This morning, Y Combinator is publishing a 70-page Series A guide based on its work with 190 YC companies over the last couple of years. It’s part of an initiative launched in 2018 to help these alums understand how Series A rounds work — and how to make them work to their advantage.

The program is led by YC partner Aaron Harris, with whom we talked at the program’s launch and who we caught up with again earlier this week to find out what’s in the guide, and why — given the many related posts that YC publishes on a regular basis — the outfit felt the need to put something so massive together. Excerpts from that chat follow.

TC: You’ve been working expressly with companies on their Series A rounds for a couple of years. What are some of the misconceptions around how to land these financings?

AH: I had this idea that Series A rounds were understood on the investor side — that they are looking for ARR, plus profit, then comes funding. But the metrics that people like to talk about, they’re really meaningless. We’ve seen companies funded with $200,000 in ARR and companies funded with $9 million in ARR. It’s really fundamentally a bet on what the investor thinks the future looks like based on the founder and what the business is doing at that point. It’s entirely possible to raise on a great story and no metrics, versus great metrics and no story.

TC: If you don’t need to reach a certain financial threshold, then how do you know when it’s time to reach out to Series A investors?

AH: There’s a lot of preparation required [before doing this]; we advise against companies going out to market because of a false signal. Sometimes, an investor wants to give a team a term sheet and they misinterpret this interest and kick off the fundraising process before they’re ready.

TC: How many investors do founders have to meet with on average?

AH: They meet with 30 on average to produce a single term sheet.

TC: Are these preemptive offers then good news?

AH: They aren’t as good as they seem. If an investor preempts your round, you might think you’ve won. But looking at dozens of preemptive rounds versus non-preemptive rounds, we’ve seen that companies wind up giving up 1.4% more in dilution for nearly $1 million less in funding when they do this, and that’s quite a lot of your company. Also, if people want to preempt you, there’s a good chance others will like your company.

TC: This guide is very detailed. For TC readers wondering what they’ll find in it, what’s one example of the advice it includes?

AH: We explain how to work through a diligence request by an investor. Someone might say, ‘Hey, can you give me a month-by-month breakdown of major customers?’ And we’ve seen founders give them a full list of their customers, then the VC calls them, and if the customer is having a bad day or [the VC] reaches the wrong person, that bad reference check can sink a round. It’s really important that founders ask instead about what the VC is trying to learn from the diligence request, then call those customers so they’re ready, You also want to make sure that 15 investors aren’t calling the same customer so that [that person or company] isn’t overwhelmed.

TC: Why make your findings available to everyone if you’re trying to give YC companies an edge?

AH: We’re happy we’ve helped our companies do better at raising A rounds, but we want to help as many founders as we possibly can. It goes back to [Paul Graham’s] online essays for founders to our Startup School, through which we’re helping founders all over the world at no cost. This guide is another step designed to solve that information asymmetry between what founders and investors know.

If YC can help companies build bigger companies and level the playing field, that’s just overall good for the rate of innovation in the world.

TC: A lot of this advice assumes that the economy won’t change. It’s based on two years of findings in a market where things have been clicking along nicely. Have you considered the impact of this coronavirus slowing things down — including the money flow to the Bay Area — and making it harder for startups to get funded?

AH: I don’t think startups are killed by macro trends, unlike tech giants; they’re too small. [PitchBook recently estimated] that there is $100 billion in dry powder [waiting to be invested in startups], but that sounds way too low to me. In 2007, 2008, I was at Bridgewater Associates, and we saw the amount of money sitting on the sidelines in sovereign wealth funds, and various of these have trillions of dollars. And some are investing directly in startups.

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.
Today we’re getting two items out of my notebook while sticking to our recent fintech theme (Q1 fintech VC results here and more on investing patterns into the category here). Let’s chat about fintech customer acquisition costs and the rise of card-focused plays inside of the category.

For a little context: I’ve been hunting down a story on rising fintech customer acquisition costs (CAC) for what feels like a year. After a host of calls and chats on the topic, I’m admitting defeat. Details below, but I’m excited to cross the topic off my to-do list.

