Swedish startup PocketLaw — a contract automation software-as-a-service legal tech platform which is mainly focused on SMEs — has pocketed €10 million (~$11M) in Series A funding led by European VC firm, Atomico, to fuel expansion in Europe. Ben Blume, partner at the venture capital firm, is joining the board as part of the investment. The round brings the startup’s total raised since being founded back in 2018 to €14M.

PocketLaw launched its product in March 2020 — targeting contract creation, e-signing and management tools at small and medium sized enterprises across all business verticals, touting a service that requires no in-house legal experience for SMEs to tap in.

It has picked up some 6,000 customers to date — name-checking the likes of startups such as Voi, Kry/Livi, Juni and Estrid, and consumer SMEs such as Punchy Drinks, as well as some larger enterprises such as Babybjorn and Schibsted, among its client roster.

Its biggest markets are its home market of Sweden and the UK so far but it told us it expects traction to pick up in Germany and Norway later this year.

The Series A funding will go on expanding its operations across Europe, including by growing its team across legal, technical, and operational areas to support the growth sprint, it added. 

“PocketLaw can be used by any business owner and any stakeholder in the world, regardless of size, financial muscle or legal experience. However, our primary priority to date has been to support all SMEs, across all business verticals, out there for clear reasons,” CEO co-founder Kira Unger tells TechCrunch. “This is a massive market with lots of companies in need of support on a daily basis and today — most of these businesses stand alone, without strong financial means and in-house experience to manage legal on their own.”

It’s been hard to miss the expanding number of legal tech startups offering tech to simplify and streamline contract creation and management for their customers in recent years. Asked about the competitive landscape, PocketLaw says it competes with the likes of Contractbook, Union Square Ventures-backed Juro and Index Ventures-backed Seedlegals.

Other legal tech players more focused at the enterprise end of the pipe include giants like DocuSign, Sirion Labs and LinkSquares.

Growth in the category is being driven by rising demand, with business budgets for legal tech projected to triple by 2025, per Garner, as we reported earlier — when we also noted that 2021 was a record year for the category, with $1.4BN invested by venture capital firms in the first half of the year according to CrunchBase data.

Given rising demand also means rising competition, we asked PocketLaw how it’s differentiating its offering vs other startups similarly chasing the SME long tail.

“PocketLaw is the first contract creation and management platform that actually empowers business stakeholders to manage legal work with confidence. As opposed to CLM [contract lifecycle management] systems, PocketLaw also offers proprietary content in the form of hundreds of jurisdiction-specific templates and guides,” suggests Unger. “This way, our users can get started from day one without advising a law firm or the in-house legal team having to spend huge amounts of time on creating and automating templates as well as making sure they are updated to make sure everything is compliant.”

“We believe that everything you do more than once should be automated. Digital first and human touch as needed,” she adds. “Our customers can easily connect with one of our partner law firms for bespoke legal advice whenever desired.”

Unger also flags rising complexity in the regulatory and legal landscape as fuelling businesses’ investment in legal services “just to survive”, as she puts it — citing a statistic that tech companies alone spend 1% of their revenues on legal services.

“That said, most day-to-day legal work consists of simple, repetitive tasks and given the cost of massive in-house legal teams, adding more people to the problem isn’t the solution. By providing automated solutions together with high-quality templates and other content developed by lawyers, PocketLaw helps every team in a company (non-legals as well as legals) to manage legal with efficiency and ease,” she argues.

PocketLaw estimates its customers save “up to fourteen working weeks and up to $200,000 in legal fees a year” by using its platform, which supports features including legal discovery, contract creation, execution and storage — as well as touting time savings of 80% vs traditional legal services.

Commenting on the Series A in a statement, Atomico’s Blume said: “This is the first time we have seen a tool really designed with the needs of business owners in mind, empowering them with access to everything they need in one place, in a world where most teams are still forced to buy multiple fragmented solutions, work in silos, or pay high legal fees to outside experts.

