Companies

Food security is one of the grand problems facing the planet this century. The UN has estimated that food supplies need to increase by 50 percent to cover the population growth expected over the coming decades, while climate change is expected to cut crop yields by a quarter. Nearly a billion people today lack sufficient food.

Those are raw statistics, but Justin Kolbeck saw them viscerally personified every day as a U.S. diplomat in Afghanistan, where food security is a perennial concern. “…Things were so bad that people were smuggling meat over the Pakistan border,” he said, despite the incredible danger along that heavily guarded dividing line. Kolbeck eventually returned to the U.S., where he met Arye Elfenbeim, who was studying for an MD/PhD in cardiology.

Elfenbeim’s research looked at how the heart could regrow functional muscle tissue lost in a heart attack. As he worked on his residency though, he realized that some of the fields he was working on, including tissue engineering, stem cell biology, and cell development could intersect and “not just solve heart problems but could feed the world.”

Together, the two co-founded Wild Type, which netted a $3.5 million seed round led by Spark Capital, with participation from Root Ventures, Mission Bay Capital, and a group of angels. The name comes from the wild type term in biology, which means that something exists naturally, but also has the connotation of animals roaming outside.

Kolbeck and Elfenbeim’s mission is to develop a platform and set of technologies that would allow any meat to be cultured in the lab using well-defined procedures. The two are stealthy around their technology, which is still in development. But the essential concept is to multiply basic animal cells in the lab and effectively culture meat. This means that the meat is fundamentally “meat,” and not a meat substitute using plant cells like Impossible Foods’ Impossible Burger.

Rather than starting from scratch for every type of protein, the technology could apply across all kinds of different animal species using the evolutionary heritage common to all of them. “We didn’t want to build a tool that could just be used for beef, or a specific type of chicken, or a specific fish,” Kolbeck explained.

The synergy of different scientific disciplines has been enticing to scientists according to Elfenbeim. “Scientists in general and who we spoke to about this idea were really fascinated that emerging technologies could be applied to something so different from the biomedical sciences,” he said.

Although the food is being developed in the lab, it is being tested regularly by chefs. “We wanted to make sure we were building something that people would love, so from day one we reached out to friends in the food business,” Kolbeck said. Wild Type isn’t just focused on the taste and texture of the meat, but is also investigating whether it could grow meat in a certain way that would make it easier to use in a kitchen.

Wild Type’s first meat is salmon. Phase one is to develop a minced salmon meat that could be used in say a spicy salmon sushi roll, where the meat is mixed with sauce and smaller quantities are needed. From there, the company is targeting lox for bagels, and eventually, salmon filets.

Spark Capital investor John Melas-Kyriazi led the round and will be joining the company’s board. “This is an area we have been interested in for a long time at Spark: What is the protein source that is going to feed the world over the next 50 to 100 years,” he asked. He loved Wild Type’s product focus, of “actually creating a product that people want that stands for delicious food and not for something else.” He invested after trying a helping of Wild Type’s food during due diligence.

Wild Type hopes to use the seed round to invest in scaling up its cellular growth infrastructure, lowering the cost of its meat while also increasing its manufacturing capability. The company has a team of five today.

from TechCrunch

DocuSign has unveiled its IPO filing, confirming our scoop from last week. 

The company had previously filed confidentially and the timing of the filing revelation implies that DocuSign is hoping to go public in late April.

Founded in 2003, the San Francisco-based e-signature company has been an anticipated IPO for a while. It’s raised over $500 million over the past 15 years and has been valued as high as $3 billion. 

The filing gives us a first glimpse at the company’s financials.

Last year saw $381.5 million in revenue, up from $250.5 million the year before. Losses for last year were $115.4 million in revenue, down from $122.6 million for 2016.

“We have a history of operating losses and may not achieve or sustain profitability in the future,” the company warned in the requisite “risk factors” section of the prospectus.

The filing reveals that Sigma Partners is the largest shareholder, owning 12.9% of the company. Ignition Partners owns 11.7% and Frazier Technology Ventures owns 7.2%.

DocuSign, which competes with HelloSign and Adobe Sign, among others, has worked to get the world’s businesses to sign documents online. The group has large clients like T-Mobile, Salesforce, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America.

Real estate, financial services, insurance and healthcare are listed on its site as targeted industries. The company says legal, sales and human resource departments frequently use DocuSign to send and sign documents. It has a tiered business model, with corporations paying more for added services.

DocuSign also offers services for small businesses and individuals.

Early last year, Dan Springer took over as CEO, after running Responsys, which went public and then was bought by Oracle for $1.5 billion.

