NewCampus wants to train the first-time managers within Southeast Asia’s tech giants

The tech boom in Southeast Asia isn’t just seeding a wave of new entrepreneurs building the next generation of unicorns, it’s also ushering young talent into the roles of first-time managers. And NewCampus, a Singapore-based startup co-founded by Will Fan and Fei Yao, announced today that it has raised millions of dollars to help coming of age companies train their maturing workforce to help them grow into those new, larger roles.

NewCampus is an online, live learning platform that hopes to train rising managers within hyper-growth organizations. It’s leadership “sprints” focus on topics like retaining knowledge, and what goes into curating a safe environment for teams. The company was part of SuperCharger Ventures’ inaugural edtech accelerator, and today announced that it has attracted millions of dollars in investor interest.

The startup has closed a seed financing round of $2.5 million in a round led by Juvo Ventures’ Maia Sharpley. Other investors include Zanichelli Venture, M Venture Partners, 27V, Pavan Katepalli, the former Chief Learning Officer at Trilogy Education, along with existing investors SOSV and 500 Startups.

While first describing itself as a membership gym for learning experiences, the 2019-founded startup raised capital to further invest in its latest iteration: an up-skilling platform for SMBs.

Currently, NewCampus builds content in-house, and then asks industry experts to come in and add in their flair of expertise. Users are expected to dedicate between 4 to 5 hours a week for work, with 90 minutes of that time devoted to live, instructor-led workshops. The material differs from other online programs by focusing on more philosophical skills, like how to create a safe environment for teams or how to retain knowledge, instead of topics like like Finance 101. Currently, its content looks more general, serving the emerging manager in tech, not the first-time manager handling a fintech startup during a pivot.

newcampus-ux-seed

NewCampus offers live classes for first-time managers.

There’s a lot of workforce training tools on the market right now: Udemy, BetterUp, Skillshare, Udacity, but NewCampus is confident that it can win by selling to a market it believes is underserved: Southeast Asia.

NewCampus targets companies that have a presence of between 500 to 1,000 people in the Southeast Asia region. Fan mentioned how companies like Grab, GoJek and Carousell still turn to local trainers in countries like Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore — giving his company an opportunity to come in and bring more advanced pedagogy and branding.

While India’s frenzy of hiring and retaining talent is not to be missed, the co-founder says that the startup is looking in other, less crowded markets.

“[The customer] may be a 600-person fintech company with an HQ in Hong Kong, but their management team is sitting in Hong Kong, their sales teams in Sydney, Melbourne, their dev team is in Indonesia and their sales team is in Philippines, and already that breakdown of managing remote teams is sophisticated and nuanced in its own way,” Fan said.

Yao likened the momentum around improving diversity and inclusion efforts in the United States to the momentum around enhancing cross-cultural communication in Southeast Asia, “because of how fragmented the market is and how fast teams are growing across the region.” She added that a lot of United States-based upskilling products “don’t speak to the rest of the world,” which gives NewCampus a chance to curate an instructor pool, time zone focus, and product for its end-users.

Smaller organizations can buy annual subscriptions for their managers to take general content courses, while larger organizations can pay for in-house programs that NewCampus will then manage and run themselves. As with any B2B business model, selling to an institution versus an individual appears to be more lucrative over time when the startup starts serving hundreds and thousands of managers. However, Yao stressed that NewCampus’ strategic advantage is more in helping upskill smaller organizations.

“It actually really does serve underserved businesses that don’t have access to traditional training facilities at those price points,” Yao said. “At the same time, a lot of the companies that we’re currently working with are more familiar with keeping something that’s within their company, it’s a bit of a balance of both.” The split between individual programming and in-house programming is currently 50/50.

Currently about 80% of NewCampus’ learners and 60% of its instructors identify as women.

Testing the tester

The test for NewCampus is if it can scale its content to be effective and inclusive of hundreds of thousands of emerging managers. This will require the company to niche down its content to specific managerial paths depending on profession, or grow bigger and serve seasoned managers as well.

NewCampus is pursuing university accreditation, which suggests that it sees itself eventually becoming a replacement for traditional degrees. Fan likened it to how fintech startups acquired banking licenses half a decade ago, in an attempt to build brand awareness and trust.

