Month: May 2021

Every company wants to be innovative, but innovation comes with its share of difficulties. One key challenge for early-stage companies that are disrupting a particular space or creating a new category is figuring out how to sell a unique product to customers who have never bought such a solution.

This is especially the case when a solution doesn’t have many reference points and its significance may not be obvious.

My view is simple — some buyers could use a walkthrough of the buying process. If you are building a singular product in a nascent market that necessitates forward-looking customers and want to drastically shorten sales cycles, I have a proposal: Create a buyer’s guide.

A buyer’s guide is essentially a prescriptive summary that provides an understandable overview of how a customer may buy your solution. What does your product actually do? Is it secure? How would you implement the technology? What does it replace, if anything? It should be short, simple and speak the customer’s language. It also acts as a sales-enabling tool. Sales teams, especially at smaller startups, can review the guide quarterly and analyze what is and isn’t working as the company goes to market.

Here is how to put together a buyer’s guide, including what to sort out before you type a single word.

Know your audience

From the start, it’s important to think about who the stakeholders are for your product’s buying cycle. One typical issue with early-stage startups is they meet with an enthusiastic buyer — a CIO, CTO or VP of product — but neglect to include the other stakeholders who should be part of the conversation. More importantly, a lot of companies don’t realize the impact of their product on a group or team that they would not typically sell to.

For example, target the security team as an early stakeholder, because they’re probably going to review your product. If the solution is focused toward, say, integration, then hone in on who would be owning the integration process on the buyer’s team.

If you’re selling a martech solution, on a business level, you have to consider a finance business partner for marketing. Think about the problems your customers face and also how others in their company relate to them.

Source: Tech Crunch

With vaccination rates slowing in the U.S., the White House is getting creative about getting shots in arms. Beyond protecting yourself and others from a deadly disease, the latest incentive to get vaccinated could help you find love (or get laid).

The White House COVID-19 response team announced Friday that a number of popular dating apps would offer new perks for users who get vaccinated, with Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, Match, OkCupid, BLK, Chispa, Plenty of Fish and Badoo all participating in the promotional push. The White House hopes to make inroads with the 50 million users across those dating apps where they’re already spending time.

On Tinder, anyone who adds a sticker to their profile promoting their vaccination status between June 2 and July 4 will be gifted a free Super Like. (Proof of vaccination isn’t necessary, but really, you should get vaccinated if it’s available where you live.) Tinder and other apps will also add vaccination site resources from Vaccine.gov to help people figure out where they can get the shot nearby.

“Nothing like fireworks to signal a new spark and a new start for those looking to meet new people IRL this summer,” Tinder CEO Jim Lanzone said.

According to OkCupid, getting vaccinated might help with that. The company found that people who displayed their vaccination status were 14% more likely to find a match. On OkCupid, vaccinated users will get a free boost, a perk that promotes their profile to potential matches. The other apps participating in the White House initiative are handing out their own premium perks to give users a competitive edge.

The effort is part of a push by the White House to get 70% of adults vaccinated by the Fourth of July. To reach more Americans, the Biden administration has also coordinated with popular entertainment companies like NASCAR and country music channel CMT to promote vaccination.

“Social distancing and dating were always a bit of a challenging combination,” White House Senior COVID Advisor Andy Slavitt said during a press event Friday. He characterized the vaccine push through dating apps as those companies “responding to the president’s call to action” rather than calling it an official partnership.

“We have finally found the one thing that makes us all more attractive,” Slavitt said. “A vaccination.”

Source: Tech Crunch

Fisker Inc., the EV startup-turned publicly traded company, is working on a modified version of its all-electric Ocean SUV for Pope Francis.