“Kira and Olga have built an amazing team at PocketLaw, bringing world class commercial, legal and technical experience from Slack, LinkedIn, Google, Zalando, KRY, Spotify, Acast, Mannheimer Swartling and Hogan Lovells. They are all aligned around the belief that businesses can alleviate huge burdens by making everyday legal more intuitive and efficient — lessening cost, risk, and wasted time in the process.”

The Series A also includes backing from a number of founders and operators including Personio co-founder Hanno Renner and COO Jonas Rieke; Pitch founder Christian Reber; Pleo co-founder Jeppe Rindom; Gloria Baeuerlein and the dbt Labs board member and former Gainsight COO, Allison Pickens. While existing PocketLaw investors, including Kinnevik’s Cristina Stenbeck and Susanna Campbell, also participated in the round.

Atma, an Indonesian startup that wants to make job hunting less painful, announced today it has raised $5 million in pre-seed funding led by AC Ventures, with participation from Global Founders Capital. Strategic investors in the round included founders and executives from GoTo Group, Advance Intelligence Group, Ula, Lummo, Kopi Kenangan, Sampoerna Strategic, MMS Group and Xiami.

The funding will be used for hiring, with plans to expand Atma’s headcount from about 30 employees to 100, product development and its go-to-market strategy. 

The platform targets the lower and middle-income segment of the working-age population in Indonesia, or people earning less than 10 million IDR a month (or about $700 USD). Atma says up to over 100 million people in Indonesia fit into this category.

Edy Tan, co-founder and CEO of Atma, formerly worked as vice president of driver income at Gojek. 

Tan told TechCrunch that part of his responsibilities at GoJek included improving drivers’ livelihoods in a sustainable way. During the peak of the pandemic, driver income dropped by 80% on average. As a result, Tan began looking for other way for drivers to make revenue. During that time, he said, “I discovered that drivers generally wanted income stability more so than higher income.” Intrigued, he began to look at the economic opportunity landscape for the lower and middle income segment. 

“It soon became apparent to me that the job market for the lower and middle income segment is fundamentally broken and ripe for innovation when most job seekers described their job search experience as emotionally traumatizing and companies often described their candidate search experience as a random walk,” he said. 

For job seekers, Atma is building a mobile app. When they start applying for jobs, job seekers will go through a screening process, including their qualifications, skills and cultural fit. Atma’s app will also provide them with real-time job application updates, so job seekers don’t suffer being ghosted after submitting an application. For employers, Atma makes the hiring process easier by using data to screen, assess and sort candidates so they know the best people to interview.

 Atma will also include community features, like career development programs, peer-to-peer learning and the chance to meet with other job seekers. 

Welcome to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. 

When you start a project, it’s easy to get caught up in it. Then time passes and suddenly it’s been a half decade. Equity, a podcast I got to help start when I was wasn’t even working here, is one such project. So, too, is The Exchange.

I started writing a daily markets column the day after I got out of rehab, back in 2016. The project, then called the “Editor’s morning note” evolved over time. When I joined Crunchbase, founding Crunchbase News, it was rebranded as Morning Markets. Then when I was lucky enough to come back to TechCrunch, it re-launched without a name.

Henry Pickavet, a TechCrunch name you don’t see much but you appreciate implicitly thanks to his extensive behind-the-scenes work, helped get the series a new name. That’s how The Exchange came to be back in late 2019. We later added a newsletter once weekly, the very missive that you are reading now.

This is by no means TechCrunch’s biggest newsletter — Daily Crunch is vastly larger. But The Exchange email has long been a place for me to put bits of reporting I had laying around, and pursue topics and questions in a more relaxed manner than usual. It’s been, really, a weekly joy.

This is also the last time that I am going to write it for at least some time. Anna Heim, who you likely know by now for her regular and vital contributions to The Exchange, is going to take over starting next week. She may ask me to kick in a few words here and there, or not. It will be up to her.

