As the private fundraising market becomes increasingly parsimonious, startups raising capital previously valued purely on growth with no care for operating burn will have to endure the market’s sentiment shift in their proximate funding round. Startups that lack impressive growth and have high levels of burn? They’re likely in even more trouble.

Precisely how many startups that raised during 2021’s aggressive fundraising climate will struggle to raise their next round at anything more than a flat valuation is not clear. But we’re starting to get an early indication.

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The current conversation over on tech Twitter yesterday evening and this morning centered around a piece of reporting from The Information’s Malique Morris, in which he discussed the travails of the one-click checkout market.

It’s an active startup space, with a number of richly funded competitors striving for market share. 

Morris reports that Fast, backed by Stripe and covered by TechCrunch during its fundraising cycles, generated revenues of around $600,000 last year. That’s thin, given that the company’s last funding round was worth $102 million in January 2021. At the time, here’s how I discussed the company’s growth metrics:

TechCrunch reached out to Fast for comment regarding its growth pace. The company shared that gross merchandise volume (GMV) processed by its checkout service has “more than tripled each month,” adding that it expects that “trend to continue and increase.” The growth pace is hard to rate as we lack a base from which to scale, but we do now have an expectation for future GMV progress from Fast that we can use as a measuring stick.

Fast declined comment today on its reported revenue figures.

The discrepancy between the pseudometrics Fast shared around the time of its nine-figure Series B and its end-of-year result exemplifies why TechCrunch has worked in recent years to get hard numbers from startups. My hunch has long been that startups unwilling to share data are not declining to do so out of fear their competitors will learn their ARR scale, but because they would struggle to explain the massive delta between their operating results and valuation.

The Fast saga makes me even more convinced of that perspective.

But I don’t want to talk about Fast, not really. It’s just one of the companies that took advantage of the cash bonanza that kicked off in late 2020 and ran through the end of 2021. I want to talk about all the startups that raised at valuations that their ARR could not support, the startup equivalent of writing checks that one’s backside cannot cash.

You’d think data visualization and exploration is a bit of a solved problem thanks to the likes of Tableau, Sisense, Looker, Microsoft Power BI and their competitors. But for the most part, these tools were developed before every company had a data lake and warehouse — let alone a lakehouse. Of course, that means there is space of more startups in this field to provide a modern experience for building dashboards on top of all of this data. One of those is Glean, which is now coming out of stealth and announcing a $7 million seed funding round led by Matrix Partners’ Ilya Sukhar. A number of angel investors, including Elad Gil, Shana Fisher, Dylan Field, Scott Belsky, Cristina Cordova, Akshay Kothari, DJ Patil and Anthony Goldbloom, also participated in this round.

Glean co-founder Carlos Aguilar was an early systems engineer at Kiva Systems, where he got to work with large data sets from the company’s warehouse robots. It was there that he realized that a lot of teams wanted access to this data, but writing new SQL query for every request wasn’t scalable in the long run. “Even back then I developed this passion for not having to do that,” he told me. “I could build these data apps and then a whole subset of questions would just disappear. But more than that, people were super empowered and now they could do all sorts of things that they couldn’t do before. […] I loved this idea of like taking the complexity, simplifying it and building tools out of it.”

After Amazon acquired Kiva, Aguilar worked there for a few years and then joined Flatiron Health as the first data hire there and while the team was able to build tools to wrangle data there, too, the bottleneck now shifted to building data apps to help the rest of the company get insights from their data as quickly as possible. That meant lots of time building dashboards in legacy BI tools and helping others to use those.

The mission of Glean, Aguilar said, is not just democratizing data but democratizing insights. Being able to dig through data and not just looking at a dashboard is what most users want, he argued, and that is something that a lot of the legacy tools actually do quite well. “There’s a bunch of startups and upstarts, but nothing really gives gets you the powerful sort of interactivity that you get with a lot of these legacies tools still,” he said.

Glean wants to combine this interactivity without the barrier to entry of the likes of Tableau. You still need somebody in a company to know a little bit of SQL and somebody who can model the data, but once that’s done, Glean will automatically try to find the best defaults to visualize this data. The service currently supports Snowflake, BigQuery and PostgreSQL. As Aguilar noted, the company’s focus right now is on data warehouses, in part because this data is typically already cleaned up and ready to be queried.

