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French startup Pennylane has raised a new $18.3 million funding round (€15 million). Interestingly, this is Sequoia Capital’s first investment in France after they announced ambitious expansion plans in Europe.

If you’re not familiar with Pennylane, the startup has been developing an accounting platform that improves accounting for both clients and their accountants. Focused on small and medium companies, the company has already attracted hundreds of clients as it says 1,000 executives are currently using Pennylane.

If you’re running a small company, chances are you’re using Microsoft Excel or another financial tool for your financial projections. You’re also sending all your invoices, payroll info and more to your accountant. Essentially, you’re doing the same thing twice.

Pennylane lets you connect your account with third-party services that already hold valuable information, such as Stripe, Payfit, Qonto, Zoho, Sellsy, etc. Data is then synchronized regularly so that you can check outstanding invoices, pay your suppliers and see where you’re standing when it comes to inbound and outbound payments.

On the other side of the equation, Pennylane works with 100 accounting firms that could handle accounting tasks for you. You can ask Pennylane to connect you with an accountant and they’ll leverage your Pennylane data to complete their work.

If you already have an accountant or you have your own in-house accounting team, you can also tell them to create an account on Pennylane and retrieve accounting data from the platform. Pennylane acts as the central repository where your financial data is always up to date.

“Pennylane is becoming the key financial management platform for SME’s in Europe,” Sequoia partner Luciana Lixandru said in a statement. “We are thrilled to partner with their exceptional team to ensure businesses of any size can have a single, up-to-date source for their financial data and improve how they collaborate with their accountants.”

Up next, the startup wants to build a ‘financial operating system’ for European small and medium enterprises. You can imagine a marketplace of services that clients can choose to use in addition to Pennylane’s core product.

Pennylane has been on a roll as the company raised an $18.4 million Series A round just a few months ago. Global Founders Capital and Partech led the Series A back in January.

Every startup is trying to fix something but Terraformation is tackling the only problem that must matter to all of us: Climate change.

This is why it’s in such a big huge hurry. Its mission — as a ‘forest tech’ startup — is to accelerate tree planting by applying a startup-y operational philosophy of scalability to the pressing task of rapidly, sustainably reforesting denuded landscapes — bringing back native trees species to revive former wastelands and shrinking our carbon emissions in the process.

Forests are natural carbon sinks. The problem is we just don’t have enough trees with roots in the ground to offset our emissions. So that at least means the mission is simple: Plant more trees, and plant more trees fast.

Terraformation’s goal is to restore three billion acres of global native forest ecosystems by scaling tree replanting projects in parallel, scaling the use of existing techniques, and working with all the partners it can. (For a little context, the U.S. contains some 2.27BN acres of total land area, per Wikipedia).

So far it says it’s planted “thousands” of trees — with live projects in North America, South America, Africa and Europe which it hopes will yield up to 20,000 replanted acres. It’s also in talks with partners about more projects that could clad hundreds of thousands of acres with carbon-consuming (and biodiversity-prompting) trees, if they come to full fruition.

That’s still a long way off the 3BN-acre-wooded moonshot, of course. But Terraformation claims it’s been able to achieve a forestry restoration work-rate that’s 5x the average already. And that’s definitely the kind of ‘gas stepping’ that climate change needs.

Its elevator pitch is also punchy: “Our mission is explicitly to solve climate change through mass reforestation,” says founder Yishan Wong — whose name may be familiar as the ex-Reddit CEO (and also a former early-stage engineer at PayPal/Facebook). “So it’s getting trees in the ground and getting faster at getting trees in the ground.”

It’s not going it alone, either. It’s just announced a first closing of a $30 million Series A funding round, led by Sam & Max Altman at Apollo Projects, the brothers’ ‘moonshot’ fund; plus several high-profile institutional investors (whose names aren’t being disclosed); along with nearly 100 angel investors, including Sundeep Ahuja, Lachy Groom, Sahil Lavingia, Joe Lonsdale, Susan Wu, and OVN Cap.

“The [Series A] was a bit larger than we anticipated and the idea is to get us to the next stage of planting orders of magnitude more trees every year,” says Wong. “So it’ll be used both for supporting forestry projects directly, as well as for the development and deployment of forestry acceleration products and technology.”

“The very, very nice thing about mass reforestation or mass restoration as a solution to climate change is that it’s extremely parallelizable,” he adds. “You can plant any tree at the same time as your planting some other tree. This is the primary reason why this solution can potentially be implemented within the timetable that we have left. But in order to do so we have to start and drive an enormous, decentralized reforestation campaign across multiple continents and countries.”

The funding follows a $5M seed last year, as the young startup worked to hone its approach.

