This morning, Mux, a startup that provides API-based video streaming tooling and analytics, announced that it has closed a $37 million Series C round of capital.

Andreessen Horowitz led the round, which included participation from Accel and Cobalt. Prior to this funding round, Mux most recently raised a roughly $20 million round in mid-2019. In total, the company had raised a hair under $32 million before its Series C, according to PitchBook data.

The Mux round lands amidst a number of trends that we’re tracking here at TechCrunch, namely API-based startups, which are hot as a group at the moment, and startups that are serving an accelerating digital transformation.

Let’s explore a bit of Mux’s history, and then dig into how the startup’s current pace of revenue growth explains its fresh infusion of capital.

From exits to analytics to APIs

TechCrunch spoke with Mux’s founder Jon Dahl about the round, curious about how the company came to be. Dahl was a co-founder of Zencoder back in the early 2010s, which sold to Brightcove. When Zencoder launched, TechCrunch said that it wanted “to be the Amazon Web Services of video encoding.” It wound up selling for $30 million, a figure that stood a bit taller in 2012, when the transaction was announced.

Dahl stuck around Brightcove for a few years while angel investing. Then in late 2015 he founded Mux. The new startup first built an analytics tool called Mux Data. Dahl said the analytics product was needed because more conventional tooling like Google Analytics don’t work well with online video.

Mux Data is a SaaS product. But what made Mux even more interesting is its on-demand infra play, namely Mux Video.

Mux Video is delivered via an API, supporting both live and on-demand video for other companies. The startup likes to argue that it’s doing for video what Stripe has done for payments, namely take a bundle of complexity and headache, wrestle it into shape, then offer it via a developer-friendly hook.

Delivering video, we’ve seen via the bootstrapped growth of Cloudinary and recent Daily.co round, is growing work in 2020.

That fact shows up in Mux’s numbers, which are somewhat bonkers. The company’s aggregate revenue numbers are growing at a pace that Dahl described as 4x, while Mux Video’s revenues are growing at a pace of 8x, he said. Dahl shared a few other metrics — startups: if you want folks to care about your funding round, follow this example — including that Mux Video’s LTV/CAC ratio is somewhere around 5x-6x, and that its net retention is around 160%.

The collected performance data that Mux shared explain why a16z wanted to put its capital into the company.

But to better understand that all the same, I caught up with Kristina Shen, a general partner at the venture firm. Shen stressed that Mux was heading in the right direction before the pandemic, but that COVID has accelerated the importance of video in how humans interact with one another — an accelerating secular shift for Mux to surf, in other words.

COVID has bolstered Mux, with a release regarding its new investment, noting that its “social media customers [have seen] an increase of 118% in video streaming since mid-February while fitness and health streaming surged by 162%, e-learning grew by 230% and religious streams jumped nearly 3 orders of magnitude.”

Shen said during our call that Mux is one of the fastest-growing enterprise SaaS companies that her firm has seen.

Finally, when asked about Mux’s gross margins, Shen said the company would eventually look similarly to other companies in the infra space, like Twilio and Stripe. This matches what Dahl told this publication, though the founder included a fun wrinkle. Remember Mux Data, the analytics product? Its margins more closely resembles SaaS economics, while Mux Video is more similar to other API, infra plays. So Mux has a bit of SaaS and a bit of infra in it, which should give it a super interesting blended gross margin profile.

Fun. The next time we talk to the firm we’ll be curious to see how far into the double-digit millions it can stretch its run rate.

At last month’s Early Stage virtual event, channel growth experts joined TechCrunch reporters and editors for a series of conversations covering the best tools and strategies for building startups in 2020. For this post, I’ve recapped highlights of talks with:

If you’d like to hear or watch these conversations in their entirety, we’ve embedded the videos below.

Ethan Smith: How to build a high-performance SEO engine

Relying on internet searches to learn about growth topics like search engine optimization leads to a rabbit hole of LinkedIn thinkfluencer musings and decade-old Quora posts. Insights are few and far between, because SEO has changed dramatically as Google has squashed spammy techniques “specialists” have pushed for years.

Ethan Smith, owner of growth agency Graphite, says Google didn’t kill SEO, but the channel has evolved. “SEO has built a negative reputation over time of being spammy,” Smith says. “The typical flow of an SEO historically has been: I need to find every single keyword I possibly can find and auto-generate a mediocre page for each of those keywords, the user experience doesn’t really matter, content can be automated and spun, the key is fooling the bot.”

Artificial intelligence has disrupted this flow as algorithms have abandoned hard-coded rules for more flexible designs that are less vulnerable to being gamed. What SEO looks like today, Smith says, is all about trying to “figure out what the algorithm is trying to accomplish and try to accomplish the same thing.” Google’s algorithms aren’t looking for buckets of keywords, they’re looking to distill a user’s intent.

The key to building a strategy around SEO as a company breaks down into six steps surrounding intent, says Smith:

In a world economy devastated by Covid, threatened by climate change, ravaged by simultaneous natural disasters like tropical cyclone Amphan, the need for philanthropy has never been higher. This is...