What I can promise is that Anna and I are very much aligned in how we approach covering startups, venture capital, and the business climate of each. She’s been an incredible co-writer, pushing me to do more planning. I am more than thankful for her past contributions, and stoked for what she has coming up.

Why the change? Since I took over as Editor in Chief of TechCrunch+ I have had less time for certain tasks. I gave up writing most of Daily Crunch and pulled back 99% on news writing (startup funding rounds, and the like) so that I could double-down on hiring, and working to get our work out more quickly, and with more bang. We’ll see how well I do there, and I welcome your feedback.

Also, you know, if you haven’t joined TC+ yet, it’s a great time to do so as we’re staffing up and kicking ass. So, sign up and join the fun.

But I am increasingly underwater when it comes to time, and that means that this newsletter with its 40,000 or 50,000 readers has fallen down my priority list to the point when it no longer makes sense for me to selfishly hold onto it. It needs someone who can give it — give you — the proper attention.

So, in Anna hands I leave you. The change will be an upgrade, and I hope you have a blast with Anna. You can follow her on Twitter here.

I will still write the daily column, often with Anna as before. But from here on out, Saturdays are Anna’s domain. Hugs, thank you, and onward! — Alex

French startup Alan has raised a new €183 million funding round ($193 million at today’s exchange rate). The company sells its own health insurance products and has expanded to other medical products and services. In other words, Alan wants to build a healthcare super app and a one-stop shop for all your questions and needs when it comes to your health.

“We decided to raise again at the start of the year,” co-founder and CEO Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve told me. “We’ve been receiving some investment requests. We could see that markets could turn around and we didn’t know how long it was going to last. Now, we are self-sustaining and will be until we reach profitability.”

Teachers’ Venture Growth (TVG), the venture fund of the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board, is leading the round. Existing investors are also participating in this new round, such as Temasek, Index Ventures, Coatue, Ribbit Capital, Exor, Dragoneer and Lakestar.

Today’s round is a Series E round and it comes just a year after the startup raised its €185 million Series D. While Alan has essentially raised the same amount of money twice, the company’s post-money valuation has jumped quite drastically. Last year, the startup was valued at €1.4 billion. It has now reached a €2.7 billion valuation (that’s respectively $1.5 billion and $2.9 billion at today’s exchange rate).

Alan’s core business and biggest revenue source hasn’t changed. The company is a health insurance company built for the 21st century. After getting approval from regulators, Alan has built its own underwriting engine.

The company can now sign up clients of all sizes and from all industries. Big companies can tweak every single parameter to build the right insurance package for them.

As for people who are covered by Alan’s health insurance, the experience is better than with other insurance companies. Alan tries to automate as many processes as possible so that the user experience is as seamless as possible.

For instance, if you’re paying at the doctor’s office and it’s a simple bill, Alan automatically processes the bill and transfers money to your bank account via an instant transfer. The result is that you are often reimbursed before you are back home. France’s national healthcare system will also reimburse its part automatically, but that usually takes a few days.

“We keep rolling out our model, which is 100% based on the loss ratio formula. We sell insurance products at cost — more or less. And then we add our membership fee on top. This model works really well,” Samuelian-Werve said.

And the company has managed to attract 300,000 members so far across 15,000 companies. Alan now says it generates an annualized revenue of €200 million.

Image Credits: Alan

Not just an insurance company

Alan’s founders have been clear about their vision from the very beginning. They don’t just want to build an insurance company. They want to build a healthcare startup that expands beyond insurance products.

Very quickly, users discovered that they can use the Alan app to find a health professional near them using Alan Map. The company is also working with general practitioners so that they can answer your questions from a chat interface.

Not all of those side bets have worked. A year and a half ago, Alan launched Alan Baby, a second app focused on your baby’s health. It provided a mix of content, some community discussions and the ability to start a discussion with a doctor. The company is going to shut down Alan Baby in the coming weeks.

