that is far more comfortable watching video on a phone than elsewhere. He also notes that screen time has become “an isolating thing,” when it could — and will — easily become “an ideal time to hang out with your buddies.”

“Over the last 20 years, games went from single player to multiplayer to voice chats showing up in games so people can actually hang out,” he says. “Because mobile is everywhere and social is fun, we think the same is going to happen to the rest of the media business.”

Zog thinks the trends play in Giggl’s favor, too. “It’s obvious that people are going to meet up more often” as the pandemic winds down, he says. But all that real-world socializing “isn’t really going to be a substitute” for the kind of online socializing that’s already happening in so many corners of the internet.

Besides, he adds Giggl wants to “make it so that being together online is just as good as being together in real life. That’s the end goal here.”

One might think that a short week due to a U.S. holiday calls for a short weekly recap, but we have plenty to share about growth marketing from our coverage over the week. With the help of your recommendations, this week we were able to interview Peep Laja and Lucy Heskins, and publish multiple guest columns on growth-related topics including homepage testing, marketing lies to watch out for, VR ad opportunities, company-naming and ad compliance.

TechCrunch is collecting responses in this survey to find the best growth marketer for founders to work with. We’ve included some of our favorites, below the links.

This early-stage marketing expert says ‘B2B SaaS is actually very, very cool now’: Extra Crunch reporter Anna Heim interviews Wales-based growth marketer Lucy Heskins about her experience working with start-ups, how content marketing is best used, and more!

Navigating ad fraud and consumer privacy abuse in programmatic advertising: Did you know that “ad fraud exceeded $35 billion last year, a figure expected to rise to $50 billion by 2025”? Jalal Nasir, CEO of marketing compliance startup Pixalate, lends his thoughts about how business leaders and brands can ensure they don’t fall victim to the problem.

To stay ahead of your competitors, start building your narrative on day one: Anna also sat down with Peep Laja to discuss the importance of a startup being the one to write their own narrative and how it can mature with the company.

Demand Curve: How to double conversions on your startup’s homepage: Head of content Nick Costelloe looks at when it’s good to be unique, and when it’s best to stick to the status quo when working to double conversions on your homepage.

(Extra Crunch) Demand Curve: 10 lies you’ve been told about marketing: For subscribers, Costelloe goes through 10 lies you’ve heard about marketing, and what to try instead to create better results.

(Extra Crunch) Can advertising scale in VR?: Have you been on the fence about VR advertising for your company? AR/VR analyst Michael Boland lists out the pros and cons in this article.

(Extra Crunch) What I learned the hard way from naming 30+ startups: Naming a start-up might require more thought than you imagined. Marketing executive Drew Beechler takes us through what should be considered when picking out a name, like strategic alignment.

As always, please let us know if you can recommend a top-tier growth marketer who works with startups by filling out this quick survey.

Marketer: Nikita Vorobyev

Recommender: Ruby Club

Testimonial: “Nikita & his company, Buildrbrand, have worked tirelessly to bring my idea to life and did everything in his power to get it to the level it is today. He & his team created a world-class conditional quiz visual experience that I think would be really cool for him to share with the industry. He doesn’t know I nominated him, but I definitely wanted to give back to him in any way I can since I believe his agency creates some of the best brands going viral online right now.”

Marketer: Max van den Ingh, Unmuted

Recommender: Harry Willis, ShopPop

Testimonial: “They [have] shown considerable and demonstrable growth marketing success at various companies. One of them being MisterGreen, a Dutch Tesla-leasing company that had grown 10x under Max’s leadership.”

Marketer: Patricia (Patty) Spiller, Chief

Recommender: Livongo

Testimonial: “Hired her to lead Product Marketing and she identified the opportunity to do growth in a much different way, which could significantly accelerate our company’s growth. So, she founded the Growth Marketing team and scaled the team from 1 person to 30 people in less than 2 years, based on all the success they had in growing our member base.”

