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“Our phones have been blowing up”: Startups look to grab market share

UPDATED, November 17, 5:15 p.m: When Nick Narodny, founder of online listing and home-buying service Aalto, bought his first home six years ago, he found that little had changed about the process in years.

He could search for properties on Zillow, but if he wanted neighborhood comps or information on the local homeowners’ association, he’d have to outsource.

“Today in America, if you want to buy a home, you have to hire an agent,” Narodny said.

That might have been the case until Oct. 31, when a Missouri jury gave homesellers a landmark victory over the National Association of Realtors and two brokerages. The guilty verdict could upend residential real estate by changing how commissions are paid, though implications of the decision have yet to crystallize.

A new crew of proptech startups, including Aalto, see the verdict as a stroke of luck in their mission to disrupt residential real estate platforms and practices.

If they succeed, will every buyer still need an agent to secure a home?

“Not anymore,” Narodny said.

Crack in the armor

Narodny got the idea for Aalto during his home search when he realized he was lucky to be able to consult with his mom, a veteran Realtor.

A new crew of proptech startups, including Aalto, see the verdict as a stroke of luck in their mission to disrupt residential real estate platforms and practices.

If they succeed, will every buyer still need an agent to secure a home?

“Not anymore,” Narodny said.

Crack in the armor

Narodny got the idea for Aalto during his home search when he realized he was lucky to be able to consult with his mom, a veteran Realtor.

Plaintiffs in the NAR case argued that bundling commissions for sellers’ and buyers’ agents blurred how much sellers and buyers were each paying them.

Nardony has raised over $17 million in venture capital funding since starting Aalto in 2021, according to Pitchbook. He launched the buyer’s side of his platform last week to coincide with the Missouri ruling.

Commission structures, and the MLS’s roles in upholding them, are now under a microscope, and the fallout could include changes to both, weakening the MLS’ control over listings. Moments of legal or regulatory change like this are opportunities for startups, he pointed out.

He is not the only tech founder stepping on the gas.

 

Patreon, which connects creators with paying fans, has acquired Moment, a livestream platform for events and ticketed experiences, Patreon CEO Jack Conte tells Axios.

Why it matters: The deal is part of a broader push by Patreon to provide services that strengthen creators’ connections with their communities, in addition to facilitating payments between them.

Catch up quick: Moment, formerly called Moment House, was co-founded by CEO Arjun Mehta, COO Nigel Egrar and CTO Shray Bansal in Los Angeles in 2019.

• The firm helps creators host live-streamed, ticketed experiences for their fans, like concerts, live podcast recordings and interviews.
• The startup has raised $13.5 million, according to Crunchbase. Investors in its $12 million Series A round included Halsey, UTA Ventures, Zaiko and Forerunner Ventures.

Details: Patreon plans to fully integrate Moment’s products and capabilities into its suite of services and tools for creators, Conte says.

• The deal, which closed Monday, will bring all of Moment’s employees to Patreon.
• Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Conte says the acquisition did not require regulatory approval, which is typically required for any U.S. deal above roughly $100 million.

Between the lines: Live-streaming is one of the top requested features from Patreon’s creators, Conte says.

• “Live experiences really tighten communities” and “make folks feel like they’re a part of something bigger than themselves,” he says. They also serve as “yet another form of revenue” for creators, in addition to memberships and commerce, he adds.

The big picture: The evolution of social media toward viral content trends has made it harder for creators to build communities with their supporters on social networks.

• That dynamic inspired Patreon to build and acquire services beyond paid memberships, Conte says.
• In the past few years, the firm has introduced new commercial features, including commerce products and community chat spaces between fans and creators.

Flashback: Patreon was co-founded by Conte and the firm’s chief technology officer Sam Yam in 2013.

Patreon is acquiring Los Angeles-based livestream ticketed event platform Moment, the company announced on Tuesday. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Patreon says the acquisition will give creators on its platform a new way to share their content through ticketed digital experiences.

Launched in 2019, Moment was founded by Arjun Mehta, Nigel Egrari and Shray Bansal. The company facilities ticketed livestreamed events, such as concerts or podcasts. Since its founding, the company has worked with big names like Justin Bieber and Tame Impala. The platform has raised $13.5 million in funding from investors including Halsey, UTA, Zaiko and Forerunner Ventures, according to Crunchbase.

As part of the acquisition, Moment’s employees will join Patreon and work cross-functionally with several teams, including creator and product.

“We built Moment to help artists and creators gather their global communities for premium live experiences while providing them complete control over creative and monetization,” said Moment CEO Arjun Mehta in a statement. “We are excited to join the Patreon team and deliver an even better, integrated experience to many more creators and their communities.”

Patreon plans to integrate elements of Moment into its suite of tools for creators. A spokesperson for the company told TechCrunch in an email that livestreaming is one of the most requested features by Patreon creators.

Following the acquisition, the first Moment event on Patreon will be Crooked Media’s Pod Save America Live from DC on October 19. The event will feature Senator John Fetterman, Chef Jose Andres and candidate for the Virginia State Senate Jennifer Carroll Foy.

“Over the next decade, Patreon is setting out to build a sustainable future for creators by giving them a direct line to the people who love their work and acquiring Moment marks an important step in that journey,” Patreon wrote in the blog post. “We can’t wait to see all of the Moments our community of musicians, podcasters, comedians, and more, creates.”

The acquisition shows that Patreon is looking to enhance creators’ relationships with their fanbases, which is something the company has been pushing for over the past few months with a series of new features designed to do just that.

