Dating app company Bumble, Inc. is making its first acquisition with today’s news that it’s adding the fast-growing French dating app Fruitz to its family of applications. Though Bumble, Inc. already has an international footprint as the parent company to Badoo, which is particularly popular in Europe, it sees the addition of Fruitz as a way to gain more traction with a younger, Gen Z audience.

Deal terms were not being disclosed.

The quirky app Fruitz takes an unconventional approach to help users find matches, as it assigns a fruit to each particular kind of relationship type, ranging from those who want long-term commitments to those in search of one-night action. This allows users to filter out those who aren’t on the same page as them. It also prompts users to answer questions that serve ice breakers before messaging their match.

Fruitz was co-founded by Julian Kabab (CEO), Fabrice Bascoulergue (CTO), and Arnaud Ruols (CFO) and initially launched in France on Feb. 1, 2017. Kabab said the idea for the app came from his own attempt at using dating apps, where he was matched with someone who had different intentions in terms of what they wanted out of the experience.

“Expressing what you’re looking for is not easy because we’re fearful of being judged. As a result, no one was being honest with their intentions and everyone was wasting each other’s time,” he said. “Empowering people to be honest with their intentions was our first mission.”

Image Credits: Fruitz

To date, Fruitz has been downloaded 5.6 million times globally across the App Store and Google Play, according to Sensor Tower data. As of Feb. 3, 2022, the app was ranked No. 4 on the iPhone’s top free charts in the “Lifestyle” category in its home market of France.

Like many modern-day dating apps, it offers a swipe-based interface and a freemium experience.

For Bumble, however, the draw was not necessarily in the app’s unique features but rather its demographic. The company saw how Fruitz had particular reach with Gen Z, a growing audience in the dating app market. The app also was gaining traction in key Western European countries, including France, Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland, and Spain, in addition to seeing rapid growth in Canada.

“Fruitz is a brand and leadership team that I’ve been following for years,” said Bumble founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd, in a statement. “Julian, Fabrice, and Arnaud are dynamic and brilliant leaders who have built a unique product that has struck a powerful chord with consumers in France and across Europe. By plugging the app into our technology platform, community support, brand and growth marketing, we can accelerate Fruitz’s growth,” she said. “The acquisition of Fruitz allows us to expand our product offering for consumers in line with our focus on empowering relationships.”

Bumble will incorporate Fruitz into its suite of dating apps while also providing it with resources including machine learning technology, marketing, localization, and safety platforms. There’s no plan to rebrand or wind down Fruitz operations. Instead, the app’s nine-person team, including all co-founders, will continue to run the app from their home country of France. Combined, Bumble, Inc. — which now includes Fruitz, Badoo and Bumble — has over 900 employees with offices in Austin, London, Barcelona, Paris and Moscow.

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Hello and welcome to the weekend, my friends! Today we’re sticking to simple fare. The meat and potatoes — pea protein and gluten-free starches? — of our beat, namely startup activity. So, read on for some news from startups that we think are pretty neat.

Not to beat the personal drum too hard, but I’ve had my ins and outs with drinking. Ultimately, I gave it up entirely. So when Reframe entered my view the other week, I was curious.

The startup offers an app built to help people reduce their alcohol consumption, focused on individuals who are not physically addicted to the drug but do want to reduce their consumption or quit altogether. The market for help with drinking — really any drug addiction, dependency or issue — is huge. I know this because I have the enormous privilege of talking to lots of folks who are looking to cut back or stop boozing altogether. The situation is getting worse during the pandemic, I’d add.

So I was not surprised to learn that Reframe has been on a rapid trajectory of late, raising $1.4 million from Atlanta Ventures before taking part in Y Combinator (Summer 2021 class, when I cited it as one of my favorites). It raised $3.4 million after the accelerator program and recently closed a $12.5 million round. That final funding event took place just as 2021 closed, and was put together at a $100 million post-money valuation.

The startup is clearly onto something. And, thankfully, it was willing to talk about its results in detail.

I spoke with the company’s CEO, Vedant Pradeep, who told The Exchange that in the last six months, Reframe has scaled its ARR by a compounding rate of around 79%. Pradeep also said that his company has seen 10.3% compounding weekly growth over the last 12 months. All that has added up to $9.5 million worth of ARR by January 28, a figure that Pradeep updated to $10 million earlier this week by text message.

