Antonio Villas-Boas/Business Insider Google's new Pixel Buds are now available to buy for $179.00 from Google's online store, Best Buy, Verizon, T-Mobile, and US Cellular.The new Pixel Buds are direct answers to Apple's AirPods — they're wireless ear buds that come in a wireless charging case, and they have a few smart features, like pairing automatically with your Android phone and summoning Google Assistant.They also have sweat-resistance and an in-ear design for a snug fit, making them a viable option for workouts.

Google introduced its new $179.00 Pixel Buds on Monday, which are available to buy from Google's own store, Best Buy, Verizon, T-Mobile, and US Cellular.

Google's Pixel Buds are totally wireless earbuds that come in a charging case. In a sentence, the Pixel Buds are Google's direct answer to Apple's AirPods. They're the Android user's wireless ear buds that pair automatically with their Android phones, and summon Google Assistant.

Google touts up to five hours of listening time for the Pixel Buds, and two and a half hours for voice calls. The charging case, which can charge wirelessly or via USB-C, holds enough charge for 24 hours of battery life, or 12 hours of voice calls, in total. Charging the Pixel Buds in the battery case for just 10 minutes gives two hours of listening time, or one hour of talk time, Google claims.

Antonio Villas-Boas/Business Insider

Google Pixel Buds features

The Pixel Buds are also sweat resistant, and they have a snug in-ear design with small fins to help stabilize the Buds in your ear and keep them from falling out with too many vibrations.

The Pixel Buds have touch sensors on each bud for pretty typical audio controls, like skipping tracks, pausing, adjusting volume, and picking up phone calls.

Of note, the Google Pixel Buds don't have active noise cancellation like the $250 AirPods Pro do. At $179.00, the Pixel Buds are cheaper than Apple AirPods with Wireless Charging Case.

Antonio Villas-Boas/Business Insider

First impressions of Google Pixel Buds

I've had the Pixel Buds for a few days, and they sound impressive for such small wireless ear buds. With that said, I've noticed some slight background hissing noise when playing music at low volumes. The noise is so quiet that you may not notice, but once you do notice, it's impossible to ignore.

It's a shame they don't come with noise cancellation, but that would surely raise their price tag above $179.00. Plus, the in-ear design acts a little like ear plugs that block out some external noise, but not as much as active noise cancellation. 

Some audience questions answered by Sramana: • Is there a company in your portfolio that is doing well amidst the Coronavirus pandemic? • What are some of the reasons why tech startups fail? • How...

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Crystal Cox/Business Insider The $900 OnePlus 8 Pro is our top choice for a high-end Android smartphone so far in 2020.The phone has a gorgeous design, an amazing screen, it's fast, powerful, it comes with an unbelievably fast charger. It's equal or better than its competition, like the $1,200 Samsung Galaxy S20 Plus, in almost every respect, including price.It's also a 5G phone, which adds to the OnePlus 8 Pro's cost. The issue here is that 5G networks are not ready for the mainstream, so you'd be spending money on a feature that you'd barely use, if at all. The OnePlus 8 Pro comes highly recommended, but it could be worth waiting at least another year if you want a 5G phone. And, if you want to save money, strongly consider the $500 OnePlus 7 Pro or OnePlus 7T.

OnePlus has built a reputation around its high-end smartphones that easily compete against the iPhones and Galaxy S phones from the big companies, all while costing hundreds less.

As expected, OnePlus has done it again. The OnePlus 8 Pro is a superb, beautiful, and powerful smartphone that costs hundreds less than most of the competition. And, like almost every OnePlus phone before it, the 8 Pro comes highly recommended. But this time, my recommendation comes with significantly more "ifs and buts" than usual.

On one hand, the OnePlus 8 Pro is a fantastic smartphone that's $300 cheaper than the equivalent 5G phone from Samsung, the $1,200 Galaxy S20 Plus.

On the other hand, the OnePlus 8 Pro is $900 — which is expensive and $230 more than the OnePlus 7 Pro from last year. That $900 price tag alone both adds to OnePlus' reputation while simultaneously taking away from it. It's both value-oriented and expensive.

So, what do you get for $900 — the new norm for "value" in high-end Android smartphones in 2020?

