Video streaming platforms have signed up more subscribers during Covid-19 lockdowns, and that growth is expected to continue after the pandemic, showcasing more international content. When subtitles are well done, they don’t take audiences out of the immersive experience of a good show or movie. This means as content providers tackle worldwide expansion, demand for localization services, including translated subtitles, is also growing. Iyuno Media Group is one of the largest media localization companies, and works with clients including Netflix, Apple iTunes, DreamWorks, HBO and Entertainment One.

A lot has changed since Iyuno was started in 2002 by executive chairman David Lee while he was an undergraduate in Seoul. Back then it provided mainly English to Korean subtitles for television networks. “I started the business in my last year of university and, of course, back then we didn’t have any video streaming services,” he said. “Our client base was mostly local and some regional broadcasters.”

Now Iyuno, whose investors include SoftBank Ventures Asia, provides localization services for about 600,000 hours of content on an annual basis, including translation, subtitling, dubbing, accessibility features and compliance with local content regulations, in more than 80 languages. It operates 35 facilities across 30 countries in the Americas, Asia Pacific, Europe and the Middle East. Iyuno also announced in January that it has entered into an agreement with Imagica Group to acquire SDI Media, another localization provider.

In order to make the current scale of its services possible, Iyuno built its own cloud-based enterprise resource planning software. The platform enables uploading of files from content providers, and includes features for time coding, translation, content and technical quality control, and distribution back to Iyuno’s clients. It onboards, trains and assesses new freelancers, and gives teams working on the same project a central base.

Iyuno also built its own neural machine translation engines, which are trained on data from specific genres (for example, drama, animation, comedies, horror and documentary), and help its teams work more accurately and quickly.

Localizing entertainment in a more connected world

Being able to guarantee consistent results with fast turnaround times is especially important now that OTT services are erasing international and cultural barriers between audiences, and the shows and movies they watch.

“Good shows, even in non-English languages, perform well in other countries,” said Lee. “Because of Covid, productions have been majorly affected. OTT providers need fresh content to keep subscribers and are licensing non-U.S. content in countries where it hadn’t been licensed a lot in the past.”

Parrot Analytics recently told Axios that non-American shows accounted for nearly 30% of demand in the United States during the third-quarter of 2020. That trend began before the pandemic, but production shutdowns meant many networks and streaming services began showing more international content to meet audience demands.

This means localization services are not only working with more shows and movies that were originally filmed in non-English languages, but also translating it into a wider array of languages, which involves a lot of teamwork.

“In a single language for a single hour of video running time, it usually takes around five or six different steps, and four or five different individuals,” including translators and quality control checkers, said Lee.

For content that is translated into a single other language, Iyuno hires people who can listen to the show and translate at the same time, without having to use a script. Files from Iyuno’s clients are uploaded onto its platform and proxy files are generated with watermarks and other security measures. Then the translator gets a link to the video. After they are done adding their translation, the subtitled content goes through a preset quality control process, and then is formatted and delivered back to the client.

The process for translating content into several different languages follows a similar procedure, except the original language is first transcribed into a script, and then sent to translators so they can work as a team. Then subtitled content is sent to a central quality control team to make sure it is consistent before being delivered to the client.

For some content, like live broadcasts or episodes of television dramas that are edited shortly before airing, Iyuno can provide very quick turnaround times, typically 24 hours, but sometimes as little as one or two hours. In those scenarios, Iyuno begins recording when the show starts airing. Then it divides the footage into 10-minute segments that are sent to teams of three people: a time coder, translator and quality control checker, who usually work from home and are logged into Iyuno’s ERP platform. It takes about an hour to translate each 10-minute section, so that means six teams are usually involved at the same time during an hour-long process.

Preserving an immersive experience

Quality control includes ensuring subtitles and other localization features for a show maintain consistent quality across languages, and also checking technical factors, since there are more than 100 subtitle formats. Iyuno’s quality checkers make sure subtitles are placed unobtrusively on the screen, don’t obscure important details and avoid overlapping between dialogue from different characters or scenes.

“We like to have buffers because reading speed is usually slower than hearing speed,” said Lee. Iyuno’s platform has scene detection tools, which analyzes video and automatically organizes subtitles so they don’t roll over into another scene.