Even better, the company’s mix of tools — CBT, journaling, etc. — is helping people make real changes to their drinking. Per Pradeep, some 88.63% of its users “reported meeting their drinking goals” at the two-month mark. The CEO added that based on his company’s data, the preceding data point “represents a [greater than] 50% reduction in their drinking.”

That’s huge. Like huge.

Now, I do have some squeamishness about for-profit care for drug-related matters. But I talked through the company’s pricing model with Pradeep, as well as his policies regarding those without enough money to pay Reframe. At least by my standards, the company is striking a fair balance.

At a time in which it seems that every tech leader, luminary and knave is piling head-first into the crypto space in hopes of a quick buck, Reframe is a reminder that solving real problems is another way to make money. I just wonder why the company’s most recent valuation didn’t have another zero in it, given recent startup pricing trends.

And speaking of alcohol

Sticking to the boozing theme of today: wine. It’s a whole thing.

I can tell you that time spent learning about wine is not wasted. Provided you aren’t in the Reframe customer demographic, wine snobbery is a fun pastime. Knowing how to enjoy a chablis over a robust California cabernet is table-stakes if you like to plop around chairs with friends and slowly intoxicate your cranium.

But not all wine is strictly for drinking. Some of it is actually investment-grade stuff. Which is why Vinovest is building a platform to let regulars bet on wine price appreciation. It recently released a way for its customers to invest in individual wines. Previously, Vinovest was more focused on its robo-advisor service in the wine investing category. In short, the company is a wager that more folks want access to alternative investing options, fine wine being one that has usually been out of reach.

I bring the Vinovest news up as it appears to be onto something, posting 500% AUM growth in 2021. Per the company and its intrepid spokesperson William Ruben, Vinovest holds more than 250,000 bottles in user portfolios, which are stored in “custom-built warehouses across the world.”

Between the crypto surge, folks buying digital collectibles and more, perhaps wine investing is going to find allocation in more suburban 401(k)s. If that pans out, well, Vinovest’s market bet could bear — fermentable — fruit.

Hello and happy weekend from the Equity crew! We had a busy week, including a Twitter Space with Natasha and Alex taking to the mics to dig into some tasty public-market news. Naturally our show is more startup-focused than public-market centered. But! We can learn a lot from the world of public companies that have a wide footprint inside particular tech niches that matter for younger companies.

So when we digest PayPal’s results and what investors did to its value this week, we are not super interested in PayPal per se, but more what its results can tell us about the fintech world more generally. After all, around a fifth of all venture capital dollars invested last year went to fintech startups. And Alphabet, it has deep ties to the public cloud space, and the advertising market, both places where startups live and play.

We do the occasional live taping on Twitter, so make sure you are following us on the Big Blue Bird App. Hugs! We are back Monday morning!

In an interview at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2014, then-CEO of Pure Storage, Scott Dietzen, was asked about the possibility of exiting via acquisition.

He didn’t pull any punches: “Acquisitions always suck, and suck worse than you think that they are going to suck.”

That doesn’t sound like getting acquired is the best thing that could happen to your startup, but this is only one perspective on the matter, and perhaps it depends who you ask.

If being acquired means losing the brand and identity you have worked so hard to build — or perhaps worse, losing your cultural identity — it probably will suck. If you get stuck with a company that simply imposes its will on you, it definitely will.

Sometimes, in spite of Dietzen’s proclamation, it can be at least OK, and both sides get something out of the deal: the acquiring company needs your product or your talent, you receive an exit and a check.

Previously, we spoke to the acquiring companies to get their perspective on the deal and how they fold these companies into the larger entity. Now, we’ll hear from executives who worked at three companies that they bought.

These companies said their acquisition experience was just fine, thank you very much. Though they aren’t about to talk crap about their new overlords, you do get the sense that they landed in a pretty decent spot, all things considered.

Deciding to sell

The companies we selected are not fresh startups by any means. One was owned by a private equity firm, and one was owned by another company when they were sold, so they had been around the block and knew what it was like to report to someone else. The last company, a 72-year-old operation, was the exception.

Will Conway, CEO of Pathwire, had been down this path before. His startup was a member of the YC Winter 2011 cohort, and was sold to Rackspace a year later. Private equity firm Thoma Bravo picked it up a while later and sold it to Sinch last year for $1.9 billion.