The company said Friday that it plans to deliver to the Vatican late next year a Popemobile based on its upcoming Fisker Ocean SUV. An initial agreement was reached during a private meeting Thursday between Pope Francis and Fisker co-founders Henrik Fisker and Dr. Geeta Gupta-Fisker. Henrik Fisker showed a number of sketches, including one that Pope Francis signed. There aren’t many details about this new Popemobile, although a rendering of the modified Fisker Ocean SUV shows an all-glass cupola. 

The agreement marks more than 50 years of automakers working with the Vatican to develop and deliver vehicles to shuttle the Holy See. Ford, which created a version of a 1964 Lehmann-Peterson, was used by Pope Paul VI in his 1965 New York City visit. The term Popemobile was popularized until Pope John Paul II’s tenure. Automakers including Dacia, Stellantis’ Fiat and Jeep brands, Mercedes-Benz and Renault have all supplied vehicles to various pontiffs. Pope Francis has been known to use a Ford Focus for drives in Vatican City.

“I got inspired reading that Pope Francis is very considerate about the environment and the impact of climate change for future generations,” says Henrik Fisker. “The interior of the Fisker Ocean papal transport will contain a variety of sustainable materials, including carpets made from recycled plastic bottles from the ocean.”

Fisker is aiming to start production of its Ocean SUV, which will have a base price of $37,499, on November 17, 2022. The Popemobile version is expected around the same time, although a specific date was not shared.

Source: Tech Crunch

We have a monthly company book club at our company. It’s in the evening and our whole team attends (yes, we’re really into book clubs), so it made sense that a few minutes before our book club on the evening of April 20, a team member let us all know that he’d be missing it.

He lives in Minnesota, the verdict for the trial of Derek Chauvin was about to be announced, and the atmosphere was tense. He wasn’t able to focus and was giving the rest of the team a heads up on Slack that he’d be absent. There were a few thumbs up emojis and then we started the book club.

A few days later, I was talking with our executive team and several of them mentioned that people on their teams had brought up the book club situation. Something felt off about it. Should we have canceled it? Reminded everyone that they were free to take personal time for whatever reason? No one had the right answer, but it felt like an opportunity to reflect and arrive at a more thoughtful approach, which is especially important as our team rapidly grows and we continue to be remote.

This past year, we’ve had so many moments when a massively important event is happening as we work, entering our collective conscience and forcing us to acknowledge that the boundary between work and life is thin and porous. Companies are grappling with how, or whether, to talk about these events with their teams.

Most companies have taken the view that to develop an inclusive company, there has to be space for what’s happening in the world. A few have gone in the opposite direction, saying companies should exist separate and apart from “politics,” which is an admittedly fuzzy term.

I’m familiar with the “shut up do your job” mentality because I spent years in the Army. About a political issue, for example, salty soldiers would say things like, “If the Army wanted you to have an opinion, they would have issued one to you.” (Side note: There were still plenty of opinions.)

But that’s not how I think about company-building. I believe that our “work selves” and what’s going on in the world are inextricably connected. And while I don’t know exactly how to navigate the choppy waters, this recent experience helped my team crystallize a few lessons.

Make space for when “politics” impacts your team

Months ago, I was listening to “The Daily” while getting ready for work. The episode was about the murder of Vanessa Guillen, an Army soldier who had been the victim of sexual harassment while in uniform. It was heartbreaking to hear her mother talk about how the Army had failed Vanessa. I cried. My own experiences in uniform came flooding back and I needed to take time that morning to think and write. I moved around some things on my schedule and didn’t start the workday until I was ready.

I needed time that morning. I do not think it’s the role of a company to dictate what is and is not an acceptable reason to need personal time. Instead, a company should hire smart, motivated people and give them a framework to help them make the right decisions.

Our working framework (and I say “working” because culture building, for us, is a work in progress) is borrowed heavily from Netflix: It’s the dual concepts of freedom and responsibility. Ethena employees have the freedom to take time off for whatever reason and they don’t need to give a justification to managers. They also have the responsibility to do their jobs well. If they’ll be missing a meeting, they need to ensure there is coverage, for example.

