Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startup and markets newsletter. It’s largely based on the daily column featured on Extra Crunch, but for free, and made for your weekend reading.
Well that was a clever week
I may be getting older, but technical news speed seems to have gotten in high gear. They are bonkers. Think about how small the news is that WeWork is going public through an SPAC made. It was a small potato in the wider situation that happened to pass us by over the past seven days.
This week was Y Comabinator Demo Day, somehow, even though it feels like a few weeks have passed since then. However, this is what I want to pursue with you today. A good early break at an early stage, we might say.
During the one-day demo day, a few hundred startups showed what they are doing in one-slide format. TechCrunch covered some of their favorites, but we had to leave far more off the shelf than we got to write about. Let’s add a few names to the mix, shall we?
On the fintech front, a few names stood out to me through the hours I was able to tune in. Alinea wants to build a trading app for Gen Z. I dig the idea because Zoomers seems to be much cooler than any other generation. Why shouldn’t they get indigenous investment experience that targets their demographic?
Hapi is a similar idea, but focused on Latin America. Again, I like it. One trend I have seen recently is the introduction of start-up models that have worked in the United States brought to new markets, repeated by local tweaks, and offered for more people. Investment has long been expensive. Here’s to making it cheaper.
Atrato explores similar boxes, bringing the Affirm-style model now, pay later (BNPL) to Latin America. I’m usually not as strong about consumer credit apps as I am about consumer credit apps, but with the growth that Affirm, Klarna and others have managed, there is a huge demand for the product. We’ll see what Atrato can do.
Turning from Latin America to Southeast Asia, OctiFi is building BNPL products for that market. Accepting that geographic chip isn’t the only start we saw on demo day – BrioHR works there too.
Bueno Finance responds to a fintech topic for markets as well as the United States and Europe, building on what it says is “Chime for India.” If you think, as I do, that Chime and other neobanks usually do a proper job of providing lower-priced and high-end banking experiences to less affluent customers, this is an obvious winner. Of course most startups fail, but I like where the idea is focused. (NextPay is working on SMB digital banking for the Philippines; the list goes on.)
Another topic on which my eyes were starting to deliver their software was through an API instead of as a managed service. It’s something we’ve been covering on the Exchange for ages. Some demo day names included Dyte (“Stripe for live video”), Pibit.ai (API to help structure data), Dayra (finservices for Egyptians via API), enode (energy provider -EV API), and so on.
Finally, there was some initial work on services for IRL SMBs. Third is building membership services for small businesses, while Per Diem wants to bring fast shipping to companies other than Amazon.
There were a handful of other cute companies (GimBooks! Recover! Wasp! Axiom.ai!), More than I could have ever written down for you. Now is the time to sit back and see what will be the biggest growth in the next half year. But I found this particular demo day very exciting about global startup activity. That’s not a bad way to close Tuesday.
Platform of all things
Among all the IPO and SPAC news (here and there in case you need to catch it), there were a number of great tours that were well worth our time. Two came from the insurtech place, with Pie (staff comp insurance) and Snapsheet (claims management) raising $ 118 million and $ 30 million apiece.
ServiceTitan raised $ 500 million at a quadruple valuation of $ 8.3 billion, Forbes said. In about two years. That’s the difference of chonky boi valuation. I believe we will be covering their IPO next year. And Pilot with a focus on accounting raised $ 100 million at a valuation of $ 1.2 billion. The pace of 2021 unicorn creation feels nothing but slow.
And I can’t help but note that filing a UiPath IPO is very appealing in terms of showing how the company turned a terrible loss into a very reasonable economy. It looks like it’s working on an avalanche, at least in GAAP terms.
I was able to add 17 more paragraphs with news straight from this month and without even getting close to the eight and nine figure rounds. It’s bonkers! Q1 2021 venture capital numbers certainly feel like they should be hot and spicy. More on that as soon as we get the data.
Different and different
I’m not here to just feed you vegetables, though. There’s a funny story I need to get to soon that incorporates my favorite sport, and my work. More specifically it’s about F1 (the car racing thing) and tech.
Cognizant recently supported the Aston Martin F1 team. Splunk will work with McLaren. Microsoft is dealing with the Renault team, now named after the car company’s Alpine brand. Epson, Bose and Hewlett Packard Enterprise support the Mercedes racing team. Oracle supports Red Bull racing. The list goes on!
And this week Zoom announced it was getting into the F1 game as well. All of this is great fun for me, and brings me hope. That is, we will see some tech companies start using F1 teams as a way to compete within the industry. That, for one, would allow me to write about F1 at work – as I do right now – and make more technical Chiefs worry about employment calls about why their team isn’t faster. I’m sure Splunk CEO Douglas Merritt is now tired of my questions about his orange team. But I don’t want to stop.
So if you’re a technical CEO, and you don’t support an F1 team, I’ll take it from here because your company is too small to be important, or too busy to have fun. And I’m just drawing the most.