Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

Equity is back in the saddle this week, with Mary Ann and Alex and Grace powering through a busy week’s news. And while much of the news in startup-land is a bit lacking these days — you may have noticed a sentiment shift on Twitter! — we did find some good tidings as well.

Here’s the rundown:

• Sesame, which operates an online medical care marketplace, raised $27 million to help people without insurance or those with high deductibles get affordable health care. Interestingly, its lead investor also previously put money in another startup in the space.
• Marc Lore’s food creation, and delivery startup Wonder raised a huge stack of cash. We had mixed views on this particular deal. On one hand, we hate cooking. On the other, will the economics ever work? Investors really seem to think so. We’re now waiting for the service to launch where we live so we can give it a try.
• Startups may be in better shape than you thought! That’s the take that Index’s Mike Volpi wrote in a letter that TechCrunch published. Alex dug into the matter as well. There are even more positive signs out there if you look.
• The real estate sector has taken a hit as of late, which led to Redfin and Compass laying off hundreds of employees. Yet one other proptech startup managed to raise capital and acquire a company this week.
• And to close, the crypto mess. Here’s some layoff news. And here are some new problems. Finally, an attempt to find some understanding of what’s going on.

And that is a wrap! We will chat you all next week!

Heading into 2022, hopes were high that a number of companies that have long awaited their liquidity moment would finally go public. Names like Chime, Stripe, Instacart, Egnyte, Databricks and others. You could throw Figma (anticipated nine-figure revenues in 2021) and Picsart (greater than $100 million run rate) into the mix as well.

Hell, Reltio and Clio recently hit $100 million ARR, and there were a host of other names that we could have put into an IPO list for the current year if the market had held up a few quarters longer.

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But that didn’t happen, of course, and with fintech valuations plumbing new depths, software revenue multiples compressing, delivery models digesting a more IRL userbase, and the like, we’ve seen an effective freeze of all IPO activity by technology companies with material venture backing.

And yet, we have a tech IPO cooking. It’s not what you expected. Say hello to Starbox Group Holdings, which is looking to raise around $23 million at a valuation of around $200 million.

Not familiar with the Cayman-based, Malaysia-focused business? We weren’t either. Let’s take a quick peek at its numbers and then lament the current state of the IPO market — such as it is.

Thank you, Starbox

Bellwethers come in varying levels of intensity. If Chime went public in Q3, it would be a critical event for venture-backed fintech valuations, and especially so for the neobanking subcategory that has attracted huge sums of capital and consumer interest around the world.

Starbox isn’t much of a bellwether, as it is both small and relatively unknown; it doesn’t seem likely that a host of startups will get comped to its results. Still, the company’s IPO could provide some signal about the current state of technology debuts in the United States, which would be welcome.

When dying of thirst, one doesn’t check the label on the water bottle found lying on the ground. You just drink it. So let’s twist the cap and have a look.

Starbox self-describes as a “cash rebate, digital advertising, and payment solution business ecosystem,” which didn’t quite assemble in our heads as a cogent explanation. Digging into the company’s filing, it appears that this is the model:

Pazcare, a Bangalore-based employee benefits and insurtech platform, announced today it has raised $8.2 million led by Jafco Asia, bringing its valuation to $48 million. The funding also included participation from returning investors 3One4 Capital and BEENEXT.

Pazcare currently offers health, term, accident insurance and outpatient health benefits. It monetizes from service providers through commissions.

The startup says it currently serves more than 130,000 members from over 500 companies on its platform and has seen quarter-on-quarter growth of 100%. Its enterprise clients include Mindtickle, Mamaearth, Levi’s, Cash Karo and Open Financial.

Pazcare’s last round of funding was a $3.5 million seed round raised in October 2021. It has now raised a total of about $12 million since its founding in 2021 by Sanchit Malik and Manish Mishra. It aims to bring 2,000 more companies onto its platform over the next few quarters.

Malik told TechCrunch that the new funding will be used to expand Pazcare’s offerings and double its team size. He and Mishra wanted to create Pazcare because “health and life insurance penetration in India has been very low,” Malik told TechCrunch. “In India, we are on our own, either we buy insurance by ourselves or we are dependent on our employers to provide these benefits. We believe that insurance penetration will be primarily employer-driven and this became a big trigger for us to get into it.”