Terraformation is targeting the main barriers to successful reforesting: Through early research and pilots it says it’s identified three key bottlenecks to large-scale forest restoration — namely, land availability, freshwater, and seed. It then seeks to address each of these pinch-points to viable reforesting — identifying and fashioning modular, sharable solutions (tools, techniques, training etc) that can help shave off friction and build leafy, branching success.

These products include a seed bank unit it’s devised, housed in a standard shipping container and kitted out with all the equipment (plus solar off-grip capability, if required) to take care of on-site storage for the thousands of native seeds each projects needs to replant a whole forest.

It also offers a nursery kit which also ships in a shipping container — a flat-packed greenhouse that it says a couple of people can put together, and where thousands of seedlings can then be tended and irrigated in pots until they’re ready to plant out.

A third support it offers to the replanting projects it wants to work with is expertise in building solar-powered desalination rigs so young trees can be supplied with adequate water to survive in locations where poor land management may have made conditions for growth difficult and harsh.

It goes without saying that planted trees which fail because of poor processes won’t help cut carbon emissions. Badly managed replanting is at best wasteful — and may be closer to cynical greenwashing in some cases. (Poor quality projects can be a known problem where claims of corporate carbon offsetting are being made, for example.)

Terraformation is thus zeroing in on repeatable ways to scale and accelerate the successful planting and nurturing of trees, from seed to sapling and beyond, to accelerate sustainable reforesting.

Ultimately, it’s the only kind of tree planting that will really count in the fight against climate change.

Its first pilot restoration projects begun in Hawai’i in 2019 — where it’s been able to plant thousands of trees at a site called Pacific Flight, reviving a native tropical sandalwood forest that had been logged unsustainably. To enable the young trees to grow in land which had also become arid as a result of cattle grazing, the team built the world’s largest fully off-grid, solar-powered desalination system to supply sustainable freshwater to the baby forest.

“The arid environment, high winds, and degraded soils meant that if a team could restore a forest there, they could do it anywhere,” is the pitch on its website.

The Series A will go toward spinning up lots more such native species forest restoration projects — working via partnerships, with organizations such as Environmental Defenders in Uganda, and other groups in Ecuador, Haiti and Tanzania — as well as on more R&D (additional products are in the pipeline, we’re told); and on expanding headcount so its team has the legs to run faster.

Interestingly, for a startup with Silicon Valley engineering pedigree at its core, the team’s approach is intentionally light on technology — leaning only on vital tech (like solar and desalination), rather than experimental bells and whistles (drones, robotics etc) to ensure the processes it’s packaging up for massive replanting parallelism remain as simple, accessible and reliable as possible. So they are able to scale all over the globe.

It’s clear that sci-fi robotic gadgetry isn’t the answer here. It’s sweating toil plus tried and tested horticulture processes, done systematically and repeatedly, in mass parallelism all over the world that’s required, argues Wong, whose years in tech have given him a healthy scepticism on the issue of over-engineering. (“The biggest lesson I learned was, you want to solve a big problem? You want to use as little technology as possible… Technology’s always breaking, it’s always got flaws. The biggest problem with technology is technology.”)

“I would say that the key contribution that ‘tech’ — if you think of a monolith or a culture or whatever — will make to climate change, is not in fact some new invention or some gadget or some sort of special magical technology… I think it really is the practice of scalability,” he goes on. “Which is an organizational end. A management way of thinking. Because that is actually something that has been carefully and painfully developed… over the past 20 years in Silicon Valley. How to take small working solutions, how to solve very big problems, how to scale them. And it isn’t a very glamorous thing — which is why I think it’s one of the more pure disciplines.

“It just has been less corrupt… Scalability is just people thinking hard and grinding it out to address really hard big problems. And I think that practice and all the little tips and rules that we have to doing that is the real contribution that tech is going to make — with one of those principles being use as little tech as you can.”

Terraformation is building software tools too — such as a mobile app to help with cataloguing and monitoring seeds. But the really critical technologies involved, solar and desalination, are very much at the ‘tried and tested’ end of the tech scale (“very, very reliable and refined”.).

Wong points out that a key development for solar and desalination is related to the unit economics — with falling costs allowing for scalability and thus speed.

Asked whether Terraformation is a business in the typical startup sense, Wong says it’s been set up in a familiar way — as a Delaware C Corp — but purely because he says that’s just the quickest way to be able to operate. Doing stuff as a non-profit would be way too slow, he says, describing it thusly as a “non non-profit” (rather than a business with a for-profit mission).

Aka: “It’s a corporate with investors but primarily the aim is to solve climate change.”

Startup investors are of course often betting their money on the chance of a quick and meaty return. But not here, confirms Wong. “When we raised funding all of our investors invested primarily because they wanted to see climate change solved,” he tells TechCrunch. “To many of them this was the first time that a plausible, full-scale solution to solving climate change had been presented.

