Technology
From golf to hunting, a new group of startups wants to make the experience even better
From golf to fishing to pickleball, outdoor sports and recreation have boomed during the pandemic. But unlike some pandemic-induced trends (virtual conferences, Zoom pleased hours), interest in outdoor activities has remained.
Until the end of 2023, participation in outdoor activities rose to a record 175.8 million peopleor 57% of all Americans ages 6 and older, according to the Outdoor Industry Association.
But the influx of interest exposed a lack of innovation in lots of parts of the industry. From phone bookings to money payments to a hardware market dominated by traditional brands, the outdoor recreation category was rife with opportunities for entrepreneurs.
In the past few years, entrepreneurs have created SaaS software for hunting and fishing guides. Founders have built AI-powered firms that find and book golf tee times. Kevin Durant has invested in a startup that helps people find pickleball courts. And the list goes on.
Meanwhile, VCs have also taken an interest. In 2019, VCs invested $48.60 million in 25 sports technology firms, according to PitchBook. In 2021, that figure rose to $949.26 million and 53 firms; in 2023, during VC winter, investments totaled $189.71 million and 43 firms. While that’s a major crash compared to 2021 (when VC investment was at a record high across all industries), dollars invested last yr still represent a 290% increase from pre-pandemic levels in 2019.
Online acceleration
Benjamin Lazarov, co-founder and CEO of AnyCreek, a startup that creates booking and business software for fishing and hunting guides, told TechCrunch that he would never have considered starting his company before the pandemic. But then Lazarov tried to book a hunting guide in Vermont in 2022.
He asked a cashier at nearby Orvis for local guide recommendations, and he or she gave him a paper list of seven names to call. As he called and left voicemails, it occurred to him that with every thing else moving online during COVID-19, why was he still trying to book guided hunts over the phone? After that, he resigned as regional development director at Compass and launched AnyCreek.
“I think if I had tried to start this business five years before COVID-19, there’s no way,” Lazarov said. “COVID-19 has definitely accelerated the adoption of more technology. There’s a new generation of guides who are leaning into technology, leaning into mobile devices, running every other part of their lives online.”
Mallard Bay is one other startup that’s bringing online hunting and fishing guides. The Houston, Texas-based company launched in 2019 and its site boomed after lockdowns eased in 2021, growing from 19 guides on its platform to greater than 100, co-founder and CEO Logan Meaux told TechCrunch.
Loop Golf, a startup that automates finding and booking tee times at a public golf course, was founded in response to the surge in new golfers that made it harder for existing players to play. Matthew Holden, co-founder and CEO of Loop Golf, told TechCrunch in June that he got here up with the idea when he realized the surge in golf interest that got here after the pandemic wasn’t going away.
“It was getting harder and harder to find time to play,” Holden said. “I spent hours looking at different options. I was sick of it, and my wife was definitely sick of it.”
Changes in behavior
As the world has been forced online, consumers have come to expect to interact with all businesses that way, Lazarov said. People simply don’t want to return to booking by phone, and so they want technology to do more for his or her leisure lives, just because it does for his or her work and private lives in other areas.
It’s like a New York restaurant that updated its point-of-sale system to support cashless transactions. “They’ll never go back,” Lazarov said, because the new POS system “helps them run their business better. Think about how much more money they can make.”
Scott Holloway, managing partner at Starting Line and investor in AnyCreek, said people, especially younger generations, increasingly want to spend extra money on experiences than on physical things. This trend has been well-documented in quite a few studies dating back a decade agoHe added that firms creating technology to support experience-based transactions are in a good position.
Additionally, people often need to purchase new equipment and supplies to perform new activities.
Many start-up firms have also emerged to provide equipment, clothes and niknaks for these new hobbyists. Eastside Golf Course AND Malbon Golf Course Both firms are venture-backed startups that aim to equip and equip new golf fans who may not want to appear to be Arnold Palmer from the Sixties. Nettie AND Recess are startups designing pickleball paddles that do not appear to be they got here from a Florida retirement home.