Image Credits: Glean

Once those first steps are done, even non-technical users should be able to easily dig through the connected data and remix a given view for their own use cases, too. As of now, Glean supports all of the standard visualizations (think pivot tables, line charts, bar charts, etc.). And while it may try to democratize this data analysis workflow and many of its users will be non-technical, the company is also building a lot of tools for engineers, including git integrations, a CLI, a native build tools and more.

“We’ve seen a massive revolution in data infrastructure over the last few years. Organizations of all kinds now have access to more data than ever before. But there’s been little innovation in how data teams surface insights to their colleagues. They struggle to keep pace and deliver the business impact expected of them,” said Matrix Partners’ Sukhar. “Carlos and his team at Glean are rethinking the BI layer to solve this problem. The idea is to empower everyone in an organization to dive into data and make sense of it. The team has deep experience building data products at Flatiron Health and we’re excited to work with them on capturing this huge opportunity.”

Looking ahead, the team wants to build more collaboration features to bring an almost Google Docs-like experience to these dashboards — and that is, in part, what the team is going to use the new funding for. “The focus is really on trying to create an incredible experience with a very high level of fit and finish that just feels incredible to use,” said Aguilar. “It turns out, doing that in the data context and with a lot of different personas is a very hard problem. So investing in these core analytics workflows and making that an incredible experience is high on the list.” The team is also looking into building more automation systems and tools to automatically create models from various points in a company’s data pipeline.

It’s no secret that digital supply chains are increasingly under attack as hackers look to use this vector to get access to company networks and confidential information. But that also means businesses have to figure out ways to secure their assets even when they sit outside of the attack surface they would traditionally focus on. That’s where external attack surface management services like Cyberpion come in.

Cyberpion is announcing a $27 million Series A round today. The round was led by U.S. Venture Partners, with existing investors Team8 Capital and Hyperwise Ventures, which co-led the company’s $8.25 million seed round, also participating.

The idea behind external attack surface management is to take an outside look at a company’s entire outside-facing assets and infrastructure and proactively scan for risks and vulnerabilities. Since raising its seed round in 2020, attacks like the SolarWinds hack increased awareness of how vulnerable the software supply chain can be. At the same time, a large percentage of enterprise IT infrastructure now sits outside of the traditional company firewall, yet a recent Gartner report noted that only 10 percent of organizations have adopted attack surface assessment solutions so far. That leaves a lot of room for growth because sooner or later, these companies will have to adapt these solutions.

“Traditional third-party risk management solutions have focused exclusively on the vendors and IT infrastructures that are directly connected to the enterprise, an approach that is outdated and ignores the true scale of the problem,” noted Jacques Benkoski, a general partner at U.S. Venture Partners. “Most organizations don’t even consider the supplier of their suppliers as an immediate cyber risk. Cyberpion is the only platform to directly address this issue by continuously assessing all external-facing assets — from 3rd, 4th to Nth party connections — and providing automatic defense against impending attacks.”

Given the increase in awareness, it’s maybe no surprise then that Cyberpion saw its business increase rapidly over the last few years, with revenue more than tripling since raising its seed round in October 2020. Cyberpion co-founder and CBO Ran Nahmias also noted that the company quadrupled its customer base during this time and added one customer in the Fortune 10 and dozens in the Fortune 500.

In terms of product, the company always focused on analyzing and mapping connections to create a map of a company’s external attack surface, but it’s now also going beyond that. “Our technology is based on analyzing and mapping connections downstream to the Nth degree,” Nahmias explained. “But — since we do scan the whole internet multiple times a day — over the last year, we realized that there’s also value in characterizing and starting to look for things that are not connected but may still be a corporate asset that got lost.”

Nahmias also noted that there is an entire class of use cases connected to local domains that were registered by an employee of a gobal company (think something akin to techcrunch.com.co). Those weren’t necessarily created with any malicious intent but aren’t connected to the corporate network or secured by it.

This ability to go upstream to find potential issues, Nahmias noted, is part of what makes Cyberpion unique (and it offers this capability as a paid add-on to its own customers).

Liberty Strategic Capital, the private equity firm launched last year by former treasury secretary Steven T. Mnuchin, announced today that it is acquiring a majority stake in mobile security startup Zimperium for $525 million.

With Zimperium, the firm takes a dive into mobile security, which Mnuchin sees at the front line of cyber security today. As he points out with employees using their own devices for years now, companies need to have a way to secure them, even when they don’t control the device directly.

“We all need to increase our focus on the protection of mobile devices and applications. Liberty Strategic Capital is investing in Zimperium because they’ve shown that they can lead the way in this multibillion-dollar market,” he said in a statement announcing the deal.

