“Microinfluencers” are gaining clout among marketers. Though they may have as little as a thousand followers, microinfluencers tend to focus on specific content and be seen as more engaging and trustworthy by their audience, said Allan Ko, founder and chief executive officer of Influenxio. The Taipei-based startup, which connects brands with Instagram microinfluencers through its online platform, announced today that it has closed $2 million in pre-Series A funding led by DCM Ventures, and is launching a new subscription plan.

Founded in 2018, Influenxio has now raised over $3 million in total, including from seed investor SparkLabs Taipei. It currently operates in Taiwan and Japan, where it has databases of 100,000 and 250,000 Instagram creators, respectively. So far, over 6,000 brands have registered on Influenxio’s platform, and it has been used to run over 1,000 campaigns.

Influenxio plans to use its new funding for hiring and product development. Influenxio’s new subscription plan is a relatively novel model for the field, so one of the startup’s goals is to prove that it works, Ko told TechCrunch. The company also plans to build out its Japanese platform and expand into more countries.

Influenxio analyzes past campaigns, performance data and client reviews to improve its algorithms. Since the entire campaign creation process–from finding influencers to paying them–is performed through Influenxio, this allows it to gather a wide range of data to refine its technology, Ko told TechCrunch.

Influencers typically make about $35 to $40 USD for each campaign they participate in, and most of the brands the company works with focus on food (like restaurants), fashion, beauty or lifestyle services.

Before launching Influenxio, Ko spent 15 years working in the digital marketing field, serving as an account manager at Yahoo! and Microsoft, and then head of Hong Kong and Taiwan for Google’s online partnerships group. He wanted to create a startup that would combine what he had learned about digital marketing and make accessible to more businesses.

Large brands have used Influenxio to quickly generate marketing campaigns for special occasions like Mother’s Day or Christmas. For example, one advertiser in Taiwan used Influenxio to hire almost 200 influencers in one week, who were asked to test and post about their products, and some of Influenxio’s highest profile clients include Shiseido, Shopee, iHerb and KKBox.

But the majority of Influenxio’s clients (about 80% to 90%) are small- to medium-sized businesses, and Ko said they usually create multiple campaigns to build brand awareness over time, working with a few influencers a month.

Influenxio’s new subscription plan, which costs less than $100 USD a month and is launching first in Taiwan before rolling out to other markets, was created for them. “The first year we launched the platform, we found small businesses want experts and advice,” said Ko. Many don’t have marketing managers, so Influenxio’s subscription plan automatically matches them with new influencers each month and provides them with analytics so they can see how well campaigns are performing.

Influenxio is among a growing number of startups that are tapping into the “microinfluencer economy,” with others including AspireIQ, Upfluence and Grin.

Ko said Influenxio’s biggest difference is its focus on small businesses, and serving as a one-stop marketplace for influencer campaigns. “The important thing for our platform is that it needs to be very easy and simple,” he added. “We spent a lot of time on the execution and details to make it smoother on the advertiser side. For the influencer side, we try to make it more convenient. For example, the way they receive money, our goal is to also make it easy.”

Zapier, a well-known no-code automation tool, has purchased Makerpad, a no-code education service and community. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

TechCrunch has covered Zapier often during its life, including its first, and only, fundraising event, a $1.2 million round back in 2012 that tapped Bessemer, DFJ and others. Since then the company has added more expensive tiers to its service, built out team-focused features, and recently talked to Extra Crunch about how it scaled its remote-only team.

In an interview Monday, Zapier CEO Wade Foster told TechCrunch that his company now has 400 workers and crossed the $100 million ARR mark last summer.

The Makerpad deal is its first acquisition. TechCrunch asked Makerpad founder Ben Tossell about the structure of the deal, who said via email that his company will operate as a “stand-alone” entity from its new parent company.

The deal doesn’t seem prepped to upend what the smaller startup was working on before it was signed. “Ultimately,” Tossell wrote, “Makerpad’s vision is to educate as many people as possible on the possibilities of building without writing code.”

Foster seems content with that focus, describing to TechCrunch how he intends to let Makerpad operate largely independently, albeit inside a set of editorial guidelines.

