Category: Tech news

If your work life — or your life’s work — revolves around the tech startup world, there’s no more important place to be on September 21-23 than TechCrunch Disrupt 2021. And for just a few more hours, you can snag a pass to this be-all-and-end-all tech startup conference for less than $99.

In other words, peeps, it’s now-o’clock. Buy your pass before the early-bird price ends tonight at 11:59 pm (PT).

We can’t possibly detail in one post all of the Disrupt presentations, speakers, events and opportunities waiting for you — believe me, we’ve tried. So, let’s focus on just one aspect of Disrupt 2021 you won’t want to miss. The breakout sessions.

You’ll find a diverse array of these sessions scattered throughout all three days. We’ll highlight a few here; be sure to check out all of them in the Disrupt 2021 agenda.

Startup Pitch Feedback Sessions: You’ll find 10 of these scheduled over three days. Make time to watch and learn as all the startups exhibiting in Startup Alley pitch and hear feedback from TC staff. You’re sure to pick up tips to improve your own pitch.

You Complete Me: In the age of the composable ecosystems, we’re all partners now — from frenemies to pure collaborations. So why is now the right time to invite friends and challengers to the table? The truth is we have to build for an unknown future, with a shared strategy and value outcome. Join us to discover five ways to encourage more symbiotic relationships in the platform economy. Presented by Elliott Limb, chief customer officer at Mambu.

Hacking U.S. Healthcare: Few things conjure more negative emotions than navigating medical billing; Americans urgently need solutions that prioritize their needs, decrease costs and elevate the patient journey so they can focus on getting care. Digital innovation can provide exceptional patient experiences that remove friction for payers, providers and consumers. Hear how Cedar, a digital-health unicorn, engineered a consumer-first digital platform that’s revolutionizing the financial experience for the entire healthcare industry. Presented by Cedar.

Taking Care of the Next Generation: KiwiCo empowers kids to explore, create and learn with hands-on kits. Mirvie provides a personalized window into pregnancy for early detection and intervention. Grove is committed to a plastic-free future with its line of eco-friendly beauty, home and lifestyle products. Hear from the exceptional leaders of these three companies about their mission to create a better world now and for future generations, building movements and communities, and the milestones in getting to escape velocity. Presented by Mayfield.

TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 is where you need to be on September 21-23. Why not be there for less than $100? Buy an early-bird pass before the deal expires tonight at 11:59 pm (PT).

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt 2021? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

The new Netflix series is a sleek update to the 1980s cartoon. But it’s not without flaws.

High-quality UX for websites and apps is no longer a nice-to-have, it’s a must-have if a company is to succeed. But scaling the impact of UX teams is not simple, and in recent years teams have turned to what’s know as DesignOps platforms to help them.

Now, a new startup hopes to become a key DesignOps platform for UX teams, and has raised money to help it, in turn, scale-up.

Zeroheight has now raised a $10 million Series A funding round led by Tribe Capital, with participation from Adobe, Y Combinator, FundersClub and Expa, as well as angel investors including Tom Preston-Werner (co-founder of GitHub), Bradley Horowitz (VP Product at Google), Irene Au (built and ran UX design for Google) and Nick Caldwell (VP Engineering at Twitter).

London-based zeroheight will now expand to the San Francisco/Bay Area, and grow the team across the board. Its focus so far has been on UX documentation, but it will now also explore other areas such as closing the gap between design and development.

Co-founder Jerome de Lafargue said: “zeroheight does for UX what DevOps platforms like GitHub do for building and shipping code, providing a central place to document and manage UX components, coupled with design APIs that allow teams to skip the design hand-off stage entirely and speed up the UX delivery process.”

He said the company addresses the scaling problem for UX teams: “Problems have emerged because UX teams have grown dramatically in the past few years, because UX is now so important for most companies to just compete. And so because of this you now need centralization, you need components that are reusable so that teams can be efficient and not lose quality as it keeps shipping.”

Zeroheight counts several Fortune 500 companies like Adobe and United Airlines as customers among its 1,300+ customer base.

Hippo began to trade earlier this week after completing its SPAC combination. The home-focused U.S. neoinsurance provider initially stuck close to its $10 per-share pre-combination price before plummeting yesterday during regular trading.

But Hippo’s declines don’t appear to be of its own doing. Lemonade, another U.S. neoinsurance player — albeit one more focused on rental coverage — posted slightly better-than-expected Q2 results earlier in the week. After its report, Lemonade’s value dropped sharply, and it appears it dragged Hippo down with it.

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The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

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The trading volatility is interesting on its own, but what matters more is that the drop in the value of several neoinsurance companies is part of a larger trend. This week’s declines are not incredibly surprising — the market has negatively repriced tech-enabled insurance providers in recent quarters, which can be an uncomfortable situation for a category that previously basked in warm attention from public investors.