OnePlus 8 Pro specs

Display: 6.7-inch 1440p (2,560 x 1,440) 120Hz AMOLEDProcessor: Qualcomm Snapdragon 865Memory & storage: 8GB LPDDR5 RAM & 128GB UFS 3.0 storage; 12GB LPDDR5 RAM & 256GB UFS 3.0 storageRear cameras: 48-megapixel wide, 48-megapixel ultra-wide, 8-megapixel 3x optical zoomed lensSelfie camera: 16-megapixelBattery: 4,510mAh

Design and display

The OnePlus 8 Pro is a gorgeous smartphone whether it's in or out of a case.

There's nothing that suggests OnePlus compromised on materials, aesthetics, and overall feel of the OnePlus 8 Pro. Clad in metal and frosted glass on the back, the "ultramarine blue" OnePlus 8 Pro review unit I've been using decidedly feels ultra-premium, and that's likely to be case with other color options. Just note that the black version has a glossy glass back, not the frosted texture.

Antonio Villas-Boas/Business Insider

Even if you hide away the OnePlus 8 Pro's design in a case, the curved screen edges, ultra-narrow bezels, and a hole-punch style selfie camera easily makes for one of the best looking smartphones you can buy, alongside phones like the Samsung Galaxy S20 lineup.

The OnePlus 8 Pro's QHD (1440p) AMOLED screen is sharp, bright, colors are rich and vibrant, and the color black is inky, making for a dynamic screen that makes everything look pleasant. That's to be expected in such a high-end smartphone, but the OnePlus 8 Pro differentiates itself with the incredibly smooth 120Hz refresh rate.

The 120Hz refresh rate at QHD resolution means the screen stays sharp while you glide through the Android operating system and apps. It'll look like a massive leap compared to smartphones with standard 60Hz screens, like the iPhone 11 series and most phones from before 2019 and before.

To be sure, such a smooth screen as the OnePlus 8 Pro's purely serves an aesthetic function — there are very few, if any, functional benefits for high refresh rate screens on smartphones. But, it sure makes an impact. 

Performance and battery life

The OnePlus 8 Pro is a powerful, fast phone for the enthusiast who doesn't want to wait for things to happen after tapping and swiping on the screen — plain and simple. 

But again, all the big Android smartphones of 2020 so far are sporting similar specs, like the Snapdragon 865 mobile chip and a ton of RAM, so stellar performance is a given at this level of the smartphone game. OnePlus' main differentiator here is that it delivers the same performance as its competitors for a lower price tag.

Crystal Cox/Business Insider

For those who want a number, a standard GeekBench test showed 894 for a single-core score, and 3,322 for a multi-core score. Those are technically slightly better scores than the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra, which sports nearly identical specs as the OnePlus 8 Pro. But in real life, there really isn't any perceivable difference between the two. Indeed, that's to say there isn't a perceivably difference in performance between a $900 phone and a $1,200 phone. That's a win for the OnePlus 8 Pro.

Battery life is stellar. I had almost five hours of screen-on time running apps like YouTube, Reddit, and Google News the majority of the time. By the time the OnePlus 8 Pro got to 15%, the phone had gone almost 48 hours without seeing a charger. To be fair, the apps I use aren't super intensive, like a game would be — expect to see shorter battery life for those kinds of power hungry apps. 

Antonio Villas-Boas/Business Insider

Cameras

You get three cameras on the OnePlus 8 Pro, including a 48-megapixel standard wide lens, an ultra-wide angle lens, and a 3x optically zoomed lens, which is pretty much standard on high-end smartphone (unless you're Google's Pixel 4 with a dual-lens camera and an $800 price tag).

Overall, pretty much anyone should be quite pleased with the OnePlus 8 Pro's cameras. 

Here's a photo from the standard wide lens:

Antonio Villas-Boas/Business Insider

Here's a photo with the ultra-wide lens:

Antonio Villas-Boas/Business Insider

And here's a photo from the 3x zoomed lens:

Antonio Villas-Boas/Business Insider

The OnePlus 8 Pro takes great photos, but it can trip up under certain lighting conditions. Below, it looks like the phone added some kind of Instagram filter, where colors appear faded and washed out:

Antonio Villas-Boas/Business Insider

And, digitally zooming into a subject beyond the 3x optical zoom introduces a hazy look to photos:

Antonio Villas-Boas/Business Insider

Additional features

OnePlus also gets one of the most undervalued parts of a smartphone almost completely right: fingerprint unlocking and facial recognition. Both are incredibly fast and accurate, making for a seamless and frustration-free unlocking experience. It might seem trivial, but it's a massive part of using a smartphone, and it's amazing how often companies get it wrong. The fancy ultrasonic in-display fingerprint scanner on the Galaxy S20 series, for example, is an unfortunate and frustrating mess to use.

