Bolt Mobility has vanished, leaving e-bikes, unanswered calls behind in several US cities

Bolt Mobility, the Miami-based micromobility startup co-founded by Olympic gold medalist Usain Bolt, appears to have vanished without a trace from several of its U.S. markets. 

In some cases, the departure has been abrupt, leaving cities with abandoned equipment, unanswered calls and emails and lots of questions.

Bolt has stopped operating in at least five U.S. cities, including Portland, Oregon, Burlington, South Burlington and Winooski in Vermont and Richmond, California, according to city officials. City representatives also said they were unable to reach anyone at Bolt, including its CEO Ignacio Tzoumas.

TechCrunch has made multiple attempts to reach Bolt and those who have backed the company. Emails to Bolt’s communications department, several employees and investors went unanswered. Even the customer service line doesn’t appear to be staffed. The PR agency that was representing Bolt in March of this year told TechCrunch it is no longer working with the company. 

Bolt halted its service in Portland on July 1. The company’s failure to provide the city with updated insurance and pay some outstanding fees, Portland subsequently suspended Bolt’s permit to operate there, according to a city  spokesperson. 

Bolt zooms than stalls

Bolt Mobility (not to be confused with the European transportation super app also named Bolt) was on what appeared to be a growth streak about 18 months ago. The company acquired in January 2021 the assets of Last Mile Holdings, which owned micromobility companies Gotcha and OjO Electric. The purchaser opened up 48 new markets to Bolt Mobility, most of which were smaller cities such as Raleigh, North Carolina, St. Augustine, Florida and Mobile, Alabama. 

After purchasing Last Mile’s assets, Bolt agreed to continue as the bike share vendor in Chittenden County, Vermont, including cities Burlington, South Burlington and Winooski.

That license was even renewed in 2022, said Bryan Davis, senior transportation planner of the county. 

“We learned a couple of weeks ago (from them) that Bolt is ceasing operations,” Davis told TechCrunch via email, noting that Bolt ceased operations July 1, but actually informed the county a week later. “They’ve vanished, leaving equipment behind and emails and calls unanswered. We’re unable to reach anyone, but it seems they’ve closed shop in other markets as well.”

Sandy Thibault, executive director of Chittenden Area Transportation Management Association, told the Burlington Free Press that Bolt communicated that employees were being let go and the company’s board of directors was discussing next steps.

A spokesperson at Burlington relayed similar information.

“All of our contacts at Bolt, including their CEO, have gone radio silent and have not replied to our emails,” Robert Goulding, public information manager at Burlington’s Department of Public Works, told TechCrunch.

Davis went on to say that about 100 bikes have been left on the ground completely inoperable and with dead batteries. Chittenden County has given Bolt a time frame in which to claim or remove the company’s vehicles otherwise the county will take ownership of them.  

Bolt also appears to have stopped operating in Richmond, California, according to Richmond Mayor Tom Butt’s e-forum. 

“Unfortunately, Bolt apparently went out of business without prior notification or removal of their capital equipment from city property,” wrote Butt. “They recently missed the city’s monthly meeting check-in and have been unresponsive to all their clients throughout all their markets.”

Butt went on to say that the city is coming up with a plan to remove all the abandoned equipment – about 250 e-bikes that were available at hub locations like BART stations and the ferry terminal – and asked people to refrain from vandalizing the bikes until the city could come up with a solution. 

TechCrunch has reached out to several other cities in which Bolt operates and has not been able to confirm that the company has stopped operating entirely. In fact, a spokesperson from St. Augustine told TechCrunch Bolt’s bike share was running as usual.

Bolt’s social media has also been rather inactive in recent weeks. The company hasn’t posted on Instagram since June 11 or on Twitter since June 2. 

The last time TechCrunch heard from Bolt was nine months ago when the company was peddling its in-app navigation system that it dubbed “MobilityOS.” At the time, the startup promised that its next generation of scooters would include a smartphone mount that would double as a phone charger, but it’s unclear if those scooters ever hit the streets. 

Bolt has publicly raised $40.2 million, an amount that doesn’t include an undisclosed investment from India’s Ram Charan Company in May. Investors there could not be reached for comment.

US startups seeking funds shouldn’t overlook financing from the government

What’s the difference between a startup and a small business? Semantics, mostly. As many startups find themselves struggling to raise funds from venture capitalists as financing continues to decline this year, the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) could prove to be a powerful resource for capital, even if startups traditionally look for funds from other sources.

Chris Hurn, the founder and CEO of Fountainhead, knows the potential benefits of taking on government financing. Fountainhead is a nonbank lender of government-guaranteed loans. Hurn said the current generation of entrepreneurs is laser-focused on raising equity-based funding from backers like venture capital firms — but that isn’t their only option, especially as equity gets more expensive in current market conditions.

“The problem is that business owners oftentimes overlook pretty readily available debt capital,” Hurn told TechCrunch. “They don’t have to give up any equity. [SBA loans] can oftentimes be the exact stepping stone they need to get to the next stage.”

How fintech startups are navigating the extension-round rush

As the fintech venture market goes, so goes the venture market itself. Why? Because fintech investment has historically made up around one-fifth of every venture dollar invested — at least in recent years. And after both fintech investing and venture capital itself went a bit bonkers last year, both are dealing with a new, more conservative reality.

For fintech startups, the downturn is real, and many upstart companies — we learned during our recent fintech investor survey — are looking to avoid de-novo rounds that include a new valuation (no one wants to raise a down round!). Therefore, extension rounds are an attractive option for many founders.

But as TechCrunch has reported, while extension rounds are popular even beyond fintech today, there are often more startups hunting for the round type than there are checks. So, to better understand the market for fintech extension rounds today, we have one more set of answers from a group of fintech venture investors we surveyed. Here’s the question we posed:

How popular are extension rounds proving? Are you seeing more companies opt to raise extensions rather than new rounds compared to, say, 2021 and 2020?

Eight investors answered: Paul Stamas of General Atlantic, Alda Leu Dennis of Initialized Capital, Michael Gilroy of Coatue, Justin Overdorff of Lightspeed Venture Partners, Addie Lerner of Avid Ventures, David Jegen of F-Prime Capital, Nik Milanović of The Fintech Fund, Jay Ganatra of Infinity Ventures. (Their answers have been lightly edited for clarity.)