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Entrepreneurial creators have to do a lot with limited time. They need to, well, create, but then they also need to build their marketing funnels, convert users to their paid products, and manage business operations. Yet, perhaps the most important task they face is keeping their existing fans engaged, because ultimately, that engagement ties directly to the health of their brand long-term.

Social tools are abysmal on platforms like YouTube and Instagram, particularly when it comes to creators owning their own communities and building deeper relationships with them. Other products like Discord have been used to some success, although Discord was built with a different focus in mind and is being hammered in to fix the problem.

Circle believes there is a better way. The New York City-based startup officially launched today for creators (following eight months of product beta testing). The platform is designed from the bottom-up to offer better community building and engagement tools for creators, while also integrating with other software typical in the creator toolkit.

The key DNA for the company is another NYC-based startup called Teachable. Two of Circle’s three founders, Sid Yadav and Andrew Guttormsen, hail from the edtech platform, which helps entrepreneurial teachers setup online storefronts for their classes. Teachable was sold to Hotmart earlier this year for what was reported to be a quarter of a billion dollars. Yadav was VP of Product there, and Guttormsen was VP of Growth and Marketing. Their third co-founder, Rudy Santino, knew Yadav from previous work.

Yadav spun out of Teachable and actually got his start as a contractor for Sahil Lavingia, the founder of Gumroad we were just talking about last week because he launched a new seed fund. He worked part-time as a product and design consultant, allowing him the flexibility to begin spending time thinking about new product ideas.

“I always knew that my next startup was going to be in [the creator] space,” Yadav said. “I just loved what they’re all about, which is about making an income from what they love doing.”

Teachable’s rapid growth in a small slice of the creator space taught Yadav some of the key challenges that creators face, and what a new product needed to solve in order to help them. With his co-founders, he enlisted a group of creators — including Pat Flynn at Smart Passive Income and Anne-Laure Le Cunff, who operates a newsletter called Ness Labs — to actively build communities on Circle to prove out their various design and product decisions.

The growth of the platform and the engagement of potential customers attracted the attention of Notation Capital, a NYC-based pre-seed fund that just announced its third fund late last month. Notation led a $1.5 million seed round into Circle, which also included Lavingia, Ankur Nagpal (the founder and CEO of Teachable), Dave Ambrose and Matthew Ziskie, among others.

There is a growing movement of software designed to help creators start their businesses. Substack of course has gotten the most attention in Silicon Valley, with a platform designed mostly around email newsletter subscriptions. Pico, meanwhile, has focused on building out more of the infrastructure of the creator business through a CRM that integrates with most other platforms. Patreon handles more of the payments and revenue engagement of fans.

Circle may end up touching on those areas, but today, wants to be the destination where you send all your creators in between newsletters or blog posts or Instagrams. It’s a smart part of the creator stack to play in, and with strong early customer enthusiasm and a chunk of funding, seems ready to make a mark in this burgeoning market.

Skillshare CEO Matt Cooper said 2020 has been a year of rapid growth — even before the pandemic forced large swaths of the population to stay home and turn to online learning for entertainment and enrichment.

Cooper (who became CEO in 2017) told me that the company decided last year to “focus on our strength,” leading to a “brand relaunch” in January 2020 to emphasize the richness of its creativity-themed content. At the same time, Cooper said the company defines creativity very broadly, with classes divided into categories like animation, design, illustration, photography, filmmaking and writing.

“It’s not Bob Ross,” he said. “And I love Bob Ross, but that’s a very narrow definition of creativity. Creativity can come in lots of different forms — art, design, journaling, creative writing, it can be culinary, it can be crafts.”

Cooper added that daily usage was already up significantly by mid-March, when the pandemic led to widespread social distancing orders across the United States. That created some challenges, particularly for the more polished Skillshare Originals that the company offers alongside its user-taught classes. (For example, Originals include a color masterclass taught by Victo Ngai, a class on “discovering your creative voice” taught by Shantell Martin and a creative nonfiction class by Susan Orlean.)

But of course the pandemic also meant that, as Cooper put it, “A lot more people had a lot more free time at home and were looking for a constructive way to spend it.” In fact, the company said that since its rebranding, new membership sign-ups have tripled, with existing members watching three times the number of lessons.

And Skillshare has continued producing Originals by sending instructors “a huge box of gear” and then supervising the shoot remotely. In fact, Cooper suggested that this has “opened up a whole new world” for the Originals team, allowing them to “look at parts of the world where we probably weren’t going to fly a camera crew to go shoot.”

The company now has 12 million registered members, 8,000 teachers and 30,000 classes — all accessible for $99 a year or $19 a month. And it’s announcing that it has raised $66 million in new funding led by OMERS Growth Equity, with managing director Saar Pikar joining the board of directors. Previous investors Union Square Ventures, Amasia, Burda Principal Investments and Spero Ventures also participated.

