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Consolidation continues apace in the world of e-commerce, and today it was the turn of the classified ads market. Today, eBay announced that it had reached a deal to sell off its Classifieds business unit to Adevinta, a Norway-based classified ads publisher majority owned by Danish publisher Schibsted. The deal is valued at $9.2 billion, which includes eBay getting $2.5 billion in cash and 540 million Adevinta shares. The deal makes eBay a 44% owner of Adevinta, with a 33.3% voting stake.

Adevinta’s interest in eBay was reported earlier in the week, but with the deal coming at a much lower valuation, of $8 billion.

More generally, it caps off months of speculation about the future for the classifieds business, which has come out of long-term pressure spurred by activist investors for eBay to rationalise what had once been a sprawling e-commerce business empire (advocating for a reverse Amazon, I guess you could say). That included not just its marketplace, but classified ads, payment services (PayPal, which got spun out as a separate company), and ticketing (Viagogo acquired its Stubhub business in a $4 billion deal last year, although that is now facing some regulatory scrutiny.).

Now, all three of those business units are no longer a part of eBay.

Adevinta is in 15 countries and today 35 digital products and websites. eBay meanwhile owns 12 brands in 13 countries around the world, but the business has been hard-hit by the coronavirus crisis. In the last quarter, eBay said that it brought in revenues of just $248 million, down 3% on an as-reported basis and remaining flat on a FX-Neutral basis. For some context, the marketplace brought in revenues of $1.9 billion in the same period.

The overlap will mean a classified ad footprint of  20 countries, and the companies believe that some $150 million – $185 million in synergies will be reached through the combination.

“We are pleased we reached an agreement with Adevinta that brings together two great companies,” said Jamie Iannone, CEO of eBay, in a statement. “eBay believes strongly in the power of community and connections between people, which has been essential to our Classifieds businesses globally. This sale creates short-term and long-term value for shareholders and customers, while allowing us to participate in the future potential of the Classifieds business.”

With little needed but text and a search facility to create a very basic classifieds list, classifieds were one of the first early “hits” of the internet, disrupting newspapers and one of their traditionally most consistent revenue streams (not so anymore, of course).

Over the years, the tech behind what constitutes a “classified ad” has changed, but those in the market are now competing with a wide plethora of alternatives that leverage social and geographical networks to connect people to things or services they might like to buy or rent, including the likes of Facebook’s Marketplace but also a lot of mobile apps and more. And some of these completely undercut the business model of the original disruptors.

That has meant that those who have established themselves in the space have played on consolidation to grow and improve their economies of scale.

“With the acquisition of eBay Classifieds Group, Adevinta becomes the largest online classifieds company globally, with a unique portfolio of leading marketplace brands. We believe the combination of the two companies, with their complementary businesses, creates one of the most exciting and compelling equity stories in the online classifieds sector,” said Rolv Erik Ryssdal, CEO of Adevinta, in a statement.

“We have been impressed with eBay Classifieds Group’s achievements in recent years, leading across markets with nationally recognized brands including Mobile.de, Gumtree, Marktplaats, dba, Bilbasen, Kijiji, 2dehands, 2ememain, Vivanuncios, Automobile.it, Motors.co.uk, Autotrader (Australia), Carsguide (Australia), and eBay Kleinanzeigen, and innovating consistently across its product portfolio and advertising technology platform.”

For now there are no announcements of layoffs or other moves, with eBay’s classifieds executive team coming over with the deal.

“This deal is a testament to the growth and potential of the eBay Classifieds business,” said Alessandro Coppo, SVP and GM, eBay Classifieds Group. “We are excited for our local classifieds brands to join Adevinta and shape a global leader in an industry full of potential.”

The deal is expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2021, subject to regulatory and shareholder approvals.

As part of, Schibsted will acquire eBay Classifieds’ Danish business once the deal closes.

“Schibsted’s Board of Directors and management strongly supports the agreement between Adevinta and eBay, as we are confident that it will further strengthen the value creation potential for Schibsted and the rest of Adevinta’s shareholders. Schibsted intends to continue to contribute to the value creation for all Adevinta shareholders as a significant long-term anchor shareholder,” said Kristin Skogen Lund, CEO of Schibsted in s a statement.

 

A number of ride-sharing companies are feeling the strain from reduced business, with many consumers still reluctant to travel, and especially to travel in surroundings that might increase the risk of spreading or catching the novel coronavirus. But today, one of the startups in the space is announcing a significant round of funding to continue growing in its target sector of corporate travel, underscoring where there may still be some existing and growing opportunities.

Gett, the London and Israel-based ride-sharing company that competes with the likes of Uber and many others to provide private car rides on-demand, has raised $100 million. Gett’s CEO and founder Dave Waiser told TechCrunch that it is all primary equity capital, and the company says it plans to use it to continue investing in its B2B business, which has been growing — not shrinking or staying flat — in the midst of the global health pandemic.

“The way people move around in cities is changing dramatically as a result of COVID-19 and businesses are seeking to optimise costs and to put in place efficient and safe ground travel solutions for their employees,” said Waiser, in a statement. “Our mobility software is helping businesses thrive by empowering people to be their best on the go. Being fully funded and reaching a key milestone in our profitability journey is an important step for the Company. The proceeds will help us grow our unique corporate SaaS platform internationally, while we consider an IPO in the future, to further accelerate our expansion.”

The company turned operationally profitable in December 2019 and had said it planned to go public in 2020, but it sounds like that timeline, if it happens, has now been pushed back to 2021. Gett says it has met its “original financial targets that were set pre-COVID-19.” It also reached profitability in each of its core markets in June, and is on target now to be cashflow positive in 2021, ahead of a “potential” IPO.

“It’s a luxury, enabling flexibility for the company to go public when it’s best, rather than from the cash needs reasoning as many (money losing) companies have to do nowadays,” Waiser said.

