Streamlytics founder Angela Benton discusses her Clture app and why she believes "democratizing" data can help reduce AI bias.Read More

When an AI algorithm fails to live up to expectations, users can end up feeling annoyed, frustrated, and tired.Read More

GoodData delivers on its promise to offer an enterprise edition of its headless business intelligence service.Read More

The $297.5 million AI and quantum computing initiative from IBM and the U.K. aims to spur research in fields like science and manufacturing.Read More

While cloud clearly delivers ROI early in a company’s journey, the costs can start to outweigh the benefits as a company scales.Read More

CEOs are investing in Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) and other integrated, cloud-based solutions, Forcepoint said in its C-Suite Report.Read More

Elevate your enterprise data technology and strategy at Transform 2021. The rumored Nintendo Switch Pro probably won’t pop up before E3, and GamesBeat editors Mike Minotti and Jeff Grubb talk about that and more on GamesBeat Decides. Also, what is up with Elden Ring, Marvel XCOM leaks, and God of War? E3 2021 is heating up, and the crew is ge…Read More

Even if you're only used to the Persona games or other spinoffs like Tokyo Mirage Sessions, Nocturne is worth a try.Read More

China's massive new AI model, which can ostensibly understand multiple modes of media, highlights the growing AI research gap between nations.Read More

Prospective contributors regularly ask us about which topics Extra Crunch subscribers would like to hear more about, and the answer is always the same:

Actionable advice that is backed up by data and/or experience.Strategic insights that go beyond best practices and offer specific recommendations readers can try out for themselves.Industry analysis that paints a clear picture of the companies, products and services that characterize individual tech sectors.

Our submission guidelines haven’t changed, but Managing Editor Eric Eldon and I wrote a short post that identifies the topics we’re prioritizing at the moment:

How-to articles for early-stage founders.Market analysis of different tech sectors.Growth marketing strategies.Alternative fundraising.Quality of life (personal health, sustainability, proptech, transportation).

If you’re a skillful entrepreneur, founder or investor who’s interested in helping someone else build their business, please read our latest guidelines, then send your ideas to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Thanks for reading; I hope you have a great weekend.

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

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

Opting for a debt round can take you from Series A startup to Series B unicorn

Debt is a tool, and like any other — be it a hammer or handsaw — it’s extremely valuable when used skillfully but can cause a lot of pain when mismanaged. This is a story about how it can go right.

Mario Ciabarra, the founder and CEO of Quantum Metric, breaks down how his company was on a “tremendous growth curve” — and then the pandemic hit.

“As the weeks following the initial shelter-in-place orders ticked by, the rush toward digital grew exponentially, and opportunities to secure new customers started piling up,” Ciabarra writes. “A solution to our money problems, perhaps? Not so fast — it was a classic case of needing to spend in order to make.”

If companies want to preserve equity, debt can be an advantageous choice. Here’s how Quantum Metric did it.

4 proven approaches to CX strategy that make customers feel loved

People have been working to optimize customer experiences (CX) since we began selling things to each other.

A famous San Francisco bakery has an exhaust fan at street level; each morning, its neighbors awake to the scent of orange-cinnamon morning buns wafting down the block. Similarly, savvy hairstylists know to greet returning customers by asking if they want a repeat or something new.

Online, CX may encompass anything from recommending the right shoes to AI that knows when to send a frustrated traveler an upgrade for a delayed flight.

In light of Qualtrics’ spinout and IPO and Sprinklr’s recent S-1, Rebecca Liu-Doyle, principal at Insight Partners, describes four key attributes shared by “companies that have upped their CX game.”

Twitter’s acquisition strategy: Eat the public conversation

What is a microblogging service doing buying a social podcasting company and a newsletter tool while also building a live broadcasting sub-app? Is there even a strategy at all?

Yes. Twitter is trying to revitalize itself by adding more contexts for discourse to its repertoire. The result, if everything goes right, will be an influence superapp that hasn’t existed anywhere before. The alternative is nothing less than the destruction of Twitter into a link-forwarding service.

Let’s talk about how Twitter is trying to eat the public conversation.

Reading the IPO market’s tea leaves

Although it was a truncated holiday week here in the United States, there was a bushel of IPO news. We sorted through the updates and came up with a series of sentiment calls regarding these public offerings.

