Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Every Monday, Grace and Alex scour the news and record notes on what’s going on to kick off the week.

• Thankfully we did not start this episode by talking about Elon Musk and Twitter! You are welcome!
• Instead we started with bleak Chinese economic news, that segued into falling venture capital totals for a key startup sector in that country. It turns out that a massive regulatory crackdown will have in-market impacts!
• From there it was time to chat Yuga Labs and its recent minting chaos. Bloomberg has more.
• Then it was time to chat neobanks, in particular the recent rounds from Open ($50 million) and Cogni ($23 million).

This is not a live show week, so Equity will simply come out on Friday as usual. That said, we do have a Twitter space scheduled for today with our own Kirsten Korosec, so follow us on Twitter and we will see you there.

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. 

Good news! We’re not talking about crypto, Elon Musk or SaaS multiples today. We’re also not talking IPOs, global venture capital trends or the like. Instead, we’re going to talk about putting toothpaste back in the tube. Sound fun? Let’s go.

China’s technology industry

Since the Ant IPO was pulled and the Chinese Communist Party executed off a flat-wild period of regulatory action in 2021, you have probably heard less about China’s technology. That’s because the companies that tended to make the biggest splash in foreign media were concerns like Alibaba, ByteDance and the like — tech companies that touched lots of individuals, including folks outside the country’s national borders.

China’s government decided that such companies had too much influence, and thus needed to be cut down to size. This meant, variously, the decapitation of the for-profit edtech sector, social media regulation, the effective curtailment of foreign listings, punitive data reviews, video game limits along with a long pause in new titles, new rules regarding algorithms and more.

After a period of comparative freedom to innovate, compete and, yes, at times act anticompetitively, China’s domestic tech industry entered 2022 in a very different state than it kicked off 2020. (This isn’t to discount the impacts of COVID-19 on Chinese tech companies; but the move toward remote work and the like was global, and for our purposes today we care more about the regulatory environments shifts in particular.)

The result of the fusillade of regulatory action, a full nelson of top-down control, was probably about what you expected. Some recent headlines for flavor:

• December 2021: A year into China’s tech crackdown, the sky is no longer the limit for China’s Big Tech
• February 2022: No reversal on China’s tech crackdown in sight as Xi calls for more work on laws
• April 2022: Chinese Tech Giants Lose Shine as Growth Stalls

Those should paint a fair enough picture of market sentiment regarding the crackdown. In more monetary terms, the value of many Chinese tech companies fell sharply. After peaking at more than $300 per share in late 2020, Alibaba is worth less than $100 per share today. Didi, which got caught between the Chinese government and the American markets after its IPO, saw its shares peak at a penny over $18 per share. Today it’s worth less than $2 per share.

Stories began to crop up about layoffs and other misery from Chinese tech companies. A few more headlines for context:

• January 2022: As Beijing Takes Control, Chinese Tech Companies Lose Jobs and Hope
• March 2022: China is forcing Alibaba and Tencent to cut over 50,000 jobs
• March 2022: China’s tech layoffs could become a self-inflicted headache for Xi

Given that this was pretty much what anyone with a pulse might have expected from the Chinese government throwing its absolute control around like gravity in a rollercoaster, pushing to remake one of its key economic engines by autocratic fiat in a short period of time, you are probably not surprised. And yet it appears that the Chinese government is, at least to some degree!

How do we know that? Well, observe:

• April 2022: China to end regulatory storm over Big Tech and give sector bigger role in boosting slowing economy, sources say
• April 2022: China Plans Reprieve for Tech Giants, Including Delaying New Rules, as Economy Slows
• April 2022: Beijing moves to mollify tech bosses as COVID threatens economy-source

The context here is that while the rest of the world is largely figuring out a path out of COVID, China’s government is locking down hundreds of millions of its citizens as it chases an impossible goal of zero COVID-19 cases. (The government previously touted its success at keeping the pandemic at bay as evidence of its superiority; such a stance makes any retreat from the goal difficult.) The result of lockdowns and a sharply diminished local tech industry is, surprise, economic malaise.