As part of a private equity firm, Conway didn’t have a lot of input when it came to being sold. If the firm was going to sell, it was going to sell, but as Conway sees it, he landed with as good a company as he could have hoped for. Pathwire’s primary products, Mailgun and Mailjet, gave Sinch a missing email marketing piece, and fit nicely into the company’s platform of communications services.

Meet Numeral, a French startup that wants to upgrade corporate bank accounts. While clients interact with Numeral using a modern application programming interface (API), the startup connects directly to bank servers to upload payment files and interact with outdated information systems. By abstracting that layer of complexity, you can treat your bank accounts like another microservice in your architecture.

Last month, Numeral announced that it raised a $14.8 million (€13 million) funding round led by Balderton Capital. Alexandre Prot, Tom Blomfield, Guillaume Princen and Kima Ventures also participated. The Numeral team originally started working on the project within Logic Founders, a startup studio created by eFounders.

The best way to describe Numeral is by describing what it isn’t. Numeral isn’t an open banking aggregator for consumer apps. It doesn’t compete with Tink, TrueLayer or Yapily.

Numeral isn’t a banking-as-a-service provider either. The company doesn’t offer bank accounts, doesn’t generate IBANs and doesn’t issue cards.

“We are a payment automation platform for tech companies,” co-founder and CEO Édouard Mandon told me. “We let tech companies connect to their bank account to automate payment operations.”

While retail banks are just starting to offer APIs, corporate banks have opened their banking platform many years ago. But don’t expect a REST API with documentation pages. Many banks expect you to upload a text file to an SFTP server. The file is supposed to be formatted in a very specific way as well.

Numeral sells its product to fintech, insurtech or real estate companies that rely heavily on bank transfers. For instance, the company’s first clients are Spendesk and Swile. Numeral has created integrations for its first clients so that Spendesk and Swile can interact with their bank accounts using an API.

By the end of 2022, Numeral plans to offer coverage for a dozen different banks. “Right now, half of our customers discover our service through a French bank that describes Numeral as the APIs they don’t offer,” Mandon said.

Once the integration is done, Numeral customers can integrate payment capabilities and features in their apps. The startup also offers a web app for non-technical staff. This way, they can reconcile payments and accounts without having to use the legacy web app offered by corporate banks.

Numeral can then add some additional features on top of its API. For instance, you can imagine setting up an approval workflow, a notification system, etc.

The startup is also thinking about orchestration capabilities. If a customer has multiple bank accounts, they could route payments to the right account depending on several rules. Numeral could also be used to actively manage cash balances across multiple accounts.

That could be particularly useful for global customers with accounts in multiple countries. Mandon worked for iBanFirst before starting Numeral, so he knows a thing or two about having several partner banks spread across multiple countries.

With the funding round, Numeral plans to grow to a team of 30 to 40 people. In addition to new integrations with French banks, the company plans to expand its coverage and customer base to other European countries, such as Germany, the U.K., Spain and Italy.

Dolby Laboratories today announced that it has acquired Millicast, a WebRTC-based developer platform for building ultra-low-latency video streaming experiences, as it works to build out its developer platform.

The promise of Millicast, which was founded in 2018, is that it can deliver content across the globe in broadcast quality and with sub-second latency. The company says its customers range from broadcasters, conference organizers and concert venues to online gambling companies and auction houses, all of which require high-quality, low-latency streams. Users can opt to stream from the company’s web-based dashboard or through the popular OBS Studio desktop app — or from any RTMP-enabled service, including Zoom.

It’s worth noting that this is very much an enterprise product, with monthly prices starting at $495, with 500 GB of CDN bandwidth included.

While you are likely familiar with Dolby because of its audio codecs, the company has been working hard on building out a developer ecosystem to allow others to integrate its audio and video expertise into their own products.

Back in 2020, the company launched Dolby.io with a couple of audio APIs. Today, it offers a wide range of APIs that give developers tools to build anything from audio mastering solutions to transcoding services and live streaming tools. Unsurprisingly, the company plans to use the Millicast acquisition to strengthen its live streaming portfolio with its low-latency broadcasting capabilities.

“For Dolby, this acquisition is about expanding the opportunities for developers and businesses, bringing Millicast ultra-low-delay streaming to complement the already rich capabilities of Dolby.io,” a company spokesperson told me.

