Tech News

Operating experience has become a buzzword over the last few years as venture capitalists pump up their resumes in a quest to set themselves apart from other sources of startup capital. Now, it seems that we are seeing the next evolution of that trend.

This year has seen a wave of startup consultant firms looking to raise venture funds of their own to take stakes in companies they are already working with or that align with their practice. In theory, this makes total sense because both consultants and venture capitalists have the same goal at the end of the day: helping companies grow.

But why are so many consultant-led venture capital funds launching now? It’s a particularly rough time in the broader venture market, and economy in general, in addition to being one of the toughest periods for emerging managers and first-time fundraisers. It’s worth noting that all of these funds are raising outside capital as opposed to investing off their balance sheets.

For one thing, the startups they were already working with were asking them to.

Move over, operators — consultants are the new nontraditional VC by Rebecca Szkutak originally published on TechCrunch

If it seems like Post News launched overnight, that’s because it kind of did. Unlike Mastodon, Hive Social, or other existing social networks being flooded with dissatisfied Twitter users, Post News emerged two weeks ago. The platform was rushed into a live beta, since its team wanted to go public in a time when the chaos of Elon Musk’s Twitter leadership was front-and-center in our collective headspace.

Post News has some similar basic functions to Twitter: you make posts, you like and repost other people’s posts, you follow interesting accounts. Yet in its beta stage, it still lacks basic functions like DMs, a native app and accessibility features like adding alt text to images (and, sparking concern for some users, the company said it was not prioritizing accessibility at this time).

Post News is trying to capitalize on the “virtual watercooler for journalists” side of Twitter. The platform describes itself as a place to access “premium news content without subscriptions or ads.” News publishers and independent writers are encouraged to share their articles on Post News under a paywall. The idea is that this would allow users to pay for individual articles from a variety of news sources. It’s an alternative, or a supplement, to paying for individual subscriptions to specific news sources.

“I believe the future newspaper is the feed and want to make it more civil for users, profitable for publishers and better for society,” wrote Post News founder Noam Bardin in a tweet announcing the endeavor. Bardin previously served as the CEO of Waze between 2009 and 2021.

As of Monday, Post News has about 335,000 users on its waitlist, according to Bardin, while about 65,000 accounts have been activated. (Users are being let in slowly as to not overload the platform’s operations and moderation capabilities). The platform has already secured an undisclosed amount of funding from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), as well as Scott Galloway, an NYU professor and tech commentator. Silicon Valley journalist Kara Swisher said she is an advisor to the company, but is not an investor.

A16z is a curious choice for an investor in a Twitter alternative, given that the venture capital firm contributed $400 million to Musk’s Twitter acquisition. Sriram Krishnan, a crypto investor at a16z, has also been working closely with Musk at Twitter HQ. But Bardin saidthat he chose to work with a16z simply because they were the quickest investor to make a decision and fork over a check.

“This does not mean that I am a Crypto fan, that I think [a16z] should have funded some of the personalities they funded lately or that I agree with every statement of theirs,” Bardin wrote on his Post News account on Sunday. “We did discuss the Twitter investment at the highest level and I can assure you that it is not a problem – Post is separated from the people involved with Twitter and a clear line has been set.”

TechCrunch reached out to Bardin and a16z for comment.

Post News’ goals are ambitious. Not only is the platform attempting to compete with a longtime social media mainstay, but its business model relies on digital news publishers opting in to its model of charging readers per article, rather than for a subscription. Plus, the platform is rapidly growing while it is still building out key safety features, which makes things a bit precarious.

“I want to remind everyone that this is a super early beta and it is not right for everyone,” Bardin wrote on Monday. “People looking for a polished product will have to wait. It is OK to take a break and come back when things are production grade – betas are not for everyone.”

Post News, a Twitter alternative, gets funding from a16z by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch

Of all the venture capital funding invested in 2021, around one in every five dollars went to fintech. But this boom now seems behind us, as global fintech funding activity returned to pre-2021 levels.

Worse, fintech didn’t escape the recent waves of tech layoffs, with high-profile companies like Brex, Chime and Stripe making headlines for this disheartening reason over the last few weeks.

And yet, fintech startups are still getting founded and funded this year. Of the 223 companies in Y Combinator’s summer 2022 batch, 79 fell more or lessinto the fintech category.

Why are founders and investors still placing bets in fintech, and where? To find out more, we reached out to fintech-focused VC firm Fiat Ventures.

Fiat co-founders Alex Harris, Drew Glover, and Marcos Fernandez also run its sister arm, Fiat Growth, a growth consultancy working with fintech and insurtech clients. This enables them to comment not only on sector trends from an investor perspective, but also to share practical advice.