You might notice that the fingerprint sensor doesn't work very well when your finger is wet (or even damp) or dirty, and even in direct sunlight, but that's when the incredibly fast facial recognition comes in hand. Conversely, you'll find that the facial recognition can be slow when it's darker, and that's when the fingerprint recognition comes in.

OnePlus also has better battery charging than any other smartphone company. The OnePlus 8 Pro comes with OnePlus' Warp Charge 30T charger, which is still among the fastest chargers that comes included with a smartphone.

The OnePlus 30W wireless charger charges the OnePlus 8 Pro incredibly quickly. Crystal Cox/Business Insider

The OnePlus 8 Pro also ushers in a brand new, long-awaited feature for OnePlus phones: wireless charging. And boy, what a wireless charger. The Warp Charge 30 Wireless Charger makes quick work to fill up the phone's battery at 30W. From 15% to 75%, it only took 37 minutes on the OnePlus wireless charger. From 15% to 100%, it took about an hour. That's incredibly fast for wireless — and even for wired — charging. To note, however, the wireless charger is a $70 optional extra, not an included accessory. 

Drawbacks

The OnePlus 8 Pro is on the larger side, so those who like smaller phones won't be happy here. The OnePlus 8 is smaller (but still quite large with a 6.55-inch screen), but it's barely the same phone — it doesn't have wireless charging, it has a 90Hz screen, and it has lesser cameras. The cameras can misfire from time to time — colors can look washed out or overly saturated.  The curved screen edges aren't for everyone. They look good, but they actually feel like wasted screen space. This isn't specific against OnePlus phones, as a lot of Android phones employ the curved screen edges.The OnePlus 8 Pro is the most expensive OnePlus phone to date, and 5G is largely to blame, as OnePlus CEO Pete Lau previously said. You're basically paying extra for 5G, but 5G is barely available — unless you live in a 5G coverage area, 5G will be a rare network that few people can realistically connect to until carriers flesh out their 5G networks. At the moment, 5G is more of a novelty rather than a functional network.To go even further, one of the only two 5G networks worth connecting to — the super fast high-band mmWave networks — will only be available to Verizon units of the OnePlus 8 Pro. That means you need to buy your OnePlus 8 Pro from Verizon, and you need to be a Verizon customer. AT&T also has a high-band 5G network, but no OnePlus 8 Pro users will be able to connect to it.

Should you buy the OnePlus 8 Pro?

If you're looking for a high-end smartphone in 2020, the OnePlus 8 Pro should be at the very top of your short list. It's the best high-end Android smartphone to date — end of discussion.

The OnePlus 8 Pro is what happens when OnePlus unleashes itself without the limitations of "value." It has all the flagship features that were previously missing in OnePlus phones, like an official water resistance rating and wireless charging, and it just went all out and created an indisputable force of smartphone nature. 

Crystal Cox/Business Insider

With that said, I'd consider waiting another year before buying any 5G smartphone if you care about saving money. 5G technology adds to the cost of smartphones, and 5G just isn't ready for you yet. Indeed, it's entirely possible to buy the OnePlus 8 Pro and never connect to a single 5G network during the year 2020. With that in mind, you'd be paying for 5G technology that you might not get to use, or use extremely rarely. And, if you do connect to a 5G network, you're likely a T-Mobile customer connecting to T-Mobile's low-band network, which frankly doesn't impress and feels just like regular 4G LTE. Other carriers have shorter range 5G networks that are faster, but coverage is unbelievably sparse at the moment. 

Whichever way you look at it, you'll be connected to your carrier's 4G LTE network more often than a 5G network, and you'll rarely be using the 5G technology you paid for in the OnePlus 8 Pro. If you'd rather wait for 5G networks to become more mainstream, I'd suggest either waiting before buying a high-end smartphone like the OnePlus 8 Pro. Or, if you need a new phone now, I'd strongly consider the $500 OnePlus 7 Pro or OnePlus 7T.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, there’s more to building a startup than raising venture capital.

