Category: Tech news

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Editor’s note: Kyle Russell is the founder of Playbyte, a startup building an app that lets people make games on their phones.

Last Friday, Dom Hofmann tweeted the launch of Loot, one of his new projects looking at games and game creation through the lens of NFTs:

If “NFTs,” “gas” and “minting” sound unintelligible, the short version is that this project lets you spend some money to create a unique list of items that you could keep in the same wallet (an app like Rainbow) where you’d keep cryptocurrencies or other digital collectibles, typically art (or, as skeptics gleefully note, JPEGs).

I repeat: a unique list of items. No artwork, stats to compare quality or even game rules that could inform such stats.

People spent money to get those unique lists. Thousands. And as happens in NFTs, a market quickly formed around these unique lists of items. The “floor,” or minimum price to buy into a Loot “bag,” shot to thousands of dollars worth of Ethereum. Certain kinds of items in these lists sounded cool and were found to be rare upon analysis of the entire set, and so bags containing them rose in value to extreme heights:

And people began to fill in those missing elements like art — not fundamentally changing the underlying lists, but creating new works that explicitly reference the items in particular lists:

And like the lists themselves, people began taking an algorithmic approach to generating that art:

By August 31st, there was a legible community of people…

• investing in bags containing certain kinds of items;
• creating tools for visualizing Loot items and monitoring price fluctuations in this niche market;
• working on new derivative projects, like creating Realms for a theoretical adventurer with the gear in a Loot bag to explore:

Except, there’s still no game rules for these items — including what it would even mean to have a character equipping them!

Hey, what’s that? Oh right, people could make or generate stats too!

This tweet really nails the overall phenomenon:

In less than a week, a community has gone from lists of text to infinitely many illustrations of those items to worlds for those items to reside in and characters to wield them. All from taking simple primitives and generating context around them that gives them value.

It’s pretty magical stuff. But even if there’s some speculative angle to the creation happening, how many people get to participate if these bags cost tens of thousands of dollars at a minimum? On the one hand: If you just think the game of making up a game is fun, because all of these bags and items live on the Ethereum network, then you can still make things that incorporate them at no cost (short of the painful fees currently associated with using Ethereum).

And if it really matters to you to have those unique objects in a wallet of your own so you can really participate, people are thinking of interesting paths there, as well:

If that’s all too jargon-y, I’ll again summarize: There are feasible paths to making it free to “have” these items for the purpose of playing with the growing set of inter-compatible apps or games that might incorporate Loot — you just won’t have a Legit Bag with rare items that could sell for lots of money.

Oh, and what if you like some of the items in a Loot bag, but wish your adventurer could mix-and-match with other items from the broader set that just dropped?

Less than a week and already getting disrupted by unbundling!

I’m sorry, why is this interesting?

The Marvel Cinematic Universe started with Marvel Comics taking out a billion-dollar loan to finance the first four movies based on its iconic superhero characters. The seeds of awareness of these characters had been planted in the minds of the masses through decades of appearances in comics and TV leading up to their first appearances in blockbuster films. Decades of perhaps hundreds of writers and artists were getting paid to create fantastical stories for those characters that people would want to read and that would get them hooked to come back for the next issue. People came to closely associate themselves with characters with kind of funny origins (bit by a radioactive spider!).

This all happened in a top-down, corporate, mass-production context. A few creatives at Marvel did high-leverage work on a freelance or in-house basis, printers made a ton of copies and a supply chain got those issues to comics shops and dime stores across the country. Like dominoes, Stan Lee thinks of some new superhero (pitch: this guy’s not a hippy, he’s a weapons manufacturer industrialist!) to five decades later, Avengers: Endgame and Black Panther warp the definition of blockbuster forever.

But what if someone wanted to create an MCU competitor as a community, instead of going head-to-head with Disney?

Extrapolating from the last week of Loot…

You’d release a contract to generate sets of superhero names and associated powers. People would mint those heroes and they would begin to trade on the open market. People would build tools that determine which powers are more rare, especially around ones that sound cool (“flight” is a gimme).

They’d imagine their hero, illustrate them themselves and commission artists who could make them look cool. Eventually more technical folks in the community would do the heavy lifting to piece together tools that could generate art for characters in a common style, or be customizable by some key parameters.

Eventually, people would commission crossover art, and then you’re only a step away from shared storylines (increase the value of multiple characters with a single commissioned piece!).

