Early Stage SF is around the corner, on April 28 in San Francisco, and we are more than excited for this brand new event. The intimate gathering of founders, VCs, operators and tech industry experts is all about giving founders the tools they need to find success, no matter the challenge ahead of them.

Struggling to understand the legal aspects of running a company, like negotiating cap tables or hiring international talent? We’ve got breakout sessions for that. Wondering how to go about fundraising, from getting your first yes to identifying the right investors to planning the timeline for your fundraise sprint? We’ve got breakout sessions for that. Growth marketing? PR/Media? Building a tech stack? Recruiting?

We. Got. You.

Hoffman + Guo

Today, we’re very proud to announce one of our few Main Stage sessions that will be open to all attendees. Reid Hoffman and Sarah Guo will join us for a conversation around “How To Raise Your Series A.”

Reid Hoffman is a legendary entrepreneur and investor in Silicon Valley. He was an Executive VP and founding board member at PayPal before going on to co-found LinkedIn in 2003. He led the company to profitability as CEO before joining Greylock in 2009. He serves on the boards of Airbnb, Apollo Fusion, Aurora, Coda, Convoy, Entrepreneur First, Microsoft, Nauto and Xapo, among others. He’s also an accomplished author, with books like “Blitzscaling,” “The Startup of You” and “The Alliance.”

Sarah Guo has a wealth of experience in the tech world. She started her career in high school at a tech firm founded by her parents, called Casa Systems. She then joined Goldman Sachs, where she invested in growth-stage tech startups such as Zynga and Dropbox, and advised both pre-IPO companies (Workday) and publicly traded firms (Zynga, Netflix and Nvidia). She joined Greylock Partners in 2013 and led the firm’s investment in Cleo, Demisto, Sqreen and Utmost. She has a particular focus on B2B applications, as well as infrastructure, cybersecurity, collaboration tools, AI and healthcare.

The format for Hoffman and Guo’s Main Stage chat will be familiar to folks who have followed the investors. It will be an updated, in-person combination of Hoffman’s famously annotated LinkedIn Series B pitch deck that led to Greylock’s investment, and Sarah Guo’s in-depth breakdown of what she looks for in a pitch.

They’ll lay out a number of universally applicable lessons that folks seeking Series A funding can learn from, tackling each from their own unique perspectives. Hoffman has years of experience in consumer-focused companies, with a special expertise in network effects. Guo is one of the top minds when it comes to investment in enterprise software.

We’re absolutely thrilled about this conversation, and to be honest, the entire Early Stage agenda.

How it works

Here’s how it all works:

There will be about 50+ breakout sessions at the event, and attendees will have an opportunity to attend at least seven. The sessions will cover all the core topics confronting early-stage founders — up through Series A — as they build a company, from raising capital to building a team to growth. Each breakout session will be led by notables in the startup world.

Don’t worry about missing a breakout session, because transcripts from each will be available to show attendees. And most of the folks leading the breakout sessions have agreed to hang at the show for at least half the day and participate in CrunchMatch, TechCrunch’s app to connect founders and investors based on shared interests.

Here’s the fine print. Each of the 50+ breakout sessions is limited to around 100 attendees. We expect a lot more attendees, of course, so signups for each session are on a first-come, first-serve basis. Buy your ticket today and you can sign up for the breakouts that we’ve announced. Pass holders will also receive 24-hour advance notice before we announce the next batch. (And yes, you can “drop” a breakout session in favor of a new one, in the event there is a schedule conflict.)

Grab yourself a ticket and start registering for sessions right here. Interested sponsors can hit up the team here.

