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

It’s the new year! Yes, welcome to 2022 from the Equity team. We hope that our holiday episodes kept you entertained, and warm. But it’s now back to work, so let’s get into the news:

• Global stocks are generally higher today, while cryptos are mostly flat. In the last week, major cryptocurrencies have lost value.
• Twitter banned Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene for “repeated violations of [its] COVID-19 misinformation policy.”
• India is investigating Apple’s payment system for iOS.
• Tesla Q4 deliveries came in above expectations, leading to the company’s stock surging in pre-market trading. NIO also saw a bump, which means that EV startups are also having a good day.
• The Sensetime IPO happened while Equity was on break. Despite raising far less than it had once wanted, the company’s Hong Kong IPO is now in the books, and doing well as a trading equity.
• And AIMMO raised $12 million in a Series A. The company provides data labeling tooling for enterprise customers building AI models.

Whoo! The year is underway! The great gears of work have once again begun to spin. Let’s get it!

Organizing information from providers, insurers and patients not only takes a lot of time, but increases private healthcare costs. Smarter Health, a Singaporean-based startup, develops technology that allows smoother exchange of data between different parties in the healthcare system, improving patient care and reducing administrative costs. The company announced today it has raised a $5.15 million SGD (about $3.8 million USD) Series A led by East Ventures for product development and to expand in Southeast Asia.

Other investors included Orbit Malaysia, Citrine Capital, HMI Group and Emtek.

The company currently operates in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, and plans to enter into new countries with its new funding. The new round brings Smarter Health’s total raised to $8 million SGD.

Smarter Health’s platform isn’t meant to replace legacy software already in use by its clients. Instead, it seeks to work with them, and reduce manual processes. The startup’s AI-based tech enables secure data exchanges (with patient consent) between healthcare providers, insurers and patients. This enables it to offer a roster of services. For payors and insurers, this includes a patient concierge that recommends specialists, schedules appointments and creates demographic profiles of policy holders. It also automates claims assessments, updates insurers about cases and makes the bill and claims adjudication process faster.

The company has three main customer categories: doctors, hospitals and insurers and other corporate payors, like AIA, Allianz and Prudential, which make up the bulk of its business.

For healthcare organizations and providers, Smarter Health offers specialist recommendations and patient registration tools, a load-levelling solution that shortens waiting times and digitized hospital admissions and claim submissions.

In a statement, East Ventures co-founder and managing partner Willson Cuaca said, “The COVID-19 pandemic has forced insurers and healthcare providers to reflect and re-strategize on their operations, catalyzing digital transformation. Smarter Health is here to make healthcare accessible, affordable and accountable by providing an AI-powered interoperable platform.”

There was a lot of action in 2021 in enterprise M&A — once totaled, my top 10 deals came in at just under $121 billion. And the biggest enterprise deal of the year by far — Oracle’s bid to buy Cerner — happened as I was writing this post.

The final tally doesn’t include what would have been the third largest deal when Zoom agreed to buy Five9 last summer for $14.7 billion. That deal eventually broke down, as Zoom’s pandemic stock price bubble burst, and the companies ultimately decided to go their separate ways.

Meanwhile the second-biggest deal, Microsoft’s bid to buy Nuance Communications is stuck in regulatory limbo in the U.K., as regulators worry that it could give Microsoft too much power in the healthcare market. The U.K. decision bears watching, given that Visa’s $5.3 billion acquisition of Plaid was scuttled last year when U.S. authorities sued to block the deal and the parties eventually decided to walk away.

You may recall that last year’s total was an incredible $165 billion, but that was fueled by four large-chip consolidation deals totaling over $100 billion. This year’s deals are far more diverse, with more than 20 deals over $1 billion, and many that didn’t make this list. In 2019, the bottom three were under $2 billion — this year, the smallest deal was $5.4 billion.

It’s also worth noting that four or the 10 deals involved private equity firms, who continue to be highly active in the M&A market. There was a big focus on legacy security companies this year.

As in previous years, I needed to decide which deals belonged on my list and which didn’t, and that’s never easy to do. I didn’t include a number of large deals, including the $29 billion Square-Afterpay merger or the $14 billion McAfee deal, as they both involved consumer-focused businesses.

