Performance management startup SocialCrowd has raised a $1.6 million pre-seed round led by Bread and Butter Ventures, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.
Launched in 2022, SocialCrowd is a SaaS platform that provides performance management software, letting companies set goals for their employees and reward them when they are achieved. Speaking to TechCrunch, Raphael Akinsipe, SocialCrowd’s co-founder, likened his product to Fitbit, but for work.
According to Akinsipe, a customer can set up incentive campaigns with specific goals, and SocialCrowd then tracks the customer’s employee performance in real time by connecting to existing productivity apps. SocialCrowd then sends reminders to employees to hit their targets, and when the goals are achieved, the workers are given points that they can redeem for gift cards or custom rewards, like time off.
He said SocialCrowd has seen an increase in attention as companies have struggled to manage the move to remote work. “Many of our customers have large blue-collar shift teams; their staff was not able to transition to remote work during or after the pandemic,” Akinsipe said. “Many of these companies struggled to retain staff, which created an even greater demand for solutions that drive employee retention and increased productivity.”
Work software remains a bright spot for investors, even despite the economic downturn. The possibility of a connection between work software increasing productivity and increasing return on investment is attractive to investors, and they are also drawn to the fact that corporations tend to spend money on work software even when the economy worsens.
However, Akinsipe said fundraising was a marathon for his company. It took him about nine months to raise this round, and he met most of his lead investors through referrals. “Last year was a tough time to raise for everyone,” he said. “There were tons of ‘No’s’ and even more ‘Not right nows,’ so it took a lot of endurance and creativity to close the entire round.”
VC 414, Serac Ventures and Gala Capital Partners also participated in the round. SocialCrowd will use the pre-seed money to expand its team and focus on customer acquisition.
Mary Grove, a managing partner at Bread and Butter, said the firm loved SocialCrowd’s consumer-first approach and focus on employees. “Feedback from [the company’s] current customers has us excited that this platform is a win-win for both employers and frontline workers within those organizations,” she told TechCrunch. “We’re backing an incredibly smart team that is deeply versed in enterprise SaaS and building with a product-first lens.”
“I envision a future where our platform delivers more than just incentives and rewards but is truly a tool for employee growth and business insight,” Akinsipe said.
Akinsipe and his co-founder Paul Doran first met in college as roommates. Together, they started a hardware startup that raised a small sum, but couldn’t land an exit. “From that point on, we knew we would stay on the entrepreneurial journey,” Akinsipe said.
The duo went on to start a few startups, including web designing firm Glow Station and website management service Just Media Studios. Akinsipe has also held jobs at Google, as well as at Casetabs, which sold to Bain Capital.
This article was updated to reflect that the company was founded in 2022 not 2020.
There’s a new generative AI startup based in Paris. But what makes Bioptimus interesting is that it plans to apply everything we’ve collectively learned about AI models over the past few years with a narrow, exclusive focus on biology.
The reason it makes sense to create a startup focused exclusively on biology is that access to training data isn’t as simple in this field. While OpenAI is slowly moving away from web crawling in favor of licensing deals with content publishers, Bioptimus is facing different data challenges as it will have to deal with sensitive clinical data that isn’t publicly available at all.
And just like other AI startups, Bioptimus is going to be a capital-intensive startup as it will train its models on expensive GPUs and hire talented researchers. That’s why the startup is raising a $35 million seed round led by Sofinnova Partners. Bpifrance’s Large Venture fund, Frst, Cathay Innovation, Headline, Hummingbird, NJF Capital, Owkin, Top Harvest Capital and Xavier Niel also participated in this funding round.
Bioptimus isn’t coming out of nowhere. At the helm of the company, Jean-Philippe Vert will act as co-founder and executive chairman in a non-operational role. At his day job, he is the chief R&D officer at Owkin, the French biotech unicorn that tries to discover new drugs and improve diagnostics through AI.
Rodolphe Jenatton, the CTO of Bioptimus, has more experience in artificial intelligence, as he was a senior research scientist at Google. Several co-founders are also former researchers at Google DeepMind.
