Month: January 2021

A little less than two years ago, when the actor, producer, and investor Robert Downey Jr. unveiled his new, sustainability focused initiative called the FootPrint Coalition at Amazon’s re:MARS conference it was little more than a static website and a subscription prompt.

Jump cut to today, and the firm now has five portfolio companies, a non-profit initiative, and is launching a rolling venture fund, Footprint Coalition Ventures, at the World Economic Forum’s Digital Davos event.

With the new rolling fund, managed through AngelList, Downey Jr.’s initiative sits the intersection of two of the biggest ideas reshaping the world economy — the democratization of access to capital and investment vehicles and the $10 trillion opportunity to decarbonize global industry.

It’s another arrow in the quiver for an institution that aims to combine storytelling, investing, and non-profit commitments to combat the world’s climate crisis.

Rolling funds and the revolution in finance

There’s a revolution happening in finance right now, whether it’s the rise of the Redittors trying to avenge the malfeasance of short-sellers and big institutional investors that’s happening through investments in stocks like Blockbuster, Nokia, Gamestop and AMC, or the new crowdfunding sources and rolling funds that are allowing regular investors to finance early stage companies, things on Wall Street are definitely changing.

And while the public market gambles are undoubtably minting some new millionaires, opening up access to interesting startup investments is a thesis that’s a stark contrast to the cynicism of day-trading gambles.

Both could leave investors with less than zero in some cases, but with rolling funds or crowdfunding, there’s a real opportunity to build something rather than just sticking it to the man.

Unlike traditional venture funds, rolling funds raise new capital commitments on a quarterly basis and invest as they go, hence the “rolling”. Investors come on for a minimum one-year commitment, and invest at a quarterly cadence. In Downey Jr.’s fund that commitment amounts to $5,000 per quarter for up to 2,000 qualified investors (and a smaller number of accredited ones), according to a person with knowledge of the firm’s plans.

“The idea of opening [the fund] to real people, rather than the ivory tower of the institutional bigwigs… It’s a little bit more slamdance than Sundance [and] I kind of dig it,” said Downey Jr.

A guide to recognizing FootPrint Coalition Ventures

FootPrint Coalition Ventures will be split between early and late stage investment funds and will be looking to make six investments per year in early stage companies and four later stage deals.

Helping Downey Jr. manage the operations are investors like Jonathan Schulthof, who previously founded LOOM Media, which leverages smart urban infrastructure for advertising, founded Motivate International, which manages bike sharing services in cities across the U.S., and served as a managing partner for Global Technology Investments. Schulthof is joined by Steve Levin, who co-founded Team Downey, Downey Jr.’s media production company and Downey Ventures, which invests in media and technology companies. 

The firm already has four companies in its portfolio through investments it made using the founders’ own capital. And while those investments were all under $1 million, the firm expects that the size of its commitments will grow as it raises additional cash. Footprint Coalition has also maintained pro-rata investment rights so that it can increase the size of its stake in businesses over time. And the investments it made to date were sized in anticipation of potential for follow-ons at much higher valuations.

A venture fund inside of a coalition

The initiative that Downey Jr. hopes to build is more than just an investment arm. Both he and his co-founders see the investment side as a single piece of a broader platform that leverages the massive social following Downey Jr. has created and the storytelling skills he and his team have mastered through decades spent working in the movie business.

That broader team includes Rachel Kropa, the former head of the CAA Foundation, who will lead scientific and philanthropic efforts and serve as the fund’s Impact Advisor and liaison to the scientific and research communities, according to a statement.

Rachel Kropa, former head of the CAA Foundation who joined Footprint Coalition to lead scientific and philanthropic efforts last year, will serve as the fund’s Impact Advisor and liaison to the scientific and research communities.

“The idea that the content that we made can be related back to the individual is very powerful,” said Kropa. “This problem is so intractable and interconnected across the world. It does matter that the fish that you eat are made using a sustainable feed.”

Kropa is referring to a piece that the FootPrint Coalition put out around sustainable aquaculture tied to the group’s recent investment in Ÿnsect, a company that makes protein from crickets for use in animal feed and human food.

“Our content around Cellular Agriculture, exemplifies the type of content we can create in the course of taking a deep dive into a particular industry. Though we have not (yet) invested in the space, we do believe there are interesting stories to tell,” said one person who works with the company.

That media is additive to activate the group’s audience, and is not something that it charges for — or considers part of its investment valuation. “We’ve been creating edited video segments with Robert doing voice over and overlaying animation all of which we’ve been posting to social. We do this for free to the companies, and we don’t charge / strong-arm / cajole for warrants, advisor shares, or the like in return,” the person said.