Per a number of investors who had seen NewCampus’ pitch deck, the university licensing move, is a nod to NewCampus’ initial bet: that it could become an alternative to the MBA.

The issue with modern business schools is that much of the utility in higher-ed isn’t the content, but the network and brand name making its way to a student’s resume. While NewCampus may thus lean on accreditation as differentiation, it really needs to lean on different ways to signal to society that its content — and consumers of its content — matters. Yao thinks that investors may be off on NewCampus’ interpretation of replacing the business school degree.

“They’re thinking of big names, like Stanford and Harvard,” she said. “We’re taking on the vertical of business education as a whole, the people who come to us, they’re not the people who haven’t gotten into Harvard, they’re 100% the people who had never considered Harvard to begin with.”

newcampus-team

NewCampus’ team


Source: Tech Crunch

How we built an AI unicorn in 6 years

Today, Tractable is worth $1 billion. Our AI is used by millions of people across the world to recover faster from road accidents, and it also helps recycle as many cars as Tesla puts on the road.

And yet six years ago, Tractable was just me and Raz (Razvan Ranca, CTO), two college grads coding in a basement. Here’s how we did it, and what we learned along the way.

Build upon a fresh technological breakthrough

In 2013, I was fortunate to get into artificial intelligence (more specifically, deep learning) six months before it blew up internationally. It started when I took a course on Coursera called “Machine learning with neural networks” by Geoffrey Hinton. It was like being love struck. Back then, to me AI was science fiction, like “The Terminator.”

Narrowly focusing on a branch of applied science that was undergoing a paradigm shift which hadn’t yet reached the business world changed everything.

But an article in the tech press said the academic field was amid a resurgence. As a result of 100x larger training data sets and 100x higher compute power becoming available by reprogramming GPUs (graphics cards), a huge leap in predictive performance had been attained in image classification a year earlier. This meant computers were starting to be able to understand what’s in an image — like humans do.

The next step was getting this technology into the real world. While at university — Imperial College London — teaming up with much more skilled people, we built a plant recognition app with deep learning. We walked our professor through Hyde Park, watching him take photos of flowers with the app and laughing from joy as the AI recognized the right plant species. This had previously been impossible.

I started spending every spare moment on image classification with deep learning. Still, no one was talking about it in the news — even Imperial’s computer vision lab wasn’t yet on it! I felt like I was in on a revolutionary secret.

Looking back, narrowly focusing on a branch of applied science undergoing a breakthrough paradigm shift that hadn’t yet reached the business world changed everything.

Search for complementary co-founders who will become your best friends

I’d previously been rejected from Entrepreneur First (EF), one of the world’s best incubators, for not knowing anything about tech. Having changed that, I applied again.

The last interview was a hackathon, where I met Raz. He was doing machine learning research at Cambridge, had topped EF’s technical test, and published papers on reconstructing shredded documents and on poker bots that could detect bluffs. His bare-bones webpage read: “I seek data-driven solutions to currently intractable problems.” Now that had a ring to it (and where we’d get the name for Tractable).

That hackathon, we coded all night. The morning after, he and I knew something special was happening between us. We moved in together and would spend years side by side, 24/7, from waking up to Pantera in the morning to coding marathons at night.

But we also wouldn’t have got where we are without Adrien (Cohen, president), who joined as our third co-founder right after our seed round. Adrien had previously co-founded Lazada, an online supermarket in South East Asia like Amazon and Alibaba, which sold to Alibaba for $1.5 billion. Adrien would teach us how to build a business, inspire trust and hire world-class talent.

Find potential customers early so you can work out market fit

Tractable started at EF with a head start — a paying customer. Our first use case was … plastic pipe welds.

It was as glamorous as it sounds. Pipes that carry water and natural gas to your home are made of plastic. They’re connected by welds (melt the two plastic ends, connect them, let them cool down and solidify again as one). Image classification AI could visually check people’s weld setups to ensure good quality. Most of all, it was real-world value for breakthrough AI.

And yet in the end, they — our only paying customer — stopped working with us, just as we were raising our first round of funding. That was rough. Luckily, the number of pipe weld inspections was too small a market to interest investors, so we explored other use cases — utilities, geology, dermatology and medical imaging.


