A series of negative signals about the value of technology companies, the stinging cost of slowing growth at tech concerns, and several ancillary signals from the more speculative regions of the tech market sum to a dramatically changed market.

It’s worth remembering just how wild the last two years have been in startup land. Back in early 2020, as the pandemic barreled into a number of sectors, layoffs swept the startup industry. The cuts were so frequent that a tracker was built to keep tabs on the carnage. Then, as we all recall, investors realized that the tech industry was going to excel during a period of working from home, and here at TechCrunch, we swapped tabulating the latest startup staffing cuts for tracking an accelerating IPO market.

How things have changed.

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For example, if you bought bitcoin one year ago, you’re sitting on more than 30% losses today. As we explored earlier this week, the NFT market is also slowing.

In less speculative areas, there are still signs of a slowdown. Klarna’s 2021 numbers indicate that the BNPL market, a huge startup focus around the world, is going to be an expensive growth proposition. So much so that we could see more combinations in the space as the number of BNPL players surpasses what the market might be able to carry.

The IPO market is another downward signal, with the upcoming calendar of public-market debuts looking essentially barren. Mobileye, yes, will go out, but that’s Intel spinning out a previously public company, so it hardly counts — though we will be watching.

EV companies that soared after they went public are seeing their values crash after they failed to meet 2021 investor targets or 2022 projections.

And investors have decided that a host of the hottest tech companies in the world — the GitLabs, HashiCorps, and other former startups that sell to developers — are worth merely a fraction of what they had previously been valued.

We’re also seeing a return of the need to track staffing cuts at richly funded startups. Looking at recent headlines, we’ve seen layoffs at Hyperscience (growth targets missed, last round $100 million); WeDoctor (layoffs after IPO delays, last round $411 million); and OkCredit (business model refocus, last round $67 million). Indeed, tracker Layoffs.fyi notes that the pace of startup layoffs has risen recently, partially due to Better.com’s successive cuts after its market crumbled from underneath it.

The stakes are not getting lower. This week we saw DocuSign get its valuation whacked after posting slower-than-expected growth guidance. So what, right? We’ve seen that enough times in recent months; we’ve covered the issue to near-death.

It’s been several years since Barcelona-based Typeform tapped investors to grow usage of its “conversational data collection platform”, as it bills the customizable form/survey/quiz builder software it sells. Actually it’s around 4.5 years since its $35M Series B — the result of “sustainable growth while prioritizing efficiency”, as it tells it.

But growth in the no-code/low-code tools space appears to have spurred the (relative) veteran form builder to feel the need to step on the gas — as it’s now announcing close of a $135M Series C.

The round is led by family controlled investment firm Sofina, with participation from existing Typeform investors including General Atlantic, Index Ventures, Point Nine Capital and Connect Ventures, plus new investors Top Tier Capital Partners, GP Bullhound, Teamworthy Ventures and Trium Venture Partners.

Typeform is also disclosing its post-money valuation after this financing round is $935M. And it says that in 2021 it reached $70M ARR — as well as disclosing that it has more than tripled its annualized recurring revenue since 2018. But now sees room to grow further as more businesses look to digital tools to grow their own sales.

“We’re at an inflection point where brands need to offer digital interactions that lead to real connections with customers,” says CEO Joaquim (aka ‘Kim’) Lecha. “There is a massive opportunity for Typeform to provide a differentiated experience, and raising this round will help us accelerate our growth even further. While we’re not prioritizing profitability as we scale, we’ll continue to focus on keeping a healthy runway and predictable ROI.”

Commenting in a statement on the growth opportunity Sofina is also spying here, principal Benjamin Sabatier added: “The accelerated consumer shift to digital channels and increasing importance of digital native brands are driving the need to build closer online engagement with customers. Typeform’s conversational solutions generate higher response rates and provide richer insights to improve consumers’ experiences. Sofina is proud to support Typeform’s vision and dynamic team as it continues to build incredibly versatile solutions that serve a wide-range of use cases.”

The Series C brings Typeform’s total investment to more than $187M since its founding a decade ago, in 2012 — before the explosion of no/low code tools we’ve seen coming to market in recent years, touting a whole range of services that claim to make it easier for non-techie professionals to build and deploy their own custom digital experiences and workflows, from website ‘lander’ chat bots to auto-rendering design elements as code and plenty more besides.

So on the one hand you could say Typeform was ahead of the no-code curve. But, on the other, there’s now very evidently a lot more competition in the marketing tech space it’s chasing than there used to be — all the way back when Typeform’s founders came up with the idea of deconstructing and beautifying online forms with a little designer (white) space to drive engagement.

And that, in turn, implies greater investment is needed to meet rising demand and fend off competitive threats.

Lecha says the new funding will be put towards more product dev, increasing accessibility and additional integrations. It will also be expanding its 450-strong remote working team globally as it seeks to swell the 500M+ “interactions” its products currently generate each year.

Typeform has already expanded out from its first focus on ‘design-led’ forms — offering adjacent products like Typeform Chat, a no-code chatbot builder.