In a statement, Jafco Asia head of South Asia investments Supriya Singh said, “B2B insurance is a large white space in Asia. Pazcare is well equipped to disrupt this space and the company’s numbers speak for itself.”

If the pandemic-triggered proliferation of online meetings is killing your team productivity and sapping the attention of overloaded info workers, German startup tl;dv might have just the tool: It’s built an extension for videoconferencing platforms, like Zoom and Google Meet, which bolts on a suite of capabilities that attendees can use to record, transcribe and timestamp key moments to quickly and easily (re)surface important info after the meeting has ended.

Idea being that, collectively, the suite of tools can help professionals keep on top of the flow of info coming at them and their co-workers without everyone needing to attend every meeting in real-time. (Hence the name, tl;dv — which is internet slang for ‘too long; didn’t view‘.)

While major videoconferencing platforms can offer basic stuff like a record function, the winter 2020-founded startup reckons there’s a gap for bolting on a suite of extras that can enhance third party live meeting platforms, while neatly integrating with other popular office productivity tools like Slack and Notion, and with CRMs like Hubspot and Pipedrive.

Going beyond pure, info-structuring convenience, it also features clipping tools which let users turn killer meeting soundbites into video snippets which could be used for various broader purposes, like internal training or external marketing, depending on the content.

The platform launched in summer 2021 and it now has around 300 paying customers — the majority of which are start-ups and SMEs.

The vast majority (~95%) aren’t yet paying as it’s taking a freemium approach, meaning it’s offering certain features (like transcription) cost-free; but — overall — “thousands” of professional users are happily tapping into its freebie time-saver tools.

While productivity software is a hotly contested space, tl;dv has managed to convince a bunch of investors it’s onto something: Today it’s announcing a €4.3 million seed raise, led by Madrid-based K Fund, with participation from existing investors Seedcamp, Mustard Seed Maze, and another.vc. Also joining the round are Shilling.vc, plus a number of other European founders and business angels, such as Oscar Pierre, co-founder and CEO of on-demand delivery platform Glovo.

“All over the world, knowledge workers are spending at least fourteen hours a week in meetings. Most of the time, they’re just passively listening with their microphone on mute. tl;dv helps people quickly catch up on meetings instead of attending every call live,” tl;dv co-founder and CEO Raphael Allstadt tells TechCrunch.

“We measure success based on how often a user watches a recorded tl;dv instead of attending the live call. When a user frequently watches tl;dv highlights and clips — quickly navigating to key moments before exiting the recording — we see this as a sign they’ve gained the context they needed, and can start focusing on the work that really matters.”

Commenting on tl;dv’s seed raised in a statement, K Fund’s Jaime Novoa added: “For a long time at K Fund, we’d been recording some of our internal meetings so that they could be consumed at a later time by those not able to attend. This exploded with the pandemic and hybrid forms of work. tl;dv brings this to another level and we’re obviously heavy users at the firm. It’s not only about the pure aspect of recording calls but also about the way it integrates with other productivity tools such as Calendar, Notion, Google Docs, etc so that it becomes an essential part of the way we work.”

Asked how defensible it is to bolt productivity features onto third party meeting platforms, given these players could just clone popular features and bake it into native functionality, undermining tl;dv’s standalone utility, Allstadt argues that’s not a concern as it can offer something they won’t: A convenience-focused layer that works across different videoconferencing platforms, wherever office pros might be chattering virtually.

“The reality is that most of us are using more than one video call platform for work,” he argues, predicting: “The live conferencing market will continue to fragment.”

“Slack is increasingly used for internal meetings — Discord, too. Some of our users have security requirements that mean they can only use Google Meet internally, however their clients insist on using Zoom,” he goes on. “Our goal is to help busy professionals bundle insights from any live conferencing provider to any async platform where they collaborate. We will become a partner to Zoom and not a competitor.”  

