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While the technology and business world worked towards the weekend, developer operations (DevOps) firm GitLab filed to go public. Before we get into our time off, we need to pause, digest the company’s S-1 filing, and come to some early conclusions.

GitLab competes with GitHub, which Microsoft purchased for $7.5 billion back in 2018.

The company is notable for its long-held, remote-first stance, and for being more public with its metrics than most unicorns — for some time, GitLab had a November 18, 2020 IPO target in its public plans, to pick an example. We also knew when it crossed the $100 million recurring revenue threshold.

The company’s IPO has therefore been long expected. In its last primary transaction, GitLab raised $286 million at a post-money valuation of $2.75 billion, per Pitchbook data. The same information source also notes that GitLab executed a secondary transaction earlier this year worth $195 million, which gave the company a $6 billion valuation.

Let’s parse GitLab’s growth rate, its final pre-IPO scale, its SaaS metrics, and then ask if we think it can surpass its most recent private-market price. Sound good? Let’s rock.

The GitLab S-1

GitLab intends to list on the Nasdaq under the symbol “GTLB.” Its IPO filing lists a placeholder $100 million raise estimate, though that figure will change when the company sets an initial price range for its shares. Its fiscal year ends January 31, meaning that its quarters are offset from traditional calendar periods by a single month.

Let’s start with the big numbers.

In its fiscal year ended January 2020, GitLab posted revenues of $81.2 million, gross profit of $71.9 million, an operating loss of $128.4 million, and a modestly greater net loss of $130.7 million.

And in the year ended January 31, 2021, GitLab’s revenue rose roughly 87% to $152.2 million from a year earlier. The company’s gross profit rose around 86% to $133.7 million, and operating loss widened nearly 67% to $213.9 million. Its net loss totaled $192.2 million.

This paints a picture of a SaaS company growing quickly at scale, with essentially flat gross margins (88%). Growth has not been inexpensive either — GitLab spent more on sales and marketing than it generated in gross profit in the past two fiscal years.

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When people are uncertain, they look to others for behavioral guidance. This is called social proof, which is a physiological effect that influences your decisions every day, whether you know it or not.

At Demand Curve and through our agency Bell Curve, we’ve helped over 1,000 startups improve their ability to convert cold traffic into repeat customers. We’ve found that effectively using social proof can lead to up to 400% improvement in conversion.

This post shares exactly how to collect and use social proof to help grow your SaaS, e-commerce, or B2B startup.

How businesses use social proof

Have you ever stopped to check out a restaurant because it had a large line of people out front? That wasn’t by chance.

It’s common for restaurants to limit the size of their reception area. This forces people to wait outside, and the line signals to people walking past that the restaurant is so good it’s worth waiting for.

But for Internet-based businesses, social proof looks a bit different. Instead of people lining up outside your storefront, you’re going to need to create social proof that resonates with your target customers — they’ll be looking for different clues to signal whether doing business with your company is “normal” or “acceptable” behavior.

Social proof for B2B

People love to compare themselves to others, and this is especially true when it comes to the customers of B2B businesses. If your competitor is able to get a contract with a company that you’ve been nurturing for months, you’d be upset (and want to know how they did it).

Therefore, B2B social proof is most effective when you display the logos of companies you do business with. This signals to people checking out your website that other businesses trust you to deliver on your offer. The more noteworthy or respected the logos on your site, the stronger the influence will be.

Social proof for SaaS

Depending on the type of SaaS product or service you’re selling, you’ll either be selling to an individual or to a business. The strategy remains the same, but the channels will vary slightly.

The most effective way to generate social proof for SaaS products is through positive reviews from trusted sources. For consumer SaaS, that will be through influential bloggers and YouTubers speaking highly of your product. For B2B SaaS, it will be through positive ratings on review sites like G2 or Capterra. Proudly display these testimonials on your site.

Social proof for e-commerce brands

E-commerce brands will typically sell directly to an individual through ads, but because anyone can purchase an ad, you’re going to need to signal trust in other ways. The most common way we see e-commerce brands building social proof is by nurturing an organic social media following on Instagram or TikTok.

This signals to new customers that you’ve gotten the seal of approval from others like them. Having an audience also allows you to showcase user-generated content from your existing customers.

How to collect social proof

There are five avenues startups can tap to collect social proof:

Product reviewsTestimonialsPublic relations and earned mediaInfluencersSocial media and community

Here are a few tactics we’ve used to help startups build social proof.