Netskope, focused on Secure Access Service Edge architecture, announced Friday a $300 million investment round on a post-money valuation of $7.5 billion.

The oversubscribed insider investment was led by ICONIQ Growth, which was joined by other existing investors, including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Accel, Sequoia Capital Global Equities, Base Partners, Sapphire Ventures and Geodesic Capital.

Netskope co-founder and CEO Sanjay Beri told TechCrunch that since its founding in 2012, the company’s mission has been to guide companies through their digital transformation by finding what is most valuable to them — sensitive data — and protecting it.

“What we had before in the market didn’t work for that world,” he said. “The theory is that digital transformation is inevitable, so our vision is to transform that market so people could do that, and that is what we are building nearly a decade later.”

With this new round, Netskope continues to rack up large rounds: it raised $340 million last February, which gave it a valuation of nearly $3 billion. Prior to that, it was a $168.7 million round at the end of 2018.

Similar to other rounds, the company was not actively seeking new capital, but that it was “an inside round with people who know everything about us,” Beri said.

“The reality is we could have raised $1 billion, but we don’t need more capital,” he added. “However, having a continued strong balance sheet isn’t a bad thing. We are fortunate to be in that situation, and our destination is to be the most impactful cybersecurity company in the world.

Beri said the company just completed a “three-year journey building the largest cloud network that is 15 milliseconds from anyone in the world,” and intends to invest the new funds into continued R&D, expanding its platform and Netskope’s go-to-market strategy to meet demand for a market it estimated would be valued at $30 billion by 2024, he said.

Even pre-pandemic the company had strong hypergrowth over the past year, surpassing the market average annual growth of 50%, he added.

Today’s investment brings the total raised by Santa Clara-based Netskope to just over $1 billion, according to Crunchbase data.

With the company racking up that kind of capital, the next natural step would be to become a public company. Beri admits that Netskope could be public now, though it doesn’t have to do it for the traditional reasons of raising capital or marketing.

“Going public is one day on our path, but you probably won’t see us raise another private round,” Beri said.

 

Did you see the viral videos of yesterday’s flooding in New York City subways?

In one, riders waded through brown, waist-deep water; another video showed a cascade rushing down a flight of stairs to a subway platform where passengers waited for a train.

Infrastructure doesn’t attract much attention until it fails. Domain name services (DNS), the system that directs readers to techcrunch.com when they say or speak it into their web browser, are much the same way.

For the latest entry in a series of longform articles that explore the inner workings of notable startups, we looked at NS1, an internet infrastructure company best known for its software-defined DNS.

Since its founding in 2013, NS1 has raised more than $100 million to build an engineering team and robust product portfolio that’s expanded to include DDI, which helps companies manage internal networks.

If you’re curious about how NS1 transformed “a slumbering and dreary yet reliable aspect of the internet” into “a strategic moat and an enterprise win” in just eight years, read on.

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

Part 1: Origin story: how three engineers decided to rebuild the internet’s core addressing system.

Part 2: Product development and roadmap: experimentation, open-source efforts and expanding beyond DNS.

Part 3: Competitive landscape: a look at the broader internet infrastructure market.

Part 4: Customer development: how their top competitor’s stumble became “the gift that kept on giving.”

Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch — have a great weekend!

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

Startups have never had it so good

Alex Wilhelm and Anna Heim didn’t mince words in today’s Exchange.

“The venture capital market is racing ahead, foot on the gas, middle finger out the window, hair on fire.”

That’s their hot take after analyzing the Q2 data released so far about how much money VCs deployed across the globe between April and the end of June.

Leaning on data from CB Insights, Crunchbase News and FactSet, Alex and Anna walk through the data from the U.S. and a few other regions — and promise deeper regional dives next week.

What I learned the hard way from naming 30+ startups

If you’re starting a company, choosing a name can feel like a fraught choice. But actually, as long as you follow some basic guidelines, it shouldn’t lead to paralysis.

