In the never-ending stream of venture capital funding rounds, from time to time, a group of startups working on the same problem will raise money nearly in unison. So it was with OKR-focused startups toward the start of 2020.

How were so many OKR-focused tech upstarts able to raise capital at the same time? And was there really space in the market for so many different startups building software to help other companies manage their goal-setting? OKRs, or “objectives and key results,” a corporate planning method, are no longer a niche concept. But surely, over time, there would be M&A in the group, right?

During our first look into the cohort, we concluded that it felt likely that there was “some consolidation” ahead for the group “when growth becomes more difficult.” At the time, however, it was clear that many founders and investors expected the OKR software market to have material depth.

They were right, and we were wrong. A year later, in early 2021, we asked the same group how their previous year had gone. Nearly every single company had a killer year, with many players growing by well over 100%.

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

OKR company Ally.io grew 3.3x in 2020, for example, while its competitor Gtmhub grew by 3x over the same time period. More capital followed. Ally.io raised $50 million in a Series C in the first quarter, while Gtmhub put together a $30 million Series B during the same period.

They won’t be the final startups in the OKR cohort to raise this year. We know this because we reached out to the group again this week, this time probing their Q1 performance, and, critically, asking the startups to discuss their level of optimism regarding the rest of 2021.

As before, the group’s recent results are strong, at least when compared to their own planning. But notably, the collection of competing companies is more optimistic than before about the rest of the year than they were before Q1 2021. Things are heating up for the OKR startup world.

A takeaway from our work today is that our prior notes about how impressively deep the software market is proving to be may have been too modest. And frankly, that’s super-good news for startups and investors alike. So much for SaaS-fatigue.

In a sense, we should not be surprised that OKR startups are doing well or that the startup software market is so large. You’d imagine that the historic pace of venture capital investment that we’ve seen so far in 2021 in Europe and the United States was based on results, or evidence that there was lots more room for software-focused startups to grow.

Interestingly, while these companies look similar to outsiders, they are each betting on strategies and differentiators that could help them win in their selected portion of the OKR space. Which also means that the sector may not be as crowded as it seems.

Don’t take our word for it. Let’s hear from Gtmhub COO Seth Elliott, Workboard CEO and co-founder Deidre Paknad, Koan CEO and co-founder Matt Tucker, Ally.io CEO and co-founder Vetri Vellore, and Perdoo CEO and founder Henrik-Jan van der Pol about just what the software market looks like to them.

We’ll start with how the startups performed in Q1 2021, dig into how they feel about the rest of the year, and then talk about how differentiation among the cohort could be helping them not step on each other’s toes.

Rapid growth

WorkBoard is having a strong start to 2021. Paknad’s company, which raised in both March of 2019 and January of 2020, told The Exchange that it hired 82 people in the first three months of 2021, and that it plans on doing it again in the current quarter. WorkBoard is “investing heavily,” Paknad said via DM, and “made [its] Q1 targets.”

San Antonio-based Plus One Robotics today announced a $33 million Series B. The round follows an $8.3 million Series A announced in 2018 and brings the company’s total funding to north of $40 million. The round, led by McRock Capital and TransLink Ventures, features BMWi Ventures, Kensington Capital Partners and Ironspring Ventures, along with existing investors.

Launched in 2016, the company is primarily focused on computer vision software for robotics in logistics and warehouse settings — clearly a hot category as more companies look to automate their back end. Specifically, the system is designed to be adaptable to a wide range of robotic arms and grippers, which tend to fill different needs for the end user.

The company plans to use the funding to expand operations internationally to keep up with the accelerated demand for robotics. The system also allows for group management, controlling up to 50 robots at once.

“We are excited to grow alongside our clients here and abroad. Like our clients, our investors have a global footprint representing Asia and the EU as well as North America,” CEO and co-founder Erik Nieves said in a release tied to the news. “This potent combination sets Plus One on a course to continue growing our international installed base.”

