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Image Credits: Nigel Sussman
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For this morning’s edition of The Exchange, Alex Wilhelm studied information recently released by mobile gaming studio Jam City as it prepares to go public in a $1.2 billion blank-check deal with DPCM Capital.
“Jam City is a bit like Zynga, but unless you are a mobile-gaming aficionado, you might not have heard of it,” he writes.
Since its launch, Jam City has raised upwards of $300 million, including a $145 million round in 2019. At the time, the company was riding high after signing a deal with Disney to adapt some of the media giant’s intellectual property, which includes brands like Marvel, Fox and Pixar.
Almost half of all Americans play mobile games, so Alex reviewed Jam City’s investor deck, a transcript of the investor presentation call and a press release on the blank-check deal to see how it stacks up against Zynga, which “has done great in recent quarters, including posting record revenue and bookings in the first three months of 2021.”
(Full disclosure: the second time I worked at a startup founded by Mark Pincus, his dog Zinga slept behind my desk and I was one of her favorite dog-sitters.)
If you have a solid business plan and are confident in your storytelling skills, consider applying to TechCrunch Startup Battlefield.
Twenty early-stage companies will have a chance to pitch themselves directly to thousands of investors, evangelists and tech journalists, and each entrant has a chance to win $100,000 equity-free dollars.
TC Battlefield alumni include companies like Postmates, DropBox, Cloudflare, and many others. All told, they’ve raised more than $9.4 billion with 117 successful exits. Apply by May 27.
Thanks for reading Extra Crunch; I hope you have an excellent weekend.
Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist
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Image Credits: Nigel Sussman
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The influence of a founder on their company’s culture cannot be overstated.
Everything from their views on the product and business to how they think about people affects how their company’s employees will behave, and since behavior, in turn, informs culture, the consequences of a founder’s early decisions can be far-reaching.
So it’s not surprising that Expensify has its own take on almost everything it does when you consider what its founder and CEO David Barrett learned early in his life: “Basically everyone is wrong about basically everything.”
As we saw in part 1 of this EC-1, this led him to the revelation that it’s easier to figure things out for yourself than finding advice that applies to you. Eventually, these insights would inform how he would go about shaping Expensify.
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Image Credits: gremlin / Getty Images
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When a company chooses supervised learning, it needs a strategy that allows it to label data as quickly as it acquires it.
Supervised learning is currently the most practical approach for most ML challenges, but it requires the crucial additional step of making raw data smart by labeling it.
It has been essential for software companies to hire top software talent to write the best lines of code, but the new paradigm will be to generate the smartest data to come up with the best AI models.
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Image Credits: Nigel Sussman
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Marqeta, long a darling of the fintech market, though less well known than some companies in its sector due to its infrastructure nature, filed to go public late last week.
If you are not familiar with Marqeta, it powers the payment card tech behind products like Square, a key customer and driver of the unicorn’s growth.
Marqeta exhibits a number of fascinating fintech characteristics (majority revenue from interchange, a rabidly competitive market) that make it very interesting to unspool.
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When a founder has a work history that includes the name of the parent company of one of their key investors, you probably assume that was one of the first deals to come together.
Not so with May Mobility and Toyota AI Ventures, which connected for the company’s second seed round after May went out and raised its original seed purely on the strength of its own ideas and proposed solutions.
That’s one of the many interesting things we learned from speaking to May Mobility co-founder and CEO Edwin Olson, as well as Chief Product Officer Nina Grooms Lee and Toyota AI Ventures founding partner Jim Adler on an episode of Extra Crunch Live.
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Image Credits: Somyot Techapuwapat / EyeEm / Getty Images
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WalkMe is the second Israel-based technology company to file to go public this week: No-code startup Monday.com is also pursuing an American IPO.
WalkMe’s software provides visual overlays on websites that help users navigate the product in question. Per the company’s F-1 filing, other elements of its service that matter include its onboarding system, Workstation, or its “single interface to the applications within an enterprise and simplifies task completion through a natural language conversational interface and automation.”
We’re including that last feature because it says “automation,” which, in the wake of the UiPath IPO, is a word worth watching. Investors are.
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Image Credits: Nigel Sussman
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Squarespace’s reference price has been set at $50 per share.
We went over Squarespace’s recently disclosed Q2 and full-2021 guidance and asked how its expectations compare to its reference price-defined pre-trading valuation.
Then, we set some stakes in the ground regarding historical direct-listing results and what we might expect from the company as it adds a third set of data to our quiver.
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Image Credits: DrAfter123 / Getty Images
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Mumbai-based Emeritus, an edtech company that works with universities to create online upskilling courses for employed folks, just spent a big chunk of cash to break into K-12.
Emeritus, which is part of the Eruditus group, announced this week that it plans to acquire iD Tech, a STEM education service for children. The acquisition, which has not yet closed, is estimated to be around $200 million and leaves iD Tech operating as an independent brand for now.
ID Tech brings a whole different set of customers to its umbrella: The startup offers courses for elementary through high-school students across the globe taught by college students in the U.S.
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Image Credits: Hiroshi Watanabe / Getty Images
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According to Versatile VC founder David Teten, five new strategies are gaining traction among fund managers looking to raise capital from family offices and high-net-worth individuals:
- Online communities and virtual events.
- Platforms that help other investors access your fund.
- Soliciting under the 506(c) designation.
- Launching a rolling fund.
- Crowdfunding from retail investors into a general partnership.
In a summary of a class he taught for the Oper8r VC fund accelerator, Teten offers actionable advice for anyone who wants to connect with pre-qualified investors.
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Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch
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Dear Sophie,
Our startup employs several individuals who are on work visas or have employment authorization. Many of them have been waiting for quite a while for the government to tell them their applications have been received.
Why? When will things be back on track? We have a few employees who are waiting for green cards, and a few F-1 visa holders who will be extending their OPT to STEM OPT.
Is there anything we can do?
— Patient in Pasadena
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Image Credits: Bryce Durbin
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Electric vehicle company Arrival wants to break the current auto manufacturing model. Instead of one giant factory and an assembly line, Arrival’s commercial electric vans, buses and cars are robotically built in small, regional microfactories, of which the company wants to open 31 by the end of 2025.
If you want to achieve something radically more efficient, you have to go deeper, into complex, high-level computational algorithms that are not normally used in consumer-facing products.
The London-based company, founded in 2015, joined the ranks of EV companies going public via SPAC, merging with blank-check company CIIG Merger Corp. in March.
UPS has already ordered 10,000 of Arrival’s robotically engineered vans, and the company recently signed a deal with Uber to create purpose-built EVs for ride-hail drivers.
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Image Credits: Nuthawut Somsuk / Getty Images
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The fear of missing out (FOMO) spreads faster than wildfire and often overwhelms rational decision-making.
In the VC community, investors look for lessons from disruptive startups they can use to identify other potential winners. But hype leads to bad decision-making, rushed due diligence and wishful thinking.
When and if those startups actually do well, “irrational FOMO takes over” because the initial assessment was based on bad information, says Victor Echevarria, a partner at Jackson Square Ventures.
“Trends are addictive; to remain disciplined and avoid hype is to deny our innate instincts.”
It’s natural for investors to follow the crowd, but in the race to the bottom, FOMO can be high-octane fuel.
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Image Credits: Nigel Sussman
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The Exchange explores Robinhood’s financial results using the lens of payment for order flow (PFOF) income, which the company said during a congressional hearing constitutes the majority of its revenues.
This particular revenue growth — or the lack thereof — is a good way to understand not only Robinhood’s own results but also its larger market. If Robinhood is seeing rapid growth and strong trading volumes, we can infer with some confidence that others in its space are enjoying a related, if not similar, level of interest.
For Public.com, eToro and others like Freetrade (as well as our own understanding), how Robinhood performed recently is key. So, let’s explore the data.
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Image Credits: gremlin / Getty Images
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Today, any entrepreneur can sign up for BigQuery or Snowflake and have a data solution that can scale with their business in a matter of hours. The emergence of cheap, flexible and scalable data storage solutions was largely a response to changing needs spurred by the massive explosion of data.
Currently, the world produces 2.5 quintillion bytes of data daily (there are 18 zeros in a quintillion). The explosion of data continues in the roaring ‘20s, both in terms of generation and storage — the amount of stored data is expected to continue to double at least every four years.
However, one integral part of modern data infrastructure still lacks solutions suitable for the Big Data era and its challenges: Monitoring of data quality and data validation.
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Image Credits: the_burtons / Getty Images
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Watching construction tech software company Procore go public Thursday after pricing above its range makes the IPO slowdown look like the deceleration that wasn’t.
Investors quickly bid up the company’s value in trading, giving Procore a higher valuation than it might have anticipated, along with a boost of confidence for the IPO market in general.
Construction tech may not be as glamorous as space travel, but it’s a massive industry that’s fraught with inefficiencies.
Procore initially set an IPO range of $60 to $65 per share before pricing at $67 per share Wednesday night. Its debut was worth gross proceeds north of $600 million and a fully diluted valuation of $9.6 billion. As of early afternoon Thursday, shares were trading at a solid $85.25.
In light of Procore’s debut, TechCrunch is digging quickly into the company’s new valuation and its resulting revenue multiples.
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Image Credits: LaylaBird / Getty Images
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It’s impossible to predict how healthcare institutions will operate post-pandemic, but with so many people now accustomed to telemedicine, startups that provide services around virtual care continue to be poised for success.
Telemedicine has faced an uphill battle to become more relevant in the U.S., with challenges such as meeting HIPAA compliance requirements and insurance companies unwilling to pay for virtual visits. But when COVID-19 began raging across the globe and people had to stay home, both the insurance and healthcare industries were forced to adapt.
Now that people see the benefits and conveniences of “dialing a doc” from the kitchen table, healthcare has changed forever.
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Image Credits: Getty Images under a MirageC license.
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Extra Crunch is looking to founders for recommendations on email marketers to help us build a shortlist of top growth marketers in tech!
If you’re a founder and have an email marketer you enjoyed working with, we want to hear from you! If you’re a growth marketer, please pass this along to your clients.
Fill out the survey here.
We’ll share great recommendations publicly so more startups can find the help they need. Find more details at techcrunch.com/experts.
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