“The truth is that business names fall on a bell curve — you have a small number of outliers that actively contribute to your success and a small number of outliers that actively impair your ability to succeed,” Drew Beechler, who’s named more than 30 software startups, writes in a guest column. “The vast majority, though, fall somewhere in the middle in their impact on your business.”

Nextdoor’s SPAC investor deck paints a picture of sizable scale and sticky users

The SPAC parade continued apace this week as Nextdoor announced it would go public via a blank-check company, with the community social network making its pitch based on scale, claiming users in one in three U.S. households.

Alex Wilhelm unpacks Nextdoor’s “clear-eyed look into [its] financial performance in both historical terms and in terms of what it might accomplish in the future,” noting that “our usual mockery of SPAC charts mostly doesn’t apply.”

Pakistan’s growing tech ecosystem is finally taking off

So far this year, startups in Pakistan are on track to raise more than in the previous five years combined, according to Mikal Khoso, an early-stage investor at Wavemaker Partners.

“Even more excitingly, a large portion of this capital is coming from international investors from across Asia, the Middle East and even famed investors from Silicon Valley,” he notes in a guest post for Extra Crunch.

He’s identified three factors that are fueling investor interest: rapidly expanding mobile connectivity, an improved security situation, and critical legal and regulatory changes that are making the country more startup- and VC-friendly.

Drawing a map of Pakistan’s tech ecosystem, Khoso identifies local companies trying to grab a slice of grocery delivery, e-commerce, ride-hailing and other sectors before examining the challenges still in place.

“The segments in Pakistan that are likely to attract the best entrepreneurs and most investor capital in the years to come will be fintech, e-commerce and edtech,” says Khoso.

Investors find European unicorns reluctant to join SPAC boom

The nonstop news of startups partnering up with SPACs in the United States had Alex Wilhelm and Anna Heim wondering if the blank-check boom expanded to other countries.

“Unicorns are hardly unique to the U.S. startup ecosystem,” they write. “Are we seeing similar SPAC interest in Europe?”

Anna and Alex talked to investors to see why — or why not — European startups would take the SPAC path to become a public company.

For successful AI projects, celebrate your graveyard and be prepared to fail fast

When you’ve invested a lot of time and energy in a project, it can be difficult to decide to shelve it — or worse, kill it.

But for AI projects, teams should be prepared to fail fast, Sandeep Uttamchandani, the chief data officer of Unravel Data, writes in a guest column.

“In order to fail fast, AI initiatives should be managed as a conversion funnel analogous to marketing and sales funnels,” he writes. “Projects start at the top of the five-stage funnel and can drop off at any stage, either to be temporarily put on ice or permanently suspended and added to the AI graveyard.”

Uttamchandani walks through the five stages of the funnel and offers suggestions for when to start digging a hole for your project in the graveyard.

Circle is a good example of why SPACs can be useful

Yes, we’re all a bit over-SPAC-ed at this point. It’s just been a nonstop torrent of startups linking up with blank-check companies.

But Circle, a Boston-based technology company that provides API-delivered financial services and a stablecoin, is just “the sort of business that is correct for a SPAC-led debut,” Alex Wilhelm writes in The Exchange.

“It could not go public in a traditional manner in its current state of maturity,” he writes.

“But a SPAC can get it a huge slug of cash at a price that it has locked in, allowing it to complete its growth into corporate adulthood while public. A gamble, sure, but one that will be very fun to watch.”

Can advertising scale in VR?

It’s not hard to imagine how advertising could be valuable in VR: billboards on streetscapes, magazine covers on newsstands, cereal boxes in virtual kitchens.

But Facebook’s stab at experimental VR ads didn’t last very long; after an onslaught of negative feedback from players, the test was quickly scuttled.

That said, VR advertising has a ton of untapped potential — but it’s going to take a minute to reach profitable scale.

Achieving digital transformation through RPA and process mining

“Robots are not coming to replace us,” Alp Uguray is quick to note in a guest column about robotic process automation. “They are coming to take over the repetitive, mundane and monotonous tasks that we’ve never been fond of.”