Not that the Chinese government intends to accept that. After indicating that besting American economic growth is a priority, debt-fueled infrastructure spending is back on the table, along with more real estate speculation, and, it appears, some softening of the rules deluge that its domestic tech market has been forced to endure without complaint.

Good luck?

Can the Chinese government put the tech toothpaste back in the tube? We’ll find out, but if I was an investor or founder I would not build inside the country. Sure, it’s a big market, but not one that you can count on. More when we get Q2 2022 Chinese venture capital data.

Lotti Siniscalco is a partner at Emergence Capital, where she invests in early-stage enterprise software companies. During TechCrunch’s Early Stage event, she headlined a session dedicated to giving feedback on pitch decks. What follows is a small slice of Lotti’s input from the session.

Constructing pitch decks is part art and part science. And they’re always a work in progress. Each week on TechCrunch Live, a founder and investor present an early pitch deck that won significant capital investment. The events are free to join, and after looking at the pitch deck, startup founders can practice their pitch with the investor and founder.

TechCrunch is also kicking off a series of posts digging into real pitch decks that raised rounds that we’ve covered. The first entry diving into the Minut deck is here. Enjoy!

On pitching the right investor:

“The first thing is: Know your audience. Do a little bit of research, and try to tweak the email to make it personal,” Lotti said, adding that cold emails are OK, but they’re better if they’re personalized. She gave this example, saying, “Hey, Lotti. I’m sending you this pitch deck. I’m the founder of company XYZ, and I’m sending it to you because I saw that you were on the board of this other company, which is somewhat similar, and I think there are some potential learnings in what you could bring to the table.”

Conversely, Lotti explained that if she receives a deck from a company outside her area of focus, like consumer companies, she’s not even going to open the email.

Create lasting memories of your deck:

Pitch decks are a way to tell a startup’s story, and there are ways to make investors and customers better remember your pitch.

According to Lotti, one of the best ways is to make an emotional appeal. “People remember feelings,” she said. “If you want someone to remember what you’re saying, find a way to associate a powerful feeling to it. Fear is a great one. Excitement is another, but the stronger the feeling, the stronger the memory.”

One thing I love about fintech is the promise of unlocking more tools for more people. In a broad sense, the current era of fintech has done just that — people around the world now have access to financial services that were earlier either completely out of reach before, or, at a minimum, prohibitively expensive.

Neobanks, fintech APIs, new savings programs, infinite cards for different payment methods, stablecoins for cross-border payments, cheaper fiat transfers, and, of course, zero-cost trading have improved how the average person can use, store, and interact with money. It pretty much rules.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

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

The tech has proved darn neat, but there are some issues on the business model side of things. As it turns out, not charging for what was once a paid service is a great way to accrete customers, but it’s also an at-times tricky way of making money. This is a lesson that Robinhood is in the process of learning — and as a public company, sharing with the rest of the world.

This week, Robinhood reported Q1 earnings that were far under street expectations. CNBC notes that the company’s per share loss of $0.45 was $0.09 worse than analysts’ expectations, and that the company’s revenue result of $299 million was off by around $57 million. Shares of Robinhood are trading sharply lower this morning.

Parsing the Robinhood earnings presentation this morning, it’s clear that the equities trading boom that powered its hyper-growth has passed. And, of all the company’s products, the most durable remains its most controversial — yes, Robinhood’s options trading revenues once again accounts for the majority of its transaction income, following declines in the value of stock trades and crypto trading activity.

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

This was a live week! Which meant that Mary Ann Azevedo was on the mic with Alex Wilhelm, and Grace Mendenhall, our ever-trusty producer, helped us power through. A big shoutout to Dennis, Julio, and Yashad for getting all the tech working well.

Right, what did we dive into during our live taping? A lot!

