Mind The Gap by Freshchat

Story of Zoom - Mind the Gap

Before Zoom went IPO, not many people spoke about the company and not many knew of their story. Zoom which was exclusively known for its video communication product, struck the most successful public offering. Launching at 36$, currently valued at 92.53 USD as of today. Zoom is leading the IPO race against Pinterest, Uber, Slack, Fiverr and the lot. So, what is Zoom’s story? Rolling back to 1987 in China. Eric, who is currently the CEO of zoom, had a girlfriend who stayed miles away from him. Eric had to take a train to meet her and it used to take him 10 hours for this. He used to think to himself how great it would be if he had a device that let him talk to her and also in a sense be with her without traveling so far. Little did he know that those daydreams would eventually become the basis for Zoom. Anyway, fast forward 10 years from his days in China, he moved to Silicon Valley and joined Webex, a video communications company. Eric was quite happy in WebEx working on something that he was truly passionate about. This continued for a while. Then came a day when Webex got acquired by Cisco. Eric became the VP of engineering in Cisco taking care of WebEx. He felt the tool to be complex and outdated. Just clunky and difficult to use. Being the VP of Engineering, he took that opportunity to interact with customers on a regular basis and got to know that the customers never really liked the product as much. He was not happy about this. According to Eric, customer happiness was the most important goal to go behind and they were failing to do that. Eric thought that webex at that time was not solving newer problems faced by the customers and were penalizing customers who used their software. He wanted to build a software that customers would enjoy using! That would make the customers happy. He quickly moved out of Cisco and started Zoom in 2011. Mostly out of the sheer motive to bring joy to customers. As much as we love the story of how Zoom started, owing to the theme of Mind the Gap, let’s move along and look at growth, marketing and customer experience learnings from Zoom’s story. And don’t worry even though there is a LOT to learn from Zoom, we have condensed our learnings into three most important lessons to make it snackable. Let’s zoom right in. Number one. Product led growth - One thing different about Zoom is how much they chose to stick to things that worked for them without following trends and fads. When Eric first decided to launch Zoom, he had his team work on the product for two full years before getting out to the market. In a world where startups talk about launching first and failing fast, Zoom has been pretty old school in terms of doing one thing extremely well and getting it right the first time. Also, an interesting observation is that Eric decided to disrupt an already noisy industry. The video collaboration domain was filled with enterprise players like WebEx, Skype, Go to meetings etc. Zoom not only launched a product in a crowded market but did a damn good job at outperforming existing players. They were able to achieve all of this because they put their bucks on the product. Zoom launched as a product that was ready to grow. Scalability, stability and performance were things that the company focused on. Zoom was a product that did not spend a lot of money on paid advertising and let the product walk the talk. Most of their traffic is organic, through word of mouth, through their content, and through their hardware integrations. The only time they actually spent money was to set up a billboard. That too because Eric liked the attention it created when his neighbours came and told him that they spotted his company’s billboard on the way and that it was pretty cool. The second strategy might seem trivial but I feel it’s the most important takeaway - “Listening”. The two years that Eric’s team spent on creating a product, they made sure that they spoke to more and more people to understand their pain points, their preferences, and their feedback on whatever tool they were already using. Most importantly they “heard them out”. After all, this is a company that cared the most about customer happiness over anything else. Interestingly, in one of Bloomerg’s interview with Eric, when they asked him about Cisco catching up in terms of features and what Eric is planning to do in terms of dealing with competition, this is what he had to say. They don’t have any strategy against competitors. As long as they listen to customers and make them happy, they don’t have to worry about anything. The third and final strategy of Zoom’s was the same as Airbnb’s. We already made an episode on Airbnb’s story. Don’t forget to tune in to that episode after this one. Now, back to the story — Zoom’s strategy was to go behind making their existing customers happy instead of going behind new customers. Retention over acquisition — classic but brave move. For zoom, their customer support team