Listen when colleagues tell you something’s wrong

While the founder mythology is strong, CTO Anne Solmssen and I don’t subscribe to it. We believe that two things can be true: We are smart, driven and resourceful founders and we are better with our team. We hire the smartest people we can find precisely because we want them to make our company better.

We have weekly feedback meetings between direct reports and the feedback is always bilateral, meaning managers get feedback from their direct reports. Feedback Fridays are where issues tend to surface first. I’m so glad there are pressure release valves for feedback, especially with a remote team, because otherwise I sit in a bubble thinking everything is fine, when it isn’t. I’m also glad we built feedback early into our culture because it’s incredibly hard to bolt it on later.

An important but often neglected part of listening to employee feedback is being honest about how decisions get made. For example, my co-founder and I want to hear dissent and criticism because it makes us better. But listening intently is different than being a direct democracy. As the CEO, I make decisions; I just want them to be as informed and inclusive as possible.

Invest early in people ops

We didn’t have a proactive approach to attendance at our recent company book club in part because we don’t yet have a people operations leader. Our team is about 20 employees and rapidly growing. We’ve prioritized a people ops hire because it’s a crucial function and if we don’t invest in it early, we’ll continue to have issues fall through the cracks.

Yes, co-founders should be personally invested in company culture, but people ops is a craft and requires expertise. Experienced people ops leaders have lots of practice navigating complex issues. (Side note: We’re hiring for many roles, including people ops. If you’d like to be part of a company that intentionally invests in company culture, come work with us.)

I want to build a highly functional team where everyone can bring themselves to work and excuse themselves when they need a minute. I’m undeniably making mistakes along the way, but the best way to learn about where we stumble is to let our smart and capable team tell us, listen when they do and be intentional in building our company culture.

Source: Tech Crunch

It’s hard enough to talk about your feelings to a person; Jo Aggarwal, the founder and CEO of Wysa, is hoping you’ll find it easier to confide in a robot. Or, put more specifically, “emotionally intelligent” artificial intelligence.

Wysa is an AI-powered mental health app designed by Touchkin eServices, Aggarwal’s company that currently maintains headquarters in Bangalore, Boston and London. Wysa is something like a chatbot that can respond with words of affirmation, or guide a user through one of 150 different therapeutic techniques.

Wysa is Aggarwal’s second venture. The first was an elder care company that failed to find market fit, she says. Aggarwal found herself falling into a deep depression, from which, she says, the idea of Wysa was born in 2016. 

In March, Wysa became one of 17 apps in the Google Assistant Investment Program, and in May, closed a Series A funding round of $5.5 million led by Boston’s W Health Ventures, the Google Assistant Investment Program, pi Ventures and Kae Capital. 

Wysa has raised a total of $9 million in funding, says Aggarwal, and the company has 60 full-time employees and about three million users. 

The ultimate goal, she says, is not to diagnose mental health conditions. Wysa is largely aimed at people who just want to vent. Most Wysa users are there to improve their sleep, anxiety or relationships, she says. 

“Out of the 3 million people that use Wysa, we find that only about 10% actually need a medical diagnosis,” says Aggarwal. If a user’s conversations with Wysa equate with high scores on traditional depression questionnaires like the PHQ-9 or the anxiety disorder questionnaire GAD-7, Wysa will suggest talking to a human therapist. 

Naturally, you don’t need to have a clinical mental health diagnosis to benefit from therapy. 

Wysa isn’t intended to be a replacement, says Aggarwal (whether users view it as a replacement remains to be seen), but an additional tool that a user can interact with on a daily basis. 

“Sixty percent of the people who come and talk to Wysa need to feel heard and validated, but if they’re given techniques of self help, they can actually work on it themselves and feel better,” Aggarwal continues. 

Wysa’s approach has been refined through conversations with users and through input from therapists, says Aggarwal. 

