I don’t know what is going on in the startup market and it’s a bit of a pain in the ass.

The larger American economy, home to the largest technology startup and venture capital markets in the world, could be in a recession right now. We don’t know. To reach a technical recession, we need two successive quarters of negative GDP growth. We got that in Q1, when the United States’ gross domestic product fell 1.6% after growing 6.9% in the fourth quarter of last year.

Goldman thinks that we’re going to avoid a recession with a paltry bit of growth when Q2 data settles. The Atlanta Fed thinks we might land in a recession. We’ll see, but the smart money is not entirely sure yet which way the economy is heading.

The startup market feels similar. Venture investors have been ringing alarm bells for months now, and the IPO market is as dead as hopes for a post-Brexit boom. It’s easy to find commentary from various actors in the startup business — both those building and those investing — noting that the market is a mess and that many upstart technology companies are in for a drubbing.

There is some good reason for that. The incoming valuation implosion at Klarna is a good example of how some of 2021 is not translating into 2022. Many a unicorn is expected to struggle to raise more capital at a price that is palatable, and thus many down rounds and last-ditch rounds are anticipated.

And yet.

Funding totals are down but far from out. And with unicorns still being born at a good clip, just how much trouble is really out there for startups?

From a global perspective, the venture capital market for startup investment is slowing. Data shows that venture investment totals are falling, with the second quarter adding to declines seen in the first quarter of this year. After reaching a peak in late 2021, startups are seeing private-market-focused wallets close just a bit — even as capital continues to flow.

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While Q2 data is still coming out, we have both global data from Crunchbase News and an early look at the U.S. market from PitchBook to lean on. The image that forms is somewhat simple: Yes, the venture capital market is slowing, but in the United States, declines do not appear to be as bad as some warned they could be.

According to the World Bank, Indonesia produces 4.8 million tons of plastic waste each year that is “mismanaged”—meaning it ends up uncollected, chucked into dumpsites or leaked from improperly managed landfills. Octopus wants to reduce that number with a platform that makes it easier to collect back waste products from consumers and recycle it into raw materials that brands can reuse. The Jakarta-based startup announced today it has raised an oversubscribed round of $5 million led by Openspace and SOSV.

Octopus was founded last year by Mohammad Ichsan, Hamish Daud, Niko Adi Nugroho, Rizki Mardian and Dimas Ario, who have known each other for over a decade.

After recently launching in Jakarta, it will use its new funding for “aggressive expansion,” including five sorting facilities and 1,700 checkpoints in four cities: Jakarta, Bandung, Bali and Makassar, with the aim of handling 380 tonnes of waste, ranging from plastics to electronic appliances, each month.

Ichsan said one reason he founded Octopus was because he returned to his parents’ house in Makassar for a holiday, and found that a landfill 30 kilometers away emitted an unbearable stench, especially considering that he had a newborn daughter.

“I wondered what kind of world she’s going to live in,” he told TechCrunch. “Apparently this problem is not happening in certain cities, but also in other cities in Southeast Asia so I started to explore more of the business by doing manual waste trading and trying to solve the problem one step at a time, starting with reducing recyclable waste that ends up in landfills by doing manual waste trading.”

Around that time, Ischan met co-founder Daud, who had the same concerns and had been doing research about ocean waste.

Octopus also points to Indonesian government regulations about waste collective referred to as 3R, or “reuse, reduce, and recycle,” that are meant to reduce the amount of plastic ocean debris in the ocean by 70%. The government has reinforced these goals with initiatives like waste banks, enforcement of recycling goals for brands and producers, and a fee on plastic bags for consumers.

Octopus says that as of 2025, the Indonesian government will have spent $5.1 billion on creating a circular economy for more brands. It claims to be “the first platform to offer an end-to- end recyclable waste management logistics platform.”

The company says that over the past six months, it has grown by over 400%, with users at both ends of the supply chain. This includes 150,000 monthly users and more than 60,000 pelestari, or independent waste collectors. It claims that more than 12,000 pelestari have been able to open a bank account since joining Octopus. On the other end of the supply chain, Octopus serves more than 20 brands, including global FMCG companies who use Octopus to help meet their ESG compliance. One of its goals is to reach 100,000 pelestari by 2024.