Online form building itself is a fairly commoditized function with plenty of competition, including from long time players like Jotform and GoCanvas, through to companies of a similar age as Typeform (like Cognito Forms), right up to tech giants like Google and Microsoft. Plus there is no shortage of chat bot builder tools these days, either. Hence Typeform’s keenness to position its business as a “conversational” data collection platform; tl;dr its USP is not the data capture itself — it’s how it’s being gathered that counts.

And on that front the pitch is Typeform’s design-led, personalized approach makes (what could otherwise be clinical) digital interactions “feel like a personal conversation”, as Lecha puts it — by providing its users with a customizable digital canvas and tools to showcase their brand through the medium of slicker audience engagement during outreach.

The follow-on premise is data collection done well can forge stronger connections and gather better intel that helps convert potential customers — so data capture itself becomes a selling opportunity to be leant into not a box to be checked. (And to back that up Lecha gives the example of a lead generation survey Typeform distributed to its own users which he says found that leads collected using its tools “have a qualification rate higher than 95%”.)

“With Typeform, customers interact with a brand through a suite of interfaces that are fun and interactive, yet have the feel of a personal, one-to-one conversation,” he adds.

Typeform’s design-led approach to marketing outreach (Image credits: Typeform)

The pitch looks to be paying off: Typeform has some 125,000+ paying customers for its products at this stage.

It does also offer a free plan — giving it a pool of users to upsell paid plans which offer tiered rates based on usage, as well as stepping up to supporting white labelling and bolting on additional functionality (such as analytics and priority support).

“We’re using this funding to support our focus on becoming the essential platform for the marketing tech stack,” Lecha tells TechCrunch. “The gold standard for digital interactions that feel like real conversations. We want to enhance the ways we solve for the mission-critical workflows that allow our customers to truly engage with their audiences and grow their businesses.

“To do that, we want to continue adding more features while reinforcing ease-of-use of our products, provide more ways to share and embed typeforms, and add new customization tools that allow for even stronger, bespoke expression of our customers’ brands.

“Our approach and technology leads to insights that are exceptionally valuable, so we want to put more power into the hands of our customers to take action on those insights by bolstering our data visualizations, analytics and optimization tools. We also know that our customers need to use Typeform in conjunction with many other tools — we integrate with apps across the tech stack, and will continue to develop even more integrations with technology partners.”

Discussing the competitive landscape in the “conversational experience space” — aka, personalized marketing outreach that feels more friendly, approachable and reactive than a static form — he also argues there’s plenty of cross-over that allows for rivals to work together on integrations.

“The conversational experience space is fascinating, in that competitors can also have complementary products and even integrate with solutions that might also be considered competitors. Companies like Qualtrics, Intercom, Hubspot, etc are some examples of companies that offer tools that compete with Typeform in some ways but we also have worked with many of them to build integrations,” he suggests.

“Our focus is on building the best possible solution for our customers, and in many cases that means meeting them where they and their stakeholders are and finding ways to work well with all the solutions in their tech stack — we do whatever we can to help businesses grow and engage their audiences.”

So while tech giants like Google and Microsoft do offer their own form-builder tools (among their wider suite of enterprise tools), Typeform is happy to integrate — letting its users “import, analyze and augment their data and processes” across tools like Google Forms, Office 365, Excel Online, Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, per Lecha.

“Compared to other options, we offer a unique combination of both the best interaction experience and the ability for businesses to create highly customized interactions across multiple types of interactions, whether it be forms, chats or video,” he further argues.

Typeform is using some AI/machine learning to increase product personalization — such as via its VideoAsk product, which it launched following its last funding raise, to let customers to create videos that combine chatbot automation “and the personal touch of video” — enabling “asynchronous video conversations” that blend the efficiency of automation with a more human/”face-to-face” feel.

“VideoAsk uses the AI model GTP-3 to understand what is being said in video response, then provide the best response based on conditional logic,” notes Lecha, adding: “Our AI also fuels seamless speech-to-text transcription for conversations in English, German, Dutch, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Swedish, Russian, and Turkish.”

Usage of Typeform’s product spans a variety of industries and services — including ecommerce, professional services and software, and academia.

While under the primary customer use-case of growing a business/engaging an audience (other use cases include recruitment, customer feedback, employee outreach etc), Typeform can manifest as “interactive forms, video and chat to do mission-critical jobs like collecting leads, qualifying customers, and engaging them for a long-term relationship”, per Lecha, who notes the software is also used for conducting research, providing personalized customer service, and collecting feedback.

“Interaction is at the core of every job our customers do,” he adds.

“We also know that when Typeform is embedded across mission-critical work flows, leveraged by multiple core functions and deployed across a variety of use cases, we help our customers discover new opportunities, create and execute plans based on actionable insights, and grow their audience — this is why we’re investing in building out our already powerful integration options.”

Typeform CEO Kim Lecha (left) and co-founder David Okuniev (Image credits: Typeform)

While the majority of Typeform’s customers are making use of its free plan, so aren’t currently generating any revenue for it, Lecha says that more than two-thirds of paying customers started as free users.

He also touts a high rate of organic growth, saying around 80% of new customers sign up — “because they or someone they know has had a great experience with Typeform’s tools in the past” — underlining the pulling power of freemium.