forms the main pillar of the company. As I mentioned previously, feedback and feature suggestions are taken extremely seriously at Zoom. Their philosophy is to make the existing customers happy first. So happy that they would want to spread the love through word of mouth. A mutual setup, the more happy your customers are, the more happy you get, you know, even in terms of bottom line. Zoom’s story is quite different from every other brand story we’ve ever heard. When every other brand wants to prove itself as a misfit or a rule breaker and a challenger of the status quo, Zoom was a little different. When Eric was asked about rules, he jokingly said, oh no. We love rules and we make sure that we follow them. Slowly and truly, Zoom grew to become different in its own way by embracing what worked for them and not following trends. Not just that, there have been a lot of talks around how Zoom’s philosophy is not about growing fast but to stay as a company that meets customer needs constantly. Ironically this is what led to their fast growth. Zoom is a living proof that when you strive for customer happiness, you are never going to be disappointed at the returns. Currently, there are about half a million unique business domains, millions of individuals, spending 18 billion minutes annually on Zoom. That’s 18 billion minutes of happiness sold. Reference - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICgehQ1xd24 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xqog63KOANc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8H-TsqT1GUk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ja9VMe18sh8

Last week in startups - Global - Mind the Gap News

Ally raises $8M Series A for its OKR solution OKRs, or Objectives and Key Results, are a popular planning method in Silicon Valley. Like most of those methods that make you fill in some form once every quarter, that employees find rather annoying and a waste of their time. Ally wants to change that and make the process more useful. The company today announced that it has raised an $8 million Series A round led by Accel Partners, with participation from Vulcan Capital, Founders Co-op and Lee Fixel. The company, which launched in 2018, previously raised a $3 million seed round. Most companies that adopt this methodology, though, tend to work with spreadsheets and Google Docs. Over time, that simply doesn’t work, especially as companies get larger. Ally, then, is meant to replace these other tools. The service is currently in use at “hundreds” of companies in more than 70 countries, Vellore tells me. Simon Data hauls in $30M Series C to continue building customer data platform As businesses use an increasing variety of marketing software solutions, the goal around collecting all of that data is to improve customer experience. Simon Data announced a $30 million Series C round today to help. The round was led by Polaris Partners . Previous investors .406 Ventures and F-Prime Capital also participated. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $59 million, according to the company. Companies tend to use a variety of marketing tools, and Simon Data takes on the job of understanding the data and activities going on in each one. Then based on certain actions — such as, say, an abandoned shopping cart — it delivers a consistent message to the customer, regardless of the source of the data that triggered the action. They see this ability to pull together data as a customer data platform (CDP). In fact, part of its job is to aggregate data and use it as the basis of other activities. In this case, it involves activating actions you define based on what you know about the customer at any given moment in the process. RedDoorz raises $70M to expand its budget hotel network in Southeast Asia Singapore-based budget-hotel booking startup RedDoorz is tiny in comparison to fast-growing giant Oyo. But it is holding its ground and winning the trust of an ever-growing number of investors. The four-year-old startup announced it has raised $70 million in a Series C financing round, less than five months after it closed its $45 million Series B. The new round, which is ongoing, was led by Asia Partners and saw participation from new investors Rakuten Capital and Mirae Asset-Naver Asia Growth FundRegardless, the new funds will help RedDoorz fight SoftBank-backed Oyo, which is already aggressively expanding to new markets. Oyo currently operates in more than 80 nations. The startup operates in 80 cities across Indonesia, Singapore, the Philippines and Vietnam, and plans to use the new capital to expand its network in its existing markets, said Saberwal. At least for the next year, RedDoorz has no plans to expand beyond the four markets where it currently operates, he said. Twitter leads $100M round in top Indian regional social media platform ShareChat ShareChat, a four-year-old social network in India that serves tens of million of people in regional languages, just answered that question with a $100 