Ideaforge

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.

Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors.

The huge sale of Utah-based startup Divvy to Bill.com is still bouncing around my head this week, not only because the $2.5 billion exit was huge for both the company and its local scene, but also because its target market is exciting to watch.

Divvy competes in what we call the corporate spend market with a few other unicorns, including Ramp and Brex. Now with Divvy taken off the table, the pair of competitors are differentiating in a few ways that matter.

And Brex is getting back on its billboard game.

This week Brex announced that it is rolling out IRL advertising in a few American cities. Residents of San Francisco back when Brex was a baby will recall how the startup plastered its brand all over the city. Essentially, it was a cheap way to get a lot of impressions.

Now the startup is taking the strategy to Houston and Miami and D.C. Why? The Exchange caught up with Brex CEO Henrique Dubugras this week to chat about the matter. Per the executive, his company has two goals for its renewed meatspace marketing push. First, Brex wants to talk up its software game over its initial branding as a corporate card for startups. And, second, it wants business owners to know that it works with all types of companies now, not merely those with Sand Hill Road on speed dial.

The push to get the Brex name out in markets less known for their startup activity than overall business climate makes sense, if the unicorn wants to attract more nonstartup customers. But it’s the software element of its efforts that unsurprisingly caught our attention.

That’s because Brex recently rolled out Brex Premium, a package of software services that it charges around $600 per year for. Brex and rivals like Ramp and Divvy have spent lots of energy and money in recent quarters building out increasingly sophisticated software around their traditional corporate card products. The result thus far are codebases more and more able to supplant other pieces of enterprise software, like expense software.

But as Brex looks to double down via an advertising push on its decision to charge for Brex Premium — which Dubugras says is performing better than his company had initially anticipated — competitor Ramp is pushing its free software as an edge.

Ramp CEO and co-founder Eric Glyman pointed The Exchange to his company’s refreshed pricing page, which highlights its zero-cost software. And, he said in an email, the new page was “powering the fastest growth month we’ve ever had.”

Broadly, what we’re seeing with Ramp and Brex and Divvy — along with Airbase and others that also compete in the space — is a cohort of startups attacking an aged corporate issue with more nimble, lower-cost products. And proving while doing so that there was huge untapped demand for something different and better. The various players competing for the startup crown in the corporate spend world wouldn’t all be growing as rapidly as they are if that weren’t the case.

If you want more, here’s our dig into the Divvy-Bill.com deal.

More from startup-land

The Exchange was lathered up in SPACs this week, which means that we missed a host of interesting news that we otherwise would have loved to poke into. For example, here are some very neat venture rounds that it would have been fun to dig into more deeply:

• ProducePay raised a $43M Series C: LA-based ProducePay helps food growers access capital, software and market data, linking them to food demanders (importers, etc.). Per its website, ProducePay funded a Bajío, Mexico-based asparagus growing operation to the tune of a half million dollars to hire labor and invest in its growing operation. Repayment, again per the company, starts when product ships.
• Farming is hard, fickle, expensive and not always aligned with traditional banking requirements. Throw in an increasingly global production/consumption food network, and you can see why G2VP and IFC co-led the round.
• Oh, and The Exchange learned that ProducePay’s reported 2020 doubling was measured in GAAP revenue terms. The startup’s gross margins “grew by over 75% from 2019 to 2020, thanks to improved underwriting policies and a more attractive cost of funds as volume scaled,” per its PR team. That’s super cool.

Another neat company that raised this week was Panther, which put together a $2.5 million round. Panther wants to help companies hire in 160 different countries. Our read of the company and its round is that, as more companies go remote-first, this sort of service is going to become a must-have. Gusto also competes in the market, so it should be an active one to watch from both VC and M&A perspectives.

Panther is based in Florida, and raised funds from, per its release, “Tribe Capital, Eric Ries, Naval Ravikant and Carta Ventures.”

One more round: Lance, a freelancer-focused neobank, raised $2.8 million this week. The round was led by, per the company, “Barclays, BDMI, Great Oaks Capital, Imagination Capital, Techstars, DFJ Frontier, New York Venture Partners” along with some angels.

Now that the fintech world has created Chime and other broad-remit neobanks, it’s not surprising to see more targeted efforts get put together. And Lance CEO Oona Rokyta is betting that the freelance world is set to grow further. Given how the labor market has evolved in the last few years, I’d hazard she’s making an intelligent bet.

To close out today, a quick note on Alpaca. It’s a startup that TechCrunch has dug into here and there, as it fits into both our general focus on API-delivered services (on-demand pricing is hot), and it exists in the consumer fintech world (powering other companies’ equities trading services). We caught up with CEO Yoshi Yokokawa this week to chat about what’s been going on at his company since we last tracked its growth rates.

After all, whatever we can learn about the world of consumer investing — and Robinhood told us quite a lot this week — is useful given the somewhat global savings/investing boom that we’ve seen in the last year or so.

Per Yokokawa, Alpaca has global plans, including rolling out with new partners on a few continents in the coming months. The company is handling 1,000 new accounts daily outside the United States, which Yokokawa expects to rise sharply in the coming months. And the company recently built out a broker API to make onboarding users simpler for its partners.

Sounds like growth to us. More when we can milk it out of, er, the alpaca.