I also excluded a couple of other big companies that fall outside my coverage area. These included the Hitachi-Global Logic deal for $9.6 billion, and the Panasonic-Blue Yonder deal for $7.1 billion. Two other big deals just missed making the list: the $5.3 billion KKR-Cloudera acquisition and the Cisco-Acacia $4.5 billion deal.

So here are my top 10 deals in ascending order:

10. Clearlake-Quest Software $5.4B

In the first of a string of private equity companies buying older security companies, Clearlake bought Quest Software for a reported $5.4 billion from another private equity firm, Francisco Partners. Quest, whose products include One Identity and OneLogin, has been shuffled around over the years, but it still has a decent business, and Francisco was able to turn a tidy profit on its 2016 $2 billion investment.

9. Permira-Mimecast $5.8B

Speaking of private equity, Permira took a plunge into email security with the acquisition of London-based Mimecast earlier this month for $5.8 billion. Permira liked that Mimecast had a large existing market with almost 40,000 customers, half of who use Microsoft Office 365 products.

Automation Anywhere, which is best known for its robotic process automation (RPA) software, plans to expand the platform. This morning, the company announced that it intends to acquire process discovery startup FortressIQ. The companies did not reveal the purchase price.

FortressIQ gives Automation Anywhere this missing process discovery component, which enables AI-fueled software to map internal processes in an automated way, replacing high-priced consultants.

“Together, Automation Anywhere and FortressIQ will reshape the future of automation, changing the way our customers automate, adapt, and accelerate as they pursue digital transformation initiatives,” Automation Anywhere CEO and co-founder Mihir Shukla said in a statement.

While there is more than a hint of executive bombast in that statement, the acquisition does expand the company’s capabilities. Consider that FortressIQ raised $46 million since its founding in 2017, according to PitchBook data. We covered the $12 million Series A in 2018 and $30 million Series B last year.

But compare that with Celonis, the market leader, which has attracted $1.4 billion in investment, according to Crunchbase data, including a massive $1 billion Series B on an $11 billion valuation in June. That followed a significant agreement with IBM in April to help sell its services inside large organizations.

FortressIQ founder and CEO Pankaj Chowdhry told me at the time of the B round that the company was focused on a computer-vision solution to drive automated process discovery.

“We’re building this kind of cool computer vision to help with process discovery, mostly in the automation space to help you automate processes. But what we’ve seen is people leveraging our data to drive transformation strategies, of which automation ends up being a pretty small component,” he said at the time. As part of Automation Anywhere, it should play a much bigger role.

Process automation has certainly been a hot area of late, with RPA, low code workflow tools and process mining coming together to generate a plethora of market activity this year. UIPath, the RPA market leader, went public in April to much fanfare and a final private valuation of $35 billion, although the stock has cooled since.

Regardless, Gartner pegs UIPath, Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere as the RPA market leaders, and this acquisition is about expanding the platform and the company’s automation capabilities to keep pace with the industry.

European startup and venture capital data company Dealroom has raised a €6 million Series A, it told TechCrunch.

The company’s new capital comes nearly two years after it raised €2.75 million in early 2020. Its database competes with a number of rivals in North America, including PitchBook, CB Insights, and my former employer Crunchbase.

Beringea led the Series A, which also saw participation from Knight Venture Capital and Shoe Investments, firms that previously invested in the company. To better understand the round, TechCrunch put a number of questions to Dealroom founder and CEO Yoram Wijngaarde.

Dealroom’s business

The startup collects data on private-market companies through public scraping and partnerships. Then, the resulting data is cleaned and run through the company’s software to “uncover actionable predictions,” as Dealroom puts it.

So Dealroom is three linked parts: data collection, cleaning and synthesis.

You can see why it might want more capital to handle the sheer influx of funding events that are swamping the globe. Indeed, companies like Dealroom should be enjoying something akin to boom times themselves. Their core market remit, the private corporate landscape, is expanding quickly, and many participants in the startup game are flush. So, Dealroom has lots of work to do — and lots of folks to sell it to.