Gett is not disclosing the names of any of its investors in this round except to note that it’s a mix of new and existing backers, nor is it disclosing its valuation.

Waiser said the reason for that is that the round is still open and oversubscribed, so it plans to announce a list of investors after it closes.

For some context, though, Gett has now raised $750 million with investors including VW, Access and its founder Len Blavatnik, Kreos, MCI and more, and its last valuation was $1.5 billion, pegged to a $200 million fundraise in May 2019.

Gett started operations years ago serving both consumers and corporate users but in recent years has honed its focus specifically on business accounts. No surprise, when you think about it, considering the capital intensiveness, competitiveness, and subsequent poor unit economics of scaling a consumer-focused ridesharing business (a confluence of factors we’ve seen played out at Uber, Lyft, Grab and many others).

Gett’s turn to B2B has seen it pick up some 15,000 corporate customers, including one-third of the Fortune 500. What has been interesting too is the approach Gett has taken to scale: today, it provides rides in some 1,500 cities, but a part of that footprint is served not directly by Gett but in a partnership with Lyft — the result of a deal Gett inked with the company in November 2019 after the former shut down its Juno operations in New York City. It’s been expanding that list to include other third-party partnerships in the mix.

While partnerships may not yield margins as strong as those Gett has in direct operations, it provides a plethora of analytics and invoicing services around the actual ride, and secures the corporate accounts, which provides other revenue streams to offset that. It claims that its services ultimately undercut other ground transportation options for corporates by about 25%.

While a lot of consumers may have curtailed their Uber rides in recent months, the business market has had seen a turn to ensuring that the travel that its users are taking is well-controlled when it has to be done, specifically to meet specific safety standards. That has been the sweet spot for Gett, with its very specific B2B approach.

“The completion of the fundraising during the pandemic is a clear expression of confidence by our shareholders and new investors in Gett’s vision to focus on the corporate market and its plan to expand globally, as well as in the Company’s strong operational and financial performance,” said Amos Genish, Gett chairman, in a statement.

Founded by former Apple engineers, a new app called Struck wants to be the Tinder for the Co-Star crowd. In other words, it’s an astrology-based matchmaker. But it took close to 10 attempts over several months for the startup to get its app approved by Apple for inclusion in the App Store. In nearly every rejection, app reviewers flagged the app as “spam” either due to its use of astrology or, once, simply because it was designed for online dating.

Apple continually cited section 4.3 of its App Store Review Guidelines in the majority of Struck’s rejections, with the exception of two that were unrelated to the app’s purpose. (Once, it was rejected for use of a broken API. Another rejection was over text that needed correction. It had still called itself a “beta.”)

The 4.3 guideline is something Apple wields to keep the App Store free from what it considers to be clutter and spam. In spirit, the guideline makes sense, as it gives Apple permission to make more subjective calls over low-quality apps.

Today, the guideline states that developers should “avoid piling on to a category that is already saturated,” and reminds developers that the App Store has “enough fart, burp, flashlight, fortune telling, dating, and Kama Sutra apps, etc. already.”

In the document, Apple promises to reject anything that “doesn’t offer a high-quality experience.”

This guideline was also updated in March to further raise the bar on dating apps and create stricter rules around “fortune-telling” apps, among other things.

Struck, unfortunately, found itself in the crosshairs of this new enforcement. But while its app may use astrology in a matchmaking process, its overall design and business model is nowhere close to resembling that of a shady “fortune-telling” app.

In fact, Struck hasn’t even implemented its monetization model, which may involve subscriptions and à la carte features at a later date.

Rather, Struck has been carefully and thoughtfully designed to provide an alternative to market leaders like Tinder. Built by a team of mostly women, including two people of color and one LGBTQ+ team member, the app is everything mainstream dating apps are not.

Struck doesn’t, for example, turn online dating into a Hot-or-Not style game. It works by first recommending matches by way of its understanding of users’ detailed birth charts and aspects. But you don’t have to be a true believer in astrology to enjoy the experience. You can use the app just for fun if you’re open-minded, the company website says. “Skeptics welcome,” it advertises.

And while Tinder and others tend to leverage psychological tricks to make their apps more addictive, Struck aims to slow things down in order to allow users to once again focus on romance and conversations. There are no endless catalogs of head shots to swipe upon in Struck. Instead, it sends you no more than four matches per day and you can message only one of the four.

The app’s overall goal is to give users time to analyze their matches’ priorities and values, not just how they appear in photos.

If anything, this is precisely the kind of unique, thoughtfully crafted app the App Store should cater to, not the kind it should ban.

“We come from an Apple background. We come from a tech background. We were very insistent on having a good, quality user interface and user experience,” explains Struck co-founder and CEO Rachel Lo. “That was a big focus for us in our beta testing. We honestly didn’t expect any pushback when we submitted to the App Store,” she says.

But Apple did push back. After first submitting the app in May, Struck went through around nine rounds of rejections where reviewers continued to claim it was spam simply for being an astrology-based dating application. The team would then pull out astrology features hoping to get the app approved… with no luck. Finally, one reviewer told them Struck was being rejected for being a dating app.

“I remember thinking, we’re going to have to shut down this project. There’s not really a way through,” recounts Lo. The Struck team, in a last resort, posted to their Instagram page about their struggles and how they felt Apple’s rejections were unfair given the app’s quality. Plus, as Lo points out, the rejection had a tinge of sexism associated with it.

“Obviously, astrology is a heavily female-dominated category,” she says. “I took issue with the guideline that says ‘burps, farts and fortune-telling apps.’ I made a fuss about that verbiage and how offensive it is for people in most of the world who actually observe astrology.”

Despite the founders’ connections within the technology industry, thanks to their ex-Apple status and relationships with journalists who would go on to plead their case, Struck was not getting approved.