That’s the good news. But RPA is still in the early stages, despite rapid growth through IPOs, acquisitions and funding rounds.

“Adoption of RPA and process mining in your organization will define the operational excellence of your firm,” he writes. “If you are behind in this race, just think of how your enterprise can continue to compete with fully digital peers. Your organization won’t want to be in the back of this race.”

Demand Curve: 10 lies you’ve been told about marketing

In a guest column, Nick Costelloe, the head of content for Demand Curve, notes that the content you stumble across in a Google search might not be “intentionally misleading,” it might not lead you in the right direction.

Here, he debunks 10 common myths about marketing — and offers suggestions for what to do instead.

5 fundraising imperatives for robotics startups

This guest post from three contributors from Next47, MassRobotics and Lux Capital looks at best practices for robotics startups looking to raise cash.

“There has never been a better time to pursue funding for robotics startups, but you are more likely to succeed if you build a fundraising strategy that is marked by the same sophistication and informed understanding you already bring to many other aspects of your new business,” the writers say.

Here, they lay out five strategies to ensure robotics startups get the funding they need.

Doing more with less: This is what marketers get asked for when they join an early-stage startup. British consultant Lucy Heskins knows firsthand how overwhelming that can be, which is why her services can both replace and complement early in-house marketing staff. Either way, it often involves educating the founders about the job to be done.

“Too many people fail to realize that marketing is the process of understanding your customers, building appropriate channels to reach them and ultimately meeting their needs (profitability),” she wrote on her site, Oh, blimey.

TechCrunch is asking founders who have worked with growth marketers to share a recommendation in this survey. We’ll use your answers to find more experts to interview.

Having earned “scars and stripes” at various startups, Heskins recently joined “tech for good” company Big Lemon as a part-time head of growth, but still offers her services to other teams as a SaaS and early-stage startup marketing consultant. If you are a marketer yourself or thinking of hiring one, read on: She shared some compelling insights with TechCrunch.

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

How do you collaborate with the startups you work with as a consultant?

Typically I will work with startups in two ways. The first will be project-based. So for example, when they want to explore a potential new customer market or introduce a freemium strategy.

The other way is as a mentor or extension to their marketer. Often I will work with marketers who’ve never worked in a startup and they can bounce ideas or strategies off me. It helps speed up their learning and time to deliver results.

How do your roles as an employee and as a consultant nourish each other?

I’ve experienced the very real pains/challenges/opportunities a startup presents, especially as an early-stage employee. I’ve come in, helped change business models, explored things like freemium and repositioned brands. It’s tough. So as a consultant, I can pass on my learnings (and mistakes). And I get to work with some great startups who are open to trying new things. Plus, having worked in four startups now, I get the pressure they’re facing and can adjust my approach accordingly. There’s a lot of plates spinning, and I get that.

What do early-stage startups typically misunderstand and need to know about startup marketers like you?

In my experience, there are a few mistakes startups often make.

The first is hiring a marketer too soon. 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. This can cause conflict because the startup’s expecting one thing (say, revenue) but the marketer is missing a few basics to be effective (value proposition, an idea of how “painful” the problem is that they are solving, lack of involvement in areas like pricing).

The next mistake is not trusting their marketer. All too often I hear of marketers who’ve gone into a startup only to learn that their ideas are put on the back burner because the founder(s) — and this is typically first-time founders — don’t quite understand marketing and will push them to deliver short-term results (leads).

Lastly and probably the biggest mistake is applying what worked at a previous business. When joining a startup, you’re starting from scratch — new customers, new markets, go-to-market strategy. There’s a bias for wanting to use what worked previously, but people forget … your customers and markets are totally different. You can’t just replicate.

What should be the main focus of a startup’s first in-house marketer?

Of course, it depends really on the stage of the startup; however, whatever stage you’re at, it needs to be customer research/development. I’d be very wary of a marketer who doesn’t suggest this as one of their first activities.

