The rapid growth of e-commerce in Indonesia, especially during the pandemic, is placing increasing demands on its supply chain infrastructure. But the country’s logistics industry is highly fragmented, with companies usually relying on multiple distributors for one shipment, and many warehouses are still concentrated around major cities. Advotics wants to help with software to make the whole supply chain easier to track, and recently closed a $2.75 million funding round led by East Ventures.

Founded in 2016 by Boris Sanjaya, Hendi Chandi and Jeffry Tani, Advotics has now raised a total of $5.5 million and currently counts more than 70 clients, ranging from individual resellers to large corporations like Exxonmobil, Danone, Reckitt Benckiser, Sampoerna, Kalbe and Mulia Group.

According to research institution Statistics Indonesia, there are about 5 million small and medium-sized manufacturers in Indonesia. They use a supply chain with 15 million small to mid-sized distributors and about 288,000 large distribution companies. This fragmentation means higher expenses, with Report Linker estimating that logistics costs range between 25% to 30% of Indonesia’s gross domestic product.

To help make logistics more efficient for its clients, Advotics offers SaaS solutions to monitor almost their entire supply and logistics chain, from warehouse inventory to generating delivery routes for drivers. It includes a product digitalization feature that uses QR codes to track products and prevent counterfeiting, and tools for salespeople visiting retail stores, since that is still one of the most effective tools for manufacturers and importers to find customers.

The company’s new funding will be used to launch a online-to-offline system for SMEs and grow its sales team. The online-to-offline system will allow sellers to integrate inventory and sales from all of their channels, including brick-and-mortar, business-to-business and e-commerce.

Advotics is among several tech startups that are taking different approaches to tackle Indonesia’s logistics infrastructure. For example, Shipper wants to give sellers access to “Amazon-level logistics,” while Logisly is focused on digitizing truck shipments. Waresix recently acquired Trukita to connect businesses to shippers and truck shipment platform Kargo’s backers include Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick.

Sales engagement platforms (SEP) help sales teams automate and track the large number of tasks they need to do each day as they contact leads and home in on potential deals. Focused on small-to-medium-sized companies, SEP startup Outplay announced today it has raised $2 million from Sequoia Capital India’s Surge program for early-stage startups.

Outplay was founded in January 2020 by brothers Ram and Laxman Papineni and now counts more than 300 clients. Before launching Outplay, the Papineni brothers built AppVirality, a referral marketing tool for app developers.

Laxman told TechCrunch that Outplay’s customers come from sectors like IT, computer software, marketing and advertising and recruiting, and most are based in North America and Europe.

Outplay is designed for teams that use multiple channels to reach potential customers, including phone calls, text messages, email, live chats on websites and social media platforms like LinkedIn or Twitter. It integrates with customer relationship management platforms like Salesforce and Pipedrive, giving sales people a new interface that includes productivity and automation tools to cut the time they spend on administrative tasks.

For example, Outplay can be used to create sequences that send initial messages through different platforms, and then automatically follows up with new messages if there isn’t a reply within a pre-set time frame. Outplay also provides analytics to help sales people track how well sales campaigns are working.

Two of Outplay’s biggest competitors are Outreach and SalesLoft, both of which hit unicorn status in recent funding rounds. Laxman said Outplay is focused on ease of use, with other differentiators including more integrations with CRMs and other software, and a strong customer support team.

As Facebook confronts outrage among its employees and the public for mishandling multiple decisions about its role in shaping public discourse, it is becoming clear that it cannot solve its conundrums without a major change in its business model. And a new model is readily available: for-benefit status.

For decades, a misguided ideology has warped companies, economies and societies: that the sole purpose of corporations is to maximize short-term returns to one set of stakeholders — those who have bought shares. Neither law nor history requires this to be true.

But shareholder value-maximization ideology has become cemented in far too much corporate practice at the expense of societal well-being. This is manifested in many ways: a slavish adherence to the judgment of the “market,” even when other social signals are more powerful; executives enriched by stock options; companies fearful of “activist investors” who attack whenever stock prices fail to meet quarterly “expectations” and often-frivolous shareholder lawsuits pushing for stock gains at all costs.

The pandemic, however, has accelerated an already-spreading recognition that shareholder value maximization is often a harmful choice — not by any means a moral imperative or even a fiduciary responsibility.