The round also finds Whitney Rockley of McRock Capital and Toshi Otani of TransLink joining Plus One’s board.

Materials Zone, a Tel Aviv-based startup that uses AI to speed up materials research, today announced that it has raised a $6 million seed funding round led by Insight Partners, with participation from crowdfunding platform OurCrowd.

The company’s platform consists of a number of different tools, but at the core is a database that takes in data from scientific instruments, manufacturing facilities, lab equipment, external databases, published articles, Excel sheets and more, and then parses it and standardizes it. Simply having this database, the company argues, is a boon for researchers, who can then also visualize it as needed.

“In order to develop new technologies and physical products, companies must first understand the materials that comprise those products, as well as those materials’ properties,” said Materials Zone founder and CEO Dr. Assaf Anderson. “Understanding the science of materials has therefore become a driving force behind innovation. However, the data behind materials R&D and production has traditionally been poorly managed, unstructured, and underutilized, often leading to redundant experiments, limited capacity to build on past experience, and an inability to effectively collaborate, which inevitably wastes countless dollars and man-hours.”

Before founding Materials Zone, Anderson spent time at the Bar Ilan University’s Institute for Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials, where he was the head of the Combinatorial Materials lab.

“As a materials scientist, I have experienced R&D challenges firsthand, thereby gaining an understanding of how R&D can be improved,” Anderson said. “We developed our platform with our years of experience in mind, leveraging innovative AI/ML technologies to create a unique solution for these problems.”

He noted that in order to, for example, develop a new photovoltaic transparent window, it would take thousands of experiments to find the right core materials and their parameters. The promise of Materials Zone is that it can make this process faster and cheaper by aggregating and standardizing all of this data and then offer data and workflow management tools to work with it. Meanwhile, the company’s analytical and machine learning tools can help researchers interpret this data.

Toucan, a startup that helps users learn a new language while they browse the web, is announcing that it has raised an additional $4.5 million in seed funding.

As I wrote last fall, the Santa Monica, California-based startup has built a Chrome extension that scans the text of whatever website you’re reading and translates select words into whichever language you’re trying to learn. That means you’re expanding your vocabulary without having to make time to study or otherwise change your behavior.

Toucan currently supports seven languages — Spanish, Korean, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Japanese. Co-founder and CEO Taylor Nieman said the company now has around 60,000 monthly active users, all acquired organically.

“On the surface, Toucan can look like a toy, but there’s massive engineering tech on the backend,” Nieman added.

For one thing, although the startup has a team of human translators, it also relies on machine learning and natural language processing to understand the context of each word and make sure it’s being translated properly. Nieman said that the company also takes an intelligent, personalized approach to the translations that appear over time, allowing them to become more complex in order to keep challenging users.

Toucan is free, but users can subscribe to Toucan Premium, which starts at $4.99 per month and offers a higher density of translated words. Premium subscribers can also opt in or out of advertising — apparently the ability to “own” a word (a.k.a. have your sponsorship message appear anytime that word is translated) is popular enough that some paying users don’t want to lose it.

Toucan has now raised a total of $7.5 million. The new round was led by LightShed Ventures, with participation from new investors Next Play Ventures, Concrete Rose Capital, GingerBread Capital, Form Capital, Goodwater Capital, Hampton VC, Spacecadet Ventures, GTMfund, Baron Davis Enterprises and Human Ventures, as well as existing investors GSV Ventures, Amplifyher Ventures and Vitalize.

“Screen time is escalating globally with younger generations living their lives always connected,” said LightShed Ventures General Partner Richard Greenfield in a statement. “Toucan seamlessly integrates language learning into the websites (and soon apps) you are already using via a simple browser extension transforming screen time into learning time.”

Nieman said Toucan will use the new funding to expand the team from 12 to 16. It’s also planning to internationalize — so not just translating English to Spanish, but Spanish to English, and so on — and is launching a new Safari extension (it will support more browsers in the future). The ultimate vision is for Toucan to be “layered wherever you are.”

“We want to be this augmented layer of learning on the web, on mobile browsing, in the most popular social apps and even in the physical world,” she said, predicting that in the future, you might be “wearing a crazy cool contact lens that can translate a sign on the subway and provide you with those same micro-moments of learning.”

Greenlight, the fintech company that pitches parents on kid-friendly bank accounts, has raised $260 million in a Series D funding round that nearly doubles its valuation to $2.3 billion.

The funding comes just months after the Atlanta-based startup landed $215 million in funding at a $1.2 billion valuation. With the latest round, Greenlight has now raised more than $550 million since its 2014 inception.

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) led its Series D, which also included participation from returning backers TTV Capital, Canapi Ventures, Wells Fargo Strategic Capital, BOND, Fin VC and Goodwater Capital, as well as new investors Wellington Management, Owl Ventures and LionTree Partners.

Since it launched its debit cards for kids in 2017, the company has managed to set up accounts for more than 3 million parents and children, who have saved more than $120 million through the app. That’s up from 2 million parents and kids having saved $50 million at the time of its September 2020 raise.

Overall, Greenlight says it has “more than tripled” YoY revenue, more than doubled the number of parents and kids on its platform and doubled the size of its team within the past year. 

“Greenlight has quickly emerged as a leader in the family finance category,” said Andreessen Horowitz general partner David George, who will join Greenlight’s board of directors, in a written statement. “Greenlight was built to help parents raise financially-smart kids, and with its breakthrough combination of easy-to-use money management tools and educational resources, the company is well-positioned to become one of the most loved and trusted brands for families around the world.”

The company pitches itself as more than just a debit card, with apps that give parents the ability to deposit money in accounts and pay for allowance, manage chores and set flexible controls on how much kids can spend. In January, Greenlight introduced its educational investing platform for kids — Greenlight Max. Through that platform, kids can research stocks with analysis from Morningstar and actually make real investments in companies like Apple, Tesla, Microsoft and Amazon, as long as their parents approve.

As TechCrunch previously reported, it’s a potentially massive business that can lock in a whole generation to a financial services platform, which is likely one reason why a whole slew of companies have launched with a similar thesis. There’s Kard, Step, Till Financial and Current pitching similar businesses in the U.S., and Mozper recently launched from Y Combinator to bring the model to Latin America. (Step and Current also announced big rounds today, while Till Financial announced its seed round last week. Notably, a16z also led Current’s raise).

“Our vision at Greenlight is to create a world where every child grows up to be financially healthy and happy,” said Tim Sheehan, co-founder and CEO of Greenlight. 

The pandemic reinforced the importance of developing good personal finance habits, according to the startup.

“As families spent more time at home together than ever, many took this as an opportunity to teach their kids about money and we saw increased demand for our product,” the company said.

 Greenlight says it will use the new capital to accelerate product development to add more financial services to its platform as well as to invest further in strategic distribution partnerships and geographic expansion. It currently has 275 employees and has plans to hire another 300 employees over the next two years, with an emphasis on engineers.

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It’s time for the 2nd annual Emerge Virtual 5k Run produced by Rise Against Suicide (formerly Second Wind Fund of Boulder County). It’ll be from 8:00 am to Midnight MT on Sunday, May 2, 2021. Amy and I are helping underwrite it as we did last year and I just signed up to run it.

Rise Against Suicide provides access to funded counseling services for at-risk youth struggling with suicidal ideation in the geographic areas included in Boulder Valley School District and St. Vrain Valley School District. Youth up to the age of 19 who are at elevated risk for suicide, uninsured, or underinsured are eligible for funded counseling services through Rise Against Suicide. The organization receives referrals from private and public elementary, middle and high schools, community social workers, psychologists and mental health professionals, hospitals, and mental health facilities. Within hours of receiving a request for help, at-risk youth can be connected with qualified, private therapists. This immediate response is unique to Rise Against Suicide. 