“Skillshare serves the needs of professional creatives and everyday creative hobbyists alike, which presents a highly-innovative value proposition for the online learning market,” Pikar said in a statement. “We look forward to deepening our partnership with Skillshare, and our fellow investors, in order to help Matt Cooper and his team scale up the company’s international reach – and help Skillshare achieve the full potential of its unique approach to online learning.”

Cooper added that the company (which had previously raised $42 million) was cash-flow positive for the first half of 2020, so it raised the new round to invest in growth — particularly in the Skillshare for Teams enterprise product, which allows customers like GM Financial, Vice, AWS, Lululemon, American Crafts and Benefit to offer Skillshare as a perk for their employees.

Cooper is also hoping to expand internationally. Apparently two-thirds of new member sign-ups are coming from outside the United States, with India as Skillshare’s fastest growing market, and that’s with “no local language content, no local language teachers.” While Cooper plans to remain focused on English content for the near future, he noted there are other steps Skillshare can take to encourage global viewership, like accepting payments in different currencies and supporting subtitles in different languages.

“Just by making it a little easier for those international users to get value from the platform, we expect to see dramatic growth in these international markets,” he said.

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

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest big news, chats about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here, and myself here, and don’t forget to check out last Friday’s episode.

This morning was a bit of a grab-bag of news, but of course we had to start off with the biggest story from the past few weeks:

All that and earnings season is largely behind us, leaving tech companies generally unscathed. So, the good times will persist for a while yet. Have a great week!

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CakeResume is a startup creating an alternative for the tech industry to job search platforms like LinkedIn. The Taipei-based company, founded in 2016, announced today that it has raised $900,000 in seed funding from Mynavi, one of the largest staffing and public relations companies in Japan. The round will be used to expand CakeResume’s operations in other countries, including Japan and India.

Founder and chief executive officer Trantor Liu, who was a full-stack web developer at Codementor before launching CakeResume, said the startup’s goal is to have the biggest pool of tech talent in Asia. The platform currently has about 500,000 resumes in its database, 75% of which were created by job seekers in Taiwan. More than 3,000 employers, ranging from startups like Appier to large companies like Amazon Web Services, TSMC, Nvidia and Tesla, use it for recruitment.

The other 25% of resumes come from countries including India, Indonesia and the United States. CakeResume plans to expand in Japan with the help of Mynavi, a strategic investor, and is also seeking partnerships in Southeast and South Asia with recruiters. Liu said CakeResume has a particularly high conversion rate in India, and its goal is to build a pool of at least 100,000 resumes there.

In a statement about its decision to invest in CakeResume, a Mynavi representative said, “The global shortage of IT engineers is becoming more apparent and we are focusing on services related to IT talent in Asia. Among them, CakeResume’s service is excellent in product design, and the service is already used by many talent in the country,” adding that it expects the platform to become “the largest IT talent pool in Asia in the near future.”

In Taiwan, CakeResume’s main rivals are LinkedIn and job search site 104.com.tw. It also competes against other job sites like AngelList, Indeed and Glassdoor.

CakeResume differentiates by giving tech professionals more ways to show off their skills, since many tech companies want more in-depth resumes than the traditional one-pagers used in other fields. The startup was named because its resume builder enables job seekers to add more layers of information, like assembling a cake. For example, CakeResume’s template allows engineers to embed projects from GitHub, while designers can add data visualizations, instead of just including links to them.

“We aren’t just providing a form to fill in that you can then download as a formatted PDF resume. We want to allow you to be more creative,” said Liu. “You can easily embed project images and add descriptions, which makes it easier for HR to understand what you can contribute.”

Another difference between CakeResume and its competitors is that most people who create a profile are actively seeking new positions, instead of professional networking opportunities. Because it is also tailored for the tech industry, recruiters have a higher chance of getting responses from interested candidates, Liu said.

“We recently got a review from one of our clients, and they said when they used our platform to contact talent, they got about a 50% reply rate, but on LinkedIn it might be less than 10%,” he added.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, many job seekers were willing to relocate, but chief operating officer Wei-Cheng Hsieh said CakeResume is now focusing more on helping people find remote jobs. More tech companies, including Facebook and Google, are extending their work from home policies until at least summer 2021.

Though many job postings still specify a location, Liu said CakeResume’s team anticipates this will change as companies continue adapting to the pandemic. While CakeResume will remain focused on matching applicants to jobs instead of networking, it also is also testing some social features to help workers around the world connect with companies and each other.

This feature from CrunchBase News by Elizabeth Acuña Rivera and Greg Mitchell looks at how women are leading the FinTech revolution in Latin America. Over 35% of Latin American FinTech startups have...

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TikTok influencers reveal how they're making money in 2020 despite the app's paltry monetization features

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AT&T CEO John Stankey John Lamparski / Stringer

The third-largest advertiser in the US just laid off a chunk of its consumer marketing team

Read the full story here.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos MANDEL NGAN—AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Amazon's record profits last quarter would've been impossible without an accounting change and a huge spending cut. That raises questions about future earnings growth.

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Thanks for reading and see you tomorrow! You can reach me in the meantime at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and subscribe to this daily email here.

— Lauren