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If you browse Instagram, you are probably familiar with the term “link in bio.” Links aren’t allowed in post captions, and users are only allowed one URL in their bios, so many create a simple website with multiple links for their followers. Linktree, one of the most popular “link in bio” services with more than 12 million users, announced today it has raised $45 million in Series B funding. The round was co-led by Index Ventures and Coatue, with participation from returning investors AirTree Ventures and Insight Partners.
Coatue chairman Dan Rose will join Linktree’s board of directors. The Sydney, Australia-based startup’s last round was a $10.7 million Series A announced in October 2020. Linktree’s latest funding will be used on tools that make social commerce easier.
Linktree says about a third, or 4 million, of its users signed up within the last three months. This is in partly because people have been spending more time on social media and e-commerce shopping during the pandemic.
Founded in 2016, Linktree now competes with a roster of “link in bio” services, including Shorby, Linkin.bio and the recently launched Beacons.
“When we launched Linktree, we created an entirely new category. We were first to market and, with over 12 million users globally, still hold 88% of market share,” founder and chief executive officer Alex Zaccaria told TechCrunch. “Inevitably we’ve seen plenty of competitors pop up as a result, but part of the uniqueness of Linktree is its deceptively simple design.”
Zaccaria added that one of Linktree’s differentiators is its adoption by users in a wide range of categories, including health and wellness, real estate, sports, music, politics, publishing and food. It’s used for bio links by Shopify, Facebook, TikTok, YSL, HBO and Major League Baseball, and celebrities like Jonathan Van Ness, Jamie Oliver and Pharrell.
“We might have started as a link-in-bio tool, but over time Linktree has evolved and the platform has become a social identity layer of the internet. Our vision for how the platform will sit at the intersection of digital self-expression and action means we’re thinking boldly when it comes to our roadmap.”
The pandemic’s impact on the business world encouraged adtech startups and digital marketing agencies to collaborate more, helping brands survive the pandemic by bringing businesses closer to consumers.
Although overall spending on advertising slowed in 2020, it is expected to recover in 2021 and reach $630 billion in 2024. According to Statista, North America spends the most on advertising, with second place going to Asia and Western Europe. The rest of Europe, Africa and the Middle East lag behind.
Although overall spending on advertising slowed in 2020, it is expected to recover in 2021 and reach $630 billion in 2024.
However, the Middle East embodies great potential. According to Statista, it boasts the highest growth, with a 600% increase in digital advertising in the MENA region between 2010 and 2015. Although consumers in the region used to prefer traditional advertising channels, the internet took over in 2020, with 44.2% of the total ad expenditures, while TV dropped to 30%.
Here are several essential characteristics of digital advertising in the Middle East region:
- According to a PwC report, 39% of shoppers in the Middle East use social media to find inspiration for purchases, compared to the global average of 29%.
- Due to the existence of a shadow economy, political regulations and unofficial business, the amount of digital ad spending in the MENA region ranged from $1 billion to $1.2 billion in 2020.
- Paid social is the leading category in digital advertising expenditures in the MENA region. Saudi Arabia and Egypt are the largest in terms of active YouTube users.
- There are more than 500 digital agencies listed in the region. UAE is leading in terms of big advertising agencies, while Egypt and Saudi Arabia are famous for small- and medium-size agencies. Most digital marketing talent and creative resources reside in Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan, while most adtech startups are born in Israel, UAE and Qatar, according to digital marketing consultant Yasser Ahmad.
- E-commerce is driving growth, hitting $17 billion in the Middle East in 2020, according to Statista, with many online shoppers increasing the frequency of purchases during the pandemic.
BBG Ventures, a now eight-year-old, New York-based seed- and early-stage venture firm that only backs founding teams which feature at least one woman, just locked down $50 million in capital for its third fund, a major leap over its first two funds, both sized at $10 million.
One determining factor in the bigger fund is that BBGV, formerly backed exclusively by AOL (now Verizon Media), now has a broader pool of institutional and individual investors, including the State of Michigan Retirement Systems, the George Kaiser Family Foundation and Verizon Ventures, along with Poshmark cofounder Tracy Sun, ClassPass cofounder Payal Kadakia, and venture capitalists Aileen Lee, Theresia Gouw, and Jennifer Fonstad.
The young firm also has a track record to which to point. Though an investment in the coworking space The Wing may have taken an unexpected turn, hurt by a national lockdown and internal turmoil, other bets have been growing, including the e-commerce platform Zola; the feminine hygiene brand Lola; and Spring Health, a mental health benefits platform for employers that recently closed on $76 million in Series B funding led by Tiger Global Management.
That’s saying nothing of the vast and underserved opportunity to invest in women-led teams that BBGV’s founders, Susan Lyne and Nisha Dua, believe most venture firms still don’t fully appreciate.
We talked earlier today about why that is with Lyne, who is a former ABC president, former Martha Stewart Living CEO and former CEO of AOL Brand Group; and Dua, who is a former lawyer, management consultant, chief of staff to Lyne, and founder. Our conversation has been edited for length.
TC You’ve raised $50 million. What size checks will you be writing? Are you looking to take bigger positions or do you have a more diverse approach?
ND: We’re looking at writing $500,000 to $1 million checks. We look for 7.5% to 10% ownership, and we’re open to co-leading, but we prefer to lead. We’ve been leading rounds already with this with this fund. We’ll likely do about 30 companies from the fund, backing a mix of pre-seed and seed-stage startups, with reserves for follow-on funding.
SL: We’ve actually done 11 investments; we started investing after the first close.
TC: You’ve invested in nearly 80 startups over the years. What has been your biggest investment to date?
ND: Planet Forward, which was founded by Zume cofounder Julia Collins.
TC: Have you — or would you — ever form a special purpose vehicle to invest more in a startup than your fund enables?
SL: We didn’t do it for our last funds, but we did our first SPV for this fund, in a company called Starface, which is skincare company that takes a very different approach to the acne problem. You’ve probably seen the gold stars [that its customers apply to their pimples] on social media. They’ve been growing very fast and did a Series A recently and we took part of it ourselves but we also opened an SPV for one of our LPs.
TC: What themes interest you right now?
SL: We’ve done a lot of investing thus far in health and well being. That’s our largest category. The second is the future of work and education; the third is climate-friendly commerce; and the fourth is really underestimated, or emerging consumers. In all of those areas, we have actually found there are many, many, many female founders who are active and building great companies
ND: Also, we [have historically] described ourselves as a consumer fund, but we are doing more B2B in this fund, where we think that the B2B approach could solve a bigger consumer problem, including for many millions of consumers.
TC: What’s an example of what you mean?
SL: Grayce, which is doing eldercare and actually selling to employers as an employee benefit. If you look at the cost to companies because of the number of hours and days that many people invest in taking care of an aging parent or trying to figure out what the next step is for them [you appreciate the need for this kind of service]. This platform not only allows you to connect with someone who can help you plan but also points you to the resources you need, including financial resources, legal resources, and living resources.
ND: Another is Full Harvest, a marketplace and logistics platform that takes all the excess food on a farm that doesn’t meet cosmetic standards and resells it to juice and salad makers and other food brands and manufacturers.
TC: You mentioned Julia Collins. Do you know how many first-time founders you’ve backed versus repeat entrepreneurs?
ND: There’s a mix. We don’t have a preference.
TC: Do you have a geographic focus?
SL: I would say, New York City is definitely our primary source for for companies for a lot of reasons, including that there’s a very rich and active female founder community here. This is the headquarters for many different kinds of industries, so you get a range of talent here. But we’ve also invested in San Francisco companies, companies in Los Angeles, in Milwaukee, in San Diego. [We see] opportunity in at least a dozen cities across the country.
TC Have have your syndicate partners changed over time, if at all?
ND: That’s been one of the most exciting things of the past few years. We love to partner with women GPs — folks like Kara Norton of Upfront Ventures and Jess Lee of Sequoia. There is a great spiderweb of women GPs emerging at these top venture funds who can create these strong relationships and are ultimately leads for follow-on rounds.
TC: Do think women-led teams are receiving the valuations they would if they were all-male teams? I was horrified to read earlier today that the wage gap between men and women has improved by 8 cents over the last 25 years.
SL: I can’t speak authoritatively about whether women are getting lower valuations across the board. We certainly know that they are getting a vastly lower percentage of the venture capital investment. If you look at the stats about the amount of funding for women in 2020 versus men, it’s definitely disturbing and shows the vast majority of venture capital is still going to all all male teams. I think some of that is due to the megarounds that we’ve seen, but not enough of it to make a significant difference.
ND: I think it was Harvard Business Review that did some really interesting research at a [2017] TechCrunch Disrupt event that overwhelmingly suggested that men are judged on their potential and women are often judged on their current expertise, and we [might] surmise that [these factors] could have something to do with valuations.
It’s why we’re leading rounds. We see the opportunities that these female-led teams are going after — and we have the opportunity to assess them on their exact merits.
Tech executives face Congress, Spotify gets a redesign and Snapchat is developing a new Remix feature. This is your Daily Crunch for March 25, 2021.
The big story: Zuckerberg defends Facebook over role in Capitol attack
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Google’s Sundar Pichai appeared at a hearing today with the House Energy and Commerce Committee on the theme of misinformation, particularly the role that their platforms may have played in the Capitol attack by allowing lies and extremism to spread.
In his opening statement, Zuckerberg advocated for reforms to Section 230 and said that Facebook “did our part” to protect last year’s presidential election, putting the blame for the Capitol riots squarely on former President Donald Trump.
Pressed by Rep. Mike Doyle (D-PA) on whether Facebook bears some responsibility, Zuckerberg replied, “I think the responsibility lies with the people who took the actions to break the law and do the insurrection. Secondarily, also with the people who spread that content, including the president but others as well, with repeated rhetoric over time, saying that the election was rigged and encouraging people to organize, I think that those people bear the primary responsibility as well.”
The tech giants
Spotify rolls out redesigned desktop and web apps — Overall, the update gives the Spotify app a more streamlined, less cluttered look and feel.
Snapchat is developing its own take on TikTok Duets with a new ‘Remix’ feature — This feature will allow users to create new content using their friends’ Snaps.
Startups, funding and venture capital
PPRO extends latest round to $270M, adding JPMorgan and Eldridge to grow its localized payments platform — PPRO’s core product is a set of APIs that e-commerce companies can integrate into their check-outs to accept payments in whatever local methods and currencies consumers prefer.
Notarize raises $130M, tripling valuation on the back of 600% YoY revenue growth — When the world shifted toward virtual a year ago, one service in particular saw heated demand: remote online notarization.
Everlywell acquires two healthcare companies and forms parent Everly Health — The new parent entity will now offer services including at-home lab testing kits and education, population-scale testing through a U.S.-wide clinician network, telehealth and a payer-supported/enterprise self-collected lab test.
Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch
Automakers, suppliers and startups see growing market for in-vehicle AR/VR applications — A new battle for market share is emerging inside vehicles.
How VC and private equity funds can launch portfolio-acceleration platforms — Almost every private equity and venture capital investor now advertises that they have a platform to support their portfolio companies.
Will fading YOLO sentiment impact Robinhood, Coinbase and other trading platforms? — What happens to hot fintech startups that have benefited from a rise in consumer trading activity if regular folks lose interest in financial wagers?
(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)
Everything else
FatFace tells customers to keep its data breach ‘strictly private’ — Clothing giant FatFace had a data breach, but it doesn’t want you to tell anyone about it.
EV makers oppose delay to automotive emissions penalty increase — Electric vehicle manufacturers are pushing back against a decision to delay penalty increases for automakers who fail to meet fuel efficiency standards.
New York moves to legalize recreational marijuana — New York State officials struck a deal with Gov. Andrew Cuomo to allow recreational use of cannabis.
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