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| |  Image Credits: slowcentury / Getty Images | | Several micromobility companies once operated in my city, but consolidation has reduced that to a small handful. Now that that many consumers are buying their own e-bikes and e-scooters, shared dockless micromobility “just hasn't proven itself to be a profitable line of business,” Puneeth Meruva, an associate at Trucks Venture Capital told TechCrunch. There’s only one dockless electric moped provider in my town, so price is no longer a consideration. Instead, my first priority is to find a vehicle with the best-charged battery. (San Francisco has a lot of hills, and you never know where the day might take you.) Larger players like Lime and Bird have vertically-integrated tech stacks for fleet management features like this, but there are also opportunities for startups — imagine a “phantom scooter” that drives itself to a neighborhood with high demand or a moped that alerts drivers if there’s traffic ahead. This in-depth industry analysis shows how increased regulation on the local level and changing consumer habits are pushing micromobility providers to adapt and innovate. “Whether you want to stack regulatory compliance on the vehicles, do safety features like ADAS, or add mapping content, you kind of need this platform where you can actively develop and launch new apps on the vehicle without having to bring it back to the factory,” says Meruva. Thank you very much for reading Extra Crunch! I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist Read More | | | |
| |  Image Credits: Nigel Sussman | | To close out the week, a short meditation on value, or, more precisely, how assets are valued in today's markets. There have been other notable declines in value among some recently public, more technologically differentiated companies. Frankly, we're still dealing with new-enough models — or big-enough guesses about the future baked into business models — that it's hard to really value the most uncertain (and therefore most exciting) companies, let alone cryptocurrencies. Let's discuss. Read More | | | |
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| |  Image Credits: Klaus Vedfelt / Getty Images | | After 18 years of bootstrapping a BI software firm into a business that now serves 28,000 companies and 3 million users in 75 countries, here's what I've learned about myself, my company, about entrepreneurship and about when to grab for that brass ring. Read More | | | |
| |  Image Credits: Erik Isakson / Getty Images | | Productivity infrastructure is on the rise and will continue to be front and center as companies evaluate what their future of work entails and how to maintain productivity, rapid software development and innovation with distributed teams. Understanding the benefits, use cases and steps to consider can propel organizations into the next phase of digital transformation. Read More | | | |
| |  Image Credits: Nigel Sussman | | The global venture capital market had a cracking start to the year. Coming off a 2020 high, VC totals in the United States, in Europe, and among competitive verticals like insurtech and AI are on pace to set new records in 2021. The rapid-fire deal-making and trend of larger venture checks at higher valuations that The Exchange has tracked for some time require private-market investors to make decisions faster than ever. For venture capitalists, the timeline for reaching conviction around a startup's thesis and executing due diligence has become compressed. We were tipped off to the concept of pre-diligence during the reporting process for a look into recent fundraising trends in the AI/ML space. Sapphire investor Jai Das, when asked about how he was handling a competitive and swiftly moving market for AI startup investments, said that "most firms are completing their due diligence way before the financing actually happens." Read More | | | |
| |  Image Credits: MartinvBarraud / Getty Images | | Your clients might not demand 24/7 customer service yet, but they're certainly hoping for it. But how can a startup with a lean staff provide round-the-clock customer care? There are several options available, but more than ever, outsourcing is one of them. When should your startup consider outsourcing its customer care? And what should you look for in a provider? Here are some insights on what customer care as a service (CCaaS) can do for you, and how fast-growing startups have been leveraging this new class of partners to boost customer satisfaction. Read More | | | |
| |  Image Credits: d3sign / Getty Images | | The second half of 2021 will bring incredible growth, the likes of which we haven't seen in a long time. Here's how marketing in tech will shift — and what you need to know to reach more customers and accelerate growth this year. Read More | | | |
| |  Image Credits: Gearstd / Getty Images | | With strict privacy laws such as GDPR and CCPA already listing big-ticket penalties — and a growing number of countries following suit — businesses have little option but to comply. It's not just bigger, established businesses offering privacy and compliance tech; brand-new startups are filling in the gaps in this emerging and growing space. Privacy isn't dead, as many would have you believe. New regulations, stricter cross-border data transfer rules and increasing calls for data sovereignty have helped the privacy startup space grow thanks to an uptick in investor support. This is how we got here, and where investors are spending. Read More | | | |
| |  Image Credits: Nigel Sussman | | UiPath is not worth $36 billion, as we might have expected, but at a figure below $30 billion. At $29.1 billion, UiPath has a roughly 35x run-rate multiple. That just about ties it for eighth-best overall. Among all public cloud companies. That means that UiPath is insanely valuable, just not that insanely valuable. So what went wrong with the company's final private round? The Exchange’s hunch is that UiPath's final private investors expected the market to stay as hot as it once was, but it has cooled since the first two months of the year. So, instead of UiPath coming to the market in the expected climate, the company instead had to price where it did because the weather predicted by its final private price had already chilled. Read More | | | |
| |  Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch | | Dear Sophie, I'm a female entrepreneur who created my first startup a few months ago. Once my startup gets off the ground — and as COVID-19 gets under control — I'd like to visit the United States to test the market and meet with investors. Which visas would allow me to do that? —Noteworthy in Nairobi Read More | | | |
| |  | | Despite a somewhat circuitous route, UiPath closed its first day as a public company worth more than it was in its Series F round — when it sold 12,043,202 shares at $62.27576 apiece, per SEC filings. More simply, UiPath closed on Wednesday worth more per-share than it was in February. How you might value the company, whether you prefer a simple or fully diluted share count, is somewhat immaterial at this juncture. UiPath had a good day. TechCrunch spoke with UiPath CFO Ashim Gupta, curious about the company's choice of a traditional IPO, its general avoidance of adjusted metrics in its SEC filings and the IPO market's current temperature. Read More | | | |
| |  Image Credits: Kehan Chen / Getty Images | | Research papers come out far too frequently for anyone to read them all. That's especially true in the field of machine learning, which now affects (and produces papers in) practically every industry and company. This column aims to collect some of the most relevant recent discoveries and papers — particularly in, but not limited to, artificial intelligence — and explain why they matter. This week, we dove into “introspective failure prediction,” using ML to identify dangerous moles and spotting cows from space. Read More | | | |
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