Apple is planning to remove developer access to important user data as part of its iOS 15 release on Monday, leaving email marketers in a dilemma about how they will figure out metrics. To find out how the industry is approaching this problem, we spoke with Vivek Sharma, CEO of Movable Ink, a software company that helps marketers act on the data they’re collecting.

This conversation builds on our Extra Crunch post from August exploring how email marketers can prepare for Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection changes.

The game-changer for email marketers with this update is that as an Apple Mail user, you’ll have the option to hide your IP address.

How can marketers pivot their tactics to remain in control of their metrics? Sharma feels we’ll see more focus on downstream metrics rather than the open rate — on clicks, conversions and revenue. “That sounds great and everything, but you have less of that data. But by definition, that funnel kind of narrows; there are fewer people to get to at that point, so it might take you longer to know if something is working or not working for you.”

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Sharma says zero-party data is something that businesses have been focused on. “There are two components: There’s ‘open’ as a metric, and there’s some of the information you’re getting at open time, like the IP address, the time of day, and the inferred weather. Things like the IP address, time of date, etc. are perceived as data leakage. These are just a couple of the data points that marketers will lose access to. Therefore they are using first and zero-party data which they have already been investing in.”

The challenge, according to Sharma, is: How can marketers collect zero-party data in an interesting, visually appealing way, and then personalize its contents for every customer at scale?

One way that Movable Ink has collected zero-party data is displayed below:

Sharma says, “Everything in here is a polling question: ‘What do you typically shop for?’ ‘What’s your shoe size?’ And they’re giving you loyalty points in return, so there’s an exchange of value happening here. They’re learning about you in a clear way and giving you an easy way to engage with the brand you’re interested in.”

Once you have the data, the question is: How do you use it? Below we see an example from JetBlue.

Sharma outlines three takeaways from iOS 15 for email marketers:

Focus on down-funnel metrics like clicks and conversions — that’s what it really comes down to and it’s the truest indicator of engagement.Invest in your zero and first-party data assets. True personalization is what people experience and what they see. You can do that from your zero and first-party assets.Email is a great channel to engage your customers, because it’s a mature one that’s been invested in. Email is an awesome channel for building a one-to-one relationship with your customer, and far more. It has gone through lots of changes over the last 10 or 15 years. The industry will evolve and we’ll find that balance of privacy and personalization.

Ginkgo Bioworks, a synthetic biology company now valued at around $15 billion, begins trading on the New York Stock Exchange today.

Ginkgo’s market debut is one of the largest in biotech history. It’s expected to raise about $1.6 billion for the company. It’s also one of the biggest SPAC deals done to date — Ginkgo is going public through a merger with Soaring Eagle Acquisition Corp., which was announced in May. 

Shares opened at $11.15 each this morning under the ticker DNA — biotech dieharders will recognize it as the former ticker used by Genentech. 

The exterior of the NYSE is decked out in Ginkgo décor. The imagery is clearly sporting Jurassic Park themes, as MIT Tech Review’s Antonio Regalado pointed out. It’s probably intentional: Jason Kelly, the CEO of Ginkgo Bioworks, has been re-reading “Jurassic Park” this week, he tells TechCrunch. 

The décor also sports a company motto: “Grow everything.”

Ginkgo was founded in 2009, and now bills itself as a synthetic biology platform. That’s essentially premised on the idea that one day, we’ll use cells to “grow everything,” and Ginkgo’s plan is to be that platform used to do that growing. 

Kelly, who often uses language borrowed from computing to describe his company, likens DNA to code. Ginkgo, he says, aims to “program cells like you can program computers.” Ultimately, those cells can be used to make stuff: like fragrances, flavors, materials, drugs or food products. 

The biggest lingering question over Ginkgo, ever since the SPAC deal was announced, has centered on its massively high valuation. When Moderna, now a household name thanks to its COVID-19 vaccines, went public in 2018, the company was valued at $7.5 billion. Ginkgo’s valuation is double that number. 

“I think that surprises people to be honest,” Kelly says. 

How is Ginkgo going to make money? 

Ginkgo’s massive valuation seems even starker when you look at its existing revenues. SEC documents show that the company pulled in $77 million in revenue in 2020, which increased to about $88 million in the first six months of 2021 (per an August investor call). The company has also reported losses: including $126.6 million in December 2020 and $119.3 million in 2019. 

Ginkgo is aiming to increase revenue a significant amount in 2021. SEC documents initially noted that the company aimed to draw about $150 million in revenue in 2021, but the August earning call updated that total for the year to over $175 million. 