So how does tl;dv work? Users manually trigger timestamps and/or add notes to flag key moments — so, interestingly (and unlike some rivals) — it’s not (currently) trying to automate the generation of meeting minutes, e.g. by using AI to parse transcriptions and ID key moments. Although it does not rule out adding that functionality at a later date.

Asked about this, Allstadt says some early users recounted having a poor experience with automated note-taking tools — hence he says they decided to focus on creating an interface/workflow that makes it super simple for actual humans to do the note-taking work in the first instance.

“We are not a tool for automatic note-taking,” he tells TechCrunch. “What is interesting is that a lot of our users have tested tools that offer some form of automated note-taking but feel the technology is not yet adequate. It’s important to be able to rely on meeting minutes, which is why tl;dv focuses on simplifying the note-taking of users (instead of attempting to take notes for users). We’re keeping a close eye on the advancements of automated note-taking software. When we feel this technology is good enough for our users, we’ll be integrating it!”

Explaining how tl;dv works currently, he adds: “During the meeting, tl;dv users can timestamp important moments with the click of a button or by writing short notes. This function also allows them to tag specific colleagues. The recording and transcript are instantly available after the meeting and automatically shared with all participants. tl;dv notifies the organizer whenever a meeting has been accessed to show them which content is especially useful or interesting for others. The organizer can also create short snippets and share these specific clips with teams, investors, stakeholders, or managers who weren’t in the call.”

Image credits: tl;dv

To make video clips from recorded meeting content, tl;dv users scan the transcript for important parts, select the relevant bit of text and hit a button to get the platform to turn that slice of the meeting into a shareable video snippet. So, er, let the meme-ification of colleagues commence!

Another convenience-focused feature tl;dv offers is baked in translations for meeting transcripts which Allstadt says are immediate available in more than twenty languages currently (“in the spirit of cross-continent collaboration!”).

More features are incoming. “We will soon release a powerful search function that allows users to search for any word and instantly locate all the conversations recorded with tl;dv in which that word was spoken,” he notes, adding that deeper integrations with asynchronous platforms like Hubspot, Salesforce and GSuite are also in the works.

The seed funding will also be put towards expanding utility with a feature that lets users group meetings in folders to simplify sharing and storing, per Allstadt, among other forthcoming extras. 

Discussing the competitive landscape for meeting productivity tools, he points to Gong as “interesting” — acknowledging that the well-financed revenue intelligence startup was an early entrant in the space and “paved the way in some sense”, as he puts it.

But he argues that Gong’s focus on sales teams creates an opportunity for the small European upstart to offer something “far more cross-functional” — further suggesting: “Especially considering how customer-oriented businesses are increasingly sharing sales insights across their organization. In other words, we want to normalize the adoption of tl;dv across entire companies — not just sales.”

Another early mover he namechecks is Otter — which had a first focus on transcription but has since been expanding its feature set to include productivity-focused features like automated meeting summaries, so there’s more than a little functionality overlap there. Although Allstadt plays that angle down. “We believe the value lies in the video, which helps enrich communication with emotive, vocal, and visual cues,” he argues, suggesting tl;dv’s video snippeting features will be able to give it an edge with teams who may already be subscribed to Otter’s rival offering.

One key thing to note about tl;dv’s platform is that meeting recordings are not currently stored end-to-end (E2E) encrypted — per Allstadt, it’s storing customer data on Amazon Web Services facilities and encrypting all communication to and from the AWS with 256-bit encryption at present — although he says that adding that extra layer of robust security is on its short term roadmap.

A lack of E2E encryption caused reputational headaches for Zoom during the pandemic — when it emerged that its security was not as robust as it had claimed. The platform later promised to focusing on fixing these security and privacy concerns and went on to roll out E2E encryption, including for non-paying users.

Startups have seen better years. Last year, for example.

We’ve worked to highlight bits of good news where possible (signs of resilient software revenue growth, indications that valuations can partially recover and that a good number of startups have oodles of cash on hand), but today we are working in the opposite direction.

A good question to ask today is whether tech stocks, particularly shares of software companies, are being sold too readily. If so, we could expect their revenue multiples to rise on the public markets in time. For tech startups being compared to their public counterparts, this would be an enormous relief.

