Startups

How to turn user data into your next pitch deck • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 16, 2022Posted in Column, EC Column, EC How To, fundraising tactics, pitch deck, Startups, VentureNo Comments

David K Smith Contributor David Smith is VP of data and analytics at TheVentureCity, a global early-stage venture fund investing in product-centric startups across the U.S., Europe, and Latin America. Of every 100 deals a VC firm considers, about a quarter get a meeting, and only one ends up securing investment. Given the downturn in the markets leading to a startup funding squeeze, getting through the door is a critical first step. But then what? How do you prove you’re that one in 100? Well, you have one drastically overlooked superpower: your data. Many early stage startups don’t have a data team or even a data expert. They’ve been told that it looks good to have cash flowing in and user numbers ticking up. But investors are looking past superficial metrics for indicators that your product is poised to grow years into the future. There’s no one metric for that, which is why you need to know exactly which ones to focus on, and what they tell others about your product’s growth prospects. If possible, collect the most granular, user-level data you can: events and transactions. Having this data allows you to X-Ray how people are interacting with your product. Visualizing and communicating this data can definitively power up a pitch deck. If you’re a founder of a new SaaS, fintech, marketplace, or consumer subscription product, here’s what you should be showing investors at the early stages of your journey. Investors need to see that you’re not being blindsided by easy wins that can go up in smoke within weeks, but are using hard data to build a sustainable company. At all stages: Focus on active usage, not vanity metrics If you haven’t been thinking about product-market fit, you don’t have a pitch. Now, that doesn’t mean you have to prove you have product-market fit, but you absolutely need to show investors that you’ve been working towards it. If investors can’t tell where you are in your lifecycle, they have no way of telling how close you are to getting real traction — and getting them their returns. Product-market fit isn’t a defined point. It’s more about reading the right signals: You have to know which metrics to look at and how to measure their strength. The stronger the signals related to user engagement and retention — all measured in different ways and all trending positively — the more evidence you have that you’ve reached, or are reaching, product-market fit. Building up all that evidence through data helps bolster a pitch and increases your odds of landing an investment.

Meet the startups competing at TC Sessions: Crypto • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 16, 2022Posted in Crypto, Galaxy Ventures, Gradient Ventures, pitch-off, Startups, TC Sessions: Crypto, TC Sessions: Crypto 2022No Comments

We’re thrilled to announce the three early-stage startups that will take the stage and go head-to-head in the pitch competition at TC Sessions: Crypto — this Thursday, November 17, in Miami. There’s still time to be in the room. Buy your pass right now to watch these founders square off in front of a live audience. They’ll have to work hard to impress our expert VC judges — Wen-Wen Lam, partner, Gradient Ventures and Will Nuelle, general partner, Galaxy Ventures. While all three startups will receive invaluable exposure to investors and media, only one will win the glory and earn an automatic place in the Startup Battlefield 200 at Disrupt 2023. ZebethMedia handpicks a cohort of 200 early-stage startups to receive a VIP experience that includes, for starters, exhibiting all three days of the show — for free — plus a shot at winning $100,000. Al right, let’s get to it. Here are the three startup contenders who are prepped and ready to compete in the TC Sessions: Crypto pitch-off. As if a pitch competition isn’t enough of a draw, consider this. At a time when convulsions in the cryptoverse have created serious uncertainty, there’s no better time or place to tap into the latest thinking and analysis from the leaders across blockchain, cryptocurrency, DeFi, NFT and web3. Just for starters, you’ll hear from: Brian Armstrong, co-founder and CEO, Coinbase Devin Finzer, co-founder and CEO, OpenSea Changpeng (CZ) Zhao, founder and CEO, Binance And you do not want to miss the ZebethMedia Chain Reaction podcast — recorded live onstage. You can bet our hosts will have plenty to say about the fallout of recent events and thoughts on what comes next. TC Sessions: Crypto takes place on November 17 in Miami. Don’t miss your chance to witness a crypto pitch-off, hear the current thinking from the industry’s top leaders, gain analytical insight, and network for opportunities to grow your business. Buy your pass today, and we’ll see you in Miami. Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Crypto? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Akeyless secures a cash infusion to help companies manage their passwords, certificates and keys • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 16, 2022Posted in Enterprise, funding, secrets, Security, startup, StartupsNo Comments