Creating accessibility features currently accounts for about 5% to 10% of Iyuno’s business and is growing. That includes audio descriptions for people with visual impairments, which means adding narration that describes what is happening on screen, and closed captions with descriptions of all the sounds that are happening in a show.

“It’s a growing demand and it’s very important for clients, who are keen to serve those audiences,” said Lee.

One of the things translators need to do when working on shows is to keep the original intent of the creator in languages with different colloquialisms or cultural nuances.

“I was a subtitler, and it’s usually not a very dry job of translating the foreign language into ours, or the other way around,” Lee said. “It’s really immersing yourself into the content, so at times you forget to translate because you’re watching the show and understanding the feeling, laughs, sadness or character dynamics.”

Iyuno’s machine translation engines are able to help with the process by performing the initial translation, so human translators can focus more on a show’s creative aspects.

“It’s more a subjective and qualitative thing. It’s hard to put into technical words, but we try to find efficiencies to reinforce that creativity,” Lee added. “At the same time, most of our translators had that learning and experience before they came to the company, so they’re aware that those are aspects they need to deal with and, in many cases, I think that’s where a machine can never substitute a human.”

Plentywaka, a Nigerian bus-booking platform, today announced that it has been accepted into the Techstars Toronto accelerator program.

It will join nine other startups in the class of 2021 and secure funding from the accelerator as it sets its sights on global expansion.

The Lagos-based company, founded by Onyeka Akumah, Johnny Ena, John Shaibu and Afolabi Oluseyi, operates an ‘Uber-for-buses’ model connecting commuters with buses via an app.

Plentywaka launched in September 2019, and in the first two months, moved an average of six people daily, according to CEO Akumah. By its sixth month, this number increased to about 1,500 daily, and the company completed more than 100,000 rides within that timeframe.

Then in March 2020, the pandemic-induced lockdown hit businesses across Lagos and other states within Nigeria. Due to the nature of its business, Plentywaka had to make a slight pivot and began transporting essential services across Lagos, especially food items. It also opened a logistics service.

As the lockdown eased across the city and commuting resumed, the company moved 60% capacity while the operational cost remained the same. Although growth was steady and picking up, the company started seeking external investment. It received $300,000 pre-seed from its parent company, EMFATO and other early-stage investors like Microtraction and Niche Capital in August.

Backed with the new funding, Plentywaka has since doubled down on its core offering — transporting people via buses. The logistics arm that it launched, as well as a car service, have since been shuttered.

Akumah says the focus on a primary offering has paid a dividend. The company has expanded its intrastate services into two other cities in Nigeria including the country’s capital city, Abuja and has moved about 300,000 people. Following this announcement though, there are immediate plans to launch an interstate service across different cities in Nigeria.

This service will see Plentywaka partner with some major bus travel companies, which collectively have more than 2000 buses and ply over 100 routes in the country. Plentywaka acts as an aggregator, and commuters can see options of various transport companies, compare fares, and book on its platform.

“Plentywaka is getting to a point where we’re now becoming more like an aggregator as we onboard transportation companies on our platform. Interstate travel in Nigeria is data insufficient, and we want to be the first company to solve this.” Ena, co-founder and president of Plentywaka, said to TechCrunch. 

In addition to this and the new capital from Techstars, Plentywaka is looking to scale its platform across Africa and North America. Akumah says this global expansion plan will start with a city in Canada, most likely Toronto, on or before Q4 2021.

Sunil Sharma, the managing director of Techstars Toronto, confirmed this to TechCrunch. According to Sharma, Techstars is backing the Nigerian mobility startup because it’s solving a massive problem in Nigeria that can be likened to urban transportation challenges in other populated cities worldwide.

“We know that Western cities have legacy transportation systems. However, there are many transportation challenges, even in a city like Toronto,” he said. “And we think that Plentywaka’s technology and approach in improving the lives of citizens and their daily commute needs can be brought over to cities in the West just as they are in Africa.”

Plentywaka plans to launch its intracity service first after engaging the country’s necessary stakeholders before introducing the intercity model. Sharma thinks that most cities in Canada aren’t well serviced by buses, leading to a broken intercity transit infrastructure. Plentywaka’s presence will bring the much-needed option the city deserves, he says.