Chairman Keith Krach had been running the company since 2011. Krach was previously CEO of Ariba, which was acquired by SAP for $4.3 billion.

from TechCrunch

LetsGetChecked, an Irish startup that offers a health test kit service so that you can take various common laboratory tests from the comfort of your home, has picked up $12 million in Series A funding.

Leading the round is Optum Ventures, the independent venture fund of health services provider Optum, and Qiming Venture Partners, the Chinese VC firm.

The funding will be used to scale the company, including growing the LetsGetChecked full clinical support team. In addition, the health tech startup plans to further invest in its technology platform that links customers to laboratories.

Founded in 2014 by Peter Foley, LetsGetChecked has set out to build a technology and logistics platform to bridge the gap between traditional lab testing and consumers. The startup’s home testing kits span a number of categories including “lifestyle testing,” cancer screening, sexual health testing, fertility, and hormone testing.

“Our aim is to make lab testing better, more convenient and patient led,” Foley tells me. “Traditionally, you need to attend a doctor’s office to obtain a lab test. The physician will determine what test is right for you, complete a paper requisition form, collect your sample and send it off to the lab for analysis. You will wait for a period of time to hear back from your physician and may never see the results. This is a slow process and far from convenient”.

Instead, LetsGetChecked mirrors the process that happens in a doctor’s office but in a way that Foley claims puts the patient at the center and makes it more convenient. “We eliminate the middleman and link customers directly to labs enabling them to better manage and control their personal health,” Foley says.

First you decide which tests or groups of tests you wish to access based on hereditary risk, curiosity or simply for health monitoring purposes. You then order the test via LetsGetChecked, which will be authorised by a medical board certified LetsGetChecked physician. A test kit is then dispatched from a LetsGetChecked accredited facility direct to your home. It is also worth noting that the kits are anonymised, containing just a barcode.

Once the test kit arrives, you’re responsible for collecting your own sample, whether that be finger prick, stool (for colorectal cancer), or a swab. You then send the sample to LetsGetChecked and can track progress via the app ‘dashboard’ at any stage during the process or request a call from the clinical team. When the lab processes the sample, the corresponding result will be reviewed by a LetsGetChecked physician and the company’s nursing support team.

“For positive or out of range results, patients will get a call from the team to discuss treatment options,” says Foley. “Only after a consultation will the results be released to the patient’s dashboard where the customer can track and monitor their health over time”.

The tests themselves range hugely in cost, from £39 for a cortisol test, £69 for a prostate cancer test, all the way up to £500 for a BRCA check (why is it that breast cancer tests are 7 times more expensive than testing for prostate cancer). Despite the extra convenience that a service like LetsGetChecked affords, the price of each test soon adds up and begs the question as to why you wouldn’t just visit your GP and request the same tests for free through the NHS.

Meanwhile, the LetsGetChecked founder wouldn’t be drawn on who the startup’s direct competitors are — although in the U.K., Thriva is an obvious example — except to say it was focused internally on innovating and building on its technology platform.

“The aim is to make the patient experience more enriched over time and through API integrations provide for a more consolidated and cohesive healthcare engagement,” he says, hinting at future partners as another way to market. No doubt the strategic investment from Optum Ventures will be able to help on that front, too.

from TechCrunch

CardUp founder and CEO Nicki Ramsay (front, second from right) with her team

CardUp, a Singapore-based startup that enables users to make large, recurring payments by credit card even to recipients that don’t accept cards, has raised $2.2 million SGD (about $1.7 million) led by Sequoia India and SeedPlus. This is CardUp’s first institutional investment round and will be used to expand its business serving small- to medium-sized enterprises.

Before launching CardUp in 2015, founder and chief executive officer Nicki Ramsay worked at American Express for seven years, where her last position before leaving was director of international business development in the Asia-Pacific region. Ramsay says she created CardUp to solve challenges for both credit card users and providers.

“In my years spent in the payments industry, we repeatedly set the same goal, which was to increase credit card usage, but a lot of initiatives actually just ended up shifting share from one card issuer to another,” Ramsay told TechCrunch in an email. “CardUp extends the way you can use credit cards, so it really grows the pie. On top of this was my own personal frustration that I was getting limited value from my credit card as I couldn’t use it for any of my big expenses.”

CardUp claims it’s seen an average monthly user growth rate of 41% since launching in late 2016, which it attributes to the fact that it doesn’t require payment recipients to sign up for a CardUp account, too, reducing barriers to adoption. It’s also inked partnerships with major financial institutions like UOB, Citibank, Bank of China and Mastercard to promote its services. Over the last 12 months, more than $55 million SGD in payments were made through CardUp, which it says represents more than one percent of overall credit card spend growth in Singapore from 2016 to 2017.

