Indonesia’s construction industry is large and growing quickly, but a lot of supply procurement is still done the old-fashioned way, through phone calls and text messages. Juragan Material wants to make things easier with a B2B marketplace for building materials from curated suppliers.

The company announced today it has raised $4 million in seed funding led by Go-Ventures, with participation from Susquehanna International Group (SIG).

The new capital will be used for hiring, increasing Juragan Materials’ market share and technological enhancements.

Founded in 2021, the company’s marketplace currently has more than 9,000 products and over 180 brands, including structural, architectural, mechanical and electrical products. It is meant for use by contractors and project owners, and helps them source materials more quickly.

Before launching Juragan Materials, Tito Putra, CEO and co-founder, was a managing director of a building contractor firm.

All the startup’s other founders also have experience working in the construction industry. Chief operating officer Graceila Putri was a product associate at Amazon and worked on growth for a building contractor firm. Chief marketing officer Ricky Fernando previously worked in marketing and relations as Mortindo, a mortar producer, and chief procurement officer Meichael Surja was an architect and contractor on residential products for more than 15 years.

Putra said it often took days for him to source a single item, including time spent checking with multiple vendors for pricing and availability.

He also dealt with deliveries that could not be tracked and arrived late and offline payment and invoicing processes that were long and frustrating. This resulted in high working capital costs and potential losses because of overstocks and over- or under-supply.

Juragan Materials was created to simplify the last leg of the supply chain for the construction industry.

“We recognized that construction is a huge market that is still very conventional and untapped by technology, resulting in a lot of inefficiencies happening in the industry,” Putra said.

Juragan Materials new capital will be used to improve its platform and launch more features, scale-up its customer and vendor acquisitions and enhance its supporting infrastructure, particularly financing and logistics, Putra added.

Indonesian wealth management app PINA’s founding team

While many of Indonesia’s investment apps are focused on hooking first-time investors with low fees and starting deposits, PINA is targeting the middle-to-upper classes with wealth management services. The app announced today that it has raised $3 million in seed funding from AC Ventures, Vibe.VC and Y Combinator, with participation from XA Network.

The company was founded in 2021 by Daniel van Leeuwen, the former country marketing head of Grab Indonesia. He is joined by technical co-founder Fajar Kuntoro, who was previously head of tech and engineering at Indonesian digital agency Mirum, Christian Hermawan, founder of Trust Securities and Hendry Chou, previously product design lead at edtech startup Zenius.

Van Leeuwen told TechCrunch that PINA was created because of the founders’ own challenges with personal finance. As a result, they wanted to make sure that all Indonesians have access to financial advice, not just people who are able to afford the fees and minimums charged by personal wealth advisors.

He said that Indonesian’s middle- and upper-class now includes 52 million people, and PINA was created to give them access to investment services without high minimums and fees as they invest for goals including buying a home, retirement and their children’s education.

“Our firsthand experience working with private financial service providers made us realize that change would never come from existing providers,” Van Leeuwen said. “Chou, Fajar and I worked at [Indonesian conglomerate] Mirum where we consulted large financial service brands on how to digitize and transform their businesses. It opened our eyes to the problems and opportunities in making wealth management accessible but also frustrating when we saw our clients’ inability to bring viable products to market due to their dated infrastructure and business models.”

PINA is among several Indonesian investment apps that have recently raised venture capital. A few examples include Pluang, GoTrade, Bibit, Ajaib, Pintu and Pluang.

Van Leeuwen said current solutions are great for first-time and new investors by charging low minimums, but PINA differentiates with its focus on integrating planning, money management and planning in one platform. “By bringing everything together in one platform, we aim to provide an experience they could never replicate with a human advisor or with a finance folder on their phone full of point solution apps,” he said.

Using PINA’s money management tools and advisors is free, and they monetize by charging when customers make an investment through the platform. Features include automatically-managed portfolios, and investing that needs more involvement from users. PINA also has customized financial advice, automated money management and investing tools in its apps.To use PINA, users link all their financial accounts to the app, and set their savings and investment goals.