Source: Tech Crunch

Litnerd streams live actors into the classroom to help kids better connect with reading

Our kids can’t read. As of 2019, roughly a third of US fourth graders were unable to read at the level expected of them. The scores have barely changed in decades. Something isn’t working here.

Litnerd, a company out of New York City, wants to try something new. They’re writing books and building lesson plans with a twist: professional actors, streamed into the class, to recreate scenes from each book and — hopefully! — help keep students engaged.

Litnerd programs are built as four one-hour, once-a-week sessions. Students read the book between sessions; once a week, an actor is streamed to the class to re-enact scenes, bring everything together, and move the story along. Sometimes this actor’s segment is pre-recorded. Other times it’s live, with choose-your-own-adventure elements mixed in to let the students steer the ship.

Something about the whole thing just tugs at my heart strings. It reminds me of “auditorium day” in school; those rare days in which our school brought in a special performer — a singer, a motivational speaker, a puppet show, whatever — to somehow wrangle our collective attention. Those days felt so unique, so special. Even decades later, fond memories of those days stick with me.

While it’s currently basing its lesson plans around existing stories and content, Litnerd has its own publishing operation in the works. The goal is to identify the categories and genres that best catch each age group’s (PreK through 5th grade) attention, then write books that, as the team puts it, “help celebrate diversity and inclusion so that all children can see themselves in the stories.”

Litnerd began its life during the pandemic under a different name: TinyBroadway. TinyBroadway shared a lot of its DNA with what would eventually become Litnerd — actors, beamed in through the magic of the Internet, work through lessons and crafts with a handful of kids at a time. Litnerd shifts the concept from B2C to B2B; whereas TinyBroadway’s customer was the parent looking to fill their own kid’s schedule, Litnerd dramatically expands its audience (and hopefully deepens its impact as a result) by working with schools.

I asked Litnerd CEO and founder Anisa Mirza for her thoughts on the shift via email:

“The reality is, the majority of Americans, some 95%, cannot afford homeschooling. Especially when it comes to K-5 years. And doubly when it comes to parents of children belonging to Title 1 schools (majority of NYC schools),” she writes. “This isn’t simply because parents can’t pay out of pocket. Rather, because for 95% of Americans, school represents free daycare (if both parents have to work a typical 9-5, they cannot afford to stay home and watch little Anisa, no matter how fabulous the online homeschool teacher is!). This is when I realized that if we truly want to disrupt K-12 (esp K-5) education, we need a solution that works from the outside in – being part of classroom time and funded by schools.”

Working with schools introduces new challenges and processes, varying a bit from city to city and state to state. In many regions, schools can’t just bring in a company like this on a whim — they’ve got to work with pre-approved, contracted vendors. Since becoming an approved vendor with the New York City Department of Education earlier this year, Anisa tells me over 14,000 students have taken part in Litnerd’s programs. She expects that number to double in the coming months.

Litnerd’s books, workshops and lesson plans are built around the social and emotional learning (or SEL) practices that most US states expect, bringing in topics like self-awareness, responsible decision making, and social awareness to help students grow more than just their ability to read.

Each book comes with its own lesson plan, complete with worksheets and activities for the students and suggested dialogue to help teachers identify and highlight the intended learnings from the stories.

Importantly, the company seems quite mindful about how it all plays out from the teacher’s perspective. They know that most teachers already have far too much to do, and design lesson plans with the goal of minimizing the amount of work they’re adding to a teacher’s day.

“We need SEL for the teachers, too,” Mirza tells me. “We need a social and emotional break for them, as well.”

It’s also a pretty dang cool gig for actors, particularly as the live acting industry works to recover from the pandemic. Actors currently perform and record all their sessions from home; as Litnerd grows, the company hopes to open up coworking-space style drop-in studios.

Litnerd is currently focused on expanding to more schools in New York City, growing beyond that as the varying regional processes allow.


Source: Tech Crunch

Founders: How well do you really understand seed-stage financing?

I’ve fundraised a lot. Tactically, fundraising is a skill like any other. You get better the more you do it. But practicing gets you nowhere if you don’t have a strong foundation in understanding a fundraising round’s core components.

