Every company wants to be innovative, but innovation comes with its share of difficulties. One key challenge for early-stage companies that are disrupting a particular space or creating a new category is figuring out how to sell a unique product to customers who have never bought such a solution.

This is especially the case when a solution doesn’t have many reference points and its significance may not be obvious.

My view is simple — some buyers could use a walkthrough of the buying process. If you are building a singular product in a nascent market that necessitates forward-looking customers and want to drastically shorten sales cycles, I have a proposal: Create a buyer’s guide.

A buyer’s guide is essentially a prescriptive summary that provides an understandable overview of how a customer may buy your solution. What does your product actually do? Is it secure? How would you implement the technology? What does it replace, if anything? It should be short, simple and speak the customer’s language. It also acts as a sales-enabling tool. Sales teams, especially at smaller startups, can review the guide quarterly and analyze what is and isn’t working as the company goes to market.

Here is how to put together a buyer’s guide, including what to sort out before you type a single word.

Know your audience

From the start, it’s important to think about who the stakeholders are for your product’s buying cycle. One typical issue with early-stage startups is they meet with an enthusiastic buyer — a CIO, CTO or VP of product — but neglect to include the other stakeholders who should be part of the conversation. More importantly, a lot of companies don’t realize the impact of their product on a group or team that they would not typically sell to.

For example, target the security team as an early stakeholder, because they’re probably going to review your product. If the solution is focused toward, say, integration, then hone in on who would be owning the integration process on the buyer’s team.

If you’re selling a martech solution, on a business level, you have to consider a finance business partner for marketing. Think about the problems your customers face and also how others in their company relate to them.

It’s hard enough to talk about your feelings to a person; Jo Aggarwal, the founder and CEO of Wysa, is hoping you’ll find it easier to confide in a robot. Or, put more specifically, “emotionally intelligent” artificial intelligence.

Wysa is an AI-powered mental health app designed by Touchkin eServices, Aggarwal’s company that currently maintains headquarters in Bangalore, Boston and London. Wysa is something like a chatbot that can respond with words of affirmation, or guide a user through one of 150 different therapeutic techniques.

Wysa is Aggarwal’s second venture. The first was an elder care company that failed to find market fit, she says. Aggarwal found herself falling into a deep depression, from which, she says, the idea of Wysa was born in 2016. 

In March, Wysa became one of 17 apps in the Google Assistant Investment Program, and in May, closed a Series A funding round of $5.5 million led by Boston’s W Health Ventures, the Google Assistant Investment Program, pi Ventures and Kae Capital. 

Wysa has raised a total of $9 million in funding, says Aggarwal, and the company has 60 full-time employees and about three million users. 

The ultimate goal, she says, is not to diagnose mental health conditions. Wysa is largely aimed at people who just want to vent. Most Wysa users are there to improve their sleep, anxiety or relationships, she says. 

“Out of the 3 million people that use Wysa, we find that only about 10% actually need a medical diagnosis,” says Aggarwal. If a user’s conversations with Wysa equate with high scores on traditional depression questionnaires like the PHQ-9 or the anxiety disorder questionnaire GAD-7, Wysa will suggest talking to a human therapist. 

Naturally, you don’t need to have a clinical mental health diagnosis to benefit from therapy. 

Wysa isn’t intended to be a replacement, says Aggarwal (whether users view it as a replacement remains to be seen), but an additional tool that a user can interact with on a daily basis. 

“Sixty percent of the people who come and talk to Wysa need to feel heard and validated, but if they’re given techniques of self help, they can actually work on it themselves and feel better,” Aggarwal continues. 

Wysa’s approach has been refined through conversations with users and through input from therapists, says Aggarwal. 

For instance, while having a conversation with a user, Wysa will first categorize their statements and then assign a type of therapy, like cognitive behavioral therapy or acceptance and commitment therapy, based on those responses. It would then select a line of questioning or therapeutic technique written ahead of time by a therapist and begin to converse with the user. 

Wysa, says Aggarwal, has been gleaning its own insights from more than 100 million conversations that have unfolded this way. 

“Take for instance a situation where you’re angry at somebody else. Originally our therapists would come up with a technique called the empty chair technique where you’re trying to look at it from the other person’s perspective. We found that when a person felt powerless or there were trust issues, like teens and parents, the techniques the therapists were giving weren’t actually working,” she says. 