Major institutions of capitalism are converging on a new vision for it. The 2019 Business Roundtable CEO statement said that corporate strategy should benefit all stakeholders – including shareholders, yes, but equally customers, employees, suppliers, and the communities in which companies operate. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink’s recent annual letters assert new views of how that investment company, the world’s largest, should invest the trillions it oversees.

Fink’s 2019 letter spelled out a new vision for corporate purpose; the subsequent 2020 and 2021 letters focused on business’ responsibility around climate change, particularly in light of the pandemic. The B Corporation and conscious capitalism movements are growing. The World Economic Forum is championing a “Fourth Sector,” combining purpose with profit. Business schools, facing student rebellions against a purely profit-maximizing curriculum, are rapidly changing what they teach.

And with society under siege, many more businesses, including social media, are scrambling to seem like good corporate citizens. They have no choice.

Facebook, for example, has doubled down on philanthropy and new efforts to combat misinformation, even as usage and share price soar. Platforms like WhatsApp (owned by Facebook) have become essential services to connect people whose physical ties have been abruptly severed during the global pandemic. Shelter-in-place has become, in many ways, shelter-in-Facebook-properties.

But Facebook and its brethren remain fragile. Since the 2016 presidential election in the U.S., Facebook has faced governmental hearings and regulation, public uproar (#deleteFacebook), and huge fines for invading privacy and undermining democracy. These calls were amplified in the weeks following the January 6 Capitol riot. Separately, it faces allegations of bias, largely (though not entirely) from the political right. These have led to calls for the revocation or reform of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which grants it immunity from the actions of its users.

A giant company that is simultaneously essential and pilloried is vulnerable. Just ask the ghosts of John D. Rockefeller and his fellow robber barons, whose huge monopolies industrialized America more than 100 years ago. Journalistic muckrakers and public outrage targeted them for their abusive practices until the government finally broke up their companies via antitrust legislation.

Because Mark Zuckerberg maintains complete majority control of Facebook, he could unilaterally quell public opprobrium and fend off heavy-handed regulation singlehandedly by transforming Facebook into a new kind of business: a for-benefit corporation.

Under the Public Benefit Corporation legal model, firms bind themselves to a public benefit mission statement and carry out required ongoing reporting on both the standard financials and on how the company is living up to its mission. That status protects the company against profit-demanding shareholder lawsuits, and also attracts employees and investors who want to combine profit with purpose.

Data.world is one of the thousands of certified B Corporations that have seen good returns on financial metrics. Allbirds, for example, launched in a few sustainable materials using a pro-sustainability process to manufacture comfortable shoes, quickly reaching revenues of $100 million and valuation of $1.7 billion in an industry fraught with sustainability and human rights concerns. Other household names that are B Corps include The Body Shop, Coursera, Danone, the Jamie Oliver Group, King Arthur Flour, Numi Tea and Patagonia.

Many companies that have not undergone formal B Certification from B Labs have nonetheless done well while transforming their business practices, such as the carpet and flooring company Interface. Some firms incorporate ESG principles into their management systems – the $24 billion (market cap) Dutch life sciences company DSM has for years had meaningful sustainability targets for its senior management that account for fully 50 percent of their annual bonuses. Both Interface and DSM attribute much of their commercial success to their attention to non-financial considerations.

A for-benefit Facebook could similarly relate to the world differently, avoiding many of the reputational shocks and regulatory responses that have led to huge stock dips and enormous fines. Its operations would align with Zuckerberg’s proclaimed purpose to enable the potential abundance that results from connecting everyone in the world.

Imagine a Facebook town hall as a true public square, not just another way to gather and sell people’s data without their explicit consent. Imagine a Facebook that put its users first and its advertisers second; that revealed where ads came from; that earned your attention in a way that you controlled rather than through machine-driven algorithms maximizing your attention for good or ill. Such a for-benefit Facebook could create true buy-in and transparency with its massive community around the world.

Of course, such steps as Facebook’s new Oversight Board, which may provide some meaningful review, don’t require a legal change. But if shareholders and employees continue to be rewarded primarily by the success of the problematic ad revenue model, a continuing conflict between private gain and public benefit makes it impossible to have confidence about what is happening behind the scenes. A shift to for-benefit incorporation and appropriate certification brings with it different performance metrics and accountability systems with public scores.

In changing Facebook into a for-benefit corporation, Zuckerberg could insulate himself against presidential rage while rehabilitating his reputation — and his company’s. It would likely create vast ripples both in Silicon Valley and beyond — and it might help transform capitalism itself.