TechCrunch asked the Makerpad founder why this was the right time to sell his business. He said that the pairing would help his team take the no-code world farther than it could alone, also noting that the deal was a “no-brainer” over “alternative routes such as VC funding.”

The acquisition was partially driven by a single tweet. This one, in fact. According to Tossell, the CEO of Zapier reached out after reading it, leading to conversations and a deal. Foster expanded on the story during a call, saying that he had long followed Tossell’s work and that the two had met previously at dinners. The tweet wound up in his Slack, he said, so he reached out to the Makerpad founder, and from there it was a pretty quick ramp to a deal.

The two companies have seen rapid growth in recent quarters. Foster detailed to TechCrunch how small businesses have become increasingly reliant on his company’s service in the post-COVID world, with Zapier seeing strong SMB adoption after the pandemic hit. Given the digital transformation’s acceleration, that’s a trend that likely won’t slow soon. And Tossell told TechCrunch that no-code has already “grown bigger than [he] had imagined it could,” with his company seeing users expanding 4x in just under the last year.

Zapier, perhaps one of the largest success stories in the broad swath of technology products that we might call the no-code world, now has an attached community that could help directly add users to its service, and perhaps indirectly by making the aggregate pool of no-coders larger over time.

The no-code space has been active in recent months, as has its sibling niche, the low-code market. The latter has seen recent rounds in the nine figures, as some corporations turn to low-code tools to help them more quickly build internal software. The no-code world has its own successes, like Zapier’s nine-figure revenues.

Foster was neutral on more acquisitions, neither closing the door on them when TechCrunch asked, but not opening it any wider at the same time. On the SPAC question, however, the CEO was a bit clearer. That’s a no.

After having spoken to a grip of no-code and low-code founders and investors in recent months, it seems clear that the broader business market is coming around to low-code services and that smaller companies have been quick adopters of no-code tooling. As low-code tools become increasingly abstracted from coding, and no-code tools add functionality, perhaps we’ll see the two related categories merge.

Since InMotion Ventures, the independent investment and incubation initiative set up by Jaguar Land Rover, launched in 2016 the firm has focused on backing companies across the mobility space broadly. Its 15 active investments run the gamut from autonomous vehicles, to car insurance tech, to ride-sharing, and travel planning, but increasingly the firm is focusing its efforts on vehicle electrification and sustainable supply chains.

That’s evident from its most recent investment in Circulor, a company that monitors supply chains from raw material inputs to finished outputs with an eye toward sustainable sourcing.

“As an OEM nowadays it’s increasingly important to have increasing transparency and visibility into how all of those materials have been sourced,” said the firm’s managing director, Sebastian Peck. Circulor already has a strong footprint in the automotive industry, Peck said, and is working with a major oil company on tracing the share of recycled plastics that have come from that provider. “It has applications across any industry.”

Jaguar Land Rover is also using Circulor’s technology to track a material that’s being used in the interior of one of the company’s vehicles, Peck said. The stealthy project hasn’t been publicly revealed yet, but the company has worked with a university and supplier to trace the material from its point of origin to the finished product.

Sustainable supply chains aren’t the only priorities Peck laid out in a recent interview with TechCrunch.

As the mobility market moves to embrace electrification, InMotion wants to make sure its portfolio is in the mix and Peck said it would be looking to make investments in a number of different areas around electric vehicles and batteries.

“We have looked at a number of companies who are developing new battery chemistries. We haven’t made an investment yet,” Peck said. “We don’t have a deep enough insight into the IP portfolios of the big battery suppliers to really be able to reliably benchmark those new chemistries. We have not had enough conviction to make an investment or back a particular company. From a value chain it is two or three steps away from us. It’s a space we’re looking at.”

Cosi Group, a Berlin-based startup offering an alternative to boutique hotels and managed short-stay apartments, is disclosing €20 million in new investment.

Backing the round is Vienna-based Soravia, a leading real estate group in German-speaking countries. Existing investors Cherry Ventures, e.ventures, Kreos Capital and Bremke followed on, along with a number of individual investors. They are described as including the founders of Flixbus, Travelperk, Comtravo and Cosi’s own founders.