Back in 2018, Refael Angel, a former security software engineer at Intuit, had an idea for a new approach to protect encryption keys — the random string of bits created to scramble and unscramble data — on the cloud. He met with Shai Onn and then Oded Hareven, with whom Angel had worked five years earlier, to look for signs of product-market fit. After finding it, the three co-founders together built a service for managing passwords, API keys and digital certificates, which evolved into a fully fledged business — Akeyless — over the course of the next several years. Today, Akeyless is thriving, Angel tells me — despite fierce competition from incumbents like Hashicorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager and Google Cloud’s Secret Manager. Akeyless has customers across the retail, fintech, insurance and gaming sectors, among others, including Wix and Outbrain. And the company’s revenue has increased 350% over the past year. “The pandemic and resulting workforce trends, such as work-from-home initiatives, have only increased the need for employees to access corporate IT resources remotely and have accelerated the adoption of cloud technologies and increased the number of secrets needed,” Shai told ZebethMedia in an email interview. In software development, “secrets” refer to credentials like passwords and access tokens. “Similarly, the economic downturn and tech slowdown stand to only further encourage organizations to seek software-as-a-service-based solutions that offer faster deployment, low to zero maintenance, global auto-scalability, lower total cost of ownership and higher adoption rates.“ To lay the groundwork for future growth, Akeyless today closed a $65 million Series B round — $45.5 million in equity and $19.5 million in debt — led by NGP Capital with participation from Team8 Capital and Jerusalem Venture Partners. Bringing Akeyless’s total funding to date to $80 million, the new capital gives the company at least two and a half years of runway and will be put toward various sales, marketing, customer service and product development initiatives, Hareven said via email. “This will allow us to navigate the current economic climate and continue to provide our much-needed solution to the market,” he added. Akeyless’s co-founders attribute the startup’s success in part to the comprehensiveness of its product offerings. Akeyless both encrypts and signs the certificates, credentials and keys that organizations use to provide access to their systems, apps and data. The platform performs cryptographic operations using fragments of an encryption key that reside across different regions and cloud providers. The fragments are never combined — not even during the encryption and decryption process, Hareven claims — and one of the fragments is created on the customer side to ensure Akeyless has zero knowledge of the keys. An abstracted view of the Akeyless secrets management dashboard. Image Credits: Akeyless The core problem Akeyless attempts to tackle is what Hareven refers to as “secret sprawl.” As a company’s IT environment expands, so does the amount of passwords, API keys and certificates that the company uses to enable authentication between processes, services and databases, he notes. Those passwords and keys are found in code, configuration files and automation tools, introducing risk that could result in data breaches. According to a 2021 survey from code security platform GitGuardian, three code commits out of 1,000 expose at least one secret. GitGuardian estimates that app security engineers on average have to handle over 3,400 secrets occurrences. And in a separate report from Forrester published in the same year, developers revealed that 57% of their employers experienced a security incident related to exposed secrets within the past two years. Akeyless’s solution is centralizing secrets through plug-ins for existing IT, dev, and security tools and capabilities like disaster recovery, Hareven continued. Secrets stored by the platform are made accessible in all of a company’s environments. “While modern secret management solutions address the security challenges of [development] environments, many organizations are still forced to rely on siloed and disconnected tools for securing secrets in legacy environments,” Hareven said. “Our customers are expressing a need for the convergence of legacy tools to reduce risks and improve compliance across all environments and use cases.” Akeyless certainly occupies a large and profitable sector — Grand View Research predicts that the market for password management software will be worth up to $2.05 billion by 2025. But it’ll have to fend off rivals like Doppler, which recently raised $20 million for its platform to help companies manage their app secrets. Another challenge will be convincing holdouts to embrace secrets management as a discipline; according to one report, only 10% of organizations were using secrets management solutions as of 2019. If Akeyless’s co-founders have concerns, they didn’t show it. To the contrary, Hareven pointed to the team’s track record in cybersecurity — Onn’s previous security venture, Fireglass, was acquired by Symantec for $250 million — and noted that Akeyless is expanding, with plans to double its 80-person workforce by the end of next year. Hareven didn’t mention during our conversation, but Akeyless is also likely to benefit from the continued broader VC interest in cybersecurity. Venture capital investments in security startups eclipsed $13 billion this year, according to PitchBook data, up from $11.47 billion in 2020. “The fact that we are a software-as-a-service provider and free of the ‘on-premise technical debt’ of versioning and support makes our economics much more efficient, allowing us to respond faster to market needs and rapidly innovate,” Hareven said.