The mental health crisis has been dramatically accelerated as part of the Covid crisis. Now, more than ever, communities need to engage with and help support organizations that provide mental health related services. Recently, this challenge has been particularly acute with children our community given the unique stressors of the Covid crisis.

The Emerge Virtual 5k Run is free to anyone, but also provides an opportunity to give financial support to Rise Against Suicide. Please join us.

The post Run With Me To Help Prevent Youth Suicide appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

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Investment app StashAway has raised a $25 million Series D led by Sequoia Capital India, with participation from returning investors Eight Roads Ventures and Square Peg. After regulatory approvals for the funding are completed, Sequoia Capital India managing director Abheek Anand will join StashAway’s board of directors as part of the round.

StashAway does not disclose how many investors use its robo-advisor app, but it surpassed $1 billion assets under management in January. It currently has operations in in five markets: Singapore, Malayasia, the United Arab Emirates and Hong Kong, and is preparing to launch in Thailand.

Its Series D brings StashAway’s total paid-up capital to about $61.4 million. The new funding will be used on expanding StashAway’s product and engineering teams to continue feature and product development. Founded in September 2016, the company will also offer to buy back up to $3 million in stock options from its employees. Co-founder and chief executive officer Michele Ferrario told TechCrunch that many of StashAway’s employees have been with the company since the start, so this gives its team members a chance to cash out stock options that have vested while creating a more compelling compensation package for recruiting talent.

StashAway’s products include services for retail investors that focus on wealth-building or specific goals like retirement or buying a house and StashAway Simple, a cash account that can earn a projected rate of 1.2% per annum and allows funds be withdrawn within one to three business days. Its management fees are between 0.2% to 0.8% a year.

Ferrario said that StashAway’s core market is people aged 30 to 45, who are earning enough money to save or invest, but also have obligations like saving for retirement or their childrens’ education. People under 30 account for a smaller portion of StashAway’s assets under management, but are still a significant part of its user base because the app doesn’t require minimum investments, making it accessible to people who recently graduated or are just starting their careers. While StashAway has built an reputation for attracting first-time investors, about 20% of its assets under management come from high-net-worth individuals.

“This is something we didn’t think would happen at the beginning, but then we realized that some of the problems we’re solving are also significant problems for high-net-worth individuals as well,” said Ferrario. “If you have less than $10 million to $15 million in wealth, the services you receive from private banks are not particularly sophisticated or personalized. So we offer a more sophisticated investment at a lower cost.”

At the end of last year, the company launched StashAway WorkPlace, a platform for employers to provide benefits like pensions and vesting schedules. StashAway WorkPlace grew out of the Financial Wellness Program, a set of seminars and workshops on financial planning and investing that has been used in Singapore by about 200 companies, including Salesforce, Twitter, Netflix and LinkedIn.

Since StashAway launched its app in 2017, more robo-advisors have emerged in the same markets it serves. For example, Syfe also caters to new investors. Other investment apps in Singapore include Endowus, Kristal.AI and AutoWealth.

One of the main ways StashAway differentiates is its proprietary asset allocation framework, which looks at how each asset class performs under specific economic conditions, measures uncertainty with leading indicators and patterns in economic data, and adjustments to expected returns based on an asset’s valuation relative to its economic fair value. The company says it has outperformed benchmarks since launching in 2017. At the end of March, its portfolios outperformed their same-risk benchmarks (proxied by MSCI World Equity Index and FTSE World Government Bond Index), with annualized returns ranging from 16.5% (for the highest-risk portfolio) to 4% (the lowest-risk portfolio).

Ferrario said the app also emphasizes customer service, with phone calls typically answered in less than eight seconds, and an in-app WhatsApp link that connects users to a human service representative instead of sending them through a chatbot first.

But StashAway’s main competitor is still traditional banks instead of other investment apps. “In the five countries we are in, there is approximately $5 trillion of personal financial wealth. In Singapore alone, it is around $1.1 trillion,” Ferrario said. A large portion of that cash, or about $400 billion, sits in savings accounts. “That’s money that’s not working for whoever owns it,” he added.

