Build a Rocket Boy's upcoming 'Everywhere' title.

Build a Rocket Boy, a game studio from former Grand Theft Auto developer, raises $110M

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Build a Rocket Boy's upcoming 'Everywhere' title.

Image Credits: Build a Rocket Boy

Build a Rocket Boy, a Scotland-headquartered game development company founded by one of the former lead developers behind the Grand Theft Auto franchise, today announced it has raised $110 million in a Series D round of funding.

The funding comes ahead of the much-anticipated launch of the company’s first titles and immersive open-world platform.

Leslie Benzies is perhaps better known as the former president of Rockstar North, driving development of its smash hit Grand Theft Auto series starting from the third installment in 2001, through each subsequent title until departing the company in 2016 following a 17-month sabbatical. That same year, Benzies initiated legal action against his former employer, arguing that he had effectively been kicked out and denied a share of the game’s profits. A substantial portion of the complaints were thrown out in court two years later, with the parties finally reaching a confidential settlement in 2019.

Throughout much of this, Benzies was laying the foundation for his next big project.

Leslie Benzies
Leslie Benzies. Image Credits: Austin Hargrave / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0

Initially called Royal Circus Games (named after a prestigious address in the company’s home city, Edinburgh), lawyers representing Rockstar parent company Take-Two Interactive argued that the “RCG” acronym was strikingly similar to Rockstar Games (RSG), and was deliberately designed to confuse. Whether its name-change was a direct result of this accusation isn’t clear, but Royal Circus Games morphed into Build a Rocket Boy in 2018 and went on to raise at least $40 million in funding to develop and commercialize a suite of new titles.

While these have yet to see the official light of day, the company has teased a new immersive open-world platform called Everywhere, pitched as “community-driven gaming” where players can build their own world — in what could perhaps be construed as something akin to Roblox. And then there is MindsEye, touted as a “story-driven action adventure.”

Both titles are slated for launch “in the near future,” while the company is also introducing a suite of user-generated content (UGC) design tools it calls Arcadia.

“I started Build A Rocket Boy so that I could continue to share the stories I love with players and give them a place to create and share,” Benzies said in a press release. “We believe in a future where game creation is put in the hands of the players, and we will empower them with the tools to help shape this vision with us.”

Build a Rocket Boy’s Series D round was led by New York-based investment firm RedBird Capital Partners, with participation from NetEase Games, Galaxy Interactive, Endeavor, Alignment Growth, Woodline Partners and GTAM Partners, among others.

Aside from its headquarters in Edinburgh, Build a Rocket Boy has opened additional development hubs in Budapest (Hungary) and Montpellier (France).

Startup studio Hexa hires former Doctolib exec to launch its health vertical

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Image Credits: Rawlstock / Getty Images

Hexa, the Paris-based startup studio that recently raised $22 million, is launching a new vertical focused on improving the healthcare system. Julien Méraud, a senior team member of the French unicorn startup Doctolib, is joining the startup studio.

As a reminder, Hexa started its life as eFounders and originally focused specifically on B2B software-as-a-service startups. The studio comes up with startup ideas, finds startup founders to pair them with these ideas and helps them get started with its own core team and some initial funding.

After a while, startups “graduate” from the startup studio and continue their life as independent companies — with Hexa maintaining a stake in its portfolio companies. Some of Hexa’s past companies include Front, Aircall and Spendesk.

As Hexa starts to branch out to other verticals, the startup studio is also rethinking its strategy. For the health vertical, Hexa is not only hiring Julien Méraud, but it’s also going to work with a full-time medical doctor to help when it comes to assessing future projects.

For each health tech startup, Hexa will look for two co-founders — a doctor who already knows their speciality and has hands-on experience and an operational founder who knows how to scale companies.

Hexa Health will have a vertical approach with each company focusing on one pathology specifically. The first two startups that will come out of the studio will focus on weight loss and skin cancer detection.

“The idea is to have a CEO and a CTO — just like in most startups. And that’s quite common across all Hexa companies. But something that’s a bit new with this particular vertical is that we believe innovation in healthcare should be driven by doctors. In other words, if you ask me to design the perfect care to detect skin cancer, I’m not capable of doing it. That’s why we want to work with doctors on every innovation,” Méraud told me.

He also insists on the fact that Hexa doesn’t want to disrupt the healthcare industry as a whole. With this new vertical, the startup studio wants to find inefficiencies and improve the care pathways, as there’s a growing imbalance between an aging population in Europe and the available medical time.

“Tech shouldn’t just enable faster care. It should also enable better care. And we’re really going to focus on measuring the medical quality of care and everything we create,” Méraud said.