“Cities and towns here should have bus connectivity, but they quite simply don’t have it, and my view is that the arrival of Plentywaka will be an immediate option to the status quo. It will also resonate with people as a way to supplement existing transportation options,” he said.

Techstars’ relationship with Akumah also proved crucial in Plentywaka’s acceptance into the accelerator. A second-time Techstars-backed founder, Akumah co-founded Farmcrowdy, a Nigerian digital agriculture platform in 2016. Having gone through the accelerator’s Atlanta program four years ago with the agritech startup, Akumah is doing the same with Plentywaka. He doubles as CEO at both companies. 

The serial founder said the relationship with Techstars is one reason the company is expanding to Canada instead of neighbouring African countries.

“If the opportunity we have in Toronto right now to expand was similar to what we had in Ghana or South Africa, of course we’ll be having those conversations already. But when we have the support system from Techstars, Sunil, and regulators in Toronto without even putting feet on the ground, I mean that makes it exciting for us to expand to Canada,” the CEO remarked.

Nigerian or African startups, in general, rarely make their way into Canada. Plentywaka is on the verge of doing so, and it will be looking to close a seed round from investors to carry out these expansion plans and further improve its technology.

Squarespace has raised $300 million in a round of funding that values the company at a staggering $10 billion valuation.

New backers include Dragoneer, Tiger Global, D1 Capital Partners, Fidelity Management & Research Company, funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. and Spruce House. Existing backers Accel and General Atlantic also participated. 

Squarespace founder & CEO Anthony Casalena said the fresh capital will advance the company’s growth initiatives and help it scale its product suite.

The move comes less than two months after the company filed confidentiality to go public via a direct listing or initial public offering.

Squarespace, which has helped millions create their own websites, was founded in 2003 and bootstrapped until a $38.5 million Series A in 2010 that was co-led by Accel and Index Ventures.

The online website creation and hosting service — which has now expanded into e-commerce by hosting online stores — then raised another $40 million round in 2014. But it is perhaps best known for its epic 2017-era $200 million secondary round that General Atlantic financed. That round was raised at a $1.5 billion pre-money valuation. That means it has effectively upped its valuation by more than five times in just over three years.

At that time, TechCrunch reported that Squarespace was a profitable company, with revenues increasing 50% in the prior year, to about $300 million. Execs are declining to comment on the company’s latest funding round beyond a post on its website.

New York City-based Squarespace has over 1,200 employees spread across its headquarters and offices in Dublin, Ireland; Portland, Oregon; and Los Angeles, California. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated digital adoption in a way that no one could have ever anticipated, and as more people conduct more services online and via mobile devices, businesses have had to work even harder to validate users and security. One company working to serve that need, Socure — which uses AI and machine learning to verify identities — announced Tuesday that it has raised $100 million in a Series D funding round at a $1.3 billion valuation.

Given how much of our lives have shifted online, it’s no surprise that the U.S. digital identity market is projected to increase to over $30 billion by 2023 from just under $15 billion in 2019, according to One World Identity. This has led to skyrocketing demand for the services provided by identity verification companies. 

The founding team set out on a mission to be able to verify 100% of “good IDs” in real-time while “completely eliminating” identity fraud across the internet.

Historically, Socure has been focused on the financial services industry, but it plans to use its new capital to further expand into “every consumer-facing vertical” including online gaming, healthcare, telco, e-commerce and on-demand services.

The startup’s predictive analytics platform applies artificial intelligence and machine-learning techniques with online/offline data intelligence (from email, phone, address, IP, device, velocity and the broader internet) to verify that people are, in fact, who they say they are when applying for various accounts.

Today, Socure has more than 350 customers including three top five banks, six top 10 card issuers, a “top” credit bureau and over 75 fintechs such as Varo Money, Public, Chime and Stash.

In 2020, Socure grew its customer base by over 85% year over year and expanded its workforce by over 50% to about 240 people today.

Accel led Socure’s latest financing, which included participation from existing backers Commerce Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, Flint Capital, Citi Ventures, Wells Fargo Strategic Capital, Synchrony, Sorenson, Two Sigma Ventures and others. 

The round comes less than six months after the company raised $35 million in a round led by Sorenson Ventures, and brings the New York-based company’s total raised to $196 million since its 2012 inception.