The company’s business makes money in a few ways, including providing an API for both business and government customers and selling access to its platform on a SaaS basis. The company also does customer research. Per Wijngaarde, it has 50 government API customers that make up “about a third of [Dealroom] revenues.”

More generally, the company’s “revenue mix is roughly equally three parts between investors, B2B companies and governments,” according to the CEO. So, there isn’t a single leg on Dealroom’s revenue stool; three different groups are buying what it has on offer.

Returning to our point about it feeling like a strong moment for Dealroom and its global rivals — Crunchbase says that it will reach roughly $38 million ARR this year — the fact that governments are such a large portion of Dealroom’s revenue feels notable, and bullish. Governments are paying attention to the startup game as it spreads more evenly around the world, and are willing to spend to better understand their local market and, we presume, those around them.

On the capital front, TechCrunch asked Wijngaarde why his company raised just €6 million. In today’s market, that’s a modest round!

The CEO said Dealroom “sized” its new round around both “business needs” and the fact that it “didn’t want to get too far ahead of [itself] based on the availability of capital.” The founder added that Dealroom is also “fortunate to have strong growing revenue, coupled with healthy capital efficiency,” two things that would lower a near-term need for more capital, and therefore dilution.

What’s next?

Dealroom, Crunchbase and others in the data game are pretty good about data — having data, collecting data, you get the picture. What Dealroom wants to do with its data in the future is tinker with it more intelligently. When asked what’s ahead for his company, Wijngaarde said that it is “focused on expanding the predictive power of the platform, to help our clients discover promising companies at an ever earlier stage.”

If it can manage that, the company can add a zero to its pricing page, at least for investors. Mattermark, another company that I worked for, wanted to build something similar. It’s a big, hard problem, and one that will require oceans of accurate, to-the-minute data.

Before we go on too long, TechCrunch wanted to better understand a particular mechanic in the data collection business. So, we asked Dealroom if it counts data collection and curation as a cost of revenue or a marketing operating cost. Here’s what Wijngaarde wrote back:

We count data collection in part as cost of revenues and in part as product development in [operating expenses]. We also do a lot of human-led research, which is counted as cost of revenue, but also could be seen as cost of marketing, as this results in a lot of content marketing.

The answer is both, it turns out. I want to better understand that mix, and I am sure that we’ll get a better understanding when one of the companies in the private market data business files to go public.

It’s my last day of work for the year, so we’re going to have some fun. Obviously, we’re talking crypto this morning.

Jack Dorsey, former Twitter CEO and present CEO of Block, the company formerly known as Square, stirred the crypto pot recently, making explicit his preferences in the larger blockchain landscape by taking swipes at decentralized internet projects that don’t fall under Bitcoin’s aegis.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

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

To avoid being accused of misinterpreting Jack, here are his key statements, starting with the genesis tweet of the conversation:

Which went down like a party foul with well-known web3 stans:

And a few hours after Jack’s tweet, Elon Musk joined in the fun:

There are several different things being said here, and a few of the tweets could use a bit of explaining if you don’t live on Twitter. The Exchange has your back:

• On who “owns” web3: Jack argues that regular users aren’t owners of web3 projects. Instead, the CEO claims that venture capitalists and, in turn, their investors are. Even more, Jack doesn’t expect this dynamic to change; instead, he anticipates that centralized capital pools backing a plethora of crypto projects will maintain quite a lot of control thanks to venture incentives.
• On being critical of web3: After being criticized for “stifling” web3 work, Jack dismissed the complaint and said that “critiques” can help folks choose to work on more fulfilling projects.
• On who will own web3: Elon Musk jumped into the fun to ask where web3 is, as he is struggling to find it. Jack then subtweets a16z, the venture capital firm, as the nexus point for web3 project funding, and therefore control.

What matters in the above is that Jack, a well-known proponent of the original cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, isn’t big on web3 projects.

It’s notable that these two characters popped up to argue against the flood of greed that’s cropped up in the decentralized economy over the last few years, with every traditional pile of money wanting to get in on putative web3 returns.

Who owns what?

The core of Jack’s complaint is that leading web3 corporations are owned by venture capitalists, and therefore will have to live with venture incentives.

