A new venture firm aims to prove that the most successful startup ideas don’t have to be born or scaled in Silicon Valley.

Fluent Ventures, a global early-stage fund, is backing founders replicating proven business models from Western markets in fintech, digital health, and commerce across emerging markets. The more cynical might describe this as a clone factory, but founder and managing partner Alexandre Lazarow calls the firm’s strategy “geographic alpha.”

Fluent’s premise is that many of the world’s most valuable startups are not entirely new concepts that haven’t been tried before, but more simply, local adaptations of models that have already succeeded elsewhere.

The San Francisco-based firm, founded in 2023, is deploying $40 million across a fund, an incubator, and a structured co-investment vehicle with limited partners. It is writing initial checks of $250,000 to $2 million from pre-seed to Series A and plans to make 22–25 investments, with follow-ons.

“We are contrarians at heart,” said Lazarow, who previously invested at Omidyar Network and Cathay Innovation. “We believe the world’s best innovations are not the exclusive purview of Silicon Valley.” 

Fluent is not exactly working in a bubble: the last decade has seen a massive decentralization in the technology industry. In 2013, just four cities had produced a unicorn. Today, that number exceeds 150.

And that has been on the back of rinse and repeat, with many of the top tech players in emerging markets mirroring successful startups that have been built elsewhere, such as Amazon clones in e-commerce, Stripe clones in payments, and neo-banking apps in fintech. The first breakout neo-bank was Tinkoff from Russia. “That movement scaled globally, and [it] was one of the insights that motivated my investments in Chime in the U.S. and Banco Neon in Brazil,” said Lazarow.

Lazarow insists Fluent doesn’t just copy-paste.

“That rarely works, in our opinion. Local adaptation is critical,” he said.

The firm points to ride-hailing as an example. Uber may have pioneered the category, but in Indonesia, Go-Jek localized it by incorporating motorcycle taxis and super app functionality similar to China’s WeChat. Now Uber Eats is essentially chasing that evolution, Lazarow argues.

To that point, Fluent Ventures, in addition to finding adapted models, screens for local product-market fit and founder-market alignment.

Tesla’s flailing sales figures have put the company closer to the red than it has been in years, according to financial results released Tuesday, threatening one of its biggest advantages over other EV players.

The electric automaker reported $409 million in net income on $19.3 billion in revenue after delivering almost 337,000 EVs in the first quarter of the year. The company’s net income reflects a 71% drop from the same quarter last year.

It was the worst quarter for Tesla deliveries in more than two years and came on the heels of the company’s first-ever year-to-year drop in sales. Tesla’s income was buffered by selling $595 million in zero-emissions tax credits, according to its earnings report — without those, it would have posted a loss.

And yet, Tesla stock rose in after-hours trading as investors put more weight on the company’s plans to begin production on an affordable EV in June and CEO Elon Musk’s comments during an earnings call that he would reduce his role with the Department of Government Efficiency to focus more attention on Tesla. Musk did not commit to ending his DOGE work altogether though, noting he may continue in some capacity through the remainder of President Donald Trump’s second term.

TechCrunch published a roundup of other Musk comments covering tariffs, robotaxis, AI, and EVs, during Tesla’s earnings call.

Tesla also cautioned shareholders about how the trade war may affect its business moving forward. The company said President Trump’s tariffs and “changing political sentiment” could have a “meaningful impact on demand for our products.”

The company noted the current tariffs, the bulk of which are directed at China, will have “a relatively larger impact on our Energy business compared to automotive.” Tesla said it is taking actions to stabilize the business in the medium to long term and focus on maintaining its health, but it also cautioned investors that it can’t say whether it will be able to grow sales this year.

Tesla is sticking to its ambitious (but mysterious) plans around making more affordable models, stating it remains on track for start of production of these vehicles in the first half of 2025. During the earnings call, Musk was more specific, stating production would begin in June.

These vehicles will use aspects of a next-generation platform that powers the robotaxi, but will rely on its existing one that powers the Model Y and Model 3, the company said in its shareholder’s letter. As such, these cheaper vehicles will be produced on the same manufacturing lines as the current vehicle lineup, the company said.

This flies in the face of a Reuters report from last week that claimed the first of these new EVs is delayed by months.

Tesla’s sales are up against a number of headwinds. 

The company’s EV lineup is aging (though the sedans and SUVs have now all gotten face-lifts) and its newest product, the Cybertruck, is nowhere near the hit that CEO Elon Musk thought it could be. And Musk’s far-right politics, along with his involvement in the Trump administration, have created a sizable backlash to Tesla’s brand. 

At the same time, Musk has oriented the company toward its Robotaxi and Optimus robot projects. 

He has promised to launch an initial version of the Robotaxi service in Austin this June, with other cities potentially coming by the end of this year, but has been light on details about how it will work. 

Musk has yet to demonstrate that Teslas are capable of driving themselves without human intervention despite years of making that promise. What’s more, The Information recently reported that an internal analysis done at Tesla showed the Robotaxi program would lose money for a long period of time even if it were to work. 

At this time last year, Tesla was grappling with some gloomy numbers. In case you forgot, the company’s profits fell 55% to $1.13 billion in the first quarter of 2024 from the same period in 2023. Tesla said it was due to a protracted EV price-cutting strategy and “several unforeseen challenges” cut into the automaker’s bottom line.

Tesla tried to turn that profit ship around, but faced continued pressure. In Q2 of 2024, Tesla reported $1.5 billion in profit, down 45% from the same period in 2023. Profits were hit by a $622 million restructuring charge. Although it’s worth noting, that profit was padded by a record $890 million in regulatory credit sales.

This article originally published at 1:15 pm PT. It has since been updated with comments from Elon Musk and other executives from the earnings call.

Chatbots and other kinds of AI agents — and the companies that build them — may feel like a dime a dozen these days. But the truth is that, for both businesses and consumers, some may be infinitely more useful (and perhaps less dystopian) than others. Today, a startup that’s built a successful business around that concept is announcing a major growth round to expand its business. Manychat, which provides brands with a tool for managing and automating conversations and engagement across multiple messaging channels, has picked up $140 million led by Summit Partners.

The funding is coming on the heels of strong growth for the startup. Manychat today has around 1.5 million customers across 170 countries, with the client list including the likes of Nike, the New York Times and Yahoo (the current owner of TechCrunch) as well as individual creators and much smaller outfits. 

CEO and co-founder Mike Yan said Manychat sends “billions” of messages annually on behalf of these users across TikTok, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and other chat platforms. The plan will be to use this latest Series B round of funding both to invest in R&D — in particular bringing more AI into the platform — as well as to boost the company’s sales, marketing and support globally. 

Notably for a startup these days, Manychat is mostly profitable — mostly, because as Yan describes it, “We always operate on the edge of being kind of break even.” 

Since launching a decade back in 2015, it has only raised around $23 million, mostly from this $18 million Series A round in 2019 led by Bessemer with participation from Flint Capital. (Manychat did not disclose what other investors are in this latest round beyond Summit.) The company is not giving out a valuation but it’s likely to be considerably higher than the modest $58 million post-money valuation PitchBook detailed for the Series A.

From Telegram to Instagram

Manychat’s trajectory mirrors both the rise of smartphone-based messaging apps over the last decade, as well as the growing opportunity around tooling for helping businesses to leverage that medium in a better way. 

In 2015, the email inbox was starting to tip into becoming a spam-laden, tired, and over-used medium for businesses looking to use it for marketing. 

Yan was coming off the back of a failed social app, and he himself was a Telegram user, one of a growing population of consumers using messaging apps for basic communications. When Telegram opened up its APIs, the lightbulb of inspiration went off for him and his co-founder Anton Morin.

“Telegram was actually one of the first western messaging apps to open up its APIs,” he recalled. “As users of Telegram ourselves, and we saw a clear job to be done.” Companies were using email to connect to users, he said, but that was not where users were spending time. “They should be using messaging apps actually to connect with customers, that’s where the new wave of communication is happening. That’s where the new consumer is.”

So he and Gorin built the first iteration of Manychat as a tool for creating chats for businesses on Telegram. It picked up enough traction to get them into the 500 Startups accelerator. 

Then, when Facebook opened up its APIs for Messenger — making its own first-efforts to build AI chatbots — things really started to take off. By the time Manychat raised its Series A in 2019, it was already reaching 350 million users on the platform monthly with billions of messages and an enviable open rate of 80%. 

Additional APIs opening up across other Meta-owned platforms as well as TikTok have boosted that growth. Users can still market on Telegram, too, Yan said, although these days that is just a small percentage of its traffic. For the record, Instagram is far and away the most engaged and active platform for the company today, Yan said.

Manychat’s founding and a large chunk of its growth preceded the rise of generative AI and the emergency of AI chatbots like Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Google’s Gemini, among others. In fact, the earlier descriptions of the product touted how it provided a “smart blend of automation and personal outreach” to customers, who were using its no-code platform to build chatbots to grow social followers, collect email addresses, respond to comments and set up flows via DM links to request products or more information on something. 

Anchoring its product around encouraging further actions, Yan said, is what sets it apart from most chatbots on the market right now, including most GenAI chatbots. 

Sophia Popova, the Summit partner who led the investment and is joining the board of the startup, believes that Manychat’s approach of building out an engagement layer that’s seen a lot of success so far makes it a solid bet for the next wave of activity on messaging platforms. 

“Our thesis hinges on a greater proportion of commerce dollars going through social messaging apps,” she said in an interview. “You need to be always on and engaging 24/7. That is what customers expect and Manychat is hitting the nail on the head.” In contrast, she said, when considering the DNA of the AI chatbots — at least what is in the market today — “very few of them are geared towards personalizing conversation in a way that drives conversion to revenue.”

If you want a help desk chatbot, there are “myriad” tools out there, but actually very few that are engaging to sell or elicit other responses from users in the way that Manychat has done, she added.

Yet given the pace of development — and the drive that many of the AI startups have to generate revenue to offset their huge cash burn — this is a gap that may not be there for long, one reason why Manychat is working to build in more AI features to improve its offering.