Goodera makes corporate volunteering events easier, even for remote and hybrid workplaces • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 16, 2022Posted in corporate volunteering, Goodera, social impact, Startups, volunteeringNo Comments

Corporate volunteering is on the rise, as a way to increase a company’s social impact while boosting employee engagement. Managing volunteer programs, however, can get tricky. Goodera wants to make it easier with an end-to-end platform that includes pre-vetted volunteer opportunities and trained hosts. The Utah-based startup announced today it has raised a $10 million Series A led by Elevation Capital, with participation from Zoom Ventures, Xto10X, Nexus Venture Partners and Omidyar Network. Former Xerox CEO Ursula Burns and Flipkart founder Binny Bansal also contributed to the round. Goodera currently has volunteering openings from over 50,000 nonprofits that can be done in an office, remotely or by hybrid workers, with the goal of making them accessible to more employees. Some examples of volunteer opportunities Goodera has hosted include onboarding interns, holiday gift-wrapping, helping Ukrainian war refugees and introducing robotics to kids through automated bot building. The startup was founded by Abhishek Gumbad in 2020, and now has over 400 customers. Goodera’s volunteering programs have been used by companies like IBM, Target, EY, Amazon and 60 Fortune 500 companies. It currently reaches more than 10 million employees in total, and wants to hit 100 million employees by 2025. When Goodera was founded two years ago, socio-political movements like Black Lives Matter were at a peak, said Gumbad, and many employees wanted to participate. But pandemic lockdowns made that difficult. Goodera had already been working on virtual volunteering for remote teams, including a pilot program with a large cloud organization. Now Goodera helps both nonprofits and corporations increase volunteering. For nonprofits, Goodera serves as a partner that helps them find volunteers. Gumbad noted that only a very small number of nonprofits have a dedicated corporate relations program and international nonprofits are hard to screen. Goodera founder and CEO Abhishek Humbad “It’s difficult to find nonprofit partners aligned to your corporate impact goals,” he said. Goodera solves that with a team focused on sourcing and training nonprofits to offer volunteering opportunities on its platform. It currently works with 50,000 nonprofits in more than 100 countries. Gumbad said that it was able to find opportunities for the Ukraine war and Pakistan floods in less than three days after news broke. After partnering with nonprofits, Goodera develops programs, making sure they are engaging for employee volunteers. Its experience team pilots volunteer opportunities through Goodera’s Volunteer Tuesdays program, getting feedback from members of the startup’s team. Once volunteer opportunities are live, it provides a trained host for each one. Goodera now has a network of over 1,000 hosts, who can oversee the organization and logistics of opportunities in 500 cities in more than 20 languages. Volunteer opportunities are also supported by a delivery operations team that creates over a week’s worth of content for each event, including emails, posters, landing pages, videos and nonprofit testimonials. Goodera signed its first customer in August 2020 and now has $7.5 million annual recurring revenue. It monetizes by charging by usage per employee for each placement, which typically costs between $25 and $50 based on if their volunteering opportunity is remote, in-person or at a location. In terms of competition, Gumbad said there are some companies, mostly small corporate event organizers, that partner with nonprofits to host volunteering opportunities, but those engagements are sporadic. He added Goodera differentiates from other volunteer platforms like WeHero and Give to Get by offering volunteer opportunities in a wider geography, and full service including curation, hosting and reporting. Goodera’s funding will be used to scale its operations, with volunteer opportunities catered to diversity, equality and inclusion, environmental, social and corporate governance and employee resource groups. It also plans to explore impact engagement around DEI awareness and training workshops. In a statement, Zoom’s head of corporate development, M&A strategy and Zoom Ventures Sanjay Rao said, “Volunteering has become mainstream across companies of all sizes, sectors and geographies. It is the most meaningful engagement, especially for Gen Z and millennials. Goodera solves a massive need that was underserved and overlooked, especially in the remote and hybrid working environment. We are proud to be a customer and now an investor in their ambition to bring volunteering to every workplace.”