“It’s still very, very hard. It’s very, very large. It’s really daunting. But it’s the first time someone has mapped out a path that could actually get us there. And so all of our investors invested because they want to see that happen.”

So how will a ‘non non-profit’ startup (even with $30M just banked) get its hands on enough land to plant enough trees? A variety of ways, per Wong. (Perhaps even, in some instances, landowners could end up paying it to turn their dirt into beautiful woodland.)

“The short answer is anywhere we can!” he adds. “The solution is structured to give us maximum flexibility, given that we can use a large variety of land. We don’t want to count on any particular land owning entity — and I use that very broad term to mean like people, communities, governments, municipalities — we don’t want to rely on any one particular land-owning entity wanting to work with us or allowing us to reforest the land, because you can’t guarantee that.”

He also notes that Terraformation’s plan to fix climate change is based on “worse case scenarios” — where “no one who owns any land that gets enough natural rainfall for forest restoration will allow it to reforest it”. “We use the least valuable land — basically desertified, degraded land,” he adds. “Is there enough of that? And it turns out there is.”

Even though personal financial upside clearly isn’t front of mind for Terraformation’s investors, Wong still believes there’s plenty of ‘value’ to be unlocked as a byproduct of spreading leafy-green goodness all over the planet vs funding more extractive exploitation.

“It turns out that solving climate change is actually a huge value creating act,” he argues. “My experience in Silicon Valley is if you have people who believe in you and believe in the thing that you’re creating is ultimately value-creating then it’s actually also wealth creating. If you do something that is fundamentally very, very valuable and you’re right next to it, you will be able to monetize it in some way. You will capture some of that value for your shareholders. So it’s a bet that if you really can solve climate change, that’s super valuable, both for the world and to the entity that’s [investing].”

Of course climate change is more than just a problem; it’s an existential threat to all life on Earth — one which affect humans and every other living creature and thing on the planet.

Given such terminal stakes, reversing climate change should be the highest global priority. Instead, humans have procrastinated — putting dealing with rises in atmospheric CO2 on the back-burner and worse (cutting down existing forests like the Amazon Rainforest, for one).

Set against that backdrop, Terraformation’s answer to humanity’s greatest crisis looks compellingly simple. Its bet is that climate change can be fixed by scaling the most proven technology possible (trees) to capture carbon emissions. Who can argue with that? 

But it does also seem clear that reforesting will need to go hand in hand with a mainstreaming of conservation, as a prevailing societal attitude, if the mission is to be pulled off — otherwise all these beautiful baby trees could just meet the same sad fate as all the Earth’s already lost forests.

Nonetheless, conservation is something Wong’s team is deliberately not focusing on.

Not because they don’t care. Rather their hope is that by building the baby forests, the protective partners will come — to watch over and get value from the trees as they grow. 

“I don’t want to make it seem like we don’t care about [forestry conservation] but one of the things that I try to do is figure out where people are already doing work and things are already moving in the right direction — and then go work on the thing that other people are not working on,” he says when we ask about this. “When I talk to people in the forestry world many, many people are working on avoiding deforestation, helping solve the broader socioeconomic issues that result in deforestation. And so I feel like there is momentum moving in that direction — so we have to work on this other issue that other people aren’t working on.”

Wong also argues that forests are naturally more valuable than the denuded waste/scrub ground they’re replanting — implying that pure economic interest should help these baby forests survive and thrive far into the future.

However the history of humanity shows that unequal wealth distribution can wreak all sorts of havoc on a resource-rich natural environment. And people who live in poverty may well be disproportionately more likely to like in a rural location, on or near land that Terraformation hopes to target for replanting. So if these forests can’t provide — in crude terms — ‘value’ for their local communities the risk is the same cycle of short-term economic harm will rip all this hard work (and hope) out of the ground once again.

Wealth inequality lies at the core of much of humanity’s counterproductive destruction of the environment. So, seen from that angle, reforesting the planet may require just as much effort toward tackling — root and branch — the wider socioeconomic fault-lines of our world, as it will washing, sorting and storing seed, watering seedlings and nurturing and planting saplings.

And that further dials up an already massive climate challenge. But, again, Wong is quietly hopeful.

“People aren’t cutting down trees because they’re evil, they’re cutting down trees because they need to make a living. So we have to provide them with ways to make a living that is more valuable than cutting down the trees. I think that recognition is moving in the correct direction — so I’m hopeful there,” he says.

Asked what keeps him up at night, he also has a straightforward answer to hand — one we’ve heard many times already from a new generation of climate campaigners, like Greta Thunberg, whose futures will be irrevocably stamped by the effects of climate change: Humanity simply isn’t moving fast enough.

“In order to do this we have to make order of magnitude improvements in both speed and scale — which is technically a thing that we know how to do but is among the most daunting things that you ever try to undertake. So… are we moving fast enough? Are we doing enough? Because time is running out,” warns Wong.