“We definitely see that the flywheel powered by our products continues to inspire loyalty once a user sees all the ways they can use Typeform to interact with their audiences throughout the funnel — that’s why so many users who start with our free version end up becoming paid customers, unlocking more and more value,” he suggests.

The US remains Typeform’s largest market (both for users and revenues), followed by Europe.

While Typeform is not yet profitable, Lecha described the business as “well positioned to prioritize profitability when the time is right” — again as a result of continued attention to operational efficiency.

“For now we’re focused on scaling our business and provide the gold standard of online interactions,” he adds.

Asked what Typeform’s investment roadmap looks like from here on in — and whether an IPO is something it’s actively considering — Lecha sidesteps the question, saying only: “Our strategy is always driven by our focus on our customer — we’re confident in our plan to grow efficiently and effectively meet the increasing demand for our solutions. As we continue on our journey to create a world of more personal business relationships, we’ll certainly consider whatever options help us achieve our vision.”

The business of building for and selling to developers is big. Startups around the world are busy creating new developer-focused — or at least developer-forward — solutions at a rapid clip.

The “developer tools” tag on TechCrunch has been busy this year. We’ve covered recent news in the space from Hardhat, CodeSee, Harness and Gadget, to share a few individual items.

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The concept of selling to developers is attractive. Many startups are building in an API-first way, creating tools and services that software engineers can hook into their existing products or workflows. This creates a dynamic where sales are often self-serve and pricing is based more on usage than the per-seat model that SaaS made ubiquitous.

Investors are also enthused by building stuff for developers and selling directly to their end-user. Data indicates that more than $37 billion went into developer tools startups last year, a huge sum for any category.

The space we’re describing is broad, including companies like Hashicorp, which went public last year and builds developer tools relating to infrastructure and security. GitLab also went public last year on the back of its git-style code repo service for devs. And Samsara went public as 2021 came to a close, selling IoT solutions to developers, including an API.

You might think that with venture capital piling into the technology business model category and a number of recent IPOs to point to, the market for such work would be hotter than ever. And yet.

Boldstart Ventures’ Ed Sim noted yesterday that public developer- and infrastructure-focused startups are seeing their valuations fall in recent quarters:

Naturally, this got us thinking, as the wave of 2021 venture capital that developer-first products raised was partially predicated on that year’s public market-signaled valuations. And those have come down dramatically. The trend is not precisely new, though recent data does make the point very clear.

It’s worth mentally circling back to the C3.ai IPO from late 2020. The company’s growth story was a little odd, and its pricing was seemingly a little rich. Then it shot out the public-market gate like a racehorse, pushing its valuation into the stratosphere. Since then, however, things have changed.

Guide, a startup building HR software for job candidates, announced this morning that it has raised an $8 million seed round. First Round and Spero Ventures led the event, which also saw participation from a number of smaller investors.

Guide fits into a larger theme that TechCrunch is tracking regarding the HR world and how startups are busy writing software to shake it up. Last November, Chinese HR tech startup Moka raised $100 million. More recently, Sense raised $50 million, while Darwinbox raised $72 million. And that’s just a sampling; we’ve spilled a lot more ink than that on the matter in the last few quarters.

But while HR tech is often focused on the company — Forma raised this week after building a “discretionary benefits management platform” for human resources teams, for example — Guide is more focused on individuals outside.

There’s no need to get deep into how being a job candidate can be a confusing process. Companies hold all the information, and small internal mixups at a company can make the candidate experience a hot mess. And it’s stressful as hell. We all know this. The question ahead is whether Guide has built something that is materially better for candidates — and whether it will work as a scaled business.

How does Guide work?

TechCrunch spoke with Guide co-founder and CEO Troy Sultan about his company’s product. Guide creates an online hub for job candidates where companies can post videos, documents and links about their team and the role in question. Guide provides a way for companies to better communicate with candidates, essentially, while giving the job-seeker a place where they can see how their interview process is progressing; the startup’s software has a tracker at the top of the candidate view showing what interviews are next, with whom, and about what, meaning that those outside the company have more information about the interview process than is typical.

There’s some neat tech involved. Guide links up with applicant tracking systems, or ATSs, like Greenhouse. Recruiters can “map” different stages of candidate interviews to Guide so that they can work in their ATS and keep candidates current in Guide. The startup’s product also tracks use, giving recruiting staff insight into candidate engagement and other metrics.

The result of the work, Sultan said, is an improved win rate for hiring desired candidates. Given how competitive the market is today for talent, companies may be willing to pay for an edge. How much? Guide starts at around $10,000 per year, which might sound like a lot if you haven’t hired external recruiters to fill roles before. Companies spend a lot of recruiting, so Guide’s price point might not cause potential customers to balk.

Today Guide has roughly a dozen staff and is looking to scale to around 30 by the end of the year. It certainly has the capital now to do so. Let’s see how far Guide can boost its own scale this year.

Despite the fact that we spend more on healthcare per capita, the U.S. leads the wealthy world in maternal mortality. And health inequity plays a big part.

Zaya Care, founded by Leoni Runge, operates here in the States but is modeled after the European maternal care system, and wants to change things. (European maternal outcomes are superior to those in the United States.)

