Extra Crunch roundup: Toast and Freshbook S-1s, pre-pitch tips, flexible funding lessons

The digital transformation currently sweeping society has likely reached your favorite local restaurant.

Since 2013, Boston-based Toast has offered bars and eateries a software platform that lets them manage orders, payments and deliveries.

Over the last year, its customers have processed more than $38 billion in gross payment volume, so Alex Wilhelm analyzed the company’s S-1 for The Exchange with great interest.

“Toast was last valued at just under $5 billion when it last raised, per Crunchbase data,” he writes. “And folks are saying that it could be worth $20 billion in its debut. Does that square with the numbers?”

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Airbnb, DoorDash and Coinbase each debuted at past Y Combinator Demo Days; as of this writing, they employ a combined 10,000 people.

Today and tomorrow, TechCrunch reporters will cover the proceedings at YC’s Summer 20201 Demo Day. In addition to writing up founder pitches, they’ll also rank their favorites.

Even remotely, I can feel a palpable sense of excitement radiating from our team — anything can happen at YC Demo Day, so sign up for Extra Crunch to follow the action.

Thanks very much for reading; I hope you have an excellent week.

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

5 takeaways from Toast’s S-1 filing

How Amazon EC2 grew from a notion into a foundational element of cloud computing

Image Credits: Ron Miller/TechCrunch

In August 2006, AWS activated its EC2 cloud-based virtual computer, a milestone in the cloud infrastructure giant’s development.

“You really can’t overstate what Amazon was able to accomplish,” writes enterprise reporter Ron Miller.

In the 15 years since, EC2 has enabled clients of any size to test and run their own applications on AWS’ virtual machines.

To learn more about a fundamental technological shift that “would help fuel a whole generation of startups,” Ron interviewed EC2 VP Dave Brown, who built and led the Amazon EC2 Frontend team.

How Amazon EC2 grew from a notion into a foundational element of cloud computing

3 ways to become a better manager in the work-from-home era

Image Credits: Jasmin Merdan (opens in a new window)/ Getty Images

Most managers agree that OKRs foster transparency and accountability, but running a team effectively has different challenges when workers are attending all-hands meetings from their kitchen tables.

Instead of just discussing key metrics before board meetings or performance reviews, make them part of the day-to-day culture, recommends Jeremy Epstein, Gtmhub’s CMO.

“Strengthen your team by creating authentic workplace transparency using numbers as a universal language and providing meaning behind your team’s work.”

3 ways to become a better manager in the work-from-home era

The pre-pitch: 7 ways to build relationships with VCs

Image Credits: Getty Images under an Andrii Yalanskyi (opens in a new window) license

Many founders must overcome a few emotional hurdles before they’re comfortable pitching a potential investor face-to-face.

To alleviate that pressure, Unicorn Capital founder Evan Fisher recommends that entrepreneurs use pre-pitch meetings to build and strengthen relationships before asking for a check:

“This is the ‘we actually aren’t looking for money; we just want to be friends for now’ pitch that gets you on an investor’s radar so that when it’s time to raise your next round, they’ll be far more likely to answer the phone because they actually know who you are.”

Pre-pitches are good for more than curing the jitters: These conversations help founders get a better sense of how VCs think and sometimes lead to serendipitous outcomes.

“Investors are opportunists by necessity,” says Fisher, “so if they like the cut of your business’s jib, you never know — the FOMO might start kicking hard.”

The pre-pitch: 7 ways to build relationships with VCs

Lessons from COVID: Flexible funding is a must for alternative lenders

Image Credits: MirageC (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

FischerJordan’s Deeba Goyal and Archita Bhandari break down the pandemic’s impact on alternative lenders, specifically what they had to do to survive the crisis, taking a look at smaller lenders including Credibly, Kabbage, Kapitus and BlueVine.

“Only those who were able to find a way through the complexities of their existing capital sources were able to maintain their performance, and the rest were left to perish or find new funding avenues,” they write.

Lessons from COVID: Flexible funding is a must for alternative lenders

Inside Freshworks’ IPO filing

Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)

Customer engagement software company Freshworks’ S-1 filing depicts a company that’s experiencing accelerating revenue growth, “a great sign for the health of its business,” reports Alex Wilhelm in this morning’s The Exchange.

“Most companies see their growth rates decline as they scale, as larger denominators make growth in percentage terms more difficult.”

Studying the company’s SEC filing, he found that “Freshworks isn’t a company where we need to cut it lots of slack, as we might with an adjusted EBITDA number. It is going public ready for Big Kid metrics.”

Inside Freshworks’ IPO filing

Peak raises $75M for a platform that helps non-tech companies build AI applications

As artificial intelligence continues to weave its way into more enterprise applications, a startup that has built a platform to help businesses, especially non-tech organizations, build more customized AI decision-making tools for themselves has picked up some significant growth funding. Peak AI, a startup out of Manchester, England, that has built a “decision intelligence” platform, has raised $75 million, money that it will be using to continue building out its platform, expand into new markets and hire some 200 new people in the coming quarters.

The Series C is bringing a very big name investor on board. It is being led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, with previous backers Oxx, MMC Ventures, Praetura Ventures and Arete also participating. That group participated in Peak’s Series B of $21 million, which only closed in February of this year. The company has now raised $119 million; it is not disclosing its valuation.

(This latest funding round was rumored last week, although it was not confirmed at the time and the total amount was not accurate.)

Peak AI nabs $21M for a platform to help non-tech companies make AI-based decisions

Richard Potter, Peak’s CEO, said the rapid follow-on in funding was based on inbound interest, in part because of how the company has been doing.

Peak’s so-called Decision Intelligence platform is used by retailers, brands, manufacturers and others to help monitor stock levels and build personalized customer experiences, as well as other processes that can stand to have some degree of automation to work more efficiently, but also require sophistication to be able to measure different factors against each other to provide more intelligent insights. Its current customer list includes the likes of Nike, Pepsico, KFC, Molson Coors, Marshalls, Asos and Speedy, and in the last 12 months revenues have more than doubled.

The opportunity that Peak is addressing goes a little like this: AI has become a cornerstone of many of the most advanced IT applications and business processes of our time, but if you are an organization — and specifically one not built around technology — your access to AI and how you might use it will come by way of applications built by others, not necessarily tailored to you, and the costs of building more tailored solutions can often be prohibitively high. Peak claims that those using its tools have seen revenues on average rise 5%, return on ad spend double, supply chain costs reduce by 5% and inventory holdings (a big cost for companies) reduce by 12%.