PINA’s automatic diversified portfolios work by first determining a user’s investment goals, time horizon, risk tolerance and priorities. Then it invests in a portfolio of low-cost mutual funds. Van Leeuwen said its software automatically rebalances investments, selling ones that rise above users’ target allocation and buying more of ones that fall below it. This is done when users fund their portfolios or when portfolio drift reaches 5%.

As for its wealth management features, Van Leeuwen said PINA “aims to bridge the so-called ‘advice gap’” by providing financial advice that is both affordable and personalized. By linking their financial accounts, including their bank accounts, e-wallets, state pension and investment accounts, users are able to see their net worth, monthly cash flow and how their budget has fluctuated over the past few months. The app also allows them to book a slot with a certified financial advisors.

PINA plans to use its funding on user acquisition and by building out its advisory and investment features and complementary services like access to career coaching and exclusive member events.

In a prepped statement, AC Ventures founder and managing partner Adrian Li said, “The rising adoption of non-cash transactions along with the increase in mass affluent individuals in Indonesia has enabled new billion-dollar opportunities to emerge for wealth management platforms that offer a full stack of services including money management and investing. The team at PINA brings in-depth knowledge and connection with the financial services industry—making PINA one of the most promising companies in the field.”

It may feel like it’s been a few years since OpenSea announced the funding round that pushed its valuation to the $13 billion mark. It was January.

At the time, this column dug into the company’s financial performance and came to a number of conclusions, primarily that the company was generating a lot of revenue. That meant OpenSea appeared somewhat inexpensive at its $13 billion price tag when stacked up against the revenue multiples other unicorns were getting in new, aggressive venture capital rounds.

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But we were also cautious, noting that Coinbase’s revenue multiple was more conservative than OpenSea’s, which gave us pause due to the well-known crypto exchange’s history of growth and profitability.

We summed it up as follows:

It appears that the new OpenSea valuation is cheap compared to recent fundamentals, but a little expensive when we consider how much its market booms and busts. NFTs had several cycles of interest last year alone. NFTs are a hectic space, and the rules of engagement have very much not been sorted out. Even more, Coinbase is getting into the NFT game and OpenSea is now likely too expensive for the crypto trading shop to buy. So, it’s going to be a gloves-on year for the two.

That wound up being correct much sooner than we expected. So let’s collect recent OpenSea market data, execute our usual round of valuation math, and then compare where the NFT marketplace’s valuation now sits compared to both its own financial performance and publicly traded comparables.

The last time we looked at OpenSea, we came away a bit more impressed than we expected to. Let’s see if that happens again.

The Q2 NFT market

If you read TechCrunch+ regularly, you may have seen two looks at the NFT market on our pages in recent weeks. In early June, we argued that the market was indeed slumping, and, based on the data available at the time, we were comfortably confident about it.

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

This was a live week on the podcast, meaning that Mary Ann and Alex and Natasha and Grace teamed up with the fine audio and visual folks from our mothership Yahoo to not only record the show, but to do so in front of, well, all of you! It’s fun to record live, and we’ll do it again in two weeks!

What did we get into? The following:

• Deals of the Week: HomeLister wants to make selling your home more of a DIY affair, and cheaper; Degreed’s co-founder is coming back to the company he helped found, via a different company that he helped found; and can chat bots not suck in the future?
• Coalition: What happens when you cross a small venture capital fund, a large operator network, and shared upside? Coalition wants to find out.
• Layoffs: Backstage has cut its staff to the quick, while we saw smaller cuts at Substack this week in percentage terms. Both rounds of layoffs were launching points for questions, and discussion on the show.
• Robinhood: Will the company, beleaguered with a rock-bottom share price and slipping consumer mindshare, sell?

Equity is off Monday for the holiday, but back three times in the following four days. Chat then!

Somehow June is over in just a few hours, meaning that we are trotting toward the third quarter’s starting line.