• The latest from the Elon Musk-Twitter saga, including the social media company’s earnings and how it is somewhat sensitive to market sentiment; Musk won’t have infinite room with which to maneuver once he owns Twitter.
• For rounds of the week, Mary Ann chatted through the recent Umaro raise — who doesn’t love talking about bacon? — and Alex picked the latest from the self-driving front.
• From there it was time to talk layoffs at Robinhood and other companies, focused around how some companies that did well in the pandemic are now suffering from what could be described as at least a hangover.
• And we closed with notes on Copper and Step and the ethics of teens investing in crypto. Which led us to question putting crypto in your 401k. Views vary!

Equity is back Monday! Chat then!

Are you slouching at your desk again? There’s an app for that… Zen uses posture mirroring software to help information workers stop hunching over their desks — sending alerts when it detects you’re not sitting up straight so you can correct your posture and, hopefully, avoid a lifetime of back problems.

The catch? It uses your webcam to check on your posture. So, er, you have to be comfortable with Zen’s software ‘watching’ through the lens as you work.

Given how many people routinely tape over their webcam just to be sure — y’know, that the NSA isn’t watching — that’s quite the ask. So we asked Zen’s co-founder and CEO, Daniel James, how the San Francisco-based startup works around that privacy concern.

As well as offering the tool direct to consumers (it currently has 1,000+ users of its subscription service), the startup sells a version of Zen to employers and has signed up around 30 companies (including over a dozen enterprises) since it launched the offering back in October 2020. And given rocketing growth in worker surveillance tools since the pandemic-triggered boom in remote working there’s plenty of reason for privacy concerns.

For example, could an employer that’s signed up to Zen use the tool, if not literally to spy on staff sitting at their desks (which would probably be pretty boring tbh), then to log how many hours they are physically sat in front of the screen, say — and use those data-points to pressure employees to shorten any desk breaks they might wish to take?

Dystopian uses of webcam-based tools aren’t hard to imagine because such stuff, sadly, isn’t science fiction. Take Amazon’s launch in the US last year of AI-powered cameras in its Prime delivery vans, which it said would be used to assess driver “safety” — but which critics instantly dubbed Orwellian surveillance…

In short, ‘AIs with eyes’ can just feel, er, function creepy.

Zen says it’s taken a “privacy centric” approach to building this webcam-based posture correcting tech — meaning its taken some specific steps to try to reassure users they’re not being watched by it or anyone else as the AI watches them.

Firstly, its posture correction software is open source (the code is here on Github). “We use open source software for the entire app, except our exercise and educational content, which we custom make,” notes James when as asked about that.

The AI also processes data locally, on device — which means it does not require an internet connection to function — so he says users can verify for themselves that it’s not uploading/streaming any data to the cloud by testing it with their wi-fi/internet connection disabled.

“The posture correction software feature runs offline, without internet, without recording or storing visuals,” he emphasizes. “Since data, like photos or videos, can’t be passed to the cloud without internet connection, which is the only way that employers could spy on employees, it’s technically impossible for us (Zen) or employers to record or store any visuals and ultimately spy on people.”

He also confirms that employers who use Zen’s software only receive “aggregated” (entire company) and “anonymous” (no individual names) information on how many employees sign up to the app and how many use it on a weekly basis.

“With these two data points they can see if employees are engaged with Zen or not, which is usually the determining factor for them when deciding to extend their contract with us,” he adds.

So — to be clear — Zen’s claim is that neither employers who pay it for the software (or Zen itself) can access the camera feed of users to record or store any visuals.

“The posture correction feature of the app, which is the only feature that accesses individuals’ cameras doesn’t run on the cloud, which technically means that no one can tap into the app and access data, including visuals,” says James, adding: “Surprisingly, no employer has ever asked for ‘spy’ type data. They really just want to know if employees are using the solution that they are paying for.”

Even so, privacy conscious desk workers may still not like the idea of sitting in front of a naked camera lens all day.

After all, there is little in tech so blissfully out-of-sight-out-of-mind as a webcam with a sticker stuck firmly over it.

Posture check-ins

On this, James suggests Zen users have come up with their own way to feel comfortable with the tool as he says they tend to use the app to do short posture checks in — say of 30 minutes or an hour with the feature enabled, a couple of times a day — rather than keeping it on all the time.