Peak’s platform, I should point out, is not exactly a “no-code” approach to solving that problem — not yet at least: It’s aimed at data scientists and engineers at those organizations so that they can easily identify different processes in their operations where they might benefit from AI tools, and to build those out with relatively little heavy lifting.

There have also been different market factors that have played a role. COVID-19, for example, and the boost that we have seen both in increasing “digital transformation” in businesses and making e-commerce processes more efficient to cater to rising consumer demand and more strained supply chains have all led to businesses being more open and keen to invest in more tools to improve their automation intelligently.

This, combined with Peak AI’s growing revenues, is part of what interested SoftBank. The investor has been long on AI for a while; but it also has been building out a section of its investment portfolio to provide strategic services to the kinds of businesses in which it invests.

How artificial intelligence will be used in 2021

Those include e-commerce and other consumer-facing businesses, which make up one of the main segments of Peak’s customer base.

Notably, one of its recent investments specifically in that space was made earlier this year, also in Manchester, when it took a $730 million stake (with potentially $1.6 billion more down the line) in The Hut Group, which builds software for and runs D2C businesses.

“In Peak we have a partner with a shared vision that the future enterprise will run on a centralized AI software platform capable of optimizing entire value chains,” Max Ohrstrand, senior investor for SoftBank Investment Advisers, said in a statement. “To realize this a new breed of platform is needed and we’re hugely impressed with what Richard and the excellent team have built at Peak. We’re delighted to be supporting them on their way to becoming the category-defining, global leader in Decision Intelligence.”

It’s not clear that SoftBank’s two Manchester interests will be working together, but it’s an interesting synergy if they do, and most of all highlights one of the firm’s areas of interest.

Longer term, it will be interesting to see how and if Peak evolves to extend its platform to a wider set of users at the organizations that are already its customers.

Potter said he believes that “those with technical predispositions” will be the most likely users of its products in the near and medium term. You might assume that would cut out, for example, marketing managers, although the general trend in a lot of software tools has precisely been to build versions of the same tools used by data scientists for these less technical people to engage in the process of building what it is that they want to use.

“I do think it’s important to democratize the ability to stream data pipelines, and to be able to optimize those to work in applications,” Potter added.

Minnesota twins raise $3M to increase accessibility to disability care

Having a loved one with specialized care needs is incredibly challenging, but not something that people who have never had to deal with the issue would necessarily quite understand.

For anyone who has had to help care for someone with special needs, the lack of options out there to navigate finding access to care providers is almost shocking.

Twin sisters Melanie Fountaine and Melissa Danielsen know the problem firsthand, having helped take care of their brother, Josh, who had a developmental disability and severe epilepsy, for years.

“We saw the struggle for our family to find reliable care,” Danielsen told TechCrunch.

After he passed away 12 years ago at the age of 29, the siblings decided they wanted to dedicate their careers to making disability care accessible to families with complex care needs. They founded Josh’s Place, a company that provided group home accommodations and other services to adults across Minnesota, which ended up being acquired by REM Minnesota in early 2020.

The pair then came up with the concept behind Joshin, a digital care platform that aims to connect care providers to families with specialized care needs. And today, that startup is announcing it has closed on a $3 million seed round of funding co-led by Anthemis Group and The Autism Impact Fund.

Joshin started out as an app that creates a care plan that helps it match families to a “carefully vetted” trained caregiver. It has evolved to also include a corporate benefits program that involves Joshin partnering with companies who want to offer an inclusive care benefit to their employees.

Image Credits: Joshin

An estimated one in five families have complex health needs, ranging from children with neurodivergence to dependent adults with developmental and physical disabilities. The COVID-19 pandemic has only highlighted the need for support, making it even more difficult to find necessary care. As such, many people (most of which are women) are finding they have to leave jobs to become full-time caregivers.

“For too long, people with special health needs and their families have been underserved and had fragmented access to disability care providers,” said CEO Danielsen.

As ADA turns 30, tech is just getting started helping people with disabilities

COO Fountaine says that historically the care economy has focused on children under 12, or adults over 65 — childcare and eldercare, respectively.

“Joshin really is positioned to be the leader in that huge age gap that’s out there,” she said. “We work with people at all stages of life, and I think it’s unfortunate that until now, that’s been missing from the conversation. 

The company plans to use its new capital in part to grow its network of care providers. It also aims to expand its corporate benefits program.

“We’re continuing to scale our technology to lessen the burden of caregiving responsibilities for employees and their families,” added Danielsen.

Over the past 12 months, Joshin’s community of members and caregivers has grown 200%. With the new funding, the startup plans to expand its services to Los Angeles and Seattle. It is currently operational in its home base of Minneapolis, Minnesota, Chicago and New York City.  Joshin will be soft launching in eight new markets over the next few weeks, and hopes “to be national very soon,” Fountaine said.

The startup is starting with employers, and building up the data that it derives from that effort. Over the next year, it intends to partner with managed Medicaid organizations, and with both private and public insurance companies so that it “can get families access to this care, quickly,” said Danielsen.

“Our goal is to make quality care free for families who need it,” she told TechCrunch.

Chris Male, co-founder of the Autism Impact Fund, said his organization backs companies that are addressing unmet needs of the autism community. Finding, retaining and coordinating care are three of the biggest hurdles that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and their families face, according to Male.

Fable aims to make disability-inclusive design as simple as a service

“Joshin has a proven ability to provide a reliable means to source caregivers with diverse skill sets and potential to serve as a platform for streamlining access to a variety of critical yet highly fragmented services for the special needs community,” he said. “Given the current insurance payer landscape and employer emphasis on DEI, Joshin is not only generating strong impact for a large disability market, but is a monetizable opportunity as both a reimbursable service and as a benefit to employees.”

By partnering with employers, Male added, Joshin will help provide an environment of support that will allow “employees to quickly and easily access key resources and thus minimize downtime. “

Matthew Jones, managing director at Anthemis, said his firm doubled down on its investment in the startup because it saw in its founders “one of the strongest examples of founder-market fit out there.” (Anthemis also led the company’s $1.6 million funding round in July of 2020.)

“The progress that they have made since our last investment — coupled with the insights that they have collected — led us to believe that doubling down in this round was a no-brainer,” he told TechCrunch.

Also, the complexity that comes with building technology in the space “makes the barriers to entry very high,” Jones added.

“The team’s grit, combined with their understanding of the problems and opportunities associated with disability-related care, set Joshin apart,” he wrote via email. “No other platform comes close in terms of having such specialized leaders at the helm, so it’s no surprise that corporates are lining up to add Joshin to their roster of employee benefits.”