“The timeframe that we have left is very small when compared to the planetary scale of the problem. And so I think the only way that we’re going to get there is with proven solutions, moving, growing at exponential speed.”

“I am [hopeful],” he adds. “I’m a big fan of humans working together. People can really do it. I’m very I guess what you’d call pro-human. We have a lot of flaws, we fight amongst ourselves a lot, but I really think that when people work together they can really do amazing, amazing things… Trees gave us life and so now it’s our time to repay that debt.”

“It’s not a nail polish company.” It’s almost the first thing out of the mouth of Fenton Jagdeo of Faculty, the startup he cofounded in 2019 with Umar ElBably. Though their Toronto-based company currently sells just three shades of nail polish along with some nail stickers — that’s it —  the products are a wedge to something much larger, says Jagdeo.

There will be merchandise, according to the former business management consultant. There will be men’s foundation, and eye shadow, and very possibly hair dye, all of which is focused around a “new wave of masculinity,” Jagdeo explains.

More, he says that in the same way that the prominent culture publication Hypebeast created a “desire for new product and newness,” Faculty has “mastered the drop model,” meaning that Faculty has and will continue to advertise a limited supply of a product before invariably selling out of that item. (Those three nail polish shades and the sticker set? They’re long gone.)

If you find yourself wondering if Faculty aims to become a streetwear company or a cosmetics company, Jagdeo is succeeding in his mission. As he explains it, “essentially, our goal is to blur” that dividing line.

It’s utterly implausible and yet strangely alluring, which likely explains why the cosmetics giant Estee Lauder just led a $3 million seed round in the five-person outfit, joined by RareBreed Ventures, Maple VC, Debut Capital, Creative Connectors, AUFI, 10K Ventures, actress Maisie Williams and recording artist Iann Dior.

After all, there is little to separate one cosmetics brand from another, aside from storytelling and the ability to build up a loyal following. (See, for example, Glossier and its mega-valuation.)

Even Jagdeo readily admits that Faculty’s nail polish is “not, from a purely chemical perspective, different” from what’s widely available in the market already. Yet he sells the vision easily while insisting that ElBably, who attended the same business school as Jagdeo, is the better storyteller of the two.

Certainly, their pitch — that men need more ways through unconventional men’s products to express themselves — is a smart one. Consider that the men’s personal care market alone is expected to balloon to $75 billion over the next six years, according to Grand View Research, and there are few established grooming brands for millennials, even while plenty of outfits are trying. (SNL even came up with a skit recently about a new men’s cosmetics brand called “Man Stain,” which pokes fun at men who want to wear make-up but feel insecure about it.)

Meanwhile, streetwear market is even bigger — it was in the range of $185 billion in sales in 2019, according to PwC analysis — and new brands are breaking through all the time, including brands that, like Faculty, are the express opposite of hyper masculine.

Naturally, Estee Lauder’s imprimatur could make a difference here, too, particularly given that the cosmetics giant isn’t known to actively invest in startups or lead seed rounds. Indeed, while Jagdeo says the funding will help Faculty with its marketing, R&D, and operational expenses, he notes the real advantage to working with Estee Lauder is the mentorship it can provide, as well as its ability to open doors for Faculty.

Says Jagdeo, “It’s a lot easier for us to say, ‘Hey, you know, we’re working with Estee Lauder and Estee Lauder is one of our investors,’ versus, ‘We’re two guys with a dream.'”

Earned wage access (EWA) platforms that allow workers to withdraw their earnings on demand instead of waiting until payday are proliferating around the world. Today, Indonesian EWA startup wagely announced it has raised $5.6 million in strategic funding, led by Integra Partners (formerly known as Dymon Asia Ventures). Other investors included the Asian Development Bank (ADB) Ventures, PT Triputra Investindo Arya, Global Founders Capital, Trihill Capital, 1982 Ventures and Willy Swandi Dharma, former president director of insurance company PT Asuransi Adira Dinamika.

Founded in 2020 by alumni of two of Southeast Asia’s largest tech companies, wagely expects to reach more than 250,000 users this year. Chief executive officer Tobias Fischer was former regional lending program manager at Grab Financial Services Asia, while chief technology officer Sasanadi Rukua served as vice president of engineering at Tokopedia.

Fischer told TechCrunch that after working at financial services companies in Southeast Asia, he and Ruka saw that “managing cashflow is the most pressing everyday issue for lower- and middle-income Indonesians.”

While the pandemic exacerbated financial hardships, Fischer said more than 75% of Indonesians already struggled to cover unexpected expenses between paychecks. Many borrow from family or friends, but if that option is unavailable, they may turn to payday lenders who can charge more than 360% annualized percentage rates, or pay overdraft and late fees to their banks until their next paycheck.