Ginkgo aims to make money in two ways: first it contracts with manufacturers during the research and development phase (i.e. while the company works out how to manufacture a cell that spits out a certain fragrance, bio-based nylon or meatless burger). That process happens in Ginkgo’s “foundry,” a massive factory for bioengineering projects. 

This source of money is already starting to flow. Ginkgo reported $59 million in foundry revenue for 2020, and anticipates $100 million in 2021, per the August investor call. 

This revenue, though, isn’t covering the full costs of Ginkgo’s operations, according to the information shared by the company in SEC documents. It is covering an increasing share, though, and as Ginkgo scales up its platform, costs will come down. Based on fees alone, Kelly projects Ginkgo will break even by 2024 or 2025. 

The second type of revenue comes from royalties, milestone payments or, in some cases, equity stakes in the companies that go on to sell products, like fragrances or meatless burgers, made using Ginkgo’s facilities or know-how. It’s this source of income that will make up the vast majority of the company’s future worth, according to its expectations. 

Once the product is made and marketed by another company, it requires little to no more work on Ginkgo’s part — all the company does is collect cash. 

The company is often hesitant to incorporate these earnings into projections, because they rely on other companies bringing products to market. That means it’s hard to know for sure when these downstream payments will emerge. “In our models, we are very sensitive that, at the end of the day, they’re not our products. I cannot predict when Roche might bring a drug to market and give me my milestones,” says Kelly. 

Kelly says there’s evidence this model will start to work in the near-term. 

Ginkgo earned a “bolus” milestone payment of 1.5 million shares of The Cronos Group, a cannabis company, for developing a commercially viable, lab-grown rare cannabinoid called CBG for commercial use (there are seven more in strains development, says Kelly). These milestone payments (in cash or shares) are earned when a company achieves some predetermined goal using Ginkgo’s platform. 

Ginkgo has also worked with Aldevron to manufacture an enzyme critical to the production of mRNA vaccines, and plans to collect royalty payments from that relationship — though no foundry fees were collected from this project. 

Finally, Ginkgo has negotiated an equity stake in Motif Foodworks, a spinout company based on its technology. That company has so far raised about $226 million, and will aim to launch a lab-grown beef product developed at Ginkgo’s foundry, paying Ginkgo the aforementioned foundry fees already for this contribution.

“The biggest value driver” of Ginkgo, according to Kelly

This rich source of cash will depend a lot on the outside contractor’s ability to manufacture and sell products made using Ginkgo’s platform. This opens the company up to some risk that’s beyond its control. Maybe, for instance, it turns people don’t want bio-manufactured meat as much as many anticipated — that means some types of downstream payments may not materialize. 

Kelly says he’s not particularly worried about this. Even if one particular program fails, he’s planning on having so many programs running that one or two are bound to succeed. 

“I’m just sorta like: some will work, some won’t work. Some will take a year, some will take three years. It doesn’t really matter, as long as everybody is working with us,” he says. “Apple doesn’t stress about what apps are going to be the next big app in the app store,” he continues.  

One key metric to watch for Ginkgo going forward will be how many new cell programs they’re managing to close. So far, Ginkgo has added 30 programs this year, says Kelly. Last year, there were 50 programs. 

Remember: Some of the projects are Ginkgo spinouts, like Motif Foodworks, not customers that come to the platform on their own. And historically, the number of companies Ginkgo has partnered with has been a point of criticism. Per SEC documents, the majority of revenue came from two large partners in 2020 — though Kelly told Business Insider that this was a pandemic-related downturn. 

The more programs Ginkgo has, the more it becomes insulated from the success or failure of any one product. Plus it’s a sign that people are at least using the “app store” for biology. 

“The biggest value driver of Ginkgo is how quickly we add programs,” Kelly says. 

Companies typically have to settle on strategies that align with their customers, employees, investors, and regulators. The more they know about how the other side will decide, the clearer their own strategies become.

If regulators always prefer choice for consumers, then it is easy for a platform to allow multiple payment choices: Shopify allows multiple payment options from its partners, Apple doesn’t.

By regulatory intervention, it will have to now.

Nash equilibrium and Netflix time

Nash equilibrium is a fascinating, post-facto explanation for some of the interesting decisions you will often see in business.

In simple terms, Nash equilibrium states that if you have clarity on the other side’s decision, you can make yours without regret. In other words, there is no incentive to change strategy once each side knows what the optimal position of the other side is, in their combined transaction.

I see this playing out every weekend at home. I don’t mind reading a book alone or watching Netflix with my kid, but when I am available for Netflix and my kid decides to read a book, it is a bummer.