The developers have smartly leaned into that — recommending users do just a short daily check in to stay posture aware.

“We noticed that the majority of our users don’t leave Zen on all day. Instead they do a short 30-60 minute posture session during their first work session in the morning and another one around Noon or 4 PM. This correlates to how most people meditate,” James tells TechCrunch. “They spend a short time actively being aware of their thoughts which strengthens their passive awareness throughout the day. This works for posture as well.

“Doing short small sessions daily ultimately increases your posture awareness and behavior change. Furthermore, in user interviews people often tell us that ‘Zen seems to be in the back of my head even when I’m not at my desktop. I find myself slouching at the dinner table, and I’m starting to naturally notice it and move back into an upright position.’ From this anecdotal and analytical data, we decided to recommend people to start using the app for just thirty minutes a day during what we call the ‘7-Day Posture Challenge’ and people are seeing amazing results both in increased posture awareness and decreased back and joint pain.”

“We’ve found that people aren’t as concerned about any privacy invasions when they realize that Zen doesn’t have to be on all day. You can turn it on and off as you wish,” he adds.

James also says users often combine use of the posture monitoring feature with use of other apps which require the webcam to be on, such as when they’re making a videoconferencing call.

“They can show posture awareness and confidence during their video calls and they have their camera on for Zoom and G Meets regardless so they aren’t as concerned about any privacy invasions,” he notes.

Zen integrates with the user’s general computer workflow — running in the background and mirroring the user’s posture via a stick-man icon displayed in the menu bar which lets users keep discreet tabs without being interrupted with alert messages. Blue and upright is good; bent and red is bad. (James says it never sends distracting/pop-up message alerts; but users can choose from a few options how they want to be alerted.)

How Zen alerts users to poor posture: A larger graphic can be pinned to the screen (with an optional alarm feature) or users can rely on watching a discreet stick-man in the menu bar can (Credit: Zen)

The posture correcting AI works off a user-defined baseline — meaning the user needs to demonstrate their upright posture on set up. The app then uses that to build a user-specific model made of vectors that record key posture points/indictors (joints, nose, ears etc) so the AI can detect posture changes in real-time (i.e. when the camera monitoring is enabled) and determine whether or not the person is slouching.

“These posture points are fed to a mathematical model that constantly compares your current posture position to the original baseline posture position that you set as your ‘upright’ position,” he explains. “In addition, the app applies geometrical formulas to vectors formed by your current posture position and your original baseline upright posture position to determine if you’re slouching.”

James has a personal reason to be keen on keeping good posture, having been a “very active” NCAA Division-One college football player at Yale University who then went on to working at Adobe in San Francisco — and “living the typical sedentary corporate lifestyle of sitting in front of a computer for over eight hours a day” — which eventually led to him developing serious low back pain and carpal tunnel.

“Adobe offered great ergonomic resources like a free ergonomic consultation and a stand-up desk and purchased different devices that claimed to help with posture but my pain just continued to increase,” he says, fleshing out the reasons that led to founding Zen.

There was a lucky strike too: His co-founder, Alex Secara — who was his housemate at the time and is now Zen’s CTO — had already developed a posture correction software for himself in college to help with a spine-related condition he has (kyphosis) which had also been exacerbated after long hours of coding during tech internships.

“We ultimately decided to join forces to build Zen alongside top ergonomists and physical therapists,” adds James.

Zen is disclosing $3.5M in pre-seed funding raised from investors including Y Combinator, Valor Equity Partners, Goodwater Capital, Samsung Next, Softbank and others which it says it will be using to invest in expanding its team for growth and product dev — with plans in the works for key workday integrations (Slack, G Cal, Microsoft Teams), and for versions of the software for different devices/platforms (mobile, tablet, etc.).

The startup also tells us says it’s exploring partnerships with larger companies and “further proving out the efficacy of our solutions through clinical studies”. (Current enterprise customers include Brex, Alation and Cedar.)

