If you’re working for an advertising agency or you’re in charge of a brand, editing and exporting a video ad that works across all social and web platforms can be a lengthy and time consuming task. French startup Aive speeds up the process quite drastically as it can automatically generate all formats and all durations from one source video.

When you create a new video to showcase your brand, you usually start with a 16:9 video with a duration of a couple of minutes. It can be a good first step to create shorter versions for TV spots for instance.

But the advertising industry has changed — 30-second TV spots are no longer as relevant as they used to be. Many brands now want to advertise across different platforms, which means that you need to provide a video that integrates natively with these platforms.

For instance, on Snapchat, brands need a vertical 9:16 video if they want to insert ads in between user stories. If a company wants to create a video for the Instagram newsfeed, a square 1:1 video will work better.

Each platform has different requirements when it comes to format, duration and even content emphasis. On YouTube, you can create very short videos that last just a few seconds or longer videos that can be skipped after a few seconds. In that case, you need to display your brand’s logo as quickly as possible to make sure that people don’t skip too quickly or get the message as quickly as possible.

Image Credits: Aive

When Aive users upload a video, they get an overall creative score and a breakdown of all the strengths and weaknesses in the video. For instance, the platform tells you if the video will work well on mobile, if the brand is showcased appropriately and more.

After that, users can create automated tasks to repackage that video. You can select multiple lengths and formats at once for your output videos. Once the service has finished processing your videos, you can see the result and manually adjust some details that don’t work as well as expected.

For instance, if you think the algorithm deleted an important scene, you can replace a scene in the output video with a deleted one. Once this is done, you can download the output videos to your computer and use it across several platforms.

The startup recently raised a $3.2 million (€3 million) seed round from dozens of business angels, including Pauline Duval, Renaud Visage, Kevin Polizzi, Jean-Paul Brunier, Aurélie Jean, Julien Chaumond, Jérémie Rosseli, etc.

With this funding round, the company plans to double the size of its team from 15 to 30 people. If you add previous funding and public funding from Région Occitanie, Bpifrance and La French Tech, Aive has scored $7.5 million (€7 million) since its inception.

Because it is a software-as-a-service product, Aive also works well as a team. Users can leave comments and annotate videos for other users. There is also a built-in user rights management system, which can be useful for freelancers, clients and agencies.

While the most expensive ad agencies can already generate variations of the same video for their clients, Aive makes this process more accessible to different teams and companies. It means that you don’t have to restrict yourself to a couple of ad campaigns per year as it’s easier to refresh your ads more frequently.

It’s still early days for the startup as Aive has been testing its product in private beta with a handful of companies, such as Club Med, L’Oréal, Monoprix, Nissan and Swile. So it’s going to be interesting to see how the product evolves in the coming years.

Image Credits: Aive

Monte Carlo, a startup that sells data observability (data obs) software to other companies, announced this morning that it has closed a $135 million Series D at a valuation of $1.6 billion.

The round is an interesting echo of 2021‘s fundraising market, making our ears perk up when we caught wind of the capital event; how did a startup raise such a round in 2022, when the late-stage market is in the tank, valuations are under pressure, and growth more generally has lost some of its appeal as investors go after companies with greater profitability and cash flow stability?

The simple answer is that Monte Carlo is growing quickly while not setting all its raised capital aflame. That fact makes the Monte Carlo round good news of a sort for other startups. Why? Because the company’s latest round — IVP led; prior investors participated — shows that it is still possible to raise nine figures at a fresh unicorn price today. The other side of that coin is that Monte Carlo doesn’t make it look easy.

Recall that when Monte Carlo raised a $60 million Series C in August 2021, we reported that it had “doubled its ARR in each of the last four quarters.” Since that round, the company said in a release that it has “more than doubled revenue every single quarter, with an 800 percent increase in revenue year-over-year.” If you grow that quickly, yes, you can raise capital for your software business like it’s still 2021. (How many unicorns meet that bar? Data aren’t clear, but we’re not wildly optimistic that it’s a majority.)