DTCs, DNVBs and game theory

In DTC, how companies decide their omnichannel strategy depends on how well they know what their customers’ choices are and what their ideal strategy will be. In many transactions, constraints are actually good forcing functions — they narrow down choices and help you arrive at an equilibrium faster and cheaper.

The marketing and public-market filing languages make for a fascinating read into the minds of companies.

When Warby Parker filed its IPO prospectus last month, the company referred to its digitally-native status in the past tense. The model was effectively flipped in 2020, as its share of online sales to total sales dropped from 65% to 40%. Meanwhile, its physical store count increased from 126 to 145.

Earlier this year, Instacart‘s chief financial officer Sagar Sanghvi departed from the on-demand grocery delivery company after nearly six years. And now he’s returning to his investing roots. Specifically, Sanghvi has joined Accel as a partner focused on global growth-stage consumer and enterprise investments.

Prior to becoming CFO of Instacart, Sanghvi served as the company’s vice president of finance and strategy. Interestingly, when he became CFO of Instacart in 2019, he was succeeding Ravi Gupta, who left the company to join Sequoia Capital as a partner on its growth team.

Sanghvi and Gupta worked together as investors at KKR (after Sanghvi had worked as an analyst for Goldman Sachs), so it is notable they are following similar career paths of first working in finance and then becoming operators before transitioning into VC roles. Both joined Instacart in 2015. And Gupta is the one who introduced Sanghvi to Accel’s Miles Clements years ago.

When Sanghvi joined Instacart, it had approximately 300 employees. By the time he’d left earlier this year, it had more than 1,500.

“I’ve been through quite the roller coaster of ups and downs along the way. It was the classic Silicon Valley journey. During my time there, a few crazy things happened,” he told TechCrunch. “ Amazon bought Whole Foods. We experienced the COVID pandemic and lockdowns, which led to an amazing wave of demand. It was an interesting time to be navigating the company.”

And while Sanghvi says he would definitely rather see a business be smaller “than have COVID happen to the world,” it was a time where he learned a lot in helping grow the company.

One of the things Sanghvi worked on during his time at Instacart was a $200 million venture round in October 2020 that valued the company at $17.7 billion. (Since then it raised another $265 million at a $39 billion valuation.) In fact, during his tenure, the company raised more than $2 billion.

But now, Sanghvi will be the one investing in other companies’ rounds — out of Accel’s Palo Alto office.

While his Instacart experience is clearly relevant to the consumer space, Sanghvi said he’ll be working with not just consumer-focused startups, but also a lot of enterprise solutions.

“One of the things that drew me to Miles and the team was the experience and success Accel as a firm has had investing in all different types of companies within the technology sector and so I’m hoping to diversify my experience,” he told TechCrunch.

Clements praised what he described as Sanghvi’s “humility and versatility.”

“He’s done everything from raising $2 billion of capital to being in the minutiae of evaluating back office automation software. He has led a company that is on its way to being an iconic consumer brand, but he’s also been a media investor at KKR,” Clements said. “He guided Instacart through some massive recent fundraises but only because he has also helped navigate through some previous existential challenges. So he brings a lot of natural empathy to founders and entrepreneurs.”

For his part, Sanghvi is eager to start investing as part of the Accel team.

When deciding to move to the venture world, he said, he was looking for a “very well-known brand” that invested across at all stages. He found that in Accel, he said.

“One of the things that was important to me was to find the type of people who really care about the success of companies, and in every person I met at Accel, I could see they took that responsibility very seriously,” Sanghvi told TechCrunch.

He officially started in his new role last week, so he’s actively scoping out investments as I type.

More spacecraft will be sent to orbit this year than ever before in human history, and the number of satellite launches is only anticipated to increase through the rest of the decade. Under these crowded conditions, being able to maneuver satellites in space and deorbit them when they reach the end of their useful life will be key.

Enter Aurora Propulsion Technologies. It’s one of a handful of startups that has emerged in the past few years to help simplify the problem of spacecraft propulsion. Since its founding in 2018, the Finnish company has developed two products — a tiny thruster engine and a plasma braking system — and will be testing both in an in-orbit demonstration in the fourth quarter of this year. Aurora’s activities have caught the eye of investors: the company just closed a €1.7 million ($2 million) seed round to bring its technology to market.

The round was led by Lithuanian VC firm Practica Capital, with additional participation from the state-owned private equity company TESI (Finnish Industry Investment Ltd.) and The Flying Object, a fund from Kluz Ventures. Individual investors also participated.