Earlier this week, we took a look at:

Marqeta‘s first IPO price range (fintech).1st Dibs‘ first IPO price range (e-commerce).Zeta Global‘s IPO pricing (martech).The start of SoFi trading post-SPAC (fintech).The latest from BarkBox (e-commerce).

How Expensify hacked its way to a robust, scalable tech stack

Part 4 of Expensify’s EC-1 digs into the company’s engineering and technology, with Anna Heim noting that the group of P2P pirates/hackers set out to build an expense management app by sticking to their gut and making their own rules.

They asked questions few considered, like: Why have lots of employees when you can find a way to get work done and reach impressive profitability with a few? Why work from an office in San Francisco when the internet lets you work from anywhere, even a sailboat in the Caribbean?

It makes sense in a way: If you’re a pirate, to hell with the rules, right?

With that in mind, one could assume Expensify decided to ask itself: Why not build our own totally custom tech stack?

Indeed, Expensify has made several tech decisions that were met with disbelief, but its belief in its own choices has paid off over the years, and the company is ready to IPO any day now.

How much of a tech advantage Expensify enjoys owing to such choices is an open question, but one thing is clear: These choices are key to understanding Expensify and its roadmap. Let’s take a look.

Etsy asks, ‘How do you do, fellow kids?’ with $1.6B Depop purchase

The news this week that e-commerce marketplace Etsy will buy Depop, a startup that provides a secondhand e-commerce marketplace, for more than $1.6 billion may not have made a large impact on the acquiring company’s share price thus far, but it provides a fascinating look into what brands may be willing to pay for access to the Gen Z market.

Etsy is buying Gen Z love. Think about it — Gen Z is probably not the first demographic that comes to mind when you consider Etsy, so you can see why the deal may pencil out in the larger company’s mind.

But it isn’t cheap. The lesson from the Etsy-Depop deal appears to be that large e-commerce players are willing to splash out for youth-approved marketplaces. That’s good news for yet-private companies that are popular with the budding generation.

Confluent’s IPO brings a high-growth, high-burn SaaS model to the public markets

Confluent became the latest company to announce its intent to take the IPO route, officially filing its S-1 paperwork this week.

The company, which has raised over $455 million since it launched in 2014, was most recently valued at just over $4.5 billion when it raised $250 million last April.

What does Confluent do? It built a streaming data platform on top of the open-source Apache Kafka project. In addition to its open-source roots, Confluent has a free tier of its commercial cloud offering to complement its paid products, helping generate top-of-funnel inflows that it converts to sales.

What we can see in Confluent is nearly an old-school, high-burn SaaS business. It has taken on oodles of capital and used it in an increasingly expensive sales model.

How to win consulting, board and deal roles with PE and VC funds

Would you like to work with private equity and venture capital funds?

There are relatively few jobs directly inside private equity and venture capital funds, and those jobs are highly competitive.

However, there are many other ways you can work and earn money within the industry — as a consultant, an interim executive, a board member, a deal executive partnering to buy a company, an executive in residence or as an entrepreneur in residence.

Let’s take a look at the different ways you can work with the investment community.

The existential cost of decelerated growth

Even among the most valuable tech shops, shareholder return is concentrated in share price appreciation, and buybacks, which is the same thing to a degree.

Slowly growing tech companies worth single-digit billions can’t play the buyback game to the same degree as the majors. And they are growing more slowly, so even a similar buyback program in relative scale would excite less.

Grow or die, in other words. Or at least grow or come under heavy fire from external investors who want to oust the founder-CEO and “reform” the company. But if you can grow quickly, welcome to the land of milk and honey.

Even among the most valuable tech shops, shareholder return is concentrated in share price appreciation, and buybacks, which is the same thing to a degree.

Slowly growing tech companies worth single-digit billions can’t play the buyback game to the same degree as the majors. And they are growing more slowly, so even a similar buyback program in relative scale would excite less.

Grow or die, in other words. Or at least grow or come under heavy fire from external investors who want to oust the founder-CEO and “reform” the company. But if you can grow quickly, welcome to the land of milk and honey.

Hormonal health is a massive opportunity: Where are the unicorns?

There is a growing group of entrepreneurs who are betting that hormonal health is the key wedge into the digital health boom.

Hormones are fluctuating, ever-evolving, and diverse — but these founders say they’re also key to solving many health conditions that disproportionately impact women, from diabetes to infertility to mental health challenges.