Weird science and sustainability

While Ÿnsect is one example of a company that the FootPrint Coalition has backed that’s doing something which may be a little outside of the purview of most of Downey Jr.’s following, other businesses like the bamboo toilet paper company, Cloud Paper, and the new investment in the sustainability focused financial services company, Aspiration, have definite direct consumer ties.

That balance is something that Schulthof said the firm was looking for as it pursues not just environmental and sustainability returns, but, more concretely, profit.

“We look at things that are meaningful and impactful [and] I get to be purely capitalist. The question is this a good opportunity is something that has to do with its margins, its scale, its risk profile, the people involved and fundamentally what are the terms… do we think the company will deliver value to investors,” said Schulthof. “We’re looking for returns.”

The opportunity for returns is enormous. As the group noted, the ESG sector – funds that focus on the Environmental, Social and Governance issues – continues to grow rapidly Part of the broader stakeholder capitalism movement, impact investing funds have topped $250 billion, and sustainability assets have doubled in value over the past three years.

“We see two powerful trends working together to support the environment. First, engaging content and media distribution enable us to create a passionate community from Robert’s 100 million followers and to use that audience to access great investments. Second, a turnkey technology platform now enables us to manage a broad set of individual investors,” said Schulthof in a statement. “Venture funds traditionally have high minimums that exclude only the wealthiest individuals, or endowments and foundations. With much lower minimums and shorter investment periods, we can now offer access to these same companies to a much broader group. When these investors further ignite our passionate audience, we hope to set a positive feedback loop in motion with environmental technologies as the ultimate beneficiary.”

Source: Tech Crunch

At TC Sessions: Justice on March 3, we’re going to dive head-first into data discrimination, algorithmic bias and how to ensure a more just future, as technology companies rely more on automated processes to make decisions.

Algorithms are sets of rules that computers follow in order to solve problems and make decisions about a particular course of action. But there is an inherent problem with algorithms that begins at the most base level and persists throughout its adaption: human bias that is baked into these machine-based decision-makers.

Algorithms driven by bad data are what leads to biased arrests and imprisonment of Black people. They’re also the same kind of algorithms that Google used to label photos of Black people as gorillas and that Microsoft’s Tay bot used to become a white supremacist.

At TC Sessions: Justice, we’ll hear from three experts in this field. Let’s meet them.

Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble

Image Credits: Stella Kallnina (opens in a new window)

Associate Professor at University of California Los Angeles a professor at the University of Southern California and author of “Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism,” Noble has become known for her analyses around the intersection of race and technology.

In her aforementioned book, Noble discusses the ways in which algorithms are biased and perpetuate racism. She calls this data discrimination.

“I think that the ways in which people get coded or encoded particularly in search engines can have an incredible amount of harm,” Noble told me back in 2018 on an episode of TC Mixtape, formerly known as CTRL+T. “And this is part of what I mean when I say data discrimination.”

Mutale Nkonde

Image Credits: Via Mutale Nkonde

It’s important to explicitly call out race in order to create just technological futures, according to Nkonde. In her research paper, “Automated Anti-Blackness: Facial Recognition in Brooklyn, New York,” Nkonde examines the use of facial recognition, the history of the surveillance of Black people in New York and presents potential ways to regulate facial recognition in the future.

Nkonde is also a United Nations adviser on race and artificial intelligence and is currently working with Amnesty International to advance a global ban on facial recognition technology.

Haben Girma

Image Credits: Courtesy of Haben Girma

Author of memoir “Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law,” and human rights lawyer, Girma focuses on advancing disability justice.

At Sight Tech Global last month, Girma spoke about how discussions around algorithmic bias as it pertains to race have become somewhat normalized, but too often do those conversations exclude the effects of algorithms on disabled people. Girma told me at that when it comes to robots, for example, the topic of algorithmic bias is lacking among developers and designers.

“Don’t blame the robots,” she said. “It’s the people who build the robots who are inserting their biases that are causing ableism and racism to continue in our society. If designers built robots in collaboration with disabled people who use our sidewalks and blind people who would Use these delivery apps, then the robots and the delivery apps would be fully accessible. So we need the people designing the services to have these conversations and work with us.”

If you’ve made it this far in the post, you’re probably wondering how to attend. Well, you can snag your ticket right here for just $5.

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Source: Tech Crunch

Extra Crunch Live 2.0 launches next week! Among several improvements, we’re thrilled to ramp up the Pitch Deck Teardown.

In short, folks can submit their pitch decks to get feedback from investors and founders alike.