Right now, one of the biggest issues that expectant and new mothers face is that care from their gynecologist ends as soon as they leave the hospital after giving birth. And to be fair, much of the care they need in the postpartum period should be delivered by other types of specialists, like pelvic floor therapists, postpartum mental healthcare providers, acupuncturists and others.

Unfortunately, however, most of these specialists aren’t covered by insurance providers. And the ones who are are in short supply, while others can cost quite a bit. The reason for this is that many of these specialists run their own small practice, and the administrative burden of working alongside insurance providers is high, for less reimbursement.

Zaya is working to group up these providers and negotiate on their behalf to the insurance providers, handling the administrative side of things and getting better reimbursements.

The startup’s CEO Runge grew up in Germany, where her sister is a OB/GYN. She saw how the medical system there wrapped around the entire experience of pregnancy, from conception to postpartum care, with service providers even coming to the patient in their own homes.

Tackling the problem here in the States was not a matter of building a great product, though the administrative functionality of Zaya’s platform is mission-critical. Rather, it was about solving for distribution, both on the provider and the patient side.

In a recent conversation with Kindred Ventures‘ Kanyi Maqubela, he explained that, for healthtech companies, distribution is the product.

Right now, Zaya is partnered with Emblem Health, Aetna, and United Healthcare, and is working to bring more insurance providers onto the platform. The platform currently has 50 providers visible and available to patients, with over 500 on the waiting list to get vetted and join Zaya.

I asked Runge if the company was looking at CityBlock as a leader when trying to rearrange the healthcare system while working within its existing boundaries. She explained that Toyin Ajayi, Cityblock cofounder and president, was actually an investor in the round and has been instrumental in workshopping the platform and product.

The startup recently raised a $7.6 million round led by Inspired Capital, with participation from Story Ventures, Tiger Global, Operator Partners, and founders and executives from Oscar Health, Dispatch Health and Headway.

Zaya isn’t the first company to recognize the issue with maternal care. Mombox is looking to offer moms a curated kit of postnatal products to help a mom through their first several weeks of recovery. Oula, Poppyseed Health, and Oova, and of course bigger companies like Modern Fertility are all playing in this space.

Considering the size of the problem, seems like it very well may take a village.

Public came to the market’s attention during the 2020-2021 savings and investing boom, a period of time that elevated Robinhood and Coinbase to the public markets. Public, initially built along similar lines to Robinhood, has pivoted away from payment-for-order-flow (PFOF) incomes, added crypto to its service and broadened its board in recent months.

The mix of product and corporate decisions appears to be working for Public, at least in terms of leading indicators. According to co-CEO Leif Abraham, Public now has 3 million users. The company also announced this morning that it has purchased Otis, a startup that allows consumers to buy and trade fractional shares in individual alternative assets.

What sort of assets? Otis founder Michael Karnjanaprakorn gave TechCrunch a few examples of assets that his company makes available to its user base, including a shoe from a famous basketball player that has a piece of backboard embedded in it (the star player shattered the board in a game) and richly valued NFTs.

The purchase price of Otis was not disclosed, but given that the smaller company had raised $16.5 million before its sale, per Crunchbase data, we’d estimate the transaction’s value at mid-to-high eight figures, probably weighted toward stock over cash.

But more to the point, why is Public buying Otis? And how does it fit into Public’s non-PFOF future? That’s what we wanted to figure out. Let’s talk about it.

Public x Otis

Otis calls itself the “stock market for culture,” which is a pretty good tagline as far as such things go. The company’s service scaled to 100,000 users, per Karnjanaprakorn, and 125 listed assets before it sold to Public.

How does Otis work? The company takes individual goods public in what is called a Reg A+ offering, or a sort of IPO lite. From there, its users can buy and sell stakes in the goods.

What Otis assets may look like inside Public. Image Credit: Public

Sometimes, the underlying asset is bought out wholesale by an individual or entity. In those cases, Otis works to make sure that the bid is real, and then allows owners in the asset to vote on a potential sale. As with all public-market M&A, a premium is usually involved.

All this is neat, yes, but where Otis gets even more interesting is in its business possibilities for its new parent company. It gets paid when an asset is listed, and when users trade shares in the item. Per Abraham, this will work out to 5% in the listing of an item and a 2% cut of secondary trades.

For Public, which essentially decided to blaze its own path in zero-cost equity trading by turning away from PFOF incomes, adding a business unit that has a transactional revenue model means that its own revenue base will expand. And if Public can help Otis list more assets and get its users aboard the alt-asset train, alt-asset transactions could grow into a material income stream. (Public has other plans coming, Abraham said, hinting that something that rhymes with slubskripshlun is on the way this year.)

Karnjanaprakorn thinks that Public’s growing user base represents a real chance for Otis to expand the market for fractionalized asset listing and trading. And his new parent company certainly has raised a lot of capital, giving it financial power that Otis lacked, meaning that it may be able to list more total items, boosting in-market demand for the company’s product; Karnjanaprakorn said that what’s neat about the sort of product that Otis lists is that they come with their own fan base, so perhaps the smaller company will be able to juice Public’s own user growth.