“There are 10,000 people facing trust issues who are actually refusing to do the empty chair exercise. So we have to find another way of helping them. These insights have built Wysa.”

Although Wysa has been refined in the field, research institutions have played a role in Wysa’s ongoing development. Pediatricians at the University of Cincinnati helped develop a module specifically targeted toward COVID-19 anxiety. There are also ongoing studies of Wysa’s ability to help people cope with mental health consequences from chronic pain, arthritis and diabetes at The Washington University in St. Louis and The University of New Brunswick. 

Still, Wysa has had several tests in the real world. In 2020, the government of Singapore licensed Wysa, and provided the service for free to help cope with the emotional fallout of the coronavirus pandemic. Wysa is also offered through the health insurance company Aetna as a supplement to Aetna’s Employee Assistance Program. 

The biggest concern about mental health apps, naturally, is that they might accidentally trigger an incident, or mistake signs of self harm. To address this, the U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS) offers specific compliance standards. Wysa is compliant with the NHS’ DCB0129 standard for clinical safety, the first AI-based mental health app to earn the distinction. 

To meet those guidelines, Wysa appointed a clinical safety officer, and was required to create “escalation paths” for people who show signs of self harm.

Wysa, says Aggarwal, is also designed to flag responses to self-harm, abuse, suicidal thoughts or trauma. If a user’s responses fall into those categories Wysa will prompt the user to call a crisis line.

In the U.S., the Wysa app that anyone can download, says Aggarwal, fits the FDA’s definition of a general wellness app or a “low risk device.” That’s relevant because, during the pandemic, the FDA has created guidance to accelerate distribution of these apps. 

Still, Wysa may not perfectly categorize each person’s response. A 2018 BBC investigation, for instance, noted that the app didn’t appear to appreciate the severity of a proposed underage sexual encounter. Wysa responded by updating the app to handle more instances of coercive sex. 

Aggarwal also notes that Wysa contains a manual list of sentences, often containing slang, that they know the AI won’t catch or accurately categorize as harmful on its own. Those are manually updated to ensure that Wysa responds appropriately. “Our rule is that [the response] can be 80%, appropriate, but 0% triggering,” she says. 

In the immediate future, Aggarwal says the goal is to become a full-stack service. Rather than having to refer patients who do receive a diagnosis to Employee Assistant Programs (as the Aetna partnership might) or outside therapists, Wysa aims to build out its own network of mental health suppliers. 

On the tech side they’re planning expansion into Spanish, and will start investigating a voice-based system based on guidance from the Google Assistant Investment Fund. 

 

While it would be nice to write about something other than yet another tech company looking to list via a SPAC, the deals keep dropping, so our more traditional fare of covering startup trends will remain on hold for at least one day more.

This morning, we’re looking at the Jam City deal to merge with DPCM Capital. Jam City is a bit like Zynga, but unless you are a mobile-gaming aficionado, you might not have heard of it.

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You likely have not heard of DPCM Capital, either, but you know more about it than you’d think.

As Jam City notes in a release, the SPAC is “led by Emil Michael.” Michael is most famous for his time at Uber, where he served as chief business officer. He left the firm, as The New York Times wrote in 2014, after a board-called “investigation into [the company’s] culture and business practices” led to a “recommendation for Mr. Michael to exit Uber.”

He’s the gentleman who floated the idea of funding a team to “dig up dirt” on Uber’s “critics in the media,” as BuzzFeed News reported in late 2014.

Regardless, we’re not here to go back through Uber and its various cultural messes. We’re here to dig into the Jam City SPAC deck to see if the company is similar to Zynga. Why do we want to know that? Because Zynga has done great in recent quarters, including posting record revenue and bookings in the first three months of 2021.

With lots of folks stuck at home in the last year, gaming has done well in aggregate. And mobile gaming is a huge chunk of the larger gaming world.

More broadly, why do we care about Jam City’s SPAC transaction? Because the mobile gaming concern has raised more than $300 million, including a $145 million round in 2019 that TechCrunch covered here.