Leaving aside the uncomfortably rapid pace at which time is flying past us, entering a new financial reporting period is an excellent moment to pause, reflect and work out the key questions for the upcoming quarter. After all, we’ve seen so very much change on a quarterly basis lately that each quarter feels like a year.

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Recall Q3 2021, for example. After a lighter second quarter, the IPO market regained its footing last July, forcing this column to group public offerings into batches to just stay on top of them. And then Q3 set a huge record in terms of total venture capital investment to boot. Robinhood went public. It was busy.

The final quarter of 2021 was different. Seeing both the peak of many technology company valuations and their initial descent, Q4 of last year was a liminal state between the tail end of a long-running bull market and a rearing correction. Q1 2022 continued that trend, but with more bear than bull, and the second quarter — though we have yet to collect all the data — featured a moribund IPO market, rising startup layoffs, a crypto winter and more.

So what will Q3 2022 bring for global startups? Let’s talk through what we’re tracking, expecting and perhaps even dreading.

As we are on the cusp of a Friday before a long weekend, I know that you mentally have one foot on the beach. I promise that we’ll be brief today. Let’s talk through the three questions we have for Q3:

Will valuations recover?

For a brief period in the final weeks of Q2, it appeared that software stocks were mounting what could have been called a modest recovery. The Bessemer Cloud Index’s ETF closed at 25.93 on June 16, before ticking up to close at 31.21 on June 24. That bump did not last.

Since the little boomlet in software stocks, the same basket of companies is now down to 27.99 points, giving back the bulk of its gains. As the ETF traded as high as 65.51 in the last year, the recovery was modest at best. That it was also transient feels nearly rude.

Queenly, a startup building a garment marketplace aimed at dressing women for formal events, announced this morning that it has purchased Mi Padrino, a company built to serve the quinceañera market.

The two companies’ overlap is obvious: Quinceañeras, events where girls celebrate their 15th birthday with a large event and ornate garb, is an event varietal that Queenly’s product supports. The deal caught our eye not for a lack of synergy, then, but more due to the relative youth of Queenly itself.

TechCrunch has wondered whether the present market downturn would lead to startup-on-startup M&A activity. The Queenly deal is one datapoint that supports that particular thesis.

And Queenly is a startup that several of us at TechCrunch have had our eyes on since its days as part of Y Combinator and through its 2021 fundraising events. So when it reached out with news that it had, despite its relatively modest corporate age, bought something, we got on the phone. Let’s talk about it.

Queenly’s growth

TechCrunch caught up with Queenly CEO Trisha Bantigue this week to discuss the deal and the status of her formalwear-focused startup. (If her name sounds familiar, recall that Bantigue came on the Equity podcast to chat about remote accelerators in early 2021 and wrote an essay about the mental health impacts of building a startup for Fortune in 2022.) What we wanted to find out was simple: How is the company performing, and why is it buying another startup so early in its life?

On the performance front, things appear to be going well at the company. Because Queenly is inherently tied to the IRL market, as COVID wanes in consumers’ minds and formal-dress events creep back onto our calendars, you might expect that it is posting rapid growth in recent quarters. Correct. Per Bantigue, Queenly’s business has effectively doubled from Q4 2021 to Q1 2022, and again from Q1 2022 to the second quarter of this year.

That growth does not all stem from the company’s original business. Over time, Queenly has expanded its model beyond user garment resale. It also works with smaller brick-and-mortar prom and formalwear stores that lack a digital presence and has deals with some clothing brands to sell directly through its website. Resale remains about 75% of Queenly transactions, according to Bantigue, with a further 15% coming from small-business partners and a final 10% from designers themselves.

The Mi Padrino deal

Bantigue said Queenly initially linked to Mi Padrino via an investor. During an early call, Bantigue learned that it was for sale. Although she didn’t expect to buy another company so early in her startup’s life, she ran a diligence process and, after months of research and hammering out the deal, Queenly’s work to acquire the smaller company wrapped around two weeks ago.