Restaurants Still Battling a Chicken Shortage in 2021

Poultry is scarce and that has restaurants fighting back against a chicken shortage this year.

Record breaking winter storms in the south central US are behind the issue. Higher pandemic demand has also dented supply for favorites like chicken wings.

Small Business Trends reached out to restaurant owners to find out how they’re coping with the chicken shortage.

At least one is taking a familiar path small businesses turn to when supply levels dip.

Restaurants Deal with Continued Chicken Shortage

“At the moment, we have had to raise prices,” Sean Kim, part owner of Holdaak in California says. “Pretty much all of our menu items include some form of chicken.”

They’re also looking to tweak their inventory at the source.

“We have had numerous meetings with new suppliers as well. And have changed our main suppliers twice since the beginning of COVID,” he says.

Kim adds his suppliers are telling him they hope things return to normal in a few months.

Restaurants Pivot

Other restaurants have decided to pivot. Lori Bogedin, a chef and culinary expert who runs TwigsCafe, explains.

“Some restaurants have made changes to their menu,” she says. “They’re selling other kinds of meat or chicken alternatives to meet the rising demands.”

Even with the changes, Bogedin says some places are operating in the red.

“The chicken shortage has caused many businesses to go into a loss because they’re selling at discounted prices,” she says.

Sadly, there’s a deeper bottom for some.

“Due to the shortage, the popular restaurant chain Nando’s has had to shut down 45 of its outlets,” Bogedin adds.

She points to other estimates and notes, “Almost 10% of restaurants have halted their operations. That’s due to the combined effect of the pandemic and the chicken shortage.”

Pandemic Related

Some people in the industry focus more on pandemic related issues. Kirk Vogel, President and Owner of the Walnut Grill Restaurant Group, explains.

“We have had a lot of issues with chicken, mainly due to COVID,” he explains. “The plants are shut down for safety reasons  or not enough staff.”

Vogel also says his suppliers are telling him shortages will last well into the fourth quarter with relief only coming in the Spring of 2022.

“Even that depends on  if the plants are fully functional to supply enough product,” he says.

Finally, it would seem size matters when dealing with the ongoing chicken shortage.

Duffy’s Sports Grill is the largest family-owned and operated restaurant group in Florida. A spokesman for the chain reports they’ve been able to supply chicken wings with only a few issues.

Garrett Foster from Pinnacle Advertising says part of Duffy’s success lies in making the most of relationships with local vendors. The result was only a slight price bump for customers.

“While the prices are almost double (for everyone) Duffy’s has only slightly raised their pricing,” he says.

As far as the chicken shortages go, the end might not be in sight anytime soon. Bogedin says suppliers haven’t released any statements about when they think it will end.

“Most agree it will be some time before supply will be able to meet demand,” she says.

Image: Depositphotos

This article, "Restaurants Still Battling a Chicken Shortage in 2021" was first published on Small Business Trends

This YC Summer batch features the largest group of African startups yet

Y Combinator’s summer batch of 2021 features 377 startups from 47 countries. It’s the 33rd Demo Day of the well-known accelerator and holds the largest cohort yet. YC S20 had 198 startups, so that’s a 90% increase from last year.

About half of the companies represented are based outside the U.S. The countries with the most representatives (aside from the U.S.) include India, with 33 startups; the U.K., with 18 startups; Mexico with 17; Singapore with 12; and Canada and Brazil, 11 each.

While the Demo Day for this year’s winter batch was held in a day, it’s two days for this summer batch. Today, 189 companies will pitch, while the rest will pitch tomorrow.

African startups also increased from 10 in the winter batch to 15 this time around, a record for African startups in a single YC cohort.

“This is the largest batch we have ever funded and it’s about 50% international. As a result, it is not surprising that this is the largest cohort from Africa,” Y Combinator managing director and group arptner Michael Seibel told TechCrunch when asked if any extra factor contributed to the rise in accepted African startups.

Another valid reason for the uptick could be that YC is getting more applications from Africa due to the recent success stories of Paystack and Flutterwave. At least, that’s the view shared by Kat Mañalac, the head of Outreach at YC.

“Alumni are always the best spokespeople and representatives for YC. A lot of African founders (and future founders) I’ve spoken to were encouraged by seeing Paystack do so well and get acquired. The success of a lot of our African alumni are inspiring more African teams to apply,” she told TechCrunch.

Nigeria leads the way again with five startups, while Egypt has four, Morocco has two, and Kenya, Ghana, Zambia and South Africa each have one. Here’s the list of African startups that made it to YC S21 in alphabetical order.

Amenli (Egypt)

Africa has the lowest insurance penetrations globally. In Egypt, the insurance penetration rate stands at a minuscule 1%.

Amenli, founded by Shady El Tohfa and Adham Nauman in 2020, is addressing an untapped $2 billion market, being the first licensed online insurance broker in the country.

Chari (Morocco)

A wave of disruption of digitizing informal retail stores is sweeping across emerging markets this year, and Chari is joining in on the action.

Sophia Alj and Ismael Belkhayat founded Chari in 2020. The company allows traditional retailers in Morocco and some parts of North Africa to order consumer goods via its platform and handles free delivery to their stores. Chari has a fintech side by providing these retailers with credit.

Fingo (Kenya)

Neobanks have taken the world by storm and Africa is the last frontier for this brand of fintech innovation. Fingo is providing an alternative brand of banking to African millennials, starting from Kenya.

Founded by Kiiru Muhoya Gitari Tirima James da Costa and Ian Njuguna in 2020, the digital bank claims to offer fees 90% cheaper than traditional banks in Kenya, among other services.

FloatPays (South Africa)

In South Africa, up to 5 million employees borrow money to meet their monthly needs when they exhaust their salaries. However, the lending options for these employees come with outrageous interest rates.

Simon Ward founded FloatPays in 2019 as an on-demand wage access platform to help employees access, spend, save and manage their money.

Freterium (Morocco)

Managers of delivery businesses handle hundreds or thousands of delivery points every day. With a fleet made up of many trucks or vans, there’s a need to drop a delivery plan for each at different locations daily. How do they optimize for costs and efficiency at the same time?

Enter Freterium. The company allows contractors, manufacturers, distributors and logisticians to plan and optimize their B2B or B2C shipments while providing a cloud platform for real-time visibility of shipments, logistics infrastructure and seamless collaboration that breaks down traditional organizational silos. Omar El Kouhene and Mehdi Cherif Alami founded Freterium in 2018.

Infiuss Health (Nigeria)

A large number of Africans are exempt from clinical research studies due to time constraints. Per reports, it can take up to ten months to conduct such studies in these climes.