Socure founder and CEO Johnny Ayers says his company’s identity management products can help B2C enterprises achieve know-your-customer (KYC) auto-approval rates of up to 97%. This means that financial institutions can more easily capture fraud, for example, via Socure’s single API. The company also claims that by more easily verifying thin-file (those without much credit history) and young consumers, it can help reduce the underbanked population.     

The pandemic and resulting shutdowns resulted in a massive demand for trusted digital identity, Ayers believes.

“This growth tracks with a larger trend marked by the broad migration of businesses to accept applications and onboard new customers online, with many companies accelerating their transformation from digital-first to digital-only,” he told TechCrunch.

Overall fraud attempts among Socure’s existing customer base nearly doubled in the second quarter of 2020 — with certain segments seeing rises as high as 150%, according to Ayers.

“These instances did not involve actual fraud but instead were flagged by Socure as suspicious and blocked prior to inflicting damage,” he said.

Looking ahead, the company plans to use its new capital to also enhance its product offering as it continues to develop patents. 

Accel partner Amit Jhawar will join Socure’s board as part of the funding round.

In a blog post, Jhawar described Socure as “a purpose-built solution designed to handle the wave of new online users because its machine learning models have learned from every identity it has already seen.”

As former COO at Braintree and general manager at Venmo, Jhawar knows a thing or two about the importance of identity verification, especially in the financial services space.

He wrote: “I knew immediately that the Socure solution would be a game-changer because the solution can be used in every step of the customer lifecycle, from account creation to login to transaction.”

Socure also has hinted that it has an IPO in its future.

In a written statement, Ayers said: “We are incredibly grateful for the chance to innovate and partner to solve this problem with some of the greatest companies in the world and are energized for the opportunities that lay ahead for Socure, especially as we make our march to a potential IPO.”

Via email, he told TechCrunch that the company will “potentially” look at public markets in 2022 or 2023, when it feels “the time is right for the business.”

The story was updated post-publication with live comments from Socure

Early Stage is the premier “how-to” event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear firsthand how some of the most successful founders and VCs build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios. We’ll cover every aspect of company building: Fundraising, recruiting, sales, product-market fit, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session also has audience participation built-in — there’s ample time included for audience questions and discussion. Use code “TCARTICLE at checkout to get 20% off tickets right here.

Like many people, I’m currently deep in SPACland. I’ve been writing privately about it a lot but have now crossed over into a zone where I feel like writing more publicly about it.

When Jason and I wrote the first edition Venture Deals in 2011, we built off a series of 30+ blog posts we wrote in 2005 about Term Sheets. It’s fun to explore them for historical reference since Jack Bauer plays a major part in the posts.

While these posts were the seed for what is now a book (Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer And Venture Capitalist), it was also a way for us to think through all the elements of a VC financing, back at a time when there was enormous opacity about how these worked, along with massive information asymmetry between people who did them all the time (e.g., us) and the entrepreneur, who did a few of these over her lifetime.

While the web is a much noisier place in 2021 than it was in 2005, the opacity and information asymmetry around SPACs are remarkably similar to what existed 16 years ago around venture deals.

The cliche “everyone’s an expert, but no one knows anything” applies. Yes, there are some experts, but not that many. And the amount of misinformation, misperception, opacity, and information asymmetry is enormous.

As I continue to write privately, I’m going to start writing more publicly. And I encourage comments, feedback, and corrections.

While there is much debate about SPACs, I believe they are a long-term part of the capital stack. They are evolving rapidly, which is part of what is so interesting about them, at least to me.

The post Writing about SPACs appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

Occasionally, it’s easy for startups to achieve so-called product-market fit, but more often, it’s a struggle. Perhaps no one knows this as well as Sean Lane, co-founder and CEO of Olive, a company whose software completes so many tedious administrative healthcare tasks for hospitals that it is currently valued by investors at $1.5 billion.

Somewhat amazingly, the nearly nine-year-old company raised $380 million of the $445 million it has raised altogether just last year. In fact, Olive is now growing so fast, and clicking along so well, that Lane just raised $50 million in funding last month for a second startup that uses Olive’s same tech platform. He’s CEO of that startup, called Circulo, too.

It’s impressive. It also took Lane around 28 big and small pivots to build the kind of high-growth, fast-scaling businesses that he always wanted to create — moves he’s going to discuss with us at TechCrunch’s upcoming two-day, all-virtual TC Early Stage event coming up April 1 and 2.