Terms were not disclosed, but in this case, we’re not too mad about it. Why? Because what Queenly bought was not a large, operating business; Mi Padrino had contracted to a diminutive scale in personnel terms by the time that it sold. And Queenly is only keeping Mi Padrino’s dress-focused business, leaving the rest of what its acquisition provided behind it. (DJ and photographer recommendations are useful, but don’t neatly land inside of what Queenly does.)

So what is really being sold? Brand, content, and history, it appears. The Mi Padrino brand is better known in Hispanic circles than Queenly, the latter company explained, and it has a library of content that could help bring more customers to its new corporate parent. Queenly gets a deeper hook into a large formalwear market, potentially helping it keep up its growth cadence — the majority of Mi Padrino’s revenue was sourced from its dress-related business, Bantigue said.

Beyond the transaction, Queenly is working on a community aspect to its business that it likened to Sephora’s, as well as a brand ambassador program for the upcoming school year. Finally, co-founder and CTO Kathy Zhou is building a reverse image search so that users can bring an image of a dress that they love to Queenly, which will then be able to help them find and buy it.

The clothing resale market is large and growing. And despite some troubles at Rent the Runway, it is clearly a place where technology will have a long-term home. Let’s see how fast Queenly can grow in the back half of 2022 and whether that shakes loose more capital.

New data indicates that startups are laying off more staff. That said, the pace of layoffs is modest compared with the early-2020 economic correction. As COVID locked down many nations for the first time, the global economy shuddered, and startups were left to deal with an immensely changed world effectively overnight.

Layoffs at companies like Toast, Airbnb, TripActions, and others were symbolic of how some still-private companies found their markets effectively shuttered overnight. (Both Airbnb and Toast recovered and went public; TripActions evolved into a more general corporate spend service.)

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The 2022 correction is different. It’s been slower to arrive, giving startups more time to adjust to changing market conditions. And it was presaged by falling public markets that, we presume, allowed some private companies to conserve cash in anticipation of, say, a more conservative funding market. The result is a more mild pace of layoffs.

In a dataset covering the startup labor market from Carta — which sells software to assist companies in managing their capitalization tables — it is clear that while layoffs are accelerating in the private markets, the cuts are simply not occurring as fast as they did in 2020. Nor are they near the same absolute pace when viewed as a percentage of total startup employee exits.

Let’s chat through the data and then quickly peek at other data points regarding the rising prevalence of remote work and what portion of payroll unicorns spend on engineering talent. Cool? Let’s go.

The rising pace of startup layoffs

A few things to ask yourself before you look at the chart below. First: Were involuntary startup layoffs rising or falling ahead of the 2020 snap-correction? Furthermore, when did involuntary startup layoffs reach a local minimum as a portion of total startup staffing reductions?

The answers, as you can see are, respectively, rising and roughly the start of Q4 2021:

Walmart is expanding its array of virtual try-on services for shoppers with today’s news that it’s planning to acquire Memomi, an AR optical tech company and current Walmart partner offering virtual try-on experience for eyewear. Deal terms were not disclosed, but Memomi has enabled digital measurements for all Walmart and Sam’s Club customers since 2019, the retailer said.

This partnership had spanned more than 2,800 Walmart Vision Centers and 550 Sam’s Clubs. The technology also powers the optical e-commerce experience on SamsClub.com.

Although Memomi’s website touts how its technology can be used across product categories beyond optical —  including beauty, fashion, accessories, footwear, and more — Walmart declined to speak to its future plans for the service in these areas. Instead, the retailer told us it was only focused on leveraging Memomi’s capabilities in virtual optical try-on.

However, Walmart has been investing in a number of new technologies in the virtual try-on space, including with its recent launch of an AI-powered virtual clothing try-on feature, powered by its acquisition of Zeekit. Last week, it also launched an AR feature that lets users see furniture and other home decor items appear in their own space.