The pandemic has forced organizations across the globe to shutter the office environment and take up a remote-first strategy. Through necessity, professionals have adapted to remote working. But the systems they use are still playing catch up.

One area less readily accommodating to the remote environment is the onboarding process. Given that it is the first sustained contact that a new starter has with a company, a remote-first strategy is dependent on its success. When looking to onboard new employees, the luxuries of first-day meet and greets, in-person hardware setup and a team lunch are no longer available. From interview to offer letter and beyond, any new hire’s early journey is critical to their life at the company, their job satisfaction and ultimately their productivity. The remote induction must be a smooth process, and so needs a thorough rethink.

A cultural shift in the company may be necessary. Organizations need to embrace knowledge sharing and collaboration, by turning to a “handbook-first” approach. A few simple steps can lead them there. Companies also need to analyze their workflow. Are the right systems in place to ensure the seamless flow of both tacit and explicit knowledge?

Perhaps most importantly, artificial intelligence can help transform a clunky old onboarding process into a sophisticated, smooth journey. Naturally the best AI models to use will depend on the business and department in question. However, with a few pointers business leaders can carve out a path to AI integration.

Let’s dive into the specifics that can transform the remote onboarding process, for the benefit of both the company and the new starter in question.

How to handbook

This is arguably the most important piece of the puzzle when it comes to ensuring newcomers are able to access the right information at the right time; it’s also the most difficult to get right. It is for workers at all levels of an organization to think about how knowledge is shared between teams and the processes that surround that interchange of ideas.

What is most important is that everyone in an organization prioritizes documentation; exactly how they do it is secondary. You can spin up plenty of free and paid software to start creating a handbook. Anything cloud-based is suitable, with more sophisticated paid options recommended to keep things easily searchable with documentation sorted into well-defined hierarchies rather than losing those nuggets of information in a sea of folders.

However, this systemic challenge is best addressed from top down. The process should include some checks and balances, with permissioning crucial for parts of the handbook that should remain static, like policies and SLPs. Other parts of the documentation should be kept flexible, like processes and team-level knowledge. The majority of the handbook must be democratized as far as possible.

GitLab, an all-remote company, first coined the term “handbook-first.” The DevOps software provider acts as a great example of a company that lives and breathes through documenting and codifying internal knowledge. Everyone within the organization buys into the mantra of documenting what they know, with subject matter experts assigned to manage knowledge base content. Keeping company documentation up to date is a collaborative task, considered paramount to the company’s livelihood. Software gives a helping hand, nudging contributors to keep information up to date.

Darren Murph, head of Remote at GitLab, says that their documentation strategy, twinned with a cooperative approach, helps to build trust with new starters. “When everything a new hire needs to know is written down, there’s no ambiguity or wondering if something is missing. We couple documentation with an onboarding buddy — a partner who is responsible for directing key stakeholder conversations and ensuring that acclimation goes well.”

It’s not yet fire season thankfully, which affords some breathing room for firefighters and emergency responders to begin planning out how to confront the increasingly complex and unwieldy task of preventing and responding to fires in the American West. Wildfires in the region have been particularly acute in recent years in states like California, mostly due to hotter conditions driven by climate change, decaying grid infrastructure that can lead to sparks, and a tinderbox of trees and foliage ripe for conflagration.

After years of bruising firefighting, some startups are exploring how to improve fire response. One of them is Cornea, a sort of spin-up by public sector-focused venture studio Hangar, which raised $15 million last year to build new startups targeting the government.

One of Hangar’s first companies was Cornea back a couple of years ago, and it remains one of the most interesting for its potential. The idea is to meld geographical, weather and historical fire data into a machine learning model that can augment frontline firefighters with better guidance on where to push forward and when to retreat in the midst of a blaze.

The startup has two main products it is looking to launch this year. The first is focused around delivering better situational awareness around a subject known among firefighters as the “Suppression Difficulty Index.” These are essentially maps that inform firefighters of the dangers of fighting fire in a very specific geographical location. For instance, a particular location could have wind or water conditions that might accelerate a fire and endanger responders if they are not careful.

The other product is focused on “Potential Control Lines” — locations where a fire break or other action could potentially push back a fire. Using typography, vegetation and a myriad of other data, Cornea can locate positions with a higher likelihood of success in battling a fire.

Cornea’s Chief Fire Officer is Tom Harbour, who formerly served a decade as head of fire response for the U.S. Forest Service. He said that “50 years ago, I was raised in a culture where you never knew ‘why’ — you just obeyed orders” when it came to firefighting decisions out in the field. “Your head was on the proverbial swivel.” With Cornea and the products the company is creating, we are “Getting aligned on the ‘why’ and beginning to have [firefighters] sense the information that they are looking at.”

Harbour noted that the most common tools in the field today remain paper maps and markers, simply because “you know it doesn’t break right at the time when you can’t have things break.” Cornea’s products may help firefighters in the field, but they are far more likely to have an impact in the fire operations centers where strategic decisions get made about where to invest firefighting resources.

Josh Mendelsohn, the founder and managing partner of Hangar, said that the company is straight down the center of the studio’s investment thesis. “Cornea is focused on taking these large datasets, processing them effectively … and then giving [firefighters] as much analytical impact in an output as simple as possible,” he said, noting that “it turns out that in this market the best user experience is a PDF.”

Indeed, one of the major challenges for building in this market is simply the unique dynamic of disaster response compared to, say, enterprise SaaS. “Cornea has had to go through a customer-discovery process,” Mendelsohn said. “It all feels necessary, but what are the right things that require the least amount of behavior change to have impact immediately?” One challenge particularly around firefighting is simply the feedback loop from the field to the team. “Fire is seasonal so we have had to be a bit incremental,” Mendelsohn said.

The team is currently three full-time people plus consultants with Hangar augmenting them with its own studio staff. The company built out its product partially using federal research grants to deepen the science of firefighting, and this year, hopes to work with the Forest Service and state firefighting agencies to get its models out to the frontlines. “There is a human bandwidth problem,” Mendelsohn said. “How do you take limited resources to help [firefighters] go further by using them effectively?”

Early Stage is the premier ‘how-to’ event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear first-hand 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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Real estate tech startup Doma, formerly known as States Title, announced Tuesday it will go public through a merger with SPAC Capitol Investment Corp. V in a deal valued at $3 billion, including debt.

SPACs, often called blank-check companies, are increasingly common. They exist as publicly traded entities in search of a private company to combine with, taking the private entity public without the hassle of an IPO.

When it floats later this year, Doma will trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol DOMA. The transaction is expected to provide up to $645 million in cash proceeds, including a fully committed PIPE of $300 million and up to $345 million of cash held in the trust account of Capitol Investment Corp. V. 

CEO Max Simkoff founded San Francisco-based Doma in September 2016 with the aim of creating a technology-driven solution for “closing mortgages instantly.” While it initially was founded to instantly underwrite title insurance, the company has expanded that same approach to handle “every aspect” of closing and escrow.

Doma has developed patented machine learning technology that it says reduces title processing time from five days to “as little as one minute” and cuts down the entire mortgage closing process “from a 50+ day ordeal to less than a week.” The startup has facilitated over 800,000 real estate closings for lenders such as Chase, Homepoint, Sierra Pacific Mortgage and others.

The name change is designed to more accurately reflect its intention to expand “well beyond” title into areas such as appraisals and home warranties.

Its goal with going public is to be able to “continue to invest in growth, market expansion and new products.”

Anchoring the PIPE include funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Fidelity Management & Research Company LLC, SB Management (a subsidiary of SoftBank Group), Gores, Hedosophia, and Wells Capital. Existing Doma shareholder Lennar has also committed to the PIPE and Spencer Rascoff, co-founder and former CEO of Zillow Group, has committed a personal investment to the PIPE.

Up to approximately $510 million of cash proceeds are expected to be retained by Doma, and existing Doma shareholders will own no less than approximately 80% of the equity of the new combined company, subject to redemptions by the public stockholders of Capitol and payment of transaction expenses.

In mid-February, Doma announced it had closed on $150 million in debt financing from HSCM Bermuda, which had previously invested in the company. And last May, it announced a massive $123 million Series C round of funding at a valuation of $623 million.

Results

The company posted modest growth from 2019 to 2020, seeing its GAAP revenues rise from $358.1 million to $409.8 million. After removing premiums paid to agents, its revenues (“retained premiums and fees”) decreased to $179.8 million in 2019 and $189.7 million in 2020. (For this section we’re leaning on the reported 2020 numbers that are caveated with an “estimated” tag. As it is March, we expect the final 2020 numbers to come in close enough to what was reported as to make us comfortable citing them.)