( function() { var func = function() { var iframe = document.getElementById('wpcom-iframe-02477ba73f2ce7104ba54bd838810d2a') if ( iframe ) { iframe.onload = function() { iframe.contentWindow.postMessage( { 'msg_type': 'poll_size', 'frame_id': 'wpcom-iframe-02477ba73f2ce7104ba54bd838810d2a' }, "https:\/\/tcprotectedembed.com" ); } } // Autosize iframe var funcSizeResponse = function( e ) { var origin = document.createElement( 'a' ); origin.href = e.origin; // Verify message origin if ( 'tcprotectedembed.com' !== origin.host ) return; // Verify message is in a format we expect if ( 'object' !== typeof e.data || undefined === e.data.msg_type ) return; switch ( e.data.msg_type ) { case 'poll_size:response': var iframe = document.getElementById( e.data._request.frame_id ); if ( iframe && '' === iframe.width ) iframe.width = '100%'; if ( iframe && '' === iframe.height ) iframe.height = parseInt( e.data.height ); return; default: return; } } if ( 'function' === typeof window.addEventListener ) { window.addEventListener( 'message', funcSizeResponse, false ); } else if ( 'function' === typeof window.attachEvent ) { window.attachEvent( 'onmessage', funcSizeResponse ); } } if (document.readyState === 'complete') { func.apply(); /* compat for infinite scroll */ } else if ( document.addEventListener ) { document.addEventListener( 'DOMContentLoaded', func, false ); } else if ( document.attachEvent ) { document.attachEvent( 'onreadystatechange', func ); } } )();

Gabi, a startup built to help consumers save money on home and auto insurance, announced today that it has closed a $27 million Series B.

The company intends to use its new capital to rapidly expand its team and invest in its product. Nearly every startup does something similar after it collects new cash, so what makes Gabi’s round interesting? Its space is attracting lots of capital, it has some notable, venture-backed competitors and its business model helped the company close its latest round. All that made the Gabi deal quite interesting.

TechCrunch covered the company’s Series A back in early 2018. The startup has come quite a ways since then. Let’s dig in.

The basics

Before the company’s Series B, Gabi raised a $2.6 million seed round. That 2017-era investment came from SV Angel and A.Capital Ventures. Then, in early 2018, Gabi put together $9.5 million in a Series A led by Canvas Ventures. As you can quickly see, the company’s latest round is larger than its preceding capital raises times two.

That makes the $27 million round a big deal for the young company. Mubadala Capital led the event, while prior investors Canvas and others took part. Gabi has now raised $39.1 million in known capital.

Finally, before we dig into Gabi, how it works and why that matters, it’s worth noting that the company declined to share any growth metrics. We’d normally complain at this juncture, but its competitor Insurify — which raised a $23 million Series A earlier this year — also didn’t share notes on its own growth. Given that they are both now well-funded, we won’t let them not share in the future.

Now let’s tie the company’s model to its round.

How Gabi works

TechCrunch previously explored the company’s creation and operational history, which lets us instead focus on what it does today. Gabi is what CEO Hanno Fichtner calls a “tech-enabled broker,” sitting between customers and insurance companies. Its service lets people upload their current policy, which Gabi uses to find cheaper policies for the customer that have similar levels of coverage.

If that customer buys a new policy, Gabi gets paid. However, there’s a wrinkle. According to Fichtner, Gabi gets paid again if that customer renews the policy. So, in a sense, Gabi generates recurring revenue. And the better it does at matching consumers with insurance that they buy, and then keep, the more money it can make. (This impact is heightened by the fact that most Gabi customers are existing insurance customers, it told TechCrunch, meaning that they tend to make for more lucrative sign-ups.)

All that fits into the Series B when you consider time. Gabi is around three years old, Fichtner told TechCrunch, meaning that its early customer cohorts have only had so much time to mature, and demonstrate retention (renewals); the higher the company’s retention rates proved to be, the more lifetime value (LTV) that Gabi could squeeze from its customers.

More simply, the better its retention proved, the more valuable Gabi would be as a business. Which brings us back to its new round.

Gabi raised its Series B, from which we can infer that its retention rates were at least pretty good. The company thinks so. Fichtner told TechCrunch that Gabi was able to raise because its “unit economics are so great.” The CEO went on to say that Gabi has “proven in the past year that customers like our product, that they are signing up at reasonable customer acquisition costs (CAC) and that the lifetime value (LTV) that we are producing based on retention [is] high enough” to be attractive.

So, getting paid off consumer insurance re-ups seems to have made Gabi an attractive receptacle for venture dollars.

The insurance game

According to Fichtner, Gabi works with a number of the venture-backed insurance companies — startups like Root Insurance and Lemonade. Regular readers will recall that we’ve inducted two of the three into the $100 million ARR club (more here and here). Fichtner told TechCrunch that they make attractive partners as they are “quite competitive” and provide strong customer support.