One of their key recommendations is for fintech startups to lean into customer acquisition channels whose cost is less variable or seasonal than others, but our exchange covered a wider range of topics, from financial inclusion to offline channels and more. Read on:

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Many of the linked companies are portfolio companies of Fiat Ventures or clients of Fiat Growth.

TC: What makes you say that “fintech acquisition funnels are too complicated”?

Alex Harris: Fintech products by nature have complicated acquisition funnels and enrollment flows. Some complications are unavoidable in a highly regulated environment, but superfluous complications can arise when rigorous testing is not applied and funnels include unnecessary bloat.

Even the smallest detail can generate friction. For example, in the know-your-customer (KYC) process, many fintechs will ask a customer for their entire Social Security Number. In most cases, for non-credit products, only the last four digits of the SSN are needed for identification purposes. While only a five-digit difference, this can have a meaningful impact on conversion rates that can save large sums of money at scale.

Data is certainly king, but there is a time and place for data collection and personalization. Too often, a well-intentioned data team will ask personalization and demographics questions directly in an enrollment process. However, these questions can most often come in a post-enrollment survey or periodically throughout the lifecycle of a customer. Even post-enrollment, these questions need to be thought out. We regularly see data collected for the sake of collecting it, without actionable insights derived from them.

On affinity-focused fintechs, the future of BNPL, and more by Anna Heim originally published on TechCrunch

It’s me! Hi! (I’m not the problem, just the podcast’s host, here to bring you the latest greatest in startup and tech news this fine Monday morning). Welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. And for those of you who hummed the first sentence of this post, extra points to you.

I’m starting things off this week as a test run before Alex heads on paternity leave. We have lots to get to, so shake off the holiday feels and let’s remember how this ecosystem works?

Here’s what we got to:

The markets are broadly down, due to COVID-19 protests breaking out in China.
Blockfi filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Our crypto reporter Jacquelyn Melinek has more on what happened – and she explains just how intertwined this universe is. I’ll also get to notes I took from our recent crypto conference and how the reality may be looking like Web 2.5 before it looks like Web 3.0.
We also talk about Amazon’s three-pronged retreat, and the common thread of India between them all.
After that, some good news from all-women led venture firm Pact and its debut fund. More funding for climate startups, please. Tim keeps writing about really cool ones.
We end with a note on Pipe, a $2 billion fintech that announced all of its co-founders are stepping down from their roles last week. Soon after that decision was announced, rumors and allegations began flying about tensions under the hood at the fintech. Mary Ann Azevedo has the story and keep reading the site today for the follow up. As I said on Twitter, on one end, when three founders step down in a single moment, people are undoubtedly going to talk and worry (out loud) about the stability of the company.

That was fun. Thanks for letting me spend a bit of your Monday with you. More to come! You can follow me on Twitter @nmasc_ or on Instagram @natashathereporter.

Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday and Wednesday, and at 6 a.m. PT on Fridays, so subscribe to us onApple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotifyandall the casts. TechCrunch also has agreat show on crypto, ashow that interviews founders, one thatdetails how our stories come together, and more!

What’s the next on crypto’s chopping block? by Natasha Mascarenhas originally published on TechCrunch

When it comes to performance issues, it’s hard to know where the problem lies. This is especially true when your monitoring dashboard shows an all-clear, yet you’re still hearing slow app complaints from your users. In these cases, there’s a good chance those problems could be related to an internet connection issue.

These kinds of issues are harder to track down because they vary so greatly and depend on a lot of factors that are mostly out of your control. Amazon wants to make it easier to track these kinds of issues on apps running on AWS infrastructure with a new service called Amazon CloudWorks Internet Monitor. It’s announcing the new service this week at AWS re:Invent.

As the name implies, it’s part of the CloudWorks monitoring tool, and it looks at internet connections around the world to find trouble spots.

“Internet Monitor uses the connectivity data that we capture from our global networking footprint to calculate a baseline of performance and availability for internet traffic,” Amazon’s Sébastien Stormacq wrote in a blog post announcing the new service.

The idea is to let you monitor problems related to internet connection problems with applications running on AWS infrastructure resources. Most major monitoring tools allow you to track various types of network traffic, but this one takes advantage of the same data AWS uses to monitor its own uptime, so presumably it’s pretty solid for those AWS-centric applications

You simply create a monitor and add some internet resources, and you can monitor from there when you’re getting performance complaints that you can’t pinpoint. Among other data, you can see a health score based on the quality of the connections on the resources you’ve added to your monitor.