“This is the start of a vicious and costly debt cycle that has a long-lasting negative impact on individual financial well-being, which in turn impacts businesses with higher turnover, lower productivity and more employee loans,” Fischer said.

On average, more than 50% of employees at wagely’s enterprise clients use it multiple times throughout the month to track their daily earnings and access their earned wages. The company’s ultimate goal is “to build a holistic financial wellness platform for lower- and middle-income workers” that includes other financial services, including savings, insurance and smart spending products, Fischer said.

More companies around the world are allowing workers to pick when they get paid. Some notable EWA platforms include Gusto Cashout; DailyPay, which recently hit unicorn status; Wagestream; Minu and Even. In Indonesia, wagely’s competitors include GajiGesa and Gajiku.

Fischer said wagely “created the earned wage access category in Indonesia,” and is the market leader with more than 50 large companies, including state-owned enterprises and multi-national conglomerates. Its new funding will be used to increase wagely’s sales team in order to close more enterprise deals. Wagely’s current customers include PT Bentoel Internasional Investama Tbk (British American Tobacco); PT Supra Boga Lestari Tbk (Ranch Market); beauty and wellness company PT Mustika Ratu Tbk; and renewable energy group PT Kencana Energi Lestari Tbk.

In a press statement, Wilson Maknawi, president director at PT Kencana Energi Lestari TBK, said, “wagely offers our employees financial stability in times of uncertainty. It is incredibly important and a crucial step for the long-term resilience of our business. With no changes to our payroll process, wagely’s solution has proven to increase our business savings and helped our employees to avoid predatory loans while providing savings and budget tools that increase their financial literacy.”

News broke this morning that Bain Capital Private Equity and Crosspoint Capital Partners are purchasing Seattle-based network security startup ExtraHop.

Part of the Network Detection and Response (NDR) market, ExtraHop’s security solutions are for companies that manage assets in the cloud and on-site, “something that could be useful as more companies find themselves in that in-between state,” report Ron Miller and Alex Wilhelm.

Just one year ago, ExtraHop was closing in on $100 million in ARR and was considering an IPO, so Ron and Alex spoke to ExtraHop CTO and co-founder Jesse Rothstein to learn more about how (and why) the deal came together.

Have a great week, and thanks for reading!

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

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

Xometry is taking its excess manufacturing capacity business public

Xometry, a Maryland-based service that connects companies with manufacturers with excess production capacity around the world, filed an S-1 form with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission last week announcing its intent to become a public company.

As the global supply chain tightened during the pandemic in 2020, a company that helped find excess manufacturing capacity was likely in high demand.

But growth aside, it’s clear that Xometry is no modern software business, at least from a revenue-quality profile.

It’s time for security teams to embrace security data lakes

The average corporate security organization spends $18 million annually but is largely ineffective at preventing breaches, IP theft and data loss. Why?

The fragmented approach we’re currently using in the security operations center (SOC) does not work. It’s time to replace the security information and event management (SIEM) approach with security data lakes.

The reduced reliance on the SIEM is well underway, along with many other changes. The SIEM is not going away overnight, but its role is changing rapidly, and it has a new partner in the SOC — the security data lake.

China’s drive to compete against Starlink for the future of orbital internet

There has been a wave of businesses over the past several years hoping to offer broadband internet delivered from thousands of satellites in low-Earth orbit (LEO), providing coverage of most of the earth’s surface.

In tandem with the accelerated deployment of SpaceX’s Starlink constellation in 2020, China has rapidly responded in terms of policy, financing and technology. While still in early development, a “Chinese answer to Starlink,” SatNet, and the associated GuoWang are likely to compete in certain markets with Starlink and others while also fulfilling a strategic purpose from a government perspective.

With considerable backing from very high-level actors, we are likely to see the rollout of a Red Star(link) over China (and the rest of the world) over the coming years.

This SPAC is betting that a British healthcare company can shake up the US market

Babylon Health, a British health tech company, is pursuing a U.S. listing via a blank-check company, or SPAC.

While we wait for Robinhood’s IPO, The Exchange dove into its fundraising history, its product, its numbers and, bracing ourselves for impact, its projections.

The hidden benefits of adding a CTO to your board

Conventional wisdom says your board should include a few CEOs who can offer informed advice from an entrepreneur’s perspective, but adding a technical leader to the mix creates real upside, according to Abby Kearns, chief technology officer at Puppet.

Beyond their engineering experience, CTOs can help founders set realistic timelines, help identify pain points and bring what Kearns calls “pragmatic empathy” to high-pressure situations.

They can also be an effective advocate for founder teams who need help explaining why a launch is delayed or new engineering hires are badly needed.

“A CTO understands the nuts and bolts,” says Kearns.