The importance of the pitch deck can’t be underestimated. It is often the first point of contact between a company and venture investors, but how investors consume a pitch deck (and what they really think) is also a bit of a black box.

Are they speed-flipping through the slides or taking their time? Do they prefer more information on the team or context on the industry? More numbers or more words? How many slides is the right number of slides?

There are too many questions to count, and often very few answers. But we’re popping the lid off of that black box with the Pitch Deck Teardown. We’ve done Pitch Deck Teardowns at events like Disrupt and Early Stage 2020, and this year we’re cranking it up a notch.

Anyone can submit their pitch deck and hear what our guests, tech leaders across the industry, think of them. (Important note: Extra Crunch members will be prioritized on the list of decks we choose to show during the episode.)

We recently shared what you can expect from Extra Crunch Live in 2021. Here’s a refresher:

• Series A – Learn how others have fundraised! We’ll have a segment dedicated to hearing from founder/investor duos who walk us through the Series A pitch deck that led to investment.
• Pitch Deck Teardowns – Folks will have the opportunity to submit their pitch deck and get feedback from our guests, which will include VCs and founders (You can submit their pitch decks right here!).
• Live Pitch-offs – Audience members can raise their hand to practice their elevator pitch in front of the audience and get real-time feedback from VCs.
• Networking!! – The Extra Crunch membership is a community. ECL will be an opportunity to meet your fellow audience members, even in a virtual environment. Who knows? Maybe you’ll meet your next co-founder or investor!
• Consistency – ECL will always be at 12pm PT/3pm ET on Wednesdays. When it comes to your calendar, set it and forget it.

We’ll announce all the speakers joining us in February tomorrow! Stay tuned!

Source: Tech Crunch

Mealco, a startup promising to help chefs launch new restaurants designed around delivery, is announcing that it has raised $7 million in seed funding.

It’s probably not news to anyone reading this that opening a restaurant can be an expensive, risky proposition — and of course, many restaurants have gone out of business during the pandemic.

But founder and CEO Daniel Simon (who was previously a developer and product lead at Applicaster, and has also worked with Tel Aviv restaurant group R2M) said that even in the best of times, it can take $1 or $2 million to get started, and “if you want to hit the ground running, 98% of your focus is not on the food or the customers.”

With Mealco, on the other hand, there’s no need to sign a lease or any other upfront costs for the chefs, and they get to focus on actually creating the dishes and the menu. Mealco locally sources the ingredients, which are then cooked using the startup’s kitchen infrastructure and offered for delivery via the standard delivery apps — Uber Eats, DoorDash, Postmates and Seamless.

Simon said that with Mealco, the process of getting a new restaurant up and running only takes six to eight weeks: “We tell [the chefs] they don’t need to chop any more onions or tomatoes. There’s Mealco software that can tell employees at the Mealco kitchen how to prepare [each dish].”

Cayenne. Image Credits: Mealco

Mealco also provides support around branding, marketing and social media, and gives chefs access to a dashboard with real-time data about menu performance and customer feedback, which can allow them to quickly make adjustments as needed. The chef, he said, can “manage the restaurant from their mobile phone.”

The startup has already launched two restaurants delivering in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens — Mexican restaurant Tributo and Nashville hot chicken restaurant Cayenne (the latter with chef Hillary Sterling). And it says there are 50 chefs on the waitlist.

Asked whether any of Mealco’s partners mind being separated from the food preparation and the dining experience, Simon said it depends on the chef.

“If you want to open a single location and be in the kitchen every morning,” then he said Mealco isn’t for you. “That not wrong or right, it’s a preference … But most chefs are creators, they’re artists. They express themselves through food.” And in his view, Mealco allows them to focus on that creativity.

Rucker Park Capital led the round with participation from FJLabs, Reshape, 2048.vc, Oceans Ventures, WLP and angel investors including former Seamless CEO Jonathan Zabusky. Simon said the plan is to launch throughout New York City and surrounding areas this year, before moving on to new cities next year.

“We had the opportunity to see the evolution of the food ecosystem firsthand in the past few years,” said Wes Tang-Wymer, general partner at Rucker Park Capital, in a statement. “The time is ripe to embrace all these advances to launch new brands in a new format. In Mealco, we found the most compelling model to push the frontier of restaurant innovation further by empowering chefs to take ‘idea-to-table’ faster and cheaper than ever before.”