Early investors entering this category akin to Hip-campbooking platform for campsites and AutoCampglamping company, showed that customers were fascinated about innovation in the category years ago. Now, greater than 10 years later, Holloway believes there’s still a lot that entrepreneurs can do.
There’s reason to think he’s right. Services that rent out things like kayaks, canoes and stand-up paddleboards still have web sites that appear to be they were in-built 2002. The same goes for those that supply every thing from archery to ziplining. Many outdoor-recreation businesses could still use some help.
“The market is huge,” Holloway said. “As Marc Andreessen famously said, ‘software is eating the world,’ but this is one of the last consumer spends that software hasn’t eaten. Consumers are demanding it. It’s a huge market opportunity to ride that wave.”
Technology
Influur wants to stand out from other influencer marketplaces by promising on-time payouts
as influential economy is growing, startups like PassionFroot, Agentio and One Impression, together with social media platforms like Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, are attempting to construct marketplaces to connect brands with creators.
A startup based in Miami Influencefocuses on two unique features of its platform: quick response from creators and financial tools ensuring timely payment.
The company is developing a set of tools for brands to higher track campaigns. Additionally, it’s considering introducing latest financial products for creators, including loans, debit cards and bank cards.
To support these efforts, Influur has raised $10 million in Series A financing from Point72 Ventures and HTwenty Capital, bringing its total funding to over $15 million. Business angels include Sofia Vergara and Thalia.
Ishan Sinha, partner at Point72, said the platform helps creators change into higher entrepreneurs.
“Creators are good at creating content. However, they may not be business-savvy entrepreneurs. So by having a place for their money to live, they can get paid quickly and their analysis is powerful,” he said.
Influur was founded in 2021 by 4 Latina founders: CEO Alessandra Angelini, who worked as a producer at CNN before founding the corporate; chief influencer Fefi Oliveira, who has worked within the entertainment industry with corporations akin to Nickelodeon and Telemundo and has over 9 million followers on her social media accounts; chief operating officer Paula Coleman, who also worked at CNN as an associate producer; and sales director Valeria Angelini, who worked as a social media analyst at FedEx.
Before founding Influur, Angelini asked Oliveira, whom she met in college, why the creators didn’t respond to CNN’s attempts to contact her. Oliveira explained that influencers receive hundreds of messages on Instagram and email, making it difficult to manage all of them.
To solve this problem, Angelini got here up with an influencer marketing tool, similar to Google AdSense, to manage a brand’s spend on this space.
Market and community
Once joined, creators can connect all their social media accounts, view marketing pricing, and consider a listing of past brand collaborations. The startup’s founders noted that there are currently over 40,000 creators on the platform with various numbers of followers.
Creators can apply for open brand campaigns that meet their criteria. They also can go for a “gated partnership” where they receive the brand’s product in exchange for content. As for brands, they also can contact chosen creators individually for collaborations.
On the platform, creators can get suggestions and suggestions from other experienced creators and learn from them. To keep interactions relevant, the platform limits posts to creators with greater than 2,000 followers.
Angelini said many platforms list influencers based on online data, which frequently leads to low response rates. She mentioned that the influencer normally responds to a brand inquiry on Influur inside 24 hours.
Influur also offers a premium subscription for creators for $30 per thirty days, which provides them access to a one-click media kit with detailed information on pricing rates, past campaigns, social media and engagement metrics. They also get access to experiences where they will create content and exclusive webinars from popular creators.
According to Oliveira – a creator for years – certainly one of the principal problems is the pursuit of brands for a payment after ending work. To solve this problem, Influur asks brands to pay upfront, holds the cash in an escrow account, after which transfers it to the creator’s wallet once they ship all campaign products.
“Influencers often wait 60 to 120 days after publishing their final product to get paid. We solve this problem with our wallet and instant payments feature,” Oliveira said.
Creators can wait 30 days for withdrawal or withdraw the cash immediately with a 15% fee to Influur. Currently, the corporate supports withdrawals in several countries, including: within the USA, Mexico and Brazil. The startup mentioned that 20% of its creators paid this fee to get a fast payout.