For instance, while having a conversation with a user, Wysa will first categorize their statements and then assign a type of therapy, like cognitive behavioral therapy or acceptance and commitment therapy, based on those responses. It would then select a line of questioning or therapeutic technique written ahead of time by a therapist and begin to converse with the user. 

Wysa, says Aggarwal, has been gleaning its own insights from more than 100 million conversations that have unfolded this way. 

“Take for instance a situation where you’re angry at somebody else. Originally our therapists would come up with a technique called the empty chair technique where you’re trying to look at it from the other person’s perspective. We found that when a person felt powerless or there were trust issues, like teens and parents, the techniques the therapists were giving weren’t actually working,” she says. 

“There are 10,000 people facing trust issues who are actually refusing to do the empty chair exercise. So we have to find another way of helping them. These insights have built Wysa.”

Although Wysa has been refined in the field, research institutions have played a role in Wysa’s ongoing development. Pediatricians at the University of Cincinnati helped develop a module specifically targeted toward COVID-19 anxiety. There are also ongoing studies of Wysa’s ability to help people cope with mental health consequences from chronic pain, arthritis and diabetes at The Washington University in St. Louis and The University of New Brunswick. 

Still, Wysa has had several tests in the real world. In 2020, the government of Singapore licensed Wysa, and provided the service for free to help cope with the emotional fallout of the coronavirus pandemic. Wysa is also offered through the health insurance company Aetna as a supplement to Aetna’s Employee Assistance Program. 

The biggest concern about mental health apps, naturally, is that they might accidentally trigger an incident, or mistake signs of self harm. To address this, the U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS) offers specific compliance standards. Wysa is compliant with the NHS’ DCB0129 standard for clinical safety, the first AI-based mental health app to earn the distinction. 

To meet those guidelines, Wysa appointed a clinical safety officer, and was required to create “escalation paths” for people who show signs of self harm.

Wysa, says Aggarwal, is also designed to flag responses to self-harm, abuse, suicidal thoughts or trauma. If a user’s responses fall into those categories Wysa will prompt the user to call a crisis line.

In the U.S., the Wysa app that anyone can download, says Aggarwal, fits the FDA’s definition of a general wellness app or a “low risk device.” That’s relevant because, during the pandemic, the FDA has created guidance to accelerate distribution of these apps. 

Still, Wysa may not perfectly categorize each person’s response. A 2018 BBC investigation, for instance, noted that the app didn’t appear to appreciate the severity of a proposed underage sexual encounter. Wysa responded by updating the app to handle more instances of coercive sex. 

Aggarwal also notes that Wysa contains a manual list of sentences, often containing slang, that they know the AI won’t catch or accurately categorize as harmful on its own. Those are manually updated to ensure that Wysa responds appropriately. “Our rule is that [the response] can be 80%, appropriate, but 0% triggering,” she says. 

In the immediate future, Aggarwal says the goal is to become a full-stack service. Rather than having to refer patients who do receive a diagnosis to Employee Assistant Programs (as the Aetna partnership might) or outside therapists, Wysa aims to build out its own network of mental health suppliers. 

On the tech side they’re planning expansion into Spanish, and will start investigating a voice-based system based on guidance from the Google Assistant Investment Fund. 

Source: Tech Crunch

In the past month, we’ve gotten a look at Poshmark’s early fundraising pitch deck with CEO Manish Chandra and Mayfield’s Navin Chaddha, heard where the biggest opportunities lie in the proptech space with Fifth Wall’s Brendan Wallace and Orchard’s Court Cunningham, and heard how to nail your pitch from Sequoia’s Shaun Maguire and Vise AI’s Samir Vasavada.

The Extra Crunch Live party carries on into June, with new episodes connecting you with some of tech’s biggest names.

For those who are new to ECL, the show also features a pitch-off, allowing folks in the audience to virtually “raise their hand” and jump on the stream to pitch their startup to our founder and investor guests.

Who might those guests be?