million financing round led by global giant Twitter . Other than Twitter, TrustBridge Partners, and existing investors Shunwei Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, SAIF Capital, India Quotient and Morningside Venture Capital also participated in the Series D round of ShareChat. The new round, which pushes ShareChat’s all-time raise to $224 million, valued the firm at about $650 million, a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. ShareChat declined to comment on the valuation. This investment will help ShareChat grow and provide the company’s management team access to Twitter’s executives as thought partners Moving on to acquisitions: Salesforce is acquiring ClickSoftware for $1.35B Just days after closing the hefty $15.7 billion Tableau deal, salesforce opened its wallet again, this time announcing it has bought field service software company ClickSoftware for a tidy $1.35 billion. This one could help beef up the company’s field service offering, which falls under the Service Cloud umbrella. In its June earnings report, the company reported that Service Cloud crossed the $1 billion revenue threshold for the first time. This acquisition is designed to keep those numbers growing. What else caught our eyes- Developers accuse Apple of anti-competitive behavior with its privacy changes in iOS 13 A group of app developers have penned a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook, arguing that certain privacy-focused changes to Apple’s iOS 13 operating system will hurt their business. In a report by The Information, the developers were said to have accused Apple of anti-competitive behavior when it comes to how apps can access user location data. With iOS 13, Apple aims to curtail apps’ abuse of its location-tracking features as part of its larger privacy focus as a company. Today, many apps ask users upon first launch to give their app the “Always Allow” location-tracking permission. Users can confirm this with a tap, unwittingly giving apps far more access to their location data than is actually necessary, in many cases. There will now be a new option upon launch presented to users, “Allow Once,” which allows users to first explore the app to see if it fits their needs before granting the app developer the ability to continually access location data. This option will be presented alongside existing options “Allow While Using App” and “Don’t Allow.” The app developers argue that this change may confuse less-technical users, who will assume the app isn’t functioning properly unless they figure out how to change their iOS Settings to ensure the app has the proper permissions.

Last week in startups - India - Mind the Gap News

One of the biggest funding this week was raised by online reseller network Meesho, gaining $125 Mn in a round led by Naspers, with participation from Facebook and existing investors SAIF, Sequoia, Shunwei Capital, RPS and Venture Highway. This fund raise will help it to make deeper inroads in areas outside India’s major metro regions, by creating more entrepreneurs, and as a result, reaching remote customers not serviced by traditional e-commerce marketplaces. Also, rumours are rife that the Japanese conglomerate is reportedly looking to invest $200 Mn in the company as well. Another major round was raised by ShareChat, adding $100 Mn in its latest Series D round of funding. Twitter and TrustBridge Partners are two new investors joining this latest funding round, while existing investors participating in this round include Shunwei Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, SAIF Capital, India Quotient and Morningside Venture Capital. The round took the total funding raised by ShareChat to $224 Mn. Bengaluru-based AI startup Parentof raised $1 Mnin a seed funding round led by V Srinivas and other existing investors. Parentof is a decision sciences organization which provides insights into child growth and decision analytics. With this, total funding raised by Parentof is $2 Mn. The funds will be used towards further evolving their technology, as well as expanding their partner network. Peer-to-peer (P2P) lending startup Faircent raised a fresh round of funding from Das Capital and Gunosy Capital. Existing investors Starharbor Asia and M&S Partners have also participated in the round. The startup will use the funding to strengthen its technology backend, expansion of its product offerings and reach. Chennai-based conversational AI startup Uniphore Software Systems raised $51 Mn in its Series C funding round led by March Capital Partners. Chiratae Ventures (formerly IDG Ventures), Sistema Asia, CXO Fund, ITP, Iron Pillar, Patni Family also participated in the round. The funds will be used to accelerate its go-to-market in North America, invest in research and development for the next wave of innovation on its platform and grow its talented employee base globally. Robotics startup Emotix, popularly known as Miko, which develops educational and recreational robot toys for children, announced to raise an INR 53.42 Cr ($7.5 Mn) Series A led by Chiratae Ventures. YourNest Venture Capital, investor Bruno Raschle and a group of angel investors are also participating in Emotix’s latest round. The company said it would be using the funding to expand internationally to North America, UK and the Middle East. A portion of the funds would be allocated for developing new products and R&D in the areas of emotional and artificial intelligence, which form a crucial component of the Miko emotive robot toy. Easy Home Finance: Real estate and lending tech company Easy Home Finance Limited announced a strategic partnership with Harbourfront Capital, a group company of Das Capital. The VC firm will invest an undisclosed amount in the real estate financing company. Easy will be utilising the funds from Harbourfront in expanding its assets under management (AUM) base and for further investment in its technology platform. Gurugram-based credit card bill payment startup Cred raised a bridge Series B round of INR 27.55 Cr ($4 Mn) from Sequoia Capital India. The company issued 20,179 Series B CCCPS shares priced Rs 13,653.31 each. The company said in its filings that the Bridge Series B funds will be used for growth, expansion, marketing and general corporate activities of the company. Moving on to acquisitions: Bengaluru-headquartered coworking space provider CoWrks acquired The UnCube for an undisclosed amount. The Gurugram-headquartered UnCube provides on-demand workspace solutions. Post-acquisition, CoWrks will rename the combined entity to CoWrks Go. CoWrks is now expanding its network of productive spaces by bringing on board a chain of cafes, restaurants, hotels, business lounges, etc. Ola acquihired Pikup.ai, a Bengaluru-based artificial intelligence startup. The deal value remains undisclosed, however, Pikup.ai founders — Inder Singh and Ritwik Saikia — along with its team will join Ola. With the acquihire, Ola aims to advance the application of machine learning and AI to identify deep insights that can lead to improved mobility outcomes. What else caught our eyes? Mukesh Ambani announced free Jio connectivity and Jio-Azure cloud services for tech startups in India by 2021. Startups will have to register on the Jio portal to access these services, which are expected to be available from January 2021. To provide these cloud services, Reliance Jio has announced a partnership with the tech giant Microsoft and its Azure cloud vertical.

Last week in startups - Global - Mind the Gap News

This episode we have a couple of interesting bits to talk about. Starting with a company that offers a safety net to digital nomads, the world’s largest internet restaurant company and most interesting of all, keep listening to know if SpaceX is turning into Uber for space? Stay tuned to know more. So, last week’s startup funding scene. We had a total of 283 funding rounds, $6.6 billion total funding, 175 acquisitions recorded, and a transaction of a total acquisition amount of $11.2 billion. Let’s dive right into the highlights now. SafetyWing raises $3.5M seed to offer medical insurance to ‘digital nomads’ They’ve got quite an interesting pitch. They claim to build safety nets for digital nomads. People used to be limited to working locally. Now the internet and recent technologies have made it possible to hire and work for companies globally, allowing people to live wherever in the world they choose to, free from the physical restraints of an office location. “Unfortunately, social safety nets like health insurance are national and only available in one’s home country. Millions are left to figure this out on their own with the majority going uninsured. To solve this problem, we are building the first global social safety net: a welfare state on the internet.” SafetyWing’s first product is focused on medical travel insurance, with the promise to provide medical cover for anybody who works outside their home country. The cover is flexible, too, sold as a 28-day rolling subscription that can be paused at any time. Cover starts at $37 every 4 weeks. Meanwhile, to support its mission of providing a safety net for digital nomads and to develop further products, the 2017-founded company, whose other co-founders are Sarah Sandnes (CTO) and Hans Kjellby (COO), has raised $3.5 million in seed funding. Leading the round is Nordic and Baltic-focused VC byFounders, with participation from Credit Ease Fintech Fund and DG Incubation. SafetyWing’s previous backers include YC and The Nordic Web Ventures. The ‘world’s largest internet restaurant company’ quietly raised $125 million this month Rebel Foods formerly known as Faasos, a once-small Pune, India-based company that now prepares a variety of foods in its cloud kitchens. The growth of the nine-year-old company is a bit breathtaking — and instructive. According to Bloomberg, Rebel — which this month raised $125 million in fresh capital from the Indonesian delivery service Go-Jek, Coatue Management and Goldman