Cosi says it will use the fresh capital to accelerate international expansion in Europe, implement a new brand and launch a “new strategic business unit” soon.

Originally described as a tech-enabled or “full-stack” hospitality service that competes with well-run boutique hotels or traditional local managed apartments, the company signs long-term leases with property owners, and then furnishes those apartments itself to “control” the interior design experience. It claims to have digitised, and where possible, automated its processes in order to scale and maintain quality of service throughout the guest journey, from initial contact to loyalty.

Christian Gaiser, CEO of Cosi, tells me the startup has not only been able to mitigate the pandemic — which has seen major restrictions in travel, including countries going into full lockdown — but actually thrive. That’s because Cosi was able to tap “new demand channels” that aren’t reliant on holiday travel or short business trips.

Described as “midstay” (guests that stay for one month or longer), examples include people who arrive in a city and need a home for one or two months until they find a longer-term apartment, citizens who need to get away from shared apartments (perhaps to be less at risk or to work from home), or families who are building or renovating a house that faces construction delays due to the pandemic.

“Thus, we were able to reach over 90% occupancy and managed to operate our locations on a cash-flow-positive scale,” adds the Cosi CEO. “Lesson learned for us: Even when almost all your demand channels dry out, you still can do a lot if you focus on what you can control. We simply activated new demand channels.”

In addition, he says the pandemic has accelerated a shift in demand preferences, seeing “big hotel bunkers” become less popular versus individual apartment style accommodations.

Meanwhile, Cosi has also seen a “massive boost in supply,” with lots of takeover opportunities in the hotel space, especially for underperforming hotel properties. And since office space demand has contracted dramatically, the company is receiving offers to convert office space for use as midstay accommodation.

“On the back of our strong COVID performance, we’ve built a lot of trust among the real estate community and receive more and more offers,” says Gaiser. “Prices for supply have fallen sometimes dramatically, depending on the city, due to these factors”.

To that end, Cosi currently has 750 units under contract, with 1,500 more under negotiation.

Adds the Cosi CEO: “Now is exactly the right timing to double down on Cosi’s growth from a long-term perspective. When everyone is scared/shocked, you can win big if you have a clear plan. Our investors bought into this plan, as we have demonstrated that our business model is resilient and we also have the capacity to navigate the ship both in good but also in rough waters.”

Swedish autonomous electric vehicle startup Einride is aiming to continue the momentum sparked by partnerships with Oatly and Lidl by seeking additional capital, TechCrunch has learned. 

Einride is seeking $75 million in new financing, while at the same time exploring the potential for a public listing through a special purpose acquisition company, according to people with knowledge of the company’s plans.

SPACs, a mechanism in which a publicly traded shell company merges with a private business, have taken the U.S. capital markets by storm led, in part, by startups focused on the electrification of mobility.

Early successes of public listings for companies like Nikola (despite its dubious claims) helped set the stage for the SPAC boom. Canoo, Fisker Inc, ChargePoint and Lordstown Motors are just a few of the U.S.-based EV companies that have gone public via a SPAC in the past year.

Unlike some newly minted SPAC companies, Einride has some fundamentals. The company has already piloted its technology through a partnership with Oatly, the Swedish oat milk maker.

Oatly began using Einride’s electric trucks on its delivery routes from each of its Swedish production sites in October 2020. Thus far, the trucks have driven over 8,600 km electric and as a result have saved over 10,500 kg of CO2 compared to diesel, according to a statement from the companies.

“Sustainability is at the core of everything we do, and we work hard to lower our emissions across the board. This includes our emissions for transports, which is why we are now shifting to electrical vehicles, which reduces our climate footprint by 87% on these routes,” said Simon Broadbent, supply chain director at Oatly, in a statement at the time.

The deal with Oatly was just the beginning. As the ink dried on that partnership, Einride quickly signed other marquee Swedish businesses including the food shipping and logistics company Lidl and the electronics manufacturer Electrolux.

Big automakers have electric and autonomous plans of their own. Argo, a developer of self-driving technology, is now worth $7.5 billion thanks to an investment from Ford and the VW Group. And VW’s Traton Group is pushing low emission and electrification through a $2.2 billion investment announced in 2019.