“Venture incentives,” of course, is a polite way of saying running a company in such a manner that venture capitalists and their backers make lots of money. 

The complaint is pretty true. Venture capitalists invested more than $6 billion into crypto projects in Q3 2021 alone. That should give you an idea of the scale of the crypto world being purchased by traditional, private-market investors at the moment. More simply, pension funds own a lot of the crypto economy.

Jack’s diss about venture capitalists and web3 didn’t stop there. Not only did Jack say that web3 projects have a weakness in their core thanks to the economic bargains their progenitors have made with external capital, but also that they are centralized. 

Aside from calling someone a “nocoiner” who is going to, alternatively, “stay poor” or “ngmi,” saying that a crypto project is centralized is perhaps the rudest possible comment.

Is Jack wrong? No, he is not.

It is true that venture players are flooding the zone in web3 with cash and assistance because they think it will make them money. This leads to quite a lot of centralization. For example, I find it blisteringly funny that a16z is an investor in both Coinbase and OpenSea. And that Coinbase intends to get in on the NFT game. You know, the thing that OpenSea currently rules.

Even more, projects like Solana sold a bunch of their tokens for a song to venture investors, effectively handing out upside that is forever frozen in already swollen accounts. Centralization? Of ownership and returns, in that case.

Centralization is antithetical to the original, somewhat punk Bitcoin ethos. Web3 advocates, as far as I can tell it, are perfectly content with using external funds to power their new token-based projects as a way to accelerate the future they see coming. Fiat as crutch, I suppose.

But Bitcoin didn’t need to raise three venture rounds in a year to grow. It just nailed an idea that still resonates. Something to think about.

Now we get to a very large yeah, but.

Bitcoin is religion; web3 is greed

While it’s nice to agree with someone on a crypto viewpoint, I don’t agree with Jack on everything.

For example, I don’t agree that Bitcoin is not centralized. It is to a degree that I don’t think that many people really grok. A new study found this week that “approximately 0.01% of Bitcoin holders control 27% of the 19 million Bitcoin that are now in circulation,” per Baystreet.

This is why, when I consider the two warring religious camps in the crypto world — the Bitcoin maximalists who think that the original crypto project is a decentralized Jesus and the web3 “gm” crew — it’s clear that they are rather different.

Bitcoin maxis are religious in their belief that the OG crypto nailed it, and successive projects are bunk. And web3 is greed, a way to financialize everything online in a manner that allows traditional investors to own toll booths and tax collectors throughout the decentralized landscape.

So while I am more than content to nod along to Jack stirring the web3 pot, I don’t agree with his general philosophy. Still, Jack managed to point out that a bunch of naked wannabe emperors are, in fact, au naturel. And that’s a good way to kick off the day.

Merry Christmas.

Enterprise software companies are suddenly focused firmly on healthcare. If you want proof, look at how Oracle and Microsoft both backed up trucks loaded with money to buy health tech companies this year.

At the moment, I’m compiling the top 10 M&A deals of the year, and the top two transactions are today’s $28.3 billion agreement by Oracle to buy Cerner and Microsoft’s $19.7 billion deal to buy Nuance Communications in April. That comes to just under $50 billion for two health-related companies.

Other majors are circling the health market. Amazon has been quieter about it, but over the last year, it too has been looking at healthcare, with partnerships, hirings and programs galore focused on the lucrative vertical. Google’s approach was less certain, as its healthcare vertical leader, David Feinberg, jumped in October to Cerner, the company Oracle bought this morning.

There’s lots of interest because healthcare is a simply huge market. In its announcement, Oracle quoted a popular figure that the U.S. healthcare business alone is worth $3.8 trillion annually. When you extrapolate that figure to the entire world, it’s no wonder big companies are willing to make enormous bets to get a piece of it.

But beyond the obvious market potential, what is Oracle getting for its money? We spoke to some industry experts to get their take.

Let’s start with some numbers. In its most recent earnings report, Cerner produced revenue of $1.47 billion in the third quarter, a rather modest 7% growth on a year-on-year basis. So the company wasn’t exactly growing in leaps and bounds, making it a good takeover target. If you figure Cerner was on a $6 billion run rate, that makes the deal worth just under 5x revenue, which is kind of the middle of the road these days.