6 career options for ex-founders seeking their next adventure

As someone with “founder” on your resume, you face a greater challenge when trying to get a traditional salaried job.

You’ve already shown that you really want to lead a company, not just rise up the ladder, which means some employers are less likely to hire you.

So what should you do? Especially if your life partner and/or bank account are burnt out on the income volatility of startups?

Here are six options for ex-founders planning their next move.

How bottom-up sales helped Expensify blaze the path for SaaS

In the fifth and final part of Expensify’s EC-1, Anna Heim explores how the company built its business, true to form, in an unexpected way.

“You’d expect an expense management company to have a large sales department and advertise through all kinds of channels to maximize customer acquisition, Anna writes. But “Expensify just doesn’t do what you think it should.

“Keeping in mind this company’s propensity to just stick to its guts, it’s not much of a surprise that it got to more than $100 million in annual recurring revenue and millions of users with a staff of 130, some contractors, and an almost non-existent sales team.”

How is that much growth possible without a sales team? Word of mouth.

The continuing saga of Lordstown Motor’s struggles as a public company took a new turn today as the electric truck manufacturer made yet more news. Bad news.

Shares of Lordstown are down sharply today after the company reported in an SEC filing that it does not have enough capital to build and launch its electric truck. Here’s the official verbiage (formatting, bolding: TechCrunch):

Since inception, the Company has been developing its flagship vehicle, the Endurance, an electric full-size pickup truck. The Company’s ability to continue as a going concern is dependent on its ability to complete the development of its electric vehicles, obtain regulatory approval, begin commercial scale production and launch the sale of such vehicles.

The Company believes that its current level of cash and cash equivalents are not sufficient to fund commercial scale production and the launch of sale of such vehicles. These conditions raise substantial doubt regarding our ability to continue as a going concern for a period of at least one year from the date of issuance of these unaudited condensed consolidated financial statements.

Now, companies that are trying to invent the future are more risky than, say, established banking concerns that are generating stable GAAP net income. I’m sure that SpaceX looked dicey at times when it was busy crashing rockets on its way to learning how to land them on drone ships.

But in the case of Lordstown’s admission that it cannot “fund commercial scale production and the launch of sale” of its Endurance pickup are fucking galling.

Why? Because when the company pitched its SPAC-led combination and public debut, it was pretty freaking confident that it would have enough cash to do so.

Don’t take my word for it. Here’s an excerpt from Lordstown’s investor deck:

You will note in the “Capital Structure” section that the company claimed that it would not need more funding to go to market.

Now Lordstown is pretty sure it’s going to need more money. If it’s putting the possible need in a filing, it means it.

Here’s what the company may do to solve its problems (formatting, bolding: TechCrunch):

To alleviate these conditions, management is currently evaluating various funding alternatives and may seek to raise additional funds through the issuance of equity, mezzanine or debt securities, through arrangements with strategic partners or through obtaining credit from government or financial institutions.

As we seek additional sources of financing, there can be no assurance that such financing would be available to us on favorable terms or at all. Our ability to obtain additional financing in the debt and equity capital markets is subject to several factors, including market and economic conditions, our performance and investor sentiment with respect to us and our industry.

In other words, the company is going to have to lever itself using debt, or dilute existing shareholders through the sale of equity, and Lordstown can’t promise that it will be able to do either “on favorable terms or at all.”

What we’re seeing here is the difference between SEC filings, which are no-bullshit zones, and SPAC decks, which are business propaganda. Shares of Lordstown fell more than 16% during regular trading, and another 6.9% in after-hours trading, as of the time of writing.

This mess from the company that put out this diagram in its investor deck:

In separate news, TechCrunch received an invite to a media availability to visit Lordstown’s operations in May, which included a note that the company “look[s] forward to opening [its] doors and showing you the latest progress from Lordstown Motors as [it] prepare[s] for the beginning of production in late September.” In a new missive sent today concerning the same event, the production timeline was not present.

So, yeah, maybe don’t trust SPAC decks much, if at all.

Electric vehicle startup Fisker Inc. has set a moonshot goal of creating its first climate-neutral car by 2027.

Fisker has yet to bring a vehicle to market — climate neutral or not — making this an ambitious target. The all-electric Fisker Ocean SUV, which is still on track to go into production in November 2022, will not be climate neutral, according to CEO Henrik Fisker, who laid out the target as part of a broader update Tuesday to investors. Instead, this will be another yet to be announced vehicle.

Henrik Fisker, a serial entrepreneur who rose to fame as the designer behind iconic vehicles like the Aston Martin V8 Vantage, the production launch design of the Aston Martin DB9 and the BMW Z8 roadster, also provided a few other updates during the investor call. He said the Ocean will have an anticipated range of up to 350 miles, beyond the previously estimated 300 miles. The company has received more than 14,000 reservations for the Ocean as of March, according to an annual report distributed to shareholders.