Aurora’s first in-orbit demonstration, Aurora Sat-1, will be heading to space on a Rocket Lab rideshare mission, the company announced last month. On that satellite will be two modules. The first module will contain six Aurora “resistojet” engines, designed to help small spacecraft adjust their attitude (the satellite’s orientation, not its mood) and de-tumble. Aurora will also test its Plasma Brake technology, which could be used to de-orbit satellites or even to conduct deep space missions.

Each resistojet thruster comes in at just around one centimeter long, and it moves the spacecraft using microliters of water and propellant. The six thrusters are distributed around the satellite in such a way to facilitate movement in virtually any direction, and the thruster can also modulate the temperature of the water and the strength of the puff of steam that’s discharged to generate movement.

Aurora CEO Roope Takala, who previously worked for Nokia, likened the innovations in weight and size in the space industry — which we see in the resistojet — to what happened to cell phones and computers 20 years ago. “The industry moves very slow,” he said in a recent interview with TechCrunch. “In the old space era, it took a quarter to develop a rocket engine — that would be a quarter of a century. Now, it takes two quarters of a year. That’s what we did.”

The Plasma Brake uses an electrically charged microtether to generate a lump of protons to generate drag. That’s ideal for de-orbiting a spacecraft, but interestingly (and counterintuitively), the Plasma Brake could also be used for traveling away from the planet, Takala said. That’s because when you go outside the Earth’s magnetosphere, the Plasma Brake becomes unstable and moves with solar wind (which is also plasma). “The same product can jump onto that flow of plasma from the sun and extract energy from that,” Takala explained. “In that context we can use it as an interplanetary traveling tool.”

Theoretically, if a spacecraft was equipped with multiple tethers extending different directions, it could be used to rotate and guide the spacecraft, like a sailboat, he added. This technology is only scalable to a certain degree, however, so don’t expect it to be sending a crewed spacecraft into deep space anytime soon. That’s mostly due to limitations in the material strength of the Plasma Brake tethers, but the tech can be used for satellites up to around 1,000 kilograms.

“That’s our future. That’s where we’re aiming,” Takala said. “We’re focused now for the short term on low Earth orbit with the Plasma Brake and the attitude control [resistojet], and later on when the moon businesses kick off as they are slowly starting to do, then we’ll probably be looking at that way.”

The Plasma Brake and resistojet thruster would need to be put on spacecraft before they launch to orbit, but Aurora is in conversation with other companies of the potential of in-orbit installation of Plasma Brakes for existing space junk. Looking to the short term, the company is going to use the funding to productize the technology for low Earth orbit and to serialize its production, as well as to add features to the products to equip them for satellites larger than CubeSats.

In the longer term, Aurora has a vision of conducting missions in deep space. “We started off from the idea that we want to make a technology that fits into a really small spacecraft, [and] travels really fast so that we can catch up with the Voyager probes,” Takala said.

“First to the moon and then to Mars, Venus, and then one day we may be able to catch up with the Voyagers and take a big trip.”

Major gains in online advertising have boosted valuations for adtech startups since the pandemic began, but one insider says investors are missing the party.

“Adtech is having a moment,” writes industry veteran Casey Saran.

“And while much of the oxygen has been soaked up by large legacy companies hitting the public market, there have been smaller deals that indicate a hunger for better creative adtech.”

Saran shares five reasons “why VCs should consider ratcheting up their investment into adtech startups building the next generation of creative tools.”

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

On Wednesday, September 22 at 9:05 a.m PT, I’m moderating “The Path for Underrepresented Entrepreneurs,” a panel discussion at Disrupt 2021.

Our conversation will examine some of the unique challenges facing founders from historically marginalized groups, the strategies they used along the way, and the disruptive changes we need to consider if we want to see fundamental change.

I’ll be speaking with:

Hana Mohan, founder & CEO, MagicBellLeslie Feinzaig, founder & CEO, Female Founders AllianceStephen Bailey, co-founder & CEO, ExecOnline

I hope you’ll attend; we’ll take audience questions after our discussion concludes. Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch this week, and have a great weekend.

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

5 things you need to win your first customer

Congratulations on shipping your product, but how much do you know about your target customers?

Companies that haven’t created an ideal customer profile and performed a SWOT analysis are making big bets on guesswork and intuition. Sometimes that works out, but more frequently, it leads to tears.

In a guest post that walks readers through the fundamentals of creating customer personas that map to your company’s goals, Grammarly product marketing lead Bryan Dsouza shares five basic requirements for customer acquisition.

“Understanding and executing on these things can guarantee you that first customer win, provided you do them well and with sincerity,” he says.

“Your investors will also see the fruits of your labor and be comforted knowing their dollars are at good work.”