Rocket Companies announced this morning that it will purchase Truebill for $1.275 billion in cash.

Rocket Companies is best known for its Rocket Mortgage product, while Truebill is a consumer-facing app that helps consumers manage subscriptions, automate savings and budget. The deal’s price tag will prove lucrative for Truebill shareholders. PitchBook data indicates that Truebill’s final private valuation was $530 million after its last round was counted. That $45 million investment took place earlier this year.

So, a quick more-than-double for Truebill’s final investors, and an even bigger return for its earlier backers. Not bad, right?

Let’s play Guess! That! Multiple!

Given that Truebill is selling for a hair under $1.3 billion, you have the information you need to come up with an estimate for the startup’s annual recurring revenue (ARR). In broad terms, where do you think the company’s top line will land at the end of the year?

If you guessed something around $50 million, our heads are in the same spot. Tech valuations are high despite some recent declines, and fintech is hot. So, a multiple in the mid-20s felt like a good guess.

Wrong. Here’s Rocket (emphasis added):

This new line of business will also add consistent monthly revenue for Rocket Companies. Today, monthly payments made by clients to the company’s mortgage servicing operations generate $1.3 billion in servicing income on an annualized basis. Rocket Companies boasts 2.5 million serviced clients and has an industry-best retention rate of 91 percent. Truebill is on track to generate $100 million in annual recurring revenue. That number is consistently growing, with 2021 revenue more than doubling that of 2020.

Hot dang. That’s a surprise.

Truebill is going to close out the year with roughly double the ARR that we anticipated. And even more, the company is doubling in size yearly. That’s the precise profile that companies want to put up before going public: big revenues and fast growth. And yet instead of going public, Truebill is selling itself for under 13x its current ARR. That number will compress as time continues, to the single digits in 2022, provided that growth can keep up at Truebill in the new year.

It feels rather cheap, frankly.

The deal being all-cash means that Rocket might have gotten a discount of sorts; shares are cheaper than cash, and Truebill likely could have eked out another $100 million if the deal had been, say, 50% stock. We’re speaking in very loose numbers, mind.

Still, the deal is good news of a sort, but also an omen. Why did a ~100% growth, nearly nine-figure ARR fintech just sell for barely unicorn money? As noted, the price means sweet, sweet holiday liquidity for Truebill’s backers, but for other fintech companies that may have just received an unwelcome comp for the holidays, the numbers are hardly bullish. They feel a bit soft, honestly.

Perhaps we’re seeing the impact of Nubank’s somewhat slack IPO. Or this could just be a general downward tilt in software multiples that we’ve seen in recent quarters. Or there’s something inside Truebill that is yucky — perhaps it has far greater sales and marketing expenses than we might anticipate; fusing itself to Rocket could lower its customer acquisition costs, perhaps improving its economic profile.

Regardless, we’ll get more data when Rocket reports its first full quarter inclusive of Truebill. The deal is expected to close this year.

The early 2022 IPO cohort is beginning to take shape. Recall that Reddit recently filed to go public, albeit privately. That’s going to be a huge debut.

With Samsara closing out 2021 and Reddit set to ensure fireworks, we might be content. But there are more offerings coming, including Justworks: The HR software company filed late last week, so we’re going to tear into its S-1 to see just what the company has built.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

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

TechCrunch has covered Justworks several times during its startup life, including when it raised a $40 million round back in 2018. The former startup also closed a $50 million round as 2020 kicked off, bringing its total known capital raised to just over $140 million. In addition, Justworks CEO Isaac Oates sat down with one of his investors and TechCrunch earlier this year to go over that 2018 Series B pitch deck. You can find our notes here.

We’ve also reported on the Justworks category more broadly, for example, when startup Blink raised $20 million at a $100 million valuation. At the time, our own Ingrid Lunden noted that HR software aimed at non-tech companies was having a moment.

Today, we’ll dig into Justworks’ business, its economic performance and what it might be worth. Let’s have a little IPO fun one last time this year!

What’s a ‘Justworks’?