CardUp positions itself as the middleman between organizations that don’t usually accept credit cards, such as landlords or the government, and people who want to use their cards for recurring payments so they can take advantage of things like reward programs and extended credit terms. The company’s value proposition for small business owners is the ability to use their existing credit card limits to extend business payables up to 55 days, interest-free, which means they have more working capital and cash flow.

Ramsay says the company plans to pursue SMEs in Singapore and other countries as well, targeting the many types of payments that are still usually made by checks or transfers, including payroll expenses, rent and supplier invoices.

“A trillion dollars is still spent by check or bank transfer in Singapore alone, that’s 30 times that of the credit card industry,” she said. “Globally, 124 trillion in business payments is still going via cash, transfer or check, and only 1% of that is currently captured on cards. Right now we’re very encouraged by the strong user adoption we’ve seen, validating the need for our service locally, and are therefore focused on capturing this large local market opportunity, but of course the pain point we are solving for SMEs is universal, and so new markets are on the horizon.”

In a press statement, SeedPlus operating partner Tiang Lim Foo said “SMEs are the main economic driving force in Asia, but are currently underserved. CardUp is bringing an innovative payments and cash management technological solution to help SME owners better manage their cash flow and payments processes. We are truly excited to be working with Nicki and her team to embark on the mission to improve the economic productivity of SMEs.”

from TechCrunch

Oscar Health, the startup run by Josh Kushner (yes, brother of Jared), has raised $165 million at a reported valuation of $3.2 billion, CNBC’s Christina Farr reports. The funding comes from Alphabet’s Capital G investment company and Verily life sciences corporation, Founders Fund, and others.

Oscar’s goal is to outpace existing industry-leading insurers including UnitedHealth and Aetna with an emphasis on mobile technology, including an appointment booking app and other tools for encouraging engaged consumers across its platform.

The startup seemed to be in some potential trouble because of its focus providing an insurance marketplace for Affordable Care Act beneficiaries, but the company has changed its model to one in which customers are charged higher premiums, and with closer relationships with a select group of care providers to help them work out more competitive pricing.

Per CNBC, Oscar Health also left the door open for potential partnerships with one of its newest investors, Verily. The Alphabet-owned health tech company has a number of potential ventures it’s working on, and insurance could feature in a few of those plans so this could turn out to be a very strategic investor partner.

from TechCrunch

Rackspace, which was taken private in a $4.3 billion deal in August 2016 by private equity firm Apollo Global Management, is reportedly in consideration for an IPO by the firm, according to a report by Bloomberg.

The company could have an enterprise value of up to $10 billion, according to the report. Rackspace opted to go private in an increasingly challenging climate that faced competition on all sides from much more well capitalized companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. Despite getting an early start in the cloud hosting space, Rackspace found itself quickly focusing on services in order to continue to gain traction. But under scrutiny from Wall Street as a public company, it’s harder to make that kind of a pivot.

Bloomberg reports that the firm has held early talks with advisers and may seek to begin the process by the end of the year, and these processes can always change over time. Rackspace offers managed services, including data migration, architecture to support on-boarding, and ongoing operational support for companies looking to work with cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. Since going private, Rackspace acquired Datapipe, and in July said it would begin working with Pivotal to continue to expand its managed services business.

Rackspace isn’t alone in companies that have found themselves opting to go private, such as Dell going private in 2013 in a $24.4 billion deal, in order to resolve issues with its business model without the quarter-to-quarter fiduciary obligations to public investors. Former Qualcomm executive chairman Paul Jacobs, too, expressed some interest in buying out Qualcomm in a process that would take the company private. There are different motivations for all these operations, but each has the same underlying principle: make some agile moves under the purview of a public owner rather than release financial statements every three months or so and watch the stock continue to tumble.

Should Rackspace actually end up going public, it would both catch a wave of successful IPOs like Zscalar and Dropbox — though things could definitely change by the end of the year — as well as an increased need by companies to manage their services in cloud environments. So, it makes sense that the private equity firm would consider taking it public to capitalize on Wall Street’s interest at this time in the latter half.

A spokesperson for Rackspace said the company does not comment on rumors or speculation. We also reached out to Apollo Global Management and will update the post when we hear back.

from TechCrunch

LA-based space startup Relativity has raised $35 million in Series B funding, in a new round led by Playground Global, and including existing investors Social Capital, Y Combinator Continuity and Mark Cuban. The funding will help the startup expand its automated, 3D-printing process for manufacturing rockets quickly and with greatly reduced complexity, with the ultimate aim of making it easier and cheaper to send satellites into space.

Relativity’s goal is to introduce a highly automated rocket construction process that relies on nearly 100 percent 3D printed rocket parts, to create custom, mission-specific rockets that can launch payloads the size of small cars, or much larger than those of some of its cubesat-targeting competitors. It boasts a process that has reduced rocket part count from around 100,000 to just 1,000, while also dropping labor and build time, using machine learning and even proprietary base materials to achieve these drastic reductions.

Basically, Relativity wants to play in the same ballpark as SpaceX for some prospective missions, and it’s getting closer to be able to do that. It has a 20-year test site partnerships with NASA Stennis, for use of its E4 Test Complex, and this will allow the would-be launcher to develop and quality as many as 36 complete rockets per year on the 25 acre space, with an option to grow its footprint to as many as 250 acres for launches.

Rocket’s 3D metal printer, aptly named ‘Stargate,’ is the largest of its kind in the world, and aims to be ale to go from raw materials to a flight-ready vehicle in just 60 days. The process overall should save between two and four years of time per launch overall, which would mean a drastic improvement in time allotment for mission conception to execution for commercial clients.

from TechCrunch

Dandelion, a clean energy startup that was originally incubated inside Google parent Alphabet, has raised $4.5 million in funding to build out its business — a geothermal heating and cooling system for homes that claims it will drastically reduce its customers’ bills — it claims to cut bills in half (notwithstanding the upfront costs, more on that below) — while also being significantly more friendly for the environment compared to conventional systems that use gas and fossil fuels.

The company opened for business first in Upstate New York — a market with extreme cold and hot spells — where it says it has started to install systems in people’s homes, and it’s going to use the funding to help work through what it says is a waitlist of “thousands” of customers nationally.

“We have been overwhelmed with demand and support from homeowners across the country,” said Kathy Hannun, cofounder and CEO of Dandelion, in a statement. “This round will help us ramp up operations to serve these customers and launch our new and improved 2018 offering.”

The funding was led by New Enterprise Associates, with participation also from new investors BoxGroup, Daniel Yates, and Ground Up, and previous investors Borealis Ventures, Collaborative Fund, and ZhenFund, the Chinese-based VC associated with Sequoia in China. It brings the total raised by Dandelion to $6.5 million, including a seed round it announced when first spinning out in July of last year.

The impressive list of backers — and the fact that Dandelion was originally incubated at Alphabet X, the company’s “moonshot” factory — underscores a couple of trends worth pointing out.

The first is the double maxim that everything is now a “tech” challenge, and that the interests of the tech world touch everything. As legacy businesses continue to try to update their systems or become more responsive to some of the challenges of running their legacy operations, a company like Dandelion becomes a direct threat, or a potential, strategic acquisition target.

The second is the ongoing interest among tech investors and tech companies to expand their horizons and explore companies and ideas that might prove to be disruptive in the same way that tech has been, further down the line; or whose solutions could prove to be a helpful boost to their more direct tech interests — for example by becoming acquirers of data systems to run these services better, or by making the cost of electricity to run other services (like internet, or maybe, these days, bitcoin mining) less expensive. (Dandelion is already proving its role in that wider ecosystem: just earlier this month, it acquired Geo-Connections, a geothermal SaaS startup.)

“Over the next decade, homeowners across America will replace their expensive, conventional home heating systems with Dandelion geothermal,” said Yates in a statement. “I’m thrilled to be part of the team that will lead this transition.” Yates — who had founded the energy efficiency startup Opower, which went public and then was acquired by Oracle — is joining the board as an executive director with this round.

In the case of Dandelion, its challenge and opportunity has been in the world of legacy energy services. Built largely on fossil fuel systems and centralised operation models — you have large plants and generators located in one place that distribute their energy to smaller stations, which distribute to individuals — the idea behind Dandelion has been to built a heating and cooling system that is significantly more decentralised: it operates directly from a person’s home — or more specifically, underneath it — leveraging the ground’s natural state of being 50°F, in order to work.

One big issue with scaling up geothermal energy solutions prior to Dandelion has been the up-front installation costs, both from a financial and practical point of view. As Hannun has described it:

The process of installing ground loops in homeowners’ yards has typically been messy and intrusive, using wide drills that are designed to dig water wells at depths of over 1,000 feet. These machines are unnecessarily large and slow for installing a system that needs only a few 4” diameter holes at depths of a few hundred feet. So we decided to try to design a better drill that could reduce the time, mess and hassle of installing these pipes, which could in turn reduce the final cost of a system to homeowners.

The company’s solution has been to build a system that bores a much smaller hole (a few inches is all that’s needed) at a much shallower depth of hundreds of feet — making the installation something that can be done in less than a day.

So far, the company’s upfront costs might prove to be too much of a gating factor for the majority of homeowners. Installations run between $20,000 and $25,000 in upfront costs alone. For those willing to take the plunge — or dig into the challenge, as the case may be — over twenty years, the company has claimed that savings can be about $35,000.

The company also tells me that homeowners are buying a lot of these using financing and will save around 20 percent annually if they finance. (The savings percentage comes after a tax credit, a spokesperson said. “Here is a real example from one of our homeowners. He needed a 4-ton system, which is the size most homes require. He formerly spent $2,621 on fuel oil annually (832 gallons over the year at $3.15/gallon). To run geothermal, he requires $803 in additional electricity costs. With Dandelion pricing, starting at $115/mo, geothermal heating costs for his home are $1,380 + $803 = $2,183. This is about 20% savings annually for heating alone. His air conditioning will also be over twice as efficient with geothermal than it was with conventional a/c.”)

The savings in terms of using clean versus dirty energy, of course, come from the start.

from TechCrunch

Dropbox’s surge on the stock market has continued, with the company going up another 7% on its second day on the stock market.

The company saw its shares close at $30.45, giving the company above a $13 billion market cap, fully diluted.

When it priced its IPO, there was a question as to whether Dropbox would surpass the $10 billion valuation it achieved in its last private round. It eliminated those concerns overnight.

The first few days have been a strong indicator of investor demand for the cloud storage company.

To recap, Dropbox initially hoped to price its IPO between $16 and $18, then raised it from $18 to $20. Then it ultimately priced its IPO at $21, closing the day above $28. And it still continues to go up.

Investors like Dropbox’s improving financials.

It brought in $1.1 billion in revenue in its most recent year. This is up from $845 million in revenue the year before and $604 million for 2015.

Yet while it’s been cash flow positive since 2016, it is not profitable. Dropbox lost nearly $112 million last year. But its margins are looking better when compared with losses of $210 million for 2016 and $326 million for 2015.

Although Dropbox is very different than Spotify which intends to list next week, investors will view this favorable debut as a sign that the IPO window is “open,” meaning that there is strong demand for newly public tech companies.

from TechCrunch

Smartsheet is the latest company to file to go public, now that the IPO window is open. 

The Bellevue, Washington-based company offers enterprise software for communication and collaboration.

It describes itself as the “leading cloud-based platform for work execution, enabling teams and organizations to plan, capture, manage, automate, and report on work at scale, resulting in more efficient processes and better business outcomes. ”

Smartsheet says it has 3.6 million users and its products are utilized at 90% of the Fortune 100 companies around the world.

It touts clients like Cisco and Starbucks. Smartsheet says Cisco uses it to keep tabs on spending and Starbucks uses it send product and business updates to its thousands of stores.

The company brought in $111.3 million in revenue for its fiscal 2018 year. It’s a big jump from $67 million for 2017 and $40.8 million for 2016.

But losses are also growing, totaling $49.1 million for 2018, up from negative $15.2 million and $14.3 million in prior years.

“We have a history of cumulative losses and we cannot assure you that we will achieve profitability in the foreseeable future,” the company warned in its prospectus.

Smartsheet acknowledges that it competes with Microsoft and Google on spreadsheets and other productivity tools. Its products also compete with Asana, Atlassian, Planview and Workfront.

“The market in which we participate is highly competitive, and if we do not compete effectively, our operating results could be harmed,” reads the “risk factors” section of the filing.

The largest shareholder is Insight Venture Partners, which owned a sizeable 32.1% of the company prior to the IPO. Madrona Ventures owned 28.4% of the company and Sutter Hill Ventures owned 5.4%.

Smartsheet had raised at least $106 million in venture funding, dating back to 2010, according to Crunchbase data. Last year, TechCrunch reported that it had an $800 million valuation.

The company plans to list on the New York Stock Exchange, under the ticker “SMAR.”

Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan are managing the offering. Fenwick & West and Wilson Sonsini served as counsel.

The floodgates have opened for enterprise tech IPOs. Last week we saw Dropbox debut and now we’ve seen filings for Zuora and Pivotal. DocuSign is also expected to file in the coming months.

Many of last year’s enterprise tech IPOs performed well, giving pipeline companies confidence in their debuts.

Spring also tends to be an active time for IPOs, with companies looking to debut before the summer slowdown.

And while consumer tech IPOs have been slow for several years now, one of the more anticipated companies looking to debut is Spotify, which is expected to go public next week via a “direct listing.”

from TechCrunch