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Showing posts from 2020

Union Square Ventures and Learn Capital file paperwork indicating new funds

As 2020 comes to a long-awaited end, a series of filings indicate that venture capitalists are ending the year with fresh money. According to SEC paperwork, Learn Capital and USV have filed paperwork that shows the firms have raised new, multimillion-dollar funds. If you’ve been paying attention to news this past year, it’s clear that much of venture capital isn’t just surviving 2020 – it’s flourishing through it. Zoom investing , it seems, is working just fine for cash-rich firms looking to double down on bets in categories from edtech to climate. First up, New York-based USV submitted a pair of filings on late Thursday. The first filing shows that the firm has closed $151 million for USV Climate 2021, which one can assume is focused on climate-tech investments. As my colleague Jonathan Shieber has pointed out, climate tech. The other, more nebulous filing , is the firm’s $22.4 million investment vehicle titled USV Bundled. It’s unclear what this is focused on, but a recent blog
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Extra Crunch’s Top 10 stories of 2020

I edited hundreds of stories in 2020, so choosing my favorites would be an exercise in futility. Instead, I’ve tried to gather a sample of Extra Crunch stories that taught me something new. (Which means this top 10 list betrays my ignorance, a humbling admission for a know-it-all like myself.) While narrowing down the field of candidates, I realized that we’re covering each of the topics on this list in greater depth next year. We already have stories in the works about no-code software, the emergence of edtech, proptech and B2B marketplaces, to name just a few. Some readers are skeptical about paywalls, but without being boastful, Extra Crunch is a premium product, just like Netflix or Disney+. I know: We’re not as entertaining as a historical drama about the reign of Queen Elizabeth II or a space western about a bounty hunter. But, speaking as someone who’s worked at several startups, Extra Crunch stories contain actionable information you can use to build a company and/or look
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The Equity crew predicts what’s to come in 2021

What could go wrong? Hello and welcome back to  Equity , TechCrunch’s venture-capital-focused podcast ( now on Twitter! ), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. As you can see, this is our yearly predictions episode. Our behind-the-scenes guru Chris Gates joins us on the mic, we take shots at our prior prognostications, and nosh on what we feel is positively persaged. As always, this episode is in good fun. If you don’t agree with we think is up ahead, that’s fine. You’re probably right. But we’re nothing if not up for a challenge, so we kept the tradition alive this year. This is the last Equity episode of 2020. While we can’t tell you yet what our plans are for 2021, we can say — nay, project — that there are a lot of fun and big things coming for Equity. We’re planning our busiest year ever, by far. And with that, we’re out of here. Thanks for several million downloads this year, our biggest annum to date. Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST and Thursday
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Amazon acquires podcast network Wondery

Amazon just announced that it’s acquiring Wondery, the network behind podcasts including “Dirty John” and “Dr. Death.” Wondery will become part of Amazon Music, which added support for podcasts  (including its own original shows) in September. At the same time, the announcement claims that “nothing will change for listeners” and that the network’s podcasts will continue to be available from “a variety of providers.” Media companies and streaming audio platforms are all making big bets on podcasting, with Spotify making a series of acquisitions including podcast network Gimlet , SiriusXM acquiring Stitcher and The New York Times acquiring Serial Productions . Amazon is coming relatively late to this market, but it will now have the support of a popular podcast maker as it works to catch up. “With Amazon Music, Wondery will be able to provide even more high-quality, innovative content and continue their mission of bringing a world of entertainment and knowledge to their audience
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Dear Sophie: Tips for getting a National Interest green card by myself?

Sophie Alcorn Contributor Share on Twitter Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneur Immigration Services.” She connects people with the businesses and opportunities that expand their lives. More posts by this contributor Dear Sophie: What’s ahead for US immigration in 2021? Dear Sophie: How did immigration change for startup founders in 2020? Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies. “Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn , a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.” Extra Crunch members receive access
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Student-founded Develop for Good surpasses 25,000 volunteer hours connecting students with nonprofits

This has been the year of the social organization. As the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the world and the United States, governments and a patchwork of nonprofits and volunteer organizations sprang into action, offering everything from food and medical supplies to children’s books and clothing to individuals and families struggling in the virus’s wake. Perhaps the biggest divide though to getting people help has been digital — non-profits need to connect with their beneficiaries over the internet just as much as any retailer today. Unfortunately, tech talent is expensive and hard to find, particularly for often cash-strapped nonprofits. That was part of the impetus for two Stanford seniors, Mary Zhu and Amay Aggarwal, to co-found Develop for Good , a matching service designed to connect motivated and ambitious undergrads in computer science, design and economics to nonprofits with specific projects that require expertise. They launched the network in March as the pandemic started sp
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On the diversity front, 2020 may prove a tipping point

Since Minneapolis police officers killed George Floyd in May and kicked off months of nationwide protests, the corporate world — including venture capitalists — have attempted to respond to the Black Lives Matter movement. Indeed, many quickly took to social media to voice their support, broadcast their new diversity-focused networking groups and pledge to do better, particularly when it comes to finding and funding more Black founders and other underrepresented entrepreneurs. As of 2018, 81% of venture firms still lacked a single Black investor. It was tempting to dismiss it as so much hot air, given that VCs have talked about diversity for eons without doing much about it. As of February 2020, according to a  report by All Raise, an organization that promotes female founders, 65% of VC firms still had no female partners. As of 2018, 81% of venture firms still lacked a single Black investor, per an analysis by Equal Ventures partner Richard Kerby. Those numbers are comparati
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CommonGround raises $19M to rethink online communication

CommonGround , a startup developing technology for what its founders describe as “4D collaboration,” is announcing that it has raised $19 million in funding. This isn’t the first time Amir Bassan-Eskenazi and Ran Oz have launched a startup together — they also founded video networking company BigBand Networks , which won two technology-related Emmy Awards, went public in 2007 and was acquired by Arris Group in 2011. And before that, they worked together at digital compression company Optibase, which Oz co-founded and where Bassan-Eskenazi served as COO. While CommonGround is still in stealth mode and doesn’t plan to fully unveil its first product until next year, Bassan-Eskenazi and Oz outlined their vision for me. While they acknowledged that video conferencing has improved significantly, they said it still can’t match face-to-face communication. “Some things you just cannot achieve through a flat video conferencing-type solution,” Bassan-Eskenazi said. “Those got better over the
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Startup cynicism and Substack, or Clubhouse, or Miami, or …

If you build it, they will come, but they sure as hell are going to complain about everything until they do. There were millions of bets made in the tech industry last year. Some of those bets involved actual venture capital dollars. Others involved individual decisions on where to live: do you bet on the future of San Francisco or do you want to partake in the growth of some other startup hub? Are you going to launch this new feature in your product or improve one of your existing ones? Do you switch jobs or stay and double down? Yet, for all those bets, just three seem to have achieved a collective and hysterical frenzy in the industry as we close out this year: a bet on the future of media, a bet on the future of (audio) media, and a bet on the future of one of America’s greatest cities. Substack, Clubhouse, and Miami as a major tech hub are compelling bets. They are early bets, in the sense that most of the work to actually realize each of their dreams remains to be done. All
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Skyroot successfully test fires India’s first privately-made solid rocket stage

Rocket launch startup Skyroot is closing out 2020 with a key milestone in the development program for their Vikram-I launch vehicle: A successful test firing of a solid rocket propulsion stage that serves as a demonstrator of the same tech to be used in the production Vikram. This is the first time that a private Indian company has designed, built and tested a solid rocket propulsion stage in its entirety, and follows a successful engine burn test of an upper stage prototype earlier this year . Skyroot also created its solid rocket stage using a carbon composite structure whose manufacturing process is entirely automated, the company says. That allows it to realize weight savings of up to five times vs. use of steel, a material typically used to house solid rocket propellant stages. The goal is to use the same process in the production of the final version of Vikram-I, which will help the small launch vehicle realize big benefits in terms of cost, in addition to the reliability benefi
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Estonian proptech Rendin raises €1.2M seed for its long-term rental platform

Rendin , an Estonian proptech startup that wants to improve the home rental experience, including offering a no-deposit feature, has raised €1.2 million in seed funding. Backing the round is Tera Ventures, Iron Wolf Capital, Truesight Ventures, Atomico’s Angel Programme, and Startup Wise Guys. Launched in Estonia in March this year and currently expanding to Poland, Rendin operates a long-term rental platform that promises to smooth out the process between landlords and tenants. Its headline feature is an insurance-backed solution that means no deposit is required from tenants. The broader premise is that by digitising the rental process and adding an insurance layer, further trust can be generated between parties, therefore increasing occupancy rates. For landlords, Rendin has created a “letting agreement service” with certain guarantees and has insured those risks via a partnership with ERGO Insurance SE (Munich Re Group). So, for example, if a tenant causes damage or ends up in
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Unpacking Qualtrics’ brand-new S-1 filing

The Exchange is taking a break from vacation to dig into the new Qualtrics S-1 filing. Then the column and newsletter are back on hold until January 4th. This afternoon, Qualtrics, a software company that helps companies poll their employee base, customers, and others, filed to go public. It’s the second time that the Utah-based unicorn has done so, failing the first time to complete its offering after SAP swooped in and bought it for around $8 billion in cash . The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch , or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday. SAP announced in late July of this year that Qualtrics would be spun out via an IPO, bringing the smaller company’s saga full-circle. The new S-1 filing — you can view the 2018 original here  — is a different animal from the first. First, Qualtrics is larger than it was, and older. And its financials are more complex as it extricates itself from its soon-to-be-erstwhile corporate pa
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Global investors flee from Chinese tech stocks after the government crackdown on Ant and Alibaba

Global investors are running from Chinese tech stocks in the wake of the government’s crackdown on Ant Group and Alibaba, two high-flying businesses founded by Ma Yun (Jack Ma) that were once hailed as paragons of China’s new tech elite. Shares of major technology companies in the country have fallen sharply in recent days, with Bloomberg calculating that Alibaba, Tencent, JD.com and Meituan have lost around $200 billion in value during a handful of trading sessions. Already reeling from the last-minute halt of the public debut of Ant Group, a major Chinese fintech player with deep ties to Alibaba, the e-commerce giant came under new fire, as China’s markets watchdog opened a probe into its business practices concerning potentially anticompetitive behavior. Ant Group was itself summoned by the government on December 26th, leading to a plan that will force the company to “rectify” its business practices . Shares of Alibaba are off around 30% from their recent, record highs set i
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Equity Monday: No, tech news doesn’t stop over the holidays

Hello and welcome back to  Equity , TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter  here  and myself  here — and don’t forget to check out the first of our two holiday eps, the last one talking to VCs about what surprised them in 2020 . Anyhoo, from vacation, here’s what Chris and I got up to: A report looking at how ecommerce changed during 2020. The epic carnage surrounding the Chinese government’s clamping down on its tech sector (more here , and here from TechCrunch). Lalamove raised $515 million in a Series E . Yuanfudao raised another $300 million . Indian startups did not have the strongest year of venture fundraising , which felt a bit surprising. And it doesn’t app
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4 keys to international expansion

Levin Bunz Contributor Share on Twitter Levin joined Heartcore Capital in 2019 from Global Founders Capital, the billion-dollar VC arm of Rocket Internet, where he was responsible for investments in Canva, Heyjobs, Instarem, Anyfin and others. During my five years with Global Founders Capital, Rocket Internet’s $1 billion VC arm, I saw more than a hundred of Rocket’s incubated companies attempt to internationalize. For background, Rocket Internet has helped launch some very successful businesses internationally, including HelloFresh ($12.9 billion market cap), Lazada ($1 billion exit to Alibaba), Jumia ($3.2 billion market cap), Zalando ($21.2 billion market cap) and many others. Rocket often followed the Blitzscaling model popularized by Reid Hoffman — earning them an appearance in his book of the same name. After an initial success helping Groupon scale internationally via a merger with Rocket’s incubation firm CityDeal, Rocket’s team have aggressively scaled busine
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