As a founder, you will understand less than investors when it comes to fundraising. For investors, negotiating with founders is their full-time job. For founders, fundraising is just a small part of building a business. Understanding the basics of venture financing can help founders raise on better terms.

We’ll cover:

  • How financing works: SAFEs versus equity rounds.
  • How much to raise.
  • How to arrive at your valuation.

How financing works: SAFEs versus equity rounds

As a founder, you will understand less than investors when it comes to fundraising.

Venture financing takes place in rounds. The first stage is the pre-seed or seed round, then a Series A, then a Series B, then a Series C and so on. You can continue to raise funding until the company is profitable, gets acquired or goes public.

We will focus here on seed-stage funding — your very first funding round.

SAFEs

Post-money SAFEs are the most common way to raise funding. These documents are used by Y Combinator, angel investors and most early-stage funds. You should raise on post-money SAFEs using standard documents created by YC. Standard documents have consistent terms that have been drafted to be fair to both investors and founders.

By using the standard post-money SAFE, your negotiation can focus on the two terms that matter:

  1. Principal: The amount you want to raise per investor.
  2. Valuation cap: The value of your business.


Source: Tech Crunch

Watch Blue Origin launch Jeff Bezos to space live, along with the youngest and oldest astronauts ever

Blue Origin is set to launch its fully reusable New Shepard spacecraft with humans on board for the first time on Tuesday, and it’s sending Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos up along with his brother and two record-setting astronauts. The launch livestream above is scheduled for 6:30 a.m. CDT (7:30 a.m. EDT/4:30 a.m. PDT), with the actual liftoff targeted for 8 a.m. CDT (9 a.m. EDT/6 a.m. PDT).

The full flight profile includes a takeoff from Blue Origin’s remote West Texas facility, followed by an ascent to a height of roughly 62 miles above the Earth’s surface. Those on board, including Bezos, his brother Mark, 82-year-old Wally Funk and 18-year-old Oliver Daemen will then experience between three and four minutes of weightlessness inside the New Shepard capsule, before it returns to Earth slowed by parachutes for a touchdown in the West Texas desert and then a recovery by Blue Origin staff.

This is not significantly different in terms of timing or sequence from the 15 prior New Shepard flights that Blue Origin has flown, but this is the first one with humans on board (including the world’s richest), so it’s obviously the one to watch.


Source: Tech Crunch

CNN+ streaming service will offer live and on-demand content in early 2022

The rumors of a CNN streaming service were true. The network has unveiled a CNN+ service that will offer a blend of live and on-demand shows that are “separate and distinct” from existing TV coverage. It will debut sometime in the first quarter of 2022. CNN hasn’t narrowed down the price, but lead executive Andrew Morse told Variety in an interview that there wouldn’t be an ad-supported tier at launch.

The centerpiece, as you’d expect, will be the live material. CNN+ plans to offer eight to 12 hours of in-depth topical coverage and “lifestyle” material every day, with both veterans and newcomers at the helm. You’ll also have chances to interact with anchors and experts in real-time discussions. This won’t be a digital replica of CNN’s usual news, then, but you may have reasons to tune in every day.

The on-demand catalog unsurprisingly taps into CNN’s existing collection, including shows like Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown and United Shades of America. There will be original shows and movies for the internet service, although CNN+ won’t reveal those until later in 2021.

Officially, Morse said CNN+ wouldn’t be bundled or otherwise tie into HBO Max despite the WarnerMedia connection. Variety sources, however, claimed there was a “strong probability” the service would be bundled with HBO Max and Discovery+ after WarnerMedia and Discovery finalize their merger.

Morse considered the CNN+ launch the largest the network has had since it started TV service in June 1980. It was also a chance to experiment with formats that blur distinctions between entertainment and news, the executive added.

The question, of course, is whether or not viewers will bite. CNN has had success with long-form content like the late Anthony Bourdain’s shows, but it’s not clear if people are ready to pay a monthly fee to see them. There’s also the matter of streaming service overload — you might not be thrilled to subscribe to yet another offering just to be sure you catch everything CNN has to offer.

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on Engadget.