The company attracted capital from Austin Ventures, Netmarble, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and JP Morgan Chase while private, per Crunchbase, so we’re very curious if Jam City has enjoyed a Zynga-like last few years and how it’s being valued as part of the SPAC deal. Let’s find out.

Jam City’s SPAC transaction

When Jam City raised that huge 2019 round, co-founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe said that the “global mobile games market [is] consolidating.” At the time, the company intended to use some of its new funding to acquire other mobile gaming companies.

An estimated 41 million Americans say they need life insurance but have yet to purchase coverage. Despite this awareness among consumers, the Life Insurance Marketing and Research Association estimates a $12 trillion coverage gap, with about 50% of millennials planning to purchase coverage within the next year.

There’s latent demand for life insurance currently unaddressed by much of the financial services industry, and embedded finance can be the solution. It’s imperative for companies to consider product lines and partnerships to expand markets, create new revenue streams and provide added value to their customers.

Connecting consumers with products they need through channels they already know and trust is both a massive revenue opportunity and a social good, providing financial resilience to families at a time when they need it most.

Why bundle life insurance?

The concept of digitally bundling financial products in a packaged offering to a customer is certainly not new — but it is for the life insurance space.

Embedded finance uses technology and operations infrastructure to offer products and services through entities that may not be financial institutions at all. Think of embedded finance like on-demand shopping; customers benefit from both the transaction (buying financial protection for their families) and the convenience it provides (from whatever platform they are currently engaging with).

Similar to how Amazon saves shoppers 75 hours a year, bundling life insurance gives consumers back time in their day and can improve their financial health.

Snap yesterday announced the latest iteration of its Spectacles augmented reality glasses, and today the company revealed a bit more news: it is also acquiring the startup that supplied the technology that helps power them. The Snapchat parent is snapping up WaveOptics, an AR startup that makes the waveguides and projectors used in AR glasses. These overlay virtual images on top of the views of the real world someone wearing the glasses can see, and Snap worked with WaveOptics to build its latest version of Spectacles.

The deal was first reported by The Verge, and a spokesperson for Snap directly confirmed the details to TechCrunch. Snap is paying over $500 million for the startup, in a cash-and-stock deal. The first half of that will be coming in the form of stock when the deal officially closes, and the remainder will be payable in cash or stock in two years.

This is a big leap for WaveOptics, which had raised around $65 million in funding from investors that included Bosch, Octopus Ventures and a host of individuals, from Stan Boland (veteran entrepreneur in the UK, most recently at FiveAI) and Ambarish Mitra (the co-founder of early AR startup Blippar). PitchBook estimates that its most recent valuation was only around $105 million.

WaveOptics was founded in Oxford, and from what we know it will continue to be based in the UK.

We have been covering the company since its earliest days, when it displayed some very interesting, early, and ahead-of-its-time technology: waveguides based on hologram physics and photonic crystals. The important and key thing is that its tech drastically compresses size and load of the hardware needed to process and display images, meaning a much wider and more flexible range of form factors for AR hardware based on WaveOptics tech.

It’s not clear whether WaveOptics will continue to work with other parties post-deal, but it seems that one obvious advantage for Snap would be making the startup’s technology exclusive to itself.

Snap has been on something of an acquisition march in recent times — it’s made at least three other purchases of startups since January, including Fit Analytics for an AR-fuelled move into e-commerce, as well as Pixel8Earth and StreetCred for its mapping tools.

This deal, however, marks Snap’s biggest acquisition to date in terms of valuation. That is not only a mark of the premium price that foundational artificial intelligence tech continues to command — in addition to the team of scientists that built WaveOptics, it also has 12 filed and in-progress patents — but also Snap’s financial and, frankly, existential commitment to having a seat at the table when it comes not just to social apps that use AR, but hardware, and being at the centre of not just using the tech, but setting the pace and agenda for how and where that will play out.

That’s been a tenacious and not always rewarding place for it to be, but the company — which has long described itself as a “camera company” — has kept hardware in the mix as an essential component for its future strategy.

 

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

This week was good fun not only because we had the whole team together to record, but also because we are still basking in the endless glory of our winning a Webby earlier this week. Frankly we are still shocked. But happy-shocked, like when you get a new toy and it is covered in static electricity.

