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led the investment which also included participation from Dutch early-stage venture capital firm and London-based firm . The funding brings Goodlord’s since its 2014 inception to about $33 million.

The news is especially meaningful considering the company saw its CEO depart and laid off nearly 40 employees just over two years ago, according to .

Co-founder started the company in 2014 after becoming frustrated with the inefficiencies in the tenancy process. (co-founder of , founding director of another proptech company, ) took the helm as CEO in early 2018.

Goodlord’s SaaS (software as a service) platform aims to make the rental process smoother and more efficient for landlords, leasing agents and renters alike. It handles a wide range of services from contracts to references to payments.

In its own words, Goodlord’s mission is to make renting simple and transparent for everyone involved.

The company certainly seems to have rebounded since that turbulence two years ago. COO Mundy said Goodlord has seen “the number of tenancies it processes” accelerate from about 20 percent to more than 90 percent year over year in 2019. Without providing specifics, Goodlord said its number of users doubled over the last year. Meanwhile, headcount more than doubled to 97 from about 47 a year ago. The company declined to comment on annual recurring revenue.

Over the past year, Goodlord has introduced new products and platform updates. It also has expanded its service to cover corporate lets, brought in extended insurance provisions and introduced virtual banking technology for customers.

Looking ahead

Goodlord plans to use its new capital to double its client base and expand its suite of products. It also plans to hire more engineering, product and customer-facing staff.

Julian Rowe from Latitude Ventures, who is joining the Goodlord board, said in a written statement that the startup has the potential to be “one of the UK’s most successful property technology companies.

“For many people under the age of 40 the rental market is the housing market and Goodlord is passionate about modernising it for millions of people,” he added. “By creating software that increases the professionalism of letting agents and reduces the stress of finding and securing a home to rent, Goodlord is supplying an essential service to meet a key need.”

Blog Roll Illustration:

Yusupov nodded to how Friday was “a very hard day” as the company ran out of cash and couldn’t afford severance for the 25 employees it consequentially laid off. The founder also claimed “there was a potential acquisition of the company which fell through abruptly.” The failed acquisition led him to shut down the company –thus not letting any winners claim the cash they were promised.

Then over the weekend, the founder spent time finding a new buyer to “do right by everyone.” Although the deal hasn’t closed yet, Yusupov said they “have found a new home for HQ, with a company that wants to keep it running. All employees, contractors and players are top priority. Severance will be paid and you will be able to cash out.” He said HQ will have changes to account for “expenses” and it will be “less buggy.”

Now let’s pause to understand a few things here. This isn’t a classic tale of a startup struggling with expenses pivoting into a new operation with a new owner. HQ Trivia, per its CEO, is publicly flip-flopping and promising that users will get their money back.

What’s most notable here, to me, is that after a failed acquisition, the founder has announced a comeback to the world promising a new buyer. The deal hasn’t closed yet.

To me, this is a note on Silicon Valley culture and founder relationships with social media reputations. It’s made the life of a startup all the more transparent, as founders can jump to the nearest platform to set the record straight, share news fast and, yes, even correct reporters. The platforms also let in a lot of flag waving and potentially empty promises. We don’t know which side HQ Trivia will end up on, yet the startup has already had its share of controversy and turbulence.

A while ago, TechCrunch to overthrow Yusupov due to mismanagement. It failed. The co-founder died. The company fired the famed, and jazzy, host. When the company died, many people on Twitter didn’t even know it still existed.

Yusupov ended with asking users to reply with advice for “Chapter 2 of HQ.”

“That’s it for now. More to come.”

-backed has reportedly shut down operations, according to an by Protocol’s Biz Carson.

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Brandless, a direct-to-consumer startup focused on food, beauty and personal care products, had announced it had raised a total of $292.5 million since its inception in 2016, according to .

led its last funding round, , which valued the company at $500 million, according to Crunchbase. At that time, our former editor-in-chief Alex Wilhelm pointed out the fact that it was “a huge check at a large cost in equity terms.” But it turns out that SoftBank had only provided��about $100 million upfront with a commitment to “fund around another $120 million if certain milestones were met. That final tranche never came,” according to Axios.

led its $35 million Series B in July 2017, a round that also included participation from NBA player , , and , among others.

Back in 2017, Crunchbase News sat down with ��, co-founder and CEO of ��to talk about how the company wanted to eliminate the inefficiency of the brand tax while changing the way people shop and live.

Background

It was bound to happen eventually. With all its misteps over the past couple of years, SoftBank was bound to have a portfolio company shut down.

The news that Brandless has shuttered is not entirely shocking, considering that last June, it got a new CEO amidst “turmoil” within the company, according to .