The company covers three parts of the mobile market looking at device security, mobile applications security and mobile threat intelligence. In fact, last year the company discovered spyware called PhoneSpy in 23 Android apps designed to steal data. As TechCrunch’s Carly Page explained at the time of the news:

Researchers at mobile security firm Zimperium, which discovered PhoneSpy inside 23 apps, say the spyware can also access a victims’ camera to take pictures and record video in real time, and warned that this could be used for personal and corporate blackmail and espionage. It does this without a victim knowing, and Zimperium notes that unless someone is watching their web traffic, it would be difficult to detect.

The company didn’t share specific revenue figures, but reported that annual recurring revenue (ARR) grew 53%. Company CEO Shridhar Mittal is hoping that the investment will continue to drive that growth.

“We’ve helped leading public and private organizations across the globe strengthen mobile security, and as we enter a high growth phase to help even more organizations, Secretary Mnuchin and the team at Liberty Strategic Capital will be a tremendous asset to guide and propel our company forward,” Mittal said in a statement.

Under the terms of the deal, Softbank will own a minority stake in the company, Mnunchin will lead the company’s board of directors. The transaction is expected to close some time in the next few months.

The company has been around since 2011, and raised $72 million, according to Crunchbase data. Its last round was in 2018, a modest $12 million investment led by Sierra Ventures. Minority investor Softbank invested in the company a year earlier leading a $15 million round.

Airhouse, a startup in the e-commerce infrastructure market, announced this morning that it closed an $11 million Series A round of funding.

The capital event was led by DNX Ventures, with participation from a number of other investors and angels. Crunchbase data indicates that Airhouse previously raised $5.5 million.

The startup’s model places it between brands creating and selling goods that they want to ship to customers and various third-party logistics groups, or 3PLs.

There are myriad 3PLs in the market, Airhouse co-founder and CEO Kevin Gibbon told TechCrunch, making it hard for smaller brands to know whom to work with, and their onboarding cycles can stretch into the months. Airhouse wants to make it easier for e-commerce companies to get up and running without having to deal with 3PLs themselves.

To accomplish that, the startup built relationships with a number of 3PLs, linking its customers to those warehousing and shipping groups via its software. This provides a number of benefits for both sides of the equation. First, by aggregating its customers, Airhouse can pass along economies of scale to its customers that they would not be able to unlock if they worked with 3PLs on their own. Second, the model helps 3PLs themselves access volume that they might not have otherwise been able to reach.

It wasn’t easy to get to where the company is today, it appears. After helping found and scale and shutter Shyp, a startup that TechCrunch covered that worked in the shipping space, Gibbon said that he learned that it’s better to walk — and then run.

After Shyp, he said that he had offers to raise lots of capital. Instead, Airhouse raised modest amounts and went to ground to build. To that end, Airhouse bought a small DTC brand that it used to trial various 3PLs, adding SKUs for customers as it grew, only later becoming a platform for other brands to leverage pre-selected 3PLs. By being a smaller-volume DTC, the company was able to vet 3PLs across a number of metrics, finding the best partners for its later platform business.

The model allows Airhouse customers to leverage multiple 3PLs via a single dashboard, and the startup can help its users recommend locations for storage and rapid shipping based on its broader view of the logistics market. To make all that possible, Airhouse connects its software with warehouse management systems, or WMSs, of its 3PL partners.

Airhouse is growing, saying in a release that since it launched publicly, customers have expanded by 600% and its “partner network footprint” rose by 500%. Those are very Series A-style metrics in that they detail operational results upstream from revenue. We’ll expect more rigorous data if the company raises again.

The e-commerce market has been hot startup territory in recent months, with Shippo also raising in 2021 and expanding its reach this year. The larger e-commerce market may be slowing somewhat from its prior levels of growth, but few expect that consumers are going to suddenly revert to pre-pandemic shopping patterns. This makes it somewhat unsurprising to see Airhouse and others busy adding funds to their accounts.

Now we wait to see how fast Airhouse can scale both 3PLs and customers — and how lucrative the revenue it collects in between proves to be.

It’s the first of Y Combinator’s two-day Demo Day event, which means that TechCrunch will spend most of our working hours watching startup demos and tracking how many companies from the batch are in particular sectors and geographies. The early-stage startup market is active and — as formerly late-stage-focused funds look to invest earlier — still awarding attractive valuations to nascent technology upstarts.