What will Monte Carlo do with its new capital? Lior Gavish, the company’s co-founder and CTO, told TechCrunch in an interview that his startup spent aggressively since its Series C, but that it still had cash in the bank when its latest round came together. The new cash, per Gavish, will be invested “across the board,” with the founding exec citing upcoming investments in engineering, data, product, and go-to-market work in the near future.

Monte Carlo’s growth underscores how quickly the data obs market is itself growing. Data obs is a product category that the startup likes to analogize to the now-established application monitoring market. The analogy is reasonable as both software niches deal with flagging issues with software systems in motion, if somewhat rosy for Monte Carlo — application monitoring has given birth to hugely successful companies like Datadog, which is worth just under $30 billion as of the close of trading yesterday.

Looking around the world, around two-thirds of Monte Carlo’s business is in the U.S., with another third coming from the Middle East/North Africa market. Gavish also said that he sees similar demand patterns between the European and U.S. markets, underscoring how the SaaS market has truly become a global game.

TechCrunch also asked Gavish about the company’s growth mix: How much of its growth comes from upsells versus new customer adds? Per the CTO, the company is young enough that most of its growth comes from new customers, though he did share that the company is seeing positive, if early, indications that its net retention is trending in a healthy direction.

The tech market has quickly lost its shine this year. Layoffs are now part of the regular startup discourse. This puts companies like Monte Carlo that are newly capitalized in a position to snag talent and make outsized noise given a more quiet competitive landscape.

Let’s see how far the new capital can get the startup, and whether Monte Carlo will finally reach the scale needed for it to stop sharing percentage-gain growth metrics and instead disclose some hard numbers.

Finally, the company is not sponsoring this year’s Grand Prix in Monaco, sadly.

French startup moka.care has raised a new $16 million Series A funding round (€15 million). The company is focused on mental well-being in the workplace. It offers a full-fledged service that sits in between employees and HR departments.

Left Lane Capital is leading today’s funding round. Existing investor Singular is participating once again. VC firm Origins (co-founded by Blaise Matudi, Ilan Abehassera and Salomon Aiach) as well as Antoine Griezmann are investing in the company for the first time.

When people are feeling down, they often mention work as an ongoing issue. That’s why mental health is becoming a key issue for companies of all sizes and industries. And there are many reasons why that’s the case.

First, companies want to create a positive company culture for their employees. But buying a pool table and displaying inspirational posters on the walls simply don’t cut it. Employees want to know that they can reach out for help when they need to.

Providing moka.care as a benefit to employees means that you care about your employees’ mental well-being. It’s both a good signal and a nice perk.

Second, employees who feel engaged at work tend to be more productive and stick around for longer. Making mental well-being a priority is common sense — but it also makes sense at a business level.

In some industries, such as the tech industry, it has become quite difficult to recruit new employees for specific roles. That’s why improving employee retention has become an important metric for HR departments.

The result is moka.care, a service that aims to align everyone’s interests. If you want to talk about your mental health, the most difficult step is the first step. Hence billing is based on usage, which means that the startup generates more revenue if people find the service useful and interact with it. That’s also why the startup wants to make it as easy as possible to interact with its service.

moka.care can be used to access self-serve mental health content. But employees can also use the service for personalized care.

When employees first reach out to moka.care, the company’s team of psychologists help you understand your personal situation. The startup can send you some recommendations for practitioners that work with the platform — it can be a psychologist, a certified coach or a licensed therapist.

After that, you can talk with a mental health professional either in person or remotely. Depending on your company’s moka.care contract, some sessions will be free and you may start paying if it becomes a regular treatment.

HR departments can’t spy on their employees. But they get a dashboard with various metrics, which help them feel the pulse of the company. moka.care also offers group sessions for managers and leaders so that they can improve their knowledge on mental well-being.