The new service is available in public preview starting today across 20 regions. It’s free in public beta, but it’s worth noting that you could still be charged for log data the service is collecting as part of its monitoring process.

Amazon CloudWorks Internet Monitor lets you track connection-related performance issues by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

FrankieOne, a Melbourne-based startup that provides an API platform for identity verification and fraud detection, said it has added $23 million AUD (about $15.4 million USD) in a Series A+, taking its Series A’s total to $45 million AUD (about $30 million USD). FrankieOne says this is the largest amount of VC funding raised by an Australian regtech so far.

The funding included a group of returning investors, including led backers AirTree Ventures and Greycroft, and participants Reinventure (financial services company Westpac’s venture arm), Tidal Ventures and Apex Capital Partners, which are all also existing investors. New strategic investors include Binance Labs and Kraken Ventures.

Founded in 2019 by serial fintech entrepreneurs Simon Costello and Aaron Chipper, FrankieOne connects banking, fintech, crypto and gaming companies to hundreds of data sources and works with 170 financial institutions around the world. The startup says it has seen 4x revenue growth over the last 12 months and its customers now include Westpac, Shopify, Afterpay, Binance, Zipmex and Pointsbet. Its team doubled over the past year, and it opened a new office in San Francisco.

Costello told TechCrunch that FrankieOne grew out of a neobank venture he also founded with Chipper called Frankie. Costello and Chipper wanted Frankie to differentiate from the rest of the industry with the best onboarding experience, using the top identity and fraud prevention tools available, but “this process proved to be unnecessarily complicated, requiring multiple integrations and it was clear we would need to create our own risk-based onboarding,” Costello said. They realized other fintech companies also had the same problems.

As a result, FrankieOne was created to streamline processes around regulation and compliance. It now provides a single API that connects third-party vendors with over 350 data sources in 48 countries.

Costello explained that most fintechs, banks and crypto companies deal with shortfalls in match rates, coverage or ability to scale because they connect to a single vendor for their identity needs. This means their tech stacks also need constant maintenance.

FrankieOne solves this problem by connecting to hundreds of data sources from multiple vendor partners, which means their clients no longer have to rely on a single vendor. Its API’s connected vendors include established financial services companies like Equifax, Experian and Socure and fast-growth startups such as Sardine AI.

“What sets FrankieOne apart is it allows its customers to switch on vendors, create dynamic workflows, add in further fraud signals and add new markets, ensuring our customers can respond quickly to changing regulations and updated business requirements, without taking on any additional work burden,” Costello said.

FrankieOne’s customers are usually mid- to large-sized organizations in highly regulated industries that need to adapt to complex policies that frequently change, he added.

As an example of how FrankieOne has been used by its clients, Costello pointed to sports betting app Pointsbet, which previously used a single provider for customer onboarding, but dealt with high numbers of prospective users who couldn’t be verified in real time. This resulted in customer drop-offs, or further manual work to verify their details. Since working with FrankieOne, Pointsbet has been able to increase customers onboarding by 14%.

When Westpac began digitizing more of their financial services, they still used separate legacy systems and, as a result, needed to increase their pass rates to reduce drop-offs. They integrated FrankieOne’s platform for their KYC (know your customer) feature on their new BaaS (banking-as-a-service). This increased pass rates significantly, so the firm added FrankieOne across its entire group.

The latest round of funding will allow FrankieOne to scale more quickly, and expand in North America, Europe and the Asia Pacific. Costello said it will also enable FrankieOne to make a significant investment into its ecosystem of vendors, data sources and fraud capabilities, enabling it to grow its customer base.

AirTree and Greycroft return to lead Australian regtech FrankieOne’s Series A+ by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

Convertible instruments, whether in the form of convertible notes, simple agreements for future equity (SAFEs) or otherwise, have long been used in the startup world to avoid a fundamental issue: the extreme difficulty associated with valuing early-stage companies. But what happens when the very mechanisms designed to address this problem become a part of it?

Valuation caps, for instance, are now employed in most early-stage convertible instruments. By imposing a ceiling on the price at which a convertible instrument converts to future stock ownership, valuation caps were intended to protect early-stage investors from extreme, unexpected growth (and, consequently, equity positions deemed excessively small by such investors).

However, valuation caps are increasingly being used as a proxy for the value of the company at the time of the investment — creating the very problem they were designed to help avoid, while adding unnecessary complexity for inexperienced founders and investors.