“In 2022 and 2023, mental health is going to be a very high priority. That’s why we decided to shut down Alan Baby so that we could reallocate resources,” Samuelian-Werve told me.

When it comes to mental well-being, Alan offers a consumer app following the acquisition of Jour. There’s also a B2B service called Alan Mind.

The company provides exercises and content. Employees can also contact an expert whenever they need to. Some companies subscribe to Alan Mind exclusively. Others add the Alan Mind package to their existing Alan contract.

With Alan Clear, Alan now also offers a way to try on glasses using augmented reality. If you find a pair that you like, you can buy it directly through the app.

By the end of 2025, Alan wants to reach profitability. It will require 3 million members, but the startup also plans to hire 1,000 people by then. The company currently operates in France, Belgium and Spain. There won’t be any new market in 2022, but Alan could launch a new country in 2023.

While Alan has ambitious goals, it currently has a tiny market share. “96% of the French population has health insurance coverage. We still have less than 1% in market share,” Samuelian-Werve said.

“We are at the very beginning of our story. It is a first baby step but everything is still ahead of us,” he added.

Image Credits: Alan

Digital therapeutics plus pills? Iceland’s Sidekick Health has developed a gamified digital care platform that’s designed to support healthcare outcomes by applying personalized behavioral lifestyle nudges, including alongside clinical treatments like drugs, to augment, extend and support patient care for a range of chronic diseases and conditions from cancer to cardiovascular health, diabetes and arthritis — a formula that’s now scored it $55M in Series B growth funding.

The new round is led by London-based VC firm Novator Ventures, with participation from Wellington Partners, Asabys Partners, and Frumtak Ventures, as well as a US-based strategic investor which it’s not disclosing yet but says will be revealed at a later stage. The 2014-founded startup raised a $20M Series A back in 2020 from many of the same investors.

As the Series B closes, Novator Ventures’ general partner and founder Birgir Mar Ragnarsson is joining Sidekick’s board.

Commenting in a statement, he said: “It has been impressive to follow the rapid growth of the company from the close of its A round 18 months ago. The company may have begun in the Nordics but I am proud to say that Sidekick is now a globally-recognized digital therapeutics player. Novator Ventures recognizes the immense opportunities presented by third generation therapeutics and Sidekick’s ability to scale and operate at the global level. We look forward to working closely with the Sidekick team to transform how healthcare is delivered.”

Sidekick Health still isn’t breaking out overall customer numbers (it’s a b2b digital health business so its targeting health insurance firms and pharma companies) but says it’s inked partnerships with some of the biggest names in healthcare — such as US-based Anthem to offer “digital-first” care programs, and global pharma giants Bayer and Pfizer, to develop what it describes as “integrated combination therapeutics consisting of a molecular drug and a digital therapeutic”.

The startup tells us its platform has helped 40,000+ patients globally at this stage, with its products currently available in six languages. It largest markets are Europe and the U.S., while it has offices in the U.S., Germany, Sweden and its home market of Iceland. Flush with growth funding it says it has a big U.S. push planned.

“Europe and the U.S. are currently our largest markets but we are forging some partnerships in Asia,” it tells TechCrunch. “But it is early days, and we will be focusing hard on increasing our commercial footprint in the U.S. going forward.

“Sidekick will use the funding to support and expand our existing U.S. presence. Our North American strength and focus is exemplified by the recent additions of Pamela Stahl (CCO and President, North America) and Mitchell Mudra (COO) to the team. By 2026, it is estimated a billion people will be served by some form of DTx [digital therapeutics] annually. Coupled with the U.S. spending a very high proportion of GDP on healthcare, the U.S. is a market where our products and services will achieve the strongest patient outcomes.”

The startup tells TechCrunch it grew revenue threefold in 2021 — attributing that growth to a mix of existing and new commercial relationships. “This year Sidekick plans to double our team from 120 to 240 team members across our four office locations,” it adds.

Pharma giants look keen on digital therapeutics not only as a scalable tool to (potentially) augment the efficacy of their drugs with app-based support (e.g. by putting digital tools in patients’ hands that can help remind them to take pills and support them in other ways, such as to make beneficial lifestyle changes around diet and exercise, or get on-demand help with mental health issues or pain management etc), but as a way to extend the value of medicines — enabling drug giants to file new patents linking existing medicines to digital therapeutic programs that are far cheaper and easier to develop and iterate than he costly business of drug discovery and research.

“We are building towards a portfolio of over 40 medical-grade digital therapeutics by 2026,” says Sidekick, discussing its product roadmap. “Currently, 18 are in Research & Development, with a total of 14 commercial partnerships secured so far, either with payers or pharma partners or, in some cases, both.”

“Sidekick has commercialized digital therapeutic products already, in therapeutic areas ranging from rheumatoid arthritis, ulcerative colitis to nonalcoholic steatohepatitis and breast cancer,” it adds. “We will prioritize a substantial amount of our resources towards expanding our oncology portfolio, as well as investing into increased personalization, which will allow us to serve people with multiple chronic conditions even better.”

With Series B funding in the bank, Sidekick also has more partnerships in the works — with three new collaborations set to be announced in the coming months including one focused on supporting patients with breast cancer by helping patients manage side effects.

The startup has published a number of studies aimed at proving out the efficacy of its digital therapeutics –including looking at use of its platform to reduce stress and fatigue in patients with inflammatory bowel disease; or this small feasibility study into improving disease management for patients with ulcerative colitis; and this small randomized control trial examining use of its digital lifestyle program for outpatient treatment of Type 2 diabetes, to name a few — and it says it takes “life science-grade evidence generation very seriously to ensure that we offer clinical companies a clinical-grade product for their patients”.

“Top 10 and 20 pharma and Top 3 Payers are partnering with us on their ‘future of franchise’ assets, in areas like oncology, metabolic, cardiovascular, and immunology and immunotoxicology,” it adds, suggesting that its “life science quality evidence rigor and approach to precision medicine is driving this”.

Average startup valuations are in decline, new data indicates.

In March, The Exchange parsed a dataset from Carta, a unicorn whose software helps companies manage their cap table, which showed early indications that the startup valuation market was changing. A look at Carta’s full Q1 data collated by its head of insights, Peter Walker, clarifies the situation: Valuations are in decline, but not evenly.

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Indeed, new data shows a spectrum of declines in the average valuation for startups that Carta has visibility into — thousands of deals from tens of thousands of companies — which matches current venture capitalist chatter that the value of startups has dramatically changed since 2021 highs.

For founders and investors alike, outliers will remain. Some startups will be able to raise like it’s 2021, but for most upstart tech concerns, the old norms are out the window.

This morning, let’s explore new marks from Carta, pulling from raw data, and looking to see where valuations are falling the fastest — and the slowest. If you are building or investing, this is the new reality.

The damage

We’re writing ahead of Carta’s impending report, so we have no pretty charts to borrow from the company’s data team. We’ll roll along in text for today. No matter, starting early and going late, here’s what Carta has to say about valuations:

Meet Getlife, a Madrid-based startup that just raised $6.3 million (€6 million) in seed funding. The company wants to make it easier to access life insurance products in Europe. For instance, there’s no medical exams needed to subscribe to Getlife.

There are many reasons why you would want to subscribe to a life insurance product. For instance, if you’re worried about the future of your loved ones once you’re gone, life insurance could be a way to make sure they won’t face financial difficulties.

“Life insurance right now is a super difficult to buy product,” Getlife co-founder and CEO Guillermo Alén told me. Of course, it’s not as easy to insure your life as your car. Assessing the risks and underwriting can be quite difficult.

That’s why many legacy insurance companies simply refuse to insure some new clients. For one reason or another, they don’t fit the bill and the insurance company doesn’t want to cover them.

“We accept 85% of clients immediately,” Alén said. He estimates that only 55% can get a life insurance product with a traditional insurance company.