Source: Tech Crunch

Uber expands its grocery delivery service to more than 400 US cities and towns

Uber has announced the first major expansion of its grocery delivery service in the US. The company is more than doubling the number of service areas this week to north of 400 cities and towns. It now serves several major markets through the Uber and Uber Eats apps, including San Francisco, New York City and Washington DC.

The rapid expansion was partly fueled by a partnership with Albertsons Companies and its 1,200 grocery stores across the country. Albertsons owns brands including Safeway, Jewel-Osco, Acme, Tom Thumb and Randalls. Uber also offers delivery from regional chains such as Southeastern Grocers and New York’s Red Apple Group. Uber Pass and Eats Pass subscribers don’t need to pay delivery fees on grocery orders over $30.

Grocery delivery became an important component of Uber’s business during the toughest parts of the COVID-19 pandemic, because the number of rides people were taking dropped significantly. The company is also dealing with a driver shortage that led to higher prices for rides. Uber bought several delivery startups over the last couple of years to fuel its growth in that sector, such as Cornershop, Postmates and Drizly.

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on Engadget.


Source: Tech Crunch

Velodyne Lidar CEO resigns in latest internal drama

Velodyne Lidar CEO Anand Gopalan is leaving the lidar company at the end of July as the sensor supplier continues to struggle with internal drama.

Gopalan, who was previously CTO, is leaving the top leadership position after about a year and a half on the job.

Velodyne said Monday in a statement that a team of top executives that includes COO Jim Barnhart, CFO Drew Hamer, Chief People Officer Kathy McBeath and Chief Commercial Officer Sinclair Vass will run the company as a search for a new chief executive is conducted. The company didn’t disclose why Gopalan was leaving.

Gopalan’s resignation comes after months of internal drama and business setbacks for a company that has been considered the leading supplier of lidar, the light detection and ranging radar sensor that is considered a critical component to commercially deploy autonomous vehicles.

The resignation is the latest in a series of issues that have cropped up since Velodyne Lidar struck a deal to merge with special purpose acquisition company Graf Industrial Corp. At the time, it was reported that Velodyne’s founder David Hall, along with backers Ford, Chinese search engine Baidu, Hyundai Mobis and Nikon Corp. would keep an 80% stake in the combined company. Hall became executive chairman and Gopalan remained CEO position.

Hall and his wife Marta Thoma Hall clashed with the SPAC that acquired Velodyne. In February, David Hall was removed as chairman of the board and Marta Thoma Hall lost her chief marketing officer position following an investigation by the board of “inappropriate behavior.”

Meanwhile, Ford, which had held almost 13.1 million shares — a value of about $244 million — in Velodyne at the close of the third quarter of 2020, sold off its stake by the end of the year.

Velodyne sensors had been used by Ford in its autonomous vehicle testing. The intention was that those would be the go-to sensor for its autonomous vehicles once they were deployed commercially.

Veoneer had even announced in 2019 that it was leveraging Velodyne’s technology for a contract to supply the sensor to Ford (and by extension its autonomous vehicle technology supplier Argo AI). But Veoneer reported in February that it had lost its contract.

Argo, which had acquired lidar company Princeton Lightwave, unveiled in May details on a long-range lidar sensor that it claims has the ability to see 400 meters away with high-resolution photorealistic quality and the ability to detect dark and distant objects with low reflectivity. With so much progress internally, Argo and Ford staked their future plans on its own lidar.

In a May letter, David Hall blamed the SPAC, specifically the SPAC-appointed members of the combined company’s board, for its poor financial performance and called for the resignation of Gopalan and two board members.

As part of Velodyne’s announcement on Gopalan’s resignation, the company restated its business outlook for 2021 revenue, noting that its guidance of between $77 million and $94 million remains unchanged. Velodyne will report second quarter financial results August 5.


Source: Tech Crunch

The end of open source?

Several weeks ago, the Linux community was rocked by the disturbing news that University of Minnesota researchers had developed (but, as it turned out, not fully executed) a method for introducing what they called “hypocrite commits” to the Linux kernel — the idea being to distribute hard-to-detect behaviors, meaningless in themselves, that could later be aligned by attackers to manifest vulnerabilities.

This was quickly followed by the — in some senses, equally disturbing — announcement that the university had been banned, at least temporarily, from contributing to kernel development. A public apology from the researchers followed.