Toss in Insurify and Gabi and there’s a constellation of insurance-focused startups that are raising oodles of ducats. Why? Fichtner left us with a figure that we have to share as it helps answer our question. Guess, if you will, how much money is paid out in the U.S. each year in insurance commissions? $64 billion, for personal (non-corporate) insurance.

According to the executive, commissions on such products can be as high as 13%. You can do the math. That’s one heck of a lot of space to sell into.

Sramana Mitra: Is Abhinav the CEO? Jishnu Battacharjee: That’s correct. He has two other co-founders. In 2017, we started thinking of what we should do regarding monetization. 2018 was our first year...

___

I assume you have been reading my commentary on Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).  To recap, in SaaS Companies: You Have An Unprecedented Opportunity, I started highlighting the massive momentum in...

___

Last year, when co-founders Danny Steiner and Krista Berlincourt debuted Kenshō Health, their directory and information service for holistic medicine, Berlincourt called it “the antithesis of Goop.”

While Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle brand startup serves up a heady mix of unverified pseudo-scientific claims alongside longstanding holistic practices, Steiner and Berlincourt focused on the verified and verifiable claims coming out of the medical community.

The two founders and their Los Angeles-based team amassed a group of healthcare providers hailing from Stanford University,  Harvard University, Columbia University and others — all with a concentration on accreditation. 

Now the service is publicly available and serving up the latest information on holistic medicine — powered by a partnership with the academic publisher Wiley — and a verified list of local practitioners for consumers seeking treatments.

“We have six points of verification,” says Steiner. “We look at accreditation, experience, peer reviews, customer reviews, we speak to the providers themselves to make sure we’re on the same page of what we’re trying to provide and for premier providers we do a background check.”

That vetting has gone a long way toward providing what the company’s founders say are tens of thousands of beta users with a search and discovery tool for information on holistic health and wellness and direct access to holistic health practitioners. 

While “wellness” is a nebulous term often representing therapies with questionable clinical value, it’s a huge business in the U.S. and around the world. Some estimates from industry organizations like the Global Wellness Institute put the dollar value of the industry at roughly $4.2 trillion, encompassing everything from medical tourism to personalized and complementary medicine.

The complementary medicine component alone is a $360 billion market opportunity, according to the GWI, and it’s there that Berlincourt and Steiner are focusing their attention.

“We wanted to create something that acted at the right point of intervention,” says Berlincourt, a former public relations professional who launched the business after turning to holistic medicine to treat her chronic adrenal failure. “So we curated a provider network and made [complementary medicine] easy to understand through research.”

The company encourages providers on its platform to offer their services on a sliding scale to improve accessibility and ensure that “this isn’t only for the wealthy elite,” says Berlincourt.

While the service is currently free, both Berlincourt and Steiner say there are obvious paths to making money that the company will explore after it builds out a solid base of users. Various potential revenue streams involve selling treatment or instructional packages or charging for listings on the site.

Kenshō’s thesis on a broader market embracing the principles of holistic medicine seems to be supported by recent moves from the nation’s largest public healthcare providers. For the first time, Medicare and Medicaid are now officially covering acupuncture as a verified treatment option for certain conditions, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced last week.

There’s also a broader recognition of the role that lifestyle and general health and fitness play in most illnesses, says Berlincourt.

“Eighty-seven percent of deaths are related to lifestyle-related disease according to the CDC,” she says. “And 75% of what we’re spending on healthcare is on the conditions associated with these chronic diseases. We don’t treat the root cause and people don’t know that there are other options.”

Now, with the public launch and financial support for investors like CrossCut Ventures, Female Founders Fund and Evolve Ventures, the company is hoping to create the “Good Housekeeping seal of approval” for wellness providers, according to Berlincourt.

“Conventional medicine wants to play with holistic medicine, but there’s a lack of connection. Our goal is to provide that connection.”