TechCrunch is curious about the data side of the equation. If Otis and Public manage to list lots of alternative assets and generate a liquid market around them, they will have managed to create a stream of price data on what are normally illiquid assets. That will be valuable — if they can monetize it within normal privacy bounds.

Ahead

That Robinhood has struggled since its IPO is hardly a secret. The company’s stock peaked at more than $80 per share before falling to $11.75 as of the close of trading Tuesday. This is at once a worry and a boon to Public. It’s never great when a public comp suffers if you are the private competitor. But Robinhood’s declines indicate that PFOF revenues that scale neatly with volume can hit reverse when underlying volume falls. And the stock market is famous for its ups and downs.

Public still has a road ahead of it to show that it can generate massive revenues from its own take on consumer trading with a community focus. More when we have it.

Meet Atlantic Money, a foreign exchange startup that plans to be cheaper than other foreign exchange services. If that pitch sounds familiar, that’s because Wise, the company formerly known as TransferWise, originally appeared on the startup scene with the same promise.

And yet, Atlantic Money thinks that even Wise and Revolut are too expensive. According to the company, they try to do too many things at once and they end up charging customers for things they don’t need.

How much will you pay for international money transfers on Atlantic Money? The company will charge a £3 flat fee and that’s it. There will be no markup on the exchange rate that they can secure.

For small transfers, £3 is quite a lot. But once you start transferring more than £1,000, Atlantic Money becomes more competitive.

And this is key to Atlantic Money’s business model. Instead of charging progressive fees, the startup wants to move to a fixed, per transaction fee.

Image Credits: Atlantic Money

Founded by Neeraj Baid and Patrick Kavanagh, the pair originally met in their previous jobs at Robinhood. The startup has raised a $4.5 million seed round led by Amplo and Ribbit Capital. Robinhood’s founders Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt also invested in the company. Webull’s Anquan Wang is an investor as well.

The startup is launching a handful of corridors at first. More specifically, users who sign up today can send money from the U.K. in GBP into nine currencies — USD, EUR, AUD, CAD, SEK, NOK, DKK, PLN and CZK. When it comes to payment methods, Atlantic Money currently focuses on local bank transfers. Standard transfers take two to three business days while express transfers should arrive within a day.

Behind the scenes, the company partners with several large financial institutions that can provide a good foreign exchange rate. Atlantic Money picks the best rate and doesn’t add any markup fee. It’s going to be interesting to see if Atlantic Money can provide better rates than its competitors.

At the time of writing, when you try to transfer £5,000 to the U.S., it currently costs £17.79 in fees on Wise — you receive $6,648.51. With a free Revolut account, you pay £20.96 in fees in addition to the £5,000 you want to convert. However, the exchange rate is slightly better as you receive around $6,700 in exchange for £5,020.96.

Of course, Revolut provides other services, such as bank accounts, cards, the ability to trade stocks and cryptocurrencies, etc. You can pay £6.99 per month for a premium account and waive fees on currency exchange. However, it’s a 12-month plan, so you may end up paying more in subscription fees than in FX fees depending on your Revolut usage.

Similarly, Wise lets you generate local account details in a dozen countries, which could be useful to get paid in a country where you don’t live. Wise also tries to make transfers as quick as possible — 45% of Wise transfers arrive in 20 seconds or less.

In other words, there is room for more than just one foreign exchange product. It’s not a one-size-fits-all industry. Customers will end up picking a service depending on the corridor they use most often, their average transfer size and the additional features they might need. But if you just want to move large amounts from the U.K. to Europe or Northern America, you could potentially become an Atlantic Money user.

Image Credits: Atlantic Money

While working her way through grad school, Opaper founder Joan McIntosh ran an online bakery. “I would wake up at 3AM, 4AM, go to a commercial kitchen and go door to door, delivering food or putting it in grocery stores.” After graduating, McIntosh’s professional life became decidedly more high tech—she was senior product manager for data and machine learning platforms at Streetlight Data and then Lacuna Technologies. On a return trip to Southeast Asia (McIntosh was born and raised in Indonesia), she observed the rise of social commerce, or people selling through social media like Instagram and WhatsApp, and was surprised to see it was similar to all the manual work she had put into her online bakery years earlier.

“Everything was the same with how I did it,” McIntosh said. “I was just so baffled after working in tech for so many years, like why has nobody improved the process? Why is it still very manual? Why are you sending sellers payment, and then proof of payment like screenshots of bank transfers?”

While at Streetlight Data and Lacuna, McIntosh worked on products that optimized pricing, logistics and the supply chain, or “making sure that things are moving the right way, at the right speed, at the right cadence,” she said. Opaper was launched to give social commerce sellers the same type of convenience. After building a minimum viable product that allows social commerce sellers to create an online store, Opaper started onboarding users and raised an oversubscribed seed round of $1 million.

Investors include Precursor Ventures, Ratio Ventures, OnDeck, and angel investors Jay Eum, managing partner of GFT Ventures; Bora Chung, chief experience officer at Bill.com and Frank Nawabi, executive at Google and founder of Google-acquired Tenor, last year. Then it built a fully-remote team of 27 people in less than a year.