Later-stage startups aren’t being afforded similar enthusiasm, with investor notes and data indicating that from Series B onward — and perhaps earlier in some cases — valuations are tightening as investors look to falling public markets as an indication that exit prices will be smaller than previously anticipated. A closed IPO market and antitrust vibes from U.S. and European governments potentially limiting big-ticket M&A aren’t helping.

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This means that many unicorns looking to provide liquidity for their employees and other shareholders are using services like Forge, which recently went public, and EquityZen. The Exchange has spoken with EquityZen before, but we wanted to dig into current later-stage startup market dynamics to understand what it would take to assuage concerns and bring later-stage startup dealmaking back into the spotlight.

So we asked EquityZen’s Phil Haslett, co-founder and chief revenue officer, to chat through his perspective on the markets.

We learned two key things: First, there is a sort of trigger, if you will, that could reset pessimism regarding technology company growth rates. And, second, Instacart did other startups a huge solid by retooling how it prices employee equity compensation through what is generally considered to be a reset induced by a new 409a valuation. (If you don’t know what a 409a valuation is, think of it as an externally set valuation for private companies’ fair market value.)

Let’s start with what it would take to Lazarus market sentiment about tech companies — and therefore tech stocks — and examine the door that Instacart just kicked open for its fellow unicorns.

Restoring market confidence in tech companies

It’s tricky to compare mid-2021 market sentiment regarding quickly growing technology companies and today. The startup and public markets each sport myriad technology companies with different growth rates, margin profiles and cost bases. One size does not fit all. But that doesn’t mean we can’t sketch out any generalities.

While every technology company is different, the markets have curtailed the value of technology revenues as other investment opportunities became more attractive. More simply, the value of growth has declined in the public markets, leading to revenue multiple compression among startups that have reached, say, eight-figure ARR.

Happily, what drove the sentiment change could also flip back. Haslett told TechCrunch that market concern is being driven by “two big macro uncertainties,” which he identified as “geopolitical risk in Europe, plus inflation.” But if we look out a bit further, he gave us a picture of what good news would look like for tech valuations (quotes have been edited for clarity and length):

What you look for on the horizon is a wave of Top 50 or 100 tech companies having earnings and forecasts that get us back, and right the ship. If DocuSign says, “OK, like, the worst is behind us,” if Zoom says, “The worst is behind us; we’re back up and running,” [then startups can say], “Oh, thank god, now we know we’re in a better spot. Our public comps are gonna look better, we can start [hitting] the ground running.”

Celonis, the process mapping startup, has been on a nice run the last several years, forging significant partnerships with IBM and ServiceNow, while announcing a $1 billion Series D last June on a massive $11 billion valuation.

With that kind of capitalization, the company decided to expand its reach today when it announced the acquisition of Process Analytics Factory (PAF) for $100 million. Celonis gets an eight-year-old German company with expertise in process mapping the Microsoft ecosystem, which should help Celonis move into that space.

Celonis CEO and co-founder Alexander Rinke said that his company has carved out a big role in the automated workflow ecosystem, figuring out how work moves in an automated fashion to help point out inefficiencies and look for ways to make work flow more smoothly through the organization. He says that includes automation, collaboration and virtual platforms.

“Obviously, a big part of that is Microsoft with Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Office. So we acquired PAF to enable that and bring the unique insights and targeted actions we provide to Microsoft users,” Rinke said.

PAF founder and CEO Tobias Rother gave the familiar argument that the two companies will be better together. “This combination leverages the strength of Celonis market leadership with the foundation that PAF has created in the Microsoft Power Platform. This allows our companies to build the bridge between the Microsoft Power Platform and the Celonis Execution Management System,” he said in a statement.

PAF launched in 2014 with the goal of embedding process mining insights into the Microsoft platform. “They have a huge head start in this space, and we thought if we can bring this functionality into the Celonis world, there will be a huge benefit for their customers, our customers and prospects. And for everybody who uses Microsoft,” Rinke said.

As he points out, that’s just about everybody in his target market. In fact, 97% of the Fortune 500 use Microsoft Office.

The company has been on a roll in recent years, forging relationships with much larger companies like IBM, SAP and ServiceNow, while also building a large presence with consulting firms like Deloitte, Accenture and WiPro, among many others. All of this is driving sales and the massive valuation.

It has also made several strategic acquisitions like today’s. PAF represents the fourth acquisition for the company. Rinke said the deal closed at the end of last year, and they are in the process of building the PAF functionality into the broader Celonis platform. The plan is to roll that out in May. The deal included 30 employees coming over to Celonis. The company should hit 3,000 employees some time later this year.