In the streaming era, data on a show’s viewership and popularity is harder to come by. It’s no longer as simple as setting up a Nielsen box to get data on a show being watched across TVs, phones, tablets and the web. One company solving this problem for content owners, broadcasters and streamers alike is Whip Media Group, parent company to the TV and movie tracking app TV Time. The company announced today it has raised $50 million in Series D funding to continue to grow its business.

The round was led by asset management firm Eminence Capital and includes participation from Raine Ventures. To date, Whip Media Group has raised $115 million from Raine Ventures, Eminence, IVP and others.

Whip Media Group has a varied history. TV Time began as WhipClip, a source for a legal collection of GIFs from favorite shows. But following the company’s acquisition of French startup TVShow Time in December 2016, it pivoted to become a social TV community. The TV Time app allows users to track their favorite shows by marking episodes as watched, as well as join in the show’s community on the app where users discuss the episode; share photos, screencaps, and memes; take polls; and more. Its recommendations feature also helps users find more things to watch.

The company rebranded as Whip Media Group to reflect that it’s now home to a handful of businesses, including the TV Time app, as well as TheTVDB, an entertainment database for TV and movies and, more recently, the content value management platform, Mediamorph.

Though consumers only interact with the TV Time app, those engagements help fuel Whip Media Group’s larger business.

Today, the TV Time app has anywhere between 800,000 and a million active users per day. And 50% of users contribute some sort of data — for example, following a show, creating content, liking another user’s post, reviewing an episode, commenting and so on. To date, TV Time has tracked more than 15 billion episodes.

Initially, TV Time was using this data to develop a new type of ratings system for the cord-cutting era. But TV Time learned that a show’s ratings don’t matter to video-on-demand services that don’t sell advertising. Instead, what TV Time could provide was emotional data on how users responded to shows.

“By collecting [this data] we can build these models to not only say what people are watching, but also start to predict what they’re going to watch next,” says Whip Media Group CEO Richard Rosenblatt.

In addition, the engagement data can help streamers find out things they never could before — like which moment in an episode had huge spikes of user interest, i.e. “the most memed moment.” This data can help them to better market the show as well as help them think about the show’s direction for future seasons.

Now, with the acquisition of Mediamorph, Whip Media Group can also help to value content. This allows buyers and sellers to make determinations about where to sell shows and for how much.

This data is highly valuable to Whip Media Group’s clients, which include more than 50 of the biggest names in entertainment — like Disney, Warner Bros., Hulu, NBCU, Paramount, Sony, Lionsgate, BBC, HBO, AT&T, T-Mobile, Liberty Global, Discovery and United Talent Agency. (There are other large, household names in streaming that also use the company’s data, but can’t be disclosed due to NDAs.)

When a content owner sells a show to a modern-day streaming service, they often have no way of knowing how it performs.

Whip Media Group, starting at the end of Q1, will be able to start making predictions about where a particular piece of content available for sale should go, says Rosenblatt.

“We will be able to roll out, starting in the first quarter, an ‘engagement score,’ where [content owners will] actually be able to look at how one piece of content engages a certain demographic or a certain geography differently than another piece of content,” Rosenblatt explains. “If you think about how ad networks got started 20 years ago — and you were trying to match the right consumer with the right ad, and all that mattered was if they clicked. Nothing else mattered. Google won because they had the best data, the best models…that’s what we want to do,” he continues.

“We want to put the right piece of content on the right platform, in the right country, to the right demographic. And we don’t think that there’s anyone else in this position like we are — that has all of that between Mediamorph and TV Time,” he says.

This data is more important than ever in an era where core classics are selling for as much as half a billion (like the “Seinfeld” sale to Netflix or “Friends” to HBO Max) or even more (like the billion-plus-dollar deal for “Big Bang Theory,” which also went to HBO Max.)

More broadly, global online television episode and movie revenues will reach $159 billion in 2024; more than double the $68 billion recorded in 2018, according to Research and Markets.

Whip Media Group’s new round of funding is being used, in part, to help pay for the Mediamorph acquisition, which was a combination of cash and stock. But the majority is being used to grow the business, including by expanding the company’s sales and data teams and accelerating product development.

The company has already hired 20 people so far and expects to hire 50 by year-end, mostly on the data and engineering sides.