Though exploit development and disclosure is often messy, running technically complex “red team” programs against the world’s biggest and most important open-source project feels a little extra. It’s hard to imagine researchers and institutions so naive or derelict as not to understand the potentially huge blast radius of such behavior.

Equally certain, maintainers and project governance are duty bound to enforce policy and avoid having their time wasted. Common sense suggests (and users demand) they strive to produce kernel releases that don’t contain exploits. But killing the messenger seems to miss at least some of the point — that this was research rather than pure malice, and that it casts light on a kind of software (and organizational) vulnerability that begs for technical and systemic mitigation.

Projects of the scale and utter criticality of the Linux kernel aren’t prepared to contend with game-changing, hyperscale threat models.

I think the “hypocrite commits” contretemps is symptomatic, on every side, of related trends that threaten the entire extended open-source ecosystem and its users. That ecosystem has long wrestled with problems of scale, complexity and free and open-source software’s (FOSS) increasingly critical importance to every kind of human undertaking. Let’s look at that complex of problems:

  • The biggest open-source projects now present big targets.
  • Their complexity and pace have grown beyond the scale where traditional “commons” approaches or even more evolved governance models can cope.
  • They are evolving to commodify each other. For example, it’s becoming increasingly hard to state, categorically, whether “Linux” or “Kubernetes” should be treated as the “operating system” for distributed applications. For-profit organizations have taken note of this and have begun reorganizing around “full-stack” portfolios and narratives.
  • In so doing, some for-profit organizations have begun distorting traditional patterns of FOSS participation. Many experiments are underway. Meanwhile, funding, headcount commitments to FOSS and other metrics seem in decline.
  • OSS projects and ecosystems are adapting in diverse ways, sometimes making it difficult for for-profit organizations to feel at home or see benefit from participation.

Meanwhile, the threat landscape keeps evolving:

  • Attackers are bigger, smarter, faster and more patient, leading to long games, supply-chain subversion and so on.
  • Attacks are more financially, economically and politically profitable than ever.
  • Users are more vulnerable, exposed to more vectors than ever before.
  • The increasing use of public clouds creates new layers of technical and organizational monocultures that may enable and justify attacks.
  • Complex commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions assembled partly or wholly from open-source software create elaborate attack surfaces whose components (and interactions) are accessible and well understood by bad actors.
  • Software componentization enables new kinds of supply-chain attacks.
  • Meanwhile, all this is happening as organizations seek to shed nonstrategic expertise, shift capital expenditures to operating expenses and evolve to depend on cloud vendors and other entities to do the hard work of security.

The net result is that projects of the scale and utter criticality of the Linux kernel aren’t prepared to contend with game-changing, hyperscale threat models. In the specific case we’re examining here, the researchers were able to target candidate incursion sites with relatively low effort (using static analysis tools to assess units of code already identified as requiring contributor attention), propose “fixes” informally via email, and leverage many factors, including their own established reputation as reliable and frequent contributors, to bring exploit code to the verge of being committed.

This was a serious betrayal, effectively by “insiders” of a trust system that’s historically worked very well to produce robust and secure kernel releases. The abuse of trust itself changes the game, and the implied follow-on requirement — to bolster mutual human trust with systematic mitigations — looms large.

But how do you contend with threats like this? Formal verification is effectively impossible in most cases. Static analysis may not reveal cleverly engineered incursions. Project paces must be maintained (there are known bugs to fix, after all). And the threat is asymmetrical: As the classic line goes — blue team needs to protect against everything, red team only needs to succeed once.

I see a few opportunities for remediation:

  • Limit the spread of monocultures. Stuff like Alva Linux and AWS’ Open Distribution of ElasticSearch are good, partly because they keep widely used FOSS solutions free and open source, but also because they inject technical diversity.
  • Reevaluate project governance, organization and funding with an eye toward mitigating complete reliance on the human factor, as well as incentivizing for-profit companies to contribute their expertise and other resources. Most for-profit companies would be happy to contribute to open source because of its openness, and not despite it, but within many communities, this may require a culture change for existing contributors.
  • Accelerate commodification by simplifying the stack and verifying the components. Push appropriate responsibility for security up into the application layers.