The idea: to save other founders from having to undergo the same anguishing twists and turns by sharing what he learned along his own path.

Lane had some help. Specifically, he has long credited one of his early investors, Mark Kvamme of Drive Capital, for helping identify a big opportunity amid of sea of smaller opportunities. As Lane told the outlet Columbus CEO a few year ago, before meeting Kvamme, he had a nice life in Baltimore, with a house on the water with his wife. Lane, who was once a U.S. Air Force and National Security Administration intelligence officer, was angel investing, co-running a tech incubator and had co-founded a company called CrossChx to link fingerprints to electronic medical records.

A chance encounter with Kvamme, a Silicon Valley VC who had moved to Columbus, would change everything. To wit, after Lane talked with him about his endeavors in Baltimore, as well as having bigger ambitions to create an “internet of healthcare,” Kvamme persuaded Lane to abandon his various projects, relocate to Columbus and focus entirely on a newer, better CrossChx.

That’s now looking like a smart bet by Kvamme, who wrote CrossChx — later renamed Olive — its first check. But even with Kvamme’s support, Olive’s success hardly happened overnight. Lane has said he met with plenty of resistance as he tried and scrapped numerous products. As with many growing startups that veer in a new direction, there were painful layoffs. He also eventually parted ways with his co-founder, Brad Mascho, who left the company in late 2017 in an apparent cloud of exhaustion. He’d “worked his butt off for a good four years,” as Lane told Columbus CEO.

It’s many of these tough points in Olive’s trajectory — and particularly those product pivots — that we’ll be talking about in a few short weeks at our upcoming event. Indeed, for those who’ve struggled with their own ambitions, or their own product roadmaps, or who’ve wondered what they could be doing better or smarter or faster to grow their own companies, this is one conversation that should not be missed.

Even better, our talk with Lane is just one part of a two-day event exploring the many aspects of early-stage startups — check out the entire agenda line up here.

It’s coming up fast, so be sure to grab your ticket to TC Early Stage on April 1-2 — and, by the way, you can save $100 or more when you get the dual-event ticket for both our April and July events. The latter is coming up July 8 and 9. You can learn more here.

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While there are plenty of companies selling data about physical locations, SafeGraph CEO Auren Hoffman said his startup is “one of the few companies to sell this data to data science teams.”

For the most part, location data has traditionally been sold to marketers, and Hoffman said, “In the marketing world, if your data is like 40% or 50% true, that’s actually amazing.” But that doesn’t cut it for the data scientist who needs to use it to build complex models and algorithms.

So SafeGraph takes what Hoffman described as a “very, very rigorous approach,” crawling and merging data like business listings, foot traffic and building polygons from 20,000 sources. He also noted that while other businesses treat this data as “an exhaust that they sell on the side of their core business,” it represents “100%” of SafeGraph’s revenue.

Hoffman told me that SafeGraph’s customers are using its data in sectors as varied as GIS/mapping, local search, financial services and logistics. Customers include investment company Ares Management, food distribution company Sysco and Choice Hotels — in a statement, Sysco’s senior manager of market, customer and competitive intelligence Ben Anderson described SafeGraph as “the most comprehensive and actionable POI dataset.”

The startup also says that its data is being used by more than 7,000 data scientists and has been cited in more than 300 academic papers.

Today, SafeGraph announced that it has raised $45 million in Series B funding led by Sapphire Ventures, bringing its total funding to $61 million. Previous investors including Alex Rosen of Ridge Ventures, DNX Ventures and Peter Thiel also participated.

“What stands out about SafeGraph is how they’ve been able to quickly position themselves into a major player in the geospatial data industry,” said Sapphire Partner Cathy Gao in a statement. “By singularly focusing on providing the highest-quality places data to data science teams, they’ve earned the trust of some of the largest public and private institutions.”

Hoffman noted that the startup has been “extremely cash efficient,” only losing $3 million over the past two years, and that it raised the funding simply to “grow much faster.” Growth plans include international expansion — SafeGraph has been focused on the United States and Canada thus far, with a U.K. launch planned in April — as well as possible acquisitions.

He added that particularly with the pandemic forcing many businesses to close or change their hours, “having really accurate data is going to be a lot more important in a post-COVID world.”