Celonis launched in 2011 and raised $1.4 billion, according to Crunchbase data. While the company has ambitions to go public at some point, Rinke was not ready to commit to any timeline.

Weaver, a London-based marketplace and SaaS contract negotiation platform for matching homeowners/architects planning major home renovation projects with vetted contractors, has closed a $4 million seed round to expand nationally.

The round was led by European VC btov Partners, with participation from FJ Labs, Enterprise Fund (a syndicate of former Atlassian & Docker executives) and Dr. Stefan Heitmann (founder & CEO of MoneyPark and PriceHubble) among others.

The 2017 founded startup had previously raised $1.5M in pre-seed financing from a number of angels — bringing its total raised to date to $5.5M.

Weaver’s platform matches homeowners and architects with appropriate contractors (using an algorithm), facilitating obtaining quotes and price comparison — without the usual friction from having to manually research and reach out to contractors.

It is also intended to house key comms around the contract negotiation/bid process, through baked in messaging, document exchange and on-site meeting scheduling features. So the platform acts as a centralized pipeline which keeps all parties in the loop and can be used to track compliance.

“We started off as two industry founders looking for product/market fit with no-code SaaS, bootstrapping whilst minimising investment. We then invited two tech founders to join us in 2020, and it took around one and a half years to reach product/market fit on a proprietary platform,” says co-founder and CEO Greg Keane on why it’s raising a seed round now.

Contractors on Weaver’s platform are manually vetted by the startup before being allowed into the marketplace where they have a chance to bid for high end projects.

They are also subject to ongoing checks by Weaver to review the quality of their work and spot any other concerns, such as early signs of insolvency. Weaver takes on a troubleshooting role in the case of problems during the build, too.

“Weaver is fixing a fundamental problem of communication between homeowners and contractors in the following order: 1. sourcing contractors they can trust, and;  2. building confidence in a renovation price,” says Keane. “Next, we will be solving the problems of 3. understanding how to get a contract agreed, and 4. removing the risk of contractor bankruptcy with fully insured escrow payments.”

“Renovation projects are matched by an algorithm to contractors,” he confirms. “We have also built the first proper SaaS tendering platform anywhere for home renovations, where users today can exchange information via messaging, document sharing, and site meeting organisation — we are working towards a network effect to kick in here.”

Construction is a complex space for startups to disrupt given it’s best thought of, not as a cohesive single market to rapidly scale across but rather as a series of distinct sub-markets which can have their own workflows and suppliers (as well as, oftentimes, specific regulatory requirements to meet).

But that multifaceted landscape does perhaps create opportunities to lean into necessary nuance and specialism by applying the specificity that a strong software as a service offering can bring.

Notably, Weaver is also targeting its marketplace at a top-slice of home renovation projects — where the size of the project is not only large enough to support monetizing via a success fee on contractors but the risks involved — for all parties — are likely to amp up demand for vetting and centralized accountability. Hence its plan to bolt on fully insured escrow payments for homeowners, for example.

Other plans the startup says it has for the seed funding are to add an extra carrot for contractors in the form of fast payments, as well as transitioning its platform from a desktop cloud-first to mobile-first product — to better align with where user engagement in this home renovation slice of the construction market is strongest.

It will also be making more use of renovations pricing data it’s able to capture to create more utility for homeowners — via “intelligent renovation pricing solutions”, as Keane puts it, which will aim to give these users better feedback on where their prices sit compared to the market.

“We are on our way to becoming the leaders in renovation pricing in our market, which we are confident will establish us as the go-to solution for renovation price indexing,” he suggests, adding: “We have plans to utilise this data to build a machine learning algorithm that will accurately budget and price home renovations, thereby solving one of the industry’s biggest frustrations today.”

He says the issue there is homeowners typically under-budget (by 10%-30%), as they’re doing back-of-an-envelope type calculations “using standard multiples taken from crude averages”. So if Weaver can provide “rapid and accurate” pricing info for the specific project from the outset homeowners may be willing to pay for it — given that data would allow them to save or borrow the right amount before embarking on a big project (with all the risks and stress that entails), or even rethink a house purchase if it’s predicted upon a certain type of renovation.

According to Keane, only a minority (40%) of homeowners use a traditional architect for a renovation project. Plus, he suggests that architects typically introduce only one contractor per project they design (“an architect’s word-of-mouth network is simply not large enough”) — so Weaver aims to step in and support homeowners to more easily get the three quotes most will want to be confident they’re getting market price for their project. 