Now Opaper is available on Android and iOS and just four months after launching, has almost 19,000 sellers in 100 cities onboarded.

It targets small vendors, usually one or two people, who are at the point where they have about $2,000 to $5,000 USD gross merchandise value and want to scale, but can’t because they are busy answering questions and taking orders through WhatsApp. “They need time to focus on their product and think about how they can have an offline stores or maybe how to do franchises,” said McIntosh. “Those are the types of customers that we get to focus on more and more these days. It’s not somebody who already has three outlets. It’s somebody who has already started and is screaming ‘how to scale, how to scale?’”

While Opaper isn’t targeted to any particular sector, McIntosh said the majority of the businesses it works with are food and beverage companies, including ones that want to avoid the high commissions of third-party delivery apps. Opaper is integrated with 13 different shipping carriers that sellers can offer to their buyers, as well as e-wallets and bank transfers for payments.

For customers, Opaper means they don’t have to message back-and-forth with sellers, picking what goods they want, arranging payment and delivery. Instead, they go to the Opaper link in the seller’s profile and add things to a basket like any other online store. But Opaper doesn’t just make it easier for people to order goods on social media. It also lets sellers “own the direct to consumer experience,” McIntosh said.

Opaper lets seller keep track of that kind of customer data, so they can use it for re-engagement and re-targeting. Overtime, it also plans to build more supply chain and inventory management tools for sellers, since many social commerce sales are pre-orders. “When I was a bakery owner, I wanted to make sure I knew how much a person was buying so I could retarget them with coupons or loyalty points. It’s something you don’t really get easily from [third-party] marketplaces,” she said.

Demand for talent continues to make tech recruitment a hotbed of startup activity. To wit: Madrid-based startup Circular.io which is now expanding its “talent sharing platform” — initially focused on tech skills — into the UK (opening to in-house tech recruiters in London from today).

It is also revealing $10 million in combined seed and pre-Series A funding as it emerges from stealth. Investors backing the Spanish startup include LocalGlobe, Point Nine and Kibo Ventures.

The 2019-founded recruitment startup may have been operating under the publicity radar but it’s signed up more than 5,500 in-house recruiters to its recommendation-focused community over the past 2.5 years of development, as well as claiming more than 19,000 candidates.

It claims it’s developed a new model for hiring — using a platform approach which encourages companies to recommend tech talent they were unable to hire to Circular’s recruitment network. So far it says this has resulted in “vetted and recommended” candidates converting 10x more than conventional recruitment methods — ergo, the top-line claim is the approach can make it  “easier and quicker to find great tech candidates who want to be hired”.

Candidates who sign up to the platform do so confidentially, meaning they open themselves to job opportunities available via the network without needing to commit themselves to a public disclosure or active job searching themselves.

Circular supports tech talent to nail down its next role through a team of what it bills as “talent advocates” — who provide assistance to candidates on locating suitable roles and on getting the initial in-house recruiter recommendation that will increase their chances of being shortlisted by employers hiring through the platform.

Companies signed up to tap into Circular’s referral-focused approach to hiring include FORM3, Echobox, Dow Jones and Busuu, it notes.

“While talent-sharing behaviour is not new and in-house recruiters have been introducing talent they liked but didn’t hire to colleagues or friends in the industry for many years, it’s been informal, unstructured and has happened in low-trust environments, limiting its effectiveness and causing compliance and privacy issues,” argues the startup. “At Circular, we use technology to make this happen at scale by creating trust, reducing friction and offering the right incentives. It’s a new recruitment model built on top of existing recommendation based behaviour.”

“At scale, this recommendation effect creates efficiency in the industry because companies are already spending time and money attracting and interviewing candidates which they eventually don’t hire. We allow them to recommend this talent to their peers and gain access to other recommended candidates in return,” it adds. “Similarly, candidates are spending time taking part in interviews and code tests — we allow them to leverage that effort in other job opportunities.”

While there has been plenty of startup attention to recruitment in the nearly two decades since LinkedIn busted onto the professional networking scene, Circular dismisses a lot of the activity — as “niche job boards or ‘AI’ sourcing tools that overpromise and underdeliver”.

As a result, it’s leaning into human referrals vs machine-matching — by encouraging in-house recruiters to pool existing effort undertaken in vetting potential candidates which they ended up being unable to hire.

Why should hyper busy in-house recruiters bother doing that? “The main incentive is improving candidate experience,” it suggests. “By recommending strong candidates that they were unable to hire, in-house recruiters can leave candidates with a positive impression of their company despite the rejection.”

Circular’s follow-on claim is it’s therefore creating “a new category” — or “literally changing the way hiring works”.

“Instead of a hard-stop for the great talent that in-house recruiters were unable to hire, we enable them to easily recommend that talent. Other in-house recruiters, who are hiring, get access to a trusted flow of high quality candidates. And candidates benefit from getting straight to the best companies’ shortlists,” it suggests.

Whether this vetted and curated candidate approach will scale — i.e. without recommendation quality getting diluted in the quest to scale the size of the platform/grow its business — is one question to consider, given how relatively few job seekers (per advertised role) actually get interviewed/thoroughly vetted and also aren’t ultimately hired.