With the addition of Memomi, the retailer says the interest was both in the tech and the team. Co-founders Salvador Nissi Vilcovsky and Ofer Saban will be joining Walmart as will other members of the team when the deal officially closes in the coming weeks, following regulatory approval. Though the founders’ new official titles are not yet available, the Memomi team will be joining the Walmart Global Tech team, we’re told.

Walmart described the deal as the “next step” in offering personalized and affordable access to optical care online, which suggests the company aims to further take on competitors like 1-800 Contacts as well as online brands like Warby Parker with the acquisition. By bringing its technology partner in-house, it can also work more closely with the team on future development and integrations, even if those remain limited to online optical.

“Customers are looking for access to care digitally, in their homes, and purchasing eyeglasses is no different,” said David Reitnauer, Vice President, Specialty Services, Walmart Health & Wellness, in a statement. “This acquisition supports our Health & Wellness mission to provide accessible care
to the communities we serve.”

“We’re excited to welcome the Memomi team to Walmart and add their capabilities to our leading virtual reality technology that is transforming the retail experience for our customers and members,” added Cheryl Ainoa, Senior Vice President, New Businesses & Emerging Tech, Walmart Global Tech.

Mapan’s team, with CEO Ardelia Apti in the front

In Indonesia, arisans are traditionally rotating savings and credit associations (RSCA) that let groups of people, primarily women, save and borrow money together. Mapan digitized that concept, and turned it into a service where users, also mostly women, can use it to pay for goods and services. The company announced today it has raised a Series A of $15 million. The round was co-led by Patamar Capital and PT Astra Digital Internasional, a subsidiary of conglomerate PT Astra International Tbk (also known as Astra International).

The round included participation from BRI Ventures, SMDV, Blibli, Prasetia Dwidharma, Flourish Ventures and 500 Global.

Mapan says it helps people get access to financial services in a country where 51% of adults are unbanked, or don’t have access to a bank account. Mapan is currently available in Java, Bali, Sumatera, Nusa Tenggara and Sulawesi, with plans to expand into the rest of Indonesia. It currently claims more than three million members.

The new capital will be used to expand Mapan’s product range and partner with more suppliers for its marketplace of goods for resellers. It also wants to make Mapan Arisan available to 10 million households in Indonesia by 2026.

Mapan, which means “steady” in Bahasa Indonesian, was founded in 2009. The company recently appointed Ardelia Apti as its CEO. Before working at Mapan, Apti spent five years at Gojek as part of its GoTo Group, where she helped build Swadaya, its benefits program for Gojek drivers, and also led GoPay’s offline payments. Before that, she was country director for AI company Element, Inc. and a McKinsey consultant.

At 13 years old, the startup is one of the first of a growing and diverse number of tech companies targeted toward Indonesians and SMEs that find it difficult to access traditional financial services. A few of the others TechCrunch has covered include earned-wage access startup GajiGesa; Super, a social commerce startup for rural areas; Jeff, which is building alternative scoring and other fintech products for Southeast Asia; SME working capital platform KoinWorks; and InfraDigital to digitize cash tuition payments for schools.

Apti told TechCrunch that Mapan’s founding team saw that “many existing commerce, income and financial solutions are not in favor of low-income communities. They require more effort and costs to be able to get the goods they want in a way that is affordable to them. Likewise, there are ways to earn income, many of which require time, capital and expertise that are difficult to access for this target market, especially women.”

When it was founded, Mapan was known was RUMA and enabled warungs, or small neighborhood stores, in rural areas to become bill and phone credit sellers. Apti said the company pivoted to focus on Mapan Arisan, launching the app in 2015 because it saw how many arisans were used by its target audience, and wanted to digitize the concept.

The company’s also introduced other products, including a bills payment features called Mapan Pulsa, and Mapan Mart, a platform where resellers can select consumer products from Mapan’s marketplace or buy for themselves.

Mapan Arisan groups have to have at least five members, and are used for goods and services, including kitchenware, electronics and furniture worth about 200,000 IDR (or about $13.48 USD) to 3 million IDR (about $200 USD), instead of cash. Apti said that “based on our research, social fintech with such a purpose is more needed by the low income community” and gives them the motivation to complete an arisan process.