French VC firm Singular led the round. Several business angels also participated, such as Gokul Dhringa and Chris Adelsbach. The company had previous raised a €1 million pre-seed round.

When you want to become a Getlife customer, you have to answer a long list of questions so that the company can learn more about you. Once you’re done filling out the form, the startup seamlessly matches you with the right insurance product for you specifically. It’s a sort of automatic bidding process for life insurance.

“Getlife unifies all this product offering under the same brand and experience,” Alén said. “The Getlife underwriting engine creates a profile based on your answers and sells you one of the products that we have.”

Behind the scenes, Getlife has partnered directly with insurers and reinsurers, such as Axa, CNP Assurance and Asisa Vida. Getlife isn’t just a broker, it acts more like a Managing General Agent.

Over time, the startup hopes it can become better and better with predictive analytics. In addition to first-party data from customers, Getlife wants to connect this data with third-party data to improve its underwriting engine. For instance, the company could match different potential illnesses based on different geographies.

While anyone can go to Getlife’s website and get started, the company also wants to develop an omnichannel distribution strategy with partners, brokers, agents and affiliates. Essentially, the startup wants to become the life insurance expert across Europe.

This isn’t the only company looking at the life insurance space. In the U.S., Ethos has been doing remarkably well as it has reached a $2.7 billion valuation. YuLife is also selling life insurance products in the U.K.

In other words, now is the right time to take advantage of European regulation as European companies can provide insurance services across the European Union. Getlife is already live in Spain and the company expects to launch in France and Germany “quite soon”.

Image Credits: Getlife

Lumos, a startup that wants to provide an end-to-end solution for enterprises to manage all of the SaaS apps their employees use, is coming out of stealth today. The company plans to take on the SaaS management market by combining security features like role-based access control that IT departments need with the self-service capabilities that employees want and the spending reports (and ability to shut down unused accounts) that the finance department needs.

Lumos also today announced that it has raised a total of over $30 million from the likes of Andreesen Horowitz, Neo, Lachy Groom, Google Cloud CISO Phil Venables, OpenAI CTO Greg Brockman and others. 

At its core, Lumos replaces IT tickets with a self-service portal for employees. The team argues that as enterprises increasingly rely on SaaS applications, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for businesses to manage them. Often, this means an added bureaucratic layer of IT tickets to gain access to a service and additional costs for SaaS licenses for users who may not even be using a service or who may have left the company — all while it’s almost impossible for IT and security teams to keep up with the inevitable rise of shadow IT as employees try to route around these systems.

The promise of Lumos is that it can provide access controls but also provide a self-service portal to employees and automatically recognize when a user stops using a SaaS tool, for example, and then de-provision those accounts to save on licensing cost.

Image Credits: Lumos

“As the world has shifted from ‘bring your own device’ to ‘bring your own app’ and now ‘bring your own office,’ the challenge of shadow IT has only continued to compound. We’re very excited to partner with the Lumos team as they build the tool that can bring light to this darkness,” said Peter Levine, a general partner at Andreesen Horowitz.

As Lumos co-founder Andrej Safundzic told me, the idea for Lumos was born out of a privacy-and ethics-focused class he and his co-founder Leo Mehr took at Stanford (with Alan Flores-Lopez rounding out the co-founding team shortly after). That class, he said, made him realize how consumers may have password managers to secure their accounts but no easy way to manage the user accounts they likely have across hundreds of services.

“Then I looked at my phone — and my phone was beautiful, right? I have everything in my home screen,” Safundzic said. “I can delete what I want. I can go to settings and disable location sharing for Facebook. The App Store on Apple made this such a beautiful integrated platform. But if you look at the web, you have 100 websites, Figma, Airtable, Smartsheet — everything. So we just said: hey, let’s create that app store for the web.”

Image Credits: Lumos

That’s still the long-term goal today, but to get started, the team decided to focus on companies because, Safundzic frankly admitted, that’s an easier business model.