Michael Gilroy, general partner and co-head of fintech, Coatue

A tale of two surveys: Fintech VCs change tune on investment landscape

Welcome to The Interchange! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up here so you can receive it directly in the future. Every week, I’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. This will include everything from funding rounds to trends to an analysis of a particular space to hot takes on a particular company or phenomenon. There’s a lot of fintech news out there and it’s my job to stay on top of it — and make sense of it — so you can stay in the know. — Mary Ann

What a difference a few months makes. In mid-February, we published a survey of 10 fintech investors with questions on topics such as what areas they are excited about and their outlook for the future. Here we are, not even six months later, and the vibe from the responses of our latest survey — this time of eight fintech investors — is a very different one.

A few examples…

When asked in February what differences in the landscape he saw in 2021 and if deals were much more competitive, Accel partner Ethan Choi responded: “On the investing side, deals were definitely more competitive and valuations certainly reflect that, even despite a correction in public fintech comps.”

And SoftBank Investment Advisers’ managing partner Munish Varma, in response to the same question, said: “The heightened level of funding has increased competition, especially for high-quality companies.”

In July, when asked the same question, Lightspeed Venture Partners’ Justin Overdorff said: “Seed hasn’t changed that much, but Series A and Series B round sizes have definitely compressed. Companies are raising less money at lower valuations than in 2021, which reflects the market sentiment.”

And Avid Ventures’ founder and managing partner Addie Lerner said: “Last year…given very low interest rates, investors were seeking yield anywhere they could find it and paying a premium for growth. Now, in a rising interest rate environment, investors across stages are valuing companies based on fundamentals and prioritizing capital-efficient growth, while looking more closely at public market comps for valuation guidance.”

Bottom line is that earlier this year, the sentiment was more of: “Woo hoo — everything is amazing and 2021 was a stellar year in the world of fintech.” And today, it’s more like: “We’re proceeding very, very cautiously — and you should too.”

I have to say that both my editors and I were very impressed with the thoughtfulness in the responses of these surveys. The VCs who responded — which this time around included Paul Stamas of General Atlantic, Alda Leu Dennis of Initialized Capital, Michael Gilroy of Coatue, Justin Overdorff of Lightspeed Venture Partners, Addie Lerner of Avid Ventures, David Jegen of F-Prime Capital, Nik Milanović of the Fintech Fund, Jay Ganatra of Infinity Ventures — clearly took their time to provide nuanced answers that help give us a better picture of the current fintech investment landscape. In my humble opinion, the quality of the responses along with all the fabulous analysis and overall content consistently produced on TechCrunch+ is well worth the $99/year cost of the subscription.

Weekly News

Starting his career in fintech as a software engineer, Rex Salisbury became a founding member of Andreessen Horowitz’s fintech practice alongside general partners Anish Acharya and Angela Strange before becoming a partner in 2019. During his two years at the firm, Salisbury went on to back the likes of now-decacorn Deel and Tally, two companies he had gotten to know through the Cambrian community he’s built up since 2016. Now he’s launched his own early-stage fund, Cambrian Ventures, out of which he plans to deploy $20 million “to back the next generation of fintech founders” at the angel, pre-seed and seed levels with checks up to $500,000.

Publicly traded Lemonade has laid off about 60 employees of Metromile, the auto insurtech company it recently acquired — adding to the volatility the technology sector has seen over the past 18 months. In an emailed statement, a Lemonade spokesperson told TechCrunch that it was “able to offer a role at Lemonade to about 80% of the Metromile team,” but that as the deal was “synergistic” it is able to “operate with fewer people than were needed to staff the two standalone.” Such staffing cuts are not abnormal in such business combinations, even if that is little comfort to those in eliminated roles. Meanwhile, sources tell me that many employees felt “blindsided” by the move and question whether Lemonade complied with the WARN Act. Those same sources also say that Lemonade required outgoing employees to sign a form with a “non-disparagement” clause. I reached out to Lemonade to ask about all of this, but got no reply.

China’s billionaire tech boss Jack Ma plans to cede control of Ant Group, the fintech powerhouse closely affiliated with Alibaba, the e-commerce giant he founded, the Wall Street Journal reported on July 28. If realized, the move will mark another important turn in Ant’s restructuring and power shuffling since China called off its $35 billion initial public offering nearly two years ago.

Instacart announced on July 25 that the Electronic Benefits Transfer and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (EBT SNAP) can now be used to buy groceries online in 10 additional states through its app. The 10 states are Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Louisiana, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming. Instacart says Albertsons Companies and Sprouts Farmers Market are among the first to accept EBT SNAP online in these states. For some context on how the program came about in the first place, check out this article I wrote earlier this year.

Cardless announced plans to launch co-branded credit cards on the American Express network. The move follows Amex Ventures’ investment in the three-year-old San Francisco–based startup’s $40 million Series B round that was announced in July of 2021. The company declined to say how much Amex contributed specifically other than to say it was “significant.” Put simply, Cardless aims to help consumer brands launch credit cards “very quickly and easily” by handling the program creation, card underwriting, lending, issuance and customer service for brands.

As we discussed last week, many believe that the modern-era consumer credit score system is broken, locking millions of potential homeowners out of the American dream. Ready Life, a new fintech backed by Figure Technologies, has developed what it describes as a “revolutionary mortgage lending model” that relies on good rental payment history to qualify buyers for home purchases. “We are rewriting the rules for homeownership,” says Ready Life CEO Ashley D. Bell, a corporate finance attorney and a former White House policy advisor for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, in a press release. When the Ready Life platform launches this fall, consumers who pay their rent on time using the Ready Pay Visa Debit Card will qualify for mortgages without a credit score review, the company says.

Earlier this year, Apple revealed a new buy now, pay later feature, Apple Pay Later, that has reportedly now drawn the attention of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), reports 9to5Mac. According to the publication, CFPB director Rohit Chopra said that Apple Pay Later raised “a host of issues,” with antitrust concerns. The Financial Revolutionist points out that “while Apple’s move into BNPL will leverage the Apple Pay network and Apple’s reach through hardware to scale quickly, this combination of software and hardware is what makes Apple Pay Later a potential privacy risk.”