That classic ratio suggests a pretty limited pool of candidates who could be recommended to/through Circular, unless conditions to access its recruitment network are rather less stringent.

And on that front its website FAQ notes work undertaken by Circular “talent advocates” (i.e. on behalf of signed up job seekers) includes “helping you get recommended” — so, clearly, it’s not leaving the size of its recruitment network/scalability of its business purely to the proactive goodwill of in-house recruiters.

It does also confirm to us that it lets candidates “sign up organically”, not only via direct recommendations.

(While, elsewhere on the website, in a section on how the platform works, Circular further writes that candidates can create a profile in less than 3min and: “Get an optional recommendation from in-house recruiters, colleagues or our team” — so the concept of a recommendation on the platform is demonstrably fairly malleable.)

The startup is also dangling some platform reputation kudos and other incentives to encourage in-house tech recruiters to make the effort to refer talent they don’t hire — touting an incoming rewards program comprised of discounts and giveaways (such as event tickets/merch) for the “most active recommenders in the community”.

“In-house recruiters are getting sick of the ‘battle for talent’,” it also argues. “Tech recruiters know that they’re after the same candidates as everyone else. They know that there’s no advantage in pure competitiveness. And they know that the traditional recruitment model is letting everyone down and leaving candidates with a poor experience and a negative perception of their business.  Most of them know it’s better to pool their efforts to find talent and fill roles quickly and painlessly. Their reputation in Circular grows as they refer candidates and help their peers.”

While Circular is zeroing in on tech talent — encouraged by tech companies’ willingness to be early adopters of newfangled tools — it believes its model could work for other industries too.

“From a candidate perspective our model can be replicated across the board,” it argues. “We assign candidates with real-life Talent Advocates to act on their behalf, ensuring they’re on shortlists for the best roles. They provide transparent information, including salary and benefits, keep them in the know, and provide in-depth feedback. And it’s all 100% confidential. We take candidate experience very seriously. Candidates in Circular rate their interview process when they end and poorly rated companies are rejected from the network.”

Its own business model is to charge companies a SaaS-style flat annual or monthly fee for access to its recruitment network, rather than taking a “traditional success fee approach” — arguing the latter is part of what “makes this industry so transactional and cold”.

And while that means employers who sign up have to  shell out an ongoing fee, Circular notes that as it opens in a new market it offers customers the “first few months” free — so they can kick the tyres of its referral-based spin on hiring gratis.

As well as (now) London, Circular’s recruitment network is live in Barcelona and Madrid.

Blocknom, a crypto-earning platform in Y Combinator’s current batch, has aspirations to become the “Coinbase Earn for Southeast Asia.” Today the company announced it has raised $500,000 in pre-seed funding from Y Combinator, Number Capital and Magic Fund.

Blocknom’s co-founders, Fransiskus Raymond and Ghuniyu Fattah Rozaq say the app gives users a secure way (it partners with crypto infrastructure company Fireblocks) to get stable, high-yield interest of up to 13% per annum. It also enables users to withdraw their money at any time without fees.

The two founders met while working on an open source project in 2020, around the start of the pandemic. “We noticed during COVID, the crypto market is booming in Indonesia, while we were both already crypto investors,” Raymond told TechCrunch.

“We talked to users and found that not everyone can do well in trading.” They found that DeFi is a stable and high-yield way to gain through crypto, but there were no competing products in Indonesia, so they decided to build one themselves. Its DeFi partners include Compound, AAVE, Terra and Cake.

After signing up for Blocknom, users with a bank account can deposit Stablecoins, which the founders chose because it is the most comparable to conventional bank deposits and therefore accessible to new crypto users.

Raymond said Blocknom differentiates from investment apps by encouraging people to save and hold their Stablecoin for the long-term.

Decipad, a no-code startup that’s aiming to disrupt spreadsheets with accessible tools that empower people to play around with numbers, has nabbed $5 million in seed funding. Put simply, it’s building an interactive notebook to help non-technical people do data modelling.

“We are building for people that lack the technical skill to do cool things with data and numbers but have ideas and expertise that they want to bring to life and share with the world,” says co-founder and CCO Kelly McEttrick, who’s previously clocked time at Facebook and LinkedIn, among other tech industry roles.

She sums up the product as “an interactive notebook to build models easily and quickly for anything and share and reuse knowledge”, and hints at the intended utility when she says: “Coding is just a means to build something. Knowing what to build and what problems to solve is the hard part.”

Asked for a brief description of how the product works McEttrick says users can create a blank notebook and “just start writing or reuse and build upon ideas from other creators” — adding that the idea is to offer “a more human way to write with numbers and interactive no-code elements to achieve more with data”.

Sample use-cases cited on Decipad’s website put a little more meat on the bones, saying the product could be used for analyzing climate change; balancing cash flows; exploring crypto; and choosing the right mortgage — so it’s targeting a blend of users and use-cases, both professional and personal.

The startup, which was founded in January 2021, is offering a beta version of the product currently but says it expects to launch more fully in a few months.