“Whip Media Group is building software and data solutions that will transform the way content is being bought and sold throughout the global entertainment ecosystem,” said Ricky Sandler, chief executive officer of Eminence Capital, in a statement. “We believe in their vision and their exceptional leadership and technology teams and are excited to partner with them as they rapidly expand their business.”

GoDaddy has reached an agreement to acquire Over, the startup behind an app that helps businesses create the photos and videos they need for social media.

Justin Tsai, GoDaddy’s vice president of growth and product, said this acquisition is about acknowledging “a world of entrepreneurs who may never have a website.”

He told me, “Over’s capabilities really target those set of people, who may have an Instagram profile where they need to post visually engaging content but have never gone to GoDaddy.”

This follows GoDaddy’s relaunch of its website-building tools last fall under the new name Websites+Marketing, with additional features around email marketing, search engine optimization and maintaining a presence beyond your website, whether that’s on Facebook or Yelp.

Tsai said Websites+Marketing now has 1 million paying customers, but as more business started using it, “We started noticing users really had trouble creating great content as they go to those platforms. They didn’t know what to post or how to make that post really sing.”

That’s where Over comes in, offering a variety of customizable templates and layouts that should make it faster and easier to create eye-catching visual content. The goal, according to co-founder and CEO Matt Winn, is to “build guitars, not violins” — in the same way that someone can pick up a guitar and “strum a few cords,” they should be able to download Over and quickly “start creating really great content.”

In fact, the startup says it has more than 1 million active users of its own, who are using it to create more than 220,000 projects every day.

Tsai said GoDaddy and Over were initially discussing a partnership, but as it became clear that there was an opportunity to integrate the products more deeply, those discussions led to acquisition talks.

Over will continue to operate as a standalone app, and he said the team will continue to develop new features for the app. At the same time, they’ll be building integrations with Websites+Marketing, for example by taking Over and connecting it “into our insights tool to understand how different elements of [online] presence layer in together, to look at templates and how those actually help different types of small business owners.”

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Winn said Over had previously raised funding from True Ventures and angel investors, and that the entire 76-person team will be joining GoDaddy. Over will continue to operate out of its Cape Town, South Africa headquarters.

According to an Allied Market Research report, the global autonomous vehicle market is expected to grow from $54.23 billion in 2019 at 40% CAGR to $556.67 billion by 2026. The autonomous vehicle...

___

Less than six months after it announced $40 million in funding, Attentive has raised another $70 million — this time in Series C funding.

The new round was led by Sequoia and IVP, two firms that were part of the Series B. Previous investors Eniac Ventures and NextView Ventures also participated.

CEO Brian Long (who, along with his Attentive co-founder Andrew Jones, sold his previous startup TapCommerce to Twitter) told me that he wasn’t planning to raise money again so soon, but things were going even better than expected, with a client list that has grown to more than 750 businesses, including Coach, Urban Outfitters, CB2, PacSun, Party City and Jack in the Box.

Long noted that it’s always smarter to raise money when things are going swimmingly, rather than dealing with the “not-so-fun process” of trying to raise “when you really need it.”

He added, “When you see that you’re doing that well, you think, ‘Hey, we should hire a lot more people to support this growth.’ And then the other piece is just being able to move faster into new areas.”

Long attributed the success Attentive has had thus far to the growing importance of text messages as a channel for businesses to reach consumers, particularly as those consumers are less inclined to open marketing emails or download retailers’ mobile apps. And in contrast to broader messaging platforms, Long said Attentive is “focused on just doing this channel right.”

He said the platform is designed to solve the main problems faced by retailers trying to build a mobile messaging strategy — first, by helping them create a text subscriber list in a way that complies with regulations, then by offering “the ability to send messages that frankly aren’t going to piss people off.”

“We want the messages to be relevant for the consumer, we want to send them things that they care about,” Long said. “The package is on the way, real-time customer service, a product that you were looking at recently is on-sale … there’s a lot of data that you can put to work in order to do it at scale.”

Looking ahead, he hopes to expand beyond the United States and Canada, and to move into industries beyond e-commerce — for example, into more traditional retail, and also to start working with colleges that are looking to attract more applicants.