Payments giant PayPal finally has attracted an activist in Elliott Management, a $50 billion hedge fund, reported the Wall Street Journal and Barron’s. The latter publication says, “PayPal had been a pandemic-darling as households increasingly shopped online but shares have slid more than 60% this year as people returned to their pre-pandemic spending habits. Earlier this year, the company cut its 2022 earnings forecast, which led to the company’s worst one-day selloff in its history as a publicly traded company.” PayPal’s valuation has tanked to $89 billion from $350 billion over the past year. Why should we care? Well, according to the Financial Revolutionist, “If Elliott’s activist-investor takeover succeeds, then the hedge fund has several strategies at its disposal to correct the course at PayPal.”

Visa and Mastercard’s earnings are good indicators for the economy as a whole, according to Moody fintech analyst Peter Krukovsky, who wrote via email: “Card networks Visa and Mastercard are a terrific broad barometer of economic activity, and the strength of Visa’s US transaction flows in the June quarter and in July indicates sustained solid consumer demand. While the demand effect of higher interest rates may build over time, continued strong trends at the card networks point to sustained growth trends for the payment processing industry.”

After Brex’s controversial announcement that it would no longer work with SMBs, it has now tapped San Francisco–based startup Oxygen “to provide their small business customers a smooth transition.” Last November, TC’s Manish Singh had reported that Oxygen — a digital bank aimed at freelancers and small businesses — was reportedly raising funds at a $500 million valuation.

Speaking of spend management, Ruth Foxe Blader, partner at Anthemis Group; Eric Glyman, co-founder and CEO of Ramp; and Thejo Kote, founder and CEO of Airbase will talk about balancing runway and growth onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt on October 18–20 in San Francisco. For more details, head here. P.S. Hope to see you there!

Alternative investment platform Yieldstreet has appointed Timothy Schott to serve in the newly created role of chief financial officer. In a press release, the company said that Schott’s “expertise in a wide range of finance and business functions, as well as his significant capital markets and M&A experience, positions Yieldstreet for continued customer growth and long-term success.” When asked if this meant the company was eyeing the public markets, a spokesperson told me via email: “No plans! Tim’s just been brought on board to build out the infrastructure so the company can scale.”

There is no doubt that the COVID-19 pandemic has made it less common for people to use cash to pay for their everyday purchases. Because of hygiene and social distancing measures, merchants who used to frown upon letting customers pay small amounts by card are now encouraging contactless transactions. And with many outdoor activities simply out of the question, cash was more often hoarded than it was spent. Now it appears that contactless payments are here to stay.

Looking at Latin America’s socioeconomic conditions these days, you can find plenty of reasons to be pessimistic or at least daunted by how much is left to improve. Sure, problems are also opportunities, but what if there are just too many hurdles to overcome in the near future? And yet, despite the worsening global and local macroeconomic climate, unicorns keep being minted in the region. Here’s why Clocktower Technology Ventures remains bullish on the region’s fintechs.

Viber, the messaging app owned by Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten, has long been dancing around the area of fintech, launching services like money transfer and chatbot payments in various countries over the years. Now it is making a move to double down on that strategy: It’s launching Payments on Viber — a new service that will let users set up digital wallets tied to their Viber accounts.

Funding and M&A

Balance raises $56M to tip the one-click checkout scales in favor of B2B merchants

Sequoia backs fintech Dbank in maiden Pakistan investment

Pogo lands millions to become the ‘Honey for the real world’

You can’t afford a house, but you can probably afford Nada

Fintech Guava raises $2.4M to provide banking services to Black small business owners

With over $3B in AUM, Portage Ventures targets $750M for its first late-stage fintech fund 

PSA: Startup Battlefield 200 Applications close soon. Apply today to join Startup Battlefield 200 for the chance to exhibit your startup for free at TechCrunch Disrupt this October and win the $100,000 equity-free prize. Applications close August 5.

One more thing, be sure to listen to fellow fintech enthusiasts Alex Wilhelm, Natasha Mascarenhas and I riff on a bunch of industry news in last week’s Friday edition of the award-winning Equity podcast.

With that, it’s time for me to go. Thank you for reading and may you have a wonderful week ahead. I can’t believe it is nearly August already. Where has the summer gone? xoxo, Mary Ann

Gmail gets a new look, Instagram trips while trying to be TikTok and India blocks Battleground Mobile

Hello hello! Welcome back to Week in Review, the newsletter where we do a quick rundown of the most-read TechCrunch stories from the past week. The idea: When you’ve had a busy few days, you should be able to skim Week in Review and still have a good idea of what’s up lately in tech. Want it in your inbox? Sign up here.

The most read story this week was about Battlegrounds Mobile India, a popular battle royale title that has found an audience of tens of millions in India. Players woke up to find the game suddenly blocked from both Google Play and Apple’s App Store by order of the Indian government. Why? That’s…not exactly clear yet, but Manish has the breakdown of everything we know so far.

other stuff

New Gmail for all: Use Gmail? Don’t be surprised if it looks different soon. The company announced this week that the “Material You” interface overhaul it has been testing will roll out to all users in the coming weeks. Don’t like the new styling? For now, at least, you can find a toggle hidden in the settings menu to switch it back.

Instagram’s bad move(s): As best anyone can tell, TikTok seems to be eating Instagram’s lunch. Is the answer for Instagram to become more like TikTok? Recent updates — like a focus on full-screen video and more content from people you don’t follow — have made the Insta interface feel more and more TikTok-y…and, well, the complaints have been loud. Instagram is at least pretending to listen, though, and says it’ll be walking back many of said changes. Maybe.

Rivian layoffs: Rumors earlier this month suggested layoffs were looming at Rivian; sure enough, the company confirmed this week that it’s laying off around 6% of its workforce as part of a “restructuring plan.”

A penny for your prompts?: OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 can generate incredible art seemingly out of thin air, but sometimes getting the exact results you want can require some…finesse. This startup wants to “sell strings of words that net predictable results” on DALL-E 2 and other such systems. An interesting story made all the better by its oh-so-Seussian opening image, which I’ll note was created by an actual human (and a lovely one at that).

