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Video taken by Noah on our NBA Summer League Tech Event's private tour of The Boring Company
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EVENT RECAP
This past week, we headed out to Las Vegas for NBA Summer League and a mix of basketball, tech, and just a little bit of blackjack! It was great to see so many friends and colleagues from the worlds of sports and startups alike, and to be back in Vegas for what is always a fun annual event. While in Vegas, Crossover teamed up with our friends at 137 Ventures and Courtside to host a private tour of Elon Musk's Boring Company, followed by an intimate dinner at the new Resorts World Las Vegas.
The Boring Company team was kind enough to give us a behind the scenes tour of the operations center, followed by a Tesla ride through the new (and colorful!) LVCC Loop system -- a three-station transportation system consisting of 1.7 miles of tunnel. We were amazed to learn that the tunnel was built in roughly one year, with plans to have the the entire Vegas loop connecting casinos, the airport, Allegiant Stadium and more completed in just two years. Truly a feat of technology and operational excellence from Musk, and co and a great way to bring together a group of world class tech founders and NBA stars.
NBA Players + Tech Founders at an underground station on the Boring Company LVCC loop.
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FIRST DOWN
Titan Tops Up With $58M To Build a NextGen Fidelity
One of the ongoing trends we have been covering in the 2-Minute Drill is the re-imagination through technology of traditional financial services for Gen Z and Millennials. From peer to peer payments to brokerages to savings and checking accounts and more, the pillars of financial services are being re-written for the needs of these emergent generations.
The latest startup to raise capital to build financial services for Gen Z and Millennials is NYC-based Titan, which announced a new $58 million Series B round of funding from a16z, General Catalyst, Box Group, Sound Ventures, and a slate of athlete + celeb angel investors (note: the Extra Point sections are too small to contain the volume of tech investments involving athletes and entertainers these days!). This brings the three-year-old fintech startup's total funding to $73 million.
Titan's aim is to essentially build the Fidelity for the Gen Z and Millennial consumer, and in doing so, become the premier investment management platform for a new generation. Most investing activity by consumers can be broken down into self-managed investing and stock picking (like Robinhood), passive index funds and ETFs, and managed investments from firms like Fidelity, Blackrock, and others. It's this latter bucket that Titan is looking to take on.
The challenge for most consumers is that managed investments typically only cater to the wealthy. The average investor can't access these investments without large balances or paying significant fees. Titan's goal is to provide world-class management at a fraction of the cost, and for a consumer who wants active involvement and education in their managed investment portfolio. Users just need at least $100 to invest, and then and either pay a $5 monthly fee or 1% if their investments are $10,000 or more.
Titan current offers clients a combination of our four strategies: Flagship, Opportunities, Offshore, and Crypto. They report nearing $1 billion in AUM, and plan to expand their offerings with time.
(more here)
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SECOND DOWN
Aalto Aims to Enable Homeowners to Sell Directly to Buyers
This week, Silicon Valley-based real estate marketplace Aalto came out of stealth and announced a new $13 million round of Series A funding to help leverage technology to modernize the home buying and selling process. This brings the 3-year-old startup's total funding to $17.3 million.
While real estate remains one of the largest segments of the economy, the process of buying and selling a home still feels likes it's a relic of the 1900s. Complicated to onboard a property? Check. Difficult to discover homes that meet your standards? Check. Expensive offline middleman taking a large cut of the proceeds? Check. And that's not to mention all the headaches associated with mortgage, title, and other transaction processes.
Within the residential real estate ecosystem, Aalto is specifically targeting home sellers with a tech-enabled offering that makes it easier and cheaper to list, show, and negotiate the sale of a home. The objective is to enable homeowners to easily list and sell their property directly to interested buyers on their own terms. The first thing that sets Aalto apart is that they make it dead simple to list your home. In fact, they claim that you can have your (qualifying) home up and listed in just 5 minutes. Secondly, owners can list a property with no commitment to sell. Third, Aalto helps owners pre-qualify interested buyers, thus saving time and headaches of navigating inquiries. Finally, Aalto reports that it saves the average homeowner $40k per transaction. How? In a typical real estate transaction, the agent is charging the home seller 2-2.5 percent--which in premium markets can easily cost well over $40k. By listing and selling directly, Aalto is leveraging technology to displace the traditional real estate broker--and charges a more manageable 1% in the process.
Aalto is certainly not the first or only startup tackling this real estate marketplace holy grail. But by targeting their focus on the affluent and tech-savvy Bay Area market first, and building up a network of more than 30,000 interested buyers browsing an average of 85 homes listed on the platform, they are off to a strong start. Whether it's Aalto, a competitor, or a market full of tech-enabled players, it feels like a pretty safe bet that in 10 years, the process and the economics of home buying and selling will not look like it does today.