Octopus offers two main kinds of service, said Ischan. The first one is selling post-consumer materials to the recycling industry and the second is data collection reporting for FMCG brands. For example, it help Softex Indonesia collect used diapers from consumers with proper handling standard-operating-procedures from pelestari, who operate as gig workers.

For pelestari who don’t own a mobile phone to access Octopus’ app, Ischan said the company is working with social welfare bureaus to provide phones as part of local city government programs to solve unemployment in their areas.

In a prepared statement, Openspace founding partner Shane Chesson said, “Octopus is leading the way in using technology to create a step change in the size of the circular economy in Indonesia. Participants at all stages of this supply chain are incentivized to make this happen and most importantly, environmental imperatives need us to get this right.”

The startup market is global in footprint, varied in focus, diverse in business model and constantly evolving. The venture capital market, meanwhile, is slower to molt, but it’s also changed in the last decade.

Startups and their financial backers went a bit nuts last year, raising too much money, often at unsustainable prices. We’re now watching a collective hangover work its way through the global startup markets.

You know all of that. This afternoon, we’re looking at a related matter. Yes, charts that once only pointed up are now only pointing down, but when did we reach the local maximum? Both startup and venture capital reached an activity zenith at some point in the last few quarters — but when?

The answer is actually a bit less clear than we anticipated. Leaning on some new data from Crunchbase News, let’s try to figure out when the music really did stop and reality descended.

Creating and grading tests is one of the most time-consuming tasks teachers need to deal with. In Vietnam, a startup called Azota wants to help with an online software platform that not only helps educators develop and proctor tests, but also automatically grades them using information from Vietnamese teaching materials. The company announced today it has raised $2.4 million in pre-Series A funding led by GGV Capital, with participation from Nextrans and returning investor Do Ventures. 

Founded last year, Azota now counts 700,000 teachers and 10 million students in primary, secondary and high schools among its users. It says that during peak test periods, it serves over six million users each month, or about 30% of the total number of teachers and students in Vietnam. It claims it can cut down the grading process from two hours when done manually to just two minutes. 

Azota’s creation came amidst the pandemic in 2021. Before co-founding the startup, Au Nguyen, its CEO, worked for Viettel, one of the largest telecoms in Vietnam. He led an educational unit on school management solutions, but realized that educators had many pain points that his team could not solve. As a result, he decided to team up with his friends, Dai Nguyen and Hung Le, to create Azota. 

“As the team sees it, there are two major scopes of work for teachers: teaching and assigning and grading tests,” they told TechCrunch in an email. “During the COVID times, teaching had to go online, and there were numerous tools to support this change such as Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Team, etc. But when it comes to online assigning and grading, there were few tools available, which made the process very labor-intensive and time-consuming.” 

Azota built an optical character recognition app to automatically recognize Q&A’s from test images taken from teachers’ phones. It shuffles those questions and answers to create hundreds of modified test combinations. Since the OCR was built using Vietnamese teaching materials, the team said it can recognize Vietnamese tests with a 99% accuracy rate. 

Azota’s founders are also working on a more advanced question bank features that will allow teachers to pick and chose from its inventory to create exams from scratch. 

The startup is used by educators across the nation, with about 22% coming from the major cities of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, and the rest distributed equally among all provinces in Vietnam, they added. 

The team identifies two main groups of competitors. The first are big corporations that provide learning management software (LMS) to schools, but they say it’s still a fragmented market in Vietnam with different companies dominating different regions.

The second are startups that provide tools for teachers, but Azota’s founders say the teaching tool segment is still early and Azota differentiates by using a product-led growth model, solving teachers’ main challenges as they grow, especially for assigning and grading, instead of trying to address every issue that comes up. 

In a prepared statement, GGV Capital global managing partner Jixun Foo said, “Using technology to empower teachers to teach better, Azota makes great education accessible to millions of students. They can unleash the true potential of teachers to groom the next generation of Vietnamese youth.”

During the most recent Y Combinator startup batch, Peakflo stood out to TechCrunch. The company’s simple pitch — Bill.com for Southeast Asia — fit neatly into the broader narrative of the world increasingly digitizing its workflows and the generally hot market we’d seen for fintech companies.

At the time, we noted that “there are huge revenues to be found in helping companies spend and receive money,” adding that Peakflo was likely “ready to raise,” having already reached $13,000 worth of monthly recurring revenue (MRR).

So when Peakflo reached out with some fundraising news, we took the call. I spoke with co-founder and CEO Saurabh Chauhan about Peakflo’s fundraising, historical growth, plans for its new capital and its revenue targets.

The world versus Excel

If I asked you what software product is the most indispensable to the global economy, what would your answer be? My hunch is that it’s Excel, the Microsoft spreadsheet app that has been around longer than the modern internet — and, let’s be clear, has been shipping longer than your scribe has been alive.

Why? Because so very many companies execute business processes inside of Excel (or Sheets, these days) that it’s effectively a multitool for business. But as anyone who has actually tried to use a multi-ool to, say, put together anything with more than one screw can attest, it’s often better to build something use-case-specific if you want to move more quickly.

Enter Peakflo in the Southeast Asian market, where it is taking on the spreadsheet tools that many businesses use to record their payments and outgoing invoices. The CFO suite used to be a Microsoft Office license, I suppose. Things have changed.

Chauhan estimated that 99% of his company’s customers come from Excel-like environments, meaning that as Peakflo grows, it essentially acts as a barometer for the pace of digital transformation in its target market.

Like Bill.com, Peakflo lets companies pay bills and send invoices. In product terms, Peakflo is a collection of services, per Chauhan, including accounts receivable (money in), accounts payable (money out), a payment layer and an integration layer, linking the service to accounting software and some enterprise resource planning. All that takes work to build and maintain, meaning that Peakflo is — you guessed it — using its new capital to hire.

How much money has the startup raised? Chauhan said it raised “almost” $1 million back when it was founded in 2021, and another $500,000 from Y Combinator during that period of its life. The rest of the $4.1 million that Peakflow has raised to date came later, in a round that closed a few weeks back. Picking from its investor list, apart from its accelerator backing, Peakflo has attracted capital from Rebel Fund, Soma Capital, Amino Capital and others, including a handful of individually active investors, aka angel investors.

Why are so many different investors putting capital into a startup that is building in a sector that has seen its valuation profile diminished in recent months? Growth, I reckon. According to Chauhan, since its Y Combinator era, Peakflo has added between 10 and 15 customers per month, now counting more than 50. With a recently expanded sales function, the company wants to hit 100 in the next month and reach $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in early 2023.

With fresh capital, a hiring plan, and a big market to attack, we have set a countdown to that ARR threshold.

Gross margins

Before we go, a little bit more on pricing and margins. You may have noted above that we mentioned a payment layer. If you have been watching the SaaS market over the last few years, your ears should have perked up a bit at that point. Is Peakflo set to grow not only on its software incomes but also due to transaction volume? The model has been popular after all.

The answer, as best as I can tell, is kinda. Per the startup’s CEO, the company can drive gross margins of around 85% on its software products, but something more akin to 40% in the payments space. As Peakflo scales its software cost based on payment volume, it scales twice off of more customer activity, but its gross margin differential lays bare why software is such a valuable business category.

More when Peakflo hits seven-figure ARR.

One easy complaint to make when it comes to venture capital is that it’s mostly not. Venture-ous, that is. It’s definitely capital.

During the last decade, for example, a huge portion of venture capital investment went into software-as-a -ervice companies, some of the least risky private technology companies out there. Sure, some fail, but the SaaS model tends to be durable, and its performance trackable to the point that anyone with a pencil can model out future growth and come to a valuation conclusion.

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Where are the venturesome gambles on space factories, superfoods and the like? Sorry — you got DocuSign instead.

But not all funds are timid, even if we find the present lack of material wagers on mega-projects disappointing. No, some funds are bucking the downturn by raising new, huge venture vehicles to invest in markets that don’t appear healthy from an outsider’s perspective. In a sense, this is actual venture capital activity, as the investors are taking their money on an adventure into parts — and market conditions — unknown.

That makes recent funds from Sequoia Capital China and a16z all the more interesting to talk about. And why their returns could be all the sweeter.

Zagging while others zig

Briefly, the news: Sequoia Capital China is raising a huge new fund. That means that the Sequoia crew is gearing up to expend a bank’s worth of cash in the country. Welcome news, assuredly, to the beleaguered Chinese technology ecosystem that has seen slowing growth and increasing layoffs. But why now? One reason could be that the Chinese tech market is just that: beleaguered.

Next up: a16z’s massive new crypto fund. Worth some $4.5 billion, it’s the company’s biggest yet, and, like the Sequoia fund, it could represent a material portion of the coming venture funding for its chosen market, namely web3.

As China’s venture capital market and technology industry suffer and the crypto industry endures rapid climate change from NFT Summer to Meltdown Winter, investors with a thesis about both areas of investment are raising new, huge funds.

Why do the opposite of the market? Because that’s — potentially, at least — where the money is.

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

Alex and Grace are back to cover the biggest, boldest and baddest technology news. We are back on Tuesday, as the United States was off yesterday. So a day late, but hopefully not a dollar short, here’s what we got into today:

• Stocks are mixed around the world, and set to fall in the United States at the open. At the same time, the crypto market has been somewhat relaxed in the last day.
• Sequoia Capital China is raising $9 billion, a huge amount of money at a time in which we have seen venture capital activity in China slow.
• Speaking of slowing venture capital, Indian activity is falling. That deceleration comes as the country’s crypto market is under pressure.
• At the same time, Twitter is pushing back against the Indian government bullying, which is good. But maybe less good for Elon Musk, who is buying the social network, and wants to sell imported cars in the country.
• Closing out, we touched on a potential database breach in China, struggles at Vauld, a new climatetech fund, and news from the quantum front.

All that and we had a good time! We are back tomorrow morning, and Friday morning!

In Indonesia, many logistics providers still use old-fashioned systems to track their operations and fleets, including pen-and-paper ledgers. McEasy wants to change that. The startup, which develops software-as-a-service solutions for the logistics and supply chain industry, has raised $6.5 million in Series A funding led by East Ventures.

The startup was founded in 2017 by Raymond Sutjiono and Hendrik Ekowaluyo, and now serves more than 200 clients, including Cleo Pure Water, KMDI Logistics, MGM Bosco Logistics, Rosalia Indah and the Tanto Intim Line.

Its software and smart tracker, called Vehicle Smart Management System, has been adopted by users like passenger buses, freight forwarding services and refrigerated vehicles used to transport pharmaceuticals, meat, seafood, dairy and frozen foods. Other products include Mobility Software-as-a-Service to digitize vehicles for real-time tracking, solutions for improving business efficiency and an open API ecosystem.

The new capital will be used on developing products for SMEs and establishing a stronger foothold in Indonesia’s Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. McEasy says it has grown more than 12x in the past 18 months.

Sutjiono told TechCrunch that he met and became best friends with Ekowaluyo while both were studying mechanical engineering at Purdue University. The two then worked at Ford in structural engineering. Sutjiona said Ekowaluyo is an expert in structural design and program management in cars, while he focuses more on engine electronics, system control and data handling.

After returning to Indonesia, the two started McEasy to produce hybrid motorcycles. But after researching the market, they realized that the market was shifting to digital instead of hybrid bikes, so they came up with a smart tracker for motorcycles. But because the trackers were cost-prohibitive, they decided to do another shift to B2B logistics and automotive.

“B2B logistics players were still using the conventional method, and we wanted to make a digital solution to improve the business process,” said Sutjiono. “The logistics sector was chosen because of its promising potential and growth during the pandemic. Indonesia has more than 22.5 million units of passenger vehicles and more than 5 million units of freight cars.

The founders say that more than 85% of businesses in the transportation and supply chain sectors still use paper ledgers for their operations, including managing drivers, expenses, fuel consumption and route efficiency. To convince people to move from their legacy systems to McEasy, it offers a free trials and is growing its operations through word of mouth.”

In a prepared statement, East Ventures co-founder Willson Cuaca said, “McEasy has managed to accelerate positively in this post-pandemic environment. They combine the best of both worlds – logistics and technology – to elevate their offerings, strengthen their national footprints, and maintain profitability levels.”

YC-backed climate tech startup, Pina Earth, has closed a $2.5 million seed round of funding a year after being founded and a few months since it presented at the accelerator’s Winter 2022 Demo Day in March.