Today’s announcement comes a week after Patreon launched new features, a redesigned app and a new brand identity. The company launched the full rollout of its Discord-like chat feature that connects creators with their fans in a group message. Patreon also announced the full rollout of a feature that it announced back in June, called “Commerce,” which allows creators to sell one-off digital goods and offer free subscriptions.

Patreon’s acquisition of Moment is its fourth acquisition in the recent past. In 2018, the company acquired Kit to let creators bundle merch in their subscriptions. Also in 2018, the Patreon acquired white-labeled subscription membership platform Memberful, which let creators sell exclusive access to content through their own site. In 2015, Patreon acquired artist subscription competitor Subbable.

Creator subscription platform Patreon has acquired Moment, which provides a platform for hosting and ticketing livestreamed events.

Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Moment (formerly known as Moment House) touts itself as the top digital events platform for artists and creators, including Justin Bieber, Tame Impala, Kygo, Pod Save America and the “Good for You” podcast hosted by comedian Whitney Cummings. The company was founded in 2019 — right before the COVID pandemic hit — by Arjun Mehta, Nigel Egrari and Shray Bansal.

L.A.-based Moment (moment.co) had raised $13.5 million in funding from investors including Halsey, UTA, Zaiko and Forerunner Ventures, according to Crunchbase.

The food star’s Giadzy Pasta includes eight unique shapes

Pasta is in Giada De Laurentiis’ blood.

The food star launched a private-label pasta line, Giadzy Pasta, on Sunday. The eight, harder-to-find shapes are sold exclusively on her lifestyle website Giadzy for $10.50 for 1.1 lb. boxes.

“It’s super exciting to finally have it out in the world,” she tells PEOPLE.

De Laurentiis comes from “a pasta family” — her great grandparents had a pasta factory outside of Naples, Italy. Of course, she also made a name for herself cooking it, among other Italian staples, on the Food Network for 21 years before leaving for Amazon Studios in February.

“From all my years cooking it and working with different brands, I realized that there are certain things that I’m looking for in a pasta that I still haven’t quite found all in one package,” she says.

So she made her own. The Giadzy Pasta shapes — nodi marini, bucatini, taccole, pappardelle, paccheri, bucatini lunghi, manfredi lunghi and spaghetti chitarra — are made in the Abruzzo, Italy region and are cut on 100-year-old bronze dies.

“It was really important to not just to do the average shapes that everybody can find, but things that are more unique,” De Laurentiis tells PEOPLE. “I think that’s why at the end of the day, kids and adults alike will fall in love with the pasta, because the shapes are fun and cool and different.”

Giadzy, De Laurentiis’ lifestyle e-commerce platform that sells Italian products curated by the chef herself, is what she calls “a dream come true.” It’s an all-women run business and something De Laurentiis has really focused on the past few years, but has been “envisioning for 20 years.”

“I’ve had a rebirth in my career and in what I really want to do,” she says. “Partnerships have been amazing over the years and I’ve been super lucky, but I haven’t been able to really tell the full story. At the heart of it, I’m a teacher and a storyteller, and when you’re in a partnership with somebody else, you have to make compromises in that storytelling.”

Frigade, a San Francisco-based develop tools startup, raised $3m in seed funding led by Craft Ventures and La Famiglia, with Y Combinator, Defy.vc, Magic.fund, and angel investors also participating. www.frigade.com

React-based product onboarding and adoption solution startup Frigade Inc. has raised $2.7 million in new funding to grow its library of onboarding experiences for developers and support additional web software development kits for business-to-business software-as-a-service companies.

Founded in 2022, Frigade offers a product onboarding and adoption solution for React. Also known as React.js or ReactJS, React is an open-source JavaScript library developed by Meta Platforms Inc. They’re for building dynamic, high-performing user interfaces for web applications, primarily through reusable components and virtual Document Object Models, which are application programming interfaces for web page languages HTML and XML.

Frigade’s offering simplifies the creation of onboarding flows, activation checklists and product tours for developers, freeing them from the need for back-end development assistance. The company offers out-of-the-box user targeting and state management features that are designed to ease development while also following industry best practices. The platform’s customizable React components deliver seamless integration into any brand and application, providing a unique and unified user experience.

One standout from Frigade’s solution is its intended audience. The company argues that traditional digital adoption platforms cater more to marketers and managers, leading to nonnative overlays on top of products, are prone to unnoticed breakdowns and impose limitations on what can be achieved. By contrast, Frigade transforms the growth strategies of leading software companies into ready-to-use React components that enable businesses to design and launch efficient user onboarding procedures within hours.

“We see many product-led companies building sophisticated onboarding from scratch – reinventing the wheel – since existing no-code tools are too rigid,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Eric Brownrout. “With Frigade, we’re giving developers a third option: build high-quality, flexible onboarding in code faster.”

With the funding, Frigade plans is to evolve into a comprehensive customer journey management platform with personalized registration flows, engaging announcements, upsells and customer retention strategies, such as feedback loops and regular communication. The company plans to push the envelope in product onboarding and developer adoption solutions.

Frigade graduated from Y Combinator’s Winter 2023 accelerator program. Craft Ventures Management LLC and La Famiglia VC GmbH & Co. KG led the seed funding round, with Y Combinator LLC, Defy Partners L.P. and Magic Fund LLC also participating.

Episode Description
Featured Guests: Neil Sequeira, Founder and Partner, Defy Ventures | Jai Das, President and Partner, Sapphire Ventures

An OECD report suggests that 27% of jobs are at risk to be replaced by A.I., Sapphire Ventures commits $1 billion to A.I. investments, and Microsoft’s $75 billion merger with Activision-Blizzard will not be blocked by U.S. courts.