Finally, after several supporters left comments on Apple VP Lisa Jackson’s Instagram where she had posted about WWDC, the app was — for unknown reasons — suddenly given the green light. It’s unclear if the Instagram posts made a difference. Even the app reviewer couldn’t explain why the app was now approved, when asked.

The whole debacle has soured the founders on the way Apple today runs its App Store, and sees them supportive of the government’s antitrust investigations into Apple’s business, which could result in new regulations.

“We had no course of action. And it felt really, really wrong for this giant company to basically be squashing small developers, says Lo. “I don’t know what’s going to become of our app — we hope it’s successful and we hope we can build a good, diverse business from it,” she continues. “But the point was that we weren’t even being given the opportunity to distribute our app that we had spent nine months building.”

Though Apple is turning its nose up at astrology apps, apparently, you don’t have to take astrology to heart to have fun with apps like Struck or those that inspired it, such as Co-Star. These newer Zodiac apps aren’t as obsessed with predicting your future as they are with offering a framework to examine your emotions, your place in the world and your interpersonal relationships. That led Co-Star to snag a $5 million seed round in 2019, one of many astrology apps investors were chasing last year as consumer spend among the top 10 in this space jumped 65% over 2018.

Struck, ultimately, wants to give the market something different from Tinder, and that has value.

“We want to challenge straight men since it is — quote unquote — a traditionally feminine-looking app,” says Lo. “For us, it’s 2020. It’s shocking to us that every dating app looks like a slot machine. We want to make something that has a voice and makes women feel comfortable. And I think our usership split between the genders kind of proved that.”

Struck is live today on the App Store — well, for who knows how long.

It initially caters to users in the Bay Area and LA and will arrive in New York on Friday. Based on user feedback, it will slowly roll out to more markets where it sees demand.

Chris Cowart, the longtime IDEO product designer, Singularity University faculty member and consultant to a variety of venture firms and tech projects, is joining the food preservation technology developer Treasure8 as its new chief innovation and strategy officer, according to a post on LinkedIn.

“In the last three years food has come to the fore as a theme,” said Cowart in an interview with TechCrunch. Cowart, who previously spent the majority of his time consulting on healthcare companies, became interested in food through a year spent as an advisor to X, the Alphabet subsidiary that develops technologies and companies focused on sustainability, connectivity and new computing paradigms.

At X, Cowart was looking at projects that would use artificial intelligence to accelerate circular economy projects and it was there that he began to focus on food waste. The gravity of the situation around America’s food waste and food insecurity in the country was driven home through Cowart’s research, he said. “We overproduce by double and we throw away 30% of our food,” said Cowart. “And in Santa Clara county one-in-six families are food insecure.”

After completing his project at X, Cowart went to Treasure8 and was immediately pulled into strategy conversations, which led to him coming on board in June.

Unlike Apeel Sciences or Hazel Technologies, which have developed new preservative technologies to keep food fresh on store shelves (and raised several hundred million dollars), Treasure8’s technology is a new spin on freeze-drying, which lets perishable foods hold their nutritional value while they’re used as ingredients, supplements or powders.

Brands can reform it with rehydration, or put it into their products or reuse pieces of the vegetables and fruits in their products. “There are byproducts that you can break down and start to use to pull out their nutrients into probiotics and nutraceuticals,” said Cowart.

He also thinks that Treasure8 could use its process to become a provider of biochar that can be applied in more sustainable agriculture techniques.

Treasure8 initially launched with a focus on food preservation, but quickly pivoted into working with hemp companies that wanted to work with the company to use more parts of the hemp plant in products. For now, Treasure8 is operating off of its pilot facility on Treasure Island, the man-made island in the San Francisco Bay which is currently the site of a multi-billion-dollar development project.

With its new innovation officer in tow, Treasure8 is now heading to market to raise a new round of financing, Cowart said. Targeting less than $50 million, the new round could help the company as Cowart starts to think longer term about ways that Treasure8’s treatment process could contribute to the development of more functional foods.

“Taking food waste streams to make products and ingredients and letting it be something useful rather than something that harms the environment, that’s the interesting part,” Cowart said of his role at the company. “[And] if you’re able to go from food security to nutritional security… If you can powder vegetables, and make them into bits and food that are stable and affordable… All of this nutrition feeds into the food as medicine and functional food. We’re going to want to fight immunity and recover from viruses and we’re going to have to rebuild our food supply.”

 

In the blink of an eye, millennials, moms and grandparents alike have abandoned the decades-old practice of wandering dusty grocery aisles for the convenient and novel use of online grocery. While Instacart, Amazon Fresh and others have been offering an alternative to brick-and-mortar grocery for years, it is the pandemic that has classified them as essential businesses and more than ever afforded them a clear competitive advantage.

But these past couple months have seen not only drastic changes in consumer behavior, but also fundamental shifts in the business models adopted by grocers worldwide. These shifts are not temporary — indeed, they are here to stay, corona-catalyzed and permanent.

Fulfillment innovation can drive efficiency and cost savings

For the consumer, online grocery generally starts and ends the same way: They place their order on an app or website, and hours later it shows up at their door. But the ways those orders are being fulfilled run the gamut.

The most widely known approach comes from Instacart, which relies on hundreds of thousands of human shoppers fulfilling customers’ online grocery orders by shopping side-by-side with regular brick-and-mortar customers. The model clearly works for Instacart, which is valued at nearly $14 billion after its latest raise.

However, this model is far from ideal. Even pre-COVID, shoppers were known to crowd out regular customers, not to mention introduce high delivery costs and the element of human error to the fulfillment process.

One obvious solution has become the central fulfillment center, or CFC. CFCs are large, standalone warehouses — often serving distinct geographies — that can supply both brick-and-mortar stores and online grocery deliveries. As order volumes rise and consumers demand faster and faster delivery times, innovation has already been infused into the CFC model.