The seed is led by Franco-German VC XAnge, with participation from London-based VC firm Nordstar, as well as a number of business angels and serial founders, including Gustaf Alstromer (partner at Y Combinator), Sundeep Ahuja (partner at Climate Capital), Lea-Sophie Cramer (founder at Amorelie) and Anselm Bauer-Wohlleb (Alasco, Stylight).

As we reported back in February, when we took a first look at the Munich-based startup, Pina Earth is building an online platform for European forest owners to get certified to sell carbon credits — with a special focus on encouraging landowners to increase woodland biodiversity and future-proof their forests.

That’s important as climate change increases risks to the survival of trees, with more droughts, forest fires, disease and other extreme weather predicted. But the startup’s premise is also that more sustainable forestry management can generate extra carbon credits for forest owners, too.

As a first step, Pina Earth’s platform helps forest owners register their forest for carbon credits. It then sells, essentially, a high tech forest management service — supporting landowners to make adaptations to their forests, such as planting climate-resilient tree species, which should, over years, generate extra carbon credits vs if they did not undertake the sustainability-focused measures that will enable the forest to take up more carbon.

The startup is using AI modelling to predict how climate change will affect the future growth of forests, combined with remote data capture to monitor customers’ projects and verify improvements to forests — to boost the quality of carbon credits.

That’s also important given the proliferation of low quality or bogus carbon offset projects during the ‘greenwashing’ scramble over the last decade+, as companies have rushed to claim they’re taking steps to reduce their business’ climate impact — while, all too often, not actually taking meaningful steps.

The reputation of offsetting as a climate change-fighting tool remains low — while tree-based offsetting attracts specific scepticism given the timescales involved and the difficulty of monitoring over the long haul to ensure the claimed carbon sequestration actually occurs — but given the scale of the challenge humanity is facing, to rapidly shrink carbon emissions in order to avoid climate disaster, offsetting will undoubtedly have some role to play in the mix of solutions.

When we spoke to Pina Earth co-founder and CEO Dr. Gesa Biermann earlier this year, the startup was operating two pilot projects across 1,200 hectares in its home market of Germany and preparing for a commercial launch this year.

Since then, she says it’s been focused on moving from initial pilot projects to expanding its reach in Germany. The commercial launch is still pending.

“We have also recently signed new team members for key positions, in tech, forestry, and business,” she tells TechCrunch. “We are switching from initial pilot projects — which helped us develop our core technology — over to adding thousands more acres of forest projects to our pipeline. We are in private beta with the owners of the respective forests at the moment — testing key features before our public launch of the platform later this year.”

On the product dev front, Biermann says the seed funding will be used for “critical steps in carbon project development include checking for eligibility of the project area, gathering data, calculating the carbon optimization potential and finally, project documentation”.

“After having completed the process for our first projects, we are translating our learnings into replicable processes, automating the bottlenecks of carbon project development,” she continues. “We have already built software to forecast the effect of climate change based on a digital twin of the forest. Next, we aim to replace input traditionally requested from forest owners with third-party data sources to increase speed and independence. We are further expanding our carbon project toolkit, learning to simulate the effect of different types of forest adaptation methods in our software. This will help us address the needs of a diverse range of forest owners.”

Asked if the startup is expecting to launch into additional European markets or would it need to raise again before it takes that step, she talks up the prospect of imminent expansion without offering a clear yes or no — suggesting it’s benefitting by being able to draw on its new European investors’ networks to “forge connections with key players”, before adding: “We are also being approached by both forest owners and project developers worldwide and are keen to bring our product to further regions. After all, over half of Europe’s forests are vulnerable to climate risks — an urgent problem to tackle.”

“Our priorities for the next 12 months are automating further parts of the carbon project development process, expanding to thousands more acres of forest in Germany and selling our first carbon credits to financially incentivize forest owners to adapt their forests to climate change. These priorities are guided by our mission: To offer landowners the most accessible way to get rewarded for making their forest climate-resilient.”