Many believe it’s that complexity that underscores the opportunity. Hormonal health sits at the center of conversations around personalized medicine and women’s health: By 2025, women’s health could be a $50 billion industry, and by 2026, digital health more broadly is estimated to hit $221 billion.

Still, as funding for women’s health startups drops and stigma continues to impact where venture dollars go, it’s unclear whether the sector will remain in its infancy or hit a true inflection point.

3 lessons we learned after raising $6.3M from 50 investors

Two years ago, founders of calendar assistant platform Reclaim were looking for a “mango” seed round — a boodle of cash large enough to help them transition from the prototype phase to staffing up for a public launch.

Although the team received offers, co-founder Henry Shapiro says the few that materialized were poor options, partially because Reclaim was still pre-product.

“So one summer morning, my co-founder and I sat down in his garage — where we’d been prototyping, pitching and iterating for the past year — and realized that as hard as it was, we would have to walk away entirely and do a full reset on our fundraising strategy,” he writes.

Shapiro shares what he learned from embracing failure and offers three conclusions “every founder should consider before they decide to go out and pitch investors.”

For SaaS startups, differentiation is an iterative process

Although software as a service has been thriving as a sector for years, it has gone into overdrive in the past year as businesses responded to the pandemic by speeding up the migration of important functions to the cloud, ActiveCampaign founder and CEO Jason VandeBoom writes in a guest column.

“We’ve all seen the news of SaaS startups raising large funding rounds, with deal sizes and valuations steadily climbing. But as tech industry watchers know only too well, large funding rounds and valuations are not foolproof indicators of sustainable growth and longevity.”

VandeBoom notes that to scale sustainably, SaaS startups need to “stand apart from the herd at every phase of development. Failure to do so means a poor outcome for founders and investors.”

“As a founder who pivoted from on-premise to SaaS back in 2016, I have focused on scaling my company (most recently crossing 145,000 customers) and in the process, learned quite a bit about making a mark,” VandeBoom writes. “Here is some advice on differentiation at the various stages in the life of a SaaS startup.”

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

As the global supply chain tightened during the pandemic in 2020, a company that helped find excess manufacturing capacity was likely in high demand. CEO and co-founder Randy Altschuler described his company to TechCrunch this way last September upon the announcement of a $75 million Series E investment:

“We’ve created a marketplace using artificial intelligence to power it, and provide an e-commerce experience for buyers of custom manufacturing and for suppliers to deliver that manufacturing,” Altschuler said at the time. Xometry raised nearly $200 million while private, per Crunchbase data.

With Xometry, companies looking to build custom parts now have the ability to do so in a digital way. Rather than working the phones or starting an email chain, they can go into the Xometery marketplace, define parameters for their project and find a qualified manufacturer who can handle the job at the best price.

As of last September, the company had built relationships with 5,000 manufacturers around the world and had 30,000 customers using the platform.

At the time of that funding round, perhaps it wasn’t a coincidence that the company’s lead investor was T. Rowe Price. When an institutional investor is involved in a late-stage round, it’s usually a sign that the company is ready to start thinking about an IPO. Altschuler said it was definitely something the company was considering and had brought on a CFO, too, another sign that a company is ready to take that next step.

So what do Xometry’s financials look like as it heads to the public markets? We took a look at the S-1 to find out.

The numbers

Xometry makes money in two ways. The first comes from one part of its marketplace, with the company generating “substantially all of [its] revenue” from charging “buyers on its platform.” The other way that Xometry engenders top line is seller-related services, including financial work. The company notes that seller-generated revenues were just 5% of its 2020 total, though it does expect that figure to rise.

There’s no crying in baseball, and there are certainly no shortcuts in building a successful startup. But, thanks to TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing and Fundraising on July 8-9, you don’t have to reinvent the freakin’ wheel.

This two-day bootcamp offers early-stage founders (pre-seed through Series A) access to the startup ecosystem’s leading experts and top investors. They’ll host a series of interactive Q&A sessions focused on essential topics, like pitch development, fundraising, brand building, growth marketing and more. Take a peek at the agenda.

Here are just some of the many reasons to carve time out of your hectic schedule and attend this all-virtual event.

1. Because your contemporaries say so

“Early Stage 2020 was a great opportunity to hear seasoned startup founders talking about their experiences and how they dealt with many of the same challenges I faced then and am going through now. It’s like a mini masterclass in entrepreneurship.” — Ashley Barrington, founder, MarketPearl.