You need to unlock why customers buy or subscribe to the startup’s product. This will determine your traction channels, your proposition, your pricing model — everything.

Why should startups consider hiring a freelancer or agency to help with their marketing instead of doing everything in-house?

I think it’s a great idea to outsource until the startup understands (1) if there’s an actual problem that needs solving and (2) whether there’s a market big enough to actually turn it into a business.

Whilst you’re in this period, you can’t afford to learn new skills — even though it may seem attractive/”cheap” to do it in-house, it really isn’t. It can actually set you back. Outsource the specifics and focus on what you do best. Once you’ve got a better idea of validation, then you can start to see which skills to bring in-house.

Have you worked with a talented individual or agency who helped you find and keep more users?

Respond to our survey and help us find the best startup growth marketers!

Why have you decided to focus on SaaS startups? What makes them different when it comes to marketing?

I love working in SaaS, especially B2B SaaS. What makes it different, for me, is that the role becomes part marketing, part product, part commercial. You get to look at the entire customer experience, and because many SaaS products are trial/subscription-based, your focus needs to be on retention. You’re only as good as your last month, so it forces you to work and think harder.

Plus, B2B SaaS is actually very, very cool now. Just because you work in B2B marketing doesn’t mean you need to be boring!

What are some key takeaways from your Early-Stage Startup Marketing Playbook?

I created the playbook because I sat in a board meeting and, when an investor was asking about the go-to-market strategy, I realized that there wasn’t a clear toolkit for helping early-stage startups to map out the market, nor think about the steps leading up to launching a product.

There are many takeaways, but I think the main one and the most valuable is providing clarity as to what specific steps go into a go-to-market strategy and how it all works together.

I talk you through how to speak to the customers who’ll actually buy from you — not those who tell you they love your product but run a mile when it’s time to pay — and how to determine which market channel is best to reach them.

What is customer-led growth? And how can it help startups adapt post-COVID?

Customer-led growth is a strategy that combines product, marketing and sales. It views your product through the lens of a customer with the aim of working out how value is delivered to them “whenever, wherever and however they need it.” It’s something I learned and studied from the co-founders of Forget the Funnel.

The idea is that you look at the entire customer journey, from the struggle stage right through to when they’re a customer, and you break each section down to where there’s an opportunity for growth. It’s really helpful for startups — especially post-COVID because chances are, your customers’ needs have changed.

How your customers derive value from your product changes all the time. This framework gives you a starting point.

How is content marketing best used?

I often say to startups, stop creating content for the sake of it. A lot of content that’s created doesn’t allow for where your customer may be in the buying process. It doesn’t consider what’s motivating them to solve their problem.

As a result, the results you get are skewed. Things take much longer than they should. Customers get confused about what it is your business actually is/does. Everyone starts to lose respect for marketing.

Again, you need to take it back to the customer and their journey and identify what content they need to overcome that particular problem that’s getting in the way of signing up/using your product.

Why is alignment with sales important, and what does it involve?

I’ve worked in startups that have been sales-led (so, complex products, long lead time) and it’s important to understand what sales needs to uncover to help move a customer to the next stage. Likewise, marketing can help sales to really dig into the proposition and understand what channels are best to convert leads.

I think when you work in a startup as a marketer, you have to roll up your sleeves and get involved in sales. It’ll help improve the content, strategy and revenue in the end.

So if you are working with a salesperson whose ultimate aim is to secure a call with a prospect, you can’t just go in and expect a prospect to say yes, immediately. There are a series of steps you and the salesperson need to go through in order to nurture and open up this relationship. It’s all about proving a set of hypotheses about your customer. Do they really hang out on LinkedIn? Are they bombarded with companies offering the same? Which proposition is working enough to get someone to agree to a call? Is that calendar link putting off prospects altogether?

I truly believe people do love to help, but it’s about working out what’s in it for them and how your product will make their life just that little bit easier.