At this juncture, we’d typically riff on the new values of public neoinsurance companies and use that data to work our way into a guess concerning what the price declines might mean for related startups. Taking public-market data and using it to better understand private markets is pretty much the national pastime of this column.

Not today. Instead, we’re going to look into an interesting dynamic among neoinsurance companies that may matter a bit more for our comprehension of the private markets. Namely that the players in the space that we can name and track are generally cash-rich and market-sentiment poor.

Public markets are cutting the value of neoinsurance stocks, but the companies behind the valuation declines are rather wealthy. This makes their enterprise values smaller than you might guess from a quick glance at their market cap figures. But do Lemonade or Hippo really care if the stock market decides from one quarter to the next that their businesses are worth plus or minus 10%? Do they have enough cash to pursue their long-term visions, regardless?

Let’s unpack all the numbers, discuss an interview The Exchange held with Hippo CEO Assaf Wand earlier in the week and consider what Lemonade had to say during its earnings call.

As startups in Africa continue to grow and raise money at a ridiculous pace, so too will their cap tables expand. Most African startups’ bulk of VC money is from foreign investors, making it imperative for African startups to incorporate abroad, especially in the U.S.

The processes for incorporation are quite complicated, and even though most founders still get the hang of it, they risk the chance of messing up their cap tables. For instance, some Nigerian startups are guilty of issuing preferred shares in naira and then canceling to issue dollar-denominated SAFEs when they get incorporated in the U.S.

Raise, a startup building Africa’s Carta is tackling these challenges and has received backing from 500 Startups to scale its technology.

In 2019, Marvin Coleby, Tina Nyamache and Eugene Mutai set out to create a blockchain solution that would make it easier for people to buy and sell shares in pre-IPO companies in Africa. After running several iterations, they found out that most companies still struggled with the concept of equity and liquidity. They spent money managing corporate structures for holding companies in Delaware, Canada, and Europe but maintained paper-based subsidiaries across Africa.

According to Coleby, most of the equity across Africa is still stored, tracked and updated using paper certificates, manual processes and fragmented government databases. This raises transaction costs to manage subsidiaries and issue employee stock options. It also inflates costs to enter and exit positions in private and public companies.

So they started Raise to help startups, investors, employees, and law firms manage deals, cap tables and corporate compliance. 

On the platform, Raise customers can also automate due diligence, set valuations, track employee stock vesting and make routine documentation for licenses and government documents in Nigeria and Kenya. 

When Raise launched in 2019, it was in private beta and was backed by Binance Labs, the sole investor in its pre-seed round. Since proceeding to a public beta in 2020, Raise has onboarded customers like Anjarwalla & Khanna, Africa’s largest law firm; startups Bamboo, Workpay and Mono; and VC firms like Microtraction and Chrysalis Capital.

But the long-term problem Raise is trying to solve is liquidity, Coleby tells TechCrunch on a call.

“Everything we do is to find a way to make it easier for founders, customers, employees, investors to get liquidity from investing in companies,” he said. “Companies are raising money, people are investing, and employees are getting stock options. However, there are only one or two exits now and then. That’s because we build with the Silicon Valley model where we have to grow, scale until we get some big exit. From our perspective, liquidity doesn’t have to be that way. It can be small little pieces of liquidity that employees and investors get over time.”

By that measure, Africa’s capital markets for private and public companies are painfully illiquid. It takes several months or years to buy or sell equity, and, according to Raise, over $1 trillion of stock in Africa is “illiquid, paper-based and priced in inflationary currencies.”

Nigerian stock trading platforms like Chaka, Bamboo and Trove help Nigerians create liquidity for assets locally and internationally. However, Raise aims to build the platform behind them to streamline more asset classes and investment opportunities.

While that’s still in the works, Raise organizes ownership data for African companies and makes them accessible. It’s a similar play to what Carta, a $3 billion company offering cap table software, does for U.S. companies.

Over time, onboarding cap tables and equity data will also open up use cases for Carta to become a blockchain-based digital asset platform. The plan is to become more like Africa’s Nasdaq for private companies as it hopes to sell indexes, ETFs, futures, and assets for them. Coleby says in that way, Raise will become an equity engine for processing Africa’s hundreds of billion dollars of trade and securities volume.

Coleby says the number of companies going live is increasing 60% month-on-month. The platform manages about 200 cap tables with assets worth more than $400 million. The next phase of growth, according to Coleby, will be onboarding Series A and growth-stage companies onto the platform.

The company is active in Nigeria and Kenya. Coleby says a seed round is in the works to continue growing deeper into those markets and experiment with funding and liquidity operations across the African VC space.

Next, Raise is building a marketplace that continues connecting and educating investors, employees, and founders in one platform with their law firms to use trusted and verified data to do deals and issue stock options to employees.

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