Meta shutters Tuned: Did you know Meta had a social app for couples? Probably not! Called Tuned, it was part of Meta’s New Product Experimentation efforts, and it seems this particular experiment is over. Meta announced this week that Tuned will go away on September 19. The app was meant to help couples communicate and “create a shared scrapbook” of photos/videos/etc. It doesn’t help that it was launched right at the beginning of the pandemic, when many couples probably had no trouble keeping in touch because they probably weren’t going anywhere anyway.

audio stuff

Is cutting your company’s internal valuation ever a good thing? Natasha and Anita focused on that question on Wednesday’s episode of Equity. Meanwhile, on Chain Reaction, Lucas and Anita chatted about Minecraft, saying, “No friggin’ thanks” to NFTs, and Lauren hopped on The TechCrunch Podcast to fill us in on why (as we learned last week) Netflix is bleeding customers.

additional stuff

If you’re a TechCrunch+ subscriber, (a) thanks! and (b) we’ve got good stuff for you this week. Such as:

3 views on Amazon’s acquisition of One Medical: Love it or hate it, Amazon is buying One Medical. Good thing? Bad thing? Alex Wilhelm, Walter Thompson and Miranda Halpern weigh in with their perspectives.

8 fintech VCs on how to pitch them: What are fintech investors looking for right now? Mary Ann Azevedo checked in with eight of the top investors in the space.

Could the CHIPS Act spark another U.S. startup renaissance?: The U.S. Senate clearly wants more semiconductor production happening stateside — but chip manufacturing is wildly expensive. Is this “potential cash injection” an opportunity for new startups to change the way it’s done? As Haje puts it: “Those weird theories you were studying as part of your PhD thesis? Now’s the time to dust ’em off.”

Daily Crunch: Mac sales down 10%, iPhones up 3% — Breaking down Apple’s quarterly numbers

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here.

Good morning, you wonderful specimens of humanity! It’s Friday, and I’m writing this from the hammock in my sunny North Oakland garden, so life ain’t all that bad. (I can only assume that WFH stands for Work From Hammock).

This weekend, earmark a bit of time to apply to our Startup Battlefield 200. It gives you the chance to exhibit your startup for free at TechCrunch Disrupt in October and win the $100,000 prize. Applications close August 5, so get cracking!

Have a good one, and see you next week! — Haje

The TechCrunch Top 3

• You’re looking more chipper already: Brian has been following the CHIPS Act moving through the government process. Today, the CHIPS Act staved off last-minute attempts by the GOP House leadership to derail its passage and will be on its way to POTUS’s desk next. On TC+, Haje wonders whether the passage of the CHIPS Act could launch another US startup renaissance.
• Like YouTube, but shorter: TikTok and Instagram Stories have been eating into YouTube’s numbers, and the Google-owned giant isn’t loving it. The video platform just made a creator tool available that can turn YouTube videos into Shorts in a matter of moments, Sarah reports.
• Another bite of the Apple: Apple’s third-quarter profits were a mixed bag, but iPhone revenue bucked the trend (even as smartphone shipments are down globally), with a 3% year-over-year revenue jump, Brian reports. Apple’s computer division took a 10% haircut compared to last year’s performance.

Startups and VC

It’s all go, go, go in the world of insurance. Mary Ann reports that Lemonade acquired Metromile and promptly laid off about 20% of its staff. Makes sense, of course, in a world where there’s probably a fair amount of administrative and operational overlap between the two companies, but it’s always sad to say goodbye to beloved colleagues.

And don’t miss Aria’s piece about how the Exploration Company is developing a brand-new reusable orbital spacecraft. “The [space] exploration ecosystem is going to change dramatically in the probably next 10 to 15 years,” co-founder and CEO Hélène Huby explained. “If you make it happen, you have a huge advantage of being one of the first in the market.”

A few more nuggets to take you into the weekend:

• Taking the fun out of everything: A startup is charging $1.99 to write strings to feed into platforms like DALL-E, and I despair for humanity. Come on, that’s half the fun! No thanks at all to Kyle for making me seethe with confused anger this afternoon. Jerk.
• Making it rain down in Africa: Zedcrest Capital, a firm known for its debt and equity capital markets investments but who recently started dabbling in venture investments, has launched a $10 million “emergency fund” for African startups, aimed at pre-Series A stage companies, Tage reports.
• Driving lessons for industrial vehicles: Polymath Robotics launches to bring plug-and-play autonomy software to any industrial vehicle, Kirsten reports.
• The more you learn: You know what, I’ve never read one of Devin’s articles that didn’t make me go, “Huh! I didn’t know that!” Today, Shinkei Systems’ AI-guided fish harvesting robot gave me that moment of delight.

All my apes gone: Legal disputes at the intersection of IP and NFTs

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

When Andy Warhol appropriated images of Campbell’s Soup in 1962, he was lucky: For a host of reasons, the company decided not to sue him for infringing its trademark.

One wonders how the situation would have played out 60 years later if Warhol had minted a series of NFTs with the iconic soup labels, however.

In her latest TC+ post, CORPlaw founder Kristen Corpion examined “the most interesting and important IP legal issues that are currently impacting the creation, transfer and use of NFTs,” including trademark infringement, the first sale doctrine and why Seth Green ended up paying a $100,000 premium to buy back his stolen Bored Ape.

All my apes gone: Legal disputes at the intersection of IP and NFTs

(TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

It’s never gonna give you up. It’ll make an effort to never let you down. It probably won’t run around and desert you. But TikTok may be considering a music service, report Aisha and Ivan in an article that unfortunately falls short of the mandatory quota of musical puns. Don’t worry, folks, I’ll talk to her about it.

Meanwhile, Annie reports that Kenya is contemplating giving Facebook a smack with the ban-hammer, after the country’s National Cohesion and Integration Commission finds that the social media platform isn’t doing enough to clear out hate speech.

• Is multimedia coming to Twitter?: Looks like the social media platform is testing letting you post images, videos, and GIFs  all in the same tweet, Ivan reports.
• We don’t want your steeenking ads: Roku misses the mark on its quarterly results, and blames advertising slowdown for coming up short, Lauren reports.
• Bank balance goes down, shares go up: Amazon reported its earnings and ran at a $2 billion loss. Seems like stonks love that sort of thing, because the share price went up, reports Lauren.
• For you, special price. For you, it’s double: Twitter Blue gets a price hike from $2.99 to $4.99 per month, reports Ivan.
• Where do you take someone after a “peekaboo” accident? To ICU: Instagram pretty much copied BeReal for its Dual camera feature, but kinda missed the point along the way, Amanda explains.
• Is there anything they can’t do?: Video memes, maybe music soon (see above) and now TikTok begins testing HTML5 minigames with a handful of partners, Sarah reports.