Anyhoo, we had a packed show with much, much left on the floor as we tried to shoehorn the week into our time slot. Here’s what we got into:

The world of connections: Fave raised $2.2 million to connect fandoms, Somewhere Good raised $3.75 million to build feedless micro-communities, and both Spokn ($4 million) and Spot ($5 million) are hoping to use the spoken word to connect companies and their staffs. Honestly we think that the overall connection-community world is super exciting.Piano, one of those startups we actually have the luck of using, raised $88 million for analytics, subscription and personalization tools. We get into why the round makes sense, and why one investor stood out more than the others.Corporate media: Coinbase is building out a media-ish org (Alex wrote about it here on his personal blog; Scrawler.co has more on the matter), and with TheSkimm hoping to find a corporate home and The Hustle doing the same, we had to dig into the matter. Our take is that content marketing is a response to expensive social advertising. And that it’s fine. And that it is not news.Shoutout Forbes and its new union effort. Well done.Uptrust raised $2 million, which let us talk about the venture-sized opportunity in fighting the billions of dollars wasted on useless mass incarceration.And then we chatted about the public markets. Monday.com’s IPO is filed, Marqeta’s IPO is filed, Squarespace’s direct listing is done, and more. It’s hectic out there for late-stage startups.

The show flew by, much like our days recently, simply because it was so fun and jam-packed with news. And we got to make jokes about our listeners and Monday.com PR timing, so what else could we ask for? Talk soon!

As decentralized currencies have taken off in recent months, there’s been renewed attention around DAOs, or Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, as a means of bringing together groups of investors who can deploy capital as a unit while voting collectively on those investments. In the spirit of blockchain, they aim to bring greater transparency to investment decision-making.

A number of high-profile DAOs have launched in recent months as the fervor for crypto mania increased. Komorebi Collective, launching today, is a new organization founded by women in the blockchain space that will be making investments exclusively in “exceptional female and nonbinary crypto founders,” founding member Manasi Vora tells TechCrunch.

The group is comprised of a number of core team members largely assembled from the crypto nonprofit she256 and the organization Women in Blockchain, including Vora, Eva Wu, Kristie Huang, Medha Kothari and Kinjal Shah, who will collectively do most of the heavy lifting behind finding and presenting investments to the group. Other hand-selected members who committed a minimum of $5,000 USD will likely have a lighter commitment.

Each investment will be voted on by all the collective’s key signers, some 36 in total, the majority of whom are female.

“DAOs level the hierarchy of a venture fund by ensuring everyone is going to have a seat at the table,” says Shah, who is also an investor at crypto VC firm Blockchain Capital. “We are very careful in approaching the backers that are really mission-aligned.”

Other members of the DAO include firms like Kleiner Perkins, Mechanism Capital, Dragonfly Capital, IDEO CoLab Ventures and Stacks Accelerator alongside a number of individuals and founders who work at firms like Twitter, Coinbase, Skynet Labs, Celo Labs and Gitcoin.

The organization itself is built on the Syndicate Protocol, a project that shares some of Komorebi Collective’s backers.

The group hopes the structure of their organization will be able to take a mission-driven approach that improves diversity in the crypto space while proving the sustainability of the DAO model. Despite an explosion in startup investments in the past year, women-led startups received just 2.3% of venture dollars invested in 2020, a study in HBR found.

“There’s so much more room to grow when it comes to female founders getting funding and I want to be part of the solution,” Shah tells TechCrunch.

TaniHub Group, an Indonesian startup that helps farmers get better prices and more customers for their crops, has raised a $65.5 million Series B. The funding was led by MDI Ventures, the investment arm of Telkom Group, one of Indonesia’s largest telecoms, with participation from Add Ventures, BRI Ventures, Flourish Ventures, Intudo Ventures, Openspace Ventures, Tenaya Capital, UOB Venture Management and Vertex Ventures.

Openspace and Intudo are returning investors from TaniHub’s $10 million Series A, announced in May 2019. The new funding brings its total raised to about $94 million.

Founded in 2016, TaniHub now has more than 45,000 farmers and 350,000 buyers (including businesses and consumers) in its network. The company helps farmers earn more for their crops by streamlining distribution channels so there are fewer middlemen between farms and the restaurants, grocery stores, vendors and other businesses that buy their products. It does this through three units: TaniHub, TaniSupply and TaniFund.