4 ways to leverage ROAS to triple lead generation

In school, it’s highly unethical to copy someone else’s work and pass it off as your own. In business, however, it is expected.

Xiaoyun TU, global director of demand generation at Brightpearl, wrote a comprehensive guide for how to use the key metric of return on advertising spend (ROAS) to triple your company’s lead generation.

“A ‘good’ ROAS score is different for each company and campaign,” she says. “If your figure isn’t where you’d like it to be, you can leverage ROAS data to create targeted campaigns and personalized experiences.”

3 strategies to make adopting new HR tech easier for hiring managers

Most of us prefer to trust our instincts instead of letting automated tools help us make decisions, particularly when it comes to hiring. But that’s not smart.

If your startup relies on an ad hoc hiring process, you’re probably not tracking candidates properly, there’s likely little consistency regarding how they’re treated, and bias can play a major role in who gets hired.

It’s fine to be skeptical of automated hiring tools — but not ignorant.

What could stop the startup boom?

In yesterday’s edition of The Exchange, Anna Heim and Alex Wilhelm speculated about the conditions that could combine to cool off a hot startup market currently fueled by low interest rates and a sweeping digital transformation.

“From where we stand, the factors underpinning the startup fundraising boom appear solid and unlikely to unwind overnight. Still, no golden period shines forever, and even today’s luster will eventually tarnish.”

Intuit’s $12B Mailchimp acquisition is about expanding its small business focus

Before news broke this week that Intuit was acquiring Mailchimp for $12 billion, the ’80s-born fintech giant’s biggest buy was spending $7.1 billion last year for Credit Karma.

In the last few years, Mailchimp “has been expanding upon its core email marketing functionality” with offerings like web design and CRM, writes enterprise reporter Ron Miller.

The industry watchers he interviewed said the move signals Intuit’s interest in acquiring and serving more SMB customers with a variety of tools:

Laurie McCabe, co-founder and partner, SMB GroupBrent Leary, founder and principal analyst, CRM EssentialsHolger Mueller, analyst, Constellation Research

Forge’s SPAC deal is a bet on unicorn illiquidity

“One of my favorite long-term issues with the late-stage startup market is that it is far better at creating value than it is at finding an exit point for that accreted value,” Alex Wilhelm writes for The Exchange. “More simply, the startup market is excellent at creating unicorns but somewhat poor at taking them public.”

That’s good news for Forge Global, a technology startup that operates a market for secondary transactions in private companies, with Alex dubbing its plans to go public via a SPAC combination “perfectly reasonable.”

Dear Sophie: Should I apply for citizenship if I have a conviction?

Dear Sophie,

At Burning Man a few years ago, I was arrested and charged with a misdemeanor for smoking marijuana in public (in my car) and driving under the influence.

I currently have a green card and want to apply for U.S. citizenship next year.

Can I? If so, how should I handle my criminal record?

— Remorseful About the Reefer

Atlanta’s sundry startups join in global VC funding boom

Alex Wilhelm and Anna Heim continued their tour of U.S. cities after hitting up Chicago and Boston in recent weeks.

This time, they dug into Atlanta’s booming startup scene, which is seeing record capital inflows.

“The picture that forms is one of a city enjoying a rising tide of venture activity, boosted by some local dynamics that may have helped some of its earlier-stage companies scale for cheaper than they might have in other markets,” they write.

Natasha and Mary Ann and Alex were all aboard this week under the guidance of Chris and Grace, which meant we had the full team. And speaking of teams, Mary Ann is joining the Friday show on a weekly basis now. She’s been a friend for years, and a colleague now twice-over for Natasha and Alex and we could not be more excited.

That personal news aside, here’s the rundown for today’s show!

Funding rounds in the logistics and infra markets: We went physical-world with our funding round roundup this week. BridgeLinx put together the largest seed round in Pakistan’s history, Releaf is doing incredibly interesting agtech work in Nigeria and Stord’s huge round from earlier in the week brought us to Atlanta.And oh boy has Atlanta had a week. Extra Crunch did a deep dive into the city’s superlative startup fundraising in recent quarters, and, of course, one of its home-grown startups sold to Intuit for $12 billion just a few days ago. We had a few thoughts on the Intuit-Mailchimp transaction, even if we tried to steer clear of territory that we’ve already tread. For more about the controversy, Business Insider wrote about how some Mailchimp employees are reacting to the deal.From there we turned to a layoff story. Casper, the DTC mattress company that is now public, had another round of layoffs that cut three C-suite executives. It brought us into a conversation about how Apple’s tracking updates are impacting startups in this category more broadly, and if more layoffs are on the horizon. And then there were IPOs to discuss. Natasha talked us through the news that Quizlet may go public soon, which meant we had to chat edtech for a minute. Rounding out the Going Public conversation was notes on both Toast and Freshworks. Alex does not apologize for his lame joke, we hasten to add.