Some grocers, notably Kroger, believe that introducing robotic automation into CFCs via solutions such as Ocado can create economies of scale for fulfillment. These CFCs deploy fulfillment robots, controlled by air-traffic control tech, that run along a grid system and move goods via categorized crates. Kroger is continuing its investment in the model, recently announcing three new Ocado-automated CFCs in the West, Pacific Northwest and Great Lakes regions of the United States. The smallest location is over 150,000 square feet.

While Kroger remains uniquely attached to the CFC model, Albertsons/Safeway, Walmart and many others prefer the microfulfillment center (MFC). MFCs, typically far smaller in size (think ~10,000 square feet), are automated warehouses carved out of the back of existing stores that drive faster fulfillment times in a smaller geographic area, allowing chain stores to use their numerous geographic locations to act as effective fulfillment/delivery hubs for e-grocery coverage.

One reason some venture capitalists and founders don’t enter edtech is because the space has a sluggish stereotype, thanks to red tape, slow sales cycles, and, in America, a fragmented customer base.

But data suggests that edtech’s reputation is not entirely earned. Byju’s is India’s second-most-valuable company. Since 2013, there have been 300 acquisitions in the space. And if you only understand success in terms of unicorns, two edtech businesses, Quizlet and ApplyBoard, were recently added to the $1 billion valuation club.

The tension between edtech’s stereotype and its potential for return, plus the surge in remote learning due to coronavirus-related shutdowns, poses an interesting challenge for the market.

In the beginning of the pandemic, TechCrunch talked to a group of edtech investors to get their knee-jerk reaction to the remote learning boom. Unsurprisingly, many commented that the heat-up of the sector will materially impact K-12 and higher education and unlock new opportunities. Others warned early-stage edtech startups about how newfound competition could hurt content, quality and effectiveness of their end product. Overall, the general message was that the boom is here, everyone is excited and waiting to see what happens next.

Fast forward a few months, mistakes and extended school closures later, edtech now has a better inkling on what the next billion-dollar business needs to get right. Last week, we got into trends that have promise in a post-pandemic world. Today, we’ll step out of sub-sector specific dialogue and get into the macro-impact of rapid change on edtech as a whole. You’ll get an eagle-eye view of what rapid change, adaptation, and for lack of better phrasing, popularity does for the market.

Today you’ll hear from the following investors:

Ian Chiu, Owl VenturesShauntel Garvey and Jennifer Carolan, Reach CapitalJan Lynn-Matern, Emerge EducationDavid Eichler, TCVJomayra Hererra, Cowboy Ventures

Companies like Uber, Lyft, Beyond Meat, Peloton, Slack, Zoom and Pinterest all made public market debuts in 2019, creating wealth and liquidity for many of the 2019 IPO class of founders.

This year, stockholders have seen anxiety-inducing volatility in their holdings, leading many to realize that they need to rethink their approach to their concentrated post-IPO stock position.

In this guide, I’ll walk through a framework of how to think about post-IPO or concentrated stock holdings objectively. While this is written specific to public company stock, many of the same fundamental concepts apply to private stock and the decision whether or not to sell. Some risks should be understood if you are relying on one stock to achieve all of your financial goals since that subjects you to having “too many eggs in one basket.” Many shareholders in the 2019 IPO class have experienced this risk over the last few months and are reevaluating their situations.

Nevertheless, following my advice may be challenging since we all have heard of someone who made it big by swinging for the fences. The key is understanding the true success rate and risks involved with this approach; it is all too common to hear others share their standout victories, while more common failures are rarely mentioned.

What do I do now?

Usually, I advocate for reducing concentrated positions in IPO stock upon lockup expiration, or via scheduled selling for more significant positions; however, for those that have not sold, it is clear that the unexpected macroeconomic downturn has materially increased the volatility of some high-valuation company share prices. If you find yourself in this position here are a few items to consider:

What is your time horizon? Are your investments intended for the long term or the short term?What are your liquidity needs? Do you need to raise cash to pay for taxes or upcoming expenses? Do you need cash in the upcoming 1-2 years?What other assets do you have?How does this impact your financial plan? Can you tolerate possible further declines?

It is not comfortable to be in this position, and decisions at this juncture can be critical in achieving long-term goals. I suggest you find an advisor to talk to if you are unsure what the best choice is. Below we review some considerations that can help build more confidence in your decision.

What’s the plan?

The decision of what to do with your stock should start at a higher level. Where does this stock fit into your investment strategy, and where does your investment strategy fit into achieving your long-term goals?

Your goals should drive your investment strategy, and your investment strategy should drive the decisions regarding your stock, not the other way around. With the proper goals set, you can use the investment portfolio, and the company stock(s) within it, as tools to achieve your goals.

For example, a goal could be to work ten more years, then partially retire and do some consulting. Defining goals helps you make objective decisions on how to best manage concentrated stock positions. There is a trade-off between maximizing the potential return in your investment portfolio, by maximizing risk with concentrated portfolios, and minimizing the risk of a catastrophic loss, by having a well-diversified portfolio. This decision is unique to each individual. The best way to maximize the odds of achieving your goals is different from the best route to maximizing your portfolio’s return possibilities.

FOMO

In these discussions, there is always an immense fear of missing out. What if this stock becomes a multibagger over time? It’s easy to look to the Zuckerbergs and Bezos of the world, who have amassed great wealth through holding concentrated stock, and think that holding a concentrated stock for the long term is the way to go.

There is also no doubt some public stocks have been runaway financial home runs, like investing in Apple or Amazon. If you had invested in those stocks since the beginning, you could have earned a 40,000% or 100,000% return. However, a rational, evidence-based decision process presents a very different picture. A statistical analysis on how IPOs and concentrated portfolios have fared in the past is covered in part two of this three-part series.

