Some audience questions answered by Sramana: – Do you have a K12 – education startup idea for the post Covid world? – Do you have a healthcare startup idea for the post Covid world?...

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In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here: 495th 1Mby1M Roundtable July 23, 2020: With Sonali Vijayavargiya, Augment Ventures

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Helping Americans get their 40 winks has never been more necessary as the country faces what some health experts have called a sleep epidemic, and Snoop Dogg’s cannabis-focused firm Casa Verde Capital wants to help.

The firm is leading a $9.5 million investment into a company called Proper, which is launching with a combination of sleep coaching and supplements, pitching a “holistic” sleep health solution.

One-third of U.S. adults don’t get enough sleep according to Proper’s estimates, and the company’s chief executive, Nancy Ramamurthi, says that the COVID-19 epidemic has only made the problem worse.

“Proper aims to help solve what the CDC has identified as a public health crisis — insufficient sleep — with a truly more holistic and personalized solution,” said Ramamurthi, founder and CEO of Proper, in a statement. “Proper has combined the best of natural, safe, evidence-based sleep supplements with expert behavioral coaching, which consumers have not traditionally been able to access. Now, thanks to the increasing popularity of telehealth, sleep coaching can be delivered online.”

The sleep coaching services from Proper are provided by board-certified health and wellness coaches under the guidance of a clinical psychologist and behavioral sleep medicine specialist, according to a statement from the company.

Ramamurthi said that clinical validation is a core component of the company’s business. Indeed, the company is currently running its formulations through a clinical trial to prove their efficacy. It’s an additional step that the company doesn’t need to take, she said, because the supplements have all been studied with clinical trials supporting the use of the ingredients as treatments for sleep therapy. “That’s in addition to them being used for thousands of years,” said Ramamurthi.

Proper was incubated within the consumer health venture studio Redesign Health and will use the new capital from investors led by Snoop Dogg’s Casa Verde to boost its sales and marketing efforts and continue its research and development activities.

While sleep aids may seem like a strange market for a cannabis-focused investment firm, Casa Verde partner Karan Wadhera says it’s a highly strategic investment for the firm.

“[Cannabis] is an input as well and its use case will go beyond how people think of cannabis stigmatically,” Wadhera said. “At its core, [Proper] is a company that’s helping us target this sleep epidemic. We think CBD and cannabis at large can play a big role in addressing that in a way that traditional products haven’t been able to.”

The investment in Proper, then, points to a maturation of the cannabis industry, as investors look at the various chemical components of the cannabis plant and try to tease out a broader range of health and wellness applications. “We are starting to shift how we think about the business. It doesn’t have to be a core, specific cannabis product,” Wadhera said. 

Ramamurthi says that her company will be exploring applications for cannabinoids in its supplements later. “As we continue our product development process one of the things we are looking at is CBD,” she said. “CBD is one of the more effective ingredients at reducing stress and anxiety, and stress and anxiety are one of the main reasons why people can’t get to sleep.”

Proper’s studies are supported by a scientific advisory board that includes Dr. Adam Perlman, the director of integrative health and well-being at the Mayo Clinic, and Dr. Allison Siebern, a clinical psychologist and board-certified sleep medicine specialist at the VA Medical Center in North Carolina.

There’s a reason why sleep is so poorly understood and ignored as a health issue in America. Around 90% of primary care physicians rate their understanding of sleep’s impact on the body as “poor to fair” and there’s only one board-certified sleep specialist for every 43,000 Americans, according to Proper’s data.

Customers who sign up for Proper’s service can select one of five sleep formulations available for $39.99 per bottle or for a subscription with a 10% discount. New users also get a free 30-minute consultation with a Proper sleep coach, the company said.

The five versions of Proper’s sleep products include a core sleep product made from GABA, valerian root extract, rafuma leaf extract, and ashwagandha root and leaf extract; a sleep and restore product that includes melatonin; a calming pill with L-theanine added to the core sleep product; a clarity product that includes concentrated grape extracts; and, finally, an immunity product with added zinc, vitamin C, B6 and D.

On day one of TechCrunch’s Early Stage virtual conference, Ali Partovi joined us to discuss best practices for startups looking to hire engineers.

