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Tag: Y Combinator

  • Postscript Raises $4.5 Million to Turbocharge Shopify SMS Marketing

    Postscript Raises $4.5 Million to Turbocharge Shopify SMS Marketing

    Postscript announced it has raised $4.5 million in seed funding to help bring turbocharged SMS marketing to Shopify and e-commerce stores.

    Postscript specializes in SMS marketing for e-commerce. The company’s goal is to help bring SMS marketing mainstream, while at the same time doing it in a way that respects users’ inboxes.

    The company has now raised $4.5 million to help it reach that goal. The investors include Y Combinator, Accomplice, 1984vc, and Ali Capital. Postscript also has the backing of some of the biggest entrepreneurial names in the e-commerce industry.

    “At Postscript, we obsess about supporting independent brands & e-commerce merchants and will always put their needs first,” said CEO Adam Turner. “Our approach to text messaging emphasizes brands build meaningful relationships with their customers by respecting the SMS inbox and encouraging two way communication. So far our competitive advantage has been our people and our product, and this funding will help us continue along that path. By operating remotely, we’re able to hire in any region, resulting in an extremely talented team dedicated to delivering a top-tier product and customer experience.”

    Postscript already claims Native, Brooklinen, StackCommerce, Frey, Oars + Alps and Olivers among its clients. The company also boasts 26x ROI with clickthrough rates ranging between 7.5% and 40%. Somewhat unique to the industry, Postscript guarantees a 4x ROI or they will refund a client’s investment — something they have not yet had to do.

    “The Postscript team has taken a product-first approach to a gigantic, fast-growing market, and the growth speaks for itself,” said angel investor Paul English, founder of Kayak. “They have outstanding founder/product/market fit, and I believe what they’re building will be an essential part of any e-commerce company’s marketing stack. I’m proud to support them in this round.”

  • Quill Gets Backing From Slack Investor

    Quill Gets Backing From Slack Investor

    According to a report by TechCrunch, Index Ventures has backed Slack competitor Quill. While that may not seem unusual in and of itself, it’s notable due to Index Ventures being a Slack investor.

    Slack has taken the business world by storm, easily becoming one of the most popular office communication and collaboration platforms. At the same, it has faced criticism for being too “busy,” overloading users with notifications and direct messages.

    Led by Ludwig Pettersson, Quill offers a more streamlined experience, focusing on “meaningful conversations, without disturbing your team.” It’s designed to offer more focused conversations, with an emphasis on threads.

    Former Y Combinator president Sam Altman, who worked with Pettersson at OpenAI and led a previous $2 million round of funding, told TechCrunch: “It’s relentlessly focused on increasing the bandwidth and efficiency of communication. The product technically works super well–it surfaces the right information in the feed and it’s pretty intelligent about how it brings the right people into conversations.”

    Quill’s latest round of funding, a $12.5 million Series A funding at a $62.5 million valuation, was led by Sarah Cannon, an Index Ventures partner and former Slack board observer.

    Whatever Quill’s success, one thing is clear: Slack is facing increasing competition from all sides. Startups like Quill are rising up to improve on Slack’s perceived shortcomings, while established companies like Microsoft have competing tools backed by entire ecosystems of business software. Slack will have to continue to improve and evolve to maintain its position.

  • Hail Damage Tech

    Hail Damage Tech

    Kentucky’s First Y Combinator Startup Wants To Streamline Hail Damage Detection And Repair

    Louisville, Kentucky startup WeatherCheck was selected from a pool of 12,000 competitors to become part of the Y Combinator’s winter 2019 startup school cohort, the first company from Kentucky to earn the distinction.

    WeatherCheck uses tech and statistical models to determine where hail damage occurred so that homeowners can start the repair process in a timely manner and insurers don’t have to rely on homeowners to discover hail damage months or even years after the fact. In 2017, 11 million properties in the United States alone were affected by hail and racked up a national bill of $1.7 billion in property damage. On a local level, some states saw more than half of their properties damaged by falling hail including Kansas at 57% and Oklahoma at 55%. Though hailstorms happen frequently, our current system of predicting risk and assessing damage falls woefully short.

    Coming in as one of TechCrunch’s favorites from Y Combinator’s 2019 Winter Demo day, WeatherCheck helps take the guesswork out of weather damage. Co-founder and CEO Demetrius Grey speaks about his business’s involvement in Y Combinator’s winter 2019 Demo Day as a ‘once in a lifetime opportunity.’ Garnering much well-deserved attention, WeatherCheck is doing what has never done before by tackling the concerns that arise from some of the most unpredictable yet destructive forces on Earth: the weather itself.

    Over the course of 2017, extreme weather caused $330 billion in global property damage and resulted in over $135 billion in insurance claims. In the last thirty years, the average number of global natural catastrophes has grown by nearly 175%, with hailstorms, in particular, hitting more frequently than ever. Compared to other types of weather damage, hail is among the most destructive, and it can also be the most challenging to predict.

    Hail can happen anywhere. Born from updrafts during thunderstorms, water droplets fuse together in the lower parts of storm clouds, held aloft and growing in size by powerful winds until the frozen droplets become too heavy and begin dropping to the ground. Falling at speeds sometimes greater than 90 miles per hour, exposed cars, unprepared roofs, and even our own heads may become victims of these pea-sized to softball-sized ice chunks. Risk increases exponentially with the size of the hailstones themselves, by the time they reach 1.5 inches or more, property damage is almost a guarantee.