“Attentive’s growth is a clear indication that people want to interact with brands in new ways, and brands are embracing messaging as an effective way to reach consumers,” said Sequoia partner Pat Grady in a statement. “We are thrilled to double down on our partnership with Attentive so they can continue to deliver fantastic results for their customers and valuable experiences for consumers.”

Attentive has now raised a total of $124 million.

As we spend more and more time on our phones, working busier and busier jobs, and leading more and more overwhelming lives, personal connection with others is harder and harder to come by. HeyMama wants to change that.

The premium social network is aimed squarely at working mothers, looking to give them a space to connect, communicate and learn from each other. The company has today announced the close of $2 million in seed funding, with investors that include Rebecca Minkoff, Kori Estrada, Kathryn Moos, Janna Meyrowitz Turner, Divya Gugnani, Alison Wyatt, Sari Azout, Kymberly Marciano and Karen Cahn, who were HeyMama members pre-investment. Keith Belling also invested in the round.

HeyMama has several moving pieces, but the biggest and most important is the platform itself. The premium network gives members the chance to post to forums, as well as join and communicate with groups like “Tech Moms,” “Single Moms” and “Moms Who Are Fundraising.” Perhaps most importantly, all members get access to the full HeyMama membership database, giving them the ability to learn more about other members and even email them directly.

Interestingly, HeyMama is a bit of a hybrid in terms of the value proposition. Moms can come in and ask about baby food recommendations and hunt for an engineer to join their company all in the same session. Founders Katya Libin and Amri Kibbler say that many members are looking for recommendations, whether they’re for professional or personal purposes.

Another piece of the business is HeyMama events. The company holds events in 11 cities across the country and earns revenue via brand partnerships. For example, Lincoln Motor Company is a sponsor for the 2020 mentorship event series.

Libin said that the offline component is a huge reason why many moms join, as there is no substitution for face-to-face connection.

As an added bonus, HeyMama negotiates membership perks for users, giving them a discount on interesting products and services.

The company says that 85% of its members come via word-of-mouth referrals to the network. When new users do submit an application, those applications are vetted by humans. The founders said that the acceptance rate is about 85%, with HeyMama primarily focused on bringing on new members that can also offer help, not just ask for it.

HeyMama membership costs $35/month or $349/year.

The company did not disclose specific numbers around membership, but did say that it has “thousands” of members on the platform.

HeyMama actually came onto the scene in 2014 in the form of a social media account and online magazine. After realizing that working moms weren’t being served in the best way possible, the company pivoted to a premium social network in 2017, and the rest is history.

“This community is for ambitious women who are coming together to support each other,” said Kibbler. “These women are so incredibly busy, and on HeyMama they can give and get vetted recommendations on everything and know that the responses are coming from women that are like them.”

Sramana Mitra: This 30 million patient data is all from your customer base or are you using any other kind of data? Shantanu Nigam: A lot of this data has been owned by our customer base. We’re...

___

Y Combinator graduate OpenPhone is raising a $2 million funding round led by Slow Ventures. The company is working on an app that lets you seamlessly get a business phone number without a second phone or a second SIM card.

Y Combinator, Kindred Ventures, Garage Capital, 122WEST Ventures and others are also participating in today’s funding round.

Compared to Aircall and other enterprise solutions, OpenPhone targets small and medium companies that want a mobile-first, easy-to-use solution to take advantage of a second phone number.

For instance, if you’re a freelancer and you hate handing out your personal phone number, OpenPhone lets you separate your personal and professional life more easily.

OpenPhone works on iPhone, iPad and Android. You also can use a web interface to interact with the app from your computer. It currently costs $10 per month per user. For that price, you get a local number, a toll-free number or you can port an existing phone number. Five thousand people are using OpenPhone right now.

You can then use that number for unlimited calls and texts in the U.S. and Canada. Behind the scene, OpenPhone uses your internet connection to establish voice-over-IP calls.

The startup has been working on collaborative features so you can use OpenPhone with multiple users. For instance, you can share a phone number with other users so your team can answer text messages faster and pick up the phone more often. The company has also launched a Slack integration that lets you receive a notification when somebody calls or texts your phone number.