It’s a subject that’s near and dear to his heart: Partovi is co-founder and CEO of Neo, a venture aimed at including young engineers in a community alongside seasoned industry vets. The fund includes top executives from a slew of different industry titans, including Amazon, Airbnb, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Stripe.

Partovi is probably best known in the Valley for co-founding Code.org with twin brother, Hadi. The nonprofit launched in 2013 with a high-profile video featuring Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Jack Dorsey, along with a mission to make coding education more accessible to the masses.

It was a two-summer internship at Microsoft while studying at Harvard that gave Partovi an entrée into the world of tech. And while it was clearly a formative experience for the college student, he advises against prospective startup founders looking to large corporations as career launch pads.

“I spend a lot of time mentoring college students, that’s a big part of what I do at Neo,” Partovi said.

“And for anyone who wants to be a founder of a company, there’s a spectrum, from giant companies like Microsoft or Google to early-stage startups. And I would say, find the smallest point on that spectrum that you’re comfortable with, and start your career there. Maybe that’s a 100-person company or maybe for you, it’s a 500-person company. But if you start at Microsoft, it’ll be a long time before you feel comfortable doing your own startup. The skills you gain at a giant company are very valuable for getting promoted and succeeding in giant companies. They’re not often as translatable to being your own founder.”

Have you ever taken something apart, like a clock or a motor?

The method is particularly useful when it comes to learning how things work — or how they don’t, in some cases.

During TechCrunch’s Early Stage event, two venture capitalists took pitch decks and evaluated them with a critical eye on content, presentation and overall messaging. If you missed it the first time through, watch it below in its entirety.

The session was a blast. This was the first time we’ve hosted this event, but we’re working on bringing this session to TechCrunch’s main event, Disrupt, this September.

Accel’s Amy Saper and Bessemer’s Talia Goldberg gave great advice as we clicked through each deck. First impressions are everything, and pitch decks are often the first glimpse of companies by potential investors and business partners. It’s critical that these decks properly present and illustrate in a concise and effective manner the goals and potential of a company.

Whether you’re an early-stage startup founder, investor, enthusiast or another integral member of the community, you can’t afford to miss Disrupt 2020 — THE tech conference at the epicenter of the startup ecosystem. Here’s something else you can’t afford to miss — early-bird pricing. Buy your pass before July 31 at 11:59 p.m. PT and you’ll save up to $300.

The all-virtual Disrupt, which takes place September 14 -18, may look and feel a bit different, but there’s nothing virtual about the programming quality, opportunities for growth and essential connections you can make to drive your business forward.

Your all-access pass lets you hear from an extraordinary lineup of tech founders, investors, icons and other leading experts across all Disrupt stages. Like interviews and panel discussions? TechCrunch editors always look past the hype to ask the hard questions. Here are just a few of the folks who will join us onstage:

Check out the Extra Crunch Stage, where you’ll find information on topics that every early-stage founder needs to ace — like how to craft a killer pitch deck, how to pivot in a crisis or how to build a sales team. These are interactive sessions led by experts in marketing, business development and investing, and you’ll come away with actionable tips and tricks that you can apply to your business.

Of course, there’s the always-epic Startup Battlefield pitch competition, hundreds of early-stage startups exhibiting in Digital Startup Alley and world-class networking. We can tell you it’s great, but here’s what two attendees — one founder and one investor — say about why they value the Disrupt experience:

“Disrupt has everything early stage founders need — from advice on raising money and how to scale to exposure and brand recognition. We connected with people we never would have met, including other founders going through the same pain points.” — Joel Neidig, founder of SIMBA Chain.

“Building relationships with early-stage startup founders is essential in my business. Disrupt draws that core group from across a wide range of industries, and the ability to easily network and connect with them is a huge benefit.” — Daniel Lloreda, general partner at H20 Capital Innovation.

Your Disrupt value-add starts when you buy an early-bird pass and save up to $300. The offer expires on July 31 at 11:59 p.m. PT, and that’s a deadline you can’t afford to miss.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

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Fintech startup Revolut just announced that it has raised $80 million as part of its Series D round that it announced in February. The new influx of funding comes from TSG Consumer Partners.

In February, Revolut raised a $500 million led by TCV at a $5.5 billion valuation. Today’s new funding extends that funding round to $580 million — the company says the valuation remains the same.