Fisker, which went public via a merger with special purpose acquisition company Apollo Global Management Inc. in October at a valuation of $2.9 billion, aims to have four vehicles to market by 2025. One of those, Fisker hinted at Tuesday, could be a luxury vehicle which he called the “UFO” that will use the company’s FM29 platform architecture.

Fisker’s carbon-neutral plan

Other companies across industries have made promises to hit that carbon-neutral goal before. Henrik Fisker emphasized to investors that the company will not purchase carbon offsets to accomplish that climate-neutrality goal. Carbon offsets are credits that companies can purchase to “claim” a reduction in CO2 toward their project or product. Instead, Fisker said they will work with suppliers to develop climate-neutral materials and manufacturing processes.

The company lays out some of its proposed strategies on its website, where it splits the vehicle lifecycle into five phases: upstream sourcing, manufacturing and assembly, logistics, the use phase and end-of-life. For each phase, the company lists a few bullet points, such as localizing manufacturing. Even with these plans, achieving climate neutrality in vehicle production will be extremely difficult. Vehicles use materials and components such as steel that are notoriously hard to decarbonize, for example.

Fisker said that the company’s manufacturing partners have climate-neutral goals of their own, which is true for automotive contract manufacturer Magna Steyr. The company inked a deal with Fisker to exclusively manufacturer the Fisker Ocean in Europe. Magna set a target of climate neutrality for its European operations by 2025 and globally by 2030. Foxconn, Fisker’s other major partner for its second, lower-price vehicle dubbed Project PEAR, also has a net-zero emissions goal, but it is set for the middle of the century.

Moonshot goals such as this one could help push innovation in manufacturing processes and encourage other automakers and suppliers to reach for the same targets. Other automakers such as Polestar and Porsche have all made carbon-neutral promises with deadlines of 2030, while Mercedes has said it will hit that target in 2039.

Fisker does seem to have a plan for how it might be able to recycle or reuse some of its EV batteries once they’re no longer useful in the vehicle. The company plans to extend its leasing program across the entire estimated 15-year lifespan of the vehicle, which would theoretically ensure that Fisker will be in possession of a number of its vehicles when they reach end-of-life.

Toast has raised more than $900 billion and is reportedly valued at over $5 billion. But back in 2011, no one knew this startup would see such meteoric success. It had a few things going for it, of course — founder Aman Narang hailed from Endeca, where he was a software engineer and product lead with a reputation for being able to ship a lot of software quickly.

But the ambitions behind Toast were big and complicated, and enough to give pause to any investor. Kent Bennett was one such VC, and while he had conviction in the founding team, he wasn’t convinced that they could tackle such a big problem.

Toast is a restaurant POS system that acts as a sort of operating system for an establishment, managing everything from online orders, deliveries and marketing to payroll and team management as well as the actual point of sale. Being able to do all that requires building a number of complex products, such as payments.

Early on, Bennett had told Narang not to build a restaurant POS. To him, it was too complicated and nuanced, which is why the systems from the ’90s were still deeply entrenched 20 years later. However, he did offer space in the Bessemer office for the Toast team to work on their product.

“I caught up with Aman and he told me that they did this interesting thing after hearing that a lot of their customers were frustrated by payments platforms, which are separate from the POS,” said Bennett. “Aman said they built their own payments platform. Once again, I was like, ‘You did what? You’re not allowed to build payments.’ But he told me that they built it and it improves their products, and that, by the way, they make a margin on it.”

Bennett said that when they added up the margins from the payments and the POS, it was impactful.

“It hit me like a ton of bricks,” said Bennett. “This is a really good business.”

From there, it became his obsession. And though it took a few more quarters to close the deal, they eventually got there. Bessemer led the company’s Series B financing in 2016.

We spoke to Bennett and Narang recently on an episode of Extra Crunch Live to explore the story of how they came together for the deal, what makes the difference for both founders and investors when fundraising, and the biggest lessons they’ve learned so far. The episode also featured the Extra Crunch Live Pitch-Off, where audience members pitched their products to Bennett and Narang and received live feedback.

Extra Crunch Live is open to everyone each Wednesday at 3 p.m. EDT/noon PDT, but only Extra Crunch members are able to stream these sessions afterward and watch previous shows on-demand in our episode library.

Despite the complexity of the Toast system, or maybe because of it, Narang says the fundamentals are the most important part of communicating the business, especially when fundraising.

It’s only been nine months since Dispo rebranded from David’s Disposable. But the vintage-inspired photo-sharing app has experienced a whiplash of ups and downs, mostly due to the brand’s original namesake, YouTuber David Dobrik.