Regarding cards, I’ve spoken to both the CEOs of Brex and Ramp in recent weeks and corresponded a bit with Coinbase. So let’s chat interchange a little bit as well. Today is a fintech grab-bag, and we’re all going to be better for it. Onward!

WordPress remains the juggernaut of content management systems, even though it now often gets used in ways it was never intended. And with that, managing the life cycle of WordPress sites has only gotten more complicated, too, all while hackers are trying to exploit any and all security issues to take control of a site. Strattic aims to make all of this a lot easier by turning WordPress sites into static sites that don’t query a database whenever a user looks at a page.

The Israeli company today announced that it has raised a $6.5 million seed round led by SignalFire and TenOneTen Ventures, with participation from Accel, Automattic, Seneca VC, Eric Ries and Village Global VC. It also announced that Zeev Suraski, who co-created PHP 3 and the Zend Engine that’s at the core of PHP 4, has joined the company as its CTO.

About 13 years ago, Strattic CEO and co-founder Miriam Schwab founded a WordPress web development company. At that time, WordPress was often still seen as a tool for running personal blogs, but that has obviously changed over time. But she realized that once her agency handed off the site to the customer, they would often come back to her to ask for maintenance as well — and the idea behind Strattic is based on that experience and trying to simplify that process by using static site generators. Schwab noted that those aren’t necessarily all that user-friendly, though.

“WordPress is still the best option out there, but it has these major issues, so I thought, all right, why not marry these two worlds? WordPress stays WordPress, but maybe we turn it into a static site generator. And that was the initial concept for Strattic,” Schwab told me.

“It was just such an obviously good idea,” co-founder and COO Josh Lawrence added. “It means that you don’t need to do maintenance anymore. It means that your site is 99.99999% more unhackable than before. It’s going to be faster, no matter what. Totally scalable. It’s just all these things and as long as you can make it work — which was not simple — it’s just obvious from a business perspective.”

With Strattic, users still get the usual WordPress experience, but the company only spins up a WordPress container when you are using it, which significantly reduces the attack surface, and then generates the static sites as you make changes. Those static sites obviously load very fast and also provide a smaller attack surface. To speed up the sites, Strattic also uses AWS’s CDN solution.

Lawrence, however, also told me, that getting funding wasn’t easy at first. VCs in Israel weren’t really looking to fund a WordPress company at the time, even though Strattic was growing (mostly organically) at a very nice pace and getting real customers. So in order to raise this round, the company went to Silicon Valley, looking to raise $2 million but came back with $6.5 million in an oversubscribed round.

The team plans to use the new funding to build out its product team and start rolling out new features quickly. Currently, for example, there are still a few types of sites that don’t work with Strattic, including those that use the popular WooCommerce system, because they rely on database connections. Support for these types of sites is in the works, though.

Sramana Mitra: Talk about the next few strategic steps of how you put one foot before the other. Joel Thomas: When I tried to incorporate, we didn’t have a merchant processor. If you’re working...

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Hasura, a startup working to solve developer problems around connecting to databases when using the open-source GraphQL tool, announced a $9.9 million Series A investment today.

Vertex Ventures US led the round, with participation from SAP.iO Fund and existing investors Nexus Venture Partners and Strive VC. A number of angel investors also participated in the round. The company has raised a total of approximately $11.5 million.

GraphQL is an open-source tool originally developed at Facebook in 2012 and open-sourced a few years later. Hasura CEO and co-founder Tanmai Gopal says the company had been working on helping developers to simplify Kubernetes, but over time, it realized that data access was a bigger problem, so it developed an open-source tool that works with GraphQL to help solve that issue.

“Application developers need access to data sitting in databases. So Hasura is an open-source service that lets you find your databases, set up a little bit of configuration, and then you generate a GraphQL API that’s performant and secure,” Gopal told TechCrunch.