If you’re not familiar with Revolut, the company is building a financial service to replace traditional bank accounts. You can open an account from an app in just a few minutes. You can then receive, send and spend money from the app or use a debit card. Revolut also lets you exchange currencies.

The startup expanded beyond that simple feature set and now wants to become a financial hub, a super app for all things related to money. For instance, you can insure your phone, get a travel medical insurance package, buy cryptocurrencies, buy shares, donate to charities and save money from Revolut.

The company says it’ll use the investment to add new features in the U.S. and roll out banking operations across Europe — you can expect local banking details in multiple European countries. Eventually, Revolut also plans to offer credit products across Europe.

In addition to that, Revolut is working on a subscription management tool. It lets you see all your active subscriptions, cancel them from Revolut and receive alerts when a free trial ends.

There are now 12 million registered users on Revolut.

The manufacturer of a vegan collagen, Geltor, has raised a new round of financing — $90 million, according to people familiar with the company.

It’s another sign of the newfound viability of sustainability and cell-based, vegetarian replacements for animal products.

Sustainable bio-products, whether plant-based, genetically modified or cell-cultured, are having a big year. In the month of July alone, companies developing sustainable alternatives to animal agriculture and the industry’s byproducts have announced or closed on investments totaling $335 million in just three companies. Those companies include Geltor, The Not Company and Perfect Day.

Geltor’s chief executive Alexander Lorestani declined to comment on the new round, and sources did not disclose who the lead investor was.

The company had previously raised capital from SOS Ventures, IndieBio, Fifty Years, Cultivian Sandbox Ventures, Starlight Ventures, New Crop Capital, Baruch Future Ventures and FTW Ventures, according to information in Crunchbase.

In November, TechCrunch reported that the company was in looking for at least $50 million in new financing, but could raise as much as $100 million in the new round.

“Geltor’s production method is vastly more sustainable and eliminates the need for animal cruelty, but the reason companies in the cosmetics and food industries are clamoring for their products is because Geltor allows them to achieve function they simply can’t get from animal-derived gelatin and collagen,” said one person familiar with the company and its technology. 

Worldwide, the collagen market is expected to reach $7.5 billion by 2027 according to data from the market research firm, Grand View Research. Another report from Grand View put the size of the gelatin market at another $6.7 billion over the same period.

Geltor’s aim is to make these additives — and other animal-derived proteins — cheaply, efficiently and animal-free.

Much of the cosmetics, skin care and food business is shaped by animal byproducts. Lanolin is made from wool grease, squaline is made from shark liver oil and gelatin is made from the bones, tendons and ligaments of cows and pigs. Geltor replaces all of that with a cell-derived protein brewed in a fermenter like beer.

The company’s founders, Alex Lorestani and chief technology officer Nick Ouzounov, first met as graduate students at Princeton and began working on their company in 2015.

As Lorestani told Forbes in a 2019 article, Ouzounov would always approach him about new ideas for companies. After graduation the two men relocated to Silicon Valley and were accepted into the IndieBio accelerator.

Geltor began as a manufacturer of gelatin, a food additive used in everything from marshmallows to Jell-O, but quickly expanded into collagen for beauty products and dietary supplements. The company is already working with Gelita, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of collagen.

The funding for companies like Geltor and Perfect Day show that industrial biology is having a moment. There are billions of dollars of value to be unlocked in the re-engineering of cell functions, and proteins are just one application.

For investors looking at new bio-products, the future is very much alive.

SurveyGizmo CEO Christian Vanek has bootstrapped SurveyGizmo to $13 million from Boulder, Colorado. He has experimented with both freemium and free trial, and has managed to monetize nicely. Read...

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Entrepreneurs are invited to the 496th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, July 30, 2020, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious...

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Scores of online learning startups have emerged in India in recent years to serve school-age students. More than 250 million students are enrolled across schools in urban and rural parts of the country.

Whether one is in kindergarten, or preparing to join a college to pursue an undergraduate course, there are several startups offering a plethora of courses at affordable price points to help these students get there.

Byju’s, Unacademy and Vedantu among other local startups today help tens of millions of students each year gain access to high-profile and established teachers and a repository of study material that many might not have been able to find in an offline setting.

These startups — and legacy educational institutions — are helping students chase some of the most aspirational jobs: careers in engineering and medicine.