Infiuss Health says it is building a decentralized platform for remote research and clinical trials in Africa. How? By connecting researchers directly to patients who want to participate in clinical research studies in less than a week.

The company was founded by Melissa Bime and Mbah Charles in 2020.

Lemonade Finance (Nigeria)

There are millions of African immigrants in Europe and North America. Some have established businesses in both these regions and also in Africa.

In another digital banking play, Lemonade Finance provides multi-currency accounts for these migrants to enable seamless transactions and banking. The company was founded by Rian Cochran and Ridwan Olalere in 2020

Mecho Autotech (Nigeria)

Repairing one’s vehicle can be a painstaking process in Africa due to pricing and quality issues. The latter is because many of these professionals (mechanics) are unvetted.

Ayoola Akinkunmi and Olusegun Owoade started Mecho Autotech in 2021 as an on-demand auto maintenance and repairs platform. Mecho Autotech has created a network of vetted mechanics, and via an app, car owners can book and pay for their services.

Odiggo (Egypt)

Like its predecessor on this list, Odiggo connects car owners with mobile mechanics in the Middle East. On the platform, car owners can also access extra services, which include car washing and maintenance.

Although Odiggo lists as a Dubai-based company on the YC database, it has origins in Egypt and launched operations first in the North African country.

Y Combinator, 500 Startups, Plug and Play invest in Odiggo’s $2.2M seed round

Payhippo (Nigeria)

Access to credit is still very much a problem to the millions of small and medium businesses in Nigeria, which make up most of the country’s businesses.

Founded by Zach Bijesse, Uche Nnadi and Chioma Okotcha in 2019, Payhippo provides loans to businesses that couldn’t ordinarily get loans or credit cards from banks or other financial institutions.

Pylon (Egypt)

Water and electricity distribution companies face losses from leakages and thefts when opening new revenue streams in emerging markets.

Pylon acts as an infrastructure management platform for these distribution companies and helps to reduce these losses. It was founded in 2017 by Ahmed Ashour and Omar Radi.

ShipBlu (Egypt)

When merchants start to grow their e-commerce businesses, it can be difficult to manage the end-to-end delivery and fulfilment needs. In Egypt, several platforms are already offering solutions to this ever-growing need, and ShipBlu is adding to that list.

Founded by Ahmed ElKawass, Abdelrahman Hosny and Ali Nasser in 2020, ShipBlu claims to offer a full suite of delivery services for e-commerce merchants from overnight to delivery to five- to seven-day delivery.

Suplias (Nigeria)

Another digitizing-informal-retail-stores play, this time from Nigeria. Suplias is a B2B marketplace where mom-and -op stores in Africa buy inventory directly from manufacturers using a mobile app.

The company was founded by Stephen Igwue, Michael Adesanya and Sefa Ikyaator in 2019.

Union54 (Zambia)

African fintechs are in the business of providing virtual and physical cards to their customers. However, it doesn’t come easy and cheap when done in partnership with banks.

Union54 is an alternative and provides an API for them to issue debit cards cheaper and faster. It was founded by Alessandra Martini and Perseus Mlambo in 2021.

The first Zambian startup to get into YC is developing Africa’s first card-issuing API

Yemaachi Biotechnology (Ghana)

Yaw Attua-Afari, Yaw Bediako, David Hutchful and Joyce Ngoi founded Yemaachi Biotechnology in 2020. The startup’s idea is to diversify precision cancer diagnostics and treatments across the continent, starting with Ghana.

An estimated 752,000 new cancer cases, 4% of the world’s total, occurred in sub-Saharan Africa in 2018. Yemaachi is working to lower the burden cancer causes by creating molecular diagnostics optimized for all Africans.

Rattle raises $2.8M from Lightspeed and Sequoia to modernize enterprise sales stack

Tech employees build amazing consumer-facing apps for the world. But for their internal communications, they are stuck using applications that don’t play well with one another.

This is a problem, as most employees at a mid-sized or large-sized firm spend a fourth to a third of their days on internal communication applications.

Now a San Francisco-headquartered startup is attempting to build software that makes it much more convenient to engage with business services.

Rattle is building a real-time and collaborative “connectivity tissue” to address the siloed nature of modern record-keeping and intelligence platforms, said Sahil Aggarwal, co-founder and chief executive of the eponymous startup, in an interview with TechCrunch.

“To use Salesforce, as an example, you are using it for two things: you’re writing data into Salesforce and you’re taking data out of it,” he explained. “What Rattle does is it enables you to send all the insights from Salesforce into a messaging platform and then lets you write data from within the messaging service back into Salesforce.”

Image Credits: Rattle

Rattle’s use case extends to even more services. It can recognize phone calls and prompt individuals to log that and pursue that opportunity on Slack.

“We started with integrating Slack and Salesforce, and now with their acquisition the idea has definitely gotten validated. It’s extremely transformational for companies,” said Aggarwal, who got the idea about this startup at his previous venture when an application he built for the internal team received great feedback.

The startup, which launched its offering in March, is already seeing over 70% conversion rate among enterprises that have given it a try. Rattle has amassed over 50 customers, including Terminus, Olive, Litmus, Imply and Parse.ly.

After implementing Rattle “[our] lead response time has gone down by 75% and key processes have sped up from days to minutes,” said Jeff Ronaldi, GTM Ops Manager at LogDNA.

The startup announced on Tuesday that it has raised a seed round of $2.8 million from Lightspeed and Sequoia Capital India. Amy Chang (EVP at Cisco & Disney board member), Ellen Levy (early investor in Outreach), Jake Seid (early investor in Brex & Carta), and Krish & Raman (the founders of unicorn SaaS firm Chargebee) also participated in the round.

Salesforce buys Slack in a $27.7B megadeal

“Businesses worldwide are mired in processes – from sales to marketing, HR, IT, and more. With increased digitization and remote work, processes and adherence thereof are only going to diverge over time,” said Hemant Mohapatra, partner at Lightspeed, in a statement. “The Rattle team impressed us by their unrelenting focus on the most important piece of this puzzle: the people caught in these processes. Rarely have we seen such intense customer love so early in a company’s life and are honored to go on this journey with Rattle together!”

The startup, which charges anywhere between $20 to $30 per user per month, plans to deploy the fresh funds to expand its product offerings including adding integration with more enterprise applications.

Inside Freshworks’ IPO filing

Freshworks, a customer engagement software company with roots in both California in the United States and Tamil Nadu in India, is going public. Its S-1 filing paints the picture of a company scaling rapidly, with improving profitability as it matures. However, to understand the company’s numbers, we’ll have to peel away certain costs for a clear picture.