Zen also plans to switch the consumer product to a freemium version — saying it’s aiming for a model akin to the meditation app Calm with premium paid features.

Expanding into selling physical products (more ergonomic chairs, mice, keyboards etc) is also on its roadmap, per James, who says it’s also looking to explore whether it can make use of existing movement sensor hardware in devices like more high end headphones, wearables and mobiles to see if it could repurpose those signals for determining if a person is slouching or not.

If it can devise AI models to figure that out, it might end up being possible for users to get real-time, back-saving posture-mirroring tips without ever needing to switch the camera on. Bliss!

Calm acquires healthcare technology company Ripple Health Group

PullRequest, a five year old startup that came out of Y Combinator in 2017, helps software developers by providing an external code review team. This not only helps find bugs in code that might have been missed, it also helps identify security vulnerabilities before the software hits production.

Perhaps that’s why HackerOne, a bug bounty company, acquired PullRequest today.

If you look at what HackerOne has done traditionally, it hires security professionals to find bugs in programs that could have a big impact if left undetected. PullRequest expands that capability by having a group of qualified code reviewers on call, who can detect a bug even before it gets into production.

HackerOne CTO Alex Rice sees a shift towards developers when it comes to security, and acquiring PullRequest gives him and his customers direct access to the development part of the cycle.

“A trend that we’ve been seeing across a lot of our customers is this real shift towards developers taking far more responsibility for security than they have in the past, which is a trend I’m really excited about. I fundamentally believe that developer-first security practices are the future of building trustworthy technology,” Rice told me.

He said that the vast majority of bugs HackerOne has found have come after the software is already in production, and even though developers want to create more secure software, it’s not always easy to have the bodies to do that. That’s where PulRequest could help.

“We’ve got this intent for developers to start taking more responsibility for security, but this gap between what they would like to find and what they’re capable of finding, so the role of PullRequests here is to bring the security expertise into the developer workflow where they need it most,” he said.

Rice says he wasn’t aware originally that PullRequest was looking at security vulnerabilities as part of the service when he approached PullRequest founder and CEO Lyal Avery about a possible partnership in September last year before realizing they were actually competing. But shortly after that the two companies began a discussion that culminated in the acquisition.

PullRequest launched in 2017 and raised almost $13 million, according to Crunchbase data. The last raise was an $8 million Series A in 2018. Avery says he has a network of 10,000 vetted reviewers of whom, about 1000 are active. All 12 employees have moved to HackerOne.

The deal closed last week. Neither company is disclosing the purchase price.

Oware co-founders Raza Kasmi and Adil Nasar

Managing goods as they make their way through multiple warehouses and logistics providers is one of the biggest headaches that businesses in the supply chain face. After leaving his job at Careem, Adil Nasar founded a company that sources, manufacturers and distributes lights in Pakistan, and experienced those challenges firsthand. So he teamed up with Raza Kasmi, the former group CFO of one of Pakistan’s largest distribution houses, to found Oware, a network of connected warehouses that let businesses track and manage their shipments from a single portal.

Today the company announced it has raised $3.3 million pre-seed funding from investors including Flexport Fund, Ration Ventures, Seedstars International Ventures, Sketchnote Partners, The Osiris Group, Swiss Founders Fund, Reflect Ventures, +92 Ventures and Walled City Co.

Nisar told TechCrunch that while starting novo, his biggest challenge as a small business owner was finding a reliable fulfillment partner and managing upfront capital costs related to warehousing.

Oware’s warehouse portal

Oware is meant to provide businesses with an affordable and scalable solution to traditional warehouse networks, while ensuring timely deliveries to end customers. Most of its customers are B2B market and retail companies that are looking for backend warehousing and transportation to their last distribution point or dark store.

Oware currently has 18 warehouses in five cities in Pakistan, with a total space of 500,000 square feet. Part of Oware’s funding will be used to increase its coverage, which the company says can already provide same-day delivery to 75% of the population and next-day delivery to 85%.