Daimler, Paccar, and Volvo all have plans as well.

That’s just scratching the surface of the money that’s pouring in to autonomous, electrified transport. Of course, Tesla is in the game with its own semi truck and, in China, Plus AI, is automating a number of vehicles from Manbang, Suning and FAW Jiefang.

All of this money is aiming to capture a portion of the market for autonomous, electrified vehicles that the consulting firm McKinsey estimated would save the trucking industry over $100 billion. It’s a potentially huge opportunity in the $260 billion U.S. trucking market alone. Worldwide, businesses spend about $1.2 trillion on trucking, according to McKinsey.

The benefits that would accrue to the industry are more than just financial. Trucking is a huge component of the greenhouse gas emissions that come from the transportation sector — which includes road, rail, air and marine transportation. In 2016, trucking and transport broadly contributed to roughly 24% of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions — and that number has been steadily increasing.

Any reduction in carbon emissions from the transport sector would be a huge step forward on the path toward a more environmentally sustainable future.

No wonder venture investors are falling all over each other to invest in these companies. Einride counts EQT Ventures and NordicNinja VC, a fund backed by Panasonic, Honda, Omron and the Japan Bank for International Cooperation, among its investors. Along with backing from Ericsson Ventures, Norrsken Foundation, Plum Alley Investments and Plug and Play Ventures the startup has raised $32 million to date.

This morning Vendr announced a $60 million Series A round, a huge funding event led by Tiger Global, with participation from Y Combinator, Sound Ventures, Craft Ventures, F-Prime Capital and Garage Capital.

The outsized Series A comes after Vendr last raised $4 million in a mid-2020 seed round, with TechCrunch reporting that the company was profitable at the time. Vendr had raised just over $6 million total before this latest round.

TechCrunch had a few questions. First, how the company had managed to attract so much capital so quickly. According to an interview with Vendr CEO Ryan Neu, his startup grew just under 5x in 2020, and was cash flow-positive last year as well. The startup’s model of standing between SaaS buyers and sellers, speeding up transactions while lowering their cost, appears to have fit well into 2020’s twin trends of rising software reliance and a focus on cost control.

Second, how did the company manage to grow so much? Vendr charges its customers between 1% and 5% of their software spend that it manages, which can add up. Neu told TechCrunch that a somewhat standard 500-person company might spend $2 million to $3.5 million on software each year, which by our math would make that company worth no less than $20,000 to $35,000 in revenue for Vendr at 1% of spend. At Vendr’s midpoint 2.5%, those figures rise $50,000 to $87,500.

At those prices, Vendr can stack up annual revenue pretty quickly. But why would Vendr customers pay it to handle their software spend? Savings, effectively. So long as they save more than Vendr charges, they are coming out ahead. And as the startup claims that it can cut the time to buying, its own customers can reduce time spent on securing tooling.

Everyone wins, it seems, except for software sellers. After all, they are the ones losing a chance to get less-sophisticated buyers to pay more for their code, right? Neu said that his company’s model isn’t too bad for selling companies as they close deals much more quickly, at a higher rate of closure. That could save their sales team time, which might help balance the price differential.

Pressed on what Vendr might be able to do for the selling side of the software market given its present-day buyer focus, Neu declined to share any possible plans.

Returning to the round, why did Vendr raise the money at all if it was doing just fine sans new external funding? The company told TechCrunch that it has scaled its staff to 60 from 10 a year ago, and that it wanted a stronger balance sheet. That’s fine. We’d be hard-pressed to find the startup that wouldn’t take such a large check from Tiger, given the valuation gain the raise implies for Vendr, so there isn’t too much mystery to unpack.

A theme that TechCrunch has explored in recent weeks has been the huge depth of the software market. Given the TAM for bits and bytes, Vendr may be able to keep up the hypergrowth that its new round implies its investors will expect. Let’s see how 2021 winds up for the company.

Early Stage is the premier “how-to” event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear firsthand how some of the most successful founders and VCs build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios. We’ll cover every aspect of company building: Fundraising, recruiting, sales, product-market fit, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session also has audience participation built-in — there’s ample time included for audience questions and discussion.