Tiger Global-backed Algorithmiq to collaborate with IBM over drug discovery using Quantum • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 16, 2022Posted in StartupsNo Comments

Algorithmiq, a Helsinki-based quantum computing startup, has pulled in a deal with IBM to super-charge its exploration of quantum algorithms applied to the life sciences. The collaboration will attempt to dramatically cut the time and cost of drug discovery and development. The widely accepted maxim is that it takes around a decade and $1 billion for a new drug to get to market. The move plans to also contribute to Qiskit, an open-source SDK for quantum computers. Algorithmiq will therefore become part of the IBM Quantum Network. In February this year, Algorithmiq announced a $4m seed round backed by investment from Tiger Global, K5 Global and various angel investors. Headed by Co-Founder, and Professor, Sabrina Maniscalco, Algorithmiq also won the honour of being the “Hottest DeepTech Startup In Europe” award at the long-standing Europas Awards, held this year in in Lisbon, which has been running for 14 years and is judged solely by investors, founders, and journalists.

Thailand’s Beam simplifies checkout for social commerce • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 16, 2022Posted in beam, Sequoia Capital India, social commerce, StartupsNo Comments

The social commerce market is already worth more than $13 billion in Southeast Asia, but the checkout process is filled with friction. Many sellers don’t have online storefronts and instead use social media and messaging apps, which means payment is made by switching to banking apps or wallets. This means low conversion rates, say the founders of Beam. The Thailand-based startup created a one-click payment solution for social commerce sellers and has raised $2.5 million in seed funding led by Sequoia Capital India and Southeast Asia’s Surge, with participation from Partech Partners. Beam was founded in 2019 by Nattapat Chaimanowong, Mike Chinakrit Piamchon and Win Vareekasem. The trio were frustrated by the process of filling out information repeatedly for things like memberships, credit cards and visas and began working on a business idea to streamline form filling, which turned into Beam. Beam founders Nattapat Chaimanowong, Mike Chinakrit Piamchon and Win Vareekasem Vareekasem told ZebethMedia that after building multiple MVPs, the team found that one of the largest groups dealing with the problem were retailers. “Form filling alone could not solve sales conversions, so payments had to be integrated too, ultimately realizing a much larger, burning problem we are going after.” Many social commerce sellers ask for peer-to-peer mobile banking apps, which means they accept payment by sharing account numbers. This can result in poor conversions because of limited payment options and a lot of work to manage payments. Beam says its checkout process takes just 20 seconds. It accepts all major payment service providers in each market, like BNPL leaders Atome and Pace, and claims sellers using their payment solution have increased checkout success by up to 30%. Sellers also save money by paying lower transaction fees, since they don’t have to pay the subscription and platform fees charged by e-commerce marketplaces. Beam monetizes by charging a flat percentage for each transaction based on the payment method. For example, it charges 2.95% for credit card transactions. Its typical client are medium-sized businesses that process a few hundred orders daily, and sell in the fashion, beauty, home and living and electronics sectors. Beam is currently focused on Thailand, with plans to expand into Southeast Asia. While there are other startups focused on removing friction from social commerce, like Opaper, Vareekasem said Beam differentiates by focusing on end-to-end user checkout experiences for both shoppers and merchants, making sure that the former can checkout in just one click when they shop online.