Commenting on Pina Earth’s seed raise in a joint statement, Nadja Bresous, partner (Paris) and Astrid Moullé-Berteaux, associate (Berlin) of XAnge, said: “XAnge is proud to continue investing in climate tech and support European forest adaptation. Pina Earth’s technology generates high-quality European nature-based carbon credits, for which demand will continue increasing. This investment is a contribution to protecting both the financial and the environmental value forests provide.”

While there are a number of other, more established startups focused on expanding access to carbon markets — such as US-focused SilviaTerra (now called NCX) — Biermann argues that Europe remains a “blue ocean opportunity” for forest carbon markets.

“This is partly due to the challenge of a more fragmented ownership structure, meaning smaller sized carbon projects. Therefore, low entry barriers for forest owners, automation and efficiency are central to our product strategy,” she suggests.

Live in India, Singapore-based MarketWolf has plans to introduce stock trading to first-time investors in more markets. The platform announced today it has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Singaporean venture capital firm Jungle Ventures and Mumbai-based Dream Capital. Returning investors 9Unicorns, iSeed, Crescent and Riverwalk also participated.

This brings MarketWolf’s total raised to $17.4 million since it was founded in 2017 (it launched in India in 2020). The new funding will be used to build product suite and on hiring for its product, marketing and engineering teams.

MarketWolf wants to making trading accessible to first-timers with low minimum investment amounts and a risk management system, as well as modules for practicing and learning about investing. They can invest in options, futures, ETFs and stocks, starting at $5. Most of its users are in the 18 to 35 year old age bracket.

MarketWolf’s risk-management features include setting mandatory risk and reward levels, listing only liquid instruments, preventing selling of options to avoid unlimited risk and its practice and learn module.

Founded by Vishesh Dingra and Thomas Joseph, MarketWolf says it has seen over 1.5 million app downloads in India over the last 18 months and that its number of trading accounts and retail active clients have grown 10x year-over-year. It was listed among the top 15 brokers in terms of trades by India’s National Stock Exchange (NSE) in 2021.

Before co-founding MarketWolf, Dingra worked at Merrill Lynch and Barclays Capital, building quantitative models and strategies for algorithmic trading in capital markets.

He told TechCrunch that he and Joseph wanted to launch an investment app because “we saw that existing products were focused on investing for long-term only, and short-term trading was overlooked. Thomas and I have worked at trading desks in Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, etc. and understood that there could be an easier, more engaging and risk-managed way of trading made available to people globally.”

The startup is among a number of investment apps based in Southeast Asia that have raised funding–and are continuing to raise). Just over the past month, wealth management platform PINA, Indonesian crypo trading app Pintu and Vietnam’s Anfin, also for first-time investors, have all raised venture capital.

Dingra said MarketWolf differentiates from other investment apps with its gamified interface (many of its users come from mobile gaming communities) and a trading-first approach.

“Most brokerages in the market are investment-first products, whereas MarketWolf is a trading-first product creating its own new market segment—people who can trade well in all market conditions, bullish, bearish, flat or volatile,” he said.

In a prepared statement, Jungle Ventures principal Arpit Beri said, “Retail participation in the stock market in India continues to remain abysmally low at ~3-5% and we believe that MarketWolf has the right product, as well as the right team and expertise to break-through this market.”

Happy Monday. It’s Independence Day here in the United States, which means that much of TechCrunch is on holiday. But as last week came to a close, several important pieces of data dropped that are worth our consideration. Let’s not let that opportunity pass, day off or not. (Also, this is the last day of our Fourth of July sale, so, you know, feel free to contribute to, ahem, TechCrunch’s financial independence as well!)

The bits of data that came out on Friday included Klarna’s potentially final new valuation, which is settling even lower than we anticipated, and the conclusion of the FTX-BlockFi drama, which we need to unpack because the numbers are a little harder to parse than the headline figures you might have seen over the weekend.

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Let’s compare the figures with 2021 prices, discuss the discrepancies thereof, and then chat through which other companies might be in trouble based on the somewhat shocking math we have ahead of us. Just how far from the mark did some startup pricing get last year? This far:

Klarna and BlockFi as warning shots

As always when discussing negative news items, we’re not here to crow. Instead, we want to parse new data so that we can better understand the state of the market. Covering layoffs, down rounds and the like is not nearly as much fun as covering IPOs. So, here’s to getting back to that when possible.

Regardless, the bad news summarizes as follows: