Month: March 2021

A new auto-injecting pill might soon become a replacement for subcutaneous injection treatments.

The idea for this so-called robotic pill came out of a research project around eight years ago from InCube Labs—a life sciences lab operated by Rani Therapeutics Chairman and CEO Mir Imran, who has degrees in electrical and biomedical engineering from Rutgers University. A prominent figure in life sciences innovation, Imran has founded over 20 medical device companies and helped develop the world’s first implantable cardiac defibrillator.

In working on the technology behind San Jose-based Rani Therapeutics, Imran and his team wanted to find a way to relieve some of the painful side effects of subcutaneous (or under-the-skin) injections, while also improving the treatment’s efficacy. “The technology itself started with a very simple thesis,” said Imran in an interview. “We thought, why can’t we create a pill that contains a biologic drug that you swallow, and once it gets to the intestine, it transforms itself and delivers a pain-free injection?”

Rani Therapeutics’ approach is based on inherent properties of the gastrointestinal tract. An injecting mechanism in their pill is surrounded by a pH-sensitive coating that dissolves as the capsule moves from a patient’s stomach to the small intestine. This helps ensure that the pill starts injecting the medicine in the right place at the right time. Once there, the reactants mix and produce carbon dioxide, which in turn inflates a small balloon that helps create a pressure difference to help inject the drug-loaded needles into the intestinal wall. “So it’s a really well-timed cascade of events that results in the delivery of this needle,” said Imran.

Despite its somewhat mechanical procedure, the pill itself contains no metal or springs, reducing the chance of an inflammatory response in the body. The needles and other components are instead made of injectable-grade polymers, that Imran said has been used in other medical devices as well. Delivering the injections to the upper part of the small intestine also carries little risk of infection, as the prevalence of stomach acid and bile from the liver prevent bacteria from readily growing there.

One of Imran’s priorities for the pill was to eliminate the painful side effects of subcutaneous injections. “It wouldn’t make sense to replace them with another painful injection,” he said. “But biology was on our side, because your intestines don’t have the kind of pain sensors your skin does.” What’s more, administering the injection into the highly vascularized wall of the small intestine actually allows the treatment to work more efficiently than when applied through subcutaneous injection, which typically deposits the treatment into fatty tissue.

Imran and his team have plans to use the pill for a variety of indications, including the growth hormone disorder acromegaly, diabetes, and osteoporosis. In January 2020, their acromegaly treatment, Octreotide, demonstrated both safety and sustained bioavailability in primary clinical trials. They hope to pursue future clinical trials for other indications, but chose to prioritize acromegaly initially because of its well-established treatment drug but “very painful injection,” Imran said.

At the end of last year, Rani Therapeutics raised $69 million in new funding to help further develop and test their platform. “This will finance us for the next several years,” said Imran. “Our approach to the business is to make the technology very robust and manufacturable.”

Source: Tech Crunch

Robotic process automation (RPA) is making a major impact across every industry. But many don’t know how common the technology is and may not realize that they are interacting with it regularly. RPA is a growing megatrend — by 2022, Gartner predicts that 90% of organizations globally will have adopted RPA and its received over $1.8 billion in investments in the past two years alone.

Due to the shift to remote work, companies across every industry have implemented some form of RPA to simplify their operations to deal with an influx of requests. For example, when major airlines were bombarded with cancellation requests at the onset of the pandemic, RPA became essential to their customer service strategy.

According to Forrester, one major airline had over 120,000 cancellations during the first few weeks of the pandemic. By utilizing RPA to handle the influx of cancellations, the airline was able to simplify its refund process and assist customers in a timely matter.

Delivering this type of streamlined cancellation process with such high demand would have been extremely challenging, if not impossible, without RPA technology.

The multitude of other RPA use cases that have popped up since COVID-19 have made it evident that RPA isn’t going away anytime soon. In fact, interest in the usage of RPA is at an unprecedented high. Gartner inquiries related to RPA increased over 1,000% during 2020 as companies continue to invest.

However, there’s one big issue that’s commonly overlooked when it comes to RPA — security. Like we’ve seen with other innovations, the security aspect of RPA isn’t implemented in the early stages of development — leaving organizations vulnerable to cybercriminals.

If the security vulnerabilities of RPA aren’t addressed quickly, there will be a string of significant RPA breaches in 2021. However, by realizing that these new “digital coworkers” have identities of their own, companies can secure RPA before they make the headlines as the latest major breach.

Understanding RPA’s digital identity

With RPA, digital workers are created to take over repetitive manual tasks that have been traditionally performed by humans. Their interaction directly with business applications mimics the way humans use credentials and privilege — ultimately giving the robot an identity of its own. An identity that is created and operates much faster than any human identity but doesn’t eat, sleep, take holidays, go on strike or even get paid.

Source: Tech Crunch

With most of us locked into a square video box on platforms like Zoom, the desire to break away and perhaps wander around a virtual space is strong. These new ways of presenting people – as small circles of videos placed in a virtual space where they can move around – has appeared in various forms, like ‘virtual bars’ for the last few months during global pandemic lockdowns. Hey, I even went to a few virtual bars myself! Although the drinks from my fridge could have been better…

The advantage of this spatial approach is it gives a lot more ‘agency’ to the user. You feel, at least, a bit more in control, as you can make a ‘physical’ choice as to where you go, even if it is only still a virtual experience.

Now SpatialChat, one of the first startups with that approach which launched on ProductHunt in April last year, is upping the game with a new design and the feature of persistent chats. The product debuted on ProductHunt on April 20, 2020, and rose to No. 3 app of the day. The web-based platform has been bootstrapped the founders with their own resources.

SpatialChat now adding a special tier and features for teams running town hall meetings and virtual offices, and says it now has more than 3,000 organizations as paying customers, with more than 200,000 total monthly active users.

The startup is part of a virtual networking space being populating by products such as
Teamflow, Gather, and Remo. Although it began as a online networking events service, its now trying to re-position as a forum for multi-group discussions, all the way up from simple stand-up meetings to online conferences.

SpatialChat uses a mix of ‘proximity’ video chats, screen sharing, and rooms for up to 50 people. It’s now putting in pricing plans for regular, weekly, and one-time use cases. It says it’s seen employees at Sony, Panasonic, Sega, LinkedIn, Salesforce, and McKinsey, as well as educators and staff at 108 American universities, including Harvard, Stanford, Yale, and MIT, use the platform.

Almas Abulkhairov, CEO and Co-founder of SpatialChat says: “Slack, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams represent a virtual office for many teams but most of our customers say these apps aren’t a good fit for that. They don’t provide the same serendipity of thought you get working shoulder to shoulder and “Zoom fatigue” became a term for a reason. We want to bring the best from offline work.”

Konstantin Krasov, CPO at DataSouls, who used the platform, said: “We had 2500 people in attendance during a 2-day event that we hosted for our community of 50,000 Data Scientists. SpatialChat enabled us to make a cool networking event, Q/A and AMA with thought leaders in data science.”

Source: Tech Crunch

Coursera, an online education platform that has seen its business grow amid the coronavirus pandemic, is planning to file paperwork tomorrow for its initial public offering, sources familiar with the matter say. The company has been talking to underwriters since last year, but tomorrow could mark its first legal step in the process to IPO.

The Mountain View-based business, founded in 2012, was last valued at $2.4 billion in the private markets, during a Series F fundraising event in July 2020. Bloomberg pegs Coursera’s latest valuation at $5 billion.

The latest financing event brought its cash balance to $300 million, right around the money that Chegg had before it went public. Coursera CEO Jeff Maggioncalda did confirm then that the company is eyeing an eventual IPO.

Coursera has had a busy pandemic. Similar to Udemy, another massive open online course provider planning to go public, Coursera added an enterprise arm to its business. It launched Coursera for Campus to help colleges bring on online courses (credit optional) with built-in exams; more than 3,700 schools across the world are using the software. It is unclear how much money this operation has brought in, but we know that Udemy for Business is nearing $200 million in annual recurring revenue. In February, the company announced that it has received B Corp. certification, which means that it hits high standards for social and environmental performance. It also converted to a public benefit corporation.

GSV, a venture capital firm that exclusively backs edtech companies, had its largest position of its first fund in Coursera. GSV announced a $180 million Fund II yesterday. 

It makes sense that edtech companies want to go public while the markets remain hot and remote education continues to be a central way that instruction is delivered. Other companies from the sector that have gone public in recent weeks include Nerdy and Skillshare, two companies that used a SPAC to make their public debuts. Once – and if – Coursera does go public, it will join these newbies as well as the long-time edtech public companies including 2U, Chegg, and K12 Inc, and Zovio Solutions.

Coursera declined to comment.

Source: Tech Crunch

When I first wrote about Whatnot in February of last year, they were just getting started. Aiming to be the GOAT of collectible toys, they were focusing first on being the go-to trusted spot for buying and selling authenticated Funko Pop figurines.

A few months later, as they expanded into categories like pins and Pokémon cards, the company started to build out a live shopping platform — think of something along the lines of a TV shopping network, but swap out the studios and camera crews for folks at home with iPhones selling to an audience of fellow collectors. The concept had already proven popular in China, and was starting to gain traction amongst buyers of collectibles in the US… but a good chunk of those US live streams were happening on Instagram Live, which isn’t really built for things like bidding or handling payments after a sale occurs. Whatnot saw a gap in the market, and wanted to fill it.

It seems that move is working out well for the team. At the end of 2020, Whatnot raised a $4M seed round; just a few months later, building on the momentum of its live shopping platform and looking to expand into many more categories of collectibles, it has raised another $20M.

The company tells me that this Series A round was led by Connie Chan of Andreessen Horowitz, and backed by YC, Wonder Ventures, Operator Partners, Scribble Ventures, Steve Aoki, and Chris Zarou.

Whatnot continues to offer a more traditional, non-livestreamed selling platform — but co-founder Grant Lafontaine tells me about “95%” of the team’s focus is on the livestream side of things.

“People really come to us for the live, but then they’re like ‘Eh, I don’t want to sell across 10 different platforms’ so we give them the tools to be a one-stop shop,” he says.

As I wrote back in December, one increasingly popular type of livestream on Whatnot is the “card break”, wherein:

Users pool their money to buy an entire box of trading card packs — often boxes that are no longer being produced and can cost thousands of dollars to obtain. Each user gets a number, each number tied to a pack (or packs) within the box. Each pack is opened on the livestream, its contents sent to the (hopefully?) lucky owner tied to that pack’s number.

So why raise more money? Lafontaine tells me it’s to help them expand into more categories, fast. The company currently focuses primarily on Pokémon cards, Funko Pops, FigPins, and sports cards, but they mention things like comic books, video games, and vintage hardware as natural fits. Diving into a new category means building up a community for it, convincing trusted sellers to hop on their platform and marketing to the right buyers to make it worthwhile. In time, Lafontaine tells me, the team expects to cover 100+ categories.

Source: Tech Crunch

A lot of our communication these days with each other is digital, and today one of the companies enabling that — with APIs to build chat experiences into apps — is announcing a round of funding on the back of some very strong growth.

Stream, which lets developers build chat and activity streams into apps and other services by way of a few lines of code, has raised $38 million, funding that it will be using to continue building out its existing business as well as to work on new features.

Stream started out with APIs for activity feeds, and then it expanded to chat, which today can be integrated into apps built on a variety of platforms. Currently, its customers integrate third-party chatbots and use Dolby for video and audio within Stream, but over time, these are all areas where Stream itself would like to do more.

“End-to-end cryption, chatbots: we want to take as many components as we can,” said Thierry Schellenbach, the CEO who co-founded the startup with the startup’s CTO Tommaso Barbugli in Amsterdam in 2015 (the startup still has a substantial team in Amsterdam headed by Barbugli, but its headquarters is now in Boulder, Colorado, where Schellenbach eventually moved).

Image Credits: Stream (opens in a new window)

The company already has amassed a list of notable customers, including Ikea-owned TaskRabbit, NBC Sports, Unilever, Delivery Hero, Gojek, eToro and Stanford University, as well as a number of others that it’s not disclosing across healthcare, education, finance, virtual events, dating, gaming and social. Together, the apps Stream powers cover more than 1 billion users.