Climate-focused VC stays scorching as Buoyant Ventures targets $100M fund

Like a groundhog and its shadow, many venture capitalists see a shrinking economy and burrow away, resting their check-signing hand for better days.

But climate-focused VCs are on a tear lately, pumping well over a billion dollars per quarter into startups that strive to mitigate emissions as the Earth bakes.

Buoyant Ventures is one such firm building momentum for the sector. Based in Chicago, the investor told regulators this week via an SEC filing that it has locked down just over $50 million for a new fund. Buoyant declined to comment when emailed by TechCrunch, but the filing shows the firm has been raising cash for the fund since at least May 2021. So far, 75 (unnamed) limited partners have chipped in, and Buoyant is fishing for just shy of $50 million more. 

Led by Electronic Arts and Energize Ventures alum Amy Francetic and former Accenture executive Allison Myers, Buoyant’s first deal dates back to the summer of 2020. That’s when it backed Raptor Maps, which aims to help solar farms squeeze more juice from the sun by spotting issues—like panel damage and shading—with drones and sensors.

Buoyant said in 2021 that it’s focused on “solutions for the industries contributing the most to carbon emissions,” including power, transportation, agriculture and buildings. Since then, it has funded at least four other early-ish stage startups, including FloodFlash, StormSensor and others seeking to cash in on emissions mitigation or climate adaptation.

Several other noteworthy climate (and climate-adjacent) VC fundraises have crossed our desks in recent weeks, including Fifth Wall‘s $500 million fund, Climentum Capital ($157 million), Systemiq Capital ($70 million) and Equal Ventures ($56 million).

Build a solid deck for your quarterly board meetings

Yousuf Khan Contributor

Yousuf Khan is a partner at Ridge Ventures. Prior to joining Ridge, he was the first CIO of Automation Anywhere, CIO and vice president of Customer Success at cloud-based AI platform Moveworks, as well as CIO of Pure Storage, Qualys and Hult International Business School.

More posts by this contributor

• 10 tips for running effective board meetings
• To achieve enterprise sales success, tailor your approach to CIOs

A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece on TechCrunch about how to run a successful board meeting. Since then, I’ve been asked one question over and over: What does a good board update actually look like?

It’s a perfectly reasonable question. In the early days of a startup, most founders have very little data to work with. It can be quite difficult to structure a productive and actionable board deck if you don’t have any customer or product information to anchor the update.

It’s important to balance two key areas: providing an assessment of the business and establishing trust with your board members.

Establish the foundations

Though it may seem daunting, the simplest way to ensure you’re providing board members with the information they want to see is to just ask them.

Reaching out to your board not only helps provide a sense of direction, it also gives you the opportunity to build your relationship. People appreciate the opportunity to weigh in.

Remember that investors are always scrutinizing you as a leader, learning how to work with you and looking for strengths and weaknesses.

Many board members are also investors, so be blunt and ask if they had any concerns about making the investment, what these concerns were and how they can be addressed now that the relationship is official.

Do your own research, too. Learn who your board members are and find out which other boards they’ve served on. What kinds of companies are they working with? What is their reputation? Their experience with other companies will influence their expectations with your firm. If an investor is new to your board but has been on another for two years, find a way to get insight into how they operate.

Additionally, don’t hesitate to reach out to other founders about what works for them. Talk to people within your network to see what they’re doing, what’s resonating with their board, what their investors respond to and what their board’s makeup looks like.

Deck production

Building an investor deck is (or at least, should be) a heavy lift. Remember that you’re going to do this on a continuous basis, so you need to structure it carefully to produce something of quality.

Polymath Robotics launches plug-and-play autonomy software for any industrial vehicle

“Robots suck.”

It’s a bold declaration for a startup founder aiming to work with robots — or more accurately, the software that helps turn a tractor, tiller or forklift into an automated vehicle. But Stefan Seltz-Axmacher, who previously founded and led the now shuttered autonomous vehicle startup Starsky Robotics, is trying to make a point.

“They’re really difficult, they break all the time and getting to a stable product is really hard,” Seltz-Axmacher said in a recent interview. “Everyone kind of ends up building nearly everything from scratch, for nearly every application.”

To make matters more complex, robots used in warehouses, mining, agriculture and other industrial environments have hyper-specific applications that are structured and are often repeated thousands of times. In other words, the farmer in Iowa, the yard truck operator in Florida and the e-commerce giant with 100 warehouses spread throughout the country have specific needs that no one else does.

That’s where Seltz-Axmacher, co-founder Ilia Baranov and their new startup Polymath Robotics hope to come in. The pair have developed a plug-and-play software platform and an accompanying SDK that allows companies to quickly and cost efficiently automate industrial vehicles. Think of it as SaaS for industrial robotics.

Image Credits: Polymath Robotics

Polymath Robotics, which came out of stealth Friday and is a Y Combinator Summer 2022 cohort, aims to become the Oracle of the robotics world. The startup is building basic generalizable autonomy designed to automate the 50 million or so industrial vehicles that are operating in closed environments today. 

The San Francisco-based startup’s software is hardware and business model agnostic and focuses on all the features a company might need to run their automated robot, tractor, or forklift, including path planning, hazard detection, behavior trees, human detection, controls tuning and safety.

Polymath, under the lead of Baranov (who is CTO and previously led robotics teams at Clearpath Robotics and Amazon Lab 126) also created, and now released, a free tool called Caladan that lets users build on top of the company’s software in simulation. And unlike other sims, this can be viewed and created on an internet browser and doesn’t require the installation of other tools like ROS, Gazebo or even Linux, according to the company. 

The Polymath Robotics software platform lets another startup, warehouse owner, farmer or mining company skip the often long process of building out autonomy, a safety layer and front-end app. Seltz-Axmacher said the software lets these users just focus on the app, connect to its REST API and command a virtual tractor, forklift or other kind of robot in sim.

Polymath is already driving unmanned and working with potential customers. But technical teams interested in seeing how it works can start building for free in simulation via its API.

Polymath’s API tells the robot what to do, whether it’s in the simulation tool or in the real world. For instance, this TechCrunch reporter was able to control a tractor located in a dusty lot in Modesto, California via an internet browser while sitting at her desk in Arizona.