Millicast’s current customers will continue to get access to the same functionality they have become accustomed to through the Dolby platform and the company tells me that there is already considerable overlap between the two companies’ customer base.

“Dolby and Millicast share a passion for enabling the future of lightning-fast, crystal-clear content streamed to thousands of participants,” said Millicast CEO Alexandrine Platonoff. “Together, we have the opportunity to bring ultra-low latency to a global customer base and empower them to build virtualized, massive audience experiences that feel almost as if you were there. We’re excited to become a part of Dolby and can’t wait to see what we build together.”

The two companies did not disclose the price of the acquisition. The company was seemingly doing quite well though in recent years, with entrepreneur and investor Keith Teare recently sharing that it grew revenue by over 300% in 2021.

The pandemic trade ended a little while ago. The COVID-induced boom that powered a host of tech companies is also fading quickly. The results are showing up in Big Tech earnings. For startups, it’s bad news — the good times of the last few years appear to be in rapid decline, with many startups holding onto speculative valuations and revenues more nascent than impressive.

The question before us is simple: Can the investing dynamics of the venture capital market slow to the point that startup valuations (expectations, essentially) reach parity with potential exit valuations (forecasts, essentially) before too many young tech companies are priced like early- to mid-2021 exits are still possible?

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

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The warning signs are piling up, and we’re not just talking about a changing monetary environment, though that does matter. We’re seeing tech companies on the public markets struggle to meet investor expectations for future growth in any number of categories.

Social media? Struggling. Fintech? Struggling. Content streaming? Struggling. Trading? Struggling. Key industries that spawned a host of high-priced startups are staring down a market in which their public comps are taking on water faster than bulls can bail.

And the damage could get even worse. After all, we’ve not even begun the monetary tightening expected in the rest of the year. This is just the beginning.

Pain

Facebook shares are off around 25% this morning, cutting around $200 billion from its market cap. The Nasdaq Composite is off 1.8% as a whole. Cloud stocks are off 1.6%. Snap’s stock is off 19%. After falling from around $175 per share to around $130 yesterday, PayPal is off another 4% this morning. Spotify stock is off 17%. Fintech stocks, depending on your index of choice, are off more than 2%.

All this after we saw the selloff from December through the new year in the value of software companies. It’s a changed landscape.

Why? Investors had valued a host of companies like their pandemic bump was more akin to their new reality. However, it turns out that a lot of pandemic growth wasn’t free — it came at the expense of later growth. In dork terms, revenue and user growth were not generated amid COVID-19, but pulled forward. This led to great near-term results, but slower growth in the medium term as companies had already eaten their second and third courses during the pre-dinner drinks portion of the evening meal.

Digibee, a low-code integration platform is doing what all low-code integration platforms are apparently doing right now: raising funding. The company today announced that it has raised a $25 million Series A round led by SoftBank Latin America Fund. Brazil-based Kinea and G2D Investments also participated in this round.

Launched in 2017, Digibee makes it easy for businesses to build and deploy integration workflows without having to touch any code. While there are plenty of other platforms that will happily do the same, one thing that sets Digibee apart is that in addition to building integrations, the service also focuses on turning those integrations into reusable business logic. A year ago, the company also launched what it calls ‘Capsules,’ that is, packs of common integrations that can be shared across organizations.

Image Credits: Digibee

Current customers include the likes of Accenture, Brazilian stock exchange B3, and retail chain Carrefour.

“We are helping global enterprises on their digital journey, so they can grow and scale without economically prohibitive upfront costs while empowering their talent to focus on driving their business forward.  We look forward to reaching the world’s most innovative companies in the US and globally,” said Rodrigo Bernardinelli, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer at Digibee.

The company tells me that it plans to use the new funding to support its U.S. go-to-market strategy.

“Our product is solving system integration challenges much better than competitors and our multinational customers are asking us to expand our global operation. To do it the right way, we needed this funding round to hire the best people in each target market,” Bernardinelli told me.

He also noted that the company plans to quickly grow its employee base across virtually all functions.

“We are very excited about the Digibee investment. The company tackles a cost line – integrations – that accounts for over 50% of software spend, enabling organizations to connect their systems to turn the digital transformation into reality,” says Rodrigo Baer, Managing Partner of early-stage investments at SoftBank Latin America Fund. “The company is building a world-class salesforce to take that solution to market, which will turn their product into a really global player.”