“Sequoia Capital’s session, ‘Start with Your Customer,’ looked at the benefits of storytelling and creating customer personas. I took the idea to my team and we’ve implemented storytelling to help onboard new customers. That one session alone has transformed my business.” — Chloe Leaaetoa, founder, Socicraft.

2. Connect with community and opportunity

Founding a startup can be a frustrating and sometimes lonely affair. It helps to bounce ideas off other early founders who know exactly what you’re going through. You never know where those communal connections might lead, and a fat Rolodex is always good for business.

Make ad hoc connections in our virtual platform’s chat feature. Want a more strategic tool? CrunchMatch, our AI-powered networking platform, simplifies finding and scheduling 1:1 meetings with the people who align with your business goals.

3. Bust out the breakout sessions

You’ll learn a ton about growing your business at interactive Q&A sessions like these:

Iterating More Effectively with Feedback: A great product alone is not enough. To be successful, early-stage companies need to optimize all phases of the customer journey. This session will include tactics, best practices and case studies on how to use customer feedback to understand customer needs, craft more compelling messaging and improve all phases of the customer experience.

Growth Hacking, Product Fit and Pricing: Superhuman’s Rahul Vohra shares strategies for early-stage founders on topics like hacking your way to product-market fit, driving user sign-ups without breaking the bank on paid ads and identifying your product’s price point.

How to Determine Your Earned Media Strategy: Learn how to build an effective earned media strategy for your startup, building on Rebecca Reeve Henderson’s deep expertise developing effective communications programs for some of the top business software companies in the world. Earned media, aka the kind of exposure you get from a TechCrunch article, is a key element of any startup’s marketing strategy, but it’s also one of the trickiest things to get right. Rebecca has worked with companies ranging from Slack, to Shopify, to Zapier, to Canva and many more, helping craft effective earned media strategies in one of the most difficult areas of all: B2B SaaS.

And even more….

4. Pitch at TC Early Stage

Day two is all about the pitch-off. Ten early-stage startups will take the virtual stage and deliver their best five-minute pitch to a global audience of investors, TC editors, press and event attendees. A five-minute Q&A with the judges follows that pitch. Want a shot? Get moving because you need to apply here by June 7!

5. You can still save $100 (if you act fast)

TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing & Fundraising kicks off on July 8-9 and for all you early birds, you can save a cool Benjamin when you register before next Friday, June 11 at 11:59 p.m. (PT). So what are you waiting for? Register today!

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Early Stage 2021 – Marketing & Fundraising? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

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For all that’s said about fundraising and working alongside investors, rarely do we get to see founders and their investors in candid conversation with one another. Extra Crunch Live is changing that. On the weekly live show, we sit down with founders and the VCs who funded them to talk about how they came together on the deal, what stood out about the other party that led to their commitment and how they operate today. We also (usually) take a walk through their early pitch decks to get a feel for how success starts.

On an upcoming episode of Extra Crunch Live, we’ll sit down with Emergence’s Lotti Siniscalco and Retail Zipline’s Melissa Wong to discuss all that and more. The event goes down on Wednesday, June 23 at 3 p.m. ET/noon PT. You can register to attend right here.

Siniscalco is a principal at Emergence Capital, investing in early-stage enterprise software companies. She currently serves on the board of directors at Whistic and High Alpha. Prior to Emergence, she was an investor in financial services and technology at Advent International, a PE firm, and led diligence for Ribbit Capital (also fintech focused) before that.

In other words, she’s an expert in fintech and can bring a wealth of wisdom to our conversation around fundraising and startup growth.

Melissa Wong, on the other hand, has spent 10 years in retail communications at Old Navy. It was here that she realized a problem that Zipline Retail, a retail communication and store execution platform, could solve and set out on her own venture.

Extra Crunch Live also features the ECL Pitch-off, where startups in the audience can virtually “raise their hand” to pitch their startup live on our stream. Our expert guests will give their feedback on each pitch. If you want to throw your hat in the ring, you have to show up.

Extra Crunch Live is accessible to everyone, but only Extra Crunch members can access the content on demand. We do these every week, so there are scores of episodes across a wide variety of startup sectors in the ECL Library. It’s but one of many reasons to become an Extra Crunch member. Join here.

 

Venture capitalists continue to fund buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) startups, evidence of ongoing optimism regarding not only e-commerce, but the specific model for financing consumer purchases as well.