The startup is also partnering with third party firms that produce fixed-price architectural drawings so it can offer their services to the ~60% of homeowners who don’t use a traditional architect so may be after that kind of help to realize their project.

Weaver’s business model has three components: A success fee from contractors who win a project through the marketplace; an access fee for homeowners (or it’s paid by architects firms) — with tiered pricing based on increasing levels of support; and referral fees from renovation loan providers who’re able to pick up Weaver customers.

While there is growing concern in the UK over a deepening cost of living crisis — with energy bills, for example, set to soar next month when a price cap expires, on top of rising inflation and wider economic concerns linked to global and other trade-related events — Keane is not worried this will dent demand for home renovations since the startup is essentially targeting it’s service at the top 1%-5% of earners who are likely to be insulted from the challenges faces lower income households.

“We are not concerned [about the impact of the cost of living crisis on demand for renovations] as our average project is £100-£300k, which are households with more >£150k incomes, and savings built up over many years,” he tells TechCrunch, going on to suggest there are other factors at play that may drive wealthier households to spend on upgrading their homes, such as in relation to climate concerns.

“We are seeing macro economics pushing more households into renovating to combat energy hikes with properly insulated homes, whilst at the same time reducing household emissions. Furthermore, we anticipate the UK government to be increasing further subsidies on home insulations and eco-boilers to tackle 40% of UK emissions.”

Weaver’s marketplace, which has been live for over four years at this point (although only live in the current form since March 2020), has processed over $120M worth of construction to-date, With the startup noting that orders on the platform in 2021 grew 2.6x times over 2020. It has around 400 contractor companies, 300 architect firms and around 900 homeowners/individual users registered at this stage.

Weaver will be using the seed funds to expand its footprint within the UK to be able to serve more of the domestic home renovation market. (Currently the service covers Greater London, South East England, Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool.)

Keane says it’s planning future international expansion “eventually” — and on that front it has an eye on Germany and the US where he says its research suggests the market dynamics are similar to the UK’s. (Although the Victorian house renovations that may be typical of many domestic projects undertaken via Weaver’s platform would, presumably, not be the norm as it expands into country’s with very different types of housing stock.)

“Our largest investors are based in these two markets which gives us the network to hire talent locally,” notes Keane, adding: “We thrive in metropolitan areas where there‘s a very fragmented market for contractors and the potential value for our solution is greatest, so we will be expanding beyond the UK by the end of 2023.

“In the UK, our closest competitors are Resi and Houzz. In the US, it would be Sweeten and Block Renovation. We are the only startup targeting architects and their clients.”

Talenthouse AG has made a name for itself as an aggregator of content creators, which is then commissioned by brands for their own social media channels. Brands just can’t seem to come up with the same kind of authenticity, so they farm it out in this manner. But business is going well, so Talenthouse is now listing on the SIX Swiss Exchange (ticker THAG) in response to this demand for content creation and ability to tap into the ‘creator economy.’

The move is significant in tech startup terms because in June last year New Value AG (trading as Talenthouse) acquired long-time social photos startup EyeEm. When it launched in 2011, only a year after Instagram, it was often talked of in the same breath, but the EyeEm founders studiously repeated that it was a place for for high-end content creators and photographers to sell their wares.

By the time it had been acquired, EyeEm had raised a total of $24 million in VC backing. No price was released at the time for the ‘mostly shares, some cash’ deal.

But the public markets flotation of Talenthouse reveals some interesting data.

Roman Scharf, Co-Founder of Talenthouse told me: “The initial shares will trade around one Swiss franc, and we have 400 million shares outstanding. So the market cap tomorrow will start around 400 million Swiss francs. We paid 37,348,490 million shares for Eyeem plus some cash. Those shares at current share price are $37.3 million. But their exit was roughly $40 million, since they also got cash.”

Talenthouse, with its operational headquarters in London, has 14 million members across brands including EyeEm, Ello, Zooppa and Jovoto. Members of these brands produce content that can be acquired or commissioned by companies such as PayPal, Netflix and Nike.

The Creator Economy generates $2,250 billion annually, employing 30 million people worldwide, according to UNESCO. For instance, in a commission for the UN, Talenthouse took in 16,700 submissions from 142 countries, for a campaign around the Covid-19 pandemic.

In a statement, Clare McKeeve, CEO of Talenthouse said: “We’ve acquired and developed brilliant companies within our portfolio so that our creatives have the tools to be part of an active community whilst successfully monetizing their skills.”