Though the Covid-19 pandemic almost immediately devasted the business of travel booking startup Headout, the company has been able to return to growth as domestic travel rebounded in recent months. The service, which helps consumers book tours, events, and other experiences and activities in cities around the world, delivered 800% growth since January 2021 by catering to domestic travel and local demand, as opposed to international. By July, the startup became EBITDA profitable. And last fall, it closed on $12 million in Series B funding. Now its existing investors have returned to add more capital to Headout’s latest round.

Headout’s new $30 million round was led by prior investor Glade Brook Capital, a firm that’s backed other marketplaces like Airbnb, Uber and Instacart. It’s joined by existing investors Nexus Venture Partners, FJ Labs, and 500 Startups, among others.

“We were not actively raising,” notes Headout co-founder and CEO Varun Khona. “Glade Brook, an investor since September, saw the continued growth that we’ve had and wanted to double down on our investment,” he explains. As a result, Headout received a few more inbound requests, too, and, decided to close on the additional funds. “The terms that were offered and the alignment that we had with them on the long-term vision was so good that it was just very hard to say no,” Khona added.

The company, at this point, has survived challenges that could have otherwise ruined its business.

As Khona said at the time of the original close on the Series B, the early days of the pandemic took Headout’s revenue from over $250 million to “negligible scale” in only a matter of weeks. But instead of closing up shop, the startup pivoted to focus more on domestic travel, catering to people looking to explore their own cities or those nearby. Today, domestic travel accounts for nearly 80% of its business — a flip from its pre-pandemic days.

And now, Headout has successfully navigated the Omicron surge, too.

Image Credits: Headout users 

By November 2021, the company had seen about 10x growth compared with the beginning of the year, Khona told TechCrunch. But that growth slowed in December and January as Omicron spread. Over the past few weeks, however, Headout’s business ramped up yet again as the latest Covid variant began to peak.

Counterintuitively, perhaps, the pandemic no longer fully quells demand for travel experiences, the founder notes. Sometimes, it even inspires it.

“People are sitting on additional cash — and they’re not able to travel internationally — but the desire to travel, to see things, and to do things is as high as it has ever been,” says Khona. “In fact, in some ways, we are noticing that the consumer sentiment or desire to want to spend money and time or experiences is even higher post-Covid,” he shares. “We are now a little bit more aware of the limitations of what life could look like if the things that we love are taken away from us, both in terms of time and access.”

Headout won’t detail its monthly active users, revenue run rate or valuation — it’s just “high hundreds of millions,” Khona says. However, the company will disclose that, so far, 10 million people from over 190 countries have now booked an experience on its platform.

Today, Headout’s marketplace offers travel experience bookings in 50 cities worldwide. It generates revenue by working directly with local service providers to digitize their offerings and provide support for last-minute bookings, priced dynamically. Headout takes a commission on the bookings and is dabbling with the idea of a subscription, which it’s now piloting.

Its customers tend to be young couples or families, as the average booking size is either two to three persons. They also tend to be city-dwellers, fairly educated, and love to travel, of course.

With the additional funds, the startup aims to rapidly grow its business. It plans to expand its service to 500 cities in the next 24 months. And in the near term, Headout will grow its 150-person team by another 200 to 250+ people over the next couple of months by hiring across all roles.

Khona also sees an opportunity in growing the team via acquisitions, noting that there were a lot of travel and entertainment startups out there that didn’t have the capital to survive the pandemic, but have a lot of great talent.

“We’re very keen to look at that and we already are in conversations,” he hints.

On the product side, Headout will use some of the capital to improve the experience both for its partners and consumers. For the former, it’s working on better ways to push out last-minute inventory and tools that would allow a tour to showcase the current live location of the guide for those who wanted to join late, for example. And for Headout users, the company is working on discovery improvements it’s not yet ready to detail.

Despite the planned growth in the months ahead, Khona doesn’t expect to lose much of the new capital.

“Every additional transaction actually improves our bottom line because every transaction on Headout is profitable. Increase in scale equals an increase in our bottom line and our profits,” he says. “We’re not too worried about the burn, per se.”

Waldo has raised $15 million for its ‘no code’ automated testing tool. Mobile development teams using Waldo can set up tests without writing a line of scripting code. It then seamlessly integrates in your continuous integration (CI) pipeline.