The net result is a kind of Data as a Service API that has solved a big problem for GraphQL users, especially the back-end developers, who had to spend lots of time manually connecting the application to the data sources for front-end developers working with GraphQL. This service creates some code that the front-end developers can drop into their application and connect to the database without a fuss.

It has proven popular, with more than 29 million downloads and counting. The company hopes to make money with an enterprise version that is currently in testing and should be ready soon.

For now, the San Francisco-based company has 40 employees, a number that should rise over the next year with the new funding. The startup hopes to expand the capabilities of the tool, while supporting a wider range of database types.

Tempo wants to be the Peloton of barbells. It’s a 42-inch tall screen with 3D machine vision that tracks and teaches you as you workout. The giant upright HD display makes it feel like your personal trainer is right there with you while you compete with others in live and on-demand classes.

Tempo’s Microsoft Kinect-esque motion sensors scan you 30 times per second and notify you if your form is wrong. It’s all housed in a sleekly designed free-standing cabinet that neatly stores the included barbells, dumbbells, attachable weights, workout mat, recovery foam roller, and heartrate monitor.

Tempo opens for pre-orders today for $1995, requiring a $250 deposit and $39 monthly content subscription before shipping this summer.

“Every single product in the market took a piece of equipment out of a gym and slapped a screen on it” says Tempo CEO and co-founder Moawia Eldeeb. “You need to be able to see a user to actually be able to give them guidance so they can work out safely. We wanted to build a fitness experience from the ground up with training and form feedback at the core of it.”

I demo’d Tempo this week and found the in-home convenience, motivational on-screen personal trainers, and the real-time posture corrections gave me the confidence to lift weights without the fear of injury. It might not feel quite as fun and addictive as Peloton, but it offers a facsimile of personal training that’s more affordable than in-person classes that cost $100 or more.

The idea of democratizing access to trainers is what convinced Eldeeb and the Tempo team to stretch its initial $1.8 million in seed funding for four years. While collecting data from its SmartSpot in-gym weight lifting assessment device, Tempo survived long enough to build this prototype.

“Most investors had given up on us. We built this product and had just $700,000 left” Eldeeb recalls. But once people could try Tempo, “we pitched 10 investors and got 9 term sheets. It got very competitive.” The startup recently walked away with a $17.5 million Series A round from Founders Fund, DCM, and Khosla Ventures. Now Tempo will pour that cash into marketing, retail distribution, R&D, and content production.

A founder’s journey out of homelessness

Tempo’s mission is to change people’s lives for the better like personal training did for Eldeeb. “Training is what took me out of a homeless shelter and got me to where I am I today” he reflects.

Eldeeb’s family immigrated to the US from Egypt when he was nine. But after an explosion leveled their building, they wound up in a homeless shelter. Eldeeb eventually dropped out of middle school to work in a pizza parlor and help pay the bills. But personal trainers at a local YMCA took him under their wing. He eventually paid his way through a computer science degree at Columbia University by working as a personal trainer to his eventual co-founder and CTO Josh Augustin. “Having trainers say you’re getting stronger taught me I could do something for myself.”

While at school, Eldeeb was developing an idea for a physical therapy wearable while Augustin was building 3D sensors for guiding robot perception. They soon realized that a combination of these ideas “offered us the possibility to deliver on the promise of guiding your form and tracking your progress accurately.”

In 2015, they started a company called Pivot to build SmartSpot — a similar looking upright screen that was designed for gyms. It could track users, but only output raw data about their form, like how bent a user’s knees were during a squat. It then worked with trainers to annotate the data to determine what movement patterns were safe and which were dangerous.

Gym owners bought in because it let them track which trainers were actually helping customers improve. “It held trainers accountable. If you weren’t delivering results, it’d be obvious” Eldeeb tells me. The company built up a dataset of over from over 1 million 3D tagged workouts, from hundreds of gyms, overseen by thousands of trainers. That formed the basis of the artificial intelligence that would let Pivot pivot into Tempo.

Pumping Iron With Tempo

At first, Tempo’s giant screen and black or white armoire can feel a bit daunting. The thing is about six feet tall, though it only takes up as much room as a large chair. It makes efficient use of space, with the barbell and dumbbells racked on the back, an internal shelf for the foam roller and mat, and a soft-closing cabinet on the front with the rubber-coated weight set. Keeping everything together means you won’t have to go digging in your closet to start a work out.

Tempo walks users through an initial computer-vision fitness assessment to understand your strength and flexibility so it can set base levels for its exercises. If you have an injury it needs to nurse, Tempo connects you to a human personal trainer that helps customize your workout plan. Otherwise, it uses your goals and data to set out a progressive regimen that gets a little tougher each day. It even blocks you from jumping into later classes so you don’t strain yourself.

Your workout plan begins with tutorial sessions that teach you to do the exercises with safe and proper form. When I was hunching forward during my squats, Tempo’s computer vision would ding me with instant feedback to keep my knees back and chest up. Then once I’d corrected the issue, it congratulated me with little green checkmarks. “Any product that doesn’t offer that is no better than a DVD or YouTube videos” Eldeeb remarks.

From there I could choose between a variety of class styles and lengths, ranging from high intensity interval training circuits to isolated sessions focused on particular muscle groups. In each, you watch a near life-size personal trainer doing the routines right in front of you while they demonstrate form and drop inspirational quotes.

Tempo is producing seven live classes per day from its San Francisco studio which you can also watch on-demand. You can compete against friends or strangers, and Tempo compares you rep for rep so it’s more about perfect form than reckless speed or weight. The live trainers can actually see all your data and your mistakes on a dashboard as they lead classes, and can call you out for screwing up (though you can deactivate this shame mode). Eldeeb says “knowing the trainer can possibly see your numbers will motivate you to actually do this right.”

The class selection interface is suspiciously similar to Peloton’s, though that at least will make it familiar for some. Over time, you build up an immense collection of data on your performance in each work out, excercise, and muscle. Unlike hitting the gym by yourself, you’ll never struggle to remember how much weight to use or whether you’re improving. Classes are soundtracked with dancey remixes sourced from a partnership with Feed.fm to avoid the royalty issues with original songs that slapped Peloton.

For a 14-person startup, Tempo is trying to do a ton and that can leave some rough edges. The bluetooth armband heartrate monitor can have connectivity issues and the computer vision doesn’t always register every rep, especially if your posture is off. Classes also fail to include enough stretching to prevent strains, instead devoting the start of classes to warmups that ease you in but might not protect your muscles well enough. My quads were destroyed after my demo.

Tempo still achieves its primary objective: it makes weight lifting accessible. No need to drag yourself to the gym or be beholden to a trainer’s schedule, where I’d always end up arriving late and wasting 25% of my session. The form feedback fixes my core complaint about remote personal training app Future I’ve been using for nine months, which can’t see you. That’s led to minor injuries from bad sit-up posture and other incorrect movements. Tempo can’t catch everything, but it can nip some of the most common mistakes in the bud.

Eldeeb was blunt when asked why Tempo is better than well-funded competitors like $3000 Tonal’s wall-mounted resistance cable-based training system or the $1500 Mirror’s massive screen.

“The biggest problem with Tonal is two-fold. Cables and motors do not last. I want this product to be in your house for 10-plus years. [Tempo] is in gyms running 24/7 in for 3 years and it’s still working. The second biggest thing is just feedback.” While Tonal does include a camera and microphone it might employ in the future, it’s not scanning you to detect when you’re lifting weights crooked like Tempo.

As for Mirror, “What is the difference between ClassPass Live and Mirror? It doesn’t come with any equipment, and there’s no training. It’s just a two-way mirror and a Samsung LED panel behind it with an arduino board” Eldeeb rails. He claims it can’t actually monitor your workouts and that his team’s tests found Mirror would say they’d burned 500 calories when they were literally just sitting on their couch in front of it.

If the software proves to have high retention so people actually recommend Tempo to friends, the biggest hurdle will be its price. You can buy a couple dumbbells for $50 or get a barbell weight bench for a few hundred. Even if Tempo’s $55 per month financing option plus $39 subscription makes it cheaper than a single personal training session or on-par with a gym membership, it could still seem like a serious commitment.

That feeling is magnified by how all of its equipment and classes and data can feel a bit overwhelming. The startup might have to spend a fortune on retail establishments that can guide users through their first Tempo experience. There’s also no mobile version yet, so you can’t bring the work outs on the road with you.

Eldeeb seems guinely motivated to keep improving the product so it’s better than commuting to work out. “Getting to the gym or class is often half the battle. By bringing the gym to you and structuring the classes to be as efficient as possible, Tempo not only makes improving your health more convenient, but it gives you back your most precious resource: time.”

For those comfortable lifting the cheap weights they have at home or hitting up a budget gym, Tempo might seem needlessly overwrought and expensive. But for anyone who needs more instruction or wants to get a Barry’s Bootcamp-worthy workout at home, Tempo might be just their speed.

Jakarta-based entertainment company Visinema will build its animation business and expand into more Southeast Asian markets after raising a $3.25 million Series A led by Intudo Ventures. Returning investors GDP Ventures and Ancora Capital also participated.

Founded in June 2008 by CEO Angga Dwimas Sasongko, a director and producer, Visinema produces TV shows, feature films, commercials and other content. Its end-to-end operations allow it to control almost every part of content creation, from concept to distribution and monetization. Visinema’s clients have included Unilever, Toyota and Honda. Along with a seed round from GDP Ventures, its Series A brings Visinema’s total raised so far to $5.25 million.

The company will use its funding to grow its animation production by partnering with or acquiring Indonesian animation studios, with plans to release its first animated feature film this year. Called Nussa, the movie began as characters developed for YouTube. Its other segments include Visinema Pictures for theatrical releases; Visinema Content, which creates shows for streaming platforms like Netflix, iFlix and Gojek’s GoPlay; and Visinema Campus, its talent development program.

Chief of business development and partnerships Ajeng Parameswari says Indonesia’s film industry contributed about $69 billion to its economy in 2015, with 7% year-over-year growth; locally produced movies account for about 40% of movies circulating in the country, a number expected to increase 55% this year.

This gives Visinema room to grow in terms of both theatrical releases and content created for streaming platforms, including international services that are launching in Indonesia, like Amazon Prime, Disney+ and Catchplay.

“The landscape is changing fast, as the Indonesian government eases restriction on outside investment in the movie business,” she told TechCrunch.

In a press statement, Intudo Ventures founding partner Patrick Yip said, “Indonesia’s domestic film industry has experienced rapid growth over the past few years, both in terms of feature-length films and unique content formats, and there continues to be significant demand for high-grade local content. With in-house produced Hollywood-caliber content, we believe that Visinema is well-positioned to tell more Indonesian stories to audiences both domestically and around the world.”

Twilio is best known for its communications API, which allows developers to add messaging, voice or video to their apps with just a small slice of code. The company’s tools are used by customers like Lyft, Airbnb, Salesforce, Box and Duke University.

The former startup went public in 2016 at $15 a share. Yesterday Twilio’s stock closed at $113.90, giving the company a market cap of about $15.6 billion (after a horrendous week on Wall Street). It’s easy to look at its value (among other measures) and declare Twilio a successful public company. But just like every former startup out there, its ascent wasn’t always so certain.

Founded in 2008, Twilio was once a tentative early-stage company feeling its way forward in the market with an unproven product and more future potential than actual results. Recently, the company’s CEO Jeff Lawson shared a Twilio board deck from March 2010.

Naturally, we read through it — how could we not? — but we also decided to analyze it for you, pulling out what we learned and using the snapshot of Twilio’s history to illustrate how far the company has come in the last decade.

The presentation’s original time stamp lands after Twilio’s Series A and just before its Series B, allowing us to see a company molting from a hatchling to something more sturdy that could stand on its own two feet. The company raised $12 million six months after the deck was presented.

To get everyone on the same page, we’ll start with a little history, and then get into the deck itself. Let’s go!