High-precision induction stove startup Impulse powers up with $20M Series A • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in Daily Crunch, Startups, Venture, venture capitalNo Comments

To get a roundup of ZebethMedia’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Greetings on this fine Tuesday. There was a lot of news today, so I’m not going to waste time and instead will get right to what you came here for. — Christine. The ZebethMedia Top 3 Taking telehealth’s temperature: Amazon is getting back into telehealth with Amazon Clinic, a marketplace for third-party virtual consultants that will initially launch in 32 states, Ingrid reports. Yes, we know it’s been a few short months since the delivery giant shut down its Amazon Care telehealth service, but as Ingrid writes, this is the company’s chance to provide care that may be a bit more complex for the corner drugstore, but not as necessary for what could be an expensive doctor’s visit. Heating things up: Impulse isn’t able to light a physical fire under consumers to get them to try out its stovetop, but now with its $20 million cash injection, it can heat up the competition with its induction technology. Haje has more. UPI XOXO: This is the moment that India has been waiting for — Google Play finally adds United Payments Interface subscriptions, Jagmeet writes. Startups and VC Most of us live and die by our calendar, but Vimcal thinks we shouldn’t have to spend that much time creating the actual event. Ivan writes that this “nifty calendar app” will have you entering a new event and even providing scheduling options in just a few steps. Oh, and it also has a desktop version. Pucker up, robot enthusiasts! Pickle brought in $26 million in new funding to continue developing its truck unloading robots, which Brian writes is one of the “links in the chain that remains one of the least addressed.” And we have five more for you: 5 sustainable best practices for bootstrapped startups Image Credits: Getty Images / Ratchapoom Anupongpan / EyeEm For founders interested in building on their own, maintaining control and staying off the fundraising treadmill for as long as possible, investor/entrepreneur Marjorie Radlo-Zandi sets out five basic principles for bootstrapped founders in her latest TC+ article. “Don’t be tempted to hop on a plane at a moment’s notice to meet potential customers in glamorous locations or for meetings in far-flung locations,” she writes. “Your bootstrapped business likely will not survive such big, optional financial outlays.” Bootstrapped founders face longer odds, but if they can drive growth and reach product-market fit, “fundraising will be that much easier.” Three more from the TC+ team: ZebethMedia+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription! Big Tech Inc. Alibaba’s logistics arm, Cainiao, is stretching out its arms to hug Latin America, which it hopes will fill some of the gap left by a Chinese commerce slowdown, Rita reports. The e-commerce giant started delivering goods in Brazil earlier this year and has plans to boost its presence in the country over the next three years. Netflix wants to help you get someone off of your account, no matter who it is and if they know your password. The streaming company has a new feature that lets subscribers kick devices off their accounts, meaning it will forcibly log a device out of that account, Lauren writes. And we have four more for you:

Ring launches pilot program to let local agencies share updates and ‘safety information’ • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in Amazon, Apps, government, neighbors, pilot, Ring, Safety, Security, StartupsNo Comments