Take a look at our June slate below:

Extra Crunch Live: Madrona and Coda.io

June 2 – 3pm ET/12pm PT

Soma Somasegar spent 27 years at Microsoft before getting into venture. He currently serves as managing director at Madrona, where he focuses on machine learning, robotic process automation, and future of work, and led investments in Snowflake and UiPath. He also invested in Coda.io, which is reinventing the doc, and has raised $140 million. Hear from Somasegar and Shishir Mehrotra, co-founder and CEO of Coda, as they walk us through the fundraising process and beyond.

REGISTER HERE FOR FREE!

Extra Crunch Live: MaC Venture Capital and Wonderschool

June 16 – 3pm ET/12pm PT

Marlon Nichols is the founding partner at MaC Venture Capital and has invested in companies like Gimlet Media, MongoDB, Thrive Market, PlayVS, Fair, LISNR, Mayvenn, Blavity and Wonderschool. Chris Bennett, Wonderschool founder, will join Nichols on this episode of Extra Crunch Live to tell us about the Series A fundraising process and give feedback on live pitches from the audience.  REGISTER HERE FOR FREE!

Extra Crunch Live: Emergence and Retail Zipline

June 23 – 3pm ET/12pm PT

Lotti Siniscalco has experience across the fintech landscape as both an operator and investor. She’s held positions at NerdWallet, Goldman Sachs, Ribbit Capital and now at Emergence, where she invests in early-stage software companies. One of those investments is Retail Zipline, founded by Melissa Wong. The company has raised nearly $40 million. The duo will walk us through Zipline’s early pitch deck and give their own feedback on startup pitches from the audience. REGISTER HERE FOR FREE!

Extra Crunch Live: Maverick Ventures and Cityblock Health

June 30 – 3pm ET/12pm PT

Maverick Ventures managing partner Ambar Bhattacharyya can boast 11 IPOs and acquisitions across his investment career, which includes stints at Bessemer and Bain. When it comes to health tech, there are few VCs with such a notable portfolio, which includes Artemis Health, Caribou Biosciences, hims and hers and Cityblock Health. Cityblock recently reached unicorn status, and co-founder and CEO Iyah Romm will sit down with Bhattacharyya and TechCrunch to discuss how to be successful fundraising in health tech. The investor/founder duo will also give their feedback on live startup pitches from the audience.

REGISTER HERE FOR FREE! 

As a reminder, Extra Crunch Live is free for anyone to attend, but only Extra Crunch members get access to on-demand episodes. And that is but one of the many perks included with an Extra Crunch membership. Join here!

Source: Tech Crunch

The relationship between Spotify and Apple has been…understandably contentious at times. After all, Apple runs the streaming service’s biggest competitor. At the end of the day though, the Apple Watch and Spotify maintain the No. 1 spot in their respective categories by a wide margin. And playing nice ultimately benefits a wide swath of users in that overlapping Venn diagram.

Today Spotify announced that it’s finally bringing to the smartwatch what’s no doubt been one of its most requested features. Starting today, Premium subscribers can download music and podcasts to the wearable for offline listening. That means users will be able to leave their phone at home when they go for a jog.

The new feature works more or less like standard downloading and sharing. Users click the three ellipses next to an album, playlist or podcast and click “Download to Apple Watch.” Once downloaded, green arrows will populate next to the title. With headphones paired, you’ll be able to stream directly from the watch.

Samsung has already offered the feature on some of the competition, including Samsung’s Galaxy Watch line. The service is also coming to Google Wear OS watches soon, per an announcement at I/O. Apple Music, of course, has offered offline listening on the Watch for a while, as has Pandora. Deezer also beat Spotify to the popular wearable by a matter of days.

Source: Tech Crunch

Watching construction tech software company Procore go public today after pricing above its range makes the IPO slowdown look like the deceleration that wasn’t.