Speaking to me over a call Scharf added: “The SIX market floatation is like a sandbox environment where we learn how to behave as a public company. And then we’re going to go for a NASDAQ listing, because you know Tanenhaus really is about the creative economy. And in the German-speaking world, investors don’t really understand what the creative economy is. They have no clue about Tik Tok.”

Eyeem was started by Florian Meissner, Ramzi Rizk, Gen Sadakane and Lorenz Aschoff in 2011. Photographers could offer their pictures for sale via the portal and Eyeem retained part of the income. But the end, the four founders each held 1.7 percent of their company.

Meissner and Rizk have since moved on to work on the app Aware, an analysis service for health data, and also become Angel investors, taking early stakes in the Gorillas delivery service.

GrowSari, a Manila-based platform for digitizing small businesses in the Philippines, announced today it has added $77.5 million to its Series C round. Along with prior funding, including $45 million announced in January, this brings the round’s total to about $110 million. Investors included the International Finance Corporation, KKR, Wavemaker Partners and the Temasek Group’s Pavilion Capital.

The new capital will be used for expansion into new store formats, building a logistics and fulfillment network and hiring for GrowSari’s operations, technology and data science teams. 

Co-founder and CEO Reymund Rollan told TechCrunch that GrowSari raised again because it wants to expand its fintech offerings for store owners and build its supplier marketplace, including commodities. It also plans to serve more types of MSMEs, like carinderias (small eateries), small over-the-counter pharmacies and other roadside and market shops.

Founded in 2016, GrowSari’s tools for small businesses now include inventory management, pricing tools, a logistics network and working capital loans. It also enables retailers to offer telco top-ups and bill payments. Its customers now include 100,000 stores in over 220 municipalities in Luzon, and it is planning to expand into Mindanao soon.

GrowSari’s app

Other plans include adding more financial services and logistics solutions, with plans to have more than 50 fulfillment centers across the country. 

In a prepared statement, Stephanie von Friedeburg, IFC’s Senior Vice President of Operations said, “The pandemic has fundamentally changed how business works,” said . “Businesses that ignore digital technology put themselves at an immediate disadvantage. Our investment will enable Growsari to expand digital adoption and financial services for MSMEs, which is critical to keep them competitive, and for a resilient and inclusive recovery.”

Singapore-headquartered esports startup Ampverse has raised $12 million in Series A funding led by Falcon Capital. The company says this is the largest Series A raised by an esports organization in Southeast Asia, based on data from PitchBook and other third-party platforms. The round will be used to expand in Indonesia and the Philippines, acquire more esports teams and scale Ampverse’s play-to-earn unit. 

Founded in 2019, Ampverse’s portfolio includes Thai esports brands Bacon and MiTH; Vietnamese team SBTC Esports and India’s 7Sea. Its play-to-earn business allows players to earn rewards by playing games like Axie Infinity, Townstar and Spider Tanks, and also get training from professional esports players. Ampverse has worked with clients like Disney, Samsung, McDonald’s, Nestlé, Lazada and Porsche. 

Ampverse CEO Ferdinand Gutierrez said that the company’s revenue has grown 125% over the last 12 months, during which it expanded into Vietnam and India. 

Gutierrez told TechCrunch that Ampverse was founded because its team saw a “huge opportunity to create a company with IP and products for gaming fans that sits at the intersection of gaming and popular culture, be it esports teams, merchandise product or other fan experiences.” The company’s leadership team has previously held roles at media, entertainment and gaming companies like Havas, Twitch and Universal Music.

He added that expanding into Indonesia and the Philippines will “round off our SEA footprint,” which already includes Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

“We felt these two markets were strategically important markets in SEA, given what dynamic esports markets they are, as well as due to the popularity of games such as Mobile Legends in those markets which complements the existing games titles our teams compete in,” Gutierrez said, noting that Indonesia is the largest gaming market in Southeast Asia. Meanwhile in the Philippines, there are more than 43 million active gamers, a number which has grown by 12.9% yearly since 2017 thanks to the growing accessibility of smartphones.

Other participants in the round include returning investors Vulpes and Gandel Invest, along with individuals like Rob Gilby, former Southeast Asia managing director for Disney; GoGame CEO David Ng; Culture Group CEO Michael Patent; and Marcus John, former vice president of Lagadere and Wolfpack Fund. 

In a prepared statement, Falcon CEO Wil Rondini said, “The growth that the Ampverse team have delivered in a short period is monumental. With their continued esports M&A strategy and play-to-earn vision, we know that the future is bright for Ampverse.”