DAOs, or decentralized groups who come together to create new projects in the crypto space or even “just” invest together, might buy up more popular characters and commission more elaborate visual stories with the aim of boosting the value of that underlying item containing a hero name + powers and any popular artworks that they inspired.

And assuming the project’s originators went with the direction of the Loot zeitgeist, all of this would be IP that could be re-used and remixed by anyone. That might sound crazy — isn’t the point to own it, and the point of owning it is to control how it’s used?

That’s the Disney status quo. In a world of projects like Loot, you want to reinforce the value of the NFT you own — and that value reflects that NFT’s renown and reputation. Echoing the phrase “all press is good press”: Any remix is a good remix. To be referenced is to still be culturally relevant. So if you own an NFT describing Arachnid Person, you want to contribute to an environment where as many people want to include Arachnid Person in their works as possible so that Arachnid Man No. 1 becomes something worth owning.

I’m really just expanding on Dylan Field:

And John Palmer rightly emphasizes something special: The lack of anybody who can say “no,” as people try to figure out how to make Loot cool:

Getting inside the mind of customers is a challenge as behaviors and demands shift, but Clootrack believes it has cracked the code in helping brands figure out how to do that.

It announced $4 million in Series A funding, led by Inventus Capital India, and included existing investors Unicorn India Ventures, IAN Fund and Salamander Excubator Angel Fund, as well as individual investment from Jiffy.ai CEO Babu Sivadasan. In total, the company raised $4.6 million, co-founder Shameel Abdulla told TechCrunch.

Clootrack is a real-time customer experience analytics platform that helps brands understand why customers stay or churn. Shameel Abdulla and Subbakrishna Rao, who both come from IT backgrounds, founded the company in 2017 after meeting years prior at Jiffstore, Abdulla’s second company that was acquired in 2015.

Business-to-consumer and consumer brands often use customer satisfaction metrics like Net Promoter Score to understand the customer experience, but Abdulla said current methods don’t provide the “why” of those experiences and are slow, expensive and error-prone.

“The number of channels has increased, which means customers are talking to you, expressing their feedback and what they think in multiple places,” he added. “Word of mouth has gone digital, and you basically have to master the art of selling online.”

Clootrack turns the customer experience data from all of those first-party and third-party touchpoints — website feedback, chat bots, etc. — into granular, qualitative insights that give brands a look at drivers of the experience in hours rather than months so that they can stay on top of fast-moving trends.

Abdulla points to data that show a customer’s biggest driver of brand switch is the experience they receive. And, that if brands can reduce churns by 5%, they could be looking at an increase in profits of between 25% and 95%.

Most of the new funding will go to product development so that all data aggregations are gathered from all possible touchpoints. His ultimate goal is to be “the single platform for B2C firms.”

The company is currently working with over 150 customers in the areas of retail, direct-to-consumer, banking, automotive, travel and mobile app-based services. It is growing nine times year over year in revenue. It is mainly operating in India, but Clootrack is also onboarding companies in the U.S. and Europe.

Parag Dhol, managing director of Inventus, said he has known Abdulla for over five years. He had looked at one of Abdulla’s companies for investment, but had decided against it due to his firm being a Series A investor.

Dhol said market research needs an overhaul in India, where this type of technology is lagging behind the U.S.

“Clootrack has a very complementary team with Shameel being a complete CEO in terms of being a sales guy and serial entrepreneur who has learned his lessons, and Subbu, who is good at technology,” he added. “As CMOs realize the value in their unstructured data inside of their own database of the customer reviews and move to real-time feedback, these guys could make a serious dent in the space.”

 

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Feeding babies can take many different forms, and is also an area where parents can feel less supported as they navigate this new milestone in their lives.

Enter SimpliFed, an Ithaca, New York-based company providing virtual lactation and a baby feeding support platform. The startup announced Friday that it raised $500,000 in pre-seed funding led by Third Culture Capital.

CEO Andrea Ippolito, a biomedical engineer and mother of two young children, had the idea for SimpliFed three years ago. She struggled with breastfeeding after having her first child and, realizing that she was not alone in this area, set out to figure out a way to get anyone access to information and support for infant feeding.

“Post discharge is when the rubber meets the road for us,” she told TechCrunch. “This is a huge pain point for Medicaid, and it is not just about increasing access, but providing ongoing support for feeding and the quagmire that is health insurance. We want to help moms reach their infant feeding goals, no matter how they choose to feed, and to figure out what feeding looks like for them.”