French startup Bankin’ has introduced Bridge Pay this week, an API that lets you initiate payments using bank transfers from your app. Think about it as a sort of Stripe, but for bank transfers. The API currently covers 12 major French banks, which represent around 90% of retail bank accounts in France.

Bankin’ is both a B2B and B2C startup. It operates a popular consumer app that lets you aggregate all your bank accounts in a single app. The company has managed to attract 4 million customers with this app. Bankin’ also manages an API called Bridge. Developers can connect directly with bank accounts to fetch transactions and banking information.

With Bridge Pay, the company wants to go one step further and become a payment API as well. The company has been using Bridge Pay within Bankin’ already — customers can transfer money from one bank account to another in the Bankin’ app. Bankin’ users have transferred €1 billion so far.

Third-party companies will now be able to initiate bank transfers themselves. It could be useful for e-commerce companies that sell very expensive items, for instance. For example, if you want to buy expensive airplane tickets or a Mac Pro on Apple’s website, you might reach your card transaction limit.

It also opens up a ton of possibilities when it comes to automating B2B transactions without having to interact with your bank account. For instance, payroll services could integrate directly with your company’s bank account to transfer money to your employees.

Bridge Pay can be integrated directly in your app or service. When you select payment via bank transfers, you get a list of banks, you then connect to your bank account, choose an account and initiate a payment. Chances are your bank is going to ask you for a confirmation via a text message or a push notification. The company can add more banks in the future without any change in the app.

According to primary survey data from Business Insider Intelligence, as many as half of US respondents reported living in a home with a voice-enabled AI device.

The prevalence of smart speakers is changing how companies in a range of spaces — media, e-commerce, smart home, banking, and more — interact with consumers.

For companies looking to sell these speakers and brands looking to engage with their customers through the now-critical medium, it's important to understand how the voice ecosystem works in practice and how it's being used. 

To learn more about adoption and habits, we surveyed 2,000 US consumers regarding factors like smart speaker ownership, what brands consumers use, and what they use the devices to do. Our survey data offers critical insights for key stakeholders at companies aiming to promote and use the smart speaker to reach customers.

In The Smart Speaker Report, Business Insider Intelligence examines the fast-evolving smart speaker market. First, we provide a glimpse into smart speaker adoption in the US, both overall and by particular demographics. Then, we look at the characteristics of device owners, including how many speakers they own, which types, how often they use them, and what they use them to do. We also break down the top smart speaker use cases and the reasons why they are or aren't resonating with consumers, and advise brands looking to reach their users via this medium how best to do so.

The companies mentioned in this report are: Amazon, American Express, Apple, Deezer, Google, Nest, Pandora, Samsung, Spotify, and TuneIn.

Here are some key takeaways from the report:

In full, the report:

Interested in getting the full report? Here's how to get access:

Perdoo, a Berlin-based OKR-focused software startup, has decided to make its basic service free, potentially shaking up its growing, and somewhat crowded, market. “Objectives and Key Results,” a planning and management technique usually shortened to “OKRs,” is a hot space for software startups, with several raising in recent months.

WorkBoard and Gtmhub, for example, each raised capital for their OKR products in the last two months. WorkBoard raised $30 million, while Gtmhub added $9 million to its coffers. So many companies are operating in the space that TechCrunch created a compendium of sorts listing the players, simply to get our mind around who is active in the space as a partial, or pure participant.

Perdoo is a different animal than its rivals. The company, instead of tapping into an obviously interested venture capital pool, is a largely bootstrapped affair, it told TechCrunch. That makes its decision all the more curious. Why would a company with, theoretically, at least, less room to maneuver, make a portion of its product cost less than before? To understand, we got on the phone with Perdoo co-founder Henrik-Jan van der Pol to dig in.

Pricing

OKR software runs from cheap to expensive, with WorkBoard not listing prices on its website (that we could find while compiling this entry), to $1 per user per month for Gtmhub’s lowest-priced tier. Most providers in the space offer enterprise offerings that cost more. (Before offering a free tier, Perdoo only charged per user per month for its service, with sliding discounts for volume.)