So far, 100 companies have signed up to the service, which means that 15,000 employees can access moka.care. Some clients include Spendesk, Qonto, ManoMano, RipCurl, Volcom, L’Oréal and Engie. With today’s funding round, the company plans to iterate on its product and expand to new European markets.

Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi’s shareholders have voted to delist the company from the NYSE. The decision is a long-expected result of the company finding itself in hot water with the Chinese government after a rushed and later troubled public-market debut in the United States.

Didi went public in the middle of 2021 in an offering that came together quickly. After listing in June, by early July, TechCrunch was already flagging issues between the newly floated company and the Chinese government.

Putatively irked over data concerns, the Chinese Communist Party was executing a regulatory push at the time, making Didi’s foreign IPO all the less palatable. Quickly after the listing, Didi had to stop accepting new user registrations, among other regulatory penalties.

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The company’s subsequent suffering was absorbed by its new investors post-IPO. After listing at $14 per share and trading as high as $18.01, per Yahoo Finance data, Didi’s shares bottomed out recently at $1.37. Today, the company is worth $1.56 per share, up 4% on the news of its impending delisting.

Per filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (condensed):

[Didi] today announced that the following resolution, which had been submitted for shareholder approval, has been approved at the extraordinary general meeting of the Company’s shareholders held in Beijing today: as an ordinary resolution, to delist the Company’s American Depositary Shares from the New York Stock Exchange as soon as practicable, and that in order to better cooperate with the cybersecurity review and rectification measures, the Company’s shares will not be listed on any other stock exchange before the Delisting is completed.

The company is expected to list in Hong Kong after it delists from U.S. markets, though when that could occur is not clear.

What’s notable, or perhaps ironic, about the timing of the Didi delisting is that it seems to have caught the worst on both ends. Recall that the scuppered Ant IPO of late 2020 was the unofficial kickoff of a regulatory crackdown by the Chinese Communist Party on its domestic technology market. A wave of changes was announced, from video game restrictions to the abolishment of the for-profit edtech market, and more.

But after years of punishment, the Chinese tech market is shedding staff and value as its ruling government seeks to smooth the waters somewhat. More simply, Didi went public in the United States quickly after its government began clamping down on the company and its peers, and is now delisting just as the Chinese government is seeking to change its tune about its tech economy.

Vice-Premier Liu He made noise just last week about “signs of easing [China’s] crackdown on the technology sector which has wiped billions of dollars of value from its most prominent companies,” as CNBC put it. Those came too late for Didi. How will other companies fare?

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.

It’s Monday, which means that Alex and Grace were back as a team to cover the biggest, boldest, and baddest technology news. We are once again back with your weekly kickoff! Here’s what we got into:

• The stock market may not vomit all over itself today, which would be a nice break from recent weeks.
• Broadcom is working on buying VMware in what would prove to be a mega-deal. Shares of Broadcom are off on the news, while VMware stock is up sharply. The transaction would be worth tens and tens of billions of dollars, if consummated.
• Paytm earnings had lots to like, and some elements that were less salubrious. Shares of the Indian unicorn have recovered somewhat in recent days, but remains sharply depressed from its IPO price.
• In the startup world: BUD raised $36.8 million, SyIndr raised $12.6 million, and 1K Kirana put $25 million onto its balance sheet.
• And we closed out with the fact that there is no free lunch, even in the crypto world.

Time is a flat circle, and all that was once old is new again. For example, back in the venture days of yore, inside rounds were considered a poor market signal; if a startup could not attract a new lead investor for its next round, what did that say about the company?

Last year, that bit of conventional wisdom was inverted by abnormal market conditions and greed; inside rounds became a sign of strength as venture players doubled and at times tripled down on their portfolio companies, looking to get as much capital in the door as they could while the startup was still in its growth phase.

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And now we’ve returned to the prior state of affairs. Inside rounds are once again signs of things not going perfectly at companies that pursue them. Buy now, pay later outfit Klarna makes the point: The richly valued BNPL giant is looking to take on new capital from existing backers at a discount to its prior valuation. The Wall Street Journal reports:

The Sweden-based payments company is aiming to raise up to $1 billion from new and existing investors in a deal that could value it in the low $30-billion-range after the money is injected, the people said. That would represent a roughly 30% drop from the previous round.