Concentration involves risks you may not have considered. In part two, I will walk you through critical considerations when maintaining a high concentration of company stock and things to consider from a big-picture perspective. I also dive into the benefits of diversification, taking it beyond the basics to show you the advantages of having a more balanced portfolio.

Today Jamf, a software company that helps other firms manage their Apple devices, raised its IPO price range.

The company had previously targeted a $17 to $19 per-share range. A new SEC filing from the firm today details a far higher $21 to $23 per-share IPO price interval.

Jamf still intends to sell up to 18.4 million shares in its debut, including 13.5 million in primary stock, 2.5 million shares from existing shareholders and an underwriter option worth 2.4 million shares. The whole whack at $21 to $23 per share would tally between $386.4 million and $423.2 million, though not all those funds would flow to the company.

At the low and high-end of its new IPO range, Jamf is worth between $2.44 billion and $2.68 billion, steep upgrades from its prior valuation range of $1.98 billion to $2.21 billion.

Jamf follows in the footsteps of recent IPOs like nCino, Vroom and others in seeing demand for its public offering allow its pricing to track higher the closer it gets to its public offering. Such demand from public-market investors indicates there is ample demand for debut shares in mid-2020, a fact that could spur other companies to the exit market.

Coinbase, Airbnb and DoorDash are three such companies that are expected to debut in the next year’s time, give or take a quarter or two.

Results, multiples

In anticipation of the Jamf debut that should come this week, let’s chat about the company’s recent performance.

Observe the following table from the most-recent Jamf S-1/A:

From even a quick glance we can learn much from this data. We can see that Jamf is growing, has improving gross margins and has managed to swing from an operating loss to operating profit in Q2 2020, compared to Q2 2019. And, for you fans out there of adjusted metrics, that Jamf managed to generate more non-GAAP operating income in its most recent period than the year-ago quarter.

In more precise terms:

Jamf grew from 26.5% to 29.0% on a year-over-year basis in Q2 2020Its gross margin grew by 6% in gross terms, and 8.3% in relative termsIts non-GAAP operating income grew 123.4%, to 150.9% in Q2 2020 compared to the year-ago quarter

Profits! Growth! Software! Improving margins! It’s not a huge surprise that Jamf managed to bolster its IPO price range.

Finally, for the SaaS-heads out there, the following:

This data lets us have a little fun. Recall that we have seen possible valuations for Jamf at IPO that started at $1.98 billion to $2.21 billion, and now include $2.44 billion and $2.68 billion? With our two ARR ranges for the end of Q2, we can now come up with eight ARR multiples for Jamf, from the low-end of its initial IPO price estimate, to the top-end of its new range.

Here they are:

Multiple at $1.98 billion valuation and $238 million ARR: 8.3xMultiple at $1.98 billion valuation and $241 million ARR: 8.2xMultiple at $2.21 billion valuation and $238 million ARR: 9.3xMultiple at $2.21 billion valuation and $241 million ARR: 9.2xMultiple at $2.44 billion valuation and $238 million ARR: 10.3xMultiple at $2.44 billion valuation and $241 million ARR: 10.1xMultiple at $2.68 billion valuation and $238 million ARR: 11.3xMultiple at $2.68 billion valuation and $241 million ARR: 11.2x

From that perspective, the pricing changes feel a bit more modest, even if they work out to a huge spread on a valuation basis.

Regardless, this is the current state of the Jamf IPO. Rackspace also filed a new S-1/A today, but we can’t find anything useful in it. A bit like the Jamf S-1/A from Friday. Perhaps we’ll get a new Rackspace document soon with pricing notes.

And, of course, like the rest of the world we await the Palantir S-1 with bated breath. Consider that our white whale.

Colin O’Donnell was already rethinking the notion of what makes cities and communities function even before the COVID-19 epidemic swept through the U.S. and revealed some of the cracks in centuries-old structures of urban life.

O’Donnell was part of the early wave of urban tech innovation, which began to rise about six years ago. He co-founded Intersection, a company manufacturing digital kiosks for public transportation services, which was eventually rolled up in one of the first big acquisitions from the Alphabet-owned subsidiary Sidewalk Labs .

While the initial optimism for — and interest in — technology’s ability to reshape the built environment has stumbled thanks to both Sidewalk’s data collection overreach in its initial Toronto project and the financial stresses that the COVID-19 epidemic has placed on cities across the country, experiments with how to integrate technology into society more intelligently continue on the margins. And investments in real estate technology continue to rise.

O’Donnell’s new company, Kibbo, takes advantage of both trends. The San Francisco-based startup aims to upgrade the American trailer park, making it a network of intentional communities for the remote-working, previously urban professionals (PUPs?).

To ensure that these remote working puppies (I’m going with it) can navigate the American roadways in the manner to which they’re accustomed, Kibbo pitches exclusive RV parks outfitted with amenities like kitchen supplies and basic staples like coffee and snacks, a gym and recreational facilities for congregating. The company is now taking applications for membership and will be charging $1,000 per month to access its locations of sites near major national parks across the West Coast.

For members who don’t have their own vehicles, Kibbo offers access to top-of-the-line Mercedes Sprinters outfitted with the latest in #vanlife amenities. The vans cost roughly $1,000 per month to rent.

Beginning in the fall, members who get past Kibbo’s virtual velvet rope and gain access to the company’s communities will be able to visit spots in Ojai, Zion, Black Rock Desert and Big Sur. Those locations will be complemented by spots in urban cores in Los Angeles, San Francisco and somewhere in Silicon Valley, according to a statement from O’Donnell.

“With the pressure of months of quarantine fueling the desire for people to get out of their expensive apartments in the city to explore nature and connect with people, we now have the demand and opportunity to rethink how we live, work, have fun and find meaning,” he said. “We get to rethink the urban experience and define what we want cities of the future to really look like.”