Like Clubhouse, Dispo was one of this year’s most hyped up new social apps, requiring an invite from an existing member to join. On March 9, when the company said “goodbye waitlist” and opened the app to any iOS user, Dispo looked poised to be a worthy competitor to photo-sharing behemoths like Instagram. But, just one week later, Business Insider reported on sexual assault allegations regarding a member of Vlog Squad, a YouTube prank ensemble headed by Dispo co-founder David Dobrik. Dobrik had posted a now-deleted vlog about the night of the alleged assault, joking, “we’re all going to jail” at the end of the video.

It was only after venture capital firm Spark Capital decided to “sever all ties” with Dispo that Dobrik stepped down from the company board. In a statement made to TechCrunch at the time, Dispo said, “Dispo’s team, product, and most importantly — our community — stand for building a diverse, inclusive and empowering world.”

Dispo capitalizes on Gen Z and young millennial nostalgia for a time before digital photography, when we couldn’t take 30 selfies before choosing which one to post. On Dispo, when you take a photo, you have to wait until 9 AM the following day for the image to “develop,” and only then can you view and share it.

In both February and March of this year, the app hit the top 10 of the Photo & Video category in the U.S. App Store. Despite the backlash against Dobrik, which resulted in the app’s product page being bombarded with negative comments, the app still hit the top 10 in Germany, Japan and Brazil, according to their press release. Dispo reportedly has not yet expended any international marketing resources.

Now, early investors in Dispo like Spark Capital, Seven Seven Six and Unshackled have committed to donate any potential profits from their investment in the app to organizations working with survivors of sexual assault. Though Axios reported the app’s $20 million Series A funding news in February, Dispo put out a press release this morning confirming the financing event. Seven Seven Six and Unshackled Ventures remain listed as investors, while Spark Capital is not. Other notable names involved in the project include high-profile photographers like Annie Leibovitz and Raven B. Varona, who has worked with artists like Beyoncé and Jay-Z. Actresses Cara Delevingne and Sofía Vergara, as well as NBA superstars Kevin Durant and Andre Iguodala, are also involved with the app as investors or advisors.

Dobrik’s role in the company was largely as a marketer — CEO Daniel Liss co-founded the app with Dobrik and has been leading the team since the beginning. After Dobrik’s departure, the Dispo team — which remains less than 20 members strong — took a break from communications and product updates on the app. It’s expected that after today’s funding confirmation, the app will continue to roll out updates.

Dispo is quick to shift focus to the work of their team, which they call “some of the most talented, diverse leaders in consumer tech.” With the capital from this funding round, they hope to hire more staff to become more competitive with major social media apps with expansive teams, like Instagram and TikTok, and to experiment with machine learning. They will also likely have some serious marketing to do, now that their attempt at influencer marketing has failed massively.

Now more than ever, Dispo is promoting the app as a mental health benefit, hoping to shift the tide away from manufactured perfectionism toward more authentic social media experiences.

“A new era of startups must emerge to end the scourge of big tech’s destruction of our political fabric and willful ignorance of its impact on body dysmorphia and mental health,” CEO Daniel Liss writes in a Substack post titled Dispo 2.0. “Imagine a world where Dispo is the social network of choice for every teen and college student in the world. How different a world would that be?”

But, for an app that propelled to success off the fame of a YouTuber with a history of less than savory behavior, that messaging might fall flat.

According to Sensor Tower, the highest Dispo has ever ranked in the Photo & Video category on the U.S. App Store was in January 2020, when it was still called David’s Disposable. The app ranked No. 1 in that category from January 7 to January 9, and on January 8, it reached No. 1 among all free iPhone apps.

Team management software company Monday.com dropped a new IPO filing today. The latest document — an F-1/A, because the company is based in Israel — provides what could be Monday.com’s final pre-IPO pricing notes and details planned investments from both Zoom and Salesforce after its public offering closes.

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Monday.com’s price range of $125 to $140 per share values it north of $6 billion at the top end of its target interval, a steep upgrade from its final private price recorded in mid-2019.

Let’s quickly unpack its IPO valuation range, discuss the private placements that Zoom and Salesforce plan and parse what Monday.com’s IPO news means for the broader public offering window.

Because the company is expected to price tomorrow and trade Thursday, we’re looking at data that could prove final, unless Monday.com manages to push its IPO price range higher or prices above its current estimates. Given the sheer number of IPOs that are either filed or rapidly forthcoming, Monday.com could prove to be a bellwether for the larger unicorn software exit market. Therefore, its debut matters to more than itself, its employees and its venture backers.

What’s Monday.com worth?

There are a few ways to value a company as it goes public. The first is its so-called simple valuation. To calculate a simple price for a debuting entity, we simply multiply the two extremes of its IPO price range by the number of shares it will have outstanding after its debut. That works out as follows in the case of Monday.com:

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