No one likes a down round. They are dilutive, messy and demoralizing. But they are also miles better than not raising money and dying, so companies raise them when required.

Our question this morning is not whether it makes sense for Klarna to raise inside capital at a lower price. As the WSJ notes, the company tried to bump up its valuation slightly before changing course and pursuing a lower price. We know why Klarna is pursuing a down round: necessity. Instead, our question is whether the company is cutting its valuation enough to bring its worth in line with present market pricing.

Let’s find out.

Klarna, Affirm and the BNPL valuation revision

Thankfully for our needs, there are public BNPL players for us to observe as we work to better understand what the particular fintech revenue is worth. Affirm is public and other players that have BNPL services are also publicly traded.

Affirm, being effectively a pure BNPL play, and one that has some market overlap with Klarna, is a perfect floating comp for the Swedish company. And the U.S. company released its calendar Q1 2022 (Q3 fiscal 2022) results a little over a week ago. This means we have fresh-off-the-vine data from a public company.

To understand how well Klarna is repricing itself, let’s do a little bit of data collection and math. We start with the collection side of things (all periods calendar; data via the companies):

Tech valuations have endured stark declines this year. But after continued selling, it’s now possible to argue that the selling has gone too far — that tech valuations are now suffering more than is warranted in the wake of the 2020-2021 tech stock bubble.

U.S. stocks opened lower today, adding to a miserable year’s trading. Technology shares, in particular, have endured a rout since reaching all-time highs in late 2021, much of which made sense. After all, software companies saw their worth rise not only on the back of growth during the pandemic, but also thanks to expanding revenue multiples. Those multiples stretched into the stratosphere, so seeing them compress now that the market’s ebullience has worn off is what we’d expect.

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Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

But the selloff has now, in some cases, pulled the value of software companies under their pre-COVID price point. This means that select tech concerns are now worth less than they were before the pandemic, despite having a few years of growth in the bank.

With that in mind, here’s the one-chart argument that tech valuations have paid their dues and then some since November 2021 highs:

Image Credits: TechCrunch via YCharts

Xendit, a payments infrastructure platform for Southeast Asia, has raised $300 million in fresh funding. The company’s new valuation wasn’t disclosed, but it hit unicorn status in its last round of funding in September 2021. The new round brings its total raised to $538 million and was led by Coatue and Insight Partners, with participation from Accel, Tiger Global, Kleiner Perkins, EV Growth, Amasia, Intudo and Goat Capital.

Part of the funding will be used to expand into new markets, like Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam. The company, which bills itself as “the Stripe of Southeast Asia,” also plans to add value-added services in addition to payments, like working capital loans. Xendit now has over 3,000 customers, including Samsung Indonesia, GrabPay, Ninja Van Philippines, Qoala, Unicef Indonesia, Cashalo and Shopback.

The company says that over the last year, it grew annualized transactions from 65 million to 200 million and increased total payments value from $6.5 billion to $15 billion. Xendit has made several strategic investments in companies that serve startups and SMEs, including private bank Bank Sahabat Sampoerna in Indonesia and payment gateway Dragonpay in the Philippines.

Xendit was founded in 2015 by chief executive officer Moses Lo and chief operating officer Tessa Wijaya.

For people who aren’t familiar with Southeast Asia’s fragmented payments landscape and the challenges its poses for businesses, Wijaya explained that “while the U.S. builds everything around credit cards, you just cannot do that in Southeast Asia. Credit card penetration is extremely low especially in countries like Indonesia, so we have to help merchants offer alternative payment methods.”

She added that before using Xendit, merchants who wanted to accept and send payments would first need to contact banks and other partners to integrate with them. Many small businesses, however, do not have the time or resources to do that. Xendit solves that problem by aggregating payment options for merchants.