Most of these students, however, will either end up not getting their dream job — or based on their skills and India’s growing unemployment figures, a job altogether.

There are about 400 million people in India, or roughly a third of the country’s population, who are confronting a fundamental challenge: Not able to speak English, and lacking other skills that could prove crucial when applying for a job.

Entri, a startup based in the Southern city of Kochi, is attempting to address this market. The three-year-old startup offers upskilling courses to help people excel at exams that would land them a job with state and federal governments. And it teaches them these courses in the language with which they are most comfortable.

Students who dropped out before high school to those who have already attained graduate-level degrees account for the vast majority of users of Entri .

The startup began its courses in Malayalam, a language spoken by about 50 million people in India and especially popular in South India, explained Mohammed Hisamuddin, co-founder and chief executive of Entri. It has since added its courses in several other languages, including Hindi, Telugu, Kannada and Tamil.

Over the years, Entri has also expanded its course catalog to help people pursuing other kinds of jobs, including those in the blue-collar category, replicating a model similar to that of San Francisco-headquartered Udemy .

“We soon realized that only about 1.5 to 2% of the people who appear in these exams are able to make the shortlist,” he said. “These exams are very competitive, so many start to explore jobs in the private sector, sometimes even when they already have some low-profile job.”

The startup now offers more than 150 courses, including several languages, accounting and those that teach popular computer applications such as Microsoft Office. These pre-recorded video courses and quizzes run for 30 to 60 days.

“Starting with the 100 million people who apply for government jobs each year, Entri is expanding the universe of employable candidates by skilling people in their own language — as it should be,” said Arjun Malhotra, a partner at venture firm Good Capital . “It’s ridiculous that economic opportunities are bottlenecked because of the medium of learning. Skills bringing employability shouldn’t require people to be proficient in English.”

Hisamuddin said Entri has amassed more than 3 million users on its platform, up from 1.5 million early this year. About 90,000 of these users are paying subscribers. “We are adding close to 10,000 paying subscribers each month now,” he said in an interview with TechCrunch early this week.

Entri offers a portion of its courses in certain languages at no charge, but complete access requires a subscription. Paid subscriptions start as low as 300 Indian rupees a year ($4) and go as high as 10,000 Indian rupees ($133), said Hisamuddin. The most popular subscription tier costs 1,500 Indian rupees ($20).

The startup said this week that it had closed a $3.1 million Pre-Series A financing round, led by Good Capital. Hari TN, head of human resources at online grocery startup BigBasket, and HyperTrack founder Kashyap Deorah also participated in the round.

It plans to deploy the fresh capital into introducing 50 additional courses to its platform and reach more users. Hisamuddin said Entri’s revenues have surged 150% in the last three months and its annual recurring revenue (ARR) has reached $2 million. He aims to scale Entri’s ARR to $5 million by this year.

On the heels of Hippo’s funding round and our exploration of how the private markets appear to be more conservative than public investors at the moment, we’re asking a new question: are a bunch of insurtech startups undervalued?

Hippo — an insurtech startup focused on home insurance — put together a $150 million round at a $1.5 billion post-money valuation after growing its gross written premium to $270 million “in the past 12 months.” At that valuation, and at pre-adjustment premium scale, Hippo is super-cheap compared to Lemonade, another venture-backed insurtech startup that just went public.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. You can read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or receive it for free in your inbox. Sign up for The Exchange newsletter, which drops Saturdays starting July 25.

There’s no need to relitigate Hippo’s valuation and how the private markets have valued the firm. But our work yesterday does give us the chance to do some fun math on other players in the neo-insurance space, namely, Root and MetroMile. Using data accrued from financial filings and valuation data from Pitchbook and Crunchbase, we can grok how much the two firms are worth using Hippo’s and Lemonade’s current premium multiples.

If you aren’t familiar, the cohort of startups we’re looking at have raised well over $1 billion as a group; VCs really believe in them. How they are priced then, and how they exit, will help determine the results of many a venture fund.

So, are other players in the startup insurance market cheap at their last private price when compared to Lemonade and Hippo? Did their venture backers overpay? Let’s find out.

Cheap? Expensive?