Basically, what I’m advocating here is that orchestrators like Kubernetes should matter less, and Linux should have less impact. Finally, we should proceed as fast as we can toward formalizing the use of things like unikernels.

Regardless, we need to ensure that both companies and individuals provide the resources open source needs to continue.


Source: Tech Crunch

All eyes are on India’s brightest Zomato

Relevance is often tied to rarity. As a result, the first anything — whether a birthday, scientific feat or female vice president — comes with its own weight. Whether that pressure is warranted is a discussion in and of itself, but today, we’ll focus on the ripple effects of India’s first unicorn IPO: Zomato.

Food delivery startup Zomato, set to start trading public shares next week, has been labeled by journalists and industry experts as India’s biggest tech public offering to date. The company could be valued at up to $8.6 billion in its public debut, and early indications of investor interest were strong. 

As my colleagues Alex Wilhelm and Anna Heim put it in their column, the eventual performance of Zomato will be watched by Paytm and MobiKwik, two Indian fintech unicorns also looking to go public soon, the some 100 Indian unicorns, and, of course, returns-focused venture capitalists. The success of the startup could lead to more venture funding, exits down the road, and overall, highlight a milestone for growth investments amid legislative and regulatory tension. 

While the pressure is on for Zomato not to get squashed by the public markets, it’s not simply baseless, anticipatory energy. Our on-the-ground reporter Manish Singh has religiously reported on all the signs that India has been building toward this event, from the early-stage startup fundraising frenzy to how engineers suddenly feel empowered to ask for more money thanks to an increase in demand.

A Zomato success may turn more investors to pay attention to the startup scene, but they will be playing catch-up: Indian startups have raised a record $10.46 billion in the first half of 2021, up from $4 billion during the same period last year, and $5.4 billion in the first half of 2019, data insight platform Tracxn told TechCrunch. For comparison, Indian startups had raised $11.6 billion in all of 2020.

The takeaway here, both in life and in startups, is that the first anything is rarely a result of a single decision. Often, if you look closely, a massive milestone is due to an amalgamation of different wins, successes, failures, and tinier milestones along the way. This doesn’t take away its title as the biggest tech startup to go public in India (relevant, and rare!) but it does suggest that ripple effects aren’t just a side effect of a financing event, but maybe the impetus of the IPO in the first place.

In the rest of this newsletter, we’ll get into emerging fund manager trends, as well as funding round advice that has nothing to do with closing a round. You can find me on Twitter @nmasc_ or listen to me as a co-host on Equity.

Emerge, then converge

unicorn

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

The clip of closed funds led by diverse, emerging fund managers is unlike anything I’ve seen before. In the last week, Female Founders Fund closed $57 million for Fund III, Nasir Quadree announced one of the largest solo GP funds, Peter Boyce II is nearing a $40 million close for Stellation Capital and H Ventures landed a $10 million debut fund.

Here’s what to know: More and more established venture firms are turning to emerging managers for deal flow, and frankly, new partners, per my colleague Connie Loizos. Just this week, Initialized Partner scooped up Parul Singh from Founder Collective, making her a new partner at the firm. Don’t expect the trend to slow down anytime soon.

Your funding round isn’t special, but you may be

It may be easier to fundraise than it is to secure fundraising coverage. As we talked about in our recent Equity podcast, featuring special guest Forbes Senior Editor Alex Konrad, the bar for “the funding round story” has never been higher.

Here’s what to know: In order to stand out, founders need to be transparent about competition, their industry and leave those godforsaken preapproved quotes and talking points. We get into specific advice on the show, and how a numbing effect could hurt historically overlooked individuals.

For more fundraising advice:

Around TC

  • The TechCrunch Disrupt Agenda just went live. It’s a must-read line up and a must-attend event.
  • Have you ever taken a cohort-based course from an edtech platform? I’m writing a story, so please e-mail if you’re open to chatting about your experience at one.
  • Shout out to Christine Hall for recently joining the TechCrunch team. Follow her on Twitter. I’ll wait!

Across the week

Seen on TechCrunch

Seen on Extra Crunch

Thanks for reading along, everyone. Have a good weekend, and if you liked this newsletter, make sure to share it with at least one friend!

N


Source: Tech Crunch