Since most services have open APIs to allow Lumos to create and delete accounts, the team didn’t even need to build a partnership team to support get started. The service integrates with existing IT systems, so tickets are still created to ensure everything is logged, but Lumos then orchestrates everything in the background. It supports services like Okta, OneLogin, Google and Azure AD for identify and access management and easy account provisioning for services like Zoom, Salesforce, AWS and Datadog. Like any modern service that focuses on workflows, it also integrates with Slack (with Teams support coming soon).

With Torii, BetterCloud, Intello and others, there are obviously quite a few SaaS management services on the market already. This is, after all, a massive problem for businesses. But the Lumos team argues that these are not end-to-end solutions and don’t offer all of the compliance, self-service and automation features its tool offers.

It’s worth noting that Safundzic has a bit of previous startup experience. Before co-founding Lumos, Safundzic built Tech4Germany, a GovTech startup that was acquired by the German Federal Chancellery.

Today, Lumos already has over 30 employees. Current users include the likes of BuzzFeed, Dialpad, Mixpanel, Skydio and Vox Media.

The Yuga Labs digital land sale this weekend, a mass-mint of new NFTs that temporarily clogged the Ethereum blockchain, is not just making money for the company behind the new set of images that may figure in a future digital service. Other parties are also doing rather well from the effort.

News coverage from the “Otherdeeds” mint points to massive volumes. Decrypt wrote that “OpenSea set a new one-day record for Ethereum NFT trading on Sunday with $476 million,” with the publication adding that “much” of the sum came from Otherdeed activity.

The rush of activity to collect what many hope will be incredibly valuable pieces of digital land — cartoon images of land, in effect, with slight variations — was immensely profitable for Yuga Labs, which took in an estimated $320 million from the event. The overall pace of activity driven by the mint was in fact so large that it led to a simply massive amount of ether, the token associated with the Ethereum blockchain, being burned.

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Amid all the large numbers, you might think that it’s bullish times for the NFT market. After all, so much activity was driven by a single collection’s expansion project — the Bored Ape crew has managed to turn a hit NFT set into several collections, huge venture checks, and now a license to print money thanks to speculators snapping up its newly offered digital assets.

But I wonder. Parsing the top collection list on OpenSea, we can see that the Yuga Labs world represents a large portion of the aggregate NFT market as we understand it. Is there a bit too much centralization in the NFT market?

Lottie animations are everywhere. The JSON-based file format, first introduced as an open-source library by Airbnb engineers, can now be seen in the top 500 iOS and Android apps, said LottieFiles co-founder Kshitij Minglani. What LottieFiles does is streamline the process of turning animations made in software like Adobe After Effects into Lotties so they can be placed in apps.

LottieFiles is now used by animation and motion designers at 150,000 companies, including Google, TikTok, Disney, Uber, Airbnb and Netflix. The startup announced today that it has raised $37 million in Series B funding led by Square Peg Capital, with participation from XYZ Venture Capital, GreatPoint Ventures and returning investors 500 Startups and Microsoft Venture Fund, M12.

LottieFiles plans to use the funding to expand it product roadmap, hire for its engineering and R&D teams and develop a new workflow that will make shipping Lottie animations easier so designers can focus more on animations. LottieFiles also has the world’s largest repository of free-to-use Lottie animations.

LottieFiles was founded in 2017 by Minglani and Nattu Adnan. TechCrunch last covered the company when it announced a $9 million Series B in January 2021. LottieFiles has now raised about $47 million in total. Since its Series A, LottieFiles has grown from about 1 million users to 3.1 million.

LottieFiles simplifies the workflow between creating an animation in software like Adobe After Effects, then shipping it to its final destination in an app. The startup currently has a plug-in for Adobe After Effects and other design software. Otherwise, Minglani told TechCrunch, the process is very complicated. LottieFiles allows designers to preview how their animation will look in the app and then ship it without hours of coding.