French startup Didomi has raised a $40 million Series B funding round led by Elephant and Breega. The company manages consent flows for web publishers and app developers. Didomi is already doing well in Europe with billions of consent interactions per month — it plans to expand to the U.S. with today’s funding round.

“Jawad, Raphaël and I have co-founded Didomi to make privacy easier for everyone and an obvious choice for companies. This fundraising is a major milestone on our journey to deliver on this mission,” co-founder and CEO Romain Gauthier said in a statement.

“We look forward to helping brands and publishers make customer journeys more transparent and trustworthy through a delightful consent and preferences management experience,” he added.

In recent years, many regulators have implemented new privacy-focused frameworks. You might think about GDPR in Europe for instance.

And if you live in a country that is affected by those changes, you are now well aware that you’ll get a consent popup or banner whenever you visit a new website or open an app for the first time.

I wouldn’t say that these popups are “delightful” as the best consent popup is the one that doesn’t exist because the site you’re visiting doesn’t collect and share personal data. But that’s not always possible and there are different reasons why you may need to collect data — including on this current site techcrunch dot com.

In that case, a product like Didomi can be really helpful. Taking those consent flows seriously is extremely important as you don’t want to mess up the implementation and get fined. Didomi is a developer-focused consent platform that works across many different devices. You can configure your consent flow for a desktop website, a mobile website, a mobile app or a connected TV.

Having a unified solution also means that you don’t have to ask for permission over and over again. Didomi can store and synchronize preferences across devices. Everything is auditable in case regulators want to see how you’re collecting consent.

With today’s funding round, the company wants to make its product even more developer friendly with open APIs and open-source SDKs. It doesn’t mean that Didomi is for everyone as the company focuses on premium clients in particular. Clients include Rakuten, Orange, Giphy and Weight Watchers International.

The company will also hire more people with local marketing and sales teams for different markets. Didomi plans to open offices in Germany, Spain and the U.S.

At the same time, the landscape is quickly evolving. Web browsers are gradually blocking third-party trackers and Apple now even asks you if an app can track you at the operating system level. It’s going to be interesting to see how Didomi evolves with user expectations.

The venture capital market is racing ahead, foot on the gas, middle finger out the window, hair on fire. That’s our read of the Q2 2021 data released thus far concerning how much money venture capitalists deployed around the world during the second three months of the year.

Startups have never had it this good when it comes to accessing private-market funds.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

Read it every morning on Extra Crunch or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

The second quarter of 2021 was the biggest quarter for venture capital activity ever, measured by dollars invested. The wave of funding led to a quarterly record of new unicorns — startups that reach the $1 billion valuation threshold — born in the United States, Asia, Europe and Canada, according to CB Insights data reviewed by The Exchange.

Data from FactSet concerning the quarter agrees. The second quarter was a record-breaker in terms of dollars invested, even if total deal volume eased some from the first quarter’s tally.

The impact of the deluge of capital is what you’d expect: Round values are rising. Deals worth $100 million are setting records. Around the world, technology hubs are enjoying a flurry of high-priced deals that are enriching startups and providing them with capital at earlier stages that used to be reserved for IPOs and other seminal funding events.

So today we’re talking through the numbers. Next week, we’ll publish a host of geography-focused notes and reactions from investors and founders in the U.S. startup ecosystem, along with similar entries concerning the Asian and European startup markets.

Chatting with venture capitalists in recent months led us to expect strong second-quarter results; investors have spoken about ever-faster follow-on rounds and the explosion of high-priced, big-dollar deal-making from Tiger. SoftBank’s second vision fund is active. And there are myriad seed, early-stage, late-stage and crossover funds all competing with each other both inside and outside their normal investing stage bands in hopes of either accreting earlier, larger ownership than a bigger investing group might have in years past or working to defend early ownership past where earlier-stage firms used to exit stage left.