With Kibbo’s launch, would-be puppies (still going with it) attracted to its vision of a network of community spaces shared by professionals whose companies have embraced remote work can now pay $100 to apply to be part of the network.

The company is tapping into a part of the American zeitgeist that’s nearly as old as the country itself. From its inception, people came (and colonized) the country in an effort to create communities that would reflect their values and beliefs and afford them an opportunity to flourish (at the expense of others).

It’s also working off of the glamping phenomenon that netted Hipcamp a valuation over $100 million and grabbed Tentrr an $11 million round of financing. Hipcamp offers a database of campsites that earns money by taking a commission from the bookings it facilitates to moe than 300,000 sites across the U.S.

Like Tentrr, Kibbo is using private land to set up sites accessible to membership. But unlike Tentrr, Kibbo owns its own real estate and is setting up its sites to be part of a community rather than just an experience for travelers looking for a different option from a city vacation or competing for campsites at national parks.

Kibbo also thinks of itself as developing a new kind of roving cities comprised of a certain kind of membership.

“Unlike traditional top-down designed and built real estate developments, Kibbo is setting out to build the first of the next generation of cities: flexible, reconfigurable, designed and defined by the people that live in it, off the grid and sustainable,” O’Donnell said. 

That’s what attracted Urban.us investor Shaun Abrahamson.

“In the short and medium term, I think this looks like a specialty part of the RV market. However, our sense is that RV experience was designed for vacations or retirees and trends like remote work and van life suggest there is demand for different kind of infrastructure and experience… Our longer term interest is climate and affordable housing,” Abrahamson said.  

Climate change and the resulting flooding, fires and rising sea levels are going to change the kinds of infrastructure to support permanent housing, Abrahamson said.

“Van life is benefiting from mobile infrastructure — solar + batteries make off-grid easier. As prices come down, mobile housing and infrastructure will become more attractive. And Kibbo is filling in other lightweight pieces of infrastructure related to things like sanitation and security and, yes, they’ll layer in experiences, too,” he said.  

Both Abrahamson and O’Donnell think there will be more nomadic communities far beyond vacations and retirement, and Kibbo is the firm’s attempt to tap into that trend. It’s a vision for a future of cities that doesn’t include them, and one that O’Donnell, a New York transplant living in a communal space in San Francisco, embraces.

“While Kibbo offers an exciting lifestyle from day one, we’re making a bet that the future of cities is electric, autonomous, distributed, renewable and user-generated,” O’Donnell said.

Insider, a Singapore-based startup that develops software to help clients make marketing decisions, plans to launch in the United States after raising a $32 million Series C. The round was led by Riverwood Capital, with participation from Sequoia India, Wamda and Endeavor Catalyst.

Founded in 2012, the company says its SaaS for multichannel marketing and customer engagement is currently used by more than 800 brands, including Singapore Airlines, Marks and Spencer, Virgin, Uniqlo, Samsung and Estée Lauder.

Insider’s Series C brings its total funding so far to $42 million. In addition to entering the U.S., the new capital will be used on sales and marketing, hiring more engineers for its research and development team and adding new features to its platform.

One noteworthy aspect of the company is that half of its executive team, including co-founder and chief executive officer Hande Cilingir, are women. The company runs a program called Young Engineers that provides coding classes to high school students, especially girls, and it plans to expand to primary school-age kids as well.

Cilingir told TechCrunch that Insider’s AI-based technology differentiates it from older, larger competitors like Salesforce because it is able to integrate customer data from different marketing channels, including offline ones, to help companies make better predictions about customer behavior. Insider’s analytics help brands coordinate campaigns across different platforms, including the web, mobile apps, messaging apps, email and other channels.

“Insider, on top of all those solutions, creates a one-stop shop because you can overcome operational bottlenecks because of the technology, but at the same time, we are still offering all of the features, including personalization technologies, that online businesses need,” she said.

Helping brands create new marketing strategies is crucial during the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, e-commerce companies have seen a surge in traffic because of COVID-19 stay-at-home orders, but need to figure out how to make that translate into sales. Meanwhile, other verticals, like travel and hospitality, have to find new ways of making revenue.

The company has teams in 24 countries across Europe, Asia and the Middle East to support brands’ localization strategies. Even though Insider’s software does not need to be adapted in order to work in different countries, Cilingir said marketing differs widely between cultures.

For example, in Indonesia, direct sales are important, but in Japan, sales operations are often dependent on agencies within a company. Insider’s customer support teams serve as a complement to its software, helping clients use it to create marketing strategies.

In a press statement about the investment, Sequoia India principal Pieter Kemps said, “We liked the Insider team from the first days, but have been positively surprised by their highly efficient go-to-market engine. The quality of customer interactions, combined with exceptional product and technology, has enabled Insider to stand out among the many point-solutions out there—and build up a very impressive list of customer logos.”

Effx, a startup that aims to give developers better insights into their microservice architectures, today announced that it has raised a $3.9 million funding round led by Kleiner Perkins and Cowboy Ventures. Other investors and angels in this round include Tokyo Black, Essence VC Fund, Jason Warner, Michael Stoppelman, Vijay Pandurangan and Miles Grimshaw.

The company’s founder and CEO, Joey Parsons, was an early employee at Rackspace and then first went to Flipboard and then Airbnb a few years ago, where he built out the company’s site reliability team.

“When I first joined Airbnb, it’s the middle of 2015, it’s already a unicorn, already a well-known entity in the industry, but they had nobody there that was really looking after cloud infrastructure and reliability there […],” he told me. The original Airbnb platform was built on Ruby on Rails and wasn’t able to scale to the demands of the growing platform anymore. “Myself and a lot of people that were really smarter than me from the team there got together and we decided at that point, ‘okay, let’s let’s break apart this monolith or monorail that we call it and break it up into microservices.’ ”

But microservices obviously come with their own challenges — they constantly change, after all, and those changes are reflected in different UIs — and that’s essentially where the idea for Effx came from. The idea behind the product is to give engineers a single pane of glass to get all of the information they need about the microservices that have been deployed across their organization.