In the longer term, the startup plans to launch a set of monetary tools for creators, akin to virtual accounts, short-term loans, credit and debit cards. “Influencers want Influur to become their bank. We are planning to launch a new financial product so that we are not only part of how influencers make money, but also part of how they save and spend money,” Angelini said.
Point72’s Sinha said that in his careful evaluation of the fund, he discovered that the founders care about financial stability and that the startup is constructing the fitting tools to achieve this.
Insights for brands
With the Series A raise, Influur is working to add insights to influencer campaigns together with financial tools. The company can be making a prediction engine that may allow corporations to predict the effectiveness of campaigns for a particular creator.
The company is expanding its team in 4 centers: San Francisco, Miami, Mexico and Argentina.
In addition to charging creators a 15% fast withdrawal fee and premium subscription, Influur also charges a service fee of 20-25% per transaction from brands. While the corporate had several profitable months last 12 months, it’ll take a while for Influur to generate a profit because it goals to change into money flow positive by 2026.
The startup believes it has an edge over other markets thanks to its financial tools, insights engine, and popular creator as co-founder.
Technology
ePlane is looking to boost the Indian government’s interest in air taxis with a new $14 million round
A pointy increase in the number of personal vehicles and a decline in the use of public and non-motorized transport have resulted in increasing traffic congestion in India, the world’s most populous country, which also struggles with relatively narrower roads and insufficient parking spaces in cities. New Delhi recognizes these challenges and is looking for new ways to quickly meet them.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said at a September event that air taxis do will soon change into a “reality in India”, indicating the government’s interest in supporting the new mode of transport. Also the national aviation regulator, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation recently formulated rules regarding vertiports prepare the ground for air taxis.
The ePlane company I’m riding this wave.
The startup, founded in 2019 by IIT Madras aerospace engineering professor Satya Chakravarthy, is constructing an electrical vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) vehicle called e200x, months after developing unmanned drones for transportation and camera applications. Chakravarthy has a strong pedigree: he is also a co-founder and advisor to Indian space tech startups including Agnikul and GalaxEye, in addition to Indian hyperloop-focused startup TuTr Hyperloop.
Chakravarthy told TechCrunch that ePlane has secured mental property rights while developing urban commuter and cargo aircraft that feature relatively low airspeed and a compact wingspan of 8 meters, as opposed to typical air taxis with wingspans of 12 to 16 meters. Thanks to this, it’ll give you the option to land in tight spaces and make many short trips – up to 60 a day – on a single charge, he says. It claims commuters would cut back their journey times by as much as 85%, at a cost lower than twice the fare they typically pay for an Uber ride.
Most eVTOL vehicles are currently multicopters similar to industrial drones, including air taxis equipped with spokes and vertical rotors. Chakravarthy said that while this configuration is easier to develop and implement in the market, it doesn’t allow for longer distances on a single battery charge. ePlane selected a lift-plus-cruise configuration, in which the vehicle has a winged architecture like a typical airplane, but with vertical, drone-like rotors.
“It has been proven that this configuration is actually very reliable because we’ve redundancy in terms of the vertical rotors carrying the weight of the aircraft, while the wings contribute to the gradual balancing of the weight in order that there is no lack of lift during the transition from vertical take-off and hover to flight forward,” he said.
The startup also developed a technology called synergistic lift, which uses vertical rotors even in forward flight to keep the wings sufficiently compact.
Chakravarthy told TechCrunch that ePlane produces aircraft components at its IIT Madras facility, including airframe parts, and designs seats and propellers. The startup outsources the cells but assembles the aircraft’s batteries in-house to manage the plane’s center of gravity.
The startup goals to commercialize its electric air taxi in mid-to-second half of 2026, after obtaining required certifications from Indian and global authorities and creating a prototype of the aircraft in the first half of 2025, Chakravarthy told TechCrunch.