But enough words. Let’s get into the numbers. We’ll start with an overview of global results before diving into U.S. and Silicon Valley tallies, Europe and Asia’s performances, and new data concerning venture capital activity in Africa.

Buckle up.

A monster quarter

We’re pulling from a number of sources this morning, but for global data, we’re leaning on CB Insights, Crunchbase News and FactSet.

CB Insights has $156 billion on the books for global venture capital activity in the second quarter, up from $60.7 billion in Q2 2020. That’s a gain of 157% on a year-over-year basis. A FactSet chart indicates around $150 billion was raised in the second quarter, up a similar percentage from its year-ago result as what CB Insights counted.

For the first half of 2021, inclusive of the record second-quarter tally, the data is similarly shocking. Crunchbase News counts $288 billion invested during the first and second quarters of the year. CB Insights reckons the number of $292.4 billion. FactSet comes to a number that it describes as “over $280 billion.”

Those are all close enough for us, and they say the same thing: Global startups raised either as much, or very nearly as much, in the first two quarters of 2021 as they did in all of 2020.

As a reference point, Crunchbase News notes that the first half of 2021 crushed the second half of 2020 by $110 billion, in terms of global capital raised.

But what about round counts? Was all that capital concentrated in a few investments, or did the money flow freely to more startups than ever? Here, things get a little tricky. CB Insights data states that there were 7,751 startup deals in the second quarter, an all-time high. FactSet counts 5,400, far from its recorded record. At this juncture we’re seeing discrepancies in how different data-focused firms count; Alex was party to similar conversations during his time at Crunchbase and is sympathetic to the difficulty of deciding what to include and not in these types of surveys.

But even FactSet data indicates that the second quarter was the second-best three-month period for venture round counts since the start of 2019. No matter how you count, then, the data indicates lots of deals — and even more dollars.

A unicorn stampede

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

Danny and Alex were on deck this week, with Grace on the recording and edit. Natasha will be back with us starting next week. So, it was old times on the show with just two of our team to vamp on the news. And oh boy was there a lot of news to get into. Like, loads.

What’s going on with Didi? Didi’s woes have continued this week, with the company seeing its share price continue to fall. The Equity team’s view is that the era of Chinese companies listing in the United States is over.What’s going on with facial recognition tech? With AnyVision raising a $235 million round, Danny and Alex tangled over the future of privacy, and what counts as good enough when it comes to keeping ourselves to ourselves.Nextdoor is going public: Via a SPAC, mind, but the transaction had our tongues wagging about its history, growth, and how hard it can be to build a social network.Dataminr buys WatchKeeper: In its first-ever acquisition, Dataminr bought a smaller company to help it better visualize the data it collects. It’s a neat deal, and especially fun given that Dataminr should go public sooner rather than later.Planet and Satellogic are going public: One week, two satellite SPACs. You can read more about Planet here, and Satellogic here.FabricNano and Cloverly raise capital: Satellites had us into the concept of climate change, so we also dug into recent funding rounds from FabricNano and Cloverly. It’s beyond neat to see for-profit companies tackle our warming planet.Two new venture capital funds: Acrylic has put together a $55 million fund for moonshot crypto work, while Renegade Partners has a $100 million fund for early-and-mid-stage generalist investments.Mmhmm is big time: And then there was mmhmm. Which now has $100 million more, and some big plans. Our question is what will it do with the money. We’ll have to wait and find out, we suppose.

French startup PowerZ has raised another $8.3 million (€7 million at today’s exchange rate) including $1.2 million (€1 million) in debt — the rest is a traditional equity round. The company is both an edtech startup and a video game studio with an ambitious goal — it wants to build a game that is as engaging as Minecraft or Fortnite, but with a focus on education.

In February, PowerZ launched the first version of its game on computers. It doesn’t have a lot of content, but the company wanted to start iterating as quickly as possible. Aimed at kids who are six years old and over, PowerZ teleports the player into a fantasy world with cute dragons and magic spells.