TaniHub is its B2B e-commerce platform, which connects farmers directly to customers. Then orders are fulfilled through TaniSupply, the company’s logistics platform, which currently operates six warehousing and processing facilities where harvests can be washed, sorted and packed within an hour, before being delivered to buyers by TaniHub’s own couriers or third-party logistics providers.

Finally, TaniFund is a fintech platform that provides loans to farmers they can use while growing crops and pay off by selling through TaniHub. Co-founder and chief executive officer Eka Pamitra told TechCrunch its credit scoring system is based on three years of performance, the company’s agriculture value chain expertise and partnerships with financial institutions.

“More than 100 data points are considered when doing the credit risk assessment. For example, for cultivation financing products, TaniFund tailors each credit scoring based on agriculture risks and market risk of each commodity, on top of the typical borrower E-KYC scoring and process,” he explained. “Beyond credit scoring, having TaniSupply and TaniHub as a standby buyer within the ecosystem also helps to mitigate risk of each loan. TaniFund aims to further boost its credit scoring system with smarter data processing and better machine learning models.”

Pamitra said TaniHub will use its new funding to build the upstream and midstream parts of its supply chain — in other words, new cultivation areas, processing, packing centers and warehouses. The company will also expand its coverage beyond Java and Bali to source and sell locally, and continue improving its supply-demand forecast model to help farmers plan crop cultivation and timing, with the goal of reducing price fluctuations and maintaining a consistent supply. Pamitra added that TaniHub will also explore precision farming technology.

Over the last couple of years, TaniHub has started exporting several types of fruits and spices to the United Arab Emirates, Singapore and South Korea. This year, it plans to focus on expanding within Indonesia because the F&B (food and beverage) market there is worth $137 billion and the Indonesian agriculture sector is still highly fragmented, Pamitra said.

Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, TaniHub says it was able to grow its revenue 600% year-on-year in 2020 as demand for online groceries increased.

“We postponed our branch expansion plan and focused on increasing the seven existing warehouses’ since there was a surge of demand on the B2C segment and the process of onboarding farmers. This benefited us since the adoption of purchasing fresh groceries online increased significantly, and the willingness of farmers to work with us became remarkably high because the local traditional markets were closed due to lockdowns,” Pamitra said. “Since COVID-19, the eagerness of provincial governments to open communications for TaniHub to work with local farmers and SMEs in their region has been quite impactful.”

TaniHub is now working with several Indonesian government agencies, including the Ministry of Trade, Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Cooperatives and SMEs, to onboard more farmers, F&B businesses and increase exports.

In a press statement, MDI Ventures director of portfolio management Sandhy Widyasthana said, “TaniHub Group has an important role in transforming the agriculture sector and has proven that its presence can deliver positive impact on the quality of life of farmers. We hope our investment can help them continue their work and expand their coverage to more and more farming communities in Indonesia.”

 

Farmers and food businesses, like restaurants, deal with the same issue: a fragmented supply chain. Secai Marche wants to streamline agricultural logistics, making fulfillment more cost-efficient and enabling food businesses to bundle products from different farmers into the same order. The company is headquartered in Japan, with operations in Malaysia, and plans to expand into Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia. This week, it announced 150 million JPY (about $1.4 million USD) in pre-Series A funding from Rakuten Ventures and Beyond Next Ventures to build a B2B logistics platform for farmers that sell to restaurants, hotels and other F&B (food and beverage) businesses.

This round brings Secai Marche’s total raised to about $3 million. The capital will be used to expand its fulfillment infrastructure, including a network of warehouses and cold chain logistics, hire more people for its engineering team and sales and marketing.

Secai Marche was founded in 2018 by Ami Sugiyama and Shusaku Hayakawa, and currently serves 130 farmers and more than 300 F&B businesses. Before launching the startup, Sugiyama spent four years working in Southeast Asia, including managing restaurants and cafes in Malaysia. During that time, she started to import green tea from Japan, intending to sell it directly to customers in Malaysia. But she realized supply chain inefficiencies not only made it hard to meet demand, but also ensure quality for all kinds of ingredients.