Source: Tech Crunch

Twitter today is rolling out a new product track on its API platform, as part of its ongoing efforts to rebuild the Twitter API from the ground up. The track, which aims to serve the needs of the academic research community’s efforts, offers broader access to the Twitter archive and fewer restrictions on tweet retrievals, so researchers can access the entire history of the public conversation on Twitter’s platform.

In addition to gaining access to all the Twitter API v2 endpoints released to date and elevated access, researchers will gain access to more precise filtering capabilities.

Specifically, they’ll be able to access the full-archive search endpoint, which offers access to everything being said on Twitter. They can narrow searches for these historical tweets using start time and end time parameters.

Image Credits: Twitter

Researchers will also gain a significantly higher monthly cap on the number of tweets they can pull using the Twitter API v2. While on the Basic level of API access, this cap is set to 500,000. The Basic level of access on the Academic Research track is an initial monthly cap of up to 10 million tweets. This applies to the Recent Search, Filtered Stream, Full-archive search, and user tweet and mentions timelines endpoints, Twitter says.

The Academic Research track will gain access to certain operators that aren’t otherwise available, too, with the goal of helping them pull more precise user data. Today, these include: $ (aka cashtag), bio, bio_name, bio_location, place, place_country, point_radius, bounding_box, -is:nullcast, has:cashtags and has:geo. 

Researchers can also add 1,000 concurrent rules when using the filter stream endpoint, instead of the limit of 25 available in the Standard track. Queries in the recent search endpoint can be 1,024 characters long, compared with 512 characters in the Standard track.

Because of the elevated levels of access, those who want to gain access to the Academic Research product track have to first submit an application.

All applicants have to either be a master’s student, doctoral candidate, post-doc, faculty or research-focused employee at an academic institution or university. They will also need to have a clearly defined research objective and must be able to detail their specific plans for how they intend to use, analyze and share Twitter data from their research.

Plus, the data used from the Academic Research product track can’t be used for any commercial purposes, Twitter notes.

Image Credits: Twitter

Academic researchers have been taking advantage of the Twitter API since its first introduction in 2006 and have used the data to study a variety of topics, Twitter says, like ​state-backed efforts to disrupt the public conversation​, ​floods and climate change, ​attitudes and perceptions about COVID-19​ and​ ​efforts to promote healthy conversation online​.

However, the earlier version of the Twitter API didn’t make it easy for researchers to gain access to Twitter data — something the company wanted to correct with API v2.

Twitter to date has catered to the research community in other ways, with additions like a website dedicated to academic research, updates to its developer policy to make it easier to reproduce and validate others’ research, and even special endpoints, like the COVID-19 stream endpoint released in April 2020. But it hasn’t fully thought through, until the API v2, how it could build tools that would actually aid researchers in doing their work, instead of the researchers having to figure out ways to work around Twitter’s limitations.

The Academic Research product track was tested in private beta starting in Oct. 2020, and now this is being opened more broadly, where it will be made freely available.

Twitter says it’s planning to add higher levels of access across all its product tracks in the future, including this one, in time. The later levels will help researchers who need even more data than what’s being offered with today’s launch. Twitter also noted it’s looking into adding flexible access as well, which would help account for times when developers were consuming more or less data throughout the year.

Source: Tech Crunch

This morning, Qualtrics, a software company that tracks customer and employee sentiment, filed a new S-1 document. The new filing raises Qualtrics’ expected IPO price range, providing the Utah-based unicorn with a higher potential valuation in its impending debut.

Qualtrics previously sold to SAP for $8 billion while on the path to going public; after a time inside the larger software company, Qualtrics announced it would spin out as its own public company. TechCrunch previously explored the company’s initial IPO filing and its first IPO pricing interval.

At the time, we described it as just that: Qualtrics’ first IPO price range. We expected the company to raise its targets. Why? At its initial $22 to $26 per-share price range, it simply felt undervalued compared to current-market analogs and benchmarks.

Let’s talk about its new price range.

Pricing

Qualtrics is a SaaS company that is growing at a moderate clip and is nearly break-even if you remove the cost of share-based compensation. And at a run rate of around $800 million in its most recent quarter, it’s a large firm.

So it’s not just another fast-growing SaaS firm that’s crested $100 million in ARR that is still running stiff deficits, it’s a different beast. That makes the effort to triangulate its valuation all the more fun.

At its new interval and with some minor share-count tweaks detailed in its new filing, Qualtrics will raise as much as $1.68 billion in its debut, a figure that is exclusive of some transactions associated with the IPO.

With its new $27 to $29 per-share IPO price range, Qualtrics is shooting a little bit higher than before. But before we get too sure that the company is being conservative, let’s get some new valuation numbers:

Source: Tech Crunch