In a press statement, Anand said, “StashAway is growing rapidly as it fulfills an obvious gap in the digital wealth management space, especially in areas where its competitors may be lacking: an easy-to-use platform, robust client relationships and a very sophisticated investing framework. StashAway has built trust with its client base by navigating them through market volatility while providing strong returns.”

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Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. 

A week ago TechCrunch covered Pico’s $6.5 million funding round and described it as “a New York startup that helps online creators and media companies make money and manage their customer data.” The Exchange has also covered Pico before, most recently during a mid-2020 dive into the world of indie pubs and subscription media.

While our own Anthony Ha did an inimitable job covering the Pico round, I got on a Zoom call with the company, as well, as their new capital came with a relaunch of sorts that I wanted to better understand.

The Pico team walked me through what’s changed at their business by describing the historical progress of creative digital tooling. They said earlier eras in the space focused on content hosting and distribution. In the startup’s view, a new generation of creative-focused tooling will bring the market to an era in which content management systems, or CMSs — say, Substack or WordPress — will not own the center of tooling. Instead, monetization will.

That’s Pico’s bet, and so it’s building what it considers to be an operating system for the creator market. My gut read is that a creative digital world that centers around monetization sounds like one that is more lucrative than what preceding eras brought us.

Pico’s view is that regardless of where someone first builds their audience, they eventually go multi-SKU — or multi-platform, perhaps — so keeping a single, centralized register of customer data may prove critical.

The startup’s revamped service is a bit of a monetization tool, as before, along with a creator-focused CRM that sits atop your CMS or other digital output on any particular platform. So far customer growth at the company looks good, growing by about 5x in the last year. Let’s see how far Pico can ride its vision, and if it can help build out a middle class in the creator economy.

The grocery revolution will be IRL

Somewhat lost in our circles amid the hype regarding Instacart’s epic COVID period is the fact that most folks still go to stores to buy their fruit and veg, as our friends in the UK might say.

Grocers did not forget the fact. But their historically thin margins and rising competition for customer ownership in the Instacart era hasn’t left them too secure. How can they pursue a more digitally enabled strategy without outsourcing their customer relationship to a third party?

Swiftly might be part of the answer. The startup is building technology that may help grocery chains of all sizes go digital, take advantage of modern mobile technology, and generate more incomes via ads, while offering consumers more shopping options. Neat, yeah?

The startup has raised a little over $15 million to date, per Crunchbase data, but came back into our minds thanks to the launch of a deal with the Dollar Tree company, a consumer retailer that has around one zillion stores in America.

I’ve been aware of Swiftly for ages, having met its co-founder Henry Kim back when he was building Sneakpeeq, which later became Symphony Commerce. The latter company was eventually bought by Quantum Retail. But during my chats with Kim over the years in and around San Francisco, he consistently brought up the grocery market, a space he’d had experience in before building Symphony Commerce.

After hearing Kim hype up the possibilities for grocery and digital for a half decade or so, to see the company that came out of his hopes and planning land a major partner is fun.

Swiftly provides two main products, a retail system and a media service. The retail side of its business provides checkout services, loyalty programs, personalized offers and the like for mobile shoppers. And the media side allows IRL grocers to snag a bit of the consumer packaged goods (CPG) ad spend that they often miss out on, while looping in analytics to provide better attribution to the impact of ads sold.

I expect that Swiftly will raise more capital in the next few quarters now that it has a big, public deal out. More when we have it.

UiPath, SPACs, and a neat venture capital round

Over the past two weeks The Exchange has written quite a lot about the UiPath IPO. Probably too much. But to catch you up just in case, the company’s first IPO pricing range looked like a warning for late-stage investors as the resulting valuations were a bit lower than anticipated. Next the company raised that range, ameliorating if not eliminating our earlier concern. Then the company priced above its raised range, though still at a discount to its final private round. Then it gained ground after starting to trade, and its CFO was like, we did good.