Ring today announced that local government agencies will be able to have an official presence on the company’s Neighbors app. Beginning with the City of North Port and Pinellas County Government in Florida and the City of Fulton in New York, the new program will allow government organizations to provide safety information through Neighbors, the Amazon-owned company’s neighborhood watch feature that alerts users to nearby alleged crimes and events. “Local government agencies, such as county and municipality governments and their departments, play an important role in public safety,” Ring wrote in a blog post published this afternoon. “This pilot program will enable users in select municipalities to receive more safety information, updates and tips from a broader group of local agencies, all in one place.” Participating local government agencies will have public profiles in Neighbors that users can visit to see their activity and posts. Ring notes that the program won’t enable the agencies to make a “Request for Assistance” on Neighbors, a capability that lets law enforcement ask the public for help with an active investigation. For the time being, that’ll remain reserved to the police departments that’ve partnered with Ring. The new Ring program, while helpful on its face, is unlikely win over consumer advocates who’ve argued the company’s devices are a security threat. As ZebethMedia previously reported, Ring has a history of sharing footage with the government without users’ permission. Between January and July of this year alone, Amazon shared Ring doorbell footage with U.S. authorities 11 times without informing the device owners. Ring has been criticized for working closely with thousands of police departments around the U.S., allowing police to request video doorbell camera footage from homeowners through Neighbors. Ring only began disclosing its connections with law enforcement after the U.S. government sent demands for transparency from the company.

Unit’s banking-as-a-service platform is getting into the charge card game • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in banking-as-a-service, Brex, Fintech, Itai Damti, Startups, unitNo Comments

If the banking-as-a-service fintech Unit does its job right, it will be ubiquitous among businesses and simultaneously have a name unknown to the end user. The company gives companies a way to embed financial services into their product — and after already launching debit cards, Unit is officially breaking into the charge card game. Unit customers can now use the startup’s API to build custom-designed charge cards for their own end users. Customers can offer their customers a charge card, credit card, revolving loan or any other credit products that Unit’s bank partners offer. On the back end, Unit will handle card printing, compliance and, once the card is in use, transaction tracking as well. According to co-founder and CEO Itai Damti, cards are Unit’s fourth and final pillar as a venture-backed company, adding onto its products in the debit, bank accounts and payments space. Just six months ago, Unit announced that it raised a $100 million Series C at a $1.2 billion valuation, making its total equity raised since inception to nearly $170 million. Charge cards, which are more popular than credit cards for small businesses, give Unit a way to enable customers to build and offer lending products, even though the startup is not a lender itself. “Once you can store money for people, you can move money for people and you can give people money, this is the full spectrum of banking that all these software products can use to launch within their environments,” Damti said. Image Credits: Unit If Unit’s new card line sounds competitive with the likes of Brex and Ramp, valued at billions of dollars — I had the same thought, and it’s a little more complicated. Instead of selling a card to startups like its well-capitalized competitors, Unit is selling customers on a way to create personalized cards for their own end users. It’s going for a classic B2BC model instead of a B2B model. “If you’re a company that sells to construction companies, instead of your customers finding other solutions in the market, you can just embed [lending] into your software,” Damti said. “We don’t compete with [Brex and Ramp] per se, but we do allow companies to basically offer an equivalent product and do it in a way that is embedded.” Unit’s expansion sits differently during a particularly tough economic run for fintech companies such as Chime and Stripe, which conducted layoffs over the past few weeks. Unit VP of lending David Sinsky, who recently joined the company after a seven-year stint at Opendoor, explained that the new product could help its customers introduce an entire new line of revenue through interchange fees. “There’s maybe less VC money to spend on Google and Facebook ads, but we’re working with companies that have built differentiated software,” Sinsky said. “And I see Unit [as an] opportunity to better serve those users and improve their unit economics.” Unit claims that a card swipe transaction will yield 0.5% more interchange revenue when done with a credit card compared to a debit card. Damti added that there’s “less of a red ocean in vertical finance … there’s a tremendous opportunity, because they have data, they have a distribution and they can be very effective underwriters who are very effective lenders in their vertical.”

October funding plateaus with valuations likely to blame

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in EC News Analysis, EC venture capital, funding, fundraising, Startups, VentureNo Comments

After a particularly slow summer, the mood in venture capital seemed to change with the season come Labor Day. By the end of September, it felt that maybe the worst had already come in terms of this year’s falling venture funding numbers. Investment volume had stopped declining and was starting to make up ground. Investors said that anecdotally it felt like the market was really starting to gain momentum again — especially at the early stages. But October funding data showed that the venture capital market still has a long way to go.