“From the consumer perspective, let’s look at a specific example. In the U.S., if you enjoy ‘Game of Thrones’ like I do, you can pay for a recurring subscription on HBO online by entering your credit card information just once,” Wijaya said. “In Indonesia, if you subscribe to HBO, the experience is extremely high-friction. HBO thought that in markets where cards don’t exist, the way to go was to pay through your telco provider. For me, the consumer, this means I have to go to my telco app, wait 10 seconds for it to load, find HBO amongst many other products, pre-purchase a 30-day plan and repeat every month.”

This friction means lost business for companies. Xendit solves this problem by integrating payment options for merchants.

“Before Xendit entered the scene, payments infrastructure was disjointed and provided no reliable way for SMEs and startups to connect with customers,” said Lo. “Since payments are a foundational part of any business, you can’t create a seamless experience without addressing payment issues first.”

Berlin-based Zolar has bagged €100 million (~$105M) in Series C funding to expand its supplier network for small solar systems to meet rising demand for clean energy.

Germany is particularly exposed to the energy crisis triggered by the war in Ukraine as it remains heavily dependent on Russian gas imports — meaning consumers there face soaring gas bills.

And while the country’s political leaders remain under huge pressure to find ways to quickly migrate to alternative energy sources to stop sending money to Putin’s regime, German householders don’t appear to be hanging around: Zolar says enquiries about installing solar systems have more than quadrupled this year — following rising energy prices.

Its Series C round is led by US investor Energy Impact Partners (EIP); and GIC, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund. Existing investors, including Inven Capital, Heartcore Capital, Statkraft Ventures and Pirate Impact Capital, also participated.

The startup’s pitch is it’s democratizing access to solar energy and reducing complexity for consumers — by offering an online configurator it says is unique in the industry which provides homeowners with an easier way to buy customized solar installations online, or lease them for a small monthly fee.

The 2016-founded business had raised €59M prior to this raise, per Crunchbase. Its network of small solar installers also recently benefitted from $23M in support from eco-focused search engine, Ecosia, which announced in March that it would be funnelling a portion of the profits it generates from search ads into clean energy locally, in addition to planting trees, to help accelerate Germany’s transition away from fossil fuels.

Add €100M now — and Zolar looks well positioned to help many more consumers make the switch to clean energy.

To meet what it describes as “unprecedented” demand for solar from German households, Zolar says it will be substantially expand its Craftship Partner Network of currently 500 local craft businesses — to 3,000 by 2025 to increase installation capacity for solar energy.

It also plans to use the Series C funds to open a training centre this year to tackle the renewable sector’s skills gap and train workers in a qualified fast-track process to meed demand for the energy turnaround.

The investment will also fund the roll out of new digital energy products — with Zolar giving the example of a smart control feature which will enable its app to recognize the best time to charge an electric car and start doing so automatically.

“Among others the company’s app will be expanded to include an energy management system and a dynamic electricity tariff,” it writes in a press release. “The app will intelligently control the solar power supply of homeowners while maximising their energy independence and cost savings.”

Commenting in a statement, Alex Melzer, CEO and founder, added: “Our goal is to supply 10M households in Europe with either a solar system or renewable energy by 2030. The climate crisis, energy security issues and the rising cost of fossil fuels mean we must move very quickly. By offering a fully digital experience and making it as easy as possible to get started and use solar energy, we help people go green, become energy independent and save costs.”

“There are 16 million roofs on single and two-family homes in Germany. More than 14 million of them are still without solar systems. Putting solar panels on these houses will drive Germany’s independence from coal, gas and oil,” he also noted.

In further supporting statements, Zolar’s investors underscored the role that rising demand for solar energy can play in helping humanity tackle the climate crisis and have a chance of a sustainable future.

Matthias Dill, managing partner Europe at EIP, said: “The demand for green energy will steeply accelerate in the world’s efforts to a net-zero future. Climate tech will drive the modern economy accelerating the transition to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions. Our investment in zolar is part of our mission to support startups worldwide that are resolutely driving the path to a sustainable future.”