Disrupt is next week, so expect some possible changes to the regular Equity show lineup if the news cycle gets dicey. Hugs!

Startups are raising record sums around the world, thanks to several contributing factors. As The Exchange explored yesterday, historically low interest rates have helped venture capitalists raise more capital than ever, to pick an example.

Low rates have helped startups in another manner: As yields fell for certain assets, investors chased returns by betting on growth. And in recent years, the investing classes turned their attention to public software companies, bidding up the value of their revenue to record highs.

This raised the worth of startups in general terms, and private tech companies’ comps enjoyed a steady, upward climb in the value of their revenues. If the value of a dollar of SaaS revenue was worth $1 one year and $2 the next, the repricing was good for private companies even if we were tracking the metrics from the perspective of public companies.

The free ride could be ending.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

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I’ve held back from covering the value of software (SaaS, largely) revenues for a few months after spending a bit too much time on it in preceding quarters — when VCs begin to point out that you could just swap out numbers quarter to quarter and write the same post, it’s time for a break. But the value of software revenues posted a simply incredible run, and I can’t say “no” to a chart.

The pace at which software revenues were repriced upwards in the last few years is simply astounding. Per the Bessemer Cloud Index, back in 2016, the median revenue multiple for public SaaS companies was around 5x. When 2018 began, median SaaS multiples had expanded to around 7x.

That’s a 40% climb in pricing, but it proved to be just a foretaste of the feast to come.

By the end of 2019, the median figure had appreciated to around the 9x mark. And today it has shot to just under 18x. That is why software companies have been able to raise so much money, earlier, and in larger chunks. Every dollar of recurring revenue they sold was worth $5 in market cap in mid-2016. At the end of 2019, that same dollar of revenue was worth $9. And today, for the median public software company, it’s valued at around $18.

There are nuances to the data, but we care less about exacting definitions than the directional change it describes: The median value of SaaS revenues more than tripled from 2016 to 2021. That’s an insane amount of growth.

Aircover raised $3 million in seed funding to continue developing its real-time sales intelligence platform.

Defy Partners led the round with participation from Firebolt Ventures, Flex Capital, Ridge Ventures and a group of angel investors.

The company, headquartered in the Bay Area, aims to give sales teams insights relevant to closing the sale as they are meeting with customers. Aircover’s conversational AI software integrates with Zoom and automates parts of the sales process to lead to more effective conversations.

“One of the goals of launching the Zoom SDK was to provide developers with the tools they need to create valuable and engaging experiences for our mutual customers and integrations ecosystem,” said Zoom’s CTO Brendan Ittelson via email. “Aircover’s focus on building sales intelligence directly into the meeting, to guide customer-facing teams through the entire sales cycle, is the type of innovation we had envisioned when we set out to create a broader platform.”

Aircover’s founding team of Andrew Levy, Alex Young and Andrew’s brother David Levy worked together at Apteligent, a company co-founded and led by Andrew Levy, that was sold to VMware in 2017.

Chatting about pain points on the sales process over the years, Levy said it felt like the solution was always training the sales team more. However, by the time everyone was trained, that information would largely be out-of-date.

Instead, they created Aircover to be a software tool on top of video conferencing that performs real-time transcription of the conversation and then analysis to put the right content in front of the sales person at the right time based on customer issues and questions. This means that another sales expert doesn’t need to be pulled in or an additional call scheduled to provide answers to questions.

“We are anticipating that knowledge and parsing it out at key moments to provide more leverage to subject matter experts,” Andrew Levy told TechCrunch. “It’s like a sales assistant coming in to handle any issue.”

He considers Aircover in a similar realm with other sales team solutions, like Chorus.ai, which was recently scooped up by ZoomInfo, and Gong, but sees his company carving out space in real-time meeting experiences. Other tools also record the meetings, but to be reviewed after the call is completed.

“That can’t change the outcome of the sale, which is what we are trying to do,” Levy added.

The new funding will be used for product development. Levy intends to double his small engineering team by the end of the month.

He calls what Aircover is doing a “large interesting problem we are solving that requires some difficult technology because it is real time,” which is why the company was eager to partner with Bob Rosin, partner at Defy Partners, who joins Aircover’s board of directors as part of the investment.