Evidence of continued investor confidence in the BNPL space cropped up several times in the second quarter. Divido, a startup that TechCrunch described as a “white-label [BNPL] platform for retail finance that integrates with e-commerce platforms,” raised $30 million. And Zilch raised $80 million for an “over-the-top” BNPL solution.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. 

Read it every morning on Extra Crunch or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

Zilch is now worth $800 million.

There are other examples, but those will suffice to get us into the correct mindset for today’s work as we look back at data points regarding the financial performance of more mature BNPL tech companies. So, as in February when we were looking at Q4 2020 numbers, today we’re looking into the more recent performance of Klarna, Affirm and Afterpay.

Growth versus profitability

As startups scale, they focus a bit more on profitability. Super-early-stage startups aren’t often too worried about net margins, for example, as their revenues can be nascent and their costs rising as they staff up for a product launch or another similar event.

But as those same startups mature into unicorn territory, questions about their model’s profitability on a unit basis, operating cash burn and aggregate profitability will start to pop up. The Rule of 40 is a startup rubric for a reason.

And in the cases of Affirm and Afterpay, we’re in fact examining public companies. So we can safely care even more about their profitability than we might if they, like Klarna, were still waiting for an IPO.

For each, then, we’ll consider growth and profitability. Let’s start with Klarna:

Klarna’s latest data, dealing with Q1 2021, breaks down as follows:

Global GMV of $18.9 billion, +91% compared to the year-ago result.

Guest articles are hugely popular with our startup audience — if the topics are right.

Prospective authors regularly ask us about which topics Extra Crunch subscribers would like to hear more about. Here are some pointers:

How-tos: Generally, early-stage founders want the latest useful information about how to create a company, including fundraising, growth and team-building. What has been changing in your area of expertise that would surprise people who have done a startup or two before?Market analysis: Our readers want to learn more about the latest developments in emerging technology sectors from people who have some sort of special viewpoint into the action. They want comprehensive posts that paint a clear picture of the companies, products and services that characterize individual tech sectors today. The focus can range from tech being applied to old-line industries or being used to create entirely new categories.

Ideas? Submit to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Right now, we are especially interested in submissions from authors who have expertise in the following subtopics:

Growth marketing

By definition, nearly every startup that has figured out its product-market fit is trying to grow fast. Our audience always wants to hear the latest ideas that they might be able to apply, too. Whether it’s related to SEO, content, email, social or other marketing channels, they’re looking for granular advice that can help them find and engage the right users. Founders and investors who have growth marketing experience will go to the front of the line.

Alternative fundraising

We cover a lot of venture capital, naturally, but we have also been covering the rise of alternative fundraising over the years, including revenue-based investing, crowdfunding, social and beyond. Founders in search of funding are generally open to new ideas and iterations, particularly from other founders and experts who are pioneering effective new concepts.

Quality of life

Tech has infused all parts of our lives and promises better answers for the physical world around us. But the hopes of today, from personal well-being to the prosperity of cities to a sustainable planet, often feel out of reach. We are especially eager for emerging solutions from industry experts in personal health, housing and transportation, and environmental and climate topics.

One final note: We only publish a handful of columns each week on Extra Crunch given our other editorial initiatives, but we would like to do more — especially with domain experts who are interested in contributing on a recurring basis. When working with repeat authors, we will also publish one-off articles about public-interest topics on TechCrunch without a paywall.

Hello Equity podcast family, we’re back with another survey.

This is our second go-round with collecting your feedback, notes and vibes.

The first survey we conducted back in the early days of 2020 was super useful in helping us better tune the show. Since then, Equity has grown in frequency and we’ve expanded our production team. So, it’s a perfect time to collect your opinions. You can find the survey here.

If you have listened to the show a few times, or if you listen every week, or if you’ve heard a few hundred episodes, we want to hear from you.

And we’re going to offer some sort of neat reward to a lucky participant. Think things like TechCrunch socks. Or a romantic dinner for you and your partner that Danny cooks. Or Alex may call the person of your choosing to tell them that they have very poor gross margins.

The gist is that we are hungry for your feedback and are willing to pay for the 37 to 94 seconds it will take you to fill out our little Google Form.

We appreciate you, and the time you spend with us. (But really, take the darn survey!)

— The Equity Team

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

Despite it being a short week, as always, it was a busy, busy time. Our regular Friday producer Grace was under the weather today, so Chris stepped in to help out.