Early Stage is the premier “how-to” event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear firsthand how some of the most successful founders and VCs build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios. We’ll cover every aspect of company building: Fundraising, recruiting, sales, product-market fit, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session also has audience participation built-in — there’s ample time included for audience questions and discussion. Use code “TCARTICLE at checkout to get 20% off tickets right here.

The importance of the pitch deck can’t be underestimated. It is often the first point of contact between a company and venture investors… but how investors consume a pitch deck (and what they really think) is also a bit of a black box.

Are they speed-flipping through the slides or taking their time? Do they prefer more information on the team or context on the industry? More numbers or more words? How many slides is the right number of slides?

There are too many questions to count, and often very few answers. But we’re popping the lid off of that black box with the Pitch Deck Teardown. We’ve done Pitch Deck Teardowns at events like Disrupt and Early Stage 2020, and this year we’re cranking it up a notch on Extra Crunch Live.

Anyone can submit their pitch deck and hear what our guests, tech leaders across the industry, think of them. (Important note: Extra Crunch members will be prioritized on the list of decks we choose to show during the episode.)

We’ve already gotten some amazing feedback from our guests.

So what are you waiting for? Submit your pitch deck or grab yourself a ticket to our next episode of Extra Crunch Live.

See you there!

Early Stage is the premier “how-to’ event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear first hand how some of the most successful founders and VCs build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios. We’ll cover every aspect of company building: Fundraising, recruiting, sales, product market fit, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session also has audience participation built-in — there’s ample time included for audience questions and discussion. Use code “TCARTICLE” at checkout to get 20% off tickets right here.

Another online grocery delivery and “dark store” operator breaks cover today: London-based Jiffy, which aims to deliver fresh groceries and household essentials in around 15 minutes, has raised £2.6 million in seed funding as it readies for launch.

Backing the upstart, which already faces a plethora of better-funded competitors, is venture capital fund LVL1 Group, with participation from AddVenture, TA Ventures, Vladimir Kholiaznikov, and angel investors Oskar Hartmann, Alexander Nevinskiy and Dominique Locher.

Jiffy says it will use the injection of capital to launch its first stores in London, as early as this month. It plans to make the service available in Westminster, Waterloo, Lambeth, Battersea, Clapham Town, Shoreditch, Bethnal Green, Hackney, Whitechapel, Stepney Green and Leytonstone.

The company will then launch a further 20 local fulfillment hubs across the U.K. later this year, and I understand is already out fundraising again. On its deck is likely a slide highlighting an executive team with online and offline retail chops, including former managers from Sainsbury’s and Deliveroo.

“We live in 2021 when you can purchase a ticket to Mars, but you still can’t get your groceries delivered on demand when you need them,” says Jiffy founder Artur Shamalov, who has previously started several companies in the food and delivery space. “The online grocery shopping experience is frustrating for most U.K. customers, as slots are often unavailable for days and weeks in advance, and some stores charge a premium fee for a ‘rapid’ delivery that still takes up to two hours. We believe it shouldn’t be this way, and that getting your groceries should be as accessible and affordable as shopping at an offline grocery store, but with the convenience of an ultrafast delivery service.”

To that end, Shamalov says that Jiffy is creating a service it believes will partially replace the traditional daily grocery shop. This will see it offer a variety of fruits and vegetables, meats, meals and household essentials from popular brands and local suppliers, with a total product range “exceeding” 2,000 SKUs per store.

“Our goal is to make it as accessible as possible for a very wide audience: from busy parents juggling work, raising children and an active social life to busy professionals in urban areas for whom saving time on essential shopping means they are free to use it for activities they really enjoy,” says the Jiffy founder. “We also think of the many vulnerable people who don’t feel safe going to supermarkets these days. They shouldn’t have to worry about their safety when they run out of bread or milk, nor should they have to wait several hours or days for their order to arrive.”

Jiffy joins a host of European startups that have raised money on the promise of delivering grocery and other convenience store items within 10-20 minutes of ordering. They do this by building out their own hyperlocal, delivery-only fulfilment centres — so-called “dark stores” — and recruiting their own delivery personnel. This full-stack or vertical approach and the visibility it provides is then supposed to produce enough supply chain and logistics efficiency to make the unit economics work, although that part is far from proven.

