Technology

Microsoft last week launched Office, a new mobile app for iOS and Android that the company slid into an already packed lineup of individual apps.

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Snapask, an on-demand tutoring app, announced today that it has raised $35 million in Series B funding. Earmarked for the startupexpansion in Southeast Asia, the round was led by Asia Partners and Intervest.

Launched in Hong Kong five years ago, Snapask has now raised a total of $50 million and operates in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Japan and South Korea. Its other investors have included Kejora Ventures, Ondine Capital and SOSV Chinaccelerator (Snapask participated in its accelerator program).

Founder and CEO Timothy Yu said Snapask will expand into Vietnam and focus on markets in Southeast Asia where there is a high demand for tutoring and other private education services. It will also open a regional headquarter in Singapore and develop video content and analytics products for its platform.

The company now has a total of 3 million students, with 1.3 million who registered over the past twelve months (including a recent surge that Yu attributes to students studying at home after COVID-19 related school cancellations). Over the past year, 100,000 tutors have applied, taking Snapaskcurrent total to 350,000 applicants.

Yu says that over 2 million questions are asked by students each month on the platform, with each subscriber typically asking about 60 questions a month, during tutoring sessions that last between 15 to 20 minutes. The majority, or about two-thirds, of the questions are about math and science-related topics.

One thing all of Snapaskmarkets have in common are highly-competitive public exams to enter top universities, says Yu. The exams have both a positive and negative effect on education, he adds.

&Students have a very clear objective about what topics they need to study, so that is driving a very lucrative market in the tutoring industry. But I think what Snapask focuses on is that exams are important, but you should do it the right way. We&re about self-directed learning. Itnot necessary to go to three-hour classes every day after school. If you need specific help on a question, you can ask for it immediately.&

While at university, Yu worked as a math tutor, and sometimes spent a total of two hours commuting to sessions that lasted the same amount of time. In markets like Malaysia or Indonesia, many educators chose to work in major cities, leaving students in rural areas with less options. The goal of Snapask is to help solve those issues and connect tutors with more students.

Yu says the average time for students to connect with a tutor after asking a question is about 15 to 20 minutes, which it is able to do because of machine learning-based technology that matches them based on educational styles, subject and availability. Snapaskmatching algorithms are also based on how students engage with tutors (for example, if they respond better to concise or longer, more elaborate answers). Students can also pick up to 15 to 20 tutors for their favorites list, who are prioritized when matching.

Yu says Snapask screens tutors by looking at their university transcripts and public exam results. Then they go through a probation period on the platform to assess how they interact with students. The platform also tracks how many messages are sent during a tutoring session and response times to make sure that tutors are explaining students& questions instead of just giving them the answers.

Tutors can talk to up to 10 students at a time through Snapaskplatform. Yu says Snapask tutors in Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan and South Korea who spend about two hours per day answering questions usually make about $1,200 a month, while those who work about four to five hours a day can make about $4,000 to $5,000 a month. The company uses different pricing models in Southeast Asian markets, and Yu says tutors there can make about 50% to 60% more than they would at traditional tutoring jobs.

Other study apps focused on students some of the same markets as Snapask include ManyTutors and Mathpresso, whose products combine tutoring services with tools that let students upload math questions, which are then scanned with optical character recognition to provide instant answers. Yu says Snapask is focusing on one-on-one tutoring because it wants to differentiate by creating a &holistic experience.&

&A lot of students come to Snapask after using OCR tools, which we know that user surveys, but they can&t get to certain steps. They still need someone to help them understand what is happening,& he says. &So we try not to use technology for every component in teaching, but to make it more efficient and scalable, and we&re creating a holistic experience to differentiate us.&

India is unlikely to have any substantial coverage of 5G until at least the end of next year, with telecom operators in the country yet to participate in spectrum auction. But that hasn&t stopped Chinese vendors Oppo, Vivo, and Xiaomi from bringing 5G-enabled smartphones to the worldsecond largest handset market.