At Airbnb, Parsons’ team built out a small metastore to track what each service did, who owned it, what language it was written in and whether it was in scope for PCI or GDPR, for example. After leaving Airbnb, Parsons went to Kleiner as an entrepreneur in residence and started to work on building out this idea of bringing to more companies some of the ideas of what the team built at Airbnb. He raised a small amount of money from Kleiner to hire the initial engineering team in 2019 and then started testing the product with a first set of pilot customers earlier this year.

In its early iterations, the product relied on engineers writing YAML files, which the product could then consume, but few engineers love writing YAML files and the value in a tool like this comes from being able to automate a lot of this work. So the team built out integrations with common service orchestration platforms, including Kubernetes, but also AWS Lambda and ECS.

“What we’ve found is that most companies that have been moving towards microservices are using some combination of those platforms — maybe one, maybe two, maybe all three — to orchestrate things,” Parsons explained. “So we built really heavy integrations into those platforms to where in Kubernetes we can drop a client in there, it automatically discovers all your services, populates as much as it can into the catalog from that and then does the same thing for an AWS Lambda or ECS perspective where we consume data from those platforms and pull data in.”

As Parsons noted, the value here isn’t just in getting that single pane of glass, but once you have all of this information and these services’ dependencies and combine it with your CI/CD data, it also becomes a new tool for troubleshooting as it helps you see which services changed before something broke. To even better enable this, teams can add links to their runbooks, documentation and version control tools too.

Parsons tells me that the team is currently in the process of closing more pilots and hiring more engineers as it works to build out its service, add more integrations and find new ways to help its customers make use of all the data it gathers.

“As the future of what we’re building comes more into fruition, the most important thing for us right now is to really deliver on the value that our existing product delivers to our end users as a platform to build more business,” Parsons explained. “I think that in the long run, the power of this feed and getting the data that’s behind it ends up being a really interesting mode for us simply because there’s a lot of great insights that you can build for organizations based on like the patterns and the cadence of information that shows up in this feed, to help teams really understand why there’s that incident that happens every Tuesday at midnight UTC.”

Earlier today, news broke that Xpeng, a China-based electric vehicle company has raised $500 million, adding to its 2019-era $400 million Series C. The round, a Series C+ investment, brings the company’s capital raised to date to around $2.2 billion.

Xpeng’s huge fundraise comes on the heels of a recent boom in the value of some public EV companies, including Tesla, Nio and Nikola. Speculation into the future value (and therefore present-day worth) of EV companies has led to their ranking on lists of most-popular stocks with some retail investors, underscoring their popularity.

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.

You might anticipate that the public-market enthusiasm is helping drive outsized private investment into global EV startups. After all, it’s often true that public market activity has an impact on private market enterprise; if shares of a particular industry rise sharply, the value of their private cognates can similarly rise, and investment in the sector can pick up tempo.

Upon reading about the Xpeng round this morning, that the event was likely part-and-parcel of rising deal volume for private EV companies was our first hunch. In honor of scratching our own itches with data whenever possible, TechCrunch decided to dig and find out.

So, is public market optimism in EV companies driving more investment into private EV companies?

What the data say

To test whether EV investment is rising or falling amongst private companies, The Exchange ran a range of queries today against Crunchbase data, looking at rounds for companies marked as “electric vehicle” firms in its data, discounting crowdfunding, secondary market activity, all post-IPO rounds and any other nonequity rounds.

Here’s what we found:

2020: $3.61 billion from 63 rounds [query].2019: $6.98 billion from 151 rounds [query].

Dan Roselli is Founder and Managing Partner at CFV Ventures, a North Carolina firm focused on FinTech and InsureTech.

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Companies like Blackline, Bill.com, Anaplan all automate various CFO office functions. HighRadius is yet another excellent company automating a piece of the finance function. Sramana Mitra: Let’s...

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As an early-stage founder, how do you draw up your first contracts? Or structure your cap table? How do you hire your first few engineers, or pitch top-tier talent? What about if that talent is abroad? How do you navigate the complicated regulatory environment? How do you make decisions around security and building a tech stack that can go the distance?

You’ve got questions. TechCrunch Early Stage has answers.

At the virtual two-day conference, we’re bringing together some of the most seasoned operators in the fields of legal, recruiting, company structure, security and tech infrastructure to help you find your way through a tactical quagmire to the bright light of success at the end of the tunnel.

Of course, the show will cover more than operational challenges. We also have many, many sessions on growth marketing, PR, brand building and a wide range of fundraising sessions.

If you’re in the midst of building a company, this show is worth making time for. Plus, audience members will be able to ask their own questions to our expert speakers in each and every breakout session.

Here’s a look at all the Operations sessions at TC Early Stage:

Hiring your early engineers with Ali Partovi

The first few employees determine a startup’s trajectory. Learn the dos and don’ts of hiring your early engineers from entrepreneur and investor Ali Partovi. And hear how these hiring decisions can determine not only the the type of culture you build for your employees, but also the overall success of your company.

How to hire globally (and how to make immigration work for you) with Sophie Alcorn

Dealing with a tricky visa situation? Troubleshoot the many snags that can affect early-stage startups that are trying to bring talent into the country, with top Silicon Valley immigration expert Sophie Alcorn.

How to build a great board with Laurie Yoler

A high-performing board of directors can help your company fulfill its potential, but without a plan to run a board that stays focused on strategy, you can get sidetracked. Laurie Yoler, board member and general partner at Playground Global, founding board member at Tesla and current board member at Bose, Church & Dwight, Zoox, Leaf Logistics and Lacuna, will share her perspectives on building a strong board, managing your board relationships and maximizing the value you get from the board both in times of success and the inevitable periods of struggle that come with growing a company.