    Occurring globally once every 7-9 days and amounting to thousands of instances every single year, hailstorms are among the most unforgiving of weather events and the need for insurance and reliable prediction is only growing. WeatherCheck allows insurance agencies to gather the right local data they need down to specific street addresses to assess the potential risk for hail careering out of the sky. As the Internet of Things capabilities continue to move forward, insurers can look to AI to monitor both properties and incoming storms, in turn, giving them opportunities to precisely quote for coverage and recommend best practices for homeowners living in high-risk hail areas.

    Though the weather can always turn without warning, high-tech tools to keep us safe and prepared will help us predict risk, mitigate damage when it does occur, and be ready for it in the future. Here’s how WeatherCheck is making it possible.

  • Reddit Raises New $50 Million Round Of Funding

    Reddit Raises New $50 Million Round Of Funding

    Reddit said on Tuesday that it has closed a new $50 million round of outside funding led by Y Combinator President Sam Altman with participation from Sequoia Capital’s Alfred Lin and Andreessen Horowitz’s Marc Andreessen.

    Other investors mentioned further down in the announcement include Peter Thiel, Ron Conway, Paul Buchheit, Jared Leto, Jessica Livingston, Kevin and Julia Hartz, Mariam Naficy, Josh Kushner, Calvin Broadus Jr. (Get it, Snoop Dogg!), and CEO Yishan Wong.

    The company discusses its plans for the money on its blog:

    reddit has had a long and complex history, starting as one of the first Y Combinator companies, then as a division of Conde Nast, and three years ago spun out as an independent entity. During all of this time we have operated with a shoestring budget. This made us become efficient; it also meant that we were only able to work on essential features and were always understaffed. Even with the last year’s hiring (we’re 60+ strong now), we’ve found that there are still a lot more features you’ve been asking for that we haven’t always been able to get to as fast as we’d like.

    Thus, we’re planning to use this money to hire more staff for product development, expand our community management team, build out better moderation and community tools, work more closely with third party developers to expand our mobile offerings (try our new AMA app), improve our self-serve ad product, build out redditgifts marketplace, pay for our growing technical infrastructure, and all the many other things it takes to support a huge and growing global internet community.

    Interestingly, reddit says it has come up with a new way for its investors to give 10% of their shares back to the community.

    In a reddit post (via TechCrunch), Wong says they’re thinking about creating a cryptocurrency and making it backed by those shares of the company, and then distributing it to the community.

    Image via reddit

  • Ark People-Search Engine Raises $4.2 Million

    Liz Gannes over at All Things D is reporting that “people-search” engine Ark has just raised $4.2 million during its recent seed round. Ark is a website that promises to help searchers find old acquaintances and new friends based on search parameters. The site can currently only be joined by requesting an invitation from Ark. A Gmail-type invitation system is being used, though, so anyone who already has an Ark account can invite others. Gannes reported that more than 250,000 people have requested invites already.

    Ark is a recent start-up that is part of Y Combinator investment funding. Y Combinator is an interesting investment group, which twice a year gives small amounts of money to start-ups so that they can get their company into shape for an investment pitch. Y Combinator then holds a “demo day” for all of the start-ups to pitch to investors. According to Gannes, Ark’s pitch got the company $2 million in a single day.

    Ark bills itself as a search engine for finding people, but it has limited functionality so far. The only people Ark can sort are those whose information is public on a social network. To find those people, users must use search filters such as location, employer, schools, and interests. The site seems tailor-made to be bought by Facebook to enhance their site search.

    I should also mention Ark’s strange obsession with penguins. Their site is covered in cute penguins, and their Facebook page includes a photo gallery packed with groan-worthy penguin comics.

    What do you think? Are the search engine wars heating up again? Will the search landscape fracture into a series of specialized search engines good at only niche searches? Or are investors jumping onto the bandwagon, hoping for a Facebook payday? Leave your comments below and let me know.

  • Facebook, Venture Firm Partner To Support Startups

    Social-minded startups with ties to Y Combinator, a well-known provider of seed funding, will soon get another benefit from the relationship.  Last night, Facebook announced that it will provide support to the startups in a number of ways.

    Don’t look for more money to change hands; Facebook hasn’t quite decided to become a venture capital firm.  The organization’s ready to lend just about every other form of assistance imaginable, though.

    Carl Sjogreen, a product manager who used to work for Google, wrote on the Facebook Developer Blog, "We’ll provide product, technical and design resources to support new Y Combinator companies interested in working with us to build deeply social products, whether a website or an application on Facebook.com."

    Also, according to Sjogreen, "These companies will have priority access to our technologies and programs such as Facebook Credits, Instant Personalization and upcoming beta features."

    That’s not a bad offer.  And considering that Y Combinator’s funded innovative companies like Dropbox, Justin.tv, Posterous, Reddit, and Scribd, it’s a good bet that Facebook’s assistance won’t go to waste.

    Here‘s the page through which firms can apply for Y Combinator funding in case any WebProNews readers want to get in on the action.