“Our investment into Zolar is a testament of GIC’s support of green innovation and the clean energy transition. During the coming decades, climate change will define investments speeding up the carbon transition. Zolar helps homeowners to significantly reduce their carbon emissions, which is vital to the global decarbonisation efforts,” added Choo Yong Cheen, chief investment officer of Private Equity at GIC.

If meme stocks can be a thing, what’s to stop audio meme sharing from going viral!? Hoping to storm the ear-bending arena of social audio and win friends amid the gamer/creator crowd is Voicy — a Netherlands-based startup that’s building a platform for user-generated audio snippets (typically a few seconds long), offering tools to create emotive samples for reaction sharing to spice up your messaging/streams.

It’s not hard to predict where this idea goes: Straight to gross out fart sfx and pwning troll clips — which are indeed plentiful on this fledgling platform for user-generated (or, well, sampled) audio. Dank audio memes anyone?

Other viral noises are available. Borat clips, for example, or Squid Game sounds. Plus a cacophony of over-enthusiastic Internet memes in audio form. John Oliver screaming “GOOGLE IT!” repeatedly, or Epic Sax Guy’s epic saxing, and so on.

The typical Voicy user is, unsurprisingly, young and trigger happy, per the startup — which envisages gamer voice chat as a key target for a pipelines of social integrations it hopes to build out. So far it has one integration inked with messaging app, Viber — but it’s offering a “simple universal API” to encourage other platforms to sign up.

Zooming out, Voicy’s stated mission is to do for sound clips what Giphy has done for GIFs.

“We want to create a new way for people to express themselves creatively in how they communicate. In areas such as gaming, where communicating with images or text doesn’t work as well — there’s a huge gap for audio to really enhance the experience,” suggest co-founders Xander Kanon, Joey de Kruis and Milan Kokir via email.

“As we’ve seen with memes and GIFs, people love to create their own very creative content. Audio has the capacity to have the same, if not bigger impact on modern communications. We’ve seen from instant chat, to emoticons to GIFs that people all over the world want to experiment with and simply have fun with how they communicate — it’s one of the things we all have in common. In addition to this, the competition among apps and platforms is immense and all of them are working hard to make their offering more sticky, fun and engaging. This is where Voicy comes into play.”

“From the ground up, we have developed our platform to give users the express ability to create,” they add. “Our technology directly serves that purpose through an open-source approach to content, with safeguards layered in to moderate. With integrations, our approach has been to connect our platform with other platforms and give users wider accessibility to sharing content. With the addition of public API, further integrations and a strong foundation within the platform, we believe our impact can be exponential.”

The platform fully launched in October 2020, per the founders, and they’ve grown usage to 1.1 million monthly active users at this stage (although that’s including usage via Viber, not just ears they’re pulling into their own platform).

Other usage metrics they share include that users have created some 145,000 sound clips so far, with an average of 10k more being added per month. They also say a Voicy user plays, on average, 20 sound clips and shares one per visit.

While, following their recent partnership with Viber, users there have sent over 20 million audio messages — which have been played 100M times in just three months.

The startup is planning to build out a pipeline of third party integrations to drive for further growth, with the help of a €1.2 million pre-seed raise being announced today — eyeing potential love-ins across social messaging, streaming and gaming platforms. Or basically anywhere where noisy memes might find an appreciative audience.

“There are a lot of potential integrations within social messaging, for example WhatsApp, FB Messenger; social video — Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube; gaming — Roblox, Ubisoft, Xbox, Discord; and streaming — Twitch, Streamlabs and Corsair,” they suggest, reeling off the tier one consumer platform list.

Voicy’s pre-seed raise is led by Oliver Samwer’s Global Founders Capital, with a number of tech senior execs also participating from companies including Twitch, Spotify, Deezer, Snapchat, Booking, Uber, Reddit, Acast and Tesla.