On how competitive the grocery and convenience dark store market is already becoming in the U.K. and elsewhere in Europe, Shamalov notes it’s still a relatively new space, and that all players are creating the infrastructure required to make instant grocery delivery possible. “We believe that within a couple of years, instant grocery delivery will become an essential part of urban infrastructure, in the same way water pipes, broadband lines and telecoms are now,” he says. “So, in a sense, we are all building this new infrastructure together, and we are all competing jointly against the traditional grocery distribution channels.”

The growing (though not definitive) list includes Berlin’s Flink, which has raised $52 million in seed financing in a mixture of equity and debt, and Berlin HQ’d Gorillas, which has raised $44 million in Series A funding and recently expanded to London in addition to Germany and Netherlands. Also operating in London are Weezy, Getir, Dija and Zapp. The U.S. unicorn goPuff is also reportedly looking to expand into Europe and has held talks to acquire or invest in the U.K.’s Fancy.

It’s not just a land grab but a capital grab, too, since the model is an infrastructure play as much as anything. Large amounts of financing will be needed to build stores and run loss leading customer acquisitions campaigns, something that is already ramping up in London. In contrast to competitors, although it is yet to launch, Jiffy appears underfunded.

“We don’t think we are underfunded,” says Shamalov, pushing back. “We take as much capital as we think is efficient considering dilution of the founders and building the company step by step rather than missing out on overpromised ambitions.

“We don’t necessarily agree that having the most funding and overspending on acquisition and expansion will automatically lead to a greater success in this industry. Hyperlocal business models require a hyperlocal approach to everything, so our focus is on expanding within just one market, instead of going globally.”

In addition, Shamalov claims that Jiffy is seeing strong inbound interest from investors, which he says is surprising since the startup is still operating in a stealth mode. “We are confident the next funding round will be a solid step forward,” he adds.

Early Stage is the premier “how-to” event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear firsthand how some of the most successful founders and VCs build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios. We’ll cover every aspect of company building: Fundraising, recruiting, sales, product-market fit, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session also has audience participation built in — there’s ample time included for audience questions and discussion. Use code “TCARTICLE at checkout to get 20% off tickets right here.

It was easy to wonder what would become of Docker after it sold its enterprise business in 2019, but it regrouped last year as a cloud native container company focused on developers, and the new approach appears to be bearing fruit. Today, the company announced a $23 million Series B investment.

Tribe Capital led the round with participation from existing investors Benchmark and Insight Partners. Docker has now raised a total of $58 million including the $35 million investment it landed the same day it announced the deal with Mirantis.

To be sure, the company had a tempestuous 2019 when they changed CEOs twice, sold the enterprise division and looked to reestablish itself with a new strategy. While the pandemic made 2020 a trying time for everyone, Docker CEO Scott Johnston says that in spite of that, the strategy has begun to take shape.

“The results we think speak volumes. Not only was the strategy strong, but the execution of that strategy was strong as well,” Johnston told me. He indicated that the company added 1.7 million new developer registrations for the free version of the product for a total of more than 7.3 million registered users on the community edition.

As with any open-source project, the goal is to popularize the community project and turn a small percentage of those users into paying customers, but Docker’s problem prior to 2019 had been finding ways to do that. While he didn’t share specific numbers, Johnston indicated that annual recurring revenue (ARR) grew 170% last year, suggesting that they are beginning to convert more successfully.

Johnston says that’s because they have found a way to turn a certain class of developer in spite of a free version being available. “Yes, there’s a lot of upstream open-source technologies, and there are users that want to hammer together their own solutions. But we are also seeing these eight to 10 person ‘two-pizza teams’ who want to focus on building applications, and so they’re willing to pay for a service,” he said.

That open-source model tends to get the attention of investors because it comes with that built-in action at the top of the sales funnel. Tribe’s Arjun Sethi, whose firm led the investment, says his company actually was a Docker customer before investing in the company and sees a lot more growth potential.

“Tribe focuses on identifying N-of-1 companies — top-decile private tech firms that are exhibiting inflection points in their growth, with the potential to scale toward outsized outcomes with long-term venture capital. Docker fits squarely into this investment thesis [ … ],” Sethi said in a statement.