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that mothers nurse for up to six months. However, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 60% of mothers don’t breastfeed for as long as they intend due to reasons like difficulty lactating or the baby latching, sickness or an unsupportive work environment.

SimpliFed’s platform is a judgement-free zone providing evidence-based information on nutritional health for babies. It isn’t meant to replace typical care that mother and baby will receive before and after delivery, but to provide support when issues arise, Ippolito said. Parents can book a free, initial 15-minute virtual consultation with a lactation expert and then subsequent 60-minute sessions for $100 each. There is also a future membership option for those seeking continuing care.

The new funds will be used to hire additional employees to further develop the telelactation platform and grow the company’s footprint, Ippolito said. The platform is gearing up to go through a clinical study to co-design the program with 1,000 mothers. She also wants to build out relationships with payers and providers toward a longer-term goal of becoming in-network and paid through reimbursement from health plans.

Julien Pham, managing partner at Third Culture Capital, said he met Ippolito at MIT Hacking Medicine a decade ago. A physician by training, he saw first-hand how big of an opportunity it is to demystify providing the best nutrition for babies.

“The U.S. culture has evolved over the years, and millennials are the next-generation moms who have a different ask, and SimpliFed is here at the right time,” Pham said. “Andrea is just a dynamo. We love her energy and how she is at the front line of this as a mother herself — she is most qualified to do this, and we support her.

 

Australian buy now, pay later (BNPL) company Zip this week acquired South Africa-based BNPL player Payflex for an undisclosed amount.

It’s a piece of news that once again highlights the hype around BNPL services and the quest for global dominance among the leading players.

This year we have covered BNPL services from the likes of Afterpay, Klarna and Affirm. And tech and payments giants Apple, Square, PayPal and Visa have joined in the action, too, massively funneling cash to their respective BNPL initiatives (for one, Square acquired Afterpay).

Australia, the U.K. and the U.S. are key markets for BNPL services. The U.S. market is so big that the number of BNPL service users is expected to hit 45 million by year’s end, representing an 81% growth from last year. But despite its Western focus, BNPL is exploding in other markets driven by a collective effort from local and global players.

For instance, in the Middle East, companies like tabby and Tamara have raised millions in debt and equity financing to provide BNPL services. Also, Checkout is a significant shareholder in Tamara; Afterpay is one in PostPay, while Zip acquired Spotii for $26 million after initially investing in the company in December 2020.

Spotii isn’t the only acquisition Zip has made this past year. The Australian company also bought U.S.-based QuadPay and Twisto, a BNPL service in the Czech Republic, to expand footprints in both regions.

Payflex is the latest addition to that list. The company, founded in 2017, claims to be the first and largest BNPL player in South Africa with more than 1,000 merchants and 135,000 customers. Before fully acquiring Payflex, Zip had a 25% stake when it invested in the South African BNPL service six months ago.

Zip’s entry to Africa is important for several reasons. First, the continent is a largely untapped market that has enormous growth potential.

Credit appetite on the continent is very much in its infancy compared to Western markets, but it is growing rapidly. These days, people take loans to finance their needs at ridiculous interest rates while lending companies report low NPL ratios. Think of what happens when these consumers get a taste of low or no-interest alternative financing options that BNPL players like Zip provide: adoption rates will be off the charts.

Second, there’s a lack of infrastructure and BNPL innovation that only new entrants like Zip can execute because it has a large monetary chest.

And with the absence of credit cards and data on the continent, Zip can provide a competitive advantage with its technology, gather alternative data and build creditworthiness for customers in South Africa and other markets it plans to expand “with sizable underbanked, digitally savvy populations.”

Two of those markets are Egypt and Nigeria. If Zip expands to these regions, it will face competition from local players like Carbon, Shahry, M-Kopa, CredPal and CDCare, which are already pulling their weight. African e-commerce giant Jumia is also rumored to be revamping its BNPL service; it started one years ago but was discontinued after gaining little traction.

That said, Africa doesn’t have a concrete market leader yet since most of these products are yet to reach mass scale. On the other hand, Zip has been quite aggressive with its expansion into other markets — evident in some of its numbers.