In 2021 the company also anticipates modest growth, with GAAP revenues estimated at $416.4 million, and its retained revenue figure landing at $226.4 million. More expansive growth is anticipated and sketched out for 2022 and 2023, though as those figures are far in the future we can discount them for now.

Doma also expects its economics to worsen in 2021, with its adjusted gross profit as a percentage of its retained premiums and fees falling from 48.3% last year to 39.5% this year. Of course we’re so far off the GAAP ranch with that metric as to be lost, but it’s worth noting what the company is telling the street about its impending financial performance.

Other metrics are also pointed in a negative direction, with Doma expecting its adjusted EBITDA to fall from -$19.0 million to -$66.6 million in 2021. The company does predict a rosy 2023 adjusted EBITDA number, for whatever stock you want to put in that.

Without discounting costs, Doma’s 2020 net loss of $35.1 million is expected to expand to $103.1 million this year. Still, as with many entities pursuing a public debut via a SPAC, Doma is debuting while it is still sorting out elements of its business as the pandemic starts to diminish in light of increasingly readily available vaccines. It certainly has high hopes for its future.

The SPAC parade

Doma joins the growing number of proptech companies going the public route. On Monday, Compass, the real-estate brokerage startup backed by roughly $1.6 billion in venture funding, filed its S-1. 

In 2020, Social Capital Hedosophia II, the blank-check company associated with investor Chamath Palihapitiya, announced that it would merge with Opendoor, taking the private real estate startup public in the process.

Porch.com also went public in a SPAC deal in December. And, SoftBank-backed View, a Silicon Valley-based smart window company, will complete a recent SPAC merger to be publicly listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange on March 9. The company is expected to debut trading with a market value of $1.6 billion.

Fluid Truck has built an app-based platform that aims to take away the pain and cost of owning or leasing commercial vehicles, all while grabbing market share from established companies like Penske, Ryder and U-Haul. 

Now, it has the capital to help it get there. The Denver-based company said Tuesday it raised $63 million in a Series A funding round to expand its truck-sharing platform, which helps mid-mile and last-mile delivery companies remotely manage an on-demand rental fleet via web or mobile app. Private equity firm Bison Capital led the round, with participation from Ingka Investments (part of Ingka Group, the main Ikea retailer), Sumitomo Corporation of Americas and Fluid Vehicle Owners.  

The investment, its first external round, comes after rapid growth at the four-year-old company. Founder and CEO James Eberhard told TechCrunch that revenue increased 100x in the last two years. That type of growth sounds promising, but the company did not provide a baseline, so it’s hard to judge scale. 

With e-commerce expected to continue to rise at a global 9.5% compound annual growth rate from 2020 to 2025, the demand for accessible trucks for hire might see correlative growth. It’s no surprise that e-commerce is one of the industries Fluid Truck has targeted. 

Fluid Truck, which operates in 25 U.S. markets, operates like the car-sharing company Zipcar, with a commercial bent. Businesses such as moving and e-commerce delivery companies can use the platform to rent trucks. Fluid Truck’s pitch to businesses extends beyond the “you don’t need to buy or lease” argument. The platform also allows delivery companies to dispense with having a manager on staff who would manage, maintain and eventually sell the fleet. 

Businesses eager to outsource the purchasing and managing of their trucks can find fleets for hire in industrial parks and retail areas within Fluid’s service network. 

“You can hop on our platform, rent a truck and be in it in a matter of minutes, which really allows businesses to scale up and scale down,” said Eberhard. “We’re watching our user behavior go from a place where they used to own every vehicle they needed at a time to a place where they’re now grabbing spare capacity off Fluid.”

Eberhard hopes to see that type of supplementary use morph into an end state where companies don’t own a single truck and run solely on Fluid Truck’s platform. 

Fluid Truck argues that its tech stack, which is designed to smooth out the booking and renting process, gives it a competitive edge in a market dominated by the likes of U-Haul, Ryder and or other small depots. Eberhard said the process of going to a depot and waiting in line is slow and sloppy, whereas Fluid Truck’s app makes renting a van as easy as calling an Uber.

“We take all those complexities away and allow people to have a virtual fleet,” Eberhard told TechCrunch.