Xiaomi, Vivosub-brand iQoo, and Opposub-brand Realme have all moved in tandem to unveil their 5G smartphones in the last one week. While Xiaomi, which has been the top handset vendor in India for more than two years, only showcased its recently unveiled 5G-enabled MiMix Alpha smartphone at several of its physical stores in the country, the other two companies have moved to launch new phones.

Vivo, Indiasecond largest phone vendor, launched the iQoo 3, which features a 6.44-inch display with screen resolution of 1080 x 2400 pixels, 4,440mAh battery (with support for 55W fast charging ), and runs Android 10. It is powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 865, coupled with 8GB of RAM, and 128GB storage. It sports four rear-cameras — 48MP main shooter, 13MP telephoto, 13MP ultra-wide, and 2MP depth-sensor — and a 16MP selfie sensor.

The phoneprices start at 36,990 Indian rupees ($515), which goes up to 44,990 ($627) Indian rupees for variants with additional storage and memory.

Realme, which is giving the top phone makers a run for their money in India, launched the X50 Pro 5G that features a 6.44-inch display of screen resolution 1080 x 2400 pixels with support for 90Hz refresh rate. It is powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 SoC, coupled with 12GB of RAM, and 4,200mAh battery with 65W Super Dart charging support.

On the photography front, it houses a 65MP primary shooter, 8MP ultra-wide sensor, 12MP telephoto shooter, and a 2MP portrait sensor. On the front is a setup of duo-selfie sensors of 32MP and 8MP.

The Realme X50 Pro 5G is priced at 37,999 Indian rupees ($530), which goes as high as 44,999 Indian rupees ($627) for variants with additional storage and memory.

Executives at the companies said that the rationale behind launching a 5G phone so ahead of time was to offer future-proof devices. Additionally, Qualcomm also requires phone vendors to use X55 5G modem if they want to use its flagship Snapdragon 865 SoC.

An executive with Poco, which recently spun out of Xiaomi, also chimed in:

Stonly is building a service for customer support teams so that they can share step-by-step guides to solve the most common issues. The startup just raised a $3.5 million funding round led by Accel with business angels also participating, such as Eventbrite CTO Renaud Visage and PeopleDoc founders Jonathan Benhamou and Clément Buyse.

The startup isn&t building a chatbot for customer support — chatbots usually don&t understand what you mean and you end up contacting customer support anyway. Stonly believes that scripted guides with multiple questions work much better than both chatbots and intimidating knowledge bases.

But the company is well aware that it isn&t going to replace Zendesk or Intercom overnight. Thatwhy a Stonly guide is a module that you can embed in your existing tools. The startup currently supports Intercom, Zendesk, Freshdesk and Front.

This way, if somebody contacts you on Front or Intercom, you can reply with a Stonly guide to help your users solve their own issues (at least if ita common issue). Stonly is also launching its own more traditional knowledge base powered by Stonly guides so that your client can access common questions through a chat widget.

Putting together a Stonly guide doesn&t require any technical skills. After defining the steps, you can write text, add images, videos and buttons in a web interface. Stonly also supports translations.

And itbeen working well for the startupfirst clients. For instance, Dashlane noticed a 25% decrease in opened tickets for their most frequent issues after using Stonly. Other clients include Devialet, Happn and Calendly.

With todayfunding round, the startup is expanding to the U.S. with a new office in New York and David Rostan joining as head of revenue — he was previously VP of Sales and Marketing at Calendly.

When it comes to the internet, content may be king, but in many cases, the emperor has no clothes: that is to say, the masses may click on interesting stories, video, music and other media, but building a lucrative business around that content can be a struggle, with advertising-based models often providing little in the way of margins except for the very biggest properties (and even then, it can a tough balancing act managing costs).

A startup called Minute Mediabelieves that it has found a way through that challenge with a platform that brings in user-generated content across a number of its own mostly-sports-based media properties — built organically and by way of acquisition — and it then syndicates that content also through third-party publishing partners.

Today, the startup is announcing a $40 million round to continue its growth — specifically to continue investing in its publishing platform; to invest in properties that it already owns; and to make more acquisitions.

Led by LondonDawn Capital with participation from other unnamed previous investors (a list that includesBattery Ventures, Goldman Sachs, ProSieben, Qumra Capital, Vintage Investments, Gemini Ventures, North Base Media, La Maison, Remagine Ventures, Hamilton Lane and Maor Investments) the funding brings the total raised by Minute Media to $160 million.

The startup is not disclosing its valuation, but last year we understood from a source very close to the company to be between $200 million and $300 million. Given that it grew around 100% last year, that likely puts the current valuation closer to $300 million.

Minute Media may not be a name you know very well, but if you are a consumer of sports content online, you may have come across some of its properties and articles. Its holdings currently number seven titles and include names like 90min.com (which focuses on soccer, hence the name: the startupfounder and CEO Asaf Peled is a football fanatic), as well as FanSided, The Players& Tribuneand Mental Floss. (Others include12up, DBLTAP and The Big Lead.)

Some of these Minute Media built from scratch, but many have come to it courtesy of the bigger picture of the media industry today: titles are created, gain an audience, and then get shifted around in the world of online publishing when the previous owner has not been able to make the business case for the site work.

For example, FanSided came to Minute Media by way ofan acquisition just last month: Meredith sold it, reportedly for $15 million, as part of a larger divestment of &non-core& assets it has been making post its acquisition of Time, Inc. in 2018 (it once sat under Sports Illustrated).

The Players Tribune runsstories written by athletes themselves — some extremely timely, such as this one from Sabrina Ionescu, a rising star in womenbasketball, published just on Monday, in the same week that her name has been making waves because of her speech at the Bryant memorial service, plus her heroic work on the court. The site was founded by baseball legend Derek Jeter and sold in November last year to Minute Media.

Mental Floss, something of a cult click-bait title, lost its way after Facebook algorithm changes: now its home is also at Minute Media.

While this might look mainly like a media play, there is a technology story underpinning what Minute Media has built the spans, B2C, B2B and C2C distribution.

For starters, there is the centralised content management system that runs the sites, &an open CMS system that allows any casual fan to create rich content,& as Peled has described it to TechCrunch. This has had as many as 20,000 contributors on it, covering a variety of languages beyond English; the number of pieces — selected by human editors — published across all its platforms is less than 1,000 per day. Only the most prolific and longstanding contributors get paid; others contribute for free.

Advertising features on Minute Mediaproperties, but is only one piece of how the company makes money, since that same platform is also a licensing-based B2B and B2C play: it links up to about a dozen other publishers and media partners, which use it both to syndicate content out and bring in content from other places: the thinking goes that bringing in syndicated content from elsewhere can help the other publishers bring down their operating costs while still continuing to expand the content (and thus traffic) on their own sites.

Last summer, Peled told me that thebalancebetween ad and licensing revenues were &around 50/50, but no doubt the B2B open platform is easier to sell and is growing faster.&

Sports content has shaped up to be an extremely important segment in the world of online media. Done right, it can breed a legion of engaged and very loyal visitors — readers, listeners — who are willing to do more than just click once and move on. That has helped some of the more interesting sports sites build paid content models — see The Athletic — and others spin out media empires based on still evolving platforms like podcasting — see the huge success of The Ringer and its recent sale to Spotify.

Minute Media fits into that bigger picture with its own take on how to build and scale a publishing empire. Without some of the overhead that has weighed down other online publishing plays, the startup has built a concept for publishing that appears to have a kind of sustainability to it.