Looks like Brandless’ vision of $3 home goods just couldn’t keep up with the steep competition from rivals like . In fact, soon after it got that big cash infusion from SoftBank, the startup’s strategy seemed to change. According to TechCrunch’s Connie Laizos, in January 2019, the “company added baby and pet products to its stable of offerings, some of them at a ”

In a statement to , Brandless blamed a “fiercely competitive” retail market that was “unsustainable” for its business.

The news is the latest in a string of bad publicity for SoftBank. In January, we reported on how SoftBank-backed Colombian delivery unicorn had been hit with a trade secrets lawsuit. Also in January, we covered how two SoftBank-funded startups were in the news for either confirmed or rumored layoffs: Rappi had , according to Axios. And published an article that discount lodging provider reportedly was “firing thousands of staff across China and India.”

That followed pizza-making robot startup , also backed by SoftBank, laying off�� 53 percent of its employees.

SoftBank, a Japanese investment conglomerate, has been accused of overinflating valuations with its fat checks, and it’s not ending well for many companies. But the practice of investing too much, perhaps too soon, may be catching up with SoftBank. Earlier this year, that SoftBank is cutting its ties with startup investments, even after signing term sheets.

In fact, SoftBank’s heavy-handed check-writing is leading investors and startups alike to rethink sky-high valuations in favor of a��path to profitability.

Illustration:

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The company is notable for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it has some similarities to Crunchbase News’ parent company, Crunchbase. Each has a publishing function and provides data on private companies. There are dissimilarities as well, mind, including some key business model distinctions. But, it was fun all the same to see a company that I somewhat understand file to go public.

Let’s get to know the company, peek at its numbers, and put our finger to the wind.

Who?

According to its F-1 filing, 36Kr launched its website (36kr.com) in 2010. The company raised a in the intervening years, including and a . The company’s ���Ի��� tipped the scales a bit more.

The company’s known venture total is over $100 million; the actual tally is likely larger given that the size of . 36Kr is, therefore, well-capitalized, but not so much that it’s bent gravity. ( that 36Kr recently raised $24 million. Expect an updated F-1 in a few weeks’ time.)

As noted above, the company publishes and sports a database of private company information. According to its F-1, 36Kr “provide[s] insightful reports on companies, timely market updates, and thought-provoking editorials and commentaries,” while “offer[ing] business services, including online advertising services, enterprise value-added services and subscription services to our customers.”

Ads monetize for the firm on a “cost-per-day basis or a cost-per-advertisement basis.” Its subscription business handles “trainings and courses at fixed fees,” along with “monthly subscription packages of our paid columns to individual subscribers.” Bigger clients can buy subscription products for “fixed periods.”

Finally, 36Kr sells “enterprise value-add services.” What is that? A good question. The company defines them as “integrated marketing, offline events and consulting services” that are often charged “on a project basis.”

How does all that fit together? Here’s a graphic that attempts to make sense out of the company’s product offerings:

If that chart doesn’t make immediate sense to you, don’t worry. It’s merely evidence that you haven’t spent all of 2019 digging through SEC filings. I have, however, so let me help:

• 36Kr’s data and written work (referred to as content above) fuels its advertising business.
• Off the strength of its content and advertising model, the company sells events and consulting. In a related-but-different model, our former sister-company built an events business off of its written work, for example. There is historical precedent for this sort of company.
• 36Kr then takes all of that and layers investor subscriptions on top of its other products. The result of this final step in its model is that it takes the learnings from all its work (More services) and cycles them into its underlying “analytics capabilities” which are then leveraged back into the company’s content, starting the entire flywheel over again.

I’m not entirely sold on the self-reinforcing argument of the image. But I do think that there’s some logic to the rest of it. But more importantly, what does that look like in dollars?

Money

Like many 2019 IPOs, 36Kr is growing quickly and losing money. The firm grew its revenue from 74.4 million RMB ($10.44 million) to 201.9 million RMB ($29.4 million) from the first half of 2018 to the first half of 2019. The company’s H1 2018 revenue result came to just over two-thirds of its full-year 2018 tally.

Don’t think that 36Kr generates software-company-like margins, however. The firm’s gross margin was just 31.5 percent in the first half of 2019, down slightly from its H1 2018 result of 33.7 percent. At those gross margins, the firm’s cost structure is too large to allow 37Kr to generate operating income. Indeed, in the first half of 2019, the company’s operating loss came to 49.9 million RMB, or $7.3 million.

Unprofitability, however, is only an episodic issue for 36Kr. The company generated positive operating and net income in 2017 and 2018, though it did lose money in the first half of 2018.