Sourceful, an Index Ventures-backed supply chain transparency startup, has fast-fuelled with a $20 million Series A around half a year after it announced a $12.2 million seed round. The latest raise is once again led by Index, with Coatue and Eka Ventures also participating.

The 2020-founded startup works with brands to shrink the environmental damage associated with their product sourcing choices in areas like packing, via offering a marketplace of vetted suppliers. The startup also takes on logistics, handling the buying and shipping piece for brands (including a little warehousing if they need it) — monetizing by taking a commission on the overall price.

Sourceful has chosen to focus on packaging for its initial push to help brands reduce their supply chain emissions on account of the ubiquity of the challenge. (Decisions around packaging are also likely to require less lengthy sign-off for brands than environmentally minded design revisions of actual products.)

The startup bakes a packaging design interface into its platform so brands can experiment with design tweaks and see in real time how those choices impact the associated carbon footprint, helping them to make reductions in emissions.

Since we last spoke, it’s gained ISO (International Organization for Standardization) certification for the lifecycle assessment (LCA) methodology it applies so customers get an understanding of the carbon footprint of their product’s supply chain — a development its investors believe will help support faster global scaling.

Commenting in a statement, Danny Rimer, partner at lead investor Index Ventures, said: “Supply chains represent one of the world’s biggest sustainability roadblocks but they also contain one of our biggest opportunities to reduce global emissions.

“Sourceful is spearheading the effort to reduce the carbon footprint of supply chains, with the expertise, data and AI to give businesses the choices and the transparency they never had. Following Sourceful’s recent ISO verification, we believe the brand can go truly global and work with the world’s biggest businesses, to help build tomorrow’s sustainable world economy.”

Sourceful has around 30 customers since it launched the platform in Q1, but says it’s expecting this to step up significantly from here on in.

The Series A funding will go on fuelling the platform’s expansion into international markets, growing its presence in Europe, Asia and the U.S. — including by a plan to double the size of its 65-strong team within the next two years.

It is also planning to develop four new product categories, including integrating lifecycle assessments for plastics into the platform. (The other three packaging areas it’ll be adding are recycled plastics, with dynamic pricing and LCA calculation expected to be integrated into its platform by the end of April; as well as glass; and plastic alternatives.)

Sourceful points to an incoming plastic packaging tax in the U.K., due to start April 1, which will mean some businesses face paying penalties if they’re using plastic packaging with <30% PCR (post-consumer recycled content).

An historic UN resolution signed earlier this month also committed signatories around the world to ending plastic pollution by developing national action plans to curb plastic waste and report progress.

“As we were building the product, we increasingly realised the opportunity was in helping all parts of the supply chain, including the manufacturers, their suppliers and all partners in the network that feed into making the product. Digitising the supply flow has major benefits for a much larger set of parties than we had imagined,” CEO and co-founder Wing Chan tells TechCrunch, fleshing out why it’s dipped back into VC so quickly after what was already a chunky seed raise (albeit one commensurate with the scale of the challenge of reforming supply chains).

“We are also building a company that counters greenwashing in a space where marketing regulation and consumer protection are still limited. We’re taking no shortcuts and have decided to take the road less travelled when it comes to the investment we’re making in certification, supplier and material due diligence, and the data science required to get trusted results,” he adds.

Chan says Sourceful is seeing the most rapid uptake from e-commerce businesses that are prioritising sustainability — suggesting that trend will “only grow in urgency with mounting government regulation and consumer pressure”.

“We are also working with young businesses, because in today’s world, all new brands must put sustainability at heart of what they do,” he adds.

In an illustration of how seemingly small design choices around packaging can add up to noteworthy emissions reductions, Sourceful says its data shows that businesses can halve their carbon footprint by switching base materials and adhesives — such as the choice of gummed tape.

The choice of self-adhesive tape can also shrink environmental impact by up to 20%.

While mailer boxes can be optimized to shrink associated carbon emissions by up to 12% — such as by using custom-sized packaging to reduce void space and visualising and proofing packaging online to reduce the need to deliver samples.

Overall, Sourceful says consumer industries represent three of the top four most-polluting sectors, accounting for around 35% of global emissions — with 83% of those emissions flowing from their supply chains. So there’s no shortage of efficiencies to drive.

The startup further points out that e-commerce packaging in particular has a worsening environmental impact as online sales grow by 15% annually — arguing there’s little visibility or data available on its production and source material footprint, something Sourceful hopes its platform will be able to change.