Joshua Zelman from Insight Partners is leading today’s Series A round with participation from Matrix Partners and First Round Capital. Some business angels are also investing, such as Nicolas Dessaigne, Ben Porterfield, Tyler Gaffney and Keenan Rice. With the new funding, the company wants to hire more people and nail down its go-to-market strategy.

The best way to understand Waldo is by talking about mobile testing first. Small development teams usually rely a lot on real-life testing. They keep several smartphone models and run a development build of their app on those devices. If someone goes wrong, they track the bug and try to fix it.

As your app and team grow, manual testing doesn’t scale that well. You can develop testing scripts, but that’s a tedious task that requires more development time. Either you have a lot of money and you can allocate development time to testing scripts, or your developers will neglect those scripts over time.

Waldo thinks there is a third way. Over the past four years, the startup has built a testing platform that is both easy to set up and easy to maintain. When you start using the product, you upload the app package to the platform — the .ipa or .apk file that you get from your development environment.

After that, Waldo runs your app in a browser window. It’s a live version of your app and you can interact with it just like in a local emulator. For instance, you can tap on buttons, enter a login and password and swipe your finger across the screen.

Waldo records every step of your test. If you choose to use this test in your production environment, then Waldo will go through the same steps and alert you if there’s an issue — if it can’t reach the final step of the test. Tests are triggered directly from your continuous integration workflow, which means that your app is automatically sent to Waldo when you commit some new lines of code to your Git repository.

Image Credits: Waldo

What makes Waldo work well over time is that it understands the screen structure. For instance, you can go back to your test and identify elements of the screen. “Imagine you’re opening the web inspector on a web page and looking at the HTML,” co-founder and CEO Amine Bellakrid told me.

This way, you can say that screen similarity should be above a certain threshold and you can configure some elements manually. For instance, you can select a text box and say that it’s fine if it’s in another language.

Over time, after tweaking your tests so that it passes and fails as expected, you get a real end-to-end testing platform. Waldo doesn’t just look at the user interface, it also interacts with the app and checks analytics events. For instance, if you’re running a Waldo test against your production server, Waldo knows that the server is working fine as you can log in without any issue.

Behind the scenes, the company repackages your app and puts some additional code to extract some information about your app. The company then executes the app on a simulator on a server. Waldo also fetches some information from the emulator.

“Our goal is to be a pipeline breaker, we are the last test before you ship to the App Store,” Bellakrid said. Some customers like Alan don’t have any QA team as they want developers to take care of QA. Others like Lemonade already have QA teams but think they can save time and improve their workflow with a product like Waldo.

“In mobile, speed is what separates winners from losers,” Bellakrid said. And testing has been a bottleneck for many mobile development teams. Once your start chaining Waldo tests, you can cover a lot of testing ground and ship faster.

Image Credits: Waldo

In early morning trading today, shares of PayPal are off around 25% following the company’s earnings report yesterday evening. Investors did not like what the company had on offer.

TechCrunch focuses on private companies and private markets. But at times, public companies can help us better understand what is going on in larger markets where startups compete. Such is the case with PayPal, which has an enormous footprint in the consumer fintech space through its products like Venmo.

If PayPal is doing well, we can infer that the larger consumer fintech market is doing pretty OK with reasonable confidence. And if PayPal is struggling, we need to understand why. After all, if something negative happens to PayPal, it could also be happening to startups with similar, related, or competing business models. (We’ve executed similar looks at fintech earnings before, scrying for startup hints.)

So. Let’s recap PayPal’s results, its guidance, and what drove investors to delete around a quarter of the company’s value overnight.

PayPal’s Q4 warning

PayPal’s fourth quarter saw total payment volume (TPV) at the company rise to $339.5 billion, up 23% compared to the year-ago period, resulting in revenues of $6.9 billion, up 13% on a year-over-year basis. From those figures, PayPal managed operating income of $1.5 billion, flat from the year-ago quarter, and cash flow improvements.

So far you are likely struggling to see why PayPal was so harshly treated this morning. Those numbers look just fine, yeah? Keep reading.