Sachs — now operates 235 kitchens across 20 Indian cities. And it’s processing two million orders a month. (It calls itself the “world’s largest internet restaurant company.”) While it began life as a chain of kebab restaurants, that original concept, Faasos, is now just one of eight other brands that Rebel operates, including a tea brand called Kettle & Kegs; a Chinese concept called Mandarin Oak; a pizza brand called Oven Story; and a brand called Behrouz, through which Rebel makes and sells slow-cooked biryani rice dishes. Still, it’s little wonder that Rebel is racing headlong into new markets as fast as it can. According to Bloomberg, the company is currently planning to build 100 cloud kitchens in Indonesia over the next 18 months, with Go-Jek’s help. It also expects to open 20 cloud kitchen facilities in the United Arab Emirates by December. Babylon Health confirms $550M raise at $2B+ valuation to expand its AI-based health services Babylon Health, the U.K.-based startup that has developed a number of AI-based health services, including a chatbot used by the U.K’.s National Health Service to help diagnose ailments, has confirmed a massive investment that it plans to use to expand its business to the U.S. and Asia, and expand its R&D to diagnose more serious, chronic conditions. It has closed a $550 million round of funding, valuing Babylon Health at more than $2 billion. The round brings together a number of strategic and financial investors, including PIF (Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund); a large U.S.-based health insurance company (which reports suggest to be Centene Corporation, although Babylon is not disclosing the name); Munich Re’s ERGO Fund; and returning investors Kinnevik and Vostok New Ventures. (Previous investors who do not appear to be in this round also include Demis Hassabis, the AI expert who co-founded DeepMind, which is now a part of Google.) That additionally gives Babylon (and others in digital health) a big opportunity to break down some of the more persistent problems in healthcare, such as providing services in developing economies and remote regions: one of its big efforts alongside rollouts in mature markets like the U.K. and Canada has been a service in Rwanda to bring health services to digital platforms for the first time. Trueface raises $3.7M to recognise that gun, as it’s being pulled, in real time Trueface is a U.S.-based computer vision company that turns camera data into so-called “actionable data” using machine learning and AI by employing partners who can perform facial recognition, threat detection, age and ethnicity detection, license plate recognition, emotion analysis and object detection. That means, for instance, recognising a gun, as it’s pulled in a dime store. Yes folks, welcome to your brave new world. The company has now raised $3.7 million from Lavrock Ventures, Scout Ventures and Advantage Ventures to scale the team growing partnerships and market share. Trueface claims it can identify enterprises’ employees for access to a building, detect a weapon as it’s being wielded or stop fraudulent spoofing attempts. Quite some claims. The company announced today that is has received signed agreements from D1 Capital Partners, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Light Street Capital, Sequoia Capital and Silver Lake Partners to fund a $525 million tender offer that will allow Unity’s common shareholders — the majority of which are early or current employees — to sell their shares in the company. What else caught our eyes- SpaceX is expanding its launch offerings with a new, more affordable and consistent option for small satellite operators looking to put lighter payloads into orbit. The new service offering is designed to work for customers who can take advantage of a “rideshare” launch, sharing space on a Falcon 9 with other small satellites being sent up. The rideshare option will be offered on a regular, defined schedule, and SpaceX says that it’s designed for flexibility, offering customers the ability to pre-book a spot, and ensuring that if they’re ready to launch when their rideshare comes up, the rocket will indeed go up — with or without other payloads also booked that may not be ready in time. SpaceX’s new service is designed somewhat like rideshare programs here on Earth: Passengers who are ready get to ride, and the company looks to fill seats by offering bookings both in advance (12 or more months out) and much closer to launch time (between 12 and 6 months out) with a possibility of even tighter turnaround, though SpaceX hasn’t publicly posted pricing for that option, which means it’ll probably be costly. As for those with plenty of notice, they get the biggest price break: Launches start at just $2.25 million for payloads of up to 150 kg (330 lbs), or $4.5 million for those weighing up to 300 kg (660 lbs). That sounds like a lot, but consider that the lowest cost for a current SpaceX launch is currently somewhere around $57 million.

Last week in startups - India - Mind the Gap News

This week US-based ecommerce company eBay is investing $160 Mn in Indian ecommerce company, Paytm Mall, valued at $2.86 Bn post-investment. According to the Ministry of Corporate Affairs filings accessed by Inc42, Paytm E-commerce private limited is issuing 1,28,028 equity shares at a price of $1,249.73 per share to eBay Singapore Service Pvt Ltd. Further, Bengaluru-based digital payments company PhonePe received INR 697.9 Cr ($101.5 Mn) equity infusion from its Singapore-based parent, PhonePe Private Limited Singapore. Interestingly, the investment has come after PhonePe founders— Rahul Chari Vardha and Sameer Nigam— increased their equity stake in the company. In April, Vardha picked up 1.67 Mn equity shares and Nigam picked up 6.63 Mn shares at a nominal value of INR 1. Gurugram-based home services marketplaceUrbanClap raised a $75 Mn Series E funding round led by Tiger Global. Existing investors Steadview Capital and Vy Capital also participated in this round. Prior to this, UrbanClap raised INR 149 Lakh ($216K) in fresh fundingfrom ex-Flipkart CTO Mekin Maheshwari and Avaana Capital founder Anjali Bansal. This transaction is said to be split into two parts, a primary round which resulted in a share subscription by the investors and a secondary share sale by some early institutional investors. Veri5Digital: Bengaluru-based software services provider Veri5Digital raised $2 Mn in Series A funding led by California-based Khosla Ventures. Veri5Digital plans to use the funding to scale its identity solutions for the Indian market and also build new identity and Digital India related products and services. It is also close to launching its identity related products in the US and Asia markets. Indifi: Gurugram-based B2B lender Indifi Technologies raised INR 145 Cr ($21 Mn) in its Series C funding round, led by the CDC Group. The company also has additional investors like Accel India, Omidyar Network, Fair Finance Fund and Elevar Equity. The company aims to utilise the funds to modernise and expand the existing business into new areas of business, develop infrastructure, capital expenditure, repay debts and general corporate expenditure to meet objectives. Pocket Aces: Digital entertainment company, Pocket Aces raised an INR 100 Cr ( $14.34 Mn) funding round from Sequoia India, DSP Group, and 3one4 Capital. Pocket Aces will utilise the funding to expand its content library and technology platform, and to acquire more talent. Further, it will also continue to invest into its live gaming platform Loco with an aim to hit 50 Mn users in the next two years. Easy Home Finance: Real estate and lending tech company Easy Home Finance Limited announced a strategic partnership with Harbourfront Capital, a group company of Das Capital. The VC firm will invest an undisclosed amount in the real estate financing company. Easy will be utilising the funds from Harbourfront in expanding its assets under management (AUM) base and for further investment in its technology platform. Gurugram-based credit card bill payment startup Cred raised a bridge Series B round of INR 27.55 Cr ($4 Mn) from Sequoia Capital India. The company issued 20,179 Series B CCCPS shares priced Rs 13,653.31 each. The company said in its filings that the Bridge Series B funds will be used for growth, expansion, marketing and general corporate activities of the company. Moving on to acquisitions: Robotic process automation company, Automation Anywhere, announced theacquisition of Paris-based Klevops for an undisclosed amount. Post-acquisition, Automation Anywhere fast forwards the RPA category to Attended Automation 2.0, where managers can easily orchestrate workflows across a team of employees and bots. This enables customers to automate more processes with the same level of central governance, security and analytic capability. What else caught our eyes? Bengaluru-based food delivery unicorn Swiggy which is definitely turning into a generic trademark these days, you know a verb for ordering food online. Is reportedly close to raising a $700-$750 Mn funding round led by its existing investor Naspers. Naspers will be investing around $350 Mn along with a group of Korean investors such as STIC Investments and Korean Omega Investment who are said to co-invest about $50 Mn. While, the rest is said to be raised from the other existing investors of Swiggy.