Prior to testing the vehicle, ePlane raised $14 million in a Series B round co-led by Speciale Invest and Singaporean company Antares Ventures. Micelio Mobility, Naval Ravikant, Java Capital, Samarthya Investment Advisors, Redstart (from Naukri) and Anicut also participated in the equity-only round. The round valued the startup at $46 million post-money – greater than double its previous valuation of $21 million.
The fresh capital will help ePlane, which employs greater than 100 people, gain global regulatory certifications and expand its commercialization efforts.
India’s success has helped ePlane expand into other markets, including the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Australia and Europe.
“We work with the belief that in the future, what is good for India will be good for the world,” Chakravarthy said.
Technology
Apple faces a $3.8 billion U.K. damages claim over its “iCloud monopoly.”
British consumer rights group ‘Which?’ files an antitrust lawsuit against Apple on behalf of roughly 40 million users of its iCloud cloud storage service.
The class motion lawsuitwhich is searching for £3 billion in damages (about $3.8 billion at current exchange rates), claims Apple broke competition rules by giving preferential treatment to its own cloud storage service and effectively forcing people to pay for iCloud after a “fraud ” prices.
“iOS has a monopoly and control over Apple’s operating systems, and it’s Apple’s responsibility not to make use of this dominance to realize an unfair advantage in related markets, resembling the cloud storage market. But that is exactly what happened,” the corporate wrote in a press release announcing the filing of the claim with the UK’s Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT).
The lawsuit alleges that Apple encourages users of its devices to join iCloud for photo storage and other data storage purposes, while making it difficult for consumers to make use of alternative storage providers – including by stopping them from storing or creating all of their data. Back up your phone data to a third-party provider.
“iOS users will have to pay for the service when photos, notes, messages and other data exceed the free 5GB limit,” he noted.
The lawsuit also accuses Apple of overcharging British consumers for iCloud subscriptions as a consequence of a lack of competition. “Apple has increased the price of iCloud for UK consumers by 20% to 29% across all storage tiers in 2023.” – it said, adding that it was searching for compensation from all affected Apple customers and estimating that individual consumers could owe a mean of £70 (about $90), depending on how long they’ve been paying Apple for iCloud services.
An analogous lawsuit – arguing that Apple has unlawfully monopolized the cloud storage market – has been filed within the US in Marchand stays pending after the corporate didn’t throw it.
UK consumers agreed
A UK claim is made on an opt-out basis for UK based consumers who qualify for inclusion. Consumers who live outside the UK and consider they’re eligible must actively conform to participate.
Spokesman Tommy Handley told us that eligible Apple customers include “anyone who ‘acquired’ iCloud services, including non-paying users, within nine years of the Consumer Rights Act coming into force on October 1, 2015.”
Handley also confirmed that the £3 billion compensation figure takes under consideration potential cancellations, duplicates and mortality.
It is a not-for-profit organization, however the litigation is being funded by Litigation Capital Management (LCM), a major global litigation financier, which it says is committed to bringing the case to fruition.
At the identical time, it calls on Apple to settle the claim without having to go to court – offering refunds to consumers and making iOS available to offer users with a “real choice” of cloud services.
Commenting in a statement, Which chief executive Anabel Hoult said: “By making this claim, Which? shows large corporations like Apple that they can’t cheat British consumers without facing consequences. Taking this legal motion means we may help consumers get the redress they deserve, discourage similar behavior in the long run and create a higher, more competitive market.”
Assuming Apple doesn’t seek an out-of-court settlement, the subsequent stage of the dispute will rely on whether the CAT grants Which permission to act as a collective representative of consumers and allows the claim to be heard on a collective basis.
In recent years, there was a rise within the number of sophistication motion lawsuits against Big Tech following a wave of antitrust enforcement on either side of the Atlantic that continues to yield incomplete results and business impact.
In the UK, Apple was also the goal of a class motion lawsuit brought last 12 months on behalf of developers over App Store fees.
Also last 12 months, a separate lawsuit within the UK was filed against Apple and Amazon, accusing them of price collusion.
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