It isn’t surprising that founders and investors struggle to resist the lure to discuss present value when using valuation caps, despite efforts to push back against that use. This is especially true in contexts where the valuation cap “ceiling” expressly values the investment in a pre-conversion exit event (e.g., both the old pre-money valuation cap SAFEs and the newer post-money valuation cap SAFEs made available by Y Combinator).

Fortunately, there’s a better approach: the interim rate of return method.

The problem with early-stage valuations, or the crystal ball

Before we get to the solution, it’s useful to provide additional context on the problem — namely, why it’s so difficult to thoughtfully and rationally negotiate the value of early-stage companies.

Some will say that such valuations are difficult because early-stage companies don’t have meaningful (if any) revenue, have limited assets or are just an idea. Yet, while these arguments identify real issues, they miss what may be the most important one: Investors at the earliest stages are investing in a possible ownership structure that will typically only fully exist in the future upon completion of the founders’ vesting schedules.

Let’s say you’re an early-stage investor writing a $500,000 check for a startup at a stated pre-money valuation of $4.5 million, where 100% of the existing equity is held by a single founder and subject to a 4-year vesting schedule that just started.

On its face, that would entitle you to a 10% ownership in the company (i.e., the post-money value would be $5 million, with your capital representing 10% of the value). But your stake and the pre-money valuation at which you effectively invested depends on how much of the founder’s vesting schedule is actually completed, as shown by the following table:

Interim rate of return: A better approach to valuing early-stage startups by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch

Cofactr is a logistics and supply chain tech company that provides scalable warehousing and procurement for electronics manufacturers. The company today announced it raised a $6 million round of seed funding, to “lead the next generation of agile hardware materials management.” The company raised on a SAFE note with a $25 million cap. We spoke to the company’s team to learn more about its vision of the future.

Cofactr addresses a suite of challenges for electronics producers through pre-manufacturing, third-party logistics services and supply chain automation. By providing these products as a unified strategic solution, the goal is to enable hardware manufacturers the ability to get to production volume without investing in the specialized facilities or headcount historically needed to manage electronic components.

“Both Phil [Gulley, the company’s CRO and co-founder] and I are driven by the desire to solve problems. Before Cofactr, we were working on the engineering and solutions side of hardware with our previous company, BeSide Digital, starting off in the entertainment industry and growing to support companies like Zoox, Google and CrowdStrike across product and custom hardware for marketing,” said Matthew Haber, co-founder and CEO of Cofactr in an interview with TechCrunch. “A challenge we had, and saw reflected in the processes of our clients, was that building and scaling hardware felt incredibly laborious in comparison to software. After we sold BeSide, electronic supply chain and logistics was the biggest and most personal problem we could address.”

The company told me that the journey to Cofactr’s current state wasn’t entirely linear. The company initially built and ran a contract manufacturer for circuit board assembly, but realized that wasn’t the right context to tackle these problems. From there, the company evolved to build electronics-specific third-party logistics and procurement automation.

“Having worked in hardware and software we had the opportunity to experience both ecosystems and knew how easy things could be when technology bridges gaps between ideas and scale,” said Gulley. “That was the insight that Cofactr was born out of. It’s the company we wished existed when we were on the engineering side of the table.”

The investment round was led by Bain Capital Ventures with participation from Y Combinator, Broom Ventures, Cathexis Ventures, Sweet Spot Capital, Pioneer Fund, Seed River, Litani Ventures, Correlation Ventures and a few angel investors.

“The big players on the cap table are Bain Capital Ventures (BCV) and Y Combinator. YC helped us focus on finding and providing the things that people really loved about Cofactr and set us up to meet Ajay Agarwal at BCV, which immediately felt like a match. The BCV team understood the opportunities that can come out of a business that integrates hardware, logistics and software into a single solution, as well as the challenges that come with building in many areas simultaneously,” says Gulley.

The investors, in turn, see a future where the Cofactr team can put a dent in how electronics are manufactured.

“When we first met Cofactr founders, I was really impressed with their understanding of the challenges of electronic component procurement. We’ve never seen anything similar to the integrated software and logistics system they’ve built. It combines cloud procurement software, a network of suppliers and a turn-key logistics platform that handles shipping, customs management, counterfeit insurance, inventory, kitting and shipping management,” says Agarwal, partner at BCV, in an interview with TechCrunch. “With the Cofactr platform, hardware manufacturers can find electronic components, check pricing, order parts, handle replenishment and send parts to their partner manufacturers. Behind the scenes, Cofactr handles everything including the acquisition of the parts, storage and management of the inventory, control checks to ensure the inventory is not counterfeit and regular shipments of components to manufacturers.”