Investors quickly bid up the company’s value in trading, giving Procore a higher valuation than it might have anticipated, along with a boost of confidence for the IPO market in general.

Procore initially set an IPO range of $60 to $65 per share before pricing at $67 per share last night. Its debut was worth gross proceeds north of $600 million and a fully diluted valuation of $9.6 billion. As of early afternoon today, shares were trading at a solid $85.25.

In light of Procore’s debut, TechCrunch is digging quickly into the company’s new valuation and its resulting revenue multiples.

Following, we have notes from a chat we had with CEO Tooey Courtemanche regarding his company’s debut, what it intends to do with its new capital and how it expects its partner platform to evolve and mature.

First, the numbers.

Procore’s new price

Starting with Procore’s $9.6 billion, fully diluted valuation that it set in its IPO pricing, the company is richly valued. It generated revenues of $113.9 million in Q1 2021, putting it on a run-rate of $455.8 million. As you can calculate, that valued the company at around 20x its run rate; more precisely, at 21.2x.

But if we do some modest extrapolation of the company’s current value in light of its trading appreciation, Procore is now worth around $12.3 billion on a fully diluted basis. That gives it a run-rate multiple of around 27x.

Source: Tech Crunch

It doesn’t feel like a week goes by at the moment that another startup doesn’t emerge armed with a huge wallet of cash to pursue a strategy of consolidating and then scaling promising brands that have built a business selling on marketplaces like Amazon’s. In the latest development, a startup called Factory14 is coming out of stealth mode in Europe with $200 million in funding to snap up smaller businesses and help them grow through better economies of scale.

Along with this, Factory14 is also announcing its latest acquisition to underscore its acquisition strategy: it’s acquired Pro Bike Tool, a popular D2C seller of its own-brand bike accessories and tools, for an undisclosed sum. The company, which is now fully owned by Factory14, has kept the original founders on to lead the smaller company.

This is Factory14’s fourth acquisition since launching earlier this year, and the company said that its focus on acquiring marketplace sellers that are already seeing success and some scale means that it is already profitable.

The startup — based in Luxembourg and has offices in Madrid, London, Shanghai and Taipei — is describing this funding injection as a seed round, but in fact the majority of it is coming in the form of debt to acquire companies. Dmg Ventures (the VC arm of the Daily Mail Group) and DN Capital co-led the equity-based seed funding, with VentureFriends and unnamed individuals in the tech world also participating. Victory Park Capital, meanwhile, provided the credit facility and also participated in the equity consortium.

CEO Guilherme Steinbruch, an alum of Global Founders Capital (the investment firm co-founded by the Samwer brothers of Rocket Internet fame, among others), co-founded Factory14 with Marcos Ramírez (COO) and Gianluca Cocco (CBO) — who have respectively worked at e-commerce giants like Amazon and Delivery Hero.

Steinbruch himself also has an interesting background. He hails from Brazil and is a member of the powerful industrial family that controls a major steel producer, a leading textile producer and a bank (Steinbruch said that Factory14 has no connection to these, and is not an investor in the startup).

He said that the idea for founding Factory14 in Europe came out his interest in e-commerce and specifically the traction that Thrasio, one of the U.S. based the pioneers of the roll-up space, was seeing for the model.

The Marketplace on Amazon is a massive business. One estimate puts the number of third-party sellers at 5 million, with more than 1 million sellers joining the platform in 2020 alone. Thrasio, meanwhile, has in the past estimated to me that there are probably 50,000 businesses selling on Amazon via FBA making $1 million or more per year in revenues.

It’s the latter category that is the target for Factory14, Steinbruch told me. Its belief is that focusing on more successful businesses will mean a better hit rate on finding companies that have already built more solid supply chains, branding and overall quality. Being willing to pay a little more for these sellers, he said, will help it compete against what has become a very crowded field.

“There are many players, there is no denying it,” he said, adding that their research has (so far) found more than 50 roll-up players going for the same general opportunities that it is.