(more here)
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THIRD DOWN
Elektra Nabs Seed Funding to Bring Tech to Menopause Care
This week, New York-based startup Elektra Health nabbed $3.75 million in venture funding to help the more than 50 million women in the United States who are currently in some stage of menopause. This represents the first round of reported funding for the two-year-old startup.
The past few years has seen a boom in funding directed toward so-called femtech startups who are addressing women's health issues through technology. Unfortunately many of these topics have been considered taboo to talk about, or relegated by investors to being "too niche." But with menopause-related care representing a $600 billion global market, building technology solutions to address the sector is by no means small.
Elektra's stated goal is to provide evidence-based menopause expertise & care for the 21st century woman. The approach is to build a technology-driven platform that provides evidence-based care, education, and a social community for women who are going through this process. Pillars of the platform include online educational guides, online telemedicine visits with board-certified doctors, a safe space to connect with other women, and a series of events & workshops on all things menopause.
Elektra's programs are still in private beta, with plans to open completely to the public in 2022. Since launching the company in 2019, over 1,800 women have participated in Elektra’s programs. With the new funding, the startup plans to invest in growing the team and building out the platform.
(more here)
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FOURTH DOWN
Restaurant Feedback is Such a Vibe with Tablevibe
With the food delivery ecosystem booming and rocketing toward a projected $365 billion market size by the end of the decade, there is perhaps no hotter sector that investors are pouring capital into. Add to that the successful DoorDash IPO, Gopuff raising massive new rounds and doing acquisitions seemingly every week, and the Postmates/Uber merger keeping things spicy, and it's safe to say that investors and founders alike have certainly been keeping busy.
But one of the dark sides of the food delivery economy has been the fees delivery services levy on restaurants, and the steady march toward vertical integration with delivery platforms increasingly launching their own virtual restaurant brands to compete with local restaurants on the same platforms. One startup that is looking to help give more power back to the restaurants themselves in the new delivery-first economy is Singapore-based startup Tablevibe.
Currently in the Summer batch of the YCombinator accelerator, Tablevibe works directly with local restaurants and restaurant groups to capture customer feedback, improve customer satisfaction, and accelerate direct sales--and save restaurants the up-to 40% commissions charged by delivery platforms in the process. The startup does this by placing QR codes on packaging (usually via stickers) that incentivize customers to leave feedback and reviews, by offering discounts on future orders of the restaurant's products. The catch is that to redeem these rewards, the customer needs to order directly from the restaurant in the future. Tablevibe also helps restaurants boost their reviews by prompting those who leave positive feedback to post those reviews to sites like Google Reviews -- which can help boost overall sales for a business.
The ultimate goal of Tablevibe (and many competitors in the space) is to help restaurants recapture some of the power in the food economy, and to better understand who their actual customers are--instead of being wholly dependent on the delivery platform. It can also serve as a hedge as these ecosystems grow and increasingly compete directly with the businesses on their platforms. For Tablevibe's sake, let's just hope the delivery giants don't start adding clauses to their contracts that prevent the use of packaging that drives customers off-platform -- which is a practice that Amazon has successfully implemented by disallowing brands from including packaging inserts that direct cusotmers to a website off Amazon's platform.
(more here)
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EXTRA POINT
Athletes + Entertainers in Tech: HUED
This week, Washington DC-based digital health startup HUED announced a $1.6 million seed round of funding to help make the healthcare system more accessible and supportive for Black and Latinx communities. This represents the first reported round of funding for the three-year-old startup, and in addition to investment from Female Founder Fund, the company is receiving an investment assist from tennis start Serena Williams.
One of the many challenges the pandemic has laid bare is the significant inequities that exist in our health care system when it comes to the provision of care for minority populations. From access to affordable care, to infant mortality, to asthma death rates, to Covid vaccination rates, and more, the healthcare system is far from equitable. Just some of the barriers these populations face include fear, distrust, lack of access, and lack of comfort.
HUED aims to solve this problem by making the healthcare system more competent and attuned to these disparities and the needs of underrepresented populations. To start with, HUED focused on education to ensure these inequities are known by healthcare workers so they can be aware of it in the first place. This includes training healthcare workers on implicit bias, anti-racist practices, and culturally sensitive care for Black and Latinx populations.
Ultimately, HUED's mission is to change patient care outcomes for 50,000 Black and Latinx individuals by 2025. And to do this, the company will connect those seeking care with resources to help them find the best quality of care by doctors that look like them. It's a big problem in need of a big solution, so here's to hoping that HUED can play a meaningful role in that journey.
Athletes + Entertainers involved include: Tennis star Serena Williams.
(more here)
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