Johnston says as they look ahead post-pandemic, he’s learned a lot since his team moved out of the office last year. After surveying employees, they were surprised to learn that most have been happier working at home, having more time to spend with family, while taking away a grueling commute. As a result, he sees going virtual first, even after it’s safe to reopen offices.

That said, he is planning to offer a way to get teams together for in-person gatherings and a full company get-together once a year.

“We’ll be virtual first, but then with the savings of the real estate that we’re no longer paying for, we’re going to bring people together and make sure we have that social glue,” he said.

Early Stage is the premier “how-to” event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear firsthand how some of the most successful founders and VCs build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios. We’ll cover every aspect of company building: Fundraising, recruiting, sales, product-market fit, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session also has audience participation built in — there’s ample time included for audience questions and discussion. Use code “TCARTICLE at checkout to get 20% off tickets right here.

Microsoft stands to receive nearly a quarter of Covid relief funds destined for U.S. cybersecurity defenders, angering some lawmakers.Read More

Datagen, which taps AI to create synthetic training datasets for computer vision systems, emerged from stealth with $18.5 million in funding.Read More

Flowspace, a fulfillment and delivery logistics startup, has raised $31 million in an equity venture round.Read More

Playstudios, a social casino game maker which is poised to public, has launched its MyVegas Bingo game with real-world rewards.Read More

I've spent some time on Roblox. My reason is simple. I have a 10 year old son, and he likes loves it (second only to Minecraft). 

I'll be honest. I do not like the games on Roblox. I find them formulaic and repetitive. Many of them also have what's called "the grind" where you have to mindlessly click on something in order to make some arbitrary number go up (see: Lifting Simulator for an example).

But, like many others, I bought Roblox shares, now that the company is public. 

My reason is simple: Roblox is not just a gaming "platform" (there are many of those out there), but because:

Roblox is a low-code game development platform for citizen developers.

I'm a big fan of low-code platforms that allow mere mortals to do things that previously required "real developers". I'm the co-founder/CTO of HubSpot and we're big believers in making it easy for people to automate processes across marketing/sales/service.  And I would have invested in Zapier (Hi, Wade!) or Airtable (Hi Howie!) if they would have let me, but they didn't. No hard feelings though. OK, maybe just a little bit. ????

Anyways, back to Roblox. 

They created a multi-platform game development environment called "Roblox Studio". Looks something like this:

This development environment is pretty well done -- and it's a non-trivial thing to build. I wish they hadn't picked Lua as the default language, and instead gone with something like Javascript or Python. Some might argue that Lua is a simpler language, but I disagree.  In any case, it's impressive the level of control you have. 

In any case, they've made it possible for people to create games -- which they have done -- by the thousands. Are the games great?  No. But, could they one day be great? Yes. And if they pull that off, Roblox could be a Very Big Deal.

The lesson for software startups: See if you can figure out ways where it's not just you trying to create value for your users/customers. Make it such that *others* can create value too. That's where the really big opportunities are.  Case in point: At HubSpot, we just learned (from IDC) that the HubSpot ecosystem is predicted to grow faster than HubSpot itself -- from $4.8 billion in 2020 to $12.5 billion in 2024.

Real platforms are when the value you help others unlock externally is more than the value you create internally. 

The 8BitDo Pro 2 gamepad adds new features and better comfort to one of the best controllers you can get for $50.Read More

Microsoft announced today that Undertale is coming to Xbox Game Pass on March 16. Undertale is one of the most beloved indie games ever.Read More

Major League Soccer’s esports league, eMLS, and Electronic Arts are kicking off a EA Sports FIFA tournament on March 20 and March 2021.Read More

$avvy, the latest movie that Amy and I helped underwrite, is now out. It’s another movie from Robin Hauser and Finish Line Features.

$avvy investigates the historical, cultural, and societal norms around women and money. This documentary questions why women often take a backseat to their finances. Interviews with business and financial experts like Carrie Schwab, Farnoosh Torabi, Sallie Krawcheck, and Haley Sacks (aka Mrs. Dow Jones) show why it is so important—now more than ever—for women to take control of their financial futures.

The first screening of $avvy is at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival from March 31st to April 10th.

Sign up here to register to watch $avvy.

The post $avvy: Women. Money. Freedom. appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

GM-backed autonomous vehicle startup Cruise announced that it has acquired Voyage for an undisclosed amount.Read More