The Exchange spoke with Freshworks CEO Girish Mathrubootham a few weeks ago about the future of his company, a conversation that in hindsight we timed rather well. We’ll lean on notes from the call as we parse Mathrubootham’s IPO filing.

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Quite a lot of venture capital is riding on Freshworks’ IPO going well. The company raised hundreds of millions of dollars while private, per Crunchbase data, including a $150 million Series H in late 2019 that valued the company at around $3.5 billion. Its investor list includes Accel, Tiger, Sequoia and Capital G.

This morning, let’s dig into the company’s historical growth, track Freshworks’ changing profitability profile and check to see if its revenue quality is improving over time.

Quick notes on product

Before we dive into the numbers, let’s discuss Freshworks’ historical product work.

The company started life with a single piece of software called Freshdesk. Freshdesk was born after the company’s CEO struggled with poor customer service when trying to return a broken television.

Per Mathrubootham, he felt like there were more avenues than ever for customers to reach companies, and that the business market was evolving in a way that gave customers more clout in how brands were perceived. So, Freshdesk brought together a host of customer contact methods, including social media, which at the time was a more nascent market category.

Freshworks later noticed that some of its customers were using its customer service software to offer IT support to their own employees. From that observation, the company built Freshservice, a version of its original product, but tuned for internal use. The company later built out sales tools and, more recently, a unified database for customer data. The latter allows companies using Freshworks software to have a single record for each customer across marketing and sales interactions, which it intends to extend to support communications as well.

All that’s to say that Freshworks has a product that it can sell to small companies that may need a single piece of its larger product mix, and lots more software that it can upsell to those customers. And it has a product suite it can sell to larger companies as well.

So how has the company performed in the market? Let’s find out.

Osana Salud raises $20M to build API-connected infrastructure for the LatAm healthcare industry

Osana Salud, which aims to transform the healthcare infrastructure in Latin America, has closed on a $20 million Series A round of funding led by General Catalyst.

The Argentina-based, yet fully remote, startup was founded in 2019 — just a few months before the pandemic. Since launching less than a year ago, Osana says it has secured contracts with health insurance firms and providers that collectively serve more than 6 million patients in the region. For example, it is working with Sanatorio Güemes and PAMI, which has a network of 5 million patients, among others.

Quiet Capital, Preface Ventures, FJ Labs, AforeVC and K50 Ventures also put money in the latest round, which brings Osana’s total raised over its lifetime to $26.5 million. Lee Fixel’s Addition is also an investor.

CEO Andre Lawson told TechCrunch he was inspired to start Osana Salud because an estimated 50% of Latin America does not have access to quality healthcare. So he teamed up with COO Jorge Lopez to found the company to help change that. President Charu Sharma (the only staffer who is U.S.-based) and CTO Hugo Martin joined at a later date.

“Our vision is to enable affordable and accessible healthcare for every person in Latin America by leveraging technology,” Lawson said.

Why global investors are flocking to back Latin American startups

Specifically, Osana Salud is building an API-connected infrastructure to help the region’s healthcare industry offer a patient experience that offers “greater convenience, outcomes and value,” Lawson told TechCrunch. Its initial focus is on building solutions for telehealth, pharmacy and diagnostics. 

For example, he said, Osana wants to make it faster and cheaper for healthcare players to build solutions that are “safe, secure and interact well” with other health systems. With that in mind, the company has tapped doctors and engineers to design that infrastructure.

“The goal is to empower the next generation of healthcare providers in building patient-centric solutions with the potential to positively impact the healthcare experiences and outcomes for hundreds of millions of people,” Lawson said.

In the past eight months, Osana has grown from four to about 50 people, and it expects to have over 250 employees in the next year. Despite not quite being two years old, the startup believes it’s already grown to be Latin America’s biggest telehealth company.

Sharma told TechCrunch that despite living in Silicon Valley, she was drawn to the company’s mission and found the potential to “massively transform healthcare for a whole continent” appealing.

“In the U.S. tech ecosystem, we focus on first-world problems a lot, but an emerging market like LatAm gave me the opportunity to make a meaningful impact at a very basic human need level,” she said. “As the saying goes, talent is equally distributed but opportunity is not.”

In fact, as evidence that remote work will never be the same after COVID, neither Sharma nor Martin have met Lawson or Lopez in person.

The new capital will in part go toward accelerating the company’s product roadmap, Lawson said, and helping it expand to Brazil and Mexico, where it has seen “strong inbound interest.” But primarily, it will be used for hiring.

The timing of the company’s inception was good. The pandemic shed light on the fractures of the healthcare system in Latin America, Lawson believes. It also gave the industry the opportunity to show the benefits of a “virtual first” approach, he added. And once people got a taste of it, they wanted more.

Where top VCs are investing in healthcare B2B and infrastructure

As a result, Osana says it has seen a big bump both in the number of clients and in the usage of its technology platform amongst existing ones.

“Furthermore, COVID-19 created urgency for healthcare providers, which resulted in very short sales cycles for us,” Lawson said.

Hemant Taneja of General Catalyst said the startup’s thesis aligns “perfectly” with his firm’s thesis around healthcare. Taneja himself is also a co-founder and executive chairman of San Francisco-based Commure, a venture-backed startup which is also building software infrastructure aimed at transforming the healthcare space.

“The healthcare infrastructure landscape in Latin America is highly fragmented,” he told TechCrunch. Most software vendors are small or medium-sized local vendors, who have not crossed into other Latin American geographies, Taneja pointed out.

“Osana has a variety of solutions for providers, payors and the pharmaceutical industry that are customizable and modular to create truly personalized experiences — regardless of the region in Latin America,” he said. “They can be an important unifier in a really fractured marketplace.”

Compounds Foods brews up $4.5M to make coffee without beans

Maricel Saenz, founder and CEO of Compound Foods, is among the over 80% of Americans who love a cup of coffee daily. And she also loves the environment.

However, when the Costa Rican-born entrepreneur, now living in the Bay Area, saw how climate change was affecting coffee growers around the world — coffee is the fifth-most polluting crop in the value chain — she wanted to create a coffee product that tasted good, but was also sustainable.

“Temperatures are rising and combined with erratic rains are leading to lower crop yield,” Saenz told TechCrunch. “The same crop can’t grow in the same place anymore, or it will be a lower quality product. Farmers in Costa Rica are having to sell their land or go higher up the mountain. Experts predict that 50% of farmland will be unsuitable in the next couple of decades.”

