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We check out Amazon’s new smart home device, Airbnb adds flexible search and Hopin is raising even more money. This is your Daily Crunch for February 24, 2021.
The big story: We review the Amazon Echo Show 10
Brian Heater spent some time with Amazon’s new smart home device, paying particular attention to the screen that rotates based on the user’s location. He reports that the screen works smoothly and silently, but also feels “unnecessary,” and in some cases “downright unnerving” (especially from a privacy perspective).
Ultimately, Brian concludes that the $249 device is “a well-constructed, nice addition to the Show family and one I don’t mind moving around the old-fashioned way.”
The tech giants
Airbnb plans for a new kind of travel post-COVID with flexible search — The feature will allow users to forgo putting in exact dates when they look to book lodging on the platform.
YouTube to launch parental control features for families with tweens and teens — YouTube announced a new experience for teens and tweens who are now too old for the schoolager-focused YouTube Kids app, but who may not be ready to explore all of YouTube.
Google Cloud puts its Kubernetes Engine on autopilot — This new mode turns over the management of much of the day-to-day operations of a container cluster to Google’s own engineers and automated tools.
Startups, funding and venture capital
VCs are chasing Hopin upwards of $5-6B valuation — According to multiple sources who spoke with TechCrunch, the company may be nearing the end of a fundraise in which it’s seeking to raise roughly $400 million.
Primary Venture Partners raises $150M third fund to back NYC startups — The firm’s portfolio includes Jet.com (acquired by Walmart for $3.3 billion), Mirror (acquired by Lululemon for $500 million) and Latch (which is planning to go public via SPAC).
Joby Aviation takes flight into the public markets via a SPAC merger — Joby has spent more than a decade developing an all-electric, vertical take-off and landing passenger aircraft.
Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch
Four essential truths about venture investing — Observations from Alex Iskold of 2048 Ventures.
Dear Sophie: Which immigration options are the fastest? — The latest edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.
Can solid state batteries power up for the next generation of EVs? — For the last decade, developers of solid state battery systems have promised products that are vastly safer, lighter and more powerful.
(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)
Everything else
Europe kicks off bid to find a route to ‘better’ gig work — The European Union has kicked off the first stage of a consultation process involving gig platforms and workers.
The Equity podcast is growing — More Equity!
Techstars’ Neal Sáles-Griffin will join us at TechCrunch Early Stage 2021 to talk accelerators — Neal has seen this industry from just about every angle — as a teacher, advisor, investor and repeat co-founder.
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/24/daily-crunch-we-review-the-amazon-echo-show-10/
Through all of the last year’s lockdowns, venue closures, and other social distancing measures that governments have enacted and people have followed to slow the spread of Covid-19, shopping — and specifically e-commerce — has remained a consistent and hugely important service. It’s not just something that we had to do; it’s been an important lifeline for many of us at a time when so little else has felt normal. Today, one of the startups that saw a big lift in its service as a result of that trend is announcing a major fundraise to fuel its growth.
Wallapop, a virtual marketplace based out of Barcelona, Spain that lets people resell their used items, or sell items like crafts that they make themselves, has raised €157 million ($191 million at current rates), money that it will use to continue growing the infrastructure that underpins its service, so that it can expand the number of people that use it.
Wallapop has confirmed that the funding is coming at a valuation of €690 million ($840 million) — a significant jump on the $570 million valuations sources close to the company gave us in 2016.
The funding is being led by Korelya Capital, a French VC fund backed by Korea’s Naver, with Accel, Insight Partners, 14W, GP Bullhound and Northzone — all previous backers of Wallapop — also participating.
The company currently has 15 million users — about half of Spain’s internet population, CEO Rob Cassedy pointed out to us in an interview earlier today, and has maintained a decent number-four ranking among Spain’s shopping apps, according to figures from App Annie.
The startup has also recently been building out shipping services, called Envios, to help people get the items they are selling to the buyers, which has expanded the range from local sales to those that can be made across the country. About 20% of goods go through Envios now, Cassedy said, and the plan is to continue doubling down on that and related services.
Naver itself is a strong player in e-commerce and apps — it’s the company behind Asian messaging giant Line, among other digital properties — and so this is in part a strategic investment. Wallapop will be leaning on Naver and its technology in its own R&D, and on Naver’s side it will give the company a foothold in the European market at a time when it has been sharpening its strategy in e-commerce.
The funding is an interesting turn for a company that has seen some notable fits and starts. Founded in 2013 in Spain, it quickly shot to the top of the charts in a market that has traditionally been slow to embrace e-commerce over more traditional brick-and-mortar retail.
By 2016, Wallapop was merging with a rival, LetGo, as part of a bigger strategy to crack the U.S. market (with more capital in tow).
But by 2018, that plan was quietly shelved, with Wallapop quietly selling its stake in the LetGo venture for $189 million. (LetGo raised $500 million more on its own around that time, but its fate was not to remain independent: it was eventually acquired by yet another competitor in the virtual classifieds space, OfferUp, in 2020, for an undisclosed sum.)
Wallapop has for the last two years focused mainly on growing in Spain rather than running after business further afield, and rather than growing the range of goods that it might sell on its platform — it doesn’t sell food, nor work with retailers in an Amazon-style marketplace play, nor does it have plans to do anything like move into video or selling other kinds of digital services — it has honed in specifically on trying to improve the experience that it does offer to users.
“I spent 12 years at eBay and saw that transition it made to new goods from used goods,” said Cassedy. “Let’s just say it wasn’t the direction I thought we should take for Wallapop. We are laser focused on unique goods, with the vast majority of that second hand with some artisan products. It is very different from big box.”
Wallapop’s growth in the past year isare the result of some specific trends in the market that were in part fuelled by the Covid-19 pandemic.
People spending more time in their homes have been focused on clearing out space and getting rid of things. Others are keen to buy new items now that they are spending more time at home, but want to spend less on them. In both cases, there has been a push for more sustainability, with people putting less waste into the world by recycling and upcycling goods instead.
At the same time, Facebook hasn’t really made big inroads with its Marketplace in the country, and Amazon has also not appeared as a threat to Wallapop, Cassedy noted.
All of these have had a huge impact on Wallapop’s business, but it wasn’t always this way. Cassedy said that the first lockdown in Spain saw business plummet, as people were restricted to leave their homes.
“It was a rollercoaster for us,” he said. “We entered the year with incredible momentum, very strong.”
He noted that the drop started in March, when “not only did it become not okay to leave house and trade locally but the post office stopped delivering parcels. Our business went off a cliff in March and April.”
Then when the restrictions were lifted in May, things started to bounce back than ever before, nearly overnight, he said. “The economic uncertainty caused people to seek out more value, better deals, spending less money, and yes they were clearing out closets. We saw numbers bounce back 40-50% growth year-on-year in June.”
The big question was whether that growth was a blip or there to say. He said it has continued into 2021 so far. “It’s a validation of what we see as long term trends driving the business.”
“The global demand for C2C and resale platforms is growing with renewed commitment in sustainable consumption, especially by younger millennials and Gen Z,” noted
Seong-sook HAN, CEO of NAVER Corp., in a statement. “We agree with Wallapop’s philosophy of conscious consumption and are enthused to support their growth with our technology and develop international synergies.”
“Our economies are switching towards a more sustainable development model; after investing in Vestiaire Collective last year, wallapop is Korelya’s second investment in the circular economy, while COVID-19 is only strengthening that trend. It is Korelya’s mission to back tomorrow’s European tech champions and we believe that NAVER has a proven tech and product edge that will help the company reinforce its leading position in Europe,” added Fleur Pellerin, CEO of Korelya Capital.
The pitch deck is just one aspect of the broader fundraising process, but for founders aiming to entice investors, it’s the best way to communicate their startup’s progress and potential.
The decisions founders make regarding what to include on those few slides can be the difference between a quick pass or a first check. As the venture capital market continues to boil over and investors find themselves reviewing more deals remotely across different stages, there’s added need to drill down into the basics for their first look inside the company.
To get an insider’s look into the process, I chatted with Pilot CEO Waseem Daher. Last month, his bookkeeping and financial tools startup wrapped a $60 million Series C round led by Sequoia, bringing the company’s total funding to just north of $118 million. We discussed the different approaches he has taken to crafting the company’s pitch deck to showcase what he knew potential investors were most curious in, something that shifted over time as the company hit new milestones.
Daher took me on a tour of his company’s Series C pitch deck (embedded below) and described the decisions he and his team spent the most time considering as they crafted the deck. During the discussion, he broke down some of the key questions investors ask at each stage and touched on many of the proof points that VCs have started paying more attention to.
“If the Series A was about, ‘Do you have the right ingredients to make this work?’ then the Series B is about, ‘Is this actually working?'”
“If the Series A was about, ‘Do you have the right ingredients to make this work?’ then the Series B is about, ‘Is this actually working?'” Daher tells TechCrunch. “And then the Series C is more, ‘Well, show me that the core business is really working and that you have unlocked real drivers to allow the business to continue growing.'”
What are investors looking for?
Seed
- Key investor question: Is there significant potential?
- Proof points to consider: Total addressable market (TAM), team.
Series A
- Key investor question: Is there proof of product-market fit?
- Additional proof points to consider: Annual recurring revenues (ARR), cash burn.
Series B
- Key investor question: Is the flywheel working? Will you be the market winner?
- Additional proof points to consider: ARR growth, net retention, market share.
Series C/D
- Key investor question: Are the unit economics compelling?
- Additional proof points to consider: Gross margin, lifetime value (LTV), Customer acquisition costs (CAC).
IPO
- Key investor question: Will the business generate significant cash flow?
- Additional proof points to consider: Free cash flow (FCF), FCF margin, average selling price (ASP) growth, category expansion, earnings per share (EPS).
Check out the full pitch deck below from Pilot’s most recent raise (with illustrative data swapped for actual financial metrics).
A little over two years after ANGI Homeservices acquired his startup Handy, Oisin Hanrahan is becoming CEO of the combined organization and joining its board of directors.
ANGI is a publicly-traded subsidiary of IAC, formed from the merger of Angie’s List and HomeAdvisor. In addition to the Angie’s List, HomeAdvisor and Handy brands, the company also operates Fixd Repair, HomeStars, MyHammer, MyBuilder, Instapro, Travaux and Werkspot (most of those are outside the United States).
The company says that nearly 250,000 home service professionals are active across its platforms in a given year, with more than 30 million projects facilitated annually. For the fourth quarter of 2020, it reported revenue of $359 million (up 12% year-over-year) and a net loss of $14.5 million.
Hanrahan joined the company with the acquisition of Handy in October 2018, becoming ANGI’s chief product officer the next year.
“I’m really excited for the opportunity to lead ANGI at this inflection point,” Hanrahan said in a statement. “As we’ve all spent extra time at home over the last year it’s clearer than ever how important our physical space is in our daily lives, and ANGI’s mission to help people love where they live is more relevant than ever. I’m grateful to the Board and energized to work with our talented team to help ANGI become the home for everything home.”
ANGI’s previous CEO, Brandon Ridenour, is stepping down from the role. In the announcement, IAC CEO Joey Levin thanked Ridenour “for his instrumental role in building ANGI Homeservices over the last decade” while praising Hanrahan as “an exceptional product visionary.”
In addition, the company announced appointments to two new positions, with Bryan Ellis, becoming Chief Revenue Officer – Marketplace (he’ll oversee the company’s leads and advertising products) and Handy co-founder Umang Dua becoming Chief Revenue Officer — ANGI Services (where he’ll be in charge of ANGI’s pre-priced product).
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/24/oisin-hanrahan-angi-homeservices-ceo/
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
This is our first-ever Wednesday episode. If you want to learn more about the latest edition of the podcast, head here for more. This week we talked about space, an increasingly active part of the global economy, and a place where we’re seeing more and more young tech companies place their focus.
We were lucky to have TechCrunch’s Darrell Etherington join us for the show. He’s our resident expert, so we had to have him on to chat about the space startup ecosystem. Here’s the rundown:
- SpaceX has raised a bunch more money, at a far higher valuation. We chat about why it didn’t raise more, and how much capital there is available for the famous rocket company.
- Starlink came up as well, as the satellite array just put another 60 units into orbit. What is it good for? We have a few ideas.
- The second crew member of first all-civilian SpaceX mission revealed, and of course there is an IPO and startup angle involved.
- Which brought us to a side conversation on which one of us are most interested in going to space commercially. It’s the raised hands feature no one asked for, but take your guesses on who wants to go first and see if you’re right.
- Regardless, Axiom Space raises $130 million for its commercial space station ambitions
- And then there was the Astra SPAC. You can read its deck here. What matters is that we get a look into how fast it plans to ramp future launches. And the answer is fast.
As we get more comfortable in our Wednesday episodes, we’ll tinker with the format and the like. As we do, we’re always taking feedback at equitypod@techcrunch.com, or over on Twitter. Hit us up, we’re having a lot of fun but are always looking for ways to sharpen the show!
Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST, Wednesday, and Friday morning at 7:00 a.m. PST, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/24/spacex-is-really-just-spac-and-an-ex/