Image Credits: Bioptimus
As part of Owkin’s work for top biopharmas, Owkin has amassed multimodal patient data through partnerships with leading academic hospitals around the world. Bioptimus will leverage this unique dataset to train its foundational model.
A moonshot project from Owkin
Bioptimus could even be considered as a sort of spin-off company from Owkin — or a so-called moonshot project. But why didn’t Owkin decide to work on a foundational model in house? Creating new AI models is such a daunting task that creating a separate entity made more sense.
“Building biology [foundational models] is not a part of Owkin’s roadmap, but Owkin supports and is keen to partner with a company like Bioptimus. Training very large-scale [foundational models] requires important resources in terms of data volume, computing power and breadth of data modalities that are easier to unlock as a specific entity,” Vert told TechCrunch. “As a ‘pure player’ in foundational models, Bioptimus is better set up to do this.”
The startup has also signed a partnership with Amazon Web Services. It sounds like the company’s model will be trained in Amazon’s data centers. Now that Bioptimus is well funded, it’s time to work on the AI model and see what the biotech research community can do with it.
“Eventually, the AI we build will improve disease diagnosis, precision medicine, and will help create new biomolecules for medical or environmental use,” Vert said.
It’s hard to keep track of crypto’s technical development, but one thing hasn’t changed much: blockchain applications are notoriously hard to build. This stems in part from their decentralized nature, resulting in a lack of uniform standards across different infrastructure pieces.
Initia, founded by a group of developers in their late 20s, is trying to bring more interoperability to multichain networks and simplify the process of creating app-specific blockchains, or app chains. Popular household blockchains like Ethereum and Bitcoin have captured most users’ attention, but app chains have emerged in recent times to provide developers with more freedom over customization, such as economic and governance structures.
This fragmentation of the blockchain landscape creates a great deal of friction for users, who have to deal with different types of gas fees (imagine having to pay in JPY, USD and EUR just to use different features in an app), wallets (imagine being asked to connect your PayPal, Apple Pay and WeChat Pay to one app), and explorers (and imagine opening Firefox, Safari and Chrome for different tasks within the same app).
“This gets 10x worse when you move assets between blockchains,” Initia’s co-founder Ezaan Mangalji, who goes by “Zon,” told TechCrunch in an interview.
For example, the stablecoin USDC can have different versions on the same chain, such as bUSDC, USDCet and USDCso, because it’s been “transferred to that chain over X, Y, Z different paths or bridges,” Mangalji explained. “One of the great parts about Initia is across the multichain world all assets are fungible, such that in this example there would only be one type of USDC across potentially thousands of app-specific blockchains.”
Developers similarly have to jump many hoops as they build across chains. While there have been efforts like roll-ups that work to improve efficiency and scalability in blockchains by removing validator sets, the method can “exacerbate fragmentation and are rigid or inflexible for developers,” said Mangalji.
Meanwhile, Cosmos, another solution tackling blockchain’s scaling problem, is “very flexible” but not easy to run. “Each Cosmos chain is a Layer 1 blockchain that requires a validator set and requires teams to pay for security by giving rewards to these validators,” the founder noted.
Initia, according to Mangalji, helps overcome both of these challenges by providing a Layer 1 blockchain network built specifically to enable a system of L2 rollups, where these rollups can reach scale and sovereignty easily and each has the Cosmos SDK underneath for full flexibility.
In layman’s speak, Initia is abstracting away app chains’ technical complexity, aiming to make them more friendly to both end users and app developers.
“I think the ultimate goal is to have thousands and tens of thousands of applications being built on crypto, in web3, as well as specifically on Initia, without knowing that this is a crypto project,” said Initia’s other co-founder Stan Liu. “What we want to do is provide the Apple App Store so thousands of users should have really easy access to these applications.”
Initia recently raised $7.5 million in seed financing to work on its testnet launch. Led by Delphi Ventures and HackVC, the investment marks a sizable seed-round injection amid the current slowdown of crypto fundraising. Other investors from the round include Nascent, Figment Capital, Big Brain and A.Capital.
When Liu and Mangalji decided to build a crypto startup together in 2022, they set out in a different direction: decentralized finance, or DeFi. They paused the project after the FTX implosion and eventually changed tack to work on blockchain infrastructure. Mangalji explained the motive behind the pivot:
“We realized that during all these downturns, the problems with current blockchains, given that we had been trying to make one ourselves, [was] with the fragmentation that occurs for both users and also the developer complexity,” he said. “So we essentially teamed back up to build out this vision of Initia now, which is doing a lot of these parts in-house by building the right glue that pieces the modular stacks together.”
Headquartered in Singapore, Initia operates a team of 20 people around the world. The startup plans to spend its new funding on growing its ecosystem, further developing its chain and platform and supporting Layer 2 applications.
Investment in infrastructure is critical for crypto startups, not a ‘nice to have’
African financial institutions typically scale their solutions using a mix of local and foreign tech. Appzone is one of the standout local fintech software providers for banks and fintechs, providing better pricing and flexibility.
For over a decade, the Nigeria-based Appzone has functioned as an enabler (at payment rails and core infrastructure) within banking and payments, building custom software and software-as-a-service products for over 18 commercial banks and more than 450 microfinance banks across Africa, including Ghana and Kenya.
In 2022, the fintech software provider, founded by Emeka Emetarom, Obi Emetarom and Wale Onawunmi, decided to self-innovate by delving into blockchain technology and integrating it with legacy banking and payment systems. As such, it rebranded to Zone, a licensed blockchain-enabled payment infrastructure company–and carved out its original banking-as-a-service business into a separate standalone company, Qore. Today, Zone, its blockchain network that enables payments and acceptance of digital currencies, is announcing that it has raised $8.5 million in a seed round.
Zone’s concept is straightforward: It recognizes that Africa’s current payment infrastructure may not be suitable for transitioning to a cashless future (which may take some time). Therefore, the fintech is developing an interoperable payment infrastructure using blockchain technology — known for its ability to scale infinitely — to connect banks and fintech companies, facilitating transaction flow without intermediaries.
Nigerian fintech Appzone raises $10M for expansion and proprietary technology
In an interview with TechCrunch, CEO Obi Emetarom says Zone is Africa’s first regulated blockchain network for payments and has already signed up over 15 of the continent’s largest banks. It is currently processing domestic transactions for seven of these banks through ATM channels, one of several payment channels through which transactions originate in Nigeria, including POS, fund transfer, web and direct debit.
According to the chief executive, eight banks are at various stages of implementation as onboarding processes can take up to six months due to internal procedures such as setting up staging environments, testing and obtaining management approvals.
Zone, before its launch, obtained a switching license from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), the country’s apex bank, tapping into Nigeria’s central switch (Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System), which is responsible for the interoperability between various players in the country’s financial system and the swift movement of money between bank accounts.
Since the central switch primarily handles fund transfer switching, a few fintechs, like Moniepoint and OPay, have used direct card routing (DCR) to establish direct connections with card issuers, leading to faster transactions with fewer failures for POS transactions, which is Zone’s next focus.
“We’re launching and rolling out some new use cases this year. The ATM use case didn’t incorporate fintechs because they don’t deploy ATMs,” said Emetarom. “But with the POS, that brings a use case fintechs are very familiar with – and for that, we are also integrating some of the big fintechs in the country.”
Emetarom explains that Zone aims to empower banks and fintechs to replicate the achievements of OPay and Moniepoint without the necessity for individual integrations. He said that Zone already has these integrations in place and operates as a licensed switch, thus avoiding the risk of violating regulatory guidelines. The blockchain architecture, he added, is such that when a fintech connects to the Zone network, it is provided with a gateway that serves as the environment through which its transactions are sent directly to the bank, to the issuer for authorization, and back.
“The bank or fintech becomes a switch because they now have something in their environment that connects them to all the destinations they need to reach rather than going through a third-party switch,” the CEO notes. “So the reliability goes up significantly because we dont have any scenario where they have to rely on a middle intermediary and the fintech has control over their switch because it’s sitting in their environment on their servers or the cloud.”
The Zone team
Emetarom stated that reconciliation and instant settlement are other imminent applications of Zone’s blockchain technology.
For instance, when a transaction fails and a customer is debited, a lengthy reconciliation process follows before a refund is issued, often taking days or weeks. Zone’s decentralized architecture will allow for automatic reconciliation and adjustment when discrepancies occur, leading to immediate refunds for customers without needing them to report the issue. In addition, its blockchain technology should provide transparency, allowing the terminal and the issuer complete visibility into the transaction status.
Similarly, merchants experience settlement delays when they receive funds. With Zone’s instant settlement feature, funds are delivered to the merchant’s bank immediately after the transaction, addressing liquidity challenges and ensuring smoother operations.
“Decentralized routing improves reliability and scalability and provides automated reconciliation to solve chargeback fraud. With Zone, we can harmonize transaction processing and the settlement system, which will be supported by a settlement token,” said the CEO, adding that these functionalities will be rolled out pending approval from the CBN.
The payments switch and financial network landscape in Africa typically rely on bank consortiums for infrastructure ownership. Private initiatives have seen mixed success, with few gaining significant traction outside traditional banking; Zone, being one of them, stands out due to its founders who are veterans of the banking industry, a live processing client base, and central bank licensing.
So far, Zone has processed transactions at more than 6,000 ATMs for more than 10 million cardholders. Within three months of launching the ATM use case, the fintech processed over $1 million.
This traction has garnered excitement among its investors. Flourish Ventures, a global fintech-focused fund, and TLcom Capital, a pan-African venture capital fund, co-led the funding round, which Zone says will assist it in launching additional functionalities and broadening its network coverage to other payment channels, thereby catering to a wider range of clients. In addition, the company, which doesn’t charge implementation fees, hopes to reduce the time it takes to onboard its clients (fintechs and banks) in the coming months.
TLcom Capital’s Ido Sum said Zone’s blockchain technology solves a critical payments system challenge and can potentially drive down costs for hundreds of millions of consumers and businesses that rely on digital payments in Africa daily, hence his firm’s backing.
“For the first time in Africa, Zone’s technology enables direct communication between participants in the payment ecosystem. We believe this is a fundamental leap that will allow customers to experience a completely new standard of reliability, speed, and cost efficiency at ATMs, POS machines, and online,” added Ameya Upadhyay, a partner at Flourish Ventures. “We are excited by the potential for Zone’s technology to be replicated across borders to advance payment innovation globally.”
Image Credits: Ivan balvan (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Layoffs usually drive attention and sympathy toward affected employees, but rarely does anyone talk about what happens to the recruiters who are sometimes also asked to leave when companies decide to cut headcount. Indeed, tech firms cut up to half of their recruitment teams when they were laying people off in droves back in 2022 and 2023.
Paraform, a recruitment platform aimed at startups, feels there’s an opportunity in tapping the pool of laid-off recruiters who have since branched out to start their own business, and helping startups source talent and access a broader talent network. To fund that effort, the company recently raised a $3.6 million seed round led by A*, a venture capital firm founded by Kevin Hartz — the co-founder of Eventbrite and Xoom, and Airbnb’s first investor.
“During the 2022 and 2023 wave of tech layoffs, we saw 100,000 recruiters laid off, driving many recruiters to go independent and start their own recruiting business,” John Kim, CEO of Paraform, said in an exclusive interview with TechCrunch. “This has left many independent recruiters with valuable skill sets and high-quality networks available and open to new ways of working.”
“To date, we have thousands of recruiters on the platform and have supported more than 200 companies in hiring for roles,” he added.
The startup charges a listing fee (subscription fee) to publish jobs on the platform and a success fee when a hire is made. “The listing fee ensures buy-in from startups to the two-way marketplace and a commitment to the recruiters they’re working with,” Kim said.
In addition to early- and late-stage startups, Kim said the platform also works with larger in-house talent teams to fill challenging roles. “More than 50% of our customers have great in-house talent teams, but they continue to post roles on Paraform. They’re able to leverage recruiter networks without having to hire full-time recruiters and can flexibly scale hiring up or down,” the company CEO explained.
The new funding, which brings Paraform’s total capital raised to $5 million, comes a year after Paraform’s pre-seed raise in March 2023. Kim said that since the pre-seed round, Paraform’s revenue has increased 10x, it has onboarded more than 100 new customers and has it grown its team. The company generated more than $1 million in revenue with a three-person team in its first year of operations, he added.
Other investors in the seed round include DoorDash co-founder Evan Moore and leaders at companies like Affirm, Hightouch, Palantir and Ramp. Previous backer Primer Sazze Partners also participated.
Paraform will use the new capital to expand across the U.S. and hire more engineers and operators to service its growing customer demands. It also intends to enter new countries and markets. It is now a team of four and hopes to double that this year.
A screenshot of Paraform’s recruiter management screen. Image Credits: Paraform
“We have supported a few customers in EU, Korea and Australia, and the way the companies worked with headhunters was homogenous and worked very well. We’re excited to be able to expand globally.”
The startup has rolled out an enterprise product, and is planning to expand its platform to cater to roles beyond software engineering and go-to-market jobs at startups.
“We’re already branching out into research, science, manufacturing and defense roles due to the demand we’re seeing from potential customers,” Kim said.
Paraform believes recruiting is still “a very human-to-human process” and wants to enhance that human element by using technology like AI to help recruiters and startups make hiring easier on the platform.
Kim said AI will enable recruiters to understand what hiring managers are seeking. AI technology will allow them to summarize and provide “the most common reasons why they’ve passed on a candidate, ultimately helping recruiters gain a better understanding of how to identify the best candidates.”
Recruiting platform Gem gains unicorn status with $100M raise to change the way companies hire
Amira Rasool founded The Folklore in 2018 to help fashion brands from emerging markets like Africa, Asia and The Caribbean tap into the international market. In 2022, the startup introduced The Folklore Connect, a B2B marketplace and wholesale management software for brands to sell to partner global retailers like Nordstrom, after it shifted from sourcing and selling directly to consumers.
What started as a mission to open the global market for fashion brands has grown into a platform that serves a diverse range of consumer companies, including those in beauty, health and wellness. Along the way, it has also enabled global retailers to source inventory from a diverse pool of creators.
Rasool told TechCrunch that the startup is introducing new services to give brands additional help they require to scale, including capital and talent. The plan follows $3.4 million raised in a seed funding round led by Benchstrength, a VC firm by ex-General Catalyst partners Kenneth Chenault Jr. and John Monagle, with the participation of existing investors Slauson & Co., Techstars and Black Tech Nation Ventures. The capital, which brings total funding raised by the startup to $6.2 million, will enable it to serve more brands.
“The key to The Folklore’s consistent user and revenue growth is continuing to build things that make sense for the customers we are targeting. We are not trying to expand too much, and just build something we think they might like; we are actually going to talk to the brands and see what the majority need, and that’s what we’re going to focus on,” said Rasool.
Among its latest offerings is The Folklore Capital, offered by its partners, allowing brands to receive loans of up to $1 million as working capital. Rasool said its pilot showed that brands went for loans of between $10,000 and $30,000.
“Access to capital is probably one of the biggest things that prevents small businesses from scaling. For diverse brands in particular, there are a lot of economic hurdles that these groups face, which makes it even harder for them to access capital. Since a large makeup of our community is diverse, we wanted to make sure that they had more resources that they can use to access capital,” she noted.
“This service is particularly helpful for people who are taking on big wholesale orders from our retailers. A lot of retailers’ payment terms are net 30 or net 60 (the retailer has 30 or 60 days to settle), so it is necessary for those brands to be able to have money upfront. That’s why purchase order financing was something that we prioritized because we are a company that is promoting wholesale growth. Providing access to working capital was also important so that brands could have money to hire people who can manage production, wholesale, social and more,” she said.
Its other offering is a labor marketplace for brands not in a position to hire full-time teams but require talent occasionally. Its community of brands recommends the talent or manufacturer, who are listed on the marketplace after several stages of vetting.
Brands gain access to the labor marketplace, capital and other resources, upon signing up (at a cost) on the startup’s main product, the B2B marketplace and SaaS product.
Qogita — a wholesale marketplace for retailers — raises $86M Series B to compete with Ankorstore in Europe
Clay Canning had an idea while in high school: smartphone screen protectors that featured logos, right on the screen.
He later connected with Rashaun Brown, who was working in sports and licensing at the time, and the idea for Screen Skinz was born.
“We both understood the opportunity and complemented each other’s weakness,” Brown, the company’s CEO, told TechCrunch. “In December 2022, I resigned from my job to pursue building Screen Skinz with Clay full-time.”
Now, Screen Skinz can officially announce the closing of a $1.5 million seed round led by South Loop Ventures and Abo Ventures.
The company produces custom, patent-pending phone screen protectors that feature personalized logos or slogans that are visible when the phone screen is black and then disappear when the phone is in use. Customers can create their own designs or pick from the company’s existing catalog.
Phone accessories have always been a massive market, with the global screen protector market alone worth an estimated $51 billion as of 2023.
Screen Skinz already holds creative licenses with various big-name brands, working with organizations such as the NFL and NBA and entertainment brands like Marvel and the WWE.
Example of Screen Skinz screen protector. Image Credits: Screen Skinz
The latest fundraise allowed Screen Skinz to move manufacturing from Asia to the U.S., where it could more easily control its supply chain.
The company is looking to double down on the screen protection industry, and though it currently only focuses on smartphones, there is a plan to one day expand to making screen protectors for tablets. “With our IP, we can essentially develop screen protection for any mobile device that has use for a screen protector and features a backlit display,” Brown said.
Brown described Screen Skinz’s fundraising process as “different,” stating that it took the company about a year to close its seed round. Brown and Canning intentionally took their time, as they also sought to refine their supply chain and prepare inventory for a mass go-to-market. “We wanted to do the work of selling a realistic vision to investors,” Brown said.
Screen Skinz met its co-lead investor, Abo Ventures, through Brown’s network from when he worked at Texas A&M. They then met South Loop Ventures while participating in DivInc’s Sports Tech Accelerator in Houston.
Michelle Micone, the former SVP of consumer products at NFL and Hasbro, said she liked that the team had a unique concept and also figured out the manufacturing and logistics of producing it. “Customers want a high level of personalization, but it’s really, really hard to deliver on time and at a reasonable price. Screen Skinz has that formula, and I wanted to be part of it,” she told TechCrunch.
Other investors in the round include Brent Montgomery, the CEO of Wheelhouse Entertainment, alongside Wayne Pfeffer and Brendan O’Donnel, former directors of worldwide mobile accessory products at Apple. Pfeffer, in particular, was also sold on the idea of making screen protectors more personalizable. “For years, personalizing your device was limited to the case,” he told TechCrunch. “When I saw the evolution to the front on a screen protector, I was sold!”
Brown said the company could look to raise as early as next year again. Screen Skinz has some partnerships lined up and is focused on customer acquisition and deepening licensing relationships.
James Jones’ father was an engineer. He was also a musician and a preacher, performing at churches along the East Coast.
Jones, an entertainment lawyer, noticed his father often worried about keeping track of the money he collected while performing at church, and artists and influencers were often complaining about the same things.
“I also often had creators complain about the lack of ownership over their creative assets and how painful it was to get loans, mortgages, or generally create generational wealth opportunities for themselves and their families,” Jones told TechCrunch.
Jones said the pandemic brought forth a new set of challenges for creators: So many of them were at home trying to figure out how they would earn money and what to do next.
His solution was Bump, a platform that helps creators manage and grow their businesses. He launched it in 2020 with Anton Kovalyov, who now serves as CTO. On Tuesday Bump announced a $3 million seed round, with investments from ImpactX, Capitalize and Serac Ventures.
Bump seeks to help creators manage their finances. Image Credits: Snap Inc. / Courtesy of James Jones
Bump allows creators to track income and market value, which can help them negotiate better deals and see how much money they are owed from partners. In 2022, Bump launched the Bump Creator credit card in partnership with Mastercard, which provides no monthly or hidden fees and can be acquired without a credit check. Bump also works with a banking institution and has direct deposit accounts that let creators earn interest on cash placed in its money market account.
Jones said fundraising for his company was brutal. Bump was up against numerous factors it simply couldn’t control, like a bear market and the lack of investor appetite for creator economy companies. “We took no after no from investors on the chin and lived to keep fighting,” he said. “We weren’t afraid to ask for investment, and we weren’t afraid of being ghosted, being judged or being told no.”
Bump closed its seed round in about six months, with other investors, including Heirloom Ventures, H/L Ventures and Mana Ventures. It has raised $3.5 million to date, with existing investors, including Snap Inc. and Sixty8 Capital.
“The creator economy is one of the most important trends in the future of work,” Oliver Libby, a managing partner at H/L Ventures, told TechCrunch. “There is virtually no financial infrastructure, no financial training, products, or help for this growing population — many of them underrepresented and underbanked.”
Bump will use the latest fundraise to help it expand and refine its infrastructure.
Creating a company like Bump has always been Jones’ passion, even though he didn’t always want to be a founder. “I always had a burning desire to solve the world’s problems,” he said. He liked talking to people, listening to what they were saying, and analyzing details that could help make them “healthier, wealthier, or happier.”
“I can’t say that I always wanted to be a founder, but I do think my natural tendencies and characteristics have pushed me toward being a founder,” he said. “And despite the highs and lows, I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.”
Carbon credits (and the trading thereof) is big business, but it can be needlessly complicated to get those resolved. Goodcarbon just raised a €5.25 million (around $5.5 million) round to put a dent in that market. Let’s take a look at the deck the company used to bring home that sack of cash.
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Slides in this deck
Goodcarbon has an 18-slide deck that has a lot of repetition in it; more than half of the company’s pitch deck is the problem and solution section. The eagle-eyed among you will have realized that means there’s a bunch of stuff missing, but we’ll get to that. Below is a list of the slides. The company says it removed the ask and use of funds slides, and some of the other slides are redacted as well. What’s left behind is still a pretty decent deck:
Cover slideProblem slide: Global contextProblem slide: Market contextProblem slide: The need for carbon removalProblem slide: The price of carbon creditsProblem slide: It’s hard to find carbon creditsSolution slide: Carbon portfolio buildingSolution slide: Building carbon credit portfoliosSolution slide: Example portfolio projects Solution slide: How it works part 1 Solution slide: How it works part 2 Customer slide Traction slide: Revenue Traction slide: Customers Traction slide: Supply Case study slide Team slide Closing slide
Three things to love about Goodcarbon’s pitch deck
Decks are all about telling a compelling story that paints the picture that says: “OMG, if you miss out on this investment, you’re truly going to regret it for the rest of your life.” Goodcarbon does a good job on that front.
A large and growing market
It’s surprisingly complicated to tell good stories about carbon companies because it always involves a degree of describing a future that everyone knows is coming, even though nobody knows when it’s coming. Goodcarbon does a great job here:
[Slide 5] The explosive growth in the cost of carbon credits means a huge — and rapidly growing — overall opportunity.Image Credits: Goodcarbon
Painting a picture of something huge, inevitable and growing is an easy way to explain that you’re gunning for a market size that’s worth paying attention to. If you can find a way to outline a trend like that in your pitch deck, you’re on the right track.
Gotta love a good portfolio approach
You know one thing VCs abso-frickin-lutely love? Portfolios. They live and breathe spread-risk portfolios as part of their own investment theses, and if you are able to convince them that you’re helping reduce risk through a portfolio approach, you’re often speaking the right language.
[Slide 7] Positioning yourself as a managed-risk balancing platform with a portfolio approach? Yeah, super smart.Image Credits: Goodcarbon
One of the big challenges with carbon offsetting is that you don’t necessarily know how secure these credits are. “Many of the carbon offsets on offer today are outdated, of poor quality or hard to verify. They risk boosting global emissions instead of curtailing them,” according to a recent S&P Global report. So what do you do when there’s high risk? You spread the risk around — if one part of your portfolio goes sour, the rest will (hopefully) balance things out.
The problem, of course, is that carbon offsetting and buying credits is already pretty complicated, so risk balancing that is even harder. Goodcarbon doesn’t make that much of the portfolio angle of what it’s doing, but it was one of the more innovative and creative aspects of its business, in my opinion. Well done finding space for that in the deck.
Social proof out the wazoo
Goodcarbon has some excellent traction, but it layers that in with social proof: companies that trust goodcarbon with their carbon strategy.
[Slide 12] Hey, I recognize some of those logos.Image Credits: Goodcarbon
Social proof is a powerful tool in a pitch deck. Goodcarbon would have been just fine without it, but it can’t harm — and what the company could be doing is priming the pump for some of the reference calls that are no doubt happening between the initial meeting and the investment.
Three things that Goodcarbon could have improved
As I hinted above, the Goodcarbon deck is pretty decent, but there’s so much information missing. Some of it is left out on purpose, but even still, this deck wouldn’t fly if you were raising from a U.S. institutional investor.
A checklist of the missing info
I fed this deck through my AI-powered deck review tool, and it gave a pretty damning summary:
The summary for the Goodcarbon slide deck: That’s a lot of missing info, you guys.Image Credits: Pitch Guide/Haje Kamps
Yeah, that’s a lot of missing puzzle pieces.
Competition slide: You definitely need a competition slide.Go-to-market slide: How are you going to reach your customers?Target customer: But first, who are your customers? Of course, you can probably deduce that from the rest of the deck, but there’s no harm in being explicit. Good customer personas really help pull this together.Operating plan: I’m a huge fan of an easy-to-read operating plan, in addition to more detailed financials. I’m guessing they were left out of this deck when the company submitted it to TechCrunch, but investors are finance people, so you might as well ensure you get ahead of that conversation.Business model: There’s very little in this deck explaining how Goodcarbon is going to make money.Pricing model: Or how much it’s charging for its services. Both are crucial aspects of a pitch, to know whether this is a good investment.Unit economics: Unit economics (i.e., how the cost of delivering your service is changing as your company grows) is toward the “advanced financials” end of the scale, but for a business this complex, it’d have been a really good idea to include.Moat: There are a god-awful number of companies trying to solve this problem. The fact that there’s no competition slide is one thing, but how does Goodcarbon see its business as defendable? Are there patents? Is there tech? Is there something else that puts it ahead of its competitors?
There are plenty of great checklists of what needs to go on a pitch deck (oh, hey, here’s one I created earlier), and there’s no excuse for leaving anything out.
We need to talk about this team slide
[Slide 17] Yeah, but …Image Credits: Goodcarbon
Look at the above slide and ask yourself: Is this a slam-dunk perfect team to run a carbon credits company? My gut says no, so when we get to this slide in the pitch, I’d tell the team: “OK, so you’ve convinced me that this is a problem worth solving. Explain to me why you’re the right team to my $5.5 million.”
For the record, the “correct” answer here would be for the team to look at me like I’m a raging lunatic and click back to the traction slide. “Look what we did, you muppet. We’ve proven ourselves.”
Still, this team slide could do some much heavier lifting.
If you need this many slides to explain the problem …
Honestly, there isn’t really a good product slide anywhere in the deck. What does the product look like? What are the features and functionality? How much of this is actually built versus a figment of Figma? But I’m not going to give Goodcarbon too hard of a time about that. What I will roast it for, though, is this: The company spent more than half its deck on its problem and solution slides.
Put yourself in the investors’ shoes: Do you really think they need five slides to be convinced that (a) this is a problem, (b) this is a problem with a huge impact and (c) this is a problem worth solving?
The company could have removed almost a quarter of its pitch deck by summarizing the 10 problem and solution slides down to two or three slides, highlighting only the things that might be new or unusual about the way the company approaches the problem. The truth is that if an investor in this space doesn’t have a firm grasp of the problem and the effects of climate change, they’re not going to invest anyway. Don’t waste your breath or your pixels trying to convince them otherwise; instead, just get to the point.
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