Leaders of Mapan Arisan groups, called Mitra Usaha Mapan, or MUM, use its app to determine the shuffle dates of Arisans, or when each member gets their goods or services. Apti said that the winner of each raffle is decided through an algorithm to ensure fairness.

MUMs also get benefits including cashback commissions based on the total transactions or group value at the end of the Arisan and a loyalty program that can redeemed into a variety of benefits, including e-wallet credits, gold bars, motorcycles, different types of savings and house down payments. They also help Mapan grow by upselling its members to the company’s other services. Apti said that since 2009, the company has had 250,000 MUMs.

Mapan monetizes through the difference between its selling prices and purchase price from its supplier. Apti said that providing large-scale access to mid- to low-income communities in a cost-efficient way compared to their traditional channels means Mapan is able to offer better prices.

In a prepared statement, Patamar Capital partner Dondi Hananto said, “The concept of Arisan has been core to Indonesian culture for many years, and by digitizing it, Mapan brought scalability to the age-old practice.”

Birdie, a U.K.-based caretech software-as-a-service maker, has closed a $30 million Series B funding round led by investment firm Sofina, with Omers Ventures and Index Ventures also participating — the latter reupping its backing after leading Birdie’s Series A last year.

Max Parmentier, co-founder and CEO of Birdie, said the latest tranche of funding will go on scaling into continental Europe where it’s started to sign partnerships with local care providers, as well as wider business growth. The new funding brings its total raised since being founded back in 2017 to $52 million.

In Birdie’s home market of the U.K., where it’s been operating for around five years, it’s now working with some 700 care businesses whose staff are delivering “millions” of visits per month to the circa 35,000 care recipients (and 8,000 family members) being supported by its customers — with growth of 3x since the startup last raised.

The SaaS platform provides care workers a suite of digital tools to support their work by streamlining admin and patient management while enabling real-time visibility into care events — helping keep family members informed of important details around their loved one’s care.

Birdie’s wider goal for the business is to use the data its platform is ingesting and structuring to power more personalized — and even preventative — healthcare for the social care sector, which remains drastically under-resourced versus the scale of demand for care services.

The sector also suffers from a chronic shortage of staff, which is likely driving investor interest in funding platforms like Birdie that promise to drive efficiencies for care customers.

“We want to become a technology partner for home healthcare across continental Europe, where we know the care industry is under increasing pressure,” Parmentier tells TechCrunch. “We’ve already signed new partners in Spain and are in advanced conversations with partners in Ireland. In the near future, we are looking at expanding our footprint to France, Germany and the Nordics.”

“Our first priority is to grow our solution so it can support any care provider, delivering any type of care at home — from complex care to live-in care as we want any older adult to be properly supported,” he adds.

“We are also constantly learning and adapting to better serve our partners and will be looking closely at our existing platform to expand its breadth and capabilities. For example we will be launching a new version of our rostering tool to optimise fulfilment rate, meaning less commuter time and more face-to-face interactions for carers and their care recipients.”

Another focus for the funding will be continuing to build out partnerships, per Parmentier. “We will continue to develop our open ecosystem to partner with health and care providers. Our aim is to invest heavily in building a clinical engine and enhancing our data analytics capabilities to offer predictive insights.”

Asked how Birdie quantifies efficiency gains for its target care provider customers, he points to a recent study which found that 73% of users save on average between 7-15 hours a week on day-to-day operations — as well as claiming the the platform offers 9x more visibility over day-to-day tasks than other care management software.

“It’s critical as fewer hours doing admin work mean more hours to care for the care recipients,” he argues.

To quantify the quality of care being delivered by users of its platform, the startup has created what it brands as the ‘Birdie Quality Score’ metric — which factors in criteria like alert responsiveness, call monitoring and medication monitoring — and then feeds the data back to care agencies to support them in monitoring and improving the care service they’re providing.