Cofactr appears to represent a continuation of BCV’s focus on logistics and supply chain. The investor has backed companies such as Kiva Systems (robotic fulfillment sold to Amazon); FourKites (supply chain visibility — which raised $30 million back in August); ShipBob (cloud fulfillment for e-commerce brands); TruckSmarter (mobile app to allow freight drivers to find and book their next load) and now Cofactr. In addition, it made an investment in Flux, which operates in a similar space, last year.

Of course, the pandemic, in particular, exposed many cracks in the supply chain. Ford, for example, warned its investors that it had to eat an additional $1 billion of costs in Q3 this year, largely due to supply chain challenges, and GM saw a 40% drop in profits in Q2 this year. It ain’t pretty out there, but that’s the fertile ground in which supply chain startups get to sow their opportunities.

“Electronics components were particularly hard to come by. That meant a lot of challenges for hardware companies, whether they’re building dishwashers, robots or smart speakers. In a handful of industries, we think there is an opportunity to create a vertically integrated software and logistics solution,” Agarwal explains. “A good example of this is ShipBob and what they built for mid-market e-commerce brands. Cofactr is doing this for procurement of electronic components, with a complete software-and-logistics solution for hardware manufacturers.”

The ultimate goal for Cofactr is to make hardware not-so-hard, the founders quip.

“There is starting to be a real groundswell of startups attacking the hardware engineering space, but we all have to interconnect and work together in the same way that software development tools do. You’ll be seeing more collaboration between Cofactr, other startups and well-established organizations that serve hardware,” says Gulley. “Fast-forward a few years and we see Cofactr as the cloud solution for pre-manufacturing infrastructure. Our vision feels something like the hardware manufacturing version of AWS; on-demand, cloud-based solutions for physical manufacturing. Today, companies can take a software product from MVP to massive scale without crippling infrastructure investments. In a decade, the same will be true for building hardware products and we believe that Cofactr will be a core enabler of that transformation.”

All of this makes a lot of sense in the context of the U.S. wanting to build a more reliable and resilient on-shore manufacturing capacity. The CHIPS act is making some real waves in the semiconductor industry, and there’s been a fair chunk of investment in logistics and electronics manufacturing in the past year. Last month, Makersite raised $18 million and Altana picked up $100 million.

Logistics and procurement on autopilot is the future Cofactr wants to live in by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

Right on time for its annual post-Thanksgiving re:Invent festivities in Las Vegas, AWS last night announced its “AWS Digital Sovereignty Pledge” — and before you click away, let me just point out that this is definitely more important than the prosaic name implies. As nations across the globe introduce legislation that governs how and where businesses can keep data on their local users, the large clouds either have to offer attractive solutions or run the risk of having their customers move to local clouds. Microsoft, with Purview, and Google, with Dataplex, also offer data governance tools, but none of them have gone quite as far as AWS in making digital sovereignty a core pillar of their cloud strategy.

Matt Garman, AWS’s senior vice president of Sales, Marketing and Global Services, notes that giving customers control over their data has always been a priority for AWS, but with constantly shifting and evolving legal requirements, managing all of this has become increasingly complex.

“In many places around the world, like in Europe, digital sovereignty policies are evolving rapidly. Customers are facing an incredible amount of complexity, and over the last 18 months, many have told us they are concerned that they will have to choose between the full power of AWS and a feature-limited sovereign cloud solution that could hamper their ability to innovate, transform, and grow. We firmly believe that customers shouldn’t have to make this choice,” he writes.

The idea of this pledge then is to tell these customers that AWS is fully committed to building out its set of sovereignty controls and features in its cloud. Some of these features are already here, including in AWS Control Tower, while others are obviously still in development. With re:Invent around the corner and this announcement preceding it, chances are we will hear a bit more about this later this week (or next year — AWS PR works in mysterious ways).

While the tools are still a work in progress, though, the pledge is not. The ideas here are straightforward, with AWS pledging to ensure that customers always have full control over the location of their data in AWS, with verifiable control over how it is accessed and the ability to encrypt it everywhere, be that in transit, at rest or in memory.

AWS also promises to make its cloud resilient against network disruptions and natural disasters. But that’s nothing new, of course, and in a way, neither are most of the other promises the company makes in this pledge. But it’s the fact that AWS spells all of this out that demonstrates that the company sees this as an opportunity to differentiate itself from the other cloud providers as it vies for lucrative public sector contracts. But it also clearly sees it asa threat, as these customers increasingly look to local cloud solutions that can help them navigate these data sovereignty challenges.

AWS announces Digital Sovereignty Pledge by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch