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We love nothing more than highlighting notable early-stage startups, and you’ll find plenty of them in the spotlight on March 3 at TC Sessions: Justice 2021, a virtual conference exploring diversity, inclusion and the human labor that powers tech. You do not want to miss meeting and learning more about these impressive early-stage founders — all participants in the TC Include Program.
Not familiar with TC Include? TechCrunch partners with various founder organizations who act as advisors and nominate promising early-stage founders to participate in the program. In a collective collaboration with VC organizations like Kleiner Perkins, Salesforce Ventures and Initialized Capital and the founder organizations, TC Include provides educational resources and mentorship over the course of the year to help program participants develop and succeed.
You’ll have plenty of opportunity to meet and network with TC Include founders, and you won’t want to miss their live pitch feedback session. Each TC Include founder gets a 60-second pitch to a TechCrunch staffer. It’s a great opportunity to learn how to structure your pitch and pick up a few tips and strategies. Who knows? The pitch you improve could be your own.
We’ve already announced the TC Include startups affiliated with partner organizations Black Female Founders (here) and the Female Founder Alliance (here). Today, we’re thrilled to share with you just some of the early-stage founders affiliated with StartOut and the LatinX Startup Alliance.
StartOut
Endo Industries: Endo Industries sells cannabis plants and, through collaboration with farmers, is building a platform that helps operators scale brands grounded in equity, diversity and wellness. Founded by Nancy Do.
Kyndoo: Kyndoo is a data platform for solving social media’s biggest problems — fraud, attribution and content safety. It helps brands avoid working with #FakeFamous and helps them find companies that share their mission and values. Founded by Kelly McDonald.
Thimble: Thimble is a monthly subscription service that teaches kids robotics and coding skills through a curated STEM curriculum, robotics and coding kits and live, build-along classes. Founded by Oscar Pedroso.
LatinX Startup Alliance
Hoy Health: Hoy Health, a digital health company with a bilingual platform, provides access to primary care products and services, at low cost, to underserved communities. Founded by Mario Anglada.
Caribu: Caribu helps kids have virtual playdates with family and friends by playing games, reading and coloring together in an interactive video-call. Founded by Max Tuchman.
Pandocap.co: Pandocap is a financial media company built around the capital markets. Bilingual content focuses on easy-to-understand information and highlights diverse voices through different strategies. Founded by Laura Moreno.
TC Sessions: Justice 2021 takes place on March 3. Check out the event agenda, buy your pass today, and discover the opportunities that come from building a more diverse, inclusive and just industry.
Virtual events platform Hopin is hopin’ for a mega valuation.
According to multiple sources who spoke with TechCrunch, the company, which was founded in mid-2019, is running around the fundraise circuit and perhaps nearing the end of a fundraise in which it is looking to raise roughly $400 million at a pre-money valuation of $5 billion for its Series C. Two sources implied that the valuation could reach as high as $6 billion, but with greater dilution based on some offered terms the company has received. The deal is in flux, and both the round size and valuation are subject to change.
One source told TechCrunch that the company’s ARR has grown to $60 million, implying a valuation multiple of 80-100x if the valuation we’re hearing pans out. That sort of multiple wouldn’t be out of line with other major fundraises for star companies with SaaS-based business models.
Hopin has been on a fundraise tear in recent months. The company raised $125 million at a $2.125 billion valuation late last year for its Series B, which came just a few months after it raised a Series A of $40 million over the summer and a $6.5 million seed round last winter. All told, the roughly 20-month-old company has raised a known $171.4 million in VC according to Crunchbase.
When we last reported on the company, Hopin’s ARR had gone from $0 to $20 million, while its overall userbase had grown from essentially zero to 3.5 million users in November. The company reported then that it had 50,000 groups using its platform.
Hopin’s platform is designed to translate the in-person events experience into a virtual one, providing tools to recreate the experience of walking exhibition floors, networking one-on-one and spontaneously joining fireside chats and panels. It’s become a darling in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has seen most business and educational conferences canceled in the midst of mass restrictions on domestic and international travel worldwide.
It’s probably also useful to note that our business team uses Hopin to run all of TechCrunch’s editorial events, including Disrupt, Early Stage, Extra Crunch Live and next week’s TechCrunch Sessions: Justice 2021 event (these software selections and their costs are — thankfully — outside the purview of our editorial team).
Hopin may be the mega-leader of the virtual events space right now, but it isn’t the only startup trying to take on this suddenly vital industry. Run The World raised capital last year, Welcome wants to be the ‘Ritz-Carlton for event platforms,’ Spotify is getting into the business, Clubhouse is arguably a contender here, InEvent raised a seed earlier this month and Hubilo is another entrant which nabbed a check from Lightspeed a few months ago. Plus, quite literally dozens of other startups have either started in the space or are pivoting toward it.
We have reached out to Hopin for comment.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/24/vcs-are-chasing-hopin-upwards-of-5-6b-valuation/
SpaceX’s first all-civilian human spaceflight mission, which will carry four passengers to orbit using a Crew Dragon capsule later this year if all goes to plan, will include one passenger selected by a panel of judges weighing the submissions of entrepreneurs. The panel will include Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Fast Company Editor-in-Chief Stephanie Mehta, YouTuber Mark Rober and Bar Rescue TV host Jon Taffer. It may seem like an eclectic bunch, but there is some reason to the madness.
This seat is one of four on the ride – the first belongs to contest and mission sponsor Jared Isaacman, the founder of Shift4 Payments and a billionaire who has opted to spend a not insignificant chunk of money funding the flight. The second, Isaacman revealed earlier this week, will go to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital employee and cancer survivor Hayley Arceneaux.
That leaves two more seats, and they’re being decided by two separate contests. One is open to anyone who is a U.S. citizen and who makes a donation to St. Jude via the ongoing charitable contribution drive. The other will be decided by this panel of judges, and will be chosen from a pool of applicants who have build stores on Shift4’s Shift4Shop e-commerce platform.
That’s right: This absurdly expensive and pioneering mission to space is also a growth marketing campaign for Isaacman’s Shopify competitor. But to be fair, the store of the winning entrant doesn’t have to be news – existing customers can also apply and are eligible.
The stated criteria for deciding the winner is “a business owner or entrepreneur the exhibits ingenuity, innovation and determination” so in other words it could be just about anybody. I’m extremely curious to see what Benioff, Mehta, Rober (also a former NASA JPL engineer in addition to a YouTuber) and Taffer come up with between them as a winner.
The Inspiration4 mission is currently set to fly in the fourth quarter of 2021, and mission specifics including total duration and target orbit are yet to be determined.
As energy grids transition away from fossil fuels and towards the use of zero emission sources of power from primarily renewable energy sources, they’re going to need an ability to store and then use the massive amounts of energy that’s only generated intermittently by the sun and wind.
That’s why technologies coming from companies like Malta, an energy storage technology developer that just raised $50 million in new financing, are attracting attention and venture capital investment.
Malta spun out from the special projects group at Google’s parent company Alphabet and relies on some very old technologies combined in a novel way to provide long duration energy storage that can be discharged during times of peaking demand — like the conditions that effected Texas’ power grid last week.
The company’s latest round of funding was led by the Swiss natural gas, methanol, and agricultural conglomerate Proman; with participation from previous investors Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the nearly ubiquitous backer of renewable energy and sustainable startups, and Alfa Laval, which makes industrial filters and heat exchangers. Dustin Moskovitz, a co-founder of Facebook and the chief executive and co-founder of Asana, also participated in the round.
Heat exchangers are central to Malta’s approach, which is based on research from the Nobel Prize winning Stanford University physics professor, Robert Laughlin. In a 2017 paper, Laughlin proposed a system that used a thermal heat-pump tapping super-cold cryogenic storage fluids and superheated molten salt to store energy.
Building on that initial design, engineers at Alphabet’s moonshot factory, X, began developing a modified version of the designs Laughlin proposed.
That modified design is what’s now being developed by Malta, which spun out from X in 2018.
Ramya Swaminathan, Malta’s chief executive officer, who previously worked for the renewable energy project developer Rye Development, said that the current Malta system can store and dispatch energy with efficiency rates of around 60%. That’s… not great, but Swaminathan said that the declining costs of renewable power means that efficiency is less important as prices continue to come down the cost curve. “In practice we are heading towards a system where electricity is priced close to zero,” Swaminathan said. Indeed, as some grids employ negative pricing models when there’s a glut of electricity generated by wind and solar power, Malta’s tech becomes more appealing she said.
Malta is far from the only company developing long-duration storage to solve the variable power production problem caused by the build out of renewable energy. Fortune had a whole dang article (which is actually something I’d wanted to write) listing the multiple companies that are tackling the energy storage dilemma.
They include companies like Energy Vault and Advanced Rail Energy Storage North America, which are both trying to use mechanical energy for long storage. In Energy Vault’s case that means using renewable power to lift huge one ton blocks of cement that can then be dropped to unleash that stored energy as power. ARES North America uses a similar concept, but instead of big honkin bricks, the company has trains that it moves to store and discharge energy.
Closer to Malta’s Cambridge, Mass. base of operations, a company called Form Energy is working on… something… that would compete with Malta’s energy storage system. That business was launched by some energy storage superstars, who previously had stints at companies like Tesla, the failed big battery tech developer Aquion, and A123 Systems (a granddaddy of the lithium ion battery revolution).
Malta’s system is able to discharge 100 megawatts over ten hours, which is equivalent to one gigawatt hour of production at a price tag that’s about price competitive with lithium ion batteries, according to Swaminathan.
The company is currently working on its first commercial scale plant, which it expects to commission in the 2024 or 2025 timeframe.
Meanwhile it’s competitors are already supplying power from pretty massive storage projects. Energy Vault has had a demonstration unit connected to the Swiss national utility grid that can discharge roughly 35 megawatt hours onto the grid, according to the company.
Companies like Proman like Malta because it can provide a ready customer for its chemicals and natural gas.
“There is an exponential global need for long-duration, low-cost energy storage solutions, and we are excited to work with the Malta team and our new partners to progress Malta’s highly scalable and technically robust solution,” said David Cassidy, Chief Executive of Proman, in a statement. “Alongside our investment, Proman will bring complementary design, engineering and construction expertise to the Malta PHES technology as we begin work with Malta on a commercial scale plant.”
As far as fundraising goes, Berkshire Grey is in pretty good shape. When I visited its Massachusetts headquarters last year, following a massive $263 million Series B, the company discussed some pretty aggressive growth plans. Mind you, that was before the pandemic has really touched down in the U.S. in a meaningful way.
If anything, Covid-19 has accelerated interest in automation, as companies look to safeguard themselves from the inevitable effects of future pandemics. Today, Berkshire Gray announced its intention to become the latest tech company to go public by way of SPAC. The deal, which finds its merging with Revolution Acceleration Acquisition, could value the company at up to $2.7 billion.
In a release tied to the news, BG cites a 5% current warehouse automation figure – a number I’ve heard tossed around a lot in relation to these deals. It certainly points big potential for growth among retailers looking to streamline fulfillment, logistics and the like. For many, it’s as simple as finding a way to stay competitive with the likes of Amazon, which has massively bolstered its own robotics efforts through acquisitions like Kiva Systems.
BG offers a kind of ground-up solution for close to full automation. The technology separates it from more plug and play automation solutions like Locus and Fetch Robotics. Their offerings are more focused on automating companies faster and more cheaply. BG’s ecosystem includes a variety of different robotics, including picking, gripping and image sensing, with north of 300 patents in the space.
“Consumer expectations have changed, putting more pressure on supply chain operations to get the right goods to the right places at the right times, as efficiently as possible,” CEO Tom Wagner said in a release tied to the news. “Over the last 12 months the pandemic amplified the already high pressure to transform, so today it is no longer a question of if companies might transform but how quickly. We are incredibly excited about this transaction, which will enable Berkshire Grey to accelerate growth and provide new and existing customers with our leading robotics solutions.”
The deal would bring up up to $413 million in cash for the company. It says it plans to use the funding to address a backlog of customers and build out an international presence. It’s expected to close in Q2.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/24/robotics-company-berkshire-grey-to-go-public-via-spac/