Susan Wojcicki

Family tragedy for former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki

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Susan Wojcicki

Image Credits: Getty Images

It’s every parent’s worst nightmare.

Earlier this week, the 19-year-old son of former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, was found dead at UC Berkeley of an apparent drug overdose, according to his grandmother, Esther Wojcicki. The  news broke widely yesterday, though Wojcicki posted the news to Facebook several days ago, writing: “Tragedy hit my family yesterday. My beloved grandson Marco Troper, age 19 passed away yesterday. Our family is devastated beyond comprehension. Marco was the most kind, loving, smart, fun and beautiful human being. He was just getting started on his second semester of his freshman year at UC Berkeley majoring in math and was truly loving it. He had a strong community of friends from his dorm at Stern Hall and his fraternity Zeta Psi and was thriving academically. At home, he would tell us endless stories of his life and friends at Berkeley.”

UC Berkeley spokesperson Janet Gilmore has said there were no signs of foul play and that an investigation into the death is underway.

Esther Wojcicki told the Palo Alto Daily of her grandson’s passing, “Kids in college, especially freshmen and sophomores, experiment with everything. I think this was an experiment that went wrong.” She separately told the San Francisco Chronicle: “He ingested a drug, and we don’t know what was in it. One thing we do know, it was a drug.”

Susan Wojcicki stepped down as CEO of the Alphabet-owned subsidiary one year ago, writing in a blog post that after nine years in the role, she’d “decided to start a new chapter focused on my family, health and personal projects I’m passionate about.”

Neal Mohan, then YouTube’s chief product officer, has run the organization since.

I didn’t have the opportunity to interview Wojcicki while she held one of the most prestigious CEO posts in the world. I do remember being captivated by her appearance at a Fortune event in Aspen back in 2015 as she answered questions that she was asked routinely, centering on how she juggled an all-encompassing job with also being a mother to five children. Her interviewer, veteran reporter Adam Lashinsky, was teased in an interview later that same day with brothers Ari and Rahm Emanuel, who noted that Lashinsky didn’t ask them at all about their children. But truthfully,  as a working mother of two children and a considerably less-demanding job at the time, I was also curious how Wojcicki — who gave birth to her youngest child just ahead of the event — handled it all.

Notably, she did not push back on the question. Instead, she talked about associating her different children with different stages of Google’s growth, after first responding, “‘You’re pretty busy’ is maybe the short answer. I love kids, I love work and I think at some level I just love creating things and building. And like kids are very rewarding projects. Building companies is rewarding too and I enjoy doing both.”

My heart now breaks for Wojcicki and her family, which is known far beyond their home in Silicon Valley and includes 23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki; Susan and Anne’s sister Janet, a professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco; and their mother Esther Wojcicki, herself a renowned educator who has written extensively on how to raise successful children.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Esther Wojcicki told the SF Chronicle that the family is speaking with the press in part to “prevent this from happening to any other family.”

“Tragedy is very hard to sustain,” she told the Chronicle. “It makes you want to hide in a closet and never come out. But I think the main thing is that we need to push forward to see what we can do to help other people so there won’t be any other kids who end up like Marco.”

Presumably, his death is already sparking widespread conversations. After hearing of it late yesterday, I reminded my own children of the dangers of today’s drugs, how painfully precious life is, and that no one is immune to calamity.

Water drop mapping money dripping from a faucet

Former Nextdoor exec raises $25 million for PipeDreams, a startup rolling up HVAC companies

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Water drop mapping money dripping from a faucet

Image Credits: erhui1979 / Getty Images

Dan Laufer swore off ever founding a startup again after he sold apartment rental platform RentLingo in 2021, but Laufer also couldn’t ignore the potential to solve a problem he saw unfolding as the head of growth and product marketing at Nextdoor.

“The top use of Nextdoor is people looking for providers, HVAC especially,” Laufer told TechCrunch. “There were these gaps on the consumer side, the satisfaction with the experience, it didn’t feel modern. The other big trend I saw was the silver tsunami. All these baby boomers who own these and don’t necessarily have an exit plan.”

The result was PipeDreams, a startup that acquires mom and pop HVAC and plumbing companies and scales them using its software that helps with scheduling and marketing. PipeDreams allows business owners to retire, if they want, without losing their employees, name or brand, or just be part of a larger company with more resources, Laufer told TechCrunch.

PipeDreams just raised a $25.5 million Series A, led by Canvas Ventures and Plural with additional funds from Tony Xu, the founder of DoorDash, and Thomas Layton, the former CEO of OpenTable. PipeDreams has purchased nine companies so far and currently operates in the San Francisco Bay Area, Tucson and Denver, with plans to expand.