Where Twilio came from

WordPress has become so ubiquitous, it’s easy to forget that it still drives a huge ecosystem of startups that build tools and services around the platform. One of these is Elementor, a graphical website building platform that you can plug into WordPress to design and publish sites. More than 4 million sites have already been built with the tool — and it’s now seeing a million new sites every six months.

Now the Tel Aviv-based company, which was founded in 2016, has raised its first round of institutional funding — a $15 million round from Lightspeed Venture Partners .

“Elementor’s growth is a wonderful example of the power of community and open-source software,” said Tal Morgenstern, partner at Lightspeed. “The founders set out to solve their own problems as web professionals and ended up with a global, highly involved fan base that kept pushing and shaping the product from the very onset. Every single metric we looked at indicated an exceptionally strong market fit and we’re extremely happy to partner with this team for the next chapter of their journey.”

Elementor gives designers everything from a visual editor to a set of pre-made templates, widgets for most standard use cases and, for paying users, support for building popups, themes and building WooCommerce sites. A lot of these features are available for free, but access to the paid tools starts at $49/year for a single site or up to $199/year for agencies that handle up to 1,000 sites.

“What we have achieved, thanks to our dedicated team and wonderful community, has been truly extraordinary,” said Yoni Luksenberg, CEO of Elementor, “In addressing a very real need, we have claimed a growing stake in a $300 billion market. With this round of funding, we accelerate our goal of allowing every web creator to easily build professional websites.”

The company tells me that it plans to use the new funding to accelerate its operations and global community. For 2020 alone, Elementor is planning about 500 meetups, the company says, and will grow its team by 50%.

Bassel Ojjeh: Backing up, what’s really important when I started my career at the database company in Ohio was coming in and saying, “We’re working out of someone’s house.” At that time, we shipped...

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Alkymi, an early-stage startup that wants to bring intelligence to highly manual business processes like copying and pasting financial data from emails and attachments, launched today with a $5 million seed investment.

Canaan Partners led the round with participation from previous investor Work-Bench. SimCorp also contributed as a strategic investor. Under the terms of the investment agreement, Joydeep Bhattacharyya from Canaan will become a member of the Alkymi board.

Company founder and CEO Harald Collet says the startup is bringing machine learning to the business analyst’s in-box with the goal of automating many of the tedious manual parts of the job. The company has created a solution that extracts data automatically that these analysts previously had to copy and paste into applications, spreadsheets or databases.

“What we do is we focus on automating tasks in emails and documents and really focus on helping business analysts in [automating] those tasks where they have been taking and picking out of business data customer and financial data that’s being fed into business processes,” Collet told TechCrunch.

For today, that strictly involves financial services, which is an industry Collet has worked in for two decades, and which could benefit greatly from this approach. He uses an investment asset manager as an example. This person would receive emails with data in them about investments, copy and paste the data into an application or database, and repeat this many times to report on overall investment performance. Alkymi would automatically extract some amount of this data, reducing the overall manual copying and pasting required.

It takes some time to train the underlying machine model, from hours to days, depending on the size and complexity of the operation, but once that’s done, Collet says the software can deal with what it knows, setting aside what it can’t figure out for a human to intervene, and then learn from that in a typical machine learning loop. Over time, it should allow business analysts to do more analysis, instead of spending time on data entry to get to the analysis part. For now, they are looking at rates starting at 40-50% automation, or more for less complex data sets.

While the company is concentrating on financial services today, the long-term plan is to expand into other verticals over time. For now, it is growing quickly with paying financial services customers. It has also partnered with investor SimCorp, which will offer the service on its platform aimed at financial services professionals.

The company launched in 2017, and Collet spent time talking to potential customers before building the product. It offers an on-prem and cloud version, and bills by the workflow. It has seven employees based in New York City, with plans to double that this year.

Entrepreneurs seldom discuss the emotional and spiritual trauma of things going wrong. Joel’s story is a deeply felt and authentically told one where he shares how he survived immense setbacks and...

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