During a call with TechCrunch, van der Pol explained his company’s move to undercut other companies’ lower-cost pricing, saying that the OKR market is “still new for a lot of organizations, meaning that they don’t have a budget available.” Those players, he said, “start with spreadsheets, which creates a lot of hassle and actually decreases their chances of success.” Those firms that need tooling but didn’t have ready budget open for the cost were why Perdoo “decided to make that switch to freemium, and give people a solid and free version that they can get started with that has very few limitations,” van der Pol continued.

Free Perdoo users can track as many goals as they’d like with as many users as they’d like. According to the co-founder, his company “looked at what functionality people currently use that build their own [OKR] tools” and decided to give those away.

Perdoo isn’t insane, mind. The company is still selling a paid version of its product with more features, and the company must hope that free users convert to its paid service over time.

In a sense, the freemium move is a gambit of sorts: By offering functionality for free, perhaps Perdoo can attract to itself users that might not have otherwise selected its service (perhaps choosing a provider with more available capital for marketing expenses) — users that might convert to paying customers later on, naturally.

Money

According to van der Pol, “in order to sustain a free offer, you need to be cash flow positive and profitable,” telling TechCrunch that his company is both.

Here we can see the power of not raising lots of money. Because Perdoo only raised angel money and has paid its own way since, the company can afford (literally) to offer a lot for nothing. It doesn’t have investors shouting over its shoulder about possible cannibalizing its own market, or anything similar.

So: Lots of venture dollars are powering several neat startups that are growing like mad, with WorkBoard and Gtmhub posting huge ARR gains in recent years to the tune of hundreds of percent. What impact Perdoo’s move might have on their growth, or product choices, won’t be clear for a while, if it has any at all. But Perdoo did just reprice basic OKR software to zero.

In the middle of a venture-capital powered growth war, that’s fascinating.

Looking for fellow travelers to join in on its mission to transform the beverage business, the Los Angeles-based startup Bev has taken on fresh capital from a slew of strategic investors. 

The company has added Erin and Sara Foster, creative heads of Bumble BFF and Bumble Biz, to their investor and creative talent pool, along with other notable names like Rich Paul, Simon Tikhman, Keith Sheldon and Chief Zaruk.

The new capital will help support the launch of Bev’s new “Made By Chicks” media platform and podcast, which will be hosted by the Foster sisters in their first official partnership with any brand, according to a statement from the company.

In addition to the new media platform, Bev is also planning to launch two new beverages into its boozy stable of canned wines. Expect two white wines to join the company’s Rosé on store shelves within the year, according to company founder and chief executive, Alix Peabody.

“We’re partnering with Bev because we’re comfortable buying the product ourselves and telling our friends to buy it,” said Sarah Foster in a statement. “Our community trusts us to be authentic to ourselves and our brand, and we strive to do that. Bev’s female-oriented mission and movement align with our personal interests. We’re very inclusive, rather than alienating, and we’re thrilled to be a part of ‘Made By Chicks.’ ”

Peabody is one of several entrepreneurs in Los Angeles and beyond looking to upend the market for beverages worldwide — an industry that’s expected to hit $1.9 trillion, according to data provided by the company. Wine alone is expected to be a roughly $450.5 billion dollar business by 2024, according to Bev.

“Legacy brands tend to sexualize alcohol consumption, and objectify women on TV, billboards, and in print,” said Peabody, in a statement. “That’s what we’re changing. We want women to know that drinking can be fun, inclusive and safe.”

Together with Peabody, the Fosters will develop media like podcasts, videos and events that center on entrepreneurial women. It’s a format similar to the media property Girlboss, founded by Sophia Amoruso and now owned by Attention Capital.

Stories and advice columns from the new platform will range from topics like asking for a raise to managing a company while pregnant.

“When I first met Alix and her team, I immediately gravitated to her incredible founder story, ambition to challenge the alcohol industry’s outdated status quo, and sheer tenacity to spark a movement through an empowering brand like Bev,” shared Simon Tikhman, the CEO and co-founder of The Core Entertainment, a partner of Live Nation, and new Bev brand investor, in a statement. “I also knew by partnering with Bev that I wanted to assemble an unrivaled strategic group with expertise and business acumen in diverse sectors. Erin and Sara Foster, Rich Paul, Keith Sheldon, and Chief Zaruk bring so much to the table.”