Extra Crunch Friday: As BNPL startups raise, a look at Klarna, Affirm and Afterpay earnings

Welcome to Extra Crunch Friday

When I needed a new sofa, I was pleased to find a buy now, pay later option during the checkout process. I’d prepared myself to make a major financial outlay, but the service fees were well worth the convenience of deferring the entire payment.

Coincidentally, I was siting on said sofa this morning and thinking about that transaction when Alex Wilhelm submitted a column comparing the earnings for three BNPL providers: Afterpay, Affirm and Klarna.

I asked him why he decided to dig into the sector with such gusto.

“What struck me about the concept was that we had just seen earnings from Affirm,” he said. “So we had three BNPL players with known earnings, and I had just covered a startup funding round in the space.”

“Toss in some obvious audience interest, and it was an easy choice to write the piece. Now the question is whether I did a good job and people find value in it.”

TechCrunch community maven Drew Olanoff is looking for feedback from Extra Crunch readers about what they’d like to see more of — or less of, as the case may be.

If you’d like to share your thoughts with Drew, please fill out this form; it should take about 5-10 minutes.

Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch this week! I hope you have an excellent weekend.

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

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Pilot CEO Waseem Daher tears down his company's $60M Series C pitch deck

I’d rather learn from someone else’s success than my own failure. Call me lazy; I just think that’s being efficient.

I avoid running Extra Crunch stories that focus on best practices; you can find those anywhere. Instead, we look for “here’s what worked for me” articles that give readers actionable insights.

That’s a much better use of your time and ours.

With that ethos in mind, Lucas Matney interviewed Pilot CEO Waseem Daheer to deconstruct the pitch deck that helped his company land a $60M Series C round.

“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.'”

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Use discount code ECNEWSLETTER to save on our 2-day virtual event for founders, investors and ecosystem experts.

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Can solid state batteries power up for the next generation of EVs?

A global survey of automobile owners found three hurdles to overcome before consumers will widely embrace electric vehicles:

• 30-minute charging time
• 300-mile range
• $36,000 maximum cost

“Theoretically, solid state batteries (SSB) could deliver all three,” but for now, lithium-ion batteries are the go-to for most EVs (along with laptops and phones).

In our latest market map, we’ve plotted the new and established players in the SSB sector and listed many of the investors who are backing them.

Although SSBs are years away from mass production, “we are on the cusp of some pretty incredible discoveries using major improvements in computational science and machine learning algorithms to accelerate that process,” says SSB startup founder Amy Prieto.

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Dear Sophie: Which immigration options are the fastest?

Dear Sophie:

Help! Our startup needs to hire 50 engineers in artificial intelligence and related fields ASAP. Which visa and green card options are the quickest to get for top immigrant engineers?

And will Biden’s new immigration bill help us?

— Mesmerized in Menlo Park

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Why F5 spent $2.2B on 3 companies to focus on cloud native applications

Founded in 1996, F5 has repositioned itself in the networking market several times in its history. In the last two years, however, it spent $2.2 billion to acquire Shape Security, Volterra and NGINX.

“As large organizations age, they often need to pivot to stay relevant, and I wanted to explore one of these transformational shifts,” said enterprise reporter Ron Miller.

“I spoke to the CEO of F5 to find out the strategy behind his company’s pivot and how he leveraged three acquisitions to push his organization in a new direction.”

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DigitalOcean's IPO filing shows a two-class cloud market

Cloud hosting company Digital Ocean filed to go public this week, so Ron Miller and Alex Wilhelm unpacked its financials.

“AWS and Microsoft Azure will not be losing too much sleep worrying about DigitalOcean, but it is not trying to compete head-on with them across the full spectrum of cloud infrastructure services,” said John Dinsdale, chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research.

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