“The idea is really to build a sort of Harry Potter,” co-founder and CEO Emmanuel Freund told me. “You have this world that is super nice and very interesting. Like with Hogwarts, you want to come back regularly, and the story will progress over a very long time.”

15,000 children tried out the first chapter. On average, they spent four hours in the game. I asked whether Freund was satisfied with those metrics. He told me he thought his company’s vision was “completely validated.”

Bpifrance Digital Venture, RAISE Ventures and Bayard are investing in today’s round. Existing investors Educapital, Hachette Livres, Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet and Michaël Benabou are also investing once again.

Now, it’s time to add content, expand to other platforms and launch new languages. When it comes to content, the company wants to partner with other game studios. They’re going to create new islands and design games that make you learn new stuff. Zero Games, Opal Games and ArkRep are the first third-party studios to contribute to PowerZ.

When those new chapters are available, kids will be able to practice mental calculation, geometry, vocabulary, foreign languages, sign language, but also astronomy, photography, architecture, sculpture, cooking, wildlife, yoga, etc.

“Basically we want to position ourselves as a publisher,” Freund said. “The only thing we want to keep in-house is the main storyline.”

As for new platforms, PowerZ is launching its game on the iPad this week. The company realized that launching on computers was a mistake. Adults are already using computers or don’t want to leave your kid on the computer. That’s why PowerZ is starting with the iPad and the iPhone will follow suite. In 2022, the company expects to release its game on the Nintendo Switch and potentially other game consoles.

While the game is only available in French for now, the startup is also thinking about launching an English version soon.

“The game is completely free right now. We have an idea to monetize it. We’ll copy every other games with in-app purchases for visual items,” Freund said.

When you look further down the roadmap, PowerZ has some radically ambitious goals. Freund believes that educational games will become mainstream really quickly. Many companies don’t want to develop this kind of stuff because screens are bad for kids.

“If we just say that screens are bad, we’ll end up with an Amazon product to learn math. I feel a sense of urgency to develop an educational platform for screens that can scale,” Freund told me.

PowerZ wants to reach hundreds of thousands of children as quickly as possible. And just like Fortnite or Minecraft, the company believes its game can act as a platform for other stuff that can evolve over time.

In the wake of Coinbase’s direct listing earlier this year, other crypto companies may be looking to go public sooner than later. That appears to be the case with Circle, a Boston-based technology company that provides API-delivered financial services and a stablecoin.

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Circle will not direct list or pursue a traditional IPO. Instead, the company is combining with Concord Acquisition Corp., a SPAC, or blank-check company. The transaction values the crypto shop at an enterprise value of $4.5 billion and an equity value of around $5.4 billion.

The offering marks an interesting moment for the crypto market. Unlike Coinbase, which operates a trading platform and generates fees in a manner that is widely understood by public-market investors, Circle’s offerings are a bit more exotic.

Circle’s SPAC presentation details a company whose core business deals with a stablecoin — a crypto asset pegged to an external currency, in this case, the U.S. dollar — and a set of APIs that provide crypto-powered financial services to other companies. It also owns SeedInvest, an equity crowdfunding platform, though Circle appears to generate the bulk of its anticipated revenues from its other businesses.

For more on the deal itself, TechCrunch’s Romain Dillet has a piece focused on the transaction. Here, we’ll dig into the company’s investor presentation, talk about its business model, and riff on its historical and anticipated results and valuation multiples.

In short, we get to have a little fun. Let’s begin.

How Circle’s business works

As noted above, Circle has three main business operations. Here’s how it describes them in its deck:

Let’s consider each one, starting with USDC.

Stablecoins have become popular in recent quarters. Because they are pegged to an external currency, they operate as an interesting form of cash inside the crypto world. If you want to have on-chain buying power, but don’t want to have all your value stored in more volatile, and tax-inducing, cryptos that you might have to sell to buy anything else, stablecoins can operate as a more stable sort of liquid currency. They can combine the stability of the U.S. dollar, say, and the crypto world’s interesting financial web.

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