The company rents its warehouse space and works with third-party logistics providers. Oware’s clients can quickly start their operations from any of its locations, picking the ones that are closest to their end customers. Oware’s partners handles almost everything they need for deliveries, including picking, packing and shipping. Its online portal manage product inventory at their warehouses and track shipments in real-time with digital proof of delivery.

In a prepared statement, Seedstars partner and CIO Charlie Graham-Brown said, “Pakistan has a massive opportunity in logistics presented by the 2 million SMEs and the rise of e-commerce in the region. We believe that Oware has a solid position to be an integral layer to an ecosystem that’s becoming digitally enabled. We are proud to have been Adil’s and Raza’s early backers and thrilled for the journey ahead.”

Dat Bike founder and CEO Son Nguyen

Dat Bike is on a journey to reduce the amount of gasoline used in Vietnam. The startup makes electric motorbikes with key components that it designs and produces domestically to reduce costs and improve performance. Today, Dat Bike announced it has raised a $5.3 million Series A led by Jungle Ventures, with participation from Wavemaker Partners.

Both are returning investors. Jungle Ventures led Dat Bike’s seed round a year ago, when TechCrunch first profiled the company. The latest funding brings Dat Bike’s total to $10 million raised since it was founded in 2019 by Son Nguyen.

Dat Bike is recognized by the Vietnam Ministry of Transportation as the first domestically-made electric bike. Nguyen said that Dat Bike uses vertical integration instead of relying on third-party, imported electric drivetrains and parts because that keeps costs down while improving quality. Most of the parts on Dat Bike’s vehicles are designed by the company and 80% of its suppliers are located in Vietnam. It also uses a direct-to-consumer distribution model, pushing prices down lower.

Part of the funding will be invested in its technology. Nguyen explained that the three most important parts of an electric bike are its battery, motor and controller. Right now, Dat Bike owns technology for its battery packaging and controller. With its new capital, it will be able to invest in its engine technology. Nguyen added that the company will also upgrade its mobile app, adding new features and shortening the feedback loop on its error reporting feature.

One major thing the company had to address was consumer concerns about the performance of e-bikes compared to their gasoline counterparts. The company says its first product line, the Weaver, displayed three times the performance (5 kW versus 1.5 kW) and two times the range of (100 km vs 50 km) of most competing electric bikes. Dat Bike’s second model, the Weaver 200, was launched last year with higher performance, or a range of 200 km and 6 kW power. It also reduced charging time from 1 hour for 100 km to 2.5 hours for its full 200 km charge.

“We aim to develop a new product every year and research for faster charging,” Nguyen said.

Dat Bike currently has two stores in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi, and its bikes can be ordered online, too. Part of the funding will be used to expand its offline-to-online model into more large cities, including Thai Nguyen, Bac Ninh, Hai Phong, Hai Duong, Ha Long, Vinh, Quy Nhon, Nha Trang, Danang, Can Tho and Vung Tau.

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

This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down to a single topic, think about a question and unpack the rest. This week, Natasha was out due to a family matter, so Alex and Amanda came together to chat through the larger Elon Musk-Twitter saga.

Yes, the TechCrunch crew got together on Tuesday for a very long, fun, and relaxed Twitter Space when the news broke. However, instead of going back through all that audio to just pull out the key bits, we decided to focus ourselves down to the core elements of that team chat and produce something a bit tighter.

Here’s our question set:

• How much of an active participant will Elon really be?
• What does the deal mean for Twitter employees?
• What impact will the sale have on security, and algorithmic transparency?
• The free speech question
• What does the transaction mean for users?

In case you need more, our coverage of locked code changes is here, more on the privacy question here, and our larger tick-tock can be read here. Ok, we are live on Thursday for the live show! Chat then!

Equity drops every Monday at 7 a.m. PT and Wednesday and Friday at 6 a.m. PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

After a lengthy period of experimentation, investors have decided that consumer fintech trading businesses are not SaaS companies, meaning that those fintech revenues should not be valued as if they were annual recurring revenue (ARR), the main product of software-as-a-service concerns.