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Olo, the New York-based fintech startup that provides order processing software to restaurants, shared its initial IPO price range this morning. The company’s debut comes ahead of the expected IPO of Toast, a Boston-based unicorn with a similar market remit.

Targeting $16 to $18 per share, Olo could raise as much as $372.6 million in its public offering.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

Unlike most companies going public in recent quarters that we’ve tracked, Olo has a history of growth and profitability, making its impending pricing all the more interesting. It’s unknown if Toast is profitable, but because most venture-backed IPOs aren’t, we’re presuming it isn’t.

This morning, we’re doing our usual work: parsing the company’s pricing interval to get a valuation range for Olo. We’ll calculate both simple and fully diluted pricing and then do some quick work on its revenue scale to come to grips with its total scale.

Are investors willing to pay more for profits? And, if so, how much? This is a niche question because most IPOs look a bit more like Coursera than Olo, but it’s still worth answering.

Olo’s IPO valuation range

If you’d like to follow along, you can read the new S-1 filing here. Our first look at Olo is here, and its fundraising history is here, per Crunchbase.

The company is targeting $16 to $18 per share with an expected sale of 18 million shares. The company is also reserving 2.7 million shares for its underwriters. At the upper end of its range, not counting shares reserved for its bankers, Olo could raise $324 million in its debut.

Per the company, its total number of Class A and B shares outstanding after its IPO would come to 142,012,926, or what we calculate to be 144,712,926 shares, including its underwriters’ option. Using the latter — because we tend to look for valuation extremes — Olo would be worth $2.32 billion to $2.6 billion.

But what about its fully diluted valuation? Adding in shares that are currently tied to unexercised but vested stock options bring Olo to around 188,085,714 shares. Add in the underwriters’ option and the total rises to 190,785,714 shares.

Using the latter figure, at $16 and $18 per share Olo could be worth $3.05 billion to $3.43 billion on a fully diluted basis.

Is that expensive?

Let’s find out! Digging back into Olo’s growth, we can see a business with rapidly expanding software incomes. And the same software revenues are improving in quality over time. From 2019 to 2020, for example, Olo’s “platform” revenues — a mix of subscription and transaction top line from software — grew from $45.1 million to $92.8 million. Over the same time, the company’s platform revenue saw its gross margin improve from 73.6% to 84.5%.

It was only a matter of time before someone married the nascent nootropic supplements for brain health to the snack bar craze that continues to attract dollars and exits.

That time is apparently now, as Rob Dyrdek, the MTV-famous celebrity, pro-skater and entrepreneur, and Chris Bernard announce a new investment in the company they co-founded, Mindright, alongside celebrity investors including Joe Jonas, Travis Barker and The Profit’s Marcus Lemonis. 

“When we started down the path of condition-specific food and beverage… we started doing a lot of research into the nootropics and adaptogens space,” said co-founder Bernard. Working with a food scientist who did not want to be named (which isn’t sketchy at all), Dyrdek and Bernard were introduced to several companies producing ashwagandha, which the two had settled on as the new key ingredient in their snack bars.

Along with ginseng and cordyceps mushrooms, the company has a trifecta of new (and old) supplements that have taken the nutraceutical world by storm.

Bernard had initially approached the Dyrdek Machine group about another product, but the company was too far along and not something that Dyrdek felt passionate about backing. The story changed when Bernard returned with plans for this nootropic nosh.

“[Bernard] brought back the concept of the path of what’s evolved from functional foods and probiotics and collagen and sort of the mental health and adaptogen and the supplement world and said here’s how to merge these,” Dyrdek said of Bernard’s second pitch. “It was a home-run for us. Our process is supporting a solopreneur where we help shape and build the company together and provide the outsourced resources. We fund the development of the idea to go to the capital markets.”

So far, Dyrdek and his team have made 15 investments in consumer and entertainment businesses, and five of those business have since been acquired.

Most deals from Dyrdek Machine follow a similar trajectory. The firm becomes a co-founder and shares common stock and then negotiate a preferred equity investment for the capital infusion. Typically those deals range from $250,000 to $500,000.

“We co-found it and we share that common share class and our first money is preferred and pick a valuation that balances out the deal,” Dyrdek said. “How much equity do we want to develop it with you is what we negotiate with that initial capital.”