How to build a tech stack that can go the distance with Jon Evans and Ben Schippers

The beautiful flower of your tech stack starts with a seed, and a series of decisions. What fertilizer will you use? How often should you water it? Where can you give it the right amount of sunlight? Every decision you make about your tech stack affects how it will hold up, and evolve, over time. Hear from HappyFunCorp’s co-founder and CEO Ben Schippers and CTO Jon Evans about how you can avoid regretting those decisions.

True product market fit is a minimum viable company with Ann Miura-Ko

Product market fit is not the sign of a scalable business model. Without a validated value proposition, business model and ecosystem working in concert, moving into “growth mode” is building your company on an unsound foundation. Learn whether you’ve built a minimum viable company from Floodgate co-founder and seed-stage investor Ann Miura-Ko, who was one of the first investors in Lyft, Refinery29 and Xamarin. She’ll dive deeper into the three elements that are required to nail it before you scale it: Value Proposition, Ecosystem and Business Model.

What VCs want in a term sheet (and how you can get what you want) with Lior Zorea

Everything comes at a cost, including that whopping round of investment you’re raising. Hear from Nixon Peabody LLP partner Lior Zorea, who has facilitated countless fundraises, about how to negotiate the all-important cap table and make sure that everybody wins.

Exploring the infrastructure of SaaS startups with Sam Pullara

A new generation of SaaS companies like Wavefront, Snowflake and Clumio has emerged to help reduce the complexity involved in managing data in the cloud. We’ll hear from Sam Pullara of Sutter Ventures, who has two decades of technology and investing experience, about how cloud infrastructure companies can compete in a cloud provider-dominated world.

How to draw up your first contracts (and other legal tips) with James Alonso and Adam Zagaris

Hear from James Alonso, partner at Magnolia Law, on the ins and outs of company formation and financing. Companies that are off to the races can learn from Adam Zagaris, partner at MoonShot Legal, as he breaks down the process of creating commercial contracts and managing transactions. This is a great 360-overview of the legal side of running a startup.

Pitch your talent like you’re pitching your investors with Kristin Tucker and Marissa Peretz

Hear from Silicon Beach Talent founder Marissa Peretz and partner at Koller Search Kristin Tucker on how to entice the right type of talent. Defining a culture with stand-out values is only the first step. These two recruiting powerhouses will share how to close the right candidate.

Launching in regulated industries and growing fast nonetheless with Katherine Boyle

Regulated industries are often the most ripe for disruption, but can also be some of the most challenging markets to enter for a startup. Not only does a company have to handle all the same hurdles as any other startup, but it must navigate a tangly web of regulation and governance. Hear from General Catalyst partner Katherine Boyle about how to tackle those challenges without losing momentum.

Securing your startup with Casey Ellis

Security is one of the most important things for a startup to focus on, but many struggle to dedicate time, resources or budget to protect against something you never want to happen. How should startups prioritize security, and what do emerging companies need to know?

But you’ll need to grab your ticket to TC Early Stage to participate in these and 40 other sessions on July 21 & 22. Sessions are filling up quickly, but as a ticket holder if you miss a session you’ll still have exclusive access to the video on demand. Get your ticket and join the discussion today!

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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.

Got all that? Great, let’s talk about what we went over today:

Chinese stocks were up, Ant is going public in both Hong Kong and Shanghai and eBay is looking to offload its classified ads unit for $8 billion.The efforts to make TikTok appear apolitical are struggling after its parent company does something very political.Xpeng, a Chinese EV company, added $500 million to its Series C round.Coming up: TechCrunch Early Stage, which is going to rule, and a host of earnings results from companies like Microsoft, Snap and Intel, among others.Funding rounds from Vestr, Mori, Soterea and Burn To Give. More notes on the Vestr round here, Mori here, Soterea here, and Burn To Give here.

And we closed the show with a short thought-bubble on manias. What constitutes a bubble? I don’t know precisely, but the electric car (EV) industry has certainly seen its fair share of ups and downs. China’s EV market has seen its booms and busts, with the IPO of Nio operating as a good example of enthusiasm (its IPO), declining faith (its later cratering share price) and the rebirth of optimism (its recent return-to-form) in its industry.

Xpeng’s huge new Series C+ round and the huge valuation that Tesla has managed as a public company in recent months add currency to the idea that the EV market has once again swung toward too much optimism. We’ll see.

More on Friday from the Equity crew!

Customer support is a huge part of a user’s experience, and one that every bank likes to say they’re great at. But there is a lot we can learn from the mistakes that U.K. banks have made.

Based on his latest research report into the user experience of a dozen leading British banks — including Barclays, HSBC, Santander, Monzo, Starling and Revolut — Built for Mars founder Peter Ramsey shares his top five UX tips for customer support.

We dive deeper into each tip, including discussing the thorny topic of call decision trees (press 1 for … press 2 for … etc.), which Ramsey advises should be depreciated in the age of mobile apps, how push notifications might be employed to provide a more Disney-like queuing experience, why hold music is bad as a concept and why it’s time to ditch the live chat bait and switch.

Get rid of call decision trees

Call decision trees are annoying to use and unnecessary for users who have access to an app. Instead of asking customers to navigate via their telephone’s numeric keypad, use in-context questions inside the app, and then put the full number, including the correct extension, behind a button.

TechCrunch: Perhaps we should clarify what you mean by “call decision trees” and — considering they’ve been an industry standard for years — why is now the time to get rid of them?

Peter Ramsey: The decision tree is that automated “press 1 for … press 2 for … ” process you sometimes have to go through at the beginning of a call. I should clarify: It’s not time to eradicate them entirely, because it’s pretty useful for people who only use telephone banking. But for anyone who has access to an app, it’s totally unnecessary.