And as noted at the top of the episode, we’re running a survey. The survey is here, dear Equity family. Please fill it out so we can keep making the show better.

That aside, here’s what Danny and Natasha and Alex got into:

Stack Overflow has a new owner, and a $1.8 billion sale price that is minting 61 new millionaires in the process.Katerra is dying, as in going to zero. As the company has been a regular feature of TechCrunch coverage, we had to discuss its end. You can also catch up on Greensill here if that’s your jam.Back on the acquisition front, Etsy is buying Depop for $1.625 billion. Our take is that the deal makes good sense, even if it is not cheap.Amazon is now open to being sued after an overwhelming number of arbitration claims were filed. Also we get to talk about everyone’s favorite judge’s writing style.Unit raised money to help teams unionize; Chipper Cash raised a huge round for its fintech product; and One Concern underscores Danny’s larger disaster tech thesis by raising $45 million.

That’s all we got! If you have heard Equity before, take the survey. Thank you!

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST, Wednesday, and Friday morning at 7:00 a.m. PST, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

SentinelOne, a late-stage security startup that helps organizations secure their data using AI and machine learning, has filed for an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).

In an S-1 filing on Thursday, the security company revealed that for the three months ending April 30, its revenues increased by 108% year-on-year to $37.4 million and its customer base grew to 4,700, up from 2,700 a year prior. Despite this pandemic-fueled growth, SentinelOne’s net losses more than doubled from $26.6 million in 2020 to $62.6 million.

“We also expect our operating expenses to increase in the future as we continue to invest for our future growth, including expanding our research and development function to drive further development of our platform, expanding our sales and marketing activities, developing the functionality to expand into adjacent markets, and reaching customers in new geographic locations,” SentinelOne wrote in its filing.

The Mountain View-based company said it intends to list its Class A common stock using the ticker symbol “S” and that details about the price range and number of common shares to be put up for the IPO are yet to be determined. The S-1 filing also identifies Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America Securities, Barclays and Wells Fargo Securities as the lead underwriters.

SentinelOne raised $276 million in a funding round in November last year, tripling its $1 billion valuation from February 2020 to $3 billion. At the time, CEO and founder Tomer Weingarten told TechCrunch that an IPO “would be the next logical step” for the company.

SentinelOne, which was founded in 2013 and has raised a total of $696.5 million through eight rounds of funding, is looking to raise up to $100 million in its IPO, and said it’s intending to use the net proceeds to increase its visibility in the cybersecurity marketplace and for product development and other “general corporate processes.”

It added that it “may also use a portion of the net proceeds for the acquisition of, or investment in, technologies, solutions, or businesses that complement our business.” The company’s sole acquisition so far took place back in February when it bought high-speed logging startup Scalyr for $155 million.

SentinelOne is going public during a period of heightened public interest in cybersecurity. There has been a wave of high-profile cyberattacks during the COVID-19 pandemic, with hackers taking advantage of widespread remote working necessitated as a result.

One of the biggest attacks saw Russian hackers breach the networks of IT company SolarWinds, enabling them to gain access to government agencies and corporations. SentinelOne’s endpoint protection solution was able to detect and stop the related malicious payload, protecting its customers.

“The world is full of criminals, state actors, and other hostile agents who seek to exfiltrate and exploit data to disrupt our way of life,” Weingarten said in SentinelOne’s SEC filing. “Our mission is to keep the world running by protecting and securing the core pillars of modern infrastructure: data and the systems that store, process, and share information. This is an endless mission as attackers evolve rapidly in their quest to disrupt operations, breach data, turn profit, and inflict damage.”

Indonesian healthcare startup Prixa has raised $3 million led by MDI Ventures and the Trans-Pacific Technology Fund (TPTF), with participation from returning investors including Siloam Hospitals Group.

This brings Prixa’s total raised to $4.5 million since it launched in 2019. Co-founder and chief executive officer James Roring M.D., told TechCrunch in an email that the new funding will enable Prixa to scale its platform and customer base. Prixa uses a B2B model, partnering with healthcare payers like insurance providers and corporations. Through its B2B customers, it currently serves about 10 million patients.

Prixa currently works with four major insurers and has six additional insurers in its short-term pipeline. It also works with Indonesia’s largest third-party administrators, Roring said, allowing it to reach more policyholders.