The timing of 36Kr’s IPO is explained by its cash statement; the company closed out the second quarter of 2019 with just $3.8 million in cash and equivalents, though it also reported $11.4 million in short-term investments at the same time. However, the sum of the two numbers isn’t too large when stacked against the company’s H1 2019 operating cash burn of $13.8 million.

The company needs more money. And it’s turning to American markets to get it. 36Kr lists a $100 million figure on its F-1 filing for its expected raise, a placeholder figure that merely helps us place the company’s IPO size��range.

So What?

If successful, I believe 36Kr will be the first venture-backed company to file to go public in America after the possible Trump administration-driven change to the listing of Chinese companies on American indices. That makes it special to some degree.

The 36Kr debut will also put another money-losing company with a dual-class share structure on to the market. If it fails to launch, companies with similar income statements could find the public markets more closed than open.

Illustration: .

Good morning and happy Friday everyone, it’s going to be a hell of a day.

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Instead of digging into something in the SaaS space this morning, or riffing on scooters (our own Mary Ann did that for us earlier today), or picking up a new round or fund (Jason has what you need here), I wanted use Morning Markets to share our podcast, as I haven’t done that yet.

Which is a bit late frankly as the show is around two years old. So, please meet , a podcast that we record with the TechCrunch crew. It’s a weekly, 20 to 30-minute show covering the biggest topics from the world of venture capital. As you can imagine, given the sheer scale of late-stage dollars that are flying around, we often wind up covering the Vision Fund, impending IPOs, and that sort of thing.

I’m bringing the show up today as a new episode , and I realized that aside from the occasional link I’ve never written about it here, despite doing a short post about each episode for TechCrunch. So, below is the most recent show, and below that the preceding show.

This week’s episode with and :

Last week’s episode with :

And that’s the show! Hope you like it, and if not, that’s cool too. I hear there are a bunch of other shows out there.

(Apple Podcasts , ���Ի��� link.)

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias.

Earlier this week,�� broke the news that MongoDB has filed to go public confidentially. In effect, it means that the company has prepared filings for their IPO, but that we can’t see them as it gets its financial house in order.

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Under the JOBS Act, companies with less than $1 billion in revenue can file privately, only revealing their numbers to the public at a later date. They do so, of course, before going on their roadshow where they hope to drum up demand for their shares. You can’t do that without a public document.

Stitch Fix and MongoDB are notable companies because they are so wildly different. The former is a consumer offering, while the latter is a targeted enterprise offering. In a way, this dichotomy feels appropriate. The 2017 IPO crop contains consumer-facing companies like Snap and Blue Apron, along with a sheaf of enterprise-focused shops like Okta and Cloudera.

Here are quick notes on both companies. We’ll start with Stitch Fix:

• As Roof notes, the company hasn’t raised in a while, and it was last valued at “a post-[money]-valuation of $309.31 million” back in 2014. It’s presumably worth more than that now. The firm, according to its , is the “first fashion retailer to blend expert styling, proprietary technology and unique product to deliver a shopping experience that is truly personalized for you.“ This is a consumer play that, it seems, has operated for years under its own cashflow. Could we see a profitable S-1?
• MongoDB is a traditional unicorn. Worth $1.6 billion, the firm has raised $303 million to date. However, and this is notable, MongoDB has not raised capital since early 2015 according to Crunchbase. That’s far longer than the traditional 18 month window between capital injections at high-growth companies. Either MongoDB is super out of cash (unclear, and it doesn’t feel overly likely), or the firm has managed to operate in a cash-efficient��manner.

When could we see the S-1s, roadshows, and first-day trading for both? According to TechCrunch, this year. That’s good news for the venture crew, as there are .

Such are the times in the liquidity desert.

From the��:

Tech firms counter hate groups

• Technology companies, including Facebook, Apple, Spotify, and others, have����in the past couple days to boot neo-Nazis and other hate groups off their services. Security provider Cloudflare also on Wednesday�� its long-held policy to remain content-neutral and removed white supremacist site The Daily Stormer from its DDoS protection service.

Color Genomics raising $80M round

• , a provider of genetic health screening, is in the final stages of closing an $80 million Series C financing round led by General Catalyst, TechCrunch��. The Silicon Valley company, founded in 2012, previously raised close to $100 million.

RFID implants won’t be coming soon

• A Wisconsin company made waves recently for its plan to implant chips in willing employees. But don’t expect this kind of practice to become mainstream soon. While investors have put sizable sums into RFID chip-focused startups in recent years, this year has been markedly slow,��Crunchbase News reports. And so far, funded startups aren’t focused on chipping people. (For more stories, follow����on Twitter and check us out on��.)