Founders are finding success without overly relying on VC dollars; some are even sharing profits with their respective employees and customers without the help of traditional funding and Silicon Valley power dynamics.

As some investors slow down their funding pace, it has become clear that profitability trumps funding and venture capital can only take a startup so far when the economy tanks and outside cash streams dry up.

In the Indie.vc portfolio, profitability is its driving force. In fact, its main criterion for funding is that a startup must be on a clear path to profitability with durable fundamentals like high gross margins or the ability to start charging for a product right away, as opposed to companies that need a significant amount of upfront investment for research and development.

Profitability, Indie.vc founder Bryce Roberts tells TechCrunch, needs to be a habit, and founders need to recognize that it’s not a switch they can just turn on. Startups looking to prioritize profitability need to start out as revenue-driven businesses that replace funding milestones with profitability goals.

“Genuinely, it’s not rocket science,” he says. “Profitability isn’t this crazy, elusive thing. It’s literally more achievable than a Series A round. It’s way more achievable than a Series B round. If you look at the kind of fall-off between those rounds, most entrepreneurs would be better off finding their path to profitability and scale.”

Indie.vc, which recently announced its latest batch of investments, advises founders to make sure they have what they need to be stable and then to create and measure value, Roberts says. That value, which differs depending on the company, must be quantifiable as some metric or revenue.

To do that, Roberts says founders should adopt a mindset where they’re focused on creating revenue opportunities, rather than cost savings. Indie.vc’s model also does not prioritize hiring ahead of growth, a strategy that seems to be working for its portfolio during the pandemic.

Earlier this month, edtech unicorn Duolingo raised $10 million in new venture capital from General Atlantic, per an SEC filing. With the raise, the online language learning platform accepted its first outside investor in almost three years. General Atlantic will take a board observer seat at the company, per Duolingo.

The company, which was last valued at $1.5 billion, says the round has increased its valuation, but it declined to share by how much.

General Atlantic has invested in a number of edtech companies around the world, like OpenClassrooms, Ruangguru and Unacademy. Duolingo said that General Atlantic’s global platform and experience with online education in Asia would help guide its own growth, specifically pointing to its plans to scale up the Duolingo English test.

The e-learning company last raised $30 million in December at that $1.5 billion valuation. To raise a smaller sum a few months later is uncommon. Historically, that type of raise could happen for a number of reasons: a company is accepting a later investment as part of the same funding round, it needs more cash and this is an easy way to raise it or the company tried to raise a new large round and failed to secure past $10 million.

So where does the language learning unicorn fit?

In Duolingo’s case, it said the $10 million was raised because it wanted to bring a new investor on, but didn’t need a massive amount of primary capital. Duolingo says it is cash-flow positive.

In the past few weeks, Duolingo launched a new app to help children read and write, passed one million paying subscribers for Duolingo Plus and disclosed that its annual bookings run rate is $140 million. The company also recently hired its first CFO and general counsel.

“Because our business has been growing very fast and we have more than enough capital, there was limited need for us to raise more primary capital. However, over the last year, we developed a relationship with General Atlantic,” the company said in a statement to TechCrunch.

Tanzeen Syed, a managing director for General Atlantic, said that Duolingo is a “market leader in the language learning space. Syed also said Duolingo has a “profitable, efficient business model while maintaining hyper-growth characteristics.”

Another key factoid here is that along with the $10 million, there was a larger secondary transaction, which occurs when an existing stockholder sells their stock for cash or to a third party, or to the company itself while the company is still private.

In this case, an existing investor in Duolingo sold a small portion of their existing stake to allow General Atlantic to have a bigger stake in the company.

The company declined to share the size of the secondary market transaction.

In light of this new information, Duolingo’s expansion to Asia, which has a robust market of English learners, welcomed one investor and lessened the stake of another.

Based on what we know, the transaction signals that a preexisting investor in Duolingo was looking for liquidity at a time where the public markets are tightening and private markets are pausing. And at a time when companies are staying private longer than ever before, secondary transactions are hardly rare.

Sometimes, however, secondary transactions signal a lack of faith from a preexisting investor in the company’s current trajectory.

Duolingo is full steam ahead on its goal to expand across the world — and now has new cash in the bank, and a new observer seat on the board, to prove it.

Some audience questions answered by Sramana: • How do you do business development for a tech business during the Covid-19 quarantine? • What would be your steps to start a business during the...

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We weren’t alone in being impressed by Motiv. The startup helped flip the script on wearables by essentially cramming a fitness tracker’s worth of technology into a ring. This week, San Francisco “digital identity” startup Proxy announced that it’s acquiring the company.

The company’s site is littered in buzzwords, but Proxy specializes in digital key cards — essentially providing a way to use digital devices like smartphones to access businesses and homes. An odd fit for a company that makes exercise rings, until you look at what Motiv’s been up to in recent years.

Among the additions to the tiny hardware platform are NFC payments, lost phone tracking and two-factor device authentication through gait monitoring. Whether or not Proxy ultimately has interest in manufacturing and selling a fitness ring, there’s plenty of underlying technology here that would be of interest to a digital identity company.

“The demand for our technology is only going to increase and we saw a clear path forward in the importance of validating one’s identity in both the physical and digital worlds,” Motiv said in a blog post. “Keys, access cards and passwords are rapidly being replaced with a biometric identity which provides greatly improved security and convenience.”

While the app will continue to be available for download (no word on how long it will continue to offer support), the deal marks the end of Motiv’s online sales, while partner retailers will burn through the rest of their stock.

Proxy, on the other hand, says it’s committed to the ring as the future of the wearables category. “With this acquisition, Proxy plans to bring digital identity signals to smart rings for the first time and revolutionize the way people use technology to interact with the world around them,” the company writes. “We believe it’s possible to ignite a paradigm shift in how people use wearables to interface with the physical world, so they can do and experience things they never have before.”

While compelling, the fitness ring hasn’t exactly taken the wearable category by storm in the past three years, as the space continues to be almost exclusively dominated by smartwatches and headphones. For those who still believe in the form factor, Motiv has had some competition recently from companies like Oura, a ring largely built around sleep tracking. 

The co-founders of Walrus.ai, a new software company that raised $4 million in a new round of financing from Homebrew, Felicis Ventures and Leadout Capital, started their business with one problem.

Jake Marsh, Akshay Nathan and Scott White had a problem. They left Wealthfront to launch a new service that would solve what they saw as a key problem with new business workflows. Their idea was to integrate the disparate software silos that different parts of their former business used to complete assignments.

The company was going to be called Monolist and it was going to aggregate tasks across every tool into a single actionable list. Unfortunately it wasn’t working.

They had founded the business back in 2018 and had gone on to raise seed capital from Homebrew and Leadout Capital, but they were hitting walls in their product development.

“Reliability was a huge problem for us,” said company co-founder, Scott White. “There were various frameworks that would let you test your automation so that before you launch your software, you catch bugs… There were some code languages that exist that can help you do this, but they didn’t work for us at all.”

The browser testing frameworks that White and his co-founders were using hadn’t kept up with the evolution of the software development industry and couldn’t adequately recreate the ways that actual users would interact with the software. “The stuff is super brittle,” said White.

Typically, according to White, these assurance tests break and then force engineers and developers to then investigate why the tests broke, to see if they can figure out what went wrong with the test even before they move on to any quality assurance of the actual changes made to a product.

“They weren’t designed to handle that much complexity,” White said of the existing testing tools.

So White and his co-founders thought about how they’d solve what they see as one of the critical problems that engineers face.

“The problem for engineers right now is that writing tests for your applications is hard because you have to write code and the frameworks are very inflexible and flaky,” White said. “Engineers spend tons of time running tests and if those tests fail then your code would not get shipped so you have to debut all those tests.”

Enter the new venture from White and his co-founders.

That would be Walrus.ai . “We’re outsourced engineering through an API,” said White. “We understand how to do testing and we can do it way better and more quickly.”

Using simple text descriptions of a planned user interface, Walrus.ai’s co-founder said his company can run diagnostics on just how effectively the code manages to execute its planned commands.

Given its status as a relatively new kind on the testing block, Walrus.ai only has tens of paying customers right now as it spins out from Monolist.

The company sees its competition coming primarily from outsourced quality assurance companies like Rainforest QA; test recorders like Mabel and Testim; and testing frameworks like Selenium and Cypress, but believes that its ability to take natural language prompts and run QA tests will be enough of a differentiator to capture a significant share of the market.

Some audience questions answered by Sramana: • When can we expect to have pharmaceutical drug or vaccine for the coronavirus (Covid-19)? • Should governments lift the Covid-19 lockdowns and let...