The company currently serves 51,000 merchants and 7.3 million customers across 12 markets. This fiscal year, June 2021, a period when most of its acquisitions have occurred, Zip hit $5.8 billion in total transaction volume, up 176% year-over-year (YoY).

Zip numbers are impressive, but if there’s anything we’ve learnt from the BNPL business it’s that it isn’t a winner-takes-all market. If Zip makes significant headway and cracks the market, expect more global BNPL players to bring the heat. Also, local players will be encouraged to step up their game because global players have surplus cash to burn if they move into Africa, which is a win-win for the market.

In many ways, there has never been a better time to be a venture capitalist. Nearly everyone in the industry is raking in money, either through long-awaited exits or because more capital flooding into the industry has meant more money in management fees  — and sometimes both.

Still, a growing number of early-stage investors is becoming wary about the pace of dealmaking. It’s not just that it’s a lot harder to write checks at what feels like a reasonable clip at the moment, or that most VCs feel they can no longer afford to be price sensitive. Many of the founders with whom they work are being handed follow-on checks before figuring out how best to deploy their last round of funding.

Consider that from 2016 through 2019, an average of 35 deals a month featured rounds of $100 million or more, according to the data company CB Insights. This year, that number is closer to 130 of these so-called mega-rounds per month. The froth is hardly contained to maturing companies. According to CB Insights’s data, the median U.S. Series A valuation hit $42 million in the second quarter, driven in part crossover investors like Tiger Global, which closed 1.26 deals per business day in Q2. (Andreessen Horowitz wasn’t far behind.)

It makes for some bewildering times, including for longtime investor Jeff Clavier, the founder the early-stage venture firm Uncork Capital. Like many of his peers, Clavier is benefiting from the booming market. Among Uncork’s portfolio companies, for example is LaunchDarkly, a company that helps software developers avoid missteps. The seven-year-old company announced $200 million in Series D funding last month at a $3 billion valuation. That’s triple the valuation it was assigned early last year.

“It’s an awesome company, so I’m very excited for them,” says Clavier.

At the same time, he adds, “You have to put this money to work in a very smart way.”

That’s not so easy in this market, where founders are inundated with interest and, in some cases, are talking term sheets after the first Zoom with an investor. (“The most absurd thing we’ve heard are funds that are making decisions after a 30-minute call with the founder,” says TX Zhou, the cofounder of L.A.-based seed-stage firm Fika Ventures, which itself just tripled the amount of assets it’s managing.)

More money can mean a much longer lifeline for a company. But as many investors have learned the hard way, it can also serve as a distraction, as well as hide fundamental issues with a business until it’s too late to address them.

Taking on more money also oftentimes goes hand-in-hand with a bigger valuation, and lofty valuations comes with their own positives and negatives. On the plus side, of course, big numbers can attract more attention to a company from the press, from customers, and from potential new hires.  At the same time, “The more money you raise, the higher the valuation it is, it catches up with you on the next round, because you’ve got to clear that watermark,” says Renata Quintini of the venture firm Renegade Partners, which focuses largely on Series B-stage companies.

Again, in today’s market, trying to slow down isn’t always possible. Quintini says that some founders her firm has talked with have said that they’re not going to raise any more, explaining that they cannot go faster or deploy more than their business model is already supporting For others, she continues, “You’ve got to look at what’s happening around you, and sometimes if your competitors are raising and they’re going to have a bigger war chest and [they’re] pushing the market forward and maybe they can out-hire you or they can outspend you in certain areas where they can generate more traction than you,” that next check, often at the higher valuation, begins to look like the only path to survival.

Many VCs have argued that today’s valuations make sense because companies are creating new markets, growing faster than before, and have more opportunities to expand globally, and certainly, in some cases, that it is true. Indeed, companies that were previously believed to be richly priced by their private investors, like Airbnb and Doordash, have seen their valuations soar as publicly traded companies.

Yet it’s also true that for many more companies, “valuation is completely disconnected from the [companies’] multiples,” says Clavier, echoing what other VCs acknowledge privately.

That might seem to be the kind of problem that investors love to face. But as been the case for years now, that depends on how long this go-go market lasts.

Clavier says that one of his own companies that “did a great Series A and did a great Series B ahead of its time is now being preempted for a Series C, and the valuation is just completely disconnected from their actual reality.”

He says he’s happy for the outfit “because I have no doubt they will catch up. But this is the point: they will have to catch up.”

For more from our conversation with Clavier, you can listen here.

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