Of course, software alone cannot turn a tractor into an automated vehicle that operates without a human. Polymath has partnered with Idaho-based startup Sygnal Technologies to help on the hardware side of things by providing retrofits with their drive-by-wire kits.

Sygnal’s CEO and co-founder Josh Hartung knows a thing or two about automated vehicles and drive-by-wire systems. His previous startup PolySync, which has since shutdown, developed an automated vehicle software platform as well as a drive-by-wire kit that numerous other startups used in their own AV demos.

This time around, Hartung and his co-founder Trey German developed a drive-by-wire kit designed with redundant controls for the accelerator, brake and steering and proprietary switching technology. And it’s built with fleets and commercial deployments — not demos — in mind. After years of experiencing the hype around AVs and seeing numerous startups, including his own, get caught up in a cycle of demos and proof of concepts in order to get funding, Hartung believes the industry is finally shifting towards reality.

“I believe the next stage of autonomy is actually returning to business principles, Hartung said, adding that Polymath seems well aligned with this shift.

It seems a number of angel investors have already taken notice of the 10-person team at Polymath.

While Seltz-Axmacher isn’t ready to share exactly what the company has raised, he did list some of the company’s angel investors, all of whom have backgrounds in autonomous vehicle technology, software and robotics. The group includes Catapult Ventures managing director Darren Liccardo, Thursday Ventures general partner Matt Sweeney, Cruise co-founder and CEO Kyle Vogt and Oliver Cameron, the former co-founder and CEO of Voyage who is now at Cruise, according to Seltz-Axmacher.

“What we’re hoping is to make robotics look a lot more like SaaS in terms of how quick you can get in and out,” he added.

Sweeney, who formerly worked at Neuralink and was product and engineering lead at Uber before launching Thursday Ventures, believes the startup has the right product, at the right time.

“What’s appealing about this approach is that I can see a future of an Oracle-like company of robotics,” Sweeney said. “All sorts of business come to Oracle for hardware and software solutions for their business,  and with minor configurations can plug it into their business. If you project forward 10 to 15 years where can this end up its an enormously audacious goal, but I think it can also continue to provide value all along the way.”

Crypto and securities, back of the postcard version

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

Alex, Natasha and Mary Ann got together with Grace once again this week for our weekly roundup show, and hot dang was there a lot to talk about. So much so that we actually had to cut one topic from our notes, any guesses what that may have been?

Regardless, here’s the rundown:

• We had a big fintech theme this week, kicking off with the huge news that Jack Ma is giving up control of Ant Financial. Two specific tidbits stood out around Ant’s origin story and Ma’s flex of an ownership hold.
• From there, it was time to talk Guava, Pogo, and TomoCredit, our Deals of the Week. The focus here was around just how inclusive certain fintechs can be, so thank you to founders who remind us to raise the bar constantly.
• Next up? A new solo fund that broke out of a16z. Why leave to do a scary thing when risk is high? We talk about that, fintech innovation, and Rex Salisbury’s LP base. (Plus, more on solo founders coming soon on TechCrunch+).
• Then we dug into Mary Ann’s behemoth investor survey, and closed with a look at the Coinbase-SEC situation.

And we had a great time to boot! Chat soon!

Equity drops every Monday at 7 a.m. PDT and Wednesday and Friday at 6 a.m. PDT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

The passage of the CHIPS Act could launch another US startup renaissance

The U.S. Senate earlier this week approved the CHIPS Act, which includes $52 billion to subsidize domestic semiconductor production. It still has to struggle its way through the bureaucracy (here’s a quick refresher), but clearing the Senate is a huge and important step toward the American chip fabrication industry getting a serious chunk of cash.

Personally, I’m psyched that this may be happening for a few reasons. Yes, yes — supply chain problems and chip shortages have been the bane of everyone’s life for a hot minute, and onshoring some of these fabrication materials, tools, and know-how will go a long way toward making the U.S. less reliant on external manufacturing, and more resilient in general.

That’s all good and well, but let’s be honest: $52 billion isn’t exactly a sachet of coppers and nickels, but chip manufacturing is expensive. The last planned chip factories I can remember are the $19 billion plant Intel is building in Germany and the $20 billion plant the company is building here in the U.S. If that’s the price tag of a factory, the subsidy builds two and a half plants. That means jobs, but it doesn’t exactly turn the U.S. into a chip-fab juggernaut overnight.

Far more than new factories, I’m most excited about the possibility of history repeating itself. Intel’s choice to build a $20 billion chip fabrication facility in Columbus, Ohio, along with the more recent news of the potential cash injection into the industry, could set the stage for a startup ecosystem boost.

Pitch Deck Teardown: Alto Pharmacy’s $200M Series E deck

We cover a lot of health startups here on TechCrunch, and you know what it’s really hard to get any sort of excitement about? An online pharmacy that raised yet another round of funding.

Don’t get me wrong, Alto Pharmacy raising a Series E is impressive, as is raising $200 million. But realistically, those companies often don’t turn up on my radar: They are too big to be startups and haven’t had a liquidity event (i.e., an IPO, an acquisition, or a bankruptcy), so there’s not a lot of news there.

“Company disrupted an existing industry with a new business model, has been doing well for a while, and is now raising more money to do more of the same, except more” is hard to tell a compelling story around. Especially when that — albeit with slightly smaller numbers — was also the story back in 2017. And in 2020, when the company raised a $250 million Series D.

I know that sounds a little lackluster for someone who writes about companies for a living, but, I mean, listen to the founder’s quote from the company’s press release regarding this fundraise:

“We’ve been laser-focused for the last seven years on building solutions to the foundational issues plaguing the broken pharmacy industry. We’re so proud of the progress the team has made, quietly solidifying our position as the market leader in the rapidly growing digital pharmacy market,” said Alto co-founder Jamie Karraker. “We’re thrilled this new funding will enable us to continue to define this evolving industry and to help even more patients get the care they deserve.”

That’s a lot of words to say, well… Yeah: Company disrupted an existing industry with a new business model, has been doing well for a while, and is now raising $200 million to do more of the same, except more.

This is the slide-deck equivalent of a standup comedian standing on a stage, peering into the spotlights, muttering ‘pharmacies, amirite?’