Justworks’ software helps small businesses keep things running. What’s on offer? Things like payroll, vendor payments, payroll tax filings, unemployment insurance, accounting software and e-signature support.

A grab bag of tooling that, even at lower price tiers, allows SMBs to actually do the core work of being in business. The tech company also has more expensive plans that include access to health insurance products.

All told, Justworks sells its software on a per-employee, per-month basis, with set costs for companies up to 175 employees; past that, the company wants you to call them.

So, SMB-focused, HR-themed SaaS. That classification of Justworks helps us know what questions to ask:

• Is Justworks a pure software company, or does its product require more human inputs that lower its gross-margin profile? (In simpler terms, how high-quality is its revenue?)
• Does the company have churn under control? (In simpler terms, are SMB customers as churn-heavy as we’ve been historically warned by venture capitalists?)
• Finally, does Justworks have attractive net retention metrics? (In simpler terms, how far can you upsell customers with limited employee footprints if you charge per worker?)

Let’s explore.

Is it a good business?

Yes? It’s certainly not a traditional software IPO, however.

The company’s revenue mix contains software income and a huge chunk of low-margin insurance and benefits coverage. And Justworks has a history of profitability that we don’t see often.

The Exchange joked earlier this week that Christmas had come early thanks to a particular SPAC deck providing us with some good fun. Ha. Little did we know what was coming.

Social hub Reddit filed to go public, TechCrunch reports. You know what that means: It’s time to ask questions.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

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

Often The Exchange digs into topics and companies that we cannot claim seniority in. Not that we mind, but it’s worth admitting. When it comes to Reddit, however, we have bona fides. I’ve had my account since June 2008, and have been a casual user even longer, so we have the standing to put a few questions into the conversation.

TechCrunch has tracked the company since time immemorial. Most recently, Reddit raised a huge venture round at a roughly $10 billion valuation. That means that its IPO is not merely the exit of one of tech’s best-known companies — it’s also a decacorn debut to help kick off 2022. Consider us excited.

Here’s what we’ll explore when we get our hands on its S-1: We’re curious about content moderation costs, product expansion, the company’s revenue mix, how frequently governments come up in the filing, and what the unicorn has to say about crypto.

Content moderation costs?

A key element of the Reddit platform is independently-run communities that self-police. If you want to better understand what that means, post a Nickelback video in the ProgMetal subreddit. You’ll learn quickly!

But Reddit proper must have a material content moderation budget to keep scum and illegal content, as well as government and corporate astroturfing, off its platform. Such efforts will require both software and human inputs, so we presume that this particular cost will prove significant.

Denver-based software startup Gtmhub announced this morning that it has closed a $120 million Series C. Index Ventures led the round, with a number of prior investors contributing as well.

Before its new investment, Gtmhub had raised just over $40 million in total, making its Series C around triple its prior aggregate capital base.

The OKR software market that the startup competes in has had a busy year, helping make the huge round more understandable than it is when simply compared to Gtmhub’s far-smaller Series A and B rounds. Competitor Ally sold to Microsoft, and rival WorkBoard raised a $75 million round earlier in the year.

Most recently, smaller OKR player Koan shut down, eventually selling to Gtmhub. TechCrunch’s prior notes regarding the OKR software market’s rise here and here provide more context.

TechCrunch caught up with Gtmhub COO Seth Elliott to chat about the round, and how quickly his startup may be able to grow next year.

Why raise $120 million?

Math, in part, per Elliott. It was time for Gtmhub to raise more capital, but given venture mathematics, it could not have raised a much smaller amount, he said. In a $50 million investment, Elliott explained, there wouldn’t have been “enough pie to go around.”

Translating that a bit: New lead investors like Index want to secure a material ownership position in their new portfolio company. And prior investors want to use up as much of their pro-rata rights — the ability to defend valuation percentages in successive venture rounds — as possible, which means that for companies of a certain valuation mark, smaller rounds become an impossibility.

No, Gtmhub is not sharing its valuation in this round. And sadly, Crunchbase and PitchBook lack other data points for us to lean on, but we’d be surprised if the startup wasn’t nearing unicorn status after its Series C. The implication of the math point and the round size itself imply that Gtmhub enjoyed a healthy new valuation in its latest round.