Dyrdek describes his investment firm as founder-driven and market agnostic. “We want a well-rounded, multi-dimensional founder and then we look at the market and how do we evolve it into something that has a larger, broader appeal,” Dyrdek said. “Rather than chasing down nootropics, we found that ‘good mood’ was the important thing to the consumer base. That’s why we drove ‘Good mood superfood.’ ”

Bernard’s faith in Dyrdek’s ability to move the business forward has been proven in the evolution of other companies in the firm’s portfolio. Dyrdek pointed to Outstanding Foods, another investment, which he said had recently closed a $10 million round at a $100 million valuation. Another startup in the portfolio, Momentous, a supplement manufacturer, also closed on a big round recently after raising $5 million in 2019, Dyrdek said.

For Mindright, Dyrdek’s involvement brought in other celebrity names once they tried the product. The company counts Joe Jonas and Travis Barker among its seed investors.

“They were excited to get involved in this because they believed in what we took the time to create,” Bernard said. 

TechCrunch is hosting a small virtual meetup this Thursday centered around Miami. We hope you can attend. It’s free.

This is our first (virtual) field trip to Miami. Even though we can’t be there physically right now, it’ll sure feel like we are. All lights will be shining on the Magic City. The area is quickly transforming thanks to active investors, interesting companies, a Twitter-proficient mayor and beautifully scenic living.

If you’re interested in what’s happening in Miami in general, seeking out a new, up-and-coming city to live in, looking for cool companies and talented founders to invest in, then you’ll want to register and drop March 11 on your calendar. This is a virtual event, but space is still limited, so register early.

Here’s just some of what you can expect:

Networking – It’s what you can always count on us for. Companies are started and deals get done at TechCrunch events (yes, even the virtual ones!).Pitch-off – We’re going to tap into the local tech scene in Miami and bring on some VCs to take a look at  your pitches. They’ll give you feedback live from the stage. Sign up to pitch by filling out this form.Panels – Meet the movers and shakers up close and personal. Hear about their journey, ask them questions and find out what’s special to them about Miami.

All along the way we’ll be asking for your feedback by way of polls, Q&As and surveys. We want to hear from everyone who lives in the birthplace of sunscreen, and we’re looking to you for suggestions on folks who should be getting all of the attention we can throw at them on March 11. Drop suggestions in the comments below.

It’s going to be one to remember, and it’s the perfect setup for when we can safely crash the city in person again!

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After TechCrunch broke the news yesterday that Coursera was planning to file its S-1 today, the edtech company officially dropped the document Friday evening.

Coursera was last valued at $2.4 billion by the private markets, when it most recently raised a Series F round in October 2020 that was worth $130 million.

Coursera’s S-1 filing offers a glimpse into the finances of how an edtech company, accelerated by the pandemic, performed over the past year. It paints a picture of growth, albeit one that came at steep expense.

Revenue

In 2020, Coursera saw $293.5 million in revenue. That’s a roughly 59% increase from the year prior when the company recorded $184.4 million in top line. During that same period, Coursera posted a net loss of nearly $67 million, up 46% from the previous year’s $46.7 million net deficit.

Notably the company had roughly the same noncash, share-based compensation expenses in both years. Even if we allow the company to judge its profitability on an adjusted EBITDA basis, Coursera’s losses still rose from 2019 to 2020, expanding from $26.9 million to $39.8 million.

To understand the difference between net losses and adjusted losses it’s worth unpacking the EBITDA acronym. Standing for “earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization,” EBITDA strips out some nonoperating costs to give investors a possible better picture of the continuing health of a business, without getting caught up in accounting nuance. Adjusted EBITDA takes the concept one step further, also removing the noncash cost of share-based compensation, and in an even more cheeky move, in this case also deducts “payroll tax expense related to stock-based activities” as well.

For our purposes, even when we grade Coursera’s profitability on a very polite curve it still winds up generating stiff losses. Indeed, the company’s adjusted EBITDA as a percentage of revenue — a way of determining profitability in contrast to revenue — barely improved from a 2019 result of -15% to -14% in 2020.