Wanna raise $17 million as Sourcepoint did? Take a few hints from their pitch deck. The US tech platform gives advertisers and publishers access to privacy-law compliant consent from customers using Sourcepoint’s data… if that doesn’t get rid of a headache, I don’t know what does.
Sourcepoint was able to raise $17 million in a round led by Arrowroot Capital with their latest deck. The company has only been around five years and has raised a total of $47.8 in funding. 2020 was a big year of growth for the tech company, with revenue up by 107% in part thanks to Google’s decision to drop their support of third party tracking cookies on Chrome.
They chose to highlight their founding team of adtech vets, which looks good to investors. Ben Barokas founded his own advertising optimization platform where Brian Kane was the COO and the company was acquired for $400 million by Google. Kane also was the COO of LiveRail which was bought out by Facebook for $500 million. So highlighting the founding team’s successes was key to show they know what they’re doing and that they stay in their lane.
Their deck highlights transparency as their core value and shows how their products optimize a consumer’s experience online while still being privacy compliant — a huge, huge, huge issue for businesses. The next slide showcased stats about data privacy, but they phrased it as “data rights are human rights”. Smart. To drive the pain point home, they brought up how regulators are imposing extreme fines (case and point, $230 million to British Airways) if a company doesn’t comply to the T with new data privacy rules.
Bringing it back home to the transparency value, Sourcepoint’s argument is that consumers will be more upfront with their data and open to sharing it when companies tell them how and why they want to use it. Makes sense. Investors looking at the deck then saw slides about their core products, how they work across different platforms, and a case study about a business using their products, but customizing them to fit their needs.
Boom. Check-writing is worthy.
Ladies Gettin’ Paid
The VC and startup community is notorious for overlooking women and POC founders, but these ladies are leading some of the most profitable and socially responsible companies with investment to be jealous of. Doesn’t quite make sense since there is a ton of data showing female founders deliver higher profits and tend to run companies in a manner that’s socially responsible… but who’s counting.
The female founder with the most funding is Lucy Peng from Alibaba (if eBay and Amazon had a baby in China) who earned Ant Financial, their payment processing business, $22 billion in funding. Right after (like a true boss), she left.
In the US, Rebekah Neumann leads as Adam Neumann’s wife and partner, the former CEO of WeWork. But let’s not discuss their failed IPO and let Rebekah have her moment for the sake of this article.
Tan Hooi Ling has raked in $9.9 billion in funding for Grab, a transportation and financial services business based out of Singapore. Their customer base is in Southeast Asia, which happens to be the fastest-growing in the world right now. Plus, the company is backed by Softbank, so they’re pretty much set for massive cashflow.
Other women raking in funding are Kate Keenan, co-founder of Judo, Australia’s “challenger bank”, with $1.4 billion, Victoria van Lennep of Lendable, a fintech and peer-to-peer loan marketplace in the UK, which raised $1 billion in funding, the cofounder of Nubank, a digital banking company in Brazil, Cristina Junqueira with $1.1 billion, and Milda Mitkute, cofounder of one of Lithuania’s biggest startups called Vinted, which has raised $260 million with a $1 billion valuation.
What other women have done an incredible job at raising funding? Hit reply and tell us!
The OG of Live-Streaming Is Dead
Yes, it’s time to officially say goodbye to the app that’s been dying for too many years —Periscope. Periscope was acquired in 2015 by Twitter but announced last week that its operations are “unsustainable” and will shut doors in March of 2021.
At the time when Twitter purchased the app, they were competing with Meerkat and the whole live video thing was just gaining traction. Even though the company has been building out their own video offerings and integrate with Twitter, having it as a standalone app is pretty much pointless. Twitter even announced, “We probably would have made this decision sooner if it weren’t for all of the projects we reprioritized due to the events of 2020.”
The company saw a whopping 101 million installations through app stores (which isn’t saying much now), and its year-over-year downloads were down by 7% in 2020 compared to 2019. The only thing that will stay around from Periscope are any broadcast replays that were shared on Twitter will still be watchable. Plus, users have the opportunity to archive their streams before March.
What’s one of your favorite apps that has died? Hit reply and let’s mourn together.