But in the process of planning out how Factory14 might differentiate itself in that mix, Steinbruch said it found some distinct differences.

“Some are looking for volume, and are willing to buy up many companies as cheaply as possible. But we took the decision to focus only on high-quality assets,” he said. “We knew we would have to pay higher multiples for a brand growing 200% a year, but when we started targeting these we were surprised to find there was less competition for these assets rather than for the smaller ones. That was a good surprise. It means that, yes, we have competition but we’ve managed to be pretty successful anyway.”

Even among the bigger retailers selling on Amazon using the e-commerce giant’s distribution and fulfillment platform, there are reasons for why the consolidators have started to circle beyond just wanting to jump on a good thing. The system has within it a lot of work is repeatable across many different companies, specifically in areas like analytics, supply chain management, marketing and more: building a framework that could handle those processes for many at once makes sense. There is also the fact that in many cases, marketplace sellers may have found themselves sitting on successful businesses but unable to source the investment (or the will) to scale them to the next step.

All the same, the mix of competitors hoping to scoop them up is a pretty formidable one, and the point of differentiation between them all may not in itself may not be as distinct as Factory14 (or any of them) hopes.

Just today, another ambitious player in this space, Heyday out of San Francisco, today announced a further $70 million in equity funding led by General Catalyst. It, too, is raising large amounts of debt and eyeing up more innovative ways of accommodating the most interesting companies selling on Amazon a bid for more quality and success.

“The top 1.5% of marketplace sellers are doing $1 million in revenues, and we believe there may be some that cross the $1 billion threshold eventually,” Heyday CEO and co-founder Sebastian Rymarz told me last week. To woo the best of them in the current market, as part of its ambition to become the “P&G” of the 21st century, it too is taking a very open-ended approach, he said.

“We have some come to Heyday, or we bring in our own brand managers. Sometimes it’s a matter of some ongoing participation and interest, growth equity where we buy some now and will buy more of your business over time. We are still defining that and that is fine, we are comfortable with that,” he said. “It’s about unique partnerships that we’re forming to accelerate their businesses.”

Closer to home in more ways than one, Berlin’s Razor Group — funded by Steinbruch’s former colleagues from GFC, and founded by ex-Rocket Internet people — earlier this month raised $400 million. Thrasio itself has raised very large rounds in rapid succession totaling hundreds of millions of dollars in the last year, and is also profitable. Others in the same area that have also raised huge warchests include Branded; Heroes; SellerX; Perch; Berlin Brands Group (X2); Benitago; Latin America’s Valoreo (with its backers including Razor’s CEO), and an emerging group out of Asia including Rainforest and Una Brands.

Even with all of this, there will be opportunities, these entrepreneurs believe, to bring together more disparate smaller e-commerce retailers to help them better leverage marketing, supply chains, analytics and wider business expertise to grow for the longer term, leveraging the marketplace model that has come to dominate how many shop online today.

Factory14 said it expects to have $20 million in “trailing twelve months” Ebitda by the end of 2021 and expects to double its team to 80 by that point too.

For as long as Amazon and its marketplace model remain, it seems investors will come with their checkbooks, too.

“E-commerce is undergoing structural changes which are enabling thousands of exciting new brands to be born every day,” said Manuel Lopo de Carvalho, CEO at dmg ventures, in a statement. “Factory14 can provide these brands with the tools, capital and expertise that enable them to play in the big leagues.”

Ian Marsh, principal at DN Capital, said that the VC did its homework before backing the startup, too. “We had discussions with most aggregators and were immediately impressed by factory14’s differentiated vision focused on strong consumer brands and the world-class team they have put together with top tier private equity investors combined with seasoned e-commerce executive and former Amazonians. We are excited to work with Guilherme, Marcos, Gianluca and the rest of the factory14 team to create brands that inspire consumers around the world.”

Source: Tech Crunch