In its fiscal 2021, PayPal grew its TPV by 31%, its revenues by 17%, and added 48.9 million net new active accounts, or NNAs. What’s ahead for the company in its fiscal 2022? The following:

• TPV growth of 19% to 22%
• Revenue growth of 15% to 17%
• 15 million to 20 million NNAs

That’s a rapid deceleration from fiscal 2021 results. And the near-term news is even worse, with PayPal anticipating a meager 6% revenue growth in the current quarter. The company’s pandemic boom, it appears, has fully crested, now a historical note more than a continuing operating condition.

Investors, who had bid PayPal from the $110 to $120 per-share range before March 2020 to over $300 per share last summer, are now paying around $130 for its stock. PayPal has therefore given back effectively all the valuation gains it saw during COVID-19.

Livestream shopping platform Whatnot has come a long from being run out of a garage in Phoenix to now a 120-person company, valued at $1.5 billion, that’s expected to grow to over 300 people by year-end as its business explodes. To aid on that front, Whatnot is making two key hires, one of which involves the acquisition of Pastel Labs, a company founded in 2020 by Jeff Chang, previously the technical lead for Pinterest’s growth team and a well-known growth advisor. Chang has now become Whatnot’s Head of Growth, as a result of the all-stock deal that’s considered more of an “acqui-hire” as it doesn’t involve IP. In addition, Whatnot is announcing the hire of the former Head of Growth and Product Engineering for Lyft, Ludo Antonov as VP and Head of Engineering.

Whatnot co-founder and CEO Grant Lafontaine characterized the Pastel Labs deal — which was finalized in December, but not yet announced — as being in the five to ten million-dollar range. Pastel Labs had been a small, five-person team that was building experimental products, including a software-as-a-service product designed to capture user video testimonials and an edtech marketplace for online tutoring.

Image Credits: Whatnot

Lafontaine had originally gotten to know Chang through Y Combinator, the accelerator program Whatnot participated in just before Covid hit in winter 2020. In the early days, the startup — which largely focused on reselling collectibles like Funko Pops — couldn’t raise money as people were instead focused on the pandemic, not frivolity. Whatnot even had to relocate from L.A. to Phoenix for a time. But the team kept building, understanding that live and social commerce in the U.S. market was in the early stages, and still had a lot of potential.

“[Chang is] actually one of the people at Y Combinator who teaches growth,” notes Lafontaine, describing Chang as one of the top people in the world in terms of knowing “how to scale a company, grow it and the mechanisms for doing that.” Chang had already advised Whatnot on some of its growth problems in the past, he notes. And as they talked more, Lafontaine saw how some of the things being developed at Pastel Labs could be better applied at Whatnot, which had just seen 60x growth over the past year.

At Whatnot, Chang will focus on scaling the seller side of its marketplace, which is today focused on collectibles like sports and game cards, toys, comics, vintage games, and, more recently, other enthusiast categories like sneakers, vintage fashion, and vinyl records. He’ll also work on building up the buy-side of Whatnot’s business, and figuring out the mechanics need there to continue to scale — whether that’s advertising or sharing tools, or anything else. Chang will lead the growth team, which is now a half-dozen employees and planning to expand.

Antonov, meanwhile, has previous experience at a number of top tech companies like Lyft, Pinterest, and Hulu, and will now run Whatnot’s engineering team.

Image Credits: Whatnot

“Ludo has, one, helped build world-class engineering teams —  from the growth team at Pinterest, which was one of the best growth teams in the world — to running a couple hundred-person product and growth engineering team at Lyft,” praises Lafontaine. “His background is just about as perfect as it gets for Whatnot. He’s worked in video. He’s worked at content and Pinterest, and he’s worked in a marketplace at Lyft.”

Whatnot, he adds, encompasses all three — it’s a content platform, marketplace, and video platform.

Together, the new hires will help to guide the still expanding startup in the months to come as it navigates into new areas, which now includes NFTs, and as it tackles other challenges, like scaling, low-latency environments, or building out discovery systems that rely on real-time data. In the year ahead, Lafontaine says Whatnot will continue to expand outside of collectibles and other enthusiast categories. The team also plans to add new consumer-facing features and more seller tools.

“Jeff and Ludo both bring a wealth of experience as leading growth and marketplace engineering teams, where they not only married both content and commerce but displayed the chops for scaling a company to hundreds of millions of users,” said Lafontaine. “We couldn’t be more excited to have both Ludo and Jeff join Whatnot.”