This Series B round is being led by Felicis Ventures’ Aydin Senkut, with previous backers GGV Capital and 01 Advisors (the fund co-founded by Twitter’s former CEO and COO, Dick Costolo and Adam Bain) also participating.

Alongside them, a mix of previous and new individual and smaller investors also participated: Olivier Pomel, CEO of Datadog; Tom Preston-Werner, co-founder of GitHub; Amsterdam-based Knight Capital; Johnny Boufarhat, founder and CEO of Hopin; and Selcuk Atli, co-founder and CEO of social gaming app Bunch (itself having raised a notable round of $20 million led by General Catalyst not long ago).

That list is a notable indicator of what kinds of startups are also quietly working with Stream.

The company is not disclosing its valuation but Schellenbach hints that it is “6x its chat revenues.”

Indeed, the Series B speaks of a moment of opportunity: it is coming only about six months after the startup raised a Series A of $15 million, and in fact Stream wasn’t looking to raise right now.

“We were not planning to raise funding until later this year but then Aydin reached out to us and made it hard to say no,” Schellenbach said.

“More than anything else, they are building on the platforms in the tech that matters,” Senkut added in an interview, noting that its users were attesting to a strong return on investment. “It’s rare to see a product so critical to customers and scaling well. It’s just uncapped capability… and we want to be a part of the story.”

That moment of opportunity is not one that Stream is pursuing on its own.

Some of the more significant of the many players in the world of API-based communications services like messaging, activity streams — those consolidated updates you get in apps that tell you when people have responded to a post of yours or new content has landed that is relevant to you, or that you have a message, and so on — and chat include SendBird, Agora, PubNub, Twilio and Sinch, all of which have variously raised substantial funding, found a lot of traction with customers, or are positioning themselves as consolidators.

That may speak of competition, but it also points to the vast market there for the tapping.

Indeed, one of the reasons companies like Stream are doing so well right now is because of what they have built and the market demand for it.

Communications services like Stream’s might be best compared to what companies like Adyen (another major tech force out of Amsterdam), Stripe, Rapyd, Mambu and others are doing in the world of fintech.

As with something like payments, the mechanics of building, for example, chat functionality can be complex, usually requiring the knitting together of an array of services and platforms that do not naturally speak to each other.

At the same time, something like an activity feed or a messaging feature is central to how a lot of apps work, even if they are not the core feature of the product itself. One good example of how that works are food ordering and delivery apps: they are not by their nature “chat apps” but they need to have a chat option in them for when you do need to communicate with a driver or a restaurant.

Putting those forces together, it’s pretty logical that we’d see the emergence of a range of tech companies that both have done the hard work of building the mechanics of, say, a chat service, and making that accessible by way of an API to those who want to use it, with APIs being one of the more central and standard building blocks in apps today; and a surge of developers keen to get their hands on those APIs to build that functionality into their apps.

What Stream is working on is not to be confused with the customer-service focused services that companies like Zendesk or Intercom are building when they talk about chat for apps. Those can be specialized features in themselves that link in with CRM systems and customer services teams and other products for marketing analytics and so on. Instead, Stream’s focus are services for consumers to talk to other consumers.

What is a trend worth watching is whether easy-to-integrate services like Stream’s might signal the proliferation of more social apps over time.

There is already at least one key customer — which I am now allowed to name — that is a steadily growing, still young social app, which has built the core of its service on Stream’s API.

With just a handful of companies — led by Facebook, but also including ByteDance/TikTok, Tencent, Twitter, Snap, Google (via YouTube) and some others depending on the region — holding an outsized grip on social interactions, easier, platform-agnostic access to core communications tools like chat could potentially help more of these, with different takes on “social” business models, find their way into the world.

“Stream’s technology addresses a common problem in product development by offering an easy-to-integrate and scalable messaging solution,” said Dick Costolo of 01 Advisors, and the former Twitter CEO, in a statement. “Beyond that, their team and clear vision set them apart, and we ardently back their mission.”

Source: Tech Crunch

TechCrunch Early Stage is coming around the corner fast, April 1 & 2nd. And you still have a chance to pitch your startup on the famous TC stage to an amazing line up of judges. On April 2nd, TechCrunch will feature ten top startups across the globe at the Early Stage Pitch Off. Companies will garner the attention of press and investors worldwide. Founders – apply here by March 9th.

The pitch-off will consist of a 5 minute presentation followed by a Q&A with our expert panel of judges. The top three companies will move to a final round, this time with a more in-depth Q&A. The winner will get a feature article on TechCrunch.com, one-year free subscription to Extra Crunch and a free Founder Pass to TechCrunch Disrupt this fall.

We know you’re excited to know who you’ll be pitching to. So without further ado, here are a few of the judges for the Early Stage Pitch-Off:

Lucy Deland – Inspired Capital

Lucy is a Partner at Inspired Capital. Prior to Inspired Capital, Lucy was on the founding team at Paperless Post, where she spent a decade as COO. In her role, Lucy built and led finance, customer insights & operations, strategic planning, and marketing—driving the company’s growth to a network of 100M hosts and guests. Lucy also led the company to raise $50M in venture financing and grew a team of 100+ in downtown Manhattan.

Bucky Moore – Kleiner Perkins

Bucky Moore is a partner at Kleiner Perkins focusing on developer facing software and infrastructure investments. As an early investor, Bucky serves on the boards of some of the most innovative software companies including Netlify, Materialize, CodeSandbox, Opstrace and Stackbit.

Marlon Nichols – MaC Venture Capital

Marlon Nichols is the founding managing partner at MaC Venture Capital (formerly Cross Culture Ventures), which finds entrepreneurs who are building the future for the rest of America. He’s a former Kauffman Fellow and Investment Director at Intel Capital, with an extensive background in technology, private equity, media and entertainment.

Eghosa Omoigui – EchoVC Partners

Eghosa Omoigui is the founder and Managing General Partner of EchoVC Partners, a seed & early-stage technology venture capital firm serving underrepresented founders and underserved markets. Before this, Eghosa was Director, Consumer Internet & Semantic Technologies, with Intel Capital. Representative investments include Lifebank, Migo, Frontier Car Group, SystemOne, Gro Intelligence and KBox.

Neal Sales-Griffin – TechStars

Neal Sáles-Griffin is the Managing Director of Techstars Chicago and a Venture Partner for MATH. Neal is an entrepreneur, investor, and teacher. In 2011, he co-founded the first beginner-focused, in person coding bootcamp. He is active in non-profit and civic engagement across Chicago and in 2018 he ran for mayor.

Sarah Smith – Bain Capital

Sarah Smith is a partner at Bain Capital Ventures where she primarily invests in early- to mid-stage companies across a range of sectors including consumer, SaaS, and marketplaces. Sarah has been deeply involved in high-growth startups as an executive, investor, and student at institutions including Quora, Facebook, Graph Ventures, and Stanford.

Leah Solivan – Fuel Capital
Leah Solivan is General Partner at Fuel Capital, where she invests in early-stage companies across consumer technology, hardware, marketplaces, and retail. She’s passionate about supporting teams who are taking on world-changing ideas.

Stephanie Zahn – Sequoia Capital

Stephanie Zhan is a partner on the early stage investing team at Sequoia Capital. She grew up in Hong Kong and Beijing and studied Computer Science at Stanford. At Sequoia, she loves partnering with founders pushing the boundaries of creating meaningful experiences in consumer, enterprise, and frontier technology. She has led Sequoia’s investmentsin Rec Room (digital third place), Brud (modern-day Marvel through computer-generated characters that become social media celebrities), Ethos (a modern life insurance company), Graphcore (microprocessors for machine intelligence), Linear (issues tracking tool), Evervault (dev tools for data privacy) and Middesk (background checks for businesses) among others.

Early Stage Day 1 will be filled with must-see panels from the judges above and more:

• How to Build Your Early Team for Future Growth (Sarah Smith, Bain Capital Ventures)
• 10 Things NOT to Do When Starting a Company (Leah Solivan, Fuel Capital)
• Four Things to Think About Before Raising a Series A (Bucky Moore, Kleiner Perkins)
• How to Get An Investor’s Attention (Marlon Nichols, MaC Venture Capital)

And that’s not all. If you snag your ticket to TC Early Stage, you get free access to Extra Crunch!  An Extra Crunch membership includes:

• Weekly investor surveys
• Fundraising, growth, monetization and workforce advice from startup experts
• Market analysis
• Late-stage deep dives
• Access to weekly Extra Crunch Live events
• EC Perks Program (save big $$$ on services and products you already use)
• The TechCrunch List

Source: Tech Crunch

Amazon is rolling out a new experience for its Fire TV platform that puts more focus on subscription-free streaming and other live content. The company today announced several new services are being integrated into its suite of Live features, including Xumo and its own IMDb TV and Amazon news app. The company also soon plans to add Plex, it notes.

All four of the services are available for free with ads and don’t require a subscription, Amazon says. These channels and their content will appear in Fire TV’s Live tab in the “On Now” rows, as well as in the Universal Channel Guide on the Fire TV app.

With the additions, Amazon says there are now over 400 live streaming channels from across 20 providers that can be accessed from Fire TV’s live channel guide — including services like YouTube TV, Sling TV, Tubi, Pluto TV, Philo, Prime Video Channels, Prime Video Live Events (like Thursday Night Football), and more.

Amazon also notes that more than 200 of those channels are available for free with ads, and don’t need a subscription to watch.

Free, live streaming content is becoming a battleground for both Amazon and Roku, the top two streaming media platforms in the U.S. But they’re taking different approaches to the format.

Amazon’s section showcasing free, live content has become more of a part of its overall Fire TV interface, instead of a separate channel you have to launch. This speaks to Amazon’s design philosophy with Fire TV, whose interface largely resembles that of a streaming service.

“We’ve always taken a content-forward approach when designing Fire TV. When you turn on your TV, you’re going to see shows, movies, and sports — not just rows of apps,” said VP & GM of Amazon Fire TV, Sandeep Gupta. “This philosophy extends to our approach to live content. We’re continuing to invest heavily in Live TV and so are our content partners. We’re expanding that today with the addition of new integrations, Alexa capabilities, and enhanced content discovery mechanisms,” he added.

Meanwhile, Roku offers its own hub with always-on free movies and TV shows, called The Roku Channel, which helps to serve as a starting point for cord cutters who are looking for something to watch after they’ve ditched traditional pay TV. But unlike Fire TV, Roku’s design is, in fact,  “rows of apps.” This makes its interface simple to use and less cluttered — something many people seem to prefer. Here, The Roku Channel is just another app to launch, not a part of the Roku interface.

Roku also makes The Roku Channel available online and as a standalone mobile app, just like other free streaming services. And this week, it integrated most of The Roku Channel’s free content with its main Roku.com website, in order to reach more consumers.

Separately, Fire TV offers its own app, but limits itself to live content, not on-demand, ad-supported shows and movies.

In addition to today’s newly announced live TV integrations, Amazon also says its live TV programs are now Alexa-enabled.

That means you can say things like “Alexa, play Good Morning America” or “Alexa, play the Seahawks game,” to launch a specific live TV program by name. This will work with the Alexa Voice Remote, on the Fire TV Cube, and with Fire TVs paired with an Echo device.

Live TV programs will also appear in the “App Peak” (hover) feature on the newly updated Fire TV interface. This feature will show you what’s on a given channel when you hover over it in the main navigation, and works on Fire TV Stick (3rd gen.) and Fire TV Stick Lite, for the time being.

As a result of its expansions and live TV integrations — not to mention the pandemic that’s kept people at home for entertainment — Amazon says that engagement with live streaming apps on Fire TV has more than doubled in the last 12 months, up by over 130%.

Amazon says the new features are rolling out today to Fire TV devices.

Source: Tech Crunch

As a devoted coffee drinker I was enthused by the idea of Bottomless. The Y Combinator-backed startup sends its users coffee as they run low so that they never run out of the Magic Juice of Life. What could be better?

Because life is somewhat funny, after signing up for its service the company reached out to share that it had raised a Series A. So I got on the phone with Liana Herrera, the company’s co-founder, to chat about the startup, which is part coffee-sourcing engine, part subscription/e-commerce play and part hardware effort.

So before we talk about its Series A, let’s work better to understand what Bottomless is building, and how it works.

What’s Bottomless?

Born from its founders’ issues ordering the right amount of Soylent when they actually needed it, and wondering why there wasn’t a better way to subscribe to goods consumed on a regular basis, Herrera uncovered the idea for Bottomless.

Today the product works by letting users pick the type of coffee they are interested in, be it caffeine level, price and the like. The company then provides customers with a small digital scale that they connect to their home internet. And then as users consume coffee that Bottomless sends them, placing the bag on the hardware in between uses, the scale notes how much is left and orders more before they run out.

A Bottomless scale, via the company as my kitchen lighting is bad.

You can set the sensitivity of the scale, asking it to either be ambitious in keeping you from running out of beans or ground coffee, or more relaxed. As I write to you today, I think that my third bag of decaf has arrived. It’s a neat system.

And from a business perspective, the Bottomless model has plusses. I honestly do not recall the price range of coffee that I picked, and do not know how much I am actually paying Bottomless at the moment. But I do know that having different types of coffee arrive at the house as I run low is pretty damn cool.

To make that happen, however, is not easy. The startup’s business is a little complex. Before and even after Bottomless went through Y Combinator back in 2019, the company hand-built its coffee-weighing scales. Herrera told TechCrunch that the old Silicon Valley saw that hardware is hard is in fact an understatement. After all the soldering she described during an interview, I believe her.

Still, after finishing the accelerator program the company managed to grow in 2019 by what Herrera said was around 10x. That customer expansion allowed the company to order bulk hardware from China in early 2020. After its first production run finished — a few thousand units — COVID-19 shut down that country’s supply chain. Happily for the startup, by the time COVID-19 had taken over America, the Chinese economy opened up and production could begin again.

Per the company, Bottomless scaled another 5-7x in 2020. An October 2020 CNN piece notes that the company had around 750 customers in late 2019, and some 6,000 by the time of publication. Herrera wants to massively expand that number, telling TechCrunch that she’d like to grow by 10x again this year, and that 5x expansion was the lower-end of her expectations.

Powering that growth are a host of coffee companies that Bottomless works with. Those companies handle roasting the beans and sending them to different Bottomless customers. So that no one reaches a zero-coffee state. And dies. Or whatever happens when one actually runs out of coffee.

The startup told TechCrunch that there are some 500 roasters on their wait list, implying that it will have the capacity to take on more customers this year.

Despite all the growth, the company still has some edges to refine. Setting up Wi-Fi on my scale wasn’t super-simple, for example. Herrera did note that her firm has a new scale coming out in the next three months. That could lower the difficulty barrier for new customers. Still, with 6,000 customers last October ordering three to four bags of coffee monthly, per Herrera’s estimate, the company had reached a comfortable seven-figure GMV run-rate before 2021 began.

For coffee roasters who may have seen their customer base slow during the pandemic, and consumers increasingly willing to dive into e-commerce, the company’s model could have long-term legs. Which brings us to the investors making that bet.

The round

Bottomless raised a $4.5 million Series A in January of 2021. It’s a smaller A than we tend to see in recent years, but Herrera said that her company has always been scrappy, which we take to mean that it has a history of being frugal. Patrick OShaughnessy led the round.

TechCrunch asked if the $4.5 million was a lot of money for the startup, as we didn’t have a clear picture at the time of its fundraising history. Herrera said that Bottomless has gotten to where it is today on just $2 million. So, the Series A is more than double all the money that the company as raised to date. It’s a lot of money, in other words.

Besides the new scale design, when asked about what the company intends to do with its funds, Herrera detailed the type of person she’s looking to hire — namely intellectually flexible folks who are informal, scrappy and very hack-y. More staff, in other words.

Let’s see how far Bottomless can get with its new check. Apparently I will be helping its KPIs for the foreseeable future as a customer.

Source: Tech Crunch