Parmentier says this data feedback loop is resulting in improvements in its care partners’ service quality.

“The aim here is to help them continually improve the quality of their care. As a result, within the first six months as a Birdie user, on average we see a 21% improvement in our partners’ quality score, with the biggest improvements within a year; 81% of all concerns are resolved in under 72 hours, and 80% of medication concerns are resolved within a 72 hour period — up from 58% within the first month. This is a huge improvement and a testament to the ongoing work of the team.”

Discussing progress on Birdie’s longer term goal of using the care data-points that are being fed into its platform to power a personalized and predictive value-based healthcare delivery model, Parmentier says it’s created its own ontology for tasks and assessments — “based on a well-known comprehensive geriatric assessment framework”.

“The best part is, we’re already seeing the benefits of this data-driven approach and can validate scientific knowledge through our own data. We’re using AI models such as NLP [natural language processing] to further enhance our data analytics capabilities and anticipate health and wellbeing trends for a care recipient,” he goes on.

“Looking ahead, we want to continue to improve our health outcomes, while also scaling the platform. We are already able to recommend specific well-being assessments based on care recipient data but we want to grow this focus and look at particular condition-specific interventions, such as mobility and mental health.”

“From the beginning, our thesis has been that a data-driven solution to home care can help us deliver personalised care to an aging population. We’ve built Birdie around this concept, and we’re now capable of collecting millions of data points every day that were previously captured on paper, making us the social care platform with the most structured data,” he adds.

On the competitive front, Parmentier says there are numerous legacy SaaS providers in the care sector — some focused on care assessment, others providing tools in people and operations management. But he argues Birdie’s modern, platform approach is helping it stand out in a crowd.

“Our all-in-one platform uniquely encompasses digital solutions across the entire care business, and we differentiate ourselves by delivering user-centric products accompanied by a high-touch service approach,” he suggests. “Additionally, by working closely with our partners to provide integrated analytics and insights that highlight performance gaps, we are not only streamlining and digitising many existing processes but we are ultimately improving the quality of care they are providing.”

Commenting on Birdie’s Series B in a statement, Harold Boël, CEO of Sofina, said: “The home healthcare tech sector seems ripe for an innovative leader like Birdie to catalyse the necessary social change. Aligned with our strategy to back growing and sustainable businesses, we’re excited to join them on their mission to enrich the lives of millions of older adults through preventive and personalised care at home.”

“What really sets Birdie apart is the combination of an intuitive product experience coupled with a true partnership approach to digital transformation,” added Stéphane Kurgan, venture partner at Index in another supporting statement. “We continue to be impressed by the team’s passion, calibre and commitment to social change and are proud to accompany them on their quest to reinvent care for the better.”

Selling your company — or not selling your company — is a complicated decision. Price, timing, pride, and a host of other factors play into the decision. Hell, you might simply enjoy running the business, be it a startup, unicorn, or public-market behemoth.

Sometimes the decision is made for a company’s leadership team. Zendesk’s work to avoid selling itself only to later acquiesce at a lower price is one such example. Twitter, which is in the process of a messy sale to Elon Musk, is another.

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All the above has been on our mind as Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO of crypto exchange FTX, circles Robinhood. After securing a material stake in the business, he denied active talks to buy the U.S. zero-cost broker. Robinhood itself stressed the fact that its founders have voting control of the business, meaning that the choice to sell or not is theirs alone. We’ll see about that.

But why would a crypto exchange be even interested in buying Robinhood? After bouncing the issue around my head since the news somewhat broke yesterday that Robinhood might be in play, I’ve come up with an explanation. Let’s talk about it.

The user question

While the era of rapid user growth at Robinhood is behind it for now, it retains a material userbase. As its Q1 earnings showed, the U.S. consumer fintech closed the first quarter with 22.8 million “net cumulative funded accounts,” up 100,000 from Q4 2021 and 4.8 million on a year-over-year basis.

Is that lots of folks? Yes, it is.