“We are democratizing motion design the way Canva democratized design,” said Minglani. “Before Canva, it was Photoshop, which needed hundreds of hours. We are doing the same thing to motion design industry.”

Toplyne founders Ruchin Kulkarni, Rohit Khanna and Rishen Kapoor

For product-led growth companies (PLG), the perennial question is: how do we get non-paying customers to subscribe? Then the second question is: how do we get paying customers to move to higher tiers? Toplyne wants to help by automating the process of identifying promising leads and figuring out what go-to market strategies will work best for each of them. Launched in June 2021, the startup’s customers already include Canva, Grafana, Gather.Town and InVideo.

The Bangalore-based startup announced today it has raised $15 million in Series A funding led by Tiger Global and Sequoia Capital India, with participation from returning investors Together Fund, Sequoia India’s Surge program, and angel investors from Canva, Vercel and Zomminfo.

Toplyne was founded by Ruchin Kulkarni, Rishen Kapoor and Rohit Khanna, who met while working as investment analysts at Sequoia India.

During that time, Kulkarni told TechCrunch they discovered that many product-led growth companies were struggling with conversion rates, even if they had a relatively easy time getting free users. Their growth teams had a hard time not only identifying the best leads among thousands or even millions of users, but also what marketing strategies they should use.

For example, Kapoor said a highly-engaged user may just need to be offered a discount on a paywall. But others might respond better to email marketing or contact from a salesperson.

Toplyne integrates with a client’s existing marketing software (including Amplitude, Mixpanel and Salesforce) and analyzes cohorts of users to show which ones have the lowest or highest potential conversion rates. For example, high engagement with an app, opening marketing emails and answering chatbot questions are all promising signals. This in turn helps growth teams plan their go-to-market strategies for each group. Toplyne analyzes which strategies are working best, or suggests other marketing channels, then helps growth teams see how effective each one is.

The funding will be used to grow Toplyne’s data science, engineering, product and design teams. The company is currently working on on its self-serve product and says it has a waiting list of more than 1,000 companies.

In a statement, Naman Gupta, product-growth lead at Canva Pro and an angel investor in Toplyne, said, “Creating the infrastructure and plumbing to support growth experiments, followed by rapidly A/B testing and operationalizing the most repeatable growth strategies is a herculean task spanning several quarters. Toplyne helped us short-circuit this process to a few days.”

The pace at which startups raise rounds worth $100 million or greater is slowing, according to early data.

Looking at historical periods stretching back a year, TechCrunch’s analysis of Pitchbook data shows Q2 2022 is on pace to undershoot the first quarter’s tally of so-called mega-rounds. And data from Crunchbase shows a similar decline.

When you consider that Q1 2022 saw fewer rounds worth $100 million or more than both the final two quarters of 2021, we’re seeing a slowdown in late-stage, private-market investment.

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It’s not a shock that the there are fewer large venture capital rounds happening. Indeed, we anticipated it, given the retrenchment we’ve seen in software valuations more generally, and the fact that the risk climate for private-market dealmaking has become more conservative in recent months. A massive public-market selloff coupled with geopolitical instability and inflation concerns will do that.

While the late-stage venture capital market is becoming more staid, the crypto world is seeing immense deals that are raising hundreds of millions of dollars. The contrast is notable. Let’s talk about it.

It’s still a good time to raise huge rounds

What makes it hard to grok the changing venture capital market is the fact that we’re coming off all-time highs. So while the data indicates that there were between 100 and 132 venture rounds worth $100 million or more (PitchBook and Crunchbase data, respectively) thus far in Q2 2022, we have to understand that there is still a lot of money flowing today compared to historical norms, even if the numbers represent a near-term decline.

Looking behind, it seems clear that 2021 will prove a high-water mark for venture capital activity for some time. There’s little indication that 2022 will be able to beat last year’s tally, and with economic clouds on the horizon, anyone betting that 2023 is going to be straight up lit is wagering against prevailing wisdom.