To dig even more into the company’s private-public valuation saga, The Exchange asked B2B investor Dharmesh Thakker, a general partner at Battery Ventures, about his take on the company’s final private round in the context of it landing a bit higher than where the company eventually priced its IPO. Here’s what he had to say:

[T]here was smart money involved in that round. These are people who understand that material value creation happens 3-5 years post IPO, as we have seen with Twilio, Atlassian, MongoDB, Okta, and Crowdstrike who have increased value 5-10x post IPO.

Right now, UIPath has only 1% penetration at $608M revenue in a $60B automation market, and the urgency around intelligent process automation for repetitive tasks is only increasing post-COVID. Companies need help managing their costs with automation. So, as the company penetrates its target market and grows over time, UIPath will drive ongoing value, which pre-IPO and IPO stage investors realize. They will be patient.”

He’s bullish, in other words. A more acerbic take on the UiPath IPO came in from PitchBook analyst Brendan Burke. Here’s what he had to say about the company and its market:

RPA has scaled rapidly due to the demand for automation yet remains a limited solution that may lack durable value. Due to its reliance on custom scripts, we view RPA as a bridge technology to cloud-native AI automation that faces competitive risk from AI-native challengers. The future of enterprise automation is for front-line users to deploy cloud-native machine learning models that can adapt to dynamic data streams and make accurate decisions. UiPath’s implementations are not cloud-native and require third party integrations with around 75 AI model vendors for intelligent decision-making. Additionally, the company lists the ability to recruit AI engineers as a risk factor for the business. UiPath’s ability to expand across the AI value chain will be critical for its long-term prospects.

I include that remark as it can be, at times, hard to get actual negative commentary out of the broader analyst world, as people are so terrified of being rude.

Scooting along, there’s a new SPAC deal out this week that I wanted to flag for you: SmartRent is merging with Fifth Wall Acquisition Corp. I. SmartRent raised more than $100 million while private, according to Crunchbase data, from RET Ventures, Spark Capital and Bain Capital Ventures, among others.

So this particular SPAC deal, which puts a $2.2 billion equity valuation on SmartRent, is a material venture-backed exit. You can check its investor deck here. We care about the company as it appears to work in a similar space to Latch, which is also going out via a SPAC. Dueling OS companies for rental units? This should be fun. (More on Latch’s SPAC deal here.)

Finally for our main work today, HYPR raised $35 million this week. Among all the venture capital rounds that I wish I could have written about this week but didn’t get to, HYPR is up there because it promises a password-free future. And having just raised a Series C, it may have a shot at pulling it off. Please god, let it happen.

Various and sundry

I got to cover a few rounds raised by recent Y Combinator graduates this week, including Queenly and Albedo’s recent funding events. Check ‘em out.

Oh, and Afterpay’s recent earnings show that the buy-now-pay-later market is still growing like all hell,

Alex

MasterClass, which sells a subscription to celebrity-taught classes, sits on the cusp of entertainment and education. It offers virtual, yet aspirational learning: an online tennis class with Serena Williams, a cooking session with Gordon Ramsay. While there’s the off chance that an instructor might actually talk to you — it has happened before — the platform mostly just offers paywalled documentary-style content.

The vision has received attention. MasterClass is raising funding that would value it at $2.5 billion, as scooped by Axios and confirmed independently by a source to TechCrunch. But while MasterClass has found a sweet spot, can the success be replicated?

Investors certainly think so. Outlier, founded by MasterClass’ co-founder, closed a $30 million Series C this week, for affordable, digital college courses. The similarities between Outlier and its founder’s alma mater aren’t subtle: It’s literally trying to apply MasterClass’ high-quality videography to college classes. This comes a week after I wrote about a “MasterClass for Chess lovers” platform launched by former Chess World Champion Garry Kasparov.