&Minute Mediabest-in-class platform enables publishers to create, distribute and monetize high-quality content,& saidHaakon Overli, general partner at Dawn Capital, in a statement. &The company is quickly establishing itself as a major player in the new generation of online publishing, empowering creators and audiences alike. Following explosive revenue growth in 2019, we&re pleased to back the team once again, allowing them to accelerate R-D and commercial efforts further still.&

Welcome to the $100 million ARR club, BounceX.

This morning (evening, timezone depending), BounceX, a New York-based marketing technology startup, announced that it has reached the $100 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) threshold, adding its name to our running list of companies that have crossed over into nine-figure revenue while remaining private.

BounceX also announced a name change to Wunderkind, a move that its CEO Ryan Urban told TechCrunch signaled &a new chapter& for the firm. Summarizing the executivecomments: After seven years in business and quite a lot of work building out its product line and revenue base, BounceX wants to think of itself as something more than merely another SaaS company; the name Wunderkind, in his view, demands that what they create &has to be extraordinary,& fitting into the idea.

Normally we&d gently tease such plainly stated aspirations, but with $100 million in ARR and a history of efficient growth behind the goal, we won&t. Instead, lettalk about what the company does, and how it has grown to the size that it has.

Whata BounceX?

I&ll spare you the details and explain what the company does without buzzwords, as best I can.

It starts with Web traffic. Everyone has it. But often you, an online retailer, don&t know who is coming to your website. BounceX (Wunderkind) can help you figure that out, matching anonymous web traffic to email addresses. Now you know some of the folks coming to your site, and how to reach them. Next, Wunderkind can help you send those identified folks targeted emails that match what is known about that person, or email address. The result of all this work is material revenue scale — the company claims that its technology boosts &behaviorally triggered emails to over 9%, on average, of a retailerdigital revenue.&

For those doing the math at home, 9% is a lot.

All this works out for Wunderkind as well, with its ability to help companies drive revenue assisting it in landing deals. The company closes new customers pretty efficiently, with Urban telling TechCrunch that his companyCAC-to-LTV ratio is &is probably the highest in [its] industry,& and has &been going up over time.&

How does it do that? By the company having what it called &really high [deal] close rates.& Fine, but how does the tech drive the companyclose rate? By promising results and cutting itself off if it fails.

Wunderkind runs short-term pilots with potential customers, say four months long. The company will only move to a more traditional SaaS contract if it sufficiently drives revenue for the potential customer. According to Urban, &90 to 95% of the time& his company &deliver[s] the guaranteed revenue.&

And the customer converts, voila!

This method of snagging customers led to Wunderkind having some pretty stellar SaaS metrics. Picking one from TechCrunchcall with the CEO, &a lot of [Wunderkind sales] reps have north of $3 million quotas a year and they hit,& he said, meaning that they meet that high expectation.

So what?

You can probably see where this is going: What happens when a company has a very strong customer value to customer acquisition cost structure, and a very efficient sales team? It doesn&t burn a lot of capital. Unsurprisingly, Wunderkind has been super efficient to date, with Urban telling TechCrunch that &the amount of equity [his company has] actually put to work is probably sub-$35 million,& with less than $50 million in equity capital raised. The company also has debt lines that it can use, the CEO noted.

Getting from $0 in ARR to $100 million while spending around $35 million in equity-sourced funds is pretty bonkers, but perhaps even more nuts is the fact that, per the CEO, Wunderkind got through its first four years on $1.5 million in external money. Urban chalked the low-burn results to the founding team and early employees having experience working with one another, and building features &purely focused on improving experience [and] driving revenue.&

Thatenough for now, we&ll write about the company more when it reaches its next ARR threshold, executes a secondary transaction to put off an IPO, or files. The lesson from today is that itpossible to build a SaaS company to-scale with far less revenue than I thought possible. Anyhoo, Wunderkind joins the $100 million ARR cadre with what I think is the second-best result in terms of efficient growth. Only boostrapped Cloudinary has cleaner metrics, though with a smaller ARR total for now.

For more on the $100 million ARR club, you can check out this and this to read about other companies that have been inducted this year.