The idea for Decipad was sparked when its other co-founder, Nuno Job, was running YLD, an engineering and design consultancy which worked with a range of businesses.

“That experience really highlighted for me the gap between tools for programmers and everyone else,” he tells TechCrunch. “It was just so complicated for non-developers to meaningfully collaborate and contribute to modern businesses in a data-driven way. They either got stuck in Excel, or needed a developer/analyst to achieve a goal.

“As an open source developer, we create so much knowledge from working together. Outside that, we are still emailing excel files, hoping they work and then answering a bunch of questions to explain what they mean; ‘can you explain this Excel sheet to me’ is unfortunately a common, accepted practice.”

There has of course been a veritable ‘Cambrian explosion’ of no/low-code tools in recent years — and Decipad sits firmly inside that trend. But McEttrick also points to the emergence of notebook-based data programming tools, such as Jupyter Notebooks — which have been adopted by data scientists and open source communities “to create powerful insights and collaborate more effectively with numbers”.

“These tools require expertise in programming languages like Python that can take years to learn, and even longer to master,” she adds, emphasizing that Decipad’s team wanted to build something a whole lot more accessible.

Given that broad reach, the startup is intentionally not targeting the tool for any specific use-case — which sets it apart from the (equally extensive) wave of SaaS startups now going after particular business needs or niches (such as regulatory compliance).

McEttrick also confirms Decipad will offer a free and paid version of its forthcoming product so it sounds like it’s planning a freemium business model to maximize access.

“We are intentionally taking a more generalist approach,” she confirms, adding: “With today’s access to data, the rise of no-code and a shifting culture toward creating in the open, we see an opportunity for a new, more modern approach to data analysis and knowledge collaboration that can’t be fragile to specific use cases.

“We intend to be the canvas for people’s imagination with numbers and empowering people and teams to create content that will drive value for other. We are not specializing on demand.”

A sample Decipad notebook (Image credits: Decipad)

She also argues that the current way humans approach analyzing numbers has been fragmented across multiple types of spreadsheets and/or vertical apps built on top of spreadsheets — exactly to do specific stuff like financial planning. “But, nothing has really stuck. We think the focus is upside down. It’s not about the use cases for specific customers. We see ourselves as a service enabling communities and businesses to create value through what they create on Decipad, not a vertical SaaS tool.

“From sales forecasting to analyzing vaccination rates to exploring crypto, we are giving people a flexible canvas to shape and express their world views in a data-driven way that other people can understand, build upon and reuse.”

McEttrick also talks in terms of Decipad wanting to empower the “modern creator” and enable “the future of work”.

“We believe people should be able to monetize the things they build on Decipad and the data-driven knowledge they share,” she says, hinting at a platform or even marketplace component to the business model (although she declines to discuss specifics).

“We believe the next generation of software is about digital ownership, and about the rise of the consumer,” she adds. “We are empowering users with tools that are easier and more intuitive to use but also connected to a community for shared learning and advancement.”

On the competition front, as well as obvious spreadsheet giants like Excel and Google Sheets, Decipad suggests it’s competing in the work productivity space with tools such as Notion or Airtable — saying it wants to be thought of as a kind of “Notion for numbers”.

The seed round was co-led by Entrée Capital and Target Global, with participation from Flybridge Capital, Founder Collective, Shilling VC, Angel Invest Ventures, and some unnamed angel investors (from companies including Airtable and Auth0).

Shares has closed a $40 million Series A funding round led by Valar Ventures. The company has been working on a mobile app that lets you easily buy and sell shares, but with a social twist. You can follow your friends’ moves and talk with other users directly from the app.

Today, the company is also launching its app on the App Store and Google Play. It is only available to people based in the U.K. for now, but the company expects to expand to other European countries in the future.

Valar Ventures already participated in the company’s $10 million seed round. This time, Valar Ventures is leading the Series A with other existing investors Singular, Global Founders Capital and Red Sea Ventures putting more money in the company.

In other words, Shares wants to execute quickly. It has raised a total of $50 million in just nine months. The startup now has 130 full-time employees in London, Paris and Krakow.

Shares thinks that they’re still too many barriers to entry if you want to get started and invest in public companies. In particular, Shares wants to make stock trading more accessible from a financial point of view and less daunting thanks to social features.

The startup ticks all the right boxes for a new trading service. It is a mobile-first experience meaning that new users only have to download a new app and follow the instructions to create an account.

Image Credits: Shares

Users can buy fractional shares — they can get started with £1.00. There are no trading fees but there could be some spread between the buy and sell price. According to the trading terms, Shares currently partners with Alpaca Securities LLC, which acts as the execution broker.

But Shares doesn’t just want to offer an alternative to Freetrade, Trade Republic or Bitpanda. In addition to stock trading, Shares users can discuss investments with friends and family members.

Users can create discussion groups and share their financial thoughts with other users. There is also a sort of investment feed that looks like Venmo’s social feed. From that tab, you can see when your friends buy and sell shares. You can also like a post and write comments.

While Venmo’s social feed isn’t particularly useful, an activity feed for stock trading makes more sense. It’s going to be interesting to see if adding those features directly in the trading app will be enough to lure people away from WhatsApp and Telegram investment groups.