While it is hard to draw direct comparisons to other consumer financial technology companies, we can do a little bit of directional work. Coinbase, for example, had 9.2 million “monthly transacting users,” or MTUs, in the first quarter. Now, we cannot directly compare net-funded accounts with monthly active traders. However, it’s fair to note that we expect MTUs to work out to a fraction of net funded accounts. Because Robinhood has net funded accounts that are a multiple of the Coinbase MTU figure, it’s clear that Robinhood is large, at least in terms of active American crypto accounts.

That’s a busy way of saying that Robinhood’s funded account number would be a huge help to any crypto company looking to snag some U.S. market share.

Yeah, but

It’s often hard making new friends as an adult, and it’s even more difficult as you get older, say the founders of Hank. The app connects people aged 55 and older with other folks in their community abd events geared specifically for them. The New York City-based startup announced today it has raised $7 million in seed funding led by General Catalyst and Resolute Ventures.

Other participants in the funding included Canaan Partners, The Fund and Tau Ventures.

Hank says it is the first platform focused on matching adults over the age of 55 with events like art workshops, pickleball, coffee meet-ups and skydiving. The startup sponsors some events, but members can also create their own.

Hank is now available in the New York City area, but will expand during the second half of this year to markets including New Jersey, Florida and Texas. It eventually plans to be available in all 50 states.

Co-founder and CEO Brian Park said he founded Hank because after more than a decade of working in tech, he realized he was primarily creating things only for people like him, or 40 and under.

“That got me thinking about what’s a very clear age bias in tech. There’s a common misconception in the tech industry that older generations don’t understand or want new technology,” he told TechCrunch. “So no one designs solutions with people 55+ in mind. But that’s a real misconception, because in reality, those are the same people who mastered Atari and bought the first iPhone!”

That realization came around the same time Park’s parents became empty nesters, and he and his brother watched them struggle to find new social circles and activities.

“They were frustrated by the sheer amount of time it took to find things to do, disappointed by the media’s outdated representations of older adult life and unsure how to translate digital connections on traditional social media platforms into real life experiences.” Park’s parents eventually found connections through church and alumni groups, but he says that “the process was piecemeal and even those groups didn’t feel like quite enough for them.”

Park points to studies that show that social circles peak at 25. By the time older adults hit their fifties, they have spent years building careers and families. But after they retire, work is no longer a source of connection. Many don’t known what events might be taking place near them or how to meet new friends.

“There’s no easy place to find that consolidated information since there’s no one solution that’s been built for this demographic based on what they actually want,” said Park.

Park and co-founder Andrew Hong (the two have been best friends since sixth grade) decided a better solution was needed, especially after forced isolation because of the pandemic. In addition to fighting loneliness, Hank is also tapping into a lucrative market: Park says people aged 55+ spend an average of $120 billion per year on leisure activities.

Park puts Hank’s competitors into two groups. The first are social networking sites like Facebook and Meetup that were originally designed for people in their 20s and 30s. The second are niche networks for older adults that haven’t build enough awareness to create an engaged community.

“We believe we can out-design the former because we’re listening to and building for 55+ people, and we can out-market the latter because we’re committed to toppling the marketing stereotype that so grossly misrepresents what midlife actually looks like,” he said.

For example, the company has launched a marketing campaign, “Generation You,” that shows people in their 50s being active.

In terms of its user acquisition strategy, Hank is starting out with traditional paid channels, which Park said has helped them build a strong initial base of users. “But because we want the Hank community to be built on real connections between like-minded people, we’re planning for the next phase of our acquisition to come from organic channels and co-marketing with interest-based organizations,” he added. The company will invest in product features for sharing and partnerships with organizations that already have niche, interest-based groups in its demographic, like Bridge & Games club in New York.

In a prepared statement, General Catalyst managing director Niko Bonatsos said, “They were the first generation to graduate from mixed tapes to digital playlists. They mastered Pong and successfully survived over 30 versions of the iPhone. They are tech savvy and it’s about time for a platform to connect this vibrant community.”