Earlier this week, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) reported its fiscal fourth quarter results that surpassed all market expectations. Growth in Teams, Cloud, and Gaming segments helped drive growth for the...

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Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

Up top the crew this week was the regular contingent: Danny Crichton, Natasha Mascarenhas and myself. As a tiny programming note, we’re going back to posting some videos on YouTube in a few weeks, so make sure to peep the TechCrunch channel if that’s your jam.

And we did a special episode on the SPAC boom, if you are into financial arcana. For more on SPACs –> here.

The Equity crew tried something new this week, namely centering our main conversation around a theme that we’re keeping tabs on: The resilience of tech during the current pandemic-led recession.

Starting with the recent economic news, it’s surprising that tech’s layoffs have slowed to a crawl. And, as we’ve recently seen, there’s still plenty of money flowing into startups, even if there are some dips present on a year-over-year basis. Why are things still pretty good for startups, and pretty good for major tech companies? We have a few ideas, like the acceleration of the digital transformation (more here, and here), and software eating the world. The latter concept, of course, is related to the former.

After that it was time to go through some neat funding rounds from the week, including:

All that and I have a newsletter launching this weekend that if you read, you will automatically be 100% cooler. It’s called the TechCrunch Exchange, and you can snag it for free here.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down on stage. How do you define pre-seed and how do you define seed? Where are you comfortable? Do you need a proof of concept? What do you need? Do you need paying...

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The Not Company, Latin America’s leading contender in the plant-based meat and dairy substitute market, is about to close on an $85 million round of funding that would value it at $250 million, according to sources familiar with the company’s plans.

The latest round of funding comes on the heels of a series of successes for the Santiago-based business. In the two years since NotCo launched on the global stage, the company has expanded beyond its mayonnaise product into milk, ice cream and hamburgers. Other products, including a chicken meat substitute, are also on the product roadmap, according to people familiar with the company.

NotCo is already selling several products in Chile, Argentina and Latin America’s largest market — Brazil — and has signed a blockbuster deal with Burger King to be the chain’s supplier of plant-based burgers. It’s in this Burger King deal that NotCo’s approach to protein formulation is paying dividends, sources said. The company is responsible for selling 48 sandwiches per store per day in the locations where it’s supplying its products, according to one person familiar with the data. That figure outperforms Impossible Foods per-store sales, the person said.

NotCo is also now selling its burgers in grocery stores in Argentina and Chile. And while the company is not break-even yet, sources said that by December 2021 it could be — or potentially even cash flow positive.

With the growth both in sales and its diversification into new products, it’s little wonder that investors have taken note.

Sources said that the consumer brand-focused private equity firm L Catterton Partners and the Biz Stone-backed Future Positive were likely investors in the new financing round for the company. Previous investors in NotCo include Bezos Expeditions, the personal investment firm of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos; the London-based CPG investment firm, The Craftory; IndieBio; and SOS Ventures.

Alternatives to animal products are a huge (and still growing) category for venture investors. Earlier this month Perfect Day closed on a second tranche of $160 million for that company’s latest round of financing, bringing that company’s total capital raised to $361.5 million, according to Crunchbase. Perfect Day then turned around and launched a consumer food business called the Urgent Company.

These recent rounds confirm our reporting in Extra Crunch about where investors are focusing their time as they try to create a more sustainable future for the food industry. Read more about the path they’re charting.

Meanwhile, large food chains continue to experiment with plant-based menu items and push even further afield into cell-based meat using cultures from animals. KFC recently announced that it would be expanding its experiment with Beyond Meat’s chicken substitute in the U.S. — and would also be experimenting with cultured meat in Moscow.

Behind all of this activity is an acknowledgement that consumer tastes are changing, interest in plant-based diets are growing, and animal agriculture is having profound effects on the world’s climate.

As the website ClimateNexus notes, animal agriculture is the second-largest contributor to human-made greenhouse gas emissions after fossil fuels. It’s also a leading cause of deforestation, water and air pollution and biodiversity loss.

There are 70 billion animals raised annually for human consumption, which occupy one-third of the planet’s arable and habitable land surface, and consume 16% of the world’s freshwater supply. Reducing meat consumption in the world’s diet could have huge implications for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. If Americans were to replace beef with plant-based substitutes, some studies suggest it would reduce emissions by 1,911 pounds of carbon dioxide.