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The job of an early-stage startup founder is challenging in good times, never mind a crash like the one we are experiencing today.

While most expect private investing to slow down, it’s clear that some investments are still happening in spite of the pandemic, if the stories we are writing on TechCrunch are any indication.

But the downturn is bound to have an impact on the types of deals that receive funding; any startup that offers a good or service requiring human interaction or installation will face an uphill battle, at least in the short term. That said, enterprise SaaS vendors, especially ones that solve hard problems, help with work-from-home or collaboration, or better yet, help increase efficiency and save money, are still very much in demand.

Nobody can do anything about the CIO who is hunkering down until things improve — but that’s not everyone. Companies might be thinking twice about where they spend money, but some are still helping drive the net-new, post-COVID-19 investments happening from seed to late stage across many sectors.

We looked at data and spoke to a couple of enterprise-focused, NYC-based seed investors to better understand their investing cadence. Nobody painted a rosy picture of today’s climate, but seed investors were never about immediate gratification, especially where enterprise startups are concerned. That means, if a seed-stage investor believes in the founders and their vision and the company can ride out today’s economic upset, there’s still money in the till — at least for now.

Seed investment generally in decline

A startup that’s hoping to be a contender in the very large and fragmented market of human resources software has captured the eye of a big investor out of the US and become its first investment in Spain.

Barcelona-based Factorial, which is building an all-in-one HR automation platform aimed at small and medium businesses that manages payroll, employee onboarding, time off and other human resource functions, has raised €15 ($16 million) in a Series A round of funding led by CRV, with participation also from existing investors Creandum, Point Nine and K Fund.

The money comes on the heels of Factorial — which has customers in 40 countries — seeing eightfold growth in revenues in 2019, with more than 60,000 customers now using its tools.

Jordi Romero, the CEO who co-founded the company with Pau Ramon (CTO) and Bernat Farrero (head of corporate), said in an interview that the investment will be used both to expand to new markets and add more customers, as well as to double down on tech development to bring on more features. These will include RPA integrations to further automate services, and to move into more back-office product areas such as handling expenses,

Factorial has now raised $18 million and is not disclosing its valuation, he added.

The funding is notable on a couple of levels that speak not just to the wider investing climate but also to the specific area of human resources.

In addition to being CRV’s first deal in Spain, the investment is being made at a time when the whole VC model is under a lot of pressure because of the global coronavirus pandemic — not least in Spain, which has a decent, fledgling technology scene but has been one of the hardest-hit countries in the world when it comes to COVID-19.

“It made the closing of the funding very, very stressful,” Romero said from Barcelona last week (via video conference). “We had a gentleman’s agreement [so to speak] before the virus broke out, but the money was still to be wired. Seeing the world collapse around you, with some accounts closing, and with the bigger business world in a very fragile state, was very nerve wracking.”

Ironically, it’s that fragile state that proved to be a saviour of sorts for Factorial.

“We target HR leaders and they are currently very distracted with furloughs and layoffs right now, so we turned around and focused on how we could provide the best value to them,” Romero said.

The company made its product free to use until lockdowns are eased up, and Factorial has found a new interest from businesses that had never used cloud-based services before but needed to get something quickly up and running to use while working from home. He noted that among new companies signing up to Factorial, most either previously kept all their records in local files or at best a “Dropbox folder, but nothing else.”

The company also put in place more materials and other tools specifically to address the most pressing needs those HR people might have right now, such as guidance on how to implement furloughs and layoffs, best practices for communication policies and more. “We had to get creative,” Romero said.

At $16 million, this is at the larger end of Series A rounds as of January 2020, and while it’s definitely not as big as some of the outsized deals we’ve seen out of the US, it happens to be the biggest funding round so far this year in Spain.

Its rise feels unlikely for another reason, too: it comes at a time when we already have dozens (maybe even hundreds) of human resources software businesses, with many an established name — they include PeopleHR, Workday, Infor, ADP, Zenefits, Gusto, IBM, Oracle, SAP, Rippling, and many others — in a market that analysts project will be worth $38.17 billion by 2027 growing at a CAGR of over 11%.

But as is often the case in tech, status quo breeds disruption, and that’s the case here. Factorial’s approach has been to build HR tools specifically for people who are not HR professionals per se: companies that are small enough not to have specialists, or if they do, they share a lot of the tasks and work with other managers who are not in HR first and foremost.