“The beauty of this industry is it’s massive, there are over 100,000 businesses doing plumbing and HVAC,” Laufer said about the U.S. market. “We intend to keep their brand. A lot of these people have their name on the truck, it’s very personal.”

PipeDreams’ strategy is a twist on the private equity roll-up model, where PE firms buy smaller companies in a niche (private schools, dental, healthcare) and combine them into a larger business, intent on selling the larger company off to pocket profits for investors.

PipeDreams also uses debt to acquire the businesses outright but isn’t tied to the kind of tight lifecycle timeline to produce returns or exit like the four-six years expected in PE. The company has a $15 million debt facility available, used to buy businesses, and will use the equity it raised to improve its software. Laufer said he imagines future rounds will involve raising more debt than equity.

Roll-up strategies aren’t common for venture-backed startups, with the closest comparison being Amazon aggregator startups like Perch and Thrasio, which have struggled financially as of late. But unlike these aggregators, the underlying businesses PipeDreams buys aren’t at the mercy of a company like Amazon that can change the rules as it pleases, and the companies PipeDreams buys have stronger relationships with its customers than Amazon brands.

That said, PipeDreams could experience some of the same growth hurdles Amazon aggregators face, like if a newer entrant grabs more business or if a local plumber beefs up its SEO or digital marketing strategy.

Laufer said owning the HVAC companies outright is what differentiates PipeDreams from other competitors looking to just connect consumers with professionals, like Angie and Thumbtack. He said that the marketplace model, like many of its competitors, isn’t sticky as consumers can just seek out professionals directly after finding them through a marketplace. With PipeDreams, since they bake their tech into each provider’s website, they are part of the process any time someone books with that professional.

PipeDreams is also addressing the skills shortage in the HVAC and plumbing industries, as Gen Z is less interested in learning trades than generations before them. The company launched an apprentice program in Q4 to allow people to get trained on the job. It’s had five students so far with plans to expand.

While the company has a long road to go to flesh out its HVAC-focused business, Laufer anticipates they’ll expand into other categories including electricians down the road too.

“We bought [a company] a couple of weeks ago and the owner had a celebratory dinner, he described it as, ‘my business is off to college,’” Laufer said. “‘I grew it up and it’s off to its next chapter.’ I love that description. That’s how we do it.”

iPhone X in hand

Former Magic Leapers launch a platform for AR experiences

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iPhone X in hand

Image Credits: Trace

When Trace’s future co-founders Greg Tran, Martin Smith and Sean Couture joined Magic Leap in spring/summer of 2015, it was about as hot as startups come. After years of secrecy, the augmented reality company captured Silicon Valley’s imagination with in-device footage, before capping the year with an $827 million raise.

The story of the intervening years is one of a massively funded and extremely promising startup struggling to find market fit. Tran exited his creative director role in January 2020, while Couture and Smith left in July 2020 and February 2021, respectively.

Trace was founded in 2021, with Tran, Smith and Couture stepping into the respective roles of CEO, CTO and head of 3D art. The startup, which builds location-based branded augmented reality experiences, is a product of some of Magic Leap’s early content struggles.

“It’s really hard to make AR content,” Tran tells TechCrunch. “It’s really early in the ecosystem. There were a lot of partners with Magic Leap. Whenever they wanted to make content, it would take three to six months to do, take experts in development and 3D art and whole teams of people. We saw an opportunity to make that process a lot easier.”

Trace is a far more modest firm than Magic Leap. In addition to its three founders, the company employs a handful of contractors. Magic Leap’s funding now tops $4 billion. Trace, on the other hand, is announcing a $2 million pre-seed this week, co-led by Rev1 Ventures and Impellent Ventures. Still, the company has already teamed with some high-profile names, including Qualcomm, Telefónica, T-Mobile and Lenovo.

Image Credits: Trace

If you attended Mobile World Congress this year, you may have encountered the AR experience it built for Deutsche Telekom. Or perhaps you saw the mixed-reality offering it built for the Hip Hop 50 Summit last year in New York.

Trace’s offering centers around a creator app designed to easily add AR content to a real-world space. Tran likens it to a Squarespace for AR experiences. Once in place, a user can access the digital content through Trace’s app or a web browser.

The creator experience has thus far been limited to a private beta, but Trace expects to open it to the public over the next few months. When that happens, companies will be able to produce experiences as part of a subscription-based offering.

One way the company is very much in line with Magic Leap, however, is its focus on enterprise clients.

“The partners that we’ve had so far have been some of these big brand companies,” says Tran. “We’re focused on some of those enterprise-level partners first. … This is a consumer-facing product, in a way, but we see there being more opportunity in the enterprise space right now.”