Rosin joined Defy in 2020 after working on the leadership teams of Stripe, LinkedIn and Skype. He said sales and customer teams need tools in the moment, and while some are useful in retrospect, people want them to be live, in front of the customer.

“In the early days, tools helped before and after, but in the moment when they need the most help, we are not seeing many doing it,” Rosin added. “Aircover has come up with the complete solution.”

 

Six months after securing a $23 million Series A round, Ketch, a startup providing online privacy regulation and data compliance, brought in an additional $20 million in A1 funding, this time led by Acrew Capital.

Returning with Acrew for the second round are CRV, super{set} (the startup studio founded by Ketch’s co-founders CEO Tom Chavez and CTO Vivek Vaidya), Ridge Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank. The new investment gives Ketch a total of $43 million raised since the company came out of stealth earlier this year.

In 2020, Ketch introduced its data control platform for programmatic privacy, governance and security. The platform automates data control and consent management so that consumers’ privacy preferences are honored and implemented.

Enterprises are looking for a way to meet consumer needs and accommodate their rights and consents. At the same time, companies want data to fuel their growth and gain the trust of consumers, Chavez told TechCrunch.

There is also a matter of security, with much effort going into ransomware and malware, but Chavez feels a big opportunity is to bring security to the data wherever it lies. Once the infrastructure is in place for data control it needs to be at the level of individual cells and rows, he said.

“If someone wants to be deleted, there is a challenge in finding your specific row of data,” he added. “That is an exercise in data control.”

Ketch’s customer base grew by more than 300% since its March Series A announcement, and the new funding will go toward expanding its sales and go-to-market teams, Chavez said.

This year, the company launched Ketch OTC, a free-to-use privacy tool that streamlines all aspects of privacy so that enterprise compliance programs build trust and reduce friction. Customer growth through OTC increased five times in six months. More recently, Qonsent, which developing a consent user experience, is using Ketch’s APIs and infrastructure, Chavez said.

When looking for strategic partners, Chavez and Vaidya wanted to have people around the table who have a deep context on what they were doing and could provide advice as they built out their products. They found that in Acrew founding partner Theresia Gouw, whom Chavez referred to as “the OG of privacy and security.”

Gouw has been investing in security and privacy for over 20 years and says Ketch is flipping the data privacy and security model on its head by putting it in the hands of developers. When she saw more people working from home and more data breaches, she saw an opportunity to increase and double down on Acrew’s initial investment.

She explained that Ketch is differentiating itself from competitors by taking data privacy and security and tying it to the data itself to empower software developers. With the OTC tool, similar to putting locks and cameras on a home, developers can download the API and attach rules to all of a user’s data.

“The magic of Ketch is that you can take the security and governance rules and embed them with the software and the piece of data,” Gouw added.

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You’ve probably learned from Reid Hoffman before, either through his inventions, investments or inspirational words. The entrepreneur is the co-founder of LinkedIn, a partner at Greylock and the author of a new book based off of his hit podcast, Masters of Scale. 

His storied past makes him chock-full of interesting anecdotes and lessons, which is why we’re excited to have him back on the TechCrunch Disrupt stage happening next week from September 21-23. I’ll sit down with him to learn about his perspective on some of the biggest tensions that entrepreneurs face today. Hoffman’s advice is often fueled by his raw conversations with top tech CEOs and founders, so we’ll broaden access to his speed-dial list to understand how even his own perceptions on blitzscaling, growth and entrepreneurship are changing amid the pandemic. As I explained in my review of his new book, his words read like a well-networked mentor giving you a pep talk — so even if you’re not building a startup, there will be useful lessons to learn just by listening.

Here’s how it impacted my interview process, for example:

While press wasn’t a main character in the book, “Master of Scale” has already changed my perspective on how I interview founders. Lessons from Tristan Walker made me want to ask more questions about founders, and their most controversial beliefs, rather than how they plan to spend their new round of funding. A note from Andrés Ruzo made me realize that a startup that makes too much sense might be a comfortable read, but it might not be a moonshot that disrupts the world; in other words, pursue the startups that have too much seemingly foolish ambition — because they may be where the best strides, and stories, are made. Finally, it confirmed my belief that the best litmus test for a founder is if they are willing to talk about the hardships ahead of them in an honest, humble way.

OK, that’s all I’m hinting. Join me at Disrupt, where I’ll put Hoffman on the hot seat, balance out the cheerfulness with some cynical takes and push him to explain what his inevitable next book is about. Buy your tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt using this link, or use promo code “MASCARENHAS20” for a little discount from me.

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