In the fast-moving, sexy world of early-stage startups, it’s often hard to forget that there is a middle ground. Some companies exit quickly for billions of dollars. Some crash and burn in a cavalcade of lawsuits. But as reporters, we are doing ourselves (and our readers) a disservice: There’s a huge number of companies that grind themselves to the bone on the way to success, customer by customer, metric by metric, market by market. Let’s be honest, there are not a lot of companies that raise five rounds of institutional growth funding, with half a billion dollars worth of investment raised along the way.

When you make it that many rounds in and that many years down the line, you had better have some incredible tricks up your sleeve, solid metrics, and some plans for what to do next to get the company to where it needs to be. It seems like Alto did — it told the world about its $200 million fundraise in January this year. Then, on June 30, the company announced it has a new CEO in the form of ex-Amazon exec and 25-year GM veteran Alicia Boler Davis.

Having read all of this, I was curious to see how a company tells the above story in the form of a pitch deck to investors. And, perhaps most notably, which parts of the story don’t show on the pitch deck.

---

We’re looking for more unique pitch decks to tear down, so if you want to submit your own, here’s how you can do that. 

Slides in this deck

1. Cover slide
2. Traction and metrics summary
3. Cover slide — Business overview
4. “The Current Pharmacy Experience is Highly Inefficient” — Problem slide
5. “Pharmacy is the Largest Consumer Industry Still Offline” — Opportunity slide
6. “The Current Experience is Broken for Patients and Providers” — Problem slide
7. “The Alto Experience Fixes That” — Solution slide
8. “Alto Patient Value Proposition” — Value proposition slide
9. “Alto Provider Value Proposition” — Value proposition slide
10.  “With an End-to-End Software Platform Powering the Next Generation of Pharmacy” — Product slide
11.  “Alto Offers a Differentiated Approach” — Competition slide
12.  ” Alto Uniquely Aligns the Broader Healthcare Ecosystem” — Market context slide
13.  Cover slide — Commercial and growth strategy
14.  Revenue traction slide
15.  “Our Growth Strategy” — Go-to-market slide
16.  “Alto is Scaling Rapidly and Efficiently” — Regional rollout slide
17.  “Alto’s Provider-Driven GTM Motion Drives Patient Engagement, Enabling Wallet and Margin Expansion” — Marketing strategy slide
18.  “Expansion Opportunities for Alto are Attractive and Significant” — Adjacent market growth strategy slide
19.  Cover slide — Operations overview
20.  “The Pharmacy Sits in the Middle of a Complex and Confusing Supply Chain” — Operational chart slide
21.  Closing slide

The company did remove three slides from the deck it sent me, and some of the numbers in the deck were redacted. Two of the removed slides were product demo screenshots and the last contained financially sensitive content.

Three things to love

There’s a lot of incredibly smooth data and presentation in this 21-slide deck, with some huge wins along the way. Here are three of my favorites:

Hit ’em with data

[Slide 2] Getting straight down to business. Image Credits: Alto Pharmacy (opens in a new window)

Traction is everything — that’s true for every startup, but it becomes more and more important the longer the company has been around. Hitting those milestones, growing that growth — it’s the name of the game. Alto doesn’t mess around, crashing straight into a five-point summary of why the investors should show them the money. Frankly, this slide is an award-worthy list of accomplishments.

Doubling its ARR year on year is a hell of a mark of growth that’ll get every investor asking, “How, and can you do it again?” “Positive contribution margin per order” is finance speak for “if we sell more of this stuff, we’ll make more money.” The company also shows that the figure was negative in 2019. That means back in 2019, the company was losing more money the more orders it fulfilled. In the intervening three years, it turned that around, and set an even more beneficial goal for next year.

The geo expansion model is very interesting; if, later in the pitch, the company can convince me that it did 11 geo rollouts and now has a playbook for how to conquer new markets, that could mark the company as a relatively safe bet, for a startup.

Reading between the lines and beyond the business-speak: The company is growing incredibly quickly and has fantastically happy customers. It is out there raising money because its operating and R&D expenses are high enough that overall it is running at a loss. But if it is able to streamline marketing and customer acquisition, it could become a profitable company. And, look! It has a way of rolling out to new markets easily and quickly.

It’s an incredibly good summary of an impressive company, and as an investor (if I invested at the late growth stage), I’d be pretty excited about the next 55 minutes of my life.

‘Mature market ripe for disruption’

[Slide 5] Let’s goooo. Image Credits: Alto Pharmacy
(opens in a new window)

This slide tells two incredible stories, both related to market size and opportunity. For one thing, as an industry, drugs are bigger than Uber and all food delivery services combined. The other is this: Food delivery and ride-hailing and travel have all gone online, and you can probably think of a dozen unicorns exits in each of those categories. If I were the CEO, I’d be jumping up and down at this point, pointing at that 1% number and strongly insinuating something along the lines of, “How badly wrong do we have to get it to not be successful in this market?”

Based on the company’s performance to date and the enormity of the market — unless there are some major red flags that show up later in this pitch, this is starting to look more and more like a pretty safe investment with a huge opportunity attached. There’s a class of VCs that are entirely geared up to nudge startups that last little way from “doing well” to IPO, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we saw one of those in the near future from Alto.

Also, folks, this is how you do a market size slide. It’s so well done.

Let’s traumatize the reader a little

[Slide 6] This is the slide-deck equivalent of a standup comedian standing on a stage, peering into the spotlights, muttering “pharmacies, amirite?” Image Credits: Alto Pharmacy(opens in a new window)

The best storytelling trick in the how-to-pitch playbook is to make it come to life. And, in the U.S., with its unmentionably complicated healthcare, the above diagram is painfully familiar. From procuring a prescription from your doctor to having the drug in your hands can be a Sisyphean task of frustration and murderous rage. By playing into that experience and then waving a magic wand to make it all better, you tickle the empathy bone in your investors.

You get exactly one guess to guess what Slide 7 is.

Oh OK, then, because you asked so nicely:

It is a storytelling trick as old as marketing itself: Set up a painful problem that the audience can identify with, then sell ’em the problem to that same issue in the very next scene.

It’s so simple, but Alto does it so fantastically well here.

---

 

In the rest of this teardown, we’ll take a look at three things Alto Pharmacy could have improved or done differently, along with its full pitch deck!