Meanwhile, Hayakawa was operating a farm in Japan and working on agriculture control systems that predicted weather and crop growth to help farmers maintain consistent quality.

Both Sugiyama and Hayakawa ended up at consulting firm Deloitte, researching how to create a more efficient supply chain for Japanese agricultural exports to Singaporean F&B businesses. Policies implemented by Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s administration aim to increase Japanese agricultural exports from 922.3 billion JPY (about $8.5 billion) in 2020 to 2 trillion JPY (about $18.5 billion) by 2025, and 5 trillion JPY (about $46.1 billion) in 2030.

Seche Marche’s goal is to make it easier for farmers to sell their crops to F&B businesses domestically or overseas.

“We found that not only farmers in Japan, but also all farmers in Southeast Asia have the same problem in terms of the current supply chain,” Sugiyama told TechCrunch. “So we left Deloitte and started our own business to connect not only farmers in Japan, but farmers in all Asian countries.”

Secai Marche’s logistics management tech is what differentiates it from other wholesaler platforms. It uses an AI-based algorithm to predict demand based on consumption trends, seasonal products and farmer recommendations, said Hayakawa. Secai Marche runs its own warehouse network, but mostly relies on third-party logistics providers for fulfillment, and its platform assigns orders to the most efficient transportation method.

This allows F&B businesses to consolidate orders from farmers, so they can order smaller batches from different places without spending more money. About 30% of Secai Marche’s products are shipped to other countries, while the rest are sold domestically.

Secai Marche is reaching out to farmers who want to increase their customer base. About 30% of its products currently come from Japanese farms, 50% from Malaysia and the rest from other ASEAN countries. Sugiyama and Hayakawa said the COVID-19 pandemic affected Secai Marche’s expansion plans because it originally planned to enter Singapore this year, but had to slow down since they were unable to travel and meet with farmers.

On the other hand, many farmers have started selling directly to consumers through social media like Instagram or Facebook, and have approached Secai Marche for help with fulfillment, logistics, repacking and quality control.

Correction: Funding amount corrected to say $1.4 million instead of $1 million. 

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The real estate market in South Korea is very fragmented, which means people often have to work with dozens of brokers before they find a new home. Founded in 2020 by a former WeWork executive, Dongnae wants to create a centralized base for brokers, serving as a multiple listing system (MLS). Since its first seed round last year, Dongnae has increased its brokerage partners to more than 70. Today the startup announced it has raised a seed extension of $4.1 million, doubling its total raised to $8.2 million.

The new funding was led by investment fund NFX, with participation from returning investors Flybridge and MetaProp, who led Dongnae’s first seed round. NFX general partner Pete Flint, who co-founded Trulia and is a former Zillow board member, will join Dongnae’s board. The startup’s other investors include Goodwater Capital, Maple VC and strategic angel investors in South Korea and the United States.

“It’s an exciting time of growth at our company, and we want to make sure that we are executing our go-to-market plan,” founder Matthew Shampine, who formerly ran WeWork Asia, told TechCrunch about the seed extension. “Pete Flint and [principal] Brittany Yoon at NFX bring an amazing combination of real estate expertise and Korean startup experience that will be invaluable to Dongnae.”

Dongnae also announced the release of its Android app today. The company’s Android and iOS apps let potential renters and buyers look at listings and book tours of properties in the Seoul metropolitan area.

Shampine said that Dongnae now has more than 8,000 listings. Since its last funding announcement five months ago, Dongnae has increased its closed deal volume by more than 65% and revenue by 150%.

Shampine added that the new funding will be used to grow Dongnae’s brokerage network across the Seoul metropolitan area, which accounts for almost half of South Korea’s population, and the development of its technology and brokerage teams.

“At the time of our seed funding, we had just launched our brokerage partner program so we actually had one partner. The name of our first partner is Global Real Estate, based in Yongsan, and they were actually the brokerage that helped me find my personal apartment around the time we started Dongnae,” said Shampine. “They’ve been a wonderful and patient partner as our organization has grown this year, and we’ve already worked together to help a number of our customers find great homes.”

In a statement, Flint said, “The executive team at Dongnae is uniquely qualified considering their global backgrounds and deep local real estate expertise, and I believe the timing is perfect for Dongnae and the market need they are addressing in Korea.”