Founded in 2020, Compound Foods uses synthetic biology to create coffee without coffee beans by extracting molecules. Saenz said the company spent a lot of time examining what makes coffee, well coffee, and then trying to correlate flavors and aromas in certain ways.

And yes, the company can still call it “coffee” even if it doesn’t contain coffee beans because there is no official regulatory definition, she said.

They use food science to recreate a base formula using sustainable ingredients that also don’t use a lot of water — she said it takes 140 liters of water along the coffee growth chain to make one cup of coffee. The company is also working toward a goal of being able to recreate coffee inspired by flavors that you would get from different areas of the world, like Costa Rica, but also the chocolate notes from a cup of Brazilian coffee.

Compound Foods announced $4.5 million in seed funding to give it total funding of $5.3 million to date. Backers of the company include Chris Sacca’s climate fund Lowercarbon Capital, SVLC, Humboldt Fund, Collaborative Fund, Maple VC, Petri Bio and angel investors like Nick Green, CEO of Thrive Market.

Saenz intends to use the new funding to improve the formulation and scale up the brand as the company works toward a soft launch by the end of the year.

There are a few competitors in the space doing different technology, including Seattle-based Atomo, which said it makes its coffee from “other fruits and plants that had seeds similar to coffee beans.”

Compound Foods is hiring coffee lovers to help build out its technology and to expand its marketing, product and business teams.

Saenz is clear that the company is not competing with coffee.

“We love coffee and know the farmers, and we are providing an alternative solution,” she added. “We want to recreate it, and even drink it on Mars one day, and we want to bring the coffee farmers and the industry with us on the journey.”

3 views on the future of work, coffee shops and neighborhoods in a post-pandemic world

 

Fundraising for your startup? We’ve got you covered at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021

Fundraising is a huge part of building a successful startup, and whether you’re looking for information about the latest trends, alternative funding or how to fine-tune your pitch to attract investors, you’ll find that and a whole lot more at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 on September 21-23.

Disrupt always taps the top experts, visionaries, founders, investors and makers to share their insights, tips and actionable advice. This year is no different, and you can choose from more than 80 presentations, events and breakout sessions over the course of three full days.

Be disruptive: Buy your pass today for less than $100 and get ready to learn from and connect with a global startup community.

Money makes the world go around (just ask Liza Minelli), and we’re highlighting just a sampling of the fundraising-focused sessions to help you on your financial journey at Disrupt.

Ready to raise? Here’s just a sample of the fundraising knowledge you can get — you’ll find the specific days and times listed in the Disrupt 2021 agenda.

How to Raise Your First Dollars

Deciding how to go about getting your initial funding is always a tricky subject, as the wrong move could adversely impact your young company. In this session we’ll hear from Index Ventures’ Nina Achadjian, Sequoia Capital’s Luciana Lixandru and Canvas Ventures’ Rebecca Lynn — experts who’ve shepherded multiple companies from the earliest to the latest fundraises.

How to Ditch Traditional Fundraising

In 2021, venture capital has never been more plentiful, but some founders still can’t break into networks or have found that traditional fundraising isn’t the best route for their business. Fortunately, alternative fundraising techniques are gathering steam as founders find paths to raise cash that diverge from the startup success stories of the past. Join Pipe’s Harry Hurst, Accel’s Arun Mathew and Clearco’s Michele Romanow to learn more about alternative fundraising options.

You’ve Raised Your Seed Round — Now What? Preparing for Your Series A

You cleared the first hurdle: initial funding is in the bank. You’re hiring more talent, seeing the beginnings of a finished product with clear evidence of traction and experiencing the coveted growth that previously felt just out of reach. Before you know it, the decision to raise for what is arguably the most competitive round is staring you in the face. Join Samsung Next’s David Lee alongside founders Kadie Okwudili (Agapé), Andy Hoang (Aviron) and Jim Bugwadia (Nirmata) as they discuss the learnings and nuances of bridging seed to Series A. Presented by Samsung Next.

Where to Cut and Where to Spend in First-Check Fundraising

Every time a founder raises financing, they usually have one goal: growth. But what does that actually mean? And how do you begin divvying up your new capital between the various goals your startup is barreling toward? In this panel, which includes Harlem Capital’s Henri Pierre-Jacques, Equal Ventures’ Richard Kerby and BBG Ventures’ Nisha Dua, you will learn about how to spend your investment the best way, balancing runway with classic startup rigor.

How Circle’s $4.5B Public Listing Will Change Startup Fundraising

Circle acquired SeedInvest in 2019, as a further step toward realizing its vision of a more open, global, connected and inclusive financial system. Circle recently announced its plans to become a $4.5 billion public company with over $1 billion of fresh capital. In this session, Circle CEO and co-founder Jeremy Allaire and Ryan Feit, CEO and co-founder of SeedInvest, will break down the evolution of the two companies and how Circle and SeedInvest plan to double down on online fundraising to make it faster and easier for entrepreneurs. Presented by by SeedInvest.

Crafting a Pitch Deck that Can’t Be Ignored

Investors may be chasing after the hottest deals, but for founders selling their startup’s vision, it’s never been more important to communicate it in the clearest way possible. Our panelists of pitch deck experts — Lightspeed Venture Partners’ Mercedes Bent, Pear VC’s Mar Hershenson and Techstars’ Saba Karim — dig into what’s essential, what’s unnecessary and what could just make all the difference in your next deck.

TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 takes place September 21-23. Buy your pass today and take advantage of these fundraising sessions and expert advice — so you can find the money to make your world go around.

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

Borzo, a delivery startup which focuses on emerging economies, raises $35M

If you’re in India, the Philippines, Russia, or Vietnam, Amazon Prime and Gorillas are probably not that much use to you. Comparable to DoorDash Drive or Lalamove (Malaysia), Dostavista is a “crowdsourced” same-day delivery service. Founded in Russia, the startup initially figured out a way to appeal to gig economy workers in countries such as the ones above by creating a game where players would be asked to deliver virtual items, before pivoting to the real thing. That left-of-field thinking has seen it expand to countries not typically touched by the bigger delivery startups.

Now the Amsterdam HQ-d startup is rebranding as “Borzo” to bring its operation in 10 different countries under one. At the same time, it’s raised $35 million in a Series C funding round led by UAE-based investor Mubadala. Also participating were VNV Global, RDIF, Flashpoint Venture Capital, and others.

The demand for affordable, same-day delivery of goods was obviously accelerated by the pandemic, and no less so in developing countries as well as developed ones.