Fluid Truck’s fleet is made up of thousands — and soon to be tens of thousands — of cargo vans, pickup trucks, large box trucks and various other vehicles. The company also claims to have the largest medium-duty EV rental fleet in the United States, which it continues to expand as it works with OEMs to increase fleet capacity. Electric vehicles still make up less than 1% of its total portfolio due to the slower adoption of EVs on the commercial side. 

Eberhard wants Fluid to be a dominant force in the trucking industry. But Fluid Truck is not the only truck sharing app on the streets. Competitors GoShare and Bungii have similar offerings.

This sizable round could provide an advantage as it tries to become the household name in digital truck sharing. Perhaps, as importantly, the company has the attention and investment of Ikea. 

“This is another step in enabling Ikea retail to provide last mile delivery services to our customers, continue to improve on our customer promise, while also reducing our environmental footprint,” Krister Mattsson, managing director of Ingka Investments said in a statement, a comment that suggests a future partnership with Fluid Truck. 

With this latest capital round, Fluid’s goal is to (you guessed it) scale outwards, with a focus on expanding the team, adding dozens more markets in the U.S. and preparing to take Fluid into the EU and Canada. 

Fluid Truck will also be investing back into its own tech stack, which includes an internal proprietary telematics platform to predict and automate servicing and maintenance of the company’s fleet. 

Early Stage is the premier ‘how-to’ event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear first-hand 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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SpineZone is a startup that creates personalized exercise programs and treatment for neck and back pain. The company uses an online platform and in-person clinics to deliver a curriculum that, ideally, helps patients avoid the need for prescription drugs, injections and surgeries, and providers then avoid the cost of all of the above. Co-founded by brothers Kian Raiszadeh and Kamshad Raiszadeh, the company tells TechCrunch that it has raised $12 million in a Series A round led by Polaris Partners and Providence Ventures, with participation from Martin Ventures.

At its core, SpineZone is a virtual physical therapy platform augmented by in-person clinics. The latter bit is important because it takes a video repository, which has health outcomes baked into it, and helps get those same users some real-life support.

Patients can log onto the site, either through smartphone or laptop, and then answer a series of questions around pain and risk factors. Then, patients can go through a series of exercises. These exercises are created in tandem with professionals, and are based on peer-reviewed and evidence-based articles on musculoskeletal health.

Beyond this digital archive of videos, SpineZone offers an in-person clinic option to help patients practice these exercises. Off of this strategy, the startup claims that it has “1 million lives under management.”

SpineZone’s value proposition is that it helps payers and providers, whether that be employers, clinics or health plans such as Cigna or Aetna, avoid placing their patients in surgeries, which are expensive. By taking care of pain issues before they bubble up, SpineZone says that its current partners have been able to have a 50% reduction in surgery rate (it’s worth noting that COVID-19 could also play a role in this because it is high-risk to enter a medical facility).

Partners are happy because footing the bill of a non-operative procedure is remarkably cheaper than a non-operative procedure.

The cost saving that a medical center could endure can be in the millions. For example, the Sharp Community Medical Group saved $3.4 million in cost savings after working with SpineZone for two years.

SpineZone’s business model is a smidge more complicated than your classic SaaS fee. For example, it charges a clinic based on the number of members it serves per month, and also shares in the downside. For example, if SpineZone promises to get a clinic to $12 million in spend from $15 million, and the cost ends up being $17 million, the company will pay the clinic a portion of the difference. Alternatively, if SpineZone got the clinic to $10 million, even below estimates, it shares in the upside.

SpineZone joins a cohort of health tech startups that focus on musculoskeletal conditions. Venture-backed competitors include Peerwell, Force Therapeutics and Hinge Health, which was most recently valued at $3 billion, with plans to go public.

In order to win, many startups, SpineZone including, need value-based care to replace fee-for-service care. Value-based care is the idea that doctors are paid for outcomes instead of the number of times you enter a doctor’s office. The end goal is that this format creates monetary incentives around getting to an outcome faster: If a doctor is going to make $30,000 on fixing a knee, regardless of whether it takes two appointments or 20 appointments, they might as well do a more thorough job upon check-up instead of elongating the process. The flipside of this, of course, is that doctors might optimize for outcome volume and speed rather than the quality of the result itself.

While SpineZone’s early traction is promising, the healthcare ecosystem still has a ways to go before value-based models take precedence. Right now, Kian Raiszadeh estimates that 10 to 20% of revenue in a medical center comes from value-based care. SpineZone is projecting that it will get to 50% of revenue in the near future.