The point matters because a host of consumer fintech startups have raised capital, spent, and been valued in recent years as if they are SaaS companies. This may have been an error.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

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

The fact that consumer fintech revenues will not be valued like SaaS top line was made clear this week with Robinhood announcing layoffs ahead of earnings after seeing its public-market value collapse and Coinbase trading at or near record lows — the U.S. cryptocurrency trading platform has lost more than 65% of its peak value as of today, despite rather robust profitability.

Both companies were once worth a multiple of their present value, and each saw their shares trade hands before going public at higher prices than they today enjoy. So what happened? Politely, optimism. Less politely? A little greed. Let’s talk about it.

Trading incomes are good, but not great

Robinhood is a neat idea for a business. Thanks to payment for order flow (PFOF), Robinhood realized it could offer zero-cost consumer trading and still generate big incomes for itself. This was akin to finding an exploit in a video game, only the game was the stock market and the exploit was a possibly temporary setup in which selling consumer order flow is legal and palatable.

As the COVID-era savings and investing boom took flight, Robinhood saw its user base and trading volume — and, therefore, trading revenues — soar. The unicorn got into trouble when its tech, accounts, or both got pounded into the ground during the memestock cycle, but, generally speaking, Robinhood grew until its IPO and posted some early adjusted profits.

Coinbase picked up related tailwinds during COVID, riding the boom in global demand for crypto assets. Thanks to a market that will yet bear trading fees, Coinbase made a mint as individuals and institutions alike got busy buying and selling digital assets.

Investors, looking at the two companies while they were still private, saw rising consumer demand, regular revenues per user, and fat margins. Software companies are inherently attractive businesses thanks to their high gross margins, and with users busy making trades, I suspect that founders and investors in the two companies were content to value them more like SaaS companies — where revenue is often contracted and tends to expand over time as customer use continues.

French startup Eden AI has raised a $1.6 million pre-seed round (€1.5 million) to build a programming interface that lets you access AI engines from multiple vendors. The company unifies those APIs and offers a simple way to try them out, and mix and match.

Over the past few years, small and large cloud vendors have been building APIs that magically process data in their cloud infrastructure using machine learning models. For instance, you can use these APIs to detect and extract text from images, recognize objects, extract keywords from a block of text, turn speech into text, translate text and more.

And yet, all those APIs aren’t perfectly equivalent. Some APIs are better than others. Some APIs work well in one language but not so well in another language. Some APIs are easier to use and implement as well.

Eden AI is building the API to rule them all. “We started as a consulting firm specialized in data science and AI,” co-founder and CEO Taha Zemmouri told me. “As consultants, we couldn’t directly recommend the best model as we had to test them first,” he added later.

The startup has established 20 partnerships with AI engine providers, such as Mindee, Dataleon, Deepgram, AssemblyAI, Rev.AI, Speechmatics and Lettria. It is also compatible with big cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

“We have created an overlay that acts as a single entry point. Switching to another provider is as easy as changing a parameter in the API,” Zemmouri said.

As pricing evolves, Eden AI also offers some flexibility as you’re no longer locked in with a single cloud vendor. On the billing side, you don’t have to open a user account with each provider. Instead, your Eden AI account lets you access all those APIs.

If you already have an account on a specific cloud, you can also add your own key to use your own account. Eden AI doesn’t charge more than what you’d get from cloud vendors. The startup takes a cut on the provider side.

Up next, the company wants to automatically select the right API for your needs. Currently, clients have to define the provider in their API calls. But you could imagine a feature that lets Eden AI pick the best route for you.

Supported by Paris-based accelerator 50 Partners, the company has raised its pre-seed round from several business angels, such as Olivier Pomel (Datadog), Nicolas Dessaigne (Algolia), Sébastien Pahl (Docker), Julien Lemoine (Algolia), Benjamin Fabre (DataDome), Laurent Letourmy (Ysance), Jean-Baptiste Aviat (Sqreen), Georges Gomes (Div Riots) and Thomas Grange (Botify).