Borzo says its gig economy workforce enables delivery via any route, any transport, any weight or size. The startup says it has built algorithms to optimize numerous parallel delivery routes taking into account the geographical routes, packages’ contents, couriers, and other factors.

In a statement, Mike Alexandrovski, founder of Borzo, said: “With the new round closed we continue to move toward our goal of becoming one of the top courier delivery companies in every market we operate in. To achieve this goal we believe it’s important to ensure operational synchronicity and integrity of the company’s brand perception, and that’s why we rebranded it to Borzo.”

Founded in 2012, Borzo says it now has a customer base of 2 million users, 2.5M couriers and operates in 10 countries including Brazil, India, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, the Philippines, Russia, Turkey, and Vietnam. It claims to be fulfilling over 3M orders per month, while its annual gross revenue run rate approaches $150M, it says.

Faris Al Mazrui, Head of Russia & CIS at Mubadala, said: “The true fundamental shift in eCommerce took place with the increasing reliability and convenience of on-demand delivery services. In Borzo, we find a team with a clear vision of the opportunity in the evolving on-demand delivery space. They have succeeded in going global; becoming competitive in 10 new international markets.”.

Last year we covered Borzo’s $15 million Series B round led by Vostok New Ventures, with participation from existing investors Flashpoint and AddVenture.

Databricks raises $1.6B at $38B valuation as it blasts past $600M ARR

Databricks this morning confirmed earlier reports that it was raising new capital at a higher valuation. The data- and AI-focused company has secured a $1.6 billion round at a $38 billion valuation, it said. Bloomberg first reported last week that Databricks was pursuing new capital at that price.

The Series H was led by Counterpoint Global, a Morgan Stanley fund. Other new investors included Baillie Gifford, UC Investments and ClearBridge. A grip of prior investors also kicked in cash to the round.

The new funding brings Databricks’ total private funding raised to $3.5 billion. Notably, its latest raise comes just seven months after the late-stage startup raised $1 billion on a $28 billion valuation. Its new valuation represents paper value creation in excess of $1 billion per month.

The company, which makes open source and commercial products for processing structured and unstructured data in one location, views its market as a new technology category. Databricks calls the technology a data “lakehouse,” a mashup of data lake and data warehouse.

Databricks CEO and co-founder Ali Ghodsi believes that its new capital will help his company secure market leadership.

For context, since the 1980s, large companies have stored massive amounts of structured data in data warehouses. More recently, companies like Snowflake and Databricks have provided a similar solution for unstructured data called a data lake.

In Ghodsi’s view, combining structured and unstructured data in a single place with the ability for customers to execute data science and business-intelligence work without moving the underlying data is a critical change in the larger data market.

“[Data lakehouses are] a new category, and we think there’s going to be lots of vendors in this data category. So it’s a land grab. We want to quickly race to build it and complete the picture,” he said in an interview with TechCrunch.

9 investors discuss hurdles, opportunities and the impact of cloud vendors in enterprise data lakes

Ghodsi also pointed out that he is going up against well-capitalized competitors and that he wants the funds to compete hard with them.

“And you know, it’s not like we’re up against some tiny startups that are getting seed funding to build this. It’s all kinds of [large, established] vendors,” he said. That includes Snowflake, Amazon, Google and others who want to secure a piece of the new market category that Databricks sees emerging.

The company’s performance indicates that it’s onto something.

Growth

Databricks has reached the $600 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) milestone, it disclosed as part of its funding announcement. It closed 2020 at $425 million ARR, to better illustrate how quickly it is growing at scale.

Per the company, its new ARR figure represents 75% growth, measured on a year-over-year basis.

That’s quick for a company of its size; per the Bessemer Cloud Index, top-quartile public software companies are growing at around 44% year over year. Those companies are worth around 22x their forward revenues.

At its new valuation, Databricks is worth 63x its current ARR. So Databricks isn’t cheap, but at its current pace should be able to grow to a size that makes its most recent private valuation easily tenable when it does go public, provided that it doesn’t set a new, higher bar for its future performance by raising again before going public.

Ghodsi declined to share timing around a possible IPO, and it isn’t clear whether the company will pursue a traditional IPO or if it will continue to raise private funds so that it can direct list when it chooses to float. Regardless, Databricks is now sufficiently valuable that it can only exit to one of a handful of mega-cap technology giants or go public.

Why hasn’t the company gone public? Ghodsi is enjoying a rare position in the startup market: He has access to unlimited capital. Databricks had to open another $100 million in its latest round, which was originally set to close at just $1.5 billion. It doesn’t lack for investor interest, allowing its CEO to bring aboard the sort of shareholder he wants for his company’s post-IPO life — while enjoying limited dilution.

This also enables him to hire aggressively, possibly buy some smaller companies to fill in holes in Databricks’ product roadmap, and grow outside of the glare of Wall Street expectations from a position of capital advantage. It’s the startup equivalent of having one’s cake and eating it too.

Would the math work if Databricks were valued at $38B?

But staying private longer isn’t without risks. If the larger market for software companies was rapidly devalued, Databricks could find itself too expensive to go public at its final private valuation. However, given the long bull market that we’ve seen in recent years for software shares, and the confidence Ghodsi has in his potential market, that doesn’t seem likely.

There’s still much about Databricks’ financial position that we don’t yet know — its gross margin profile, for example. TechCrunch is also incredibly curious what all its fundraising and ensuing spending have done to near-term Databricks operating cash flow results, as well as how long its gross-margin adjusted CAC payback has evolved since the onset of COVID-19. If we ever get an S-1, we might find out.

For now, winsome private markets are giving Ghodsi and crew space to operate an effectively public company without the annoyances that come with actually being public. Want the same thing for your company? Easy: Just reach $600 million ARR while growing 75% year over year.

Octane banks $2M for flexible billing software

Software billing startup Octane announced Tuesday that it raised $2 million on a post-money valuation of $10 million to advance its pay-as-you-go billing software.

Akash Khanolkar and his co-founders met a decade ago at Carnegie Mellon University and since then went off in different directions. In Khanolkar’s case, he ran a cloud consulting business and saw how fast companies like Datadog and Snowflake were coming to market and dealing with Amazon Web Services.

He found that the commonality in all of those fast-growing companies was billing software using a pay-as-you-go business model versus the traditional flat-rate plans, Khanolkar told TechCrunch.

However, he explained that monitoring consumption means that billing becomes complicated: companies now have to track how customers are using the software per second in order to bill correctly each month.

Seeing the shift toward consumption-based billing, the co-founders came back together in June 2020 to create Octane, a metered billing system that helps vendors create a plan, monitor usage and charge in a similar way to Snowflake and AWS, Khanolkar said.