“And that’s the biggest evolution and tallest lift that we’re expecting,” he said.

Early Stage is the premiere ‘how-to’ event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear first-hand 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, legal, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session also has audience participation built-in – there’s ample time included in each for audience questions and discussion.

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Over the past decade, venture capital has become synonymous with entrepreneurship. Founders from around the world arrive in Silicon Valley with visions of record-setting A rounds and billion-dollar valuations. But what if you don’t have unicorn dreams — or you don’t want to pursue VC money?

Bootstrapping a SaaS company is not only possible — I believe it’s a saner, more sustainable way to build and scale a business. To be clear, bootstrapping isn’t always easy. It requires patience and focus, but the freedom to create a meaningful product, on your terms, is worth more than even the biggest VC check.

I started my company, JotForm, in 2006. We’ve grown steadily from a simple web tool into a product that serves more than 8 million users — without taking a dime in outside funding. We’re profitable in an industry with big-name competitors like Google.

Most importantly, I still love this company and its mission, and I want the same for my fellow entrepreneurs. If you’re a SaaS founder who’s wary of VC funding, here are my best bootstrapping tips.

Keep your day job

Success stories from founders who leap blindly into business without resources or relevant experience are compelling, but they’re the exception, not the rule. Working inside another organization can build your skills, your network and even inspire great product ideas.

After finishing college with a computer science degree, I worked as a developer for a New York media company. The editors always needed custom web forms, which were tedious and time consuming to build. I kept thinking, “There has to be a better way.”

That daily frustration led me to start JotForm — but I didn’t leave my job right away. I stayed with the media firm for five years and worked on my product on the side. By the time I was ready to go all in, I had the confidence, experience and savings I needed.

Many of the world’s biggest companies began as side projects, including Twitter, Craigslist, Slack, Instagram, Trello, and a little venture called Apple. If your day job doesn’t pay enough to fund the early stages of your business, consider a side gig or consulting work. There are so many ways to set yourself up for success without the pressure of VC cash or selling a chunk of your business.

Know you’re not alone

The exact numbers shift every year, but data compiled by Fundable show that only 0.05% of U.S. startups are backed by VCs. Another 0.91% are funded by angel investors. The vast majority, at 57%, are funded by credit and personal loans, while 38% get funding from friends and family.

It may feel like most founders raise multimillion-dollar rounds, but that’s simply not the case. It’s also good to remember that securing VC money is complicated and time consuming. You can spend months taking meetings and presenting the perfect deck — and still leave empty handed. Be patient and stick to your own path.

Measure profits, not popularity

SaaS founders often emphasize vanity metrics, like user acquisitions and total downloads. These numbers can measure short-term popularity, but they don’t reveal how users and customers feel about your product — or your long-term potential.

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Skydio has raised $170 million in a Series D funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz’s Growth Fund. That pushes it into unicorn territory, with $340 million in total funding and a post-money valuation north of $1 billion. Skydio’s fresh capital comes on the heels of its expansion last year into the enterprise market, and it intends to use the considerable pile of cash to help it expand globally and accelerate product development.

In July of last year, Skydio announced its $100 million Series C financing, and also debuted the X2, its first dedicated enterprise drone. The company also launched a suite of software for commercial and enterprise customers, its first departure from the consumer drone market where it had been focused prior to that raise since its founding in 2014.

Skydio’s debut drone, the R1, received a lot of accolades and praise for its autonomous capabilities. Unlike other consumer drones at the time, including from recreational drone maker DJI, the R1 could track a target and film them while avoiding obstacles without any human intervention required. Skydio then released the Skydio 2 in 2019, its second drone, cutting off more than half the price while improving on it its autonomous tracking and video capabilities.

Late last year, Skydio brought on additional senior talent to help it address enterprise and government customers, including a software development lead who had experience at Tesla and 3D printing company Carbon. Skydio also hired two Samsara executives at the same time to work on product and engineering. Samsara provides a platform for managing cloud-based fleet operations for large enterprises.

The applications of Skydio’s technology for commercial, public sector and enterprise organizations are many and varied. Already, the company works with public utilities, fire departments, construction firms and more to do work including remote inspection, emergency response, urban planning and more. Skydio’s U.S. pedigree also puts it in prime position to capitalize on the growing interest in applications from the defense sector.

a16z previously led Skydio’s Series A round. Other investors who participated in this Series D include Lines Capital, Next47, IVP and UP.Partners.