Evabot secures fresh capital to inject AI into corporate gifting

The idea of corporate gifting to maintain client relationships isn’t a novel concept. In fact, there’s a cottage industry of “gifting-as-a-service” startups that promise to streamline the task, ranging from companies such as Reachdesk and &Open to Sendoso and Goody. Vendors claim their industry is a profitable one (worth an estimated $258 billion) because the evidence suggests corporate gifting works. One study found that 66% of people who received a promotional product or gift could recall the brand that sent it, and 79% would be likely to do business with the company again.

But according to Rabi Gupta, the co-founder of Evabot, there’s “a lot of clutter” in the corporate gifting space. He argues that many vendors do little more than send company-branded swag like T-shirts and thermoses, which don’t exactly foster loyalty. In one recent survey, companies cited the inability to purchase from multiple brands, managing inventory and storage, and the limited range of products as their top challenges where it concerned gifting.

Evabot itself is a vendor. But Gupta asserts that the company’s AI-driven approach, which uses a chatbot to poll potential gift recipients about their likes, preferences and lifestyles to personalize presents, is more effective than most.

Investors agree. Today, Evabot announced that it raised $10.83 million in a funding round led by Comcast Ventures with participation from Alumni Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, Precursor Ventures, Forefront Venture Partners and Silicon Valley Bank. Gupta said that the proceeds will be used to scale Evabot’s operations, product development and growth, as well as its investments in AI to build “fully automated” gifting experiences.

“Every enterprise wants to really ‘know’ their customers and employees so as to be able to create thoughtful experiences and touch points. Every enterprise cares about building relationships but they need to do that at scale,” Gupta told TechCrunch via email. “Since most of us are remote now, businesses need a better way to connect with their customers and employees.”

Image Credits: Evabot

Gupta co-launched Evabot, which previously went by the name Vizzi, in 2016 with Satwick Saxena, Ashish Kumar and Akshay Gupta shortly after they immigrated to the U.S. Prior to Evabot, Rabi Gupta, Kumar and Akshay Gupta worked together at India-based iCouchApp, a social app for discussing TV shows and channels.

Like other corporate gifting platforms, Evabot provides an array of gifting services ranging from holiday and birthday gifts to employee onboarding items. To autofill details like names and contact information, Evabot connects to customer relationship and HR systems like Salesforce and Workday. Once recipients finish a questionnaire sent via the aforementioned chatbot, Evabot automatically selects and mails the gift — complete with a handwritten note.

Evabot rival Alyce uses AI, too, to plug into various apps and track relationships to personalize gift recommendations. But Rabi Gupta says that Evabot leverages AI in a variety of ways, not just for gift suggestions.

“[Gifts are] picked by our AI based on the data collected and attributes like past gift ratings, weather in a location, gift budget, and more,” Rabi Gupta said. “[To create the] personalized note that’s added to every gift, we use the data collected by our AI and the natural language generation tool GPT-3. Evabot also collects birthdays from the gift recipients, and then data like this becomes a trigger for the sender to send another gift or a thoughtful note or email.”

Rabi Gupta tells TechCrunch that the business model is a combination of software-as-a-service subscriptions and per-gift revenue. It’s pricing that’s proven attractive — Evabot has shipped more than 125,000 unique gifts to date for over 1,000 customers, including health services giant Cigna. Most of the gifts come from “artisanal” direct-to-consumer brands and local vendors, Rabi Gupta says.

But what of future growth? The corporate gifting market had a rosy outlook as of 2020, when a poll found that 54% of companies planned to increase their investment in gifting over the next two years. Despite Rabi Gupta admitting that he’s seen a “slowdown,” Evabot’s co-founders believe the company is in a position to perform despite the headwinds.

“There is definitely some short-term slowdown [in the corporate gifting space] since companies are slowing down hiring … But overall, we are seeing very strong interest from enterprises who care about long-term relationship building,” Rabi Gupta said. “Before raising our Series A, we were profitable. Right now, we have two years of runway, and the idea is to get to profitability and scale 4x within the next 18 months.”

Evabot has raised a total of $13.83 million in capital to date, which includes a previously undisclosed $3 million seed round. The company employs 60 people across offices in San Francisco, Dallas, and cities in Canada and India, a headcount Rabi Gupta intends to grow to 70 by the end of the year.

How to grow a SaaS company efficiently in a recession

Alex Zekoff Contributor

Alex Zekoff is the CEO and co-founder of Thoughtful Automation, an automation-as-a-service platform.

With rising interest rates, there’s a new sheriff in town for all companies. It’s called efficiency.

Efficiency is now especially important for startups, which are always running fast toward a cliff.

When, as a typical startup, you have immediate death coming at you within 18 to 24 months, it’s really scary. When you reach the edge of that cliff, you either take off — or you don’t. And in this new environment in which interest rates are climbing, access to capital is diminished and investors are “fleeing from the riskiest companies,” meaning nascent companies are in an even more precarious position. They don’t have the luxury of hiring too many people or not the right kinds of people. Such mistakes will only accelerate their move off the cliff and to their deaths.

The gold standard is a burn multiple of one — for every dollar you burn, you add a net new dollar in subscription revenue.

As startups born or growing during the last recession, including Airbnb and Facebook, have proved, efficiency can put you on the fast track to massive success even in hard times. Yet many startups have much higher than necessary burn rates. Just look at Fast, a one-click checkout software startup that burned through $10 million a month. Earlier this year, Fast shut down abruptly after burning through more than $120 million in funding.

Avoiding this fate requires a radically different approach. You now need to ask: How can we slow down the speed at which we reach the cliff of death? Can we turn this into free cash?

Adopting this mindset can be very difficult for a young company to do, especially given the revenue growth demands that venture capitalists require on return. But such thinking is what you need to grow your company efficiently in a recession — and hiring against the burn multiple is a proven way to extend your runway while still achieving lofty growth targets.

Calculate your burn multiple and understand when you need to reduce it

David Sacks, the godfather of the burn multiple, explains that burn multiple is net burn/net new annual recurring revenue (ARR). This ratio addresses how efficiently you are in adding revenue. As Sacks notes, the beauty of the burn multiple is that it’s a catchall metric. You can manage your whole company around it. If you have a churn problem, a growth challenge, a product-market fit issue, it’s all baked into burn multiple. The number doesn’t lie. If you have recurring revenue, burn multiple is the gold standard for how to evaluate your company.