“We are API-driven, and you as a vendor will send us usage data, and on our end, we store it and then do real-time aggregations so at the end of the month, you can accordingly bill customers,” Khanolkar said. “We have seen contention between engineering and product. Engineers are there to create core plans, so we built a no-code experience for product teams to be able to create new price plans and then perform changes, like adding coupons.”

Within the global cloud billing market, which is expected to reach $6.5 billion by 2025, there are a set of Octane competitors, like Chargebee and Zuora, that Khanolkar said are tackling the subscription management side and succeeding in the past several years. Now there is a usage and consumption-based world coming and a whole new set of software businesses, like Octane, coming in to succeed there.

The new round of funding was led by Basis Set Ventures and included Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi, Github CTO Jason Warner, Fortress CTO Assunta Gaglione, Scale AI CRO Chetan Chaudhary, former Twilio executive Evan Cummack, Esteban Reyes, Abstraction Capital and Script Capital.

“With the rise of product-led growth and usage-based pricing models, usage-based billing is a critical and foundational piece of infrastructure that has been simply missing,” said Chang Xu, partner at Basis Set Ventures, via email. “At the same time, it’s something that every department cares about as it’s your revenue. Many later-stage companies we talk to that have built this in-house talk about the ongoing maintenance costs and wishes that there is a vendor they can outsource it to.”

We are super impressed with the Octane team with their dedication to building a best-in-class and robust usage-based billing solution. They’ve validated this opportunity by talking to lots of engineering teams so they can solve for all the edge cases, which is important in something as mission critical as billing. We are convinced that Octane will become an inevitable part of the tech infrastructure.”

Quolum announces $2.75M seed investment to track SaaS spending

The new funding will go primarily toward hiring engineers, as well as product, marketing and sales staff. Octane currently has seven employees, and Khanolkar expects to be around 10 by the end of the year.

The company is working with a large range of companies, primarily focused on infrastructure and the depth gauge industries. Octane is also seeing some unique use cases emerge, like a construction company using the usage meter to track the hours an employee works and companies in electric charging using the meter for those purposes.

“We didn’t envision construction guys using it, but in theory, it could be used by any company that tracks time — even legal,” Khanolkar added.

He declined to speak about the company’s revenue, but did say it now had two to three years of runway.

Up next, the company plans to roll out new features like price experimentation based on usage to help customers better make decisions on how to price their software, another problem Khanolkar sees happening. It will build ways that customers can try different plans against usage data to validate which one works the best.

“We are still in the early innings of consumption-based models, but we see more end users opting to go with an enterprise that wants to let them try out the software and then pay as they go,” he added.

Subscription-based pricing is dead: Smart SaaS companies are shifting to usage-based models

Quip’s new $100M round will usher in more than just clean teeth

Quip is on a mission to be the go-to platform for both personal and professional oral care, and a new $100 million cash infusion is giving the New York-based company fuel to do it.

The new round from Cowen Sustainable Investments (CSI), labeled a Series B, follows the company reaching profitability in April 2020 and gives Quip more than $160 million in total funding since the company was founded in 2015. Its last publicly announced raise was $40 million in 2018. The company showcased its service at TechCrunch Disrupt NY’s Startup Alley in 2015.

At that time, Quip was best known as a subscription-based toothbrush replacement service, but over the years has steadily taken on more of the $435 billion global oral healthcare market by adding other products like flossers, mouthwash, gum, smart electric toothbrushes and, most recently, a virtual orthodontist-enabled clear aligner service launched in April.

Quip raises another $40 million for dental care products and services

Company co-founder and CEO Simon Enever told TechCrunch that its long-term vision is to “build a lasting global business in the oral care category, and it is important to keep the business on the right scale.” Quip is focused on growth, innovation and community building among its over 7.5 million customers in 100 countries.

“The timing of this round, and raising such a significant round, was deliberate and strategic,” he added. “We wanted to prove a couple of things: that we create a high-profile, profitable core business that people know today, aligning the first pieces of the pie on our oral care app and then services, such as the clear aligner that we launched a couple of months ago.”

When Quip first launched and received funding six years ago, there were very few oral care startups and not much funding going into the space, Enever said. In fact, that was what led him to start the company in the first place — a dental visit eight years ago where he learned how little investment was being made to improve the space. Since then, more startups are innovating dental care and there is investment in both the personal care side and professional, especially in sub areas like orthodontics and appointment bookings, which Quip is working on, he added.

The new funding will enable the company to further scale its personal care platform, which already has over 7.5 million users, and continue to connect them with a network of more than 50,000 dental professionals. It will also go into new verticals, expand its global footprint and roll out new features to its oral care companion mobile app.

Quip expects to reach over 1 million app users in 2022, Enever said. New features will complement the company’s mission to track oral habits, coaching and health monitoring. Members can then earn points by improving their habits and health and redeem them for products and discounts from Quip and other partners.

Enever also plans to double Quip’s 200-person team (located in New York and Salt Lake City) by the end of 2022.

“We had an amazing lean and driven team that has gotten us to the point where we are at now, and we are excited to scale that and have more support to take things to the next level,” he added. “It is incredible to watch the team. In the past few years, they hit their goals and launched four brand new personal care product lines, rolled out in Walmart and helped us become profitable. It has been amazing to watch the team despite the pandemic.”

Retail sales are up more than 100% compared to last year, according to the company. In addition to going into Walmart, the company’s products are also in Target, giving it over 10,000 retail locations.

As part of the investment, Artem Mariychin, managing director at CSI, is joining the company’s board. CSI, an environmental sustainability focused growth investment strategy, looks for companies having a positive impact on the world’s environment, like addressing waste, which was one of the attractions to Quip, he said.

To break away from D2C crowd, SmileDirectClub announces retail partnership with Walmart

The company estimated over 100 million single-use plastic components were diverted from landfills through its paper packaging and refillable products recycling program. It aims to reach over 1 million pounds of plastic reduction or diversion in the next 12 months.

Mariychin was also attracted to Quip’s growth versus other consumer companies and its ability to be capital efficient and also consumer-centric, something he said was unique in the oral care business.

“They aren’t expensive, but they are high-quality and solve consumer needs and pain points,” he said. “Simon’s origin was to improve brushing outcomes — only 50% of people brush twice a day now. However, with the brush built, they looked at what else they can do and expanded into the floss pick and mouthwash. What is impressive is that subscribers are now purchasing other products. Quip is now expanding into other parts of dental, like the liners, and that is atypical of others in e-commerce.”