Commenting in a statement, Global Founders Capital’s Soheil Mirpour said: “Voicy is a very exciting new startup. In short order, their strong team has grown a huge community of very active users who are creating hundreds of pieces of new audio content every day. There’s a massive amount of potential for short audio in social communication. A Discord user spends on average 285 minutes a day in a Discord voice chat, people share 7 billion voice messages per day on WhatsApp alone and billions of people use short audio in their TikTok or Instagram videos. Voicy brings a new concept to the table, which is ready to disrupt an enormous market — we knew we had to invest.”

But why do web users need audio memes when there are already, er, audio GIFs? Isn’t this a rather niche proposition — given existing overlap, plus the general (broad) competition from other reaction ‘shareables’ consumers can easily use to express themselves, from ye olde emoji, to customizable stickers to viral GIFs?

Soundless reaction formats (like GIFs) are also essentially an advantage to the sizeable ‘never turn up the volume’ mobile crew — whose silence-loving (voice-message hating) existence explains why even short video clips which are made to be shared on social typically come with captions to provide an baked in alternative to engaging any ear. (And, well, an audio meme with the sound off is just some sad-looking pixels, right? … Quite possibly, though, this is an older vs younger Internet user generation thang )

Surprising no one, Voicy users so far are Gen Z or Gen Alpha, with a strong following amid the TikTok/Roblox generation, per the founders. (“Our users use us for gaming, creation, and messaging. Across our user base, most users are located in the USA (60%). The majority of users are aged below 35 years old (75%+),” they also confirm.)

“The advantage of a sound clip over a GIF/sound GIF is the wider applicability of it,” argue Voicy’s founders. “Practically, you can use a sound clip in your stream, during gaming, or to edit your video or your TikTok video/Youtube Short as well as use it in messaging. You simply cannot do this with an audio GIF due to user experience and practical constraints.”

“Audio memes are funny, iconic and unique shareable audio bites that can be used in any form of online communication to express thoughts or feelings in a specific context,” add the trio — who are self professed avid gamers themselves.

What about risks around copyright? How are they managing that issue? Voicy is not licensing any audio content currently but the founders suggest they may do in future. For now they’re relying on fair use to recirculate samples (plus their platform supports a DCMA reporting and takedowns procedure). They say they’re also using a third party service to stop protected samples from being piped onto any third party platforms they integrate with.

While it’s early for such a consumer-focused product to be focused on monetization, the team says they’re building Voicy as a marketplace — and ultimately intend to focus on the needs of the creator community.

“We believe that our long term opportunity lies at enabling creators to monetise their content,” they tell TechCrunch. “With the creator’s economy continuing to grow at a rapid speed, we provide them a platform to create, clipify, distribute, earn, and build a community around their sonic identity. With a large integration network and a platform as an end-destination for consuming and engaging with sounds and sound-creators, Voicy can monetise its library and integrations. Voicy can provide a ton of value both for the supply side and the demand side.”

“More specifically, our business model will be focused around the sub-licensing of clips, and by providing additional premium features for creators to do what they do best: creating content. Content will have the possibility to be sub-licensed to integration partners, fans, other creators, and premium consumers,” they add.

Indonesia’s 60 million blue collar workers contribute 20% to its gross domestic product, but they face a lot of uncertainty. Many are forced to bounce from job to job, some fall victim to scam job postings and without a steady employment history, are unable to qualify for financial services, say the founders of Pintarnya. That’s why they created the app, which includes verified job postings and financial services, like loans, for blue collar workers. The startup announced today it has raised $6.3 million in seed funding led by Sequoia Capital India and General Catalyst. The funding includes a $100,000 grant from Sequoia Spark, a program for women founders that co-founder Nelly Nurmalasari participated in.

Pintarnya was launched this May in major Indonesian cities by Nurmalasari, Henry Hendrawan and Ghirish Pokardas. Nurmalasari and Hendrawan were formerly senior executives at lifestyle super app unicorn Traveloka, while Pokardas was a KKR executive who worked with portfolio companies in financial services.

In an email, the cofounders told TechCrunch that Nurmalasari also owned a hair salon and as an SME owner, she experienced the pain points of trying to hire, filter and verify applicants for blue collar jobs. She also saw that they struggled to obtain loans from traditional financial institutions because of their lack of verifiable employment and income history.

“The problem became clear when the spillover of her employee’s struggles became hers as these challenges impact employee performance,” they said. “This fortified the vision for a one-stop digital platform that can help in tackling this challenge, to be more employable and access financial services products.”

Pintarnya focuses on the food and beverage, hotel and retail sectors, now reopening after COVID lockdowns, and logistics. It plans to expand into other sectors as well and is open to partnering with employers from other industries.

Job seekers register and create a profile, then Pintarnya uses that information to recommend job openings based on their requirements, location, skills and other data. Key criteria include the distance between a job and their home, their profile and job history and their self-determined capabilities. The team said that as they build a track record of successfully connecting and placing jobseekers with employers, Pintarnya’s recommendation algorithms will become better by “understanding what other jobseeker traits have a higher propensity of converting their application into a successful job placements.” Variables that it takes into consideration include a jobseeker’s current salary and availability, whether or not they have a photo on their CV and the frequency in which they switch jobs.

Pintarnya also works with employers to screen and recruit the most suitable workers for their needs, including online tests. It also verifies job listings’ authenticity to avoid scams and highlights verified job posts using green shield markers. Verification includes checking that a job listing came from a real employer and curating them based on new posts, jobs closest to a jobseeker, jobs for people without experience, salary information and other factors that the platform is experimenting with.

“Technology has transformed the kinds of jobs being created in Indonesia, but the process of hiring, especially in the blue collar segments, continue to be broken,” said Sequoia India managing director Abheek Anand in a statement. “Pintarnya’s founding team brings years of exceptional experience building tech and financial products to solving this problem, and we are thrilled to partner with them in their journey to help millions of Indonesians realize their full economic potential.”

In the fourth quarter of 2021, Coinbase’s stock was trading around record highs, worth more than $340 before starting to fall as technology stocks corrected into the new year. Those declines persisted into 2022, causing Coinbase to continue losing altitude as the year began.

The company’s Q4 earnings released in February were strong, but it warned of a slowdown in its trading business. That deceleration in trading activity continued, leading to the U.S. crypto exchange’s first-quarter earnings pushing the value of its shares to new lows.

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Despite rebounding to around $67 as of this morning, Coinbase’s worth fell to as little as $40.83 during its selloff.

From a high-flying direct listing with a massive market cap that proved crypto-forward companies could generate metrics that made traditional investors take note, Coinbase’s fall has been dramatic.

The drop of its stock has also been painful, as its declines were not simply due to changing market sentiment about technology companies — though that didn’t help. The company’s rising cost structure and falling revenues made it clear that ripping cash out of the crypto market was more expensive and variable than some public-market investors anticipated.

As much as Coinbase helped boost investor interest in crypto startups last year, it may now have the opposite impact. Coinbase was proof that crypto companies could post huge profits, but its success was built on top of rising demand for crypto assets and services. A strong Coinbase meant a strong web3 market.

What is the value of those same startups now that Coinbase has been repriced, and its underlying market flounders in the crypto equivalent of a recession?

In its recent Q1 results’ investor call, the company had notes on that very point. Let’s explore.

The public-private valuation gap

Before we dive in, it’s worth noting that little in our work today is unique to crypto. Most investors, both private and public, overvalued technology companies last year. Those erroneous valuation marks, set during one of the hottest periods for investment ever, landed all around the technology market, and are still being dealt with today.

But the crypto market does have a special issue in that its venture capital totals did not peak in Q4 2021, but in Q1 2022, meaning that the crypto startup investment cycle stayed hot longer, and that crypto startups will feel the pain (when it comes to managing too-rich private valuations) a little later than their more traditional counterparts.