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There is reason to believe that this could happen. Altimeter Capital partner Jamin Ball, whom we consider to be a pro-bono data journalist, wrote earlier this week that the “median software multiple is now 5.7x,” which is “close to 30% below the long-term pre-COVID average for the cloud software universe.” (Note that Bessemer Venture Partners’ Mary D’Onofrio and Andrew Schmitt arrived at a 6.6x median ARR multiple for public cloud companies this week, which is close enough to give extra weight to Ball’s mathematics.)

If you feel cloud and software stocks should not trade for less than their historical average, then you have cause to cheer. But is that a valid perspective? Should we expect cloud and software stocks to trade at a discount to their pre-COVID revenue multiples? Let’s find out.

The bear case

The Federal Reserve is expected to raise rates sharply today, perhaps by as much as 75 basis points. The hike will come in the wake of a 50-basis-point raise back in May, which was the first time the Fed increased rates by that much in 22 years. The Fed is tightening not only interest rates — the price of money — it is also allowing its total asset base to descend.

Rising rates are generally anticipated to be inversely correlated with the value of highly priced assets, including stocks that traded at richer-than-average revenue multiples. That means tech and software stocks. There were several reasons for the huge ascent in the value of software revenues last year, but their descent and the resulting market hangover are inversely correlated to the price of money, which is about to go up. Again.

The crypto sell-off of the last several days was preceded by staffing cuts at several companies in the business of facilitating the trading of decentralized assets and tokens. Reductions at Gemini and Crypto.com were superseded today by news that Coinbase is cutting more than 1,000 staff. Given that Coinbase and other crypto exchanges were high-flying success stories of 2021, the retreat may feel surprising.

How could companies like Coinbase, which reported massive growth and huge profits last year, now be in a position where they would need to slash staffing? This isn’t to overly focus our attention on exchanges; other companies in the larger web3 space are also under fire, including BlockFi, which also recently cut staff.

The answer to the sharp swap from rapid staffing to personnel cuts at exchanges, however, is something that we can actually understand with reasonable clarity. It boils down to this: Costs scaled at crypto exchanges as their revenues grew. Now, as their top lines contract due to falling trading volumes, those previously warranted costs have morphed into a burden.

Leaning on May data from consumer trading service Robinhood, Coinbase performance data and public layoff notices from crypto exchanges, let’s explore how things got so upside-down so quickly.

Booming revenues, costs

Coinbase had a simply excellent 2021. Its net revenues grew from $1.14 billion in 2020 to $7.36 billion last year, with its net income rising from $322 million to $3.62 billion over the same time frame. Growth and profitability like that impressed investors and potential employees alike, with both groups flocking to the company.

In its final earnings report of 2021, Coinbase indicated it had invested heavily to keep the revenue expansion coming, citing both hiring and its cash position as potential growth levers:

Digital coaching platform CoachHub plans to further expand in the Asia Pacific and other regions of the world after raising a $200 million Series C. The round, led by Sofina and Softbank Vision Fund 2, comes just eight months after the startup’s last funding announcement. Other participants included returning investors Molten Ventures, Silicon Valley Bank/SVB Capital, HV Capital, Signal Ventures Capital and Speedinvest. CoachHub has now raised a total of $330 million.

Yannis Niebelschuetz, co-founded CoachHub with his brother Matti in 2018. The company entered APAC a year ago, with its regional headquarters in Singapore.

The platform currently has more than 3,500 business coaches who are spread across 90 countries, covering all time zones. It has worked with more than 500 companies, including Coca Cola, Danone, Toyota, LVMH, L’Oreal, Credit Suisse and Twitter. One of the reasons CoachHub is able to scale is because it uses artificial intelligence-based tech to match employees with coaches.

Part of the funding will be used to increase CoachHub’s headcount from 850 to 1,000 by the end of this year. The company currently has 50 employees in Asia and will continue hiring as it expands in the region.

CoachHub monetizes on a “per person per month” basis, instead of session per session, which Yannis Niebelschuetz told TechCrunch gives companies more flexibility when using their services.

“It is also why our clients now engage with us in multi-year contracts,” he added. “They see the value in bringing in a large part of their workforce into digital coaching, not just for a specific moment in time but on an ongoing business.

An example of the kind of service that CoachHub offers include coaching for first-time managers. “It is a fact that soft skills are a must to progress in a career and improving on these can make a massive difference to the manager and team’s performance,” Niebelschuetz said.

Coaches can also emotionally support employees. “The pandemic has put a spotlight on employee engagement, mental well-being and retention,” said Niebelschuetz. The “Great Resignation” underscores how burnt out many employees on feeling and why emotional support is an important part of retention. “Investing in employee well-being dramatically improves their mental health, reduces stress and can bring meaning and purpose to their work.”

There are other digital coaching platforms like Sharpist and BetterUp, but Niebelschuetz said “we do not compare ourselves to anyone else and we know that the largest competition is the status quo—the ‘old way’ of doing people development.”

CoachHub differentiates with its international coverage; its platform is available in 14 languages and its coaches can speak a total of 60 languages. Niebelschuetz said CoachHub also focuses on research and development teams, which include behavioral scientists.

In Asia, CoachHub is prioritizing expansion in Southeast Asia, particularly Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, followed by Thailand and the Philippines.

Many people have plenty of online subscriptions that they barely use, and can save a fair amount of money with a service like Truebill to see all their recurring payments in one place. Spendflo wants to do the same for enterprise subscribers of SaaS services, and is targeted toward chief financial officers and finance leadership teams.

The startup announced today that it has raised $4.4 million in seed funding led by Accel India and Together Fund, with participation from BoldCap and Signal Peak Ventures, along with founders and operators from companies including Airbase, Zuora, Ivanti, CleverTap, Slintel, Lamda Test, Haptik and Wingify. 

Since its launch six months ago, Spendflo claims it has saved 23% on average for its customers. Its clients include Airmeet, Cronwpeak, Lambda Test, Urban Company, WIntify and Yellow.ai.

Founded in 2021 by Siddarth Sridharan, Ajay Vardhan and Rajiv Ramanan, Spendflo gathers all SaaS contracts into one place, giving companies visibility into spending. It also provides assisted purchasing and says it can guarantee savings with proprietary benchmarking data. The company was part of the first cohort of Atoms, an Accel program for pre-seed startups with $250,000 in non-dilutive capital. 

Sridharan told TechCrunch that while working at Volta Charging as an early employee, he “saw the company go from seed to IPO during my tenure. In this time, I brought over $10 million of SaaS tools myself.” He added that his CFO would consult him every quarter, instructing him to cut down spending by half.

“Honestly, it was a real pain since I had at least 150 different subscriptions at the time and SaaS buying had become decentralized along with no visibility in pricing and renewals,” Sridharan said. “But, in that phase, it struck me that perhaps other folks were also facing the same issue. So I started asking around in finance communities to figure out if there could be a solution for this.”

SaaS buying is decentralized because it’s not just CIOs who buy SaaS anymore, but every stakeholder, Srdiharan added. “The challenge here is that current SaaS buying happens through popular but unreliable channels such as G2 REviews, Quora and Reddit for pricing information. Approvals end up being stuck in endless email trials.”

On the other hand, Spendflo gives companies a centralized place to track their SaaS spending and usage.

As a use case, Sridharan told TechCrunch about Airmeet’s experience with Spendflo. First it onboarded Airmeet onto its platform and enabled them to centralize contracts and visualize spending. Then the platform’s strategic buyer and CMS worked on creating a buying roadmap based on Airmeet’s needs. Finally, Spendflo’s buying team took over procurements, streamlined the entire process and started saving money. Sridharan said that after using Spendflo, Airmeet’s procurements now happen 3X faster, and save over 16% of their SaaS expenses. 

Spendflo’s subscriptions dashboard

Sridharan added that small and large companies spend close to $330 billion on SaaS services, in addition to spending about $1 trillion on their own IT. “Spending on SaaS products grows 25% year on year. SaaS has become the only spend that CFOs have no visibility or control over. We have come to realize that the CFO’s role is evolving,” he said. “It is not just accounting anymore. Legal, ESG and FinOps, among others, are all rolling up to the CFO. The CFOs are no more the referee who blows a whistle, but they are now becoming a point guards inside the company.”