How did the company manage to raise more capital after announcing its Series B this January? Growth, according to Elliott.

The COO told TechCrunch that Gtmhub expects to triple its revenues this year, and perhaps achieve the same growth rate next year. The new capital will help support that goal.

Looking ahead, the OKR space is diverging somewhat between players. WorkBoard spends its time discussing its enterprise clients, for example. Gtmhub, in contrast, told TechCrunch about its longer-term plans to grow from a corporate planning software concern — OKR stands for objectives and key results, a Silicon Valley-standard corporate planning process — into something more proactive, perhaps leveraging company data to help customers identify “inflection points” and become more guiding than merely supporting in time.

That work won’t come cheap given the cost of machine-learning talent in today’s market.

The OKR market

Along with corporate spend, the OKR market may be my favorite startup cluster to track these days. Not only does it feature a number of well-funded startups competing directly, but we’re also already seeing smaller players shake out and Big Tech firms take note. Tracking how WorkBoard and Gtmhub perform in 2022 will be fascinating.

Given their historical growth rates, if they have a good next year, each will become at least something near to an IPO candidate in 2023. Bring it on.

French startup La Belle Vie announced that it has raised a $28.2 million (€25 million) Series B round led by Left Lane and Quadrille Capital, with existing investor Capagro also participating. The company operates an online grocery store in the Paris area.

Online grocery delivery services and so-called quick-commerce startups are quite trendy. In fact, it has become an incredibly crowded space. In Paris alone, people can order groceries from Cajoo, Gorillas, Flink, Getir, Zapp and Gopuff (following Dija’s acquisition) — I’m probably forgetting a name or two.

But La Belle Vie has been around since 2015. It has acquired quite a lot of experience when it comes to logistics, inventory management and unit economics.

La Belle Vie originally started with a focus on fresh products, such as vegetables, fruits, meat, fish and cheese. You could order anything you would find in a local outdoor food market. And it’s true that supermarket chains have often neglected that segment with their online order service.

Over time, La Belle Vie has expanded its offering with packaged goods and many of the items that you would find in a supermarket. The company has signed a partnership with Système U.

In many ways, La Belle Vie feels like an online supermarket. There are offers and an editorialized selection of products. For instance, you can buy 12 oysters for €4.99 right now. This is the kind of offer you would find in the central aisle of a supermarket.

Right now, La Belle Vie offers 17,000 products, including 4,000 different fresh products. The company can deliver your order in less than 3 hours across the Ile-de-France region. It has 500 employees and processes 15,000 orders per week.

While it feels perfectly fine to wait a couple of hours to get your groceries, La Belle Vie isn’t standing still. The company wants to compete directly with quick-commerce startups. It has launched a new brand called Bam Courses.

The new service is limited to Paris and a selection of 2,500 products. Orders are dispatched from one of La Belle Vie’s seven distribution hubs in Paris and the company tries to deliver orders within 15 minutes.

"I am very proud of the path [co-founder] Alban [Wienkoop] and I have taken. Since day one, we have been obsessed with profitability, with extremely tight control of our margins and supply chain, but also with the social aspect, with the employment of over 600 people on permanent contracts. La Belle Vie is a wonderful human adventure and we are thrilled to be supported in our growth by international and French investors that are as prestigious as they are experienced,” co-founder and CEO Paul Lê said in a statement.

Before today’s funding round, the company had raised a $6.2 million (€5.5 million) round in 2018 and and a $13.1 million (€11.6 million) round in 2020. Up next, the startup plans to expand to other major cities in France.

While Getir and Gopuff have been around for a while, most quick-commerce startups have been founded in the past year or two. The fact that La Belle Vie has been around for a while is a clear advantage as it has gained some experience over the past few years.

There’s a big question mark in the instant grocery delivery space. What happens if VC firms stop financing gigantic funding rounds, like Flink’s recent $750 million round? It’s hard to predict whether customers will stick around once promo codes dry up and service quality goes down. With its slow and steady approach, La Belle Vie has more visibility on its customer base and future performance.