It’s a formula that Romero said could potentially see the company taking on bigger customers, but for now, investors like it for having built a platform approach for the huge but often under-served SME market.

“Factorial was built for the users, designed for the modern web and workplace,” said Reid Christian, General Partner at CRV, in a statement. “Historically the HR software market has been one of the most lucrative categories for enterprise tech companies, and today, the HR stack looks much different. As we enter the third generation of cloud HR products, with countless point solutions, there’s a strong need for an underlying platform to integrate work across these.”

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here: 482nd 1Mby1M Roundtable April 23, 2020: With Garrett Goldberg, Bee Partners

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Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

As global startup markets enter a slowdown — more on that shortly — we’re starting to get notes on when growth-oriented firms are going to run short of cash. Of course, startups around the world are cutting staff and trying to limit costs as macro uncertainty reins, but their efforts won’t save everyone.

This morning, let’s dig into what venture’s impending investment pace may look like over the next year or two, courtesy of Upfront Ventures‘ Mark Suster. Then we’ll parse cash runway data from UK and Belgian startups. The resulting picture is one detailing falling cash accounts for a number of startups that could reach zero before venture trends are expected to recover.

Downturn

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Ritesh Agarwal was recorded in April 2020. Ritesh...

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Startup founders who are fundraising in this climate should expect venture investors to take a huge chunk out of their valuation expectations.

“What we’re seeing across the board is discounts,” says Mike Janke, co-founder of early-stage cybersecurity investment firm Datatribe.

Investors are still committing to new deals, he says, but they’re adding new terms and demanding lower valuations from companies as the cost of raising capital during the downturn. Janke, whose firm has several deals in the pipeline, says entrepreneurs should expect VCs to demand concessions like more frequent board meetings and large price cuts compared to what they’d previously seen.

“If you look at 2000 and 2008, venture always views [downturns] as the time to get good deals,” Janke says. “We’re looking at a 15% to 25% discount to do deals.”

In one instance, a company that turned down a $900 million acquisition offer is now in the process of raising a new round at a $500 million valuation, he says. “In 2019 it was just generally accepted that this company was worth over $1 billion.”

Deals are getting done, though. As the pandemic began to spread, Janke says most firms began triaging their portfolios to determine who would need to raise cash and who could remain afloat without an infusion. Now, firms are looking out and seeing what kind of opportunities there are in the broader market — if they can.

“Some of our peers in the Valley have up to 40% of their companies that need an infusion or some sort of bridge to get through,” says Janke. “These companies that had higher valuations that came out of the Valley have had to do more drastic cuts.” Startups that raised cash in markets outside the Bay Area have not had as much difficulty, he says, because they’re more efficient.

Good morning and welcome back to TechCrunch’s Equity Monday, a jumpstart for your week.

Regular Equity episodes still drop each and every Friday morning, so if you’ve listened to the show over the years, don’t worry — we’re only adding to the mix. You can catch last week’s show with Danny Crichton and Natasha Mascarenhas right here if you haven’t yet.

Unlike some weeks when the weekend’s crop of news and thought runs fallow, our recent interlude was stuffed with things to talk about:

Sequoia China and Starbucks are tying up, which is especially notable after the Luckin Coffee story came crashing back to Earth.A survey concerning UK startups showed cracks in the EU’s largest startup market, measured by VC activity.It’s earnings week, with everyone from Apple to Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, Spotify and Tesla reporting. Strap in for the busy week. It’s going to be a lot, but should help us figure out what has been going on in the stock market.Codota raised $12 million, and we think that its product is neat.A new pre-seed/seed fund has raised €50 million in fresh capital, which is notable given the global economic slowdown.

And then, finally, this essay from Founder’s Fund John Luttig, which I encourage you to read. It’s something that everyone is reading, and thus you must even if you don’t want to. We chat about it on the show, but read it yourself anyways. If it’s right, we’re in for a sea change in the startup world. For good, or at least until there’s a new leap forward in tech or technology product distribution. (You can read more on the idea of a SaaS slowdown here.)

IDC projects the database market to be $71 billion in 2020, growing to $97 billion in 2023. MongoDB has less than 1% share of the global database market and a long runway for growth ahead of it....

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Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Elly Truesdell was recorded in March 2020. Elly...

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