Spendflo sells to finance teams,, working closely with department, security and department heads. Sridharan said he usually sees an average of six stake holders in the buying process for SaaS tools. But, he added, Spendflo “follows a holistic approach,” which means it enables every SaaS buyer to raise and renew requests, view all tools, contracts and security documents, and collaborate with vendors on renewals and new procurement. 

The company monetizes by charging a fixed fee on the total SaaS spend that it manages. Sridharan said that it provides a money-back guarantee on the subscription fee, making it budget neutral for finance organizations to adopt our services. “We consistently show 2x to 5x ROI savings. On average, we save 23% on their annual SaaS spend.”

In a prepared statement, Accel India partner Dinesh Katiyar said, “Pay-by-use SaaS tools have been a boon for companies worldwide. They’re all rapidly shifting toward vendors that offer these tools. However, the mass exodus to SaaS has created a new challenge. Instead of centralized procurement workflows, we now have each business function buying what they need. They overspend through unoptimized pricing plans, under-utilized tiers and unused licenses. Spendflo is committed to bringing back spending efficacy without compromising business velocity.”

Earlier today, TechCrunch+ published an open letter to startups from Index Ventures partner Mike Volpi with advice for startups that have different levels of runway. In short, the more cash that a startup has, the more latitude it will have to be aggressive in the present downturn and the looming recession.

We caught up with Volpi last week to talk through his perspective on the market, the disconnect between venture performance and startup operating results, and what portion of startups might be in reasonable shape to attract capital and grow despite a risk-off investing environment.

Check out Volpi’s full note here, and read on for our founder-focused takeaways from our chat with the investor.

Cash rules everything

One claim stood out the most in the investor letter: “many companies are still hitting or exceeding operating plans.” Given that we’ve seen mixed results in the public market, that statement was a bit surprising.

We asked Volpi how many startups were hitting their plans, and while the investor was hesitant to put too fine an approximation on a venture market that he has limited visibility into, he did estimate that around 75% of startups are hitting — or exceeding — their plans.

Startup operating plans vary in their level of aggression, so the “around 75%” figure may not be as bullish as it reads, but that’s immaterial. What matters is that most startups are still able to sell their goods and services, and we are not seeing the kind of deceleration in startup growth that the public markets might lead us to expect.

More simply, startups are still able to sell in the current market even as asset prices fall.

If that’s the case, what should we make of the steady drumbeat of doom and gloom from investors on Twitter and elsewhere?

The 2022 crisis is the third major tech downturn of the internet era, following the dot-com bubble and the Great Recession.

Many experts are dispensing advice to founders on how to weather this storm. While this advice is broadly helpful, we must consider that it’s been approximately 14 years since the last major correction, and few in our industry have actively gone through a full economic cycle. Therefore, it is important to remember that good advice is tailored, specific and, more importantly, contextual.

Each company is unique and faces diverse circumstances. Does a downturn affect every company identically? No. Do some companies have more favorable balance sheets than others? Yes. Are some companies able to raise funds even in difficult circumstances? Absolutely.

The best advice for handling the downturn should be based on the length of your runway and the efficiency of your business. Runway falls into one of three categories:

• Two years or more;
• Between one and two years;
• A year or less.

The corresponding strategy for each would be, respectively, “stay aggressive,” “ruthlessly prioritize,” and “time to trim.”

Editor’s Note: TechCrunch+ has notes from an interview with the author of this letter, Mike Volpi — including the potentially good news it contains for many startups — coming shortly. The following letter was lightly edited and reformatted for our pages.

Great companies are born in difficult times

Great businesses have been built and have flourished through some of the most difficult times. Famously, Google raised capital in the aftermath of the dot-com bubble, grew through the downturn, and was able to distance itself from the competition. Salesforce, founded shortly before the 2001 crisis, survived the storm effectively, even though it almost went out of business in its early days. Most recently, Uber enjoyed a similar rise during the Great Recession.

Turbulence does require a different skill set from founders. Gone are the days of “grow at all costs.” Today’s environment requires subtle and precise control and management of the business. When navigated carefully, these periods can separate the wheat from the chaff.

The first step in navigating through stormy waters is to make a cold, hard assessment of your business:

• How much cash runway do you have?
• Do you have the proverbial product-market fit?
• Is your growth strategy cash-efficient?
• Have you evaluated and prioritized your engineering projects and marketing programs?
• What is your competition doing?

If you have two-plus years of runway, stay aggressive

The web3 market is a mess.

There’s enough going on that it will take us a moment to unpack the situation this morning, but leading indicators of sentiment in the blockchain ecosystem are sufficiently nasty to set the stage: Bitcoin is off around 13% in the last 24 hours to $23,436; ETH is off around 15% over the same time frame to $1,219; Solana’s token is off approximately 15% in the last day to $26.75.

The three tokens are down roughly 26%, 36% and 39%, respectively, over the last week.

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The biggest driver of concern this morning appears to be a crisis at Celsius Networks, which raised a huge chunk of venture capital last year, and today halted withdrawals after its token crashed.

This doesn’t mean that there is no money flowing in the startup world — even some less tech-focused ideas are busy raising big checks, as TechCrunch noted earlier today. But what’s going on in the blockchain domain? Let’s take a minute to explore that  question from a few angles.

What the heck is going on?

While I am not the TechCrunch+ crypto expert — that mantle belongs to recent hire Jacquelyn Melinek — I have put together a list of issues that are currently tripping up the web3 market, which is inclusive of everything from cryptocurrencies and decentralized finance to non-fungible tokens. They are, loosely:

Norwegian startup, Glint Solar, has built a SaaS platform to help developers identify strong contenders for ground-based (or floating) solar projects with the goal of supporting a fast-growing industry to spin up a strong pipeline of projects as a demand to accelerate the shift to renewable energy continues.

Co-founder and COO, Even Kvelland, tells us its approach draws on satellite imagery, government (and other) data-sets, as well as applying machine learning and other algorithms, to provide customers with assessments of the risks and costs of prospective solar installations.

Its software as a service platform can be used to model costs and risks for ground-based solar installations but is also able to assess project viability for a growing niche of floating solar parks, such as solar installations sited in dams and reservoirs.

Since launch, back in March 2020, Kvelland says Glint Solar has onboarded 14 customers in markets around the world, including Northern Europe, Asia and North and South America, with a range of large and small developers tapping in to its one-stop-shop for assessing possible solar projects — name checking the likes of Scatec, Fortum and TotalEnergies ++ as among its first wave of sign ups.

“What we’ve spent the last two years doing since we started the company is to understand what are the main obstacles [to solar energy projects]. And it’s become pretty clear that the biggest headache for the core customer, solar developers — those companies actually building the parks — is they’re struggling to build their project pipelines, so getting enough projects [lined up],” he tells TechCrunch. “What we’re doing is we’re going into the early phases — helping them both identify and analyze potential project locations.”

The platform allows customers to look through “tens of thousands” of possible project locations, per Kvelland — whittling their options down to “very good” prospects, based on its ability to perform cost analysis and spot issues which could otherwise create major problems (or even derail a project) down the line.

“We run or allow our customers to run preliminary technical and financial analysis and then spend the time on those projects where you can optimize the chances for success,” is how he sums up the core function.

Reducing time to build a solar installation is one touted benefit but the utility of the tool is broader, per Kvelland, who says it could — for example — help a customer find and realize the value of an (otherwise) overlooked site.

View of Glint Solar’s SaaS product (Image credits: Glint Solar)

The SaaS platform is able to analyze factors such as available solar radiation and proximity to key infrastructure, such as capacity in the grid for connecting to projects — which Kvelland notes is a “huge Capex driver”.

It also considers social and environmental regulations, as well as looking at other physical factors — like shading on a site; extreme weather; or the elevation or slope of the land, among others — to feed its modelling.

For floating solar, it’s able to support project scoping by analyzing underwater features — such as the depth of the water and whether there’s a rocky or smooth bottom — which can impact project capex and opex costs (since floating solar rigs typically need to be anchored so the deeper the body of water the more costly that may be, for example).

“Here we’ve been trying to detect both the types of natural vs manmade bodies of water using machine learning and also the bathymetry — so basically the underwater topography using a number of satellite imageries and looking at how much light is penetrating through the water and then reflected back,” he explains. “It’s complex — there are a few people if any in the world who have successfully really built a good model so that’s part of the problem we’re working on.”

Glint Solar’s ultimate goal is to help customers find more valuable sites for solar installations at a time when competition for such sites is on the rise as demand for renewables keeps stepping up.

“Against the backdrop of, already, the energy transition [away from fossil fuels] but also — especially in Europe now with Ukraine and Germany and other countries doubling down on renewables — we’re seeing they really now need to get started much quicker and having more projects through the funnel to realize the best ones,” says Kvelland.

“On the macro side, we’re seeing solar might increase something like 24%-25% year-on-year until 2030 so I think we’re definitely in a booming market and we’re capturing — currently — value at the very beginning and then… I think there’s a whole host of additional values we can offer [our customers] either later in the value chain or in other verticals down the road, with wind or battery storage. So it’s a large market that we’re aiming for,” he adds.

Demonstrating the value of its product is likely to take time — as it’s still early days for Glint Solar’s customers to progress the solar projects they’ve used the tool to scope and prioritize. But Kvelland notes that “several” have taken the insights they gleaned from using the software to the “next stage” — which he says means they’re either in the negotiation process with the landowner/water owner or are doing more detailed engineering work or are in the last stages of project finance.

“We expect that hopefully later this year we’ll see some of the first projects coming online,” he adds.

Glint Solar is announcing a $3 million seed funding raise which it says will be used to scale the business — with a plan to expand into new countries but also grow its customer base in key markets in Europe and the US. Hence it’s planning to double the size of its team over the next year as it gears up to capitalize on the scramble to build out solar plants.

Investors in the seed round include sustainability focused Momentum, early stage Norwegian fund, Wiski Capital and cleantech and energy investor Statkraft Ventures, as well as some existing shareholders.

Commenting in a statement, Hilde Støle Pettersen, managing partner at Momentum, said: “We have followed the Glint team since the company’s inception and always liked their idea of accelerating the solar revolution through valuable insight. With their early commercial traction and the fantastic team they are building, we now found the timing to be right. We look forward to supporting the team in the years to come in collaboration with very strong co-investors.”

The startup previously went through the Antler accelerator in Oslo — taking in some pre-seed funding via that program.

Co-founders (L to R): CEO Harald Olderheim, CTO John Modin and COO Even Kvelland (Image credits: Glint Solar)

Kvelland also recounts how it got an early ‘cold call’ from a US-based private equity fund, via LinkedIn, which was eager to invest (unusually so, given how early stage the business — but it’s presumably projecting major growth in solar). So, in all, he says it had raised ~$700k in external funding prior to the seed round, not including funds put it by the founders as they bootstrapped to get the SaaS business off the ground.

The business model it’s using is a straightforward, company-wide, annual per market licensing model at this stage, per Kvelland.

On the competition front, he says Glint Solar’s focus on the early phase of solar projects gives it an edge — arguing there’s relatively little attention at that end of the solar value chain.

But he’s able to point to a few US-based competitors — naming the likes of veteran data management software firm, TerraBase; and GeoCF, a software platform which he says was acquired by a solar developer seeking to use the capabilities in-house, as offering similar services. 

Other competition comes from more generalist tech tools and/or consultancy firms, he suggests.

“Typically today it’s a lot of rudimentary tools. From people literally looking at Google Maps trying to guess what’s potentially a good project area to working with legacy consulting engineering firms getting inbound from farmers. So what we’re trying to do is finally give the developers a pro-active tool that allows them to much sooner screen a very high number of sites against a number of different variables and then take the information that typically today might have been something you assess later in the project stage — [and] bring that into the early assessment.

“Because what we keep hearing from the solar developers is that they oftentimes discover something later that maybe — worse case — breaks the project so they have to start from scratch so we want to give them as much relevant insight as early as possible.”