Prixa’s platform includes a digital health assistant to answer patients’ questions, telemedicine consultations, pharmacy deliveries and on-demand lab diagnostics. Usage increased during the COVID-19 pandemic as more patients sought online consultations for primary care.

Other telehealth startups in Indonesia include Halodoc and Alodokter (which is also backed by MDI). Both connect patients directly with healthcare and insurance providers. Roring said Prixa differentiates by focusing on greater cost control for healthcare payers and positioning itself as a digital primary care platform.

“By symptomatically managing patients outside of tertiary care facilities and caring for chronic non-communicable diseases online, Prixa is able to effectively reduce the amount of outpatient claims and downstream inpatient cost incurred by healthcare payers,” Roring said. “Additionally, the combination of a growing and robust medical database, as well as proven clinical guidelines, contribute to cost efficiency and service optimization through the standardization of treatment by our healthcare providers.”

In a press statement about the funding, Aditia Henri Narendra, MDI Ventures’ general manager of legal and corporate communication, said, “MDI co-led this financing because Prixa has demonstrated its ability to support insurance companies and hospitals in making medical services more accessible and affordable through its AI telemedicine platform.”

Toyota AI Ventures, Toyota’s standalone venture capital fund, has dropped the “AI” and is reborn as, simply, Toyota Ventures. The fund is commemorating its new identity by investing an additional $300 million in emerging technologies and carbon neutrality via two early-stage funds: the Toyota Ventures Frontier Fund and the Toyota Ventures Climate Fund. 

The introduction of these two new funds, each worth $150 million, brings Toyota Ventures’ total assets under management to over $500 million. With the new capital infusion into the Frontier Fund comes an expansion of Toyota Ventures’ core thesis, which previously focused on AI, autonomy, mobility, robotics and the cloud, and now is adding smart cities, digital health, fintech and energy. So while Toyota Ventures’ investment approach isn’t changing, it’s broadening the scope of startups it will consider investing in. 

“AI is kind of shrinking as a proportion of everything,” Jim Adler, founding managing director of Toyota Ventures, told TechCrunch. “The first mission of the Frontier Fund has always been to discover what’s next for Toyota. Toyota pivoted to cars in the 1930s, and Toyota will grow to other businesses in the future. Startups are experiments in the marketplace, and this is a way for us to understand and get comfortable with where innovations are coming from.” 

Toyota as a global company has more than 370,000 employees that cover a range of business units in which the company at large stands to benefit from investing, such as financial technology. The Frontier Fund is a step outside of mobility. It not only seeks to bring emerging tech to market, but it also wants to bring new innovations onboard, whether as a customer or an acquisition, according to Adler. 

“I think the vision of the company really is that machines are here to stay, they amplify the human experience, and Toyota understands how machines amplify humans really well for the benefit of society, which sounds incredibly corny, but the company really believes that,” said Adler.

By that same token, the new Climate Fund seeks to invest in startups that can help Toyota accelerate its goal of reaching carbon neutrality by 2050. The company has been investing in hydrogen for years, including a recent partnership with Japanese fuel company ENEOS, but it’s open to whatever technology will help achieve carbon neutrality, according to Adler.

“We think renewable energies will play a role,” said Adler. “Hydrogen production, storage distribution and utilization will play a role. We think carbon capture and storage will play a role. We’re not going to get dogmatic about hydrogen because we’ve been at it for decades and maybe things will change. Hydrogen hasn’t been crowdsourced across the startup community because there just wasn’t a market for it, but I think the market may be emerging.”

The fund is accepting online pitches on its website from entrepreneurs seeking early-stage funding. On Thursday, Toyota Ventures also announced it would be expanding its team and working with a new Advisor Network as a resource for founders looking for guidance on anything from product development to diversity and recruitment. 

“Toyota Ventures has been an invaluable partner for Boxbot since they invested in our seed round in 2018,” said Austin Oehlerking, co-founder and CEO of Boxbot, in a statement. “They have been instrumental in helping us to navigate complicated, existential challenges on our journey from concept to product/market fit. Jim and the team really understand how corporate venture capital should function in order to successfully partner with startups.” 

Adler says he and his team come from an entrepreneurial background, so they understand what it’s like on the other side of the table. Toyota Ventures’ focuses on early-stage startups because that’s where it believes some of the most interesting innovations come from. 

“I’m a big believer that early-stage venture capital is a telescope into the future,” said Adler. “I think we can actually find those incredibly valuable innovations that make this all worthwhile.”