Two back-to-back MasterClass copycats raising millions in venture capital makes me think about if the model can truly be verticalized and focused down into specific niches. After 2020 and the rise of Zoom University, we know edtech needs to be more engaging, but we don’t know the exact way to get there. Is it by creating micro-learning communities around shared loves? Is it about gamification? Aspirational learning has different incentives than for-credit learning. In order to be successful, Outlier needs to prove to universities it can use MasterClass magic for true outcomes that rival in-person lectures. It’s a harder, and more ambtious promise.

My riff aside, I turned to two edtech founders to understand how they see the MasterClass effect panning out, and to cross-check my gut reaction.

Taylor Nieman, the founder of language learning startup Toucan:

Although I do love how these models try to lean into this theme of “invisible learning” like we leverage with Toucan, it faces the same issues as so many other consumer products that try to steal time out of people’s very busy days. Constantly competing for time leads to terrible engagement metrics and very high churn. That leads me to question what true learning outcomes could occur from little to no usage of the product itself.

Amanda DoAmaral, the founder of Fiveable, a learning platform for high school students:

Masterclass is important for showing us why educational content should be treated more like entertainment. All of our bars for content quality is much higher now than it ever was before and I’m excited to see how that affects learning across the board.

For students, it’s about creating environments that support them holistically and giving them space to collaborate openly. It feels so obvious that these spaces should exist for young people, but we’ve lost sight of what students actually need. At my school, we built policies that assumed the worst in students. I want to flip that. Assume the best, be proactive to keep them safe, and create ways to react when we need to.

Anyways, that’s just some nuance to chew on during this fine day. In the rest of this newsletter, we will focus a lot on tactical advice for founders, from the money they raise to the peacock dance they might want to do one day. Make sure to follow me on Twitter @nmasc_ so we can talk during the week, too!

The peacock dance

You know when male peacocks fan their feathers to court a lover? That, but for startups trying to get acquired. As one of our many rabbit holes on Equity this week, we talk about Discord walking away from a Microsoft deal, and if that deal ever existed in the first place or if it was just a way to drum up investor excitement in the audio gaming platform.

Here’s what to know: Discord is reportedly pursuing an IPO after walking away from talks with multiple companies that were looking to acquire the audio gaming giant.

Discord aside, the consolidation environment continues to be hot for some sectors.

Even venture capital knows that the future isn’t simply venture capital

Clearbanc, a Toronto-based fintech startup that gives non-dilutive financing to businesses, has rebranded alongside a $100 million financing that valued it at $2 billion. Now rebranded as Clearco, the startup wants to be more than just a capital provider, but a services provider, too.

Here’s what to know: The startup has been on a tear of product development for the past year, launching services such as valuation calculators or runway tools. It’s a step away from what Clearbanc originally flexed: the 20-minute term sheet and rapid-fire investment. I talk about some of the levers at play in my piece:

Many of Clearco’s newest products are still in their infancy, but the potential success of the startup could nearly be tied to the general growth of startups looking for alternatives to venture capital when financing their startups. Similar to how AngelList’s growth is neatly tied to the growth of emerging fund managers, Clearco’s growth is cleanly related to the growth of founders who see financing as beyond a seed check from Y Combinator.

Don’t market your opportunity away

Keeping on the theme of tactical advice for founders, let’s move onto talking about marketing. Tim Parkin, president of Parkin Consulting, explained how startup founders can use marketing as a tool to stand out in the noisy environment. Differentiation has never been harder, but also more imperative.

Here’s what to know: Parkin outlines four ways that martech will shift in 2021, strapped with anecdotes and a nod to the importance of investing in influencers.

Around TechCrunch

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This newsletter will always be free, but if you do want to support me, feel free to use code STARTUPSWEEKLY for 25% off a subscription to Extra Crunch.

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How to pivot your startup, save cash and maintain trust with investors and customers

How startups can ensure CCPA and GDPR compliance in 2021

As UiPath closes above its final private valuation, CFO Ashim Gupta discusses his company’s path to market

European VC soars in Q1

Thanks for reading along today and everyday. Sending love to my readers in India and everyone around the world that is facing yet another deadly surge of this horrible disease. I’m rooting for you.

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