Alex

Source: Tech Crunch

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Welcome to Daily Crunch for May 21, 2021. Closing out the week, bitcoin dropped sharply today on (more?) news from China about possible restrictions on cryptocurrencies more broadly. Depending on your priors, the most recent news is purely FUD, or it’s indication that Bitcoin and friends are terrible inflation hedges. Pick your poison! Regardless, we have a grip of startup news to get to, so off we go! — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Snap spends a half billion on AR: Yesterday’s news from consumer photo giant Snap didn’t stop with the company plunking down $500 million for WaveOptics, which we reported “makes the waveguides and projectors used in AR glasses.” That sure sounds like Snap gearing up for eventual mass production? Right?
• Startups heart farming: TechCrunch covered a huge $65.5 million Series B for Indonesian startup TaniHub Group today. Part of what it does is loan capital to farmers ahead of their harvests. In related news, ProducePay raised $43 million earlier this week to do something similar in Latin America. There’s notable startup activity, then, at the intersection of agtech and fintech.
• Mobile gaming is bigger than you thought: Did you know that former gaming darling Zynga is in the midst of a comeback? Mobile gaming, its core focus, had a huge 2020, leading to the company posting record Q1 results. Riding the same way is Jam City, another mobile gaming shop is going public. More here.

Startups and VC

To round out the week, how about a few smaller venture capital rounds? We have a number from today that are well worth our time:

Secai Marche raises $1.4M for farm-to-table food distribution: We don’t cover enough Japanese startups, frankly, but here’s to doing better. Tokyo-based Secai Marche is building a B2B “logistics platform for farmers that sell to restaurants, hotels and other” food and beverage companies, and we think it’s neat. Rakuten and Beyond Next supplied the capital.

Mio raises $1M to bring social commerce to rural Vietnam: Quickly growing e-commerce market Vietnam is seeing rising penetration in major cities. Mio wants to bring e-commerce to smaller cities and rural areas. Per our reporting, it is “building a reseller network and logistics infrastructure that can offer next-day delivery to Tier 2 and 3 cities.” Our present may be someone else’s future, so it’s swell to see startups bring the latest to more folks.

To round out our round coverage today, a slightly larger deal for a mental-health focused service:

Wysa raises $5.5M for AI-powered mental health: This is at a minimum cool on paper. We’ll have to get some time with the service as it evolves through time, but TechCrunch reports that “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.” I, for one, welcome our robot mental-health overlords. Jokes aside, there is a therapist shortage in the world, and if Wysa can help more folks handle their mental health better, we’re all for it.

5 predictions for the future of e-commerce

The United States is one of the world’s most advanced economies, but until quite recently, South Korea and China had much higher e-commerce penetration.

American consumers and companies are closing that gap. In 2016, the percentage of total retail spend where the goods were bought and sold online in the U.S. was about 8%. Today, that figure is closer to 17%.

Despite the last two decades of disruption, we’re still in the early days of e-commerce. But as more merchants of every size start making their goods and services available online, we’ve reached an inflection point.

In an exclusive report for Extra Crunch, Ethan Choi, a partner at Accel, offers five well-researched predictions about where e-commerce is heading in terms of D2C and the overall enablement landscape.

“We’re entering what we at Accel believe is ‘the golden age of D2C e-commerce,’” says Choi.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

Today we have to stretch the Big Tech portion of this newsletter to include entities even larger than the largest technology companies, namely governments.

The Indian government is mad at tech companies yet again. This time it’s Twitter’s turn. Per TechCrunch, New Delhi “has expressed strong objection to Twitter for classifying tweets by Indian politicians as ‘manipulated media,’ and separately asked social media firms to remove posts that refer to an ‘Indian variant’ of the coronavirus.”

A few thoughts here: One, Twitter is going to have to navigate an increasingly complicated global climate for free speech in general. And figure out how to handle governments’ reactions to its decisions on labeling content. That’s going to be hard. And asking a social service to blanket-ban a particular phrase is going to be essentially impossible. After all, even in China, where banned phrases on social media are common, individuals have found myriad ways around the restrictions. So, good luck, Indian government.

On a related note, if you are interested in privacy more generally, what’s going on in the European Union regarding data protection is fascinating.

Moving back to the world of corporate news, Spotify is finally bringing offline listening to the Apple Watch. For runners, this is big news. Our own Brian Heater is hype about the update.

To close us out today, the Equity podcast team has thoughts on the growth in corporate “media” and what it means for unicorns and other large technology companies.

Community

Two quick things heading into the weekend: Ford’s new electric truck looks cool, but you, our readers, are hodling out for Tesla’s Cyber Truck. If you’re a founder of a startup of any stage and want to try your pitch out on some really cool investors … then Extra Crunch Live is the place to go. Check out this week’s pitch by Capri Money. From the audience to the stage, just like that! See you there next week.

TechCrunch Experts: Email Marketing

Image Credits: Getty Images

We’re thrilled with the responses to our survey about the top email marketers. It’s not too late to weigh in: Fill out the survey here.

In addition to giving founders who respond to the survey a discount to a new Extra Crunch subscription, we’ll be featuring a couple of nominations in Daily Crunch starting next week!

If you’re a growth marketer, pass the survey on to your clients — we’d love to hear from them!

To find out more details about this project and how we plan to use it to shape our editorial coverage, visit techcrunch.com/experts.

TC Eventful

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

Source: Tech Crunch

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