Steve Case and JD Vance are speaking at Disrupt SF on startup opportunities outside of Silicon Valley

We’re excited to announce Steve Case and JD Vance will sit down for a fireside chat at Disrupt SF this September. There’s plenty to talk about, too, including the pair’s latest venture: A massive $150 million seed fund backed by an impressive group of investors that are targeted at startups outside of Silicon Valley.

As The New York Times put it after the fund’s announcement, the complete list of investors in the Rise of the Rest fund “may be the greatest concentration of American wealth and power in one investment fund.” It includes among others Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt, John Doerr, Jim Breyer, Dan Gilbert and members of the Walton, Koch and Pritzker families.

This fund is core to what Case and Vance are championing at Revolution. The Washington, D.C.-based venture capital firm primarily backs companies outside of major tech hubs. At Disrupt New York in May, Case told the audience that many regions are overlooked simply because investors can’t “get in their cars and drive to those companies” and he wants to convince other VCs to look outside of their comfort zones.

In August of 2017 Steve Case, founder of AOL and Revolution, tapped JD Vance to run Revolution as its Managing Partner.

“I don’t know if I’m ever going to be comfortable with being the media-dubbed spokesperson,” Vance told TechCrunch at the time. “But I do think you can talk about the issues and try to raise awareness or you can do something about the issues — my goal here is to try to do both. There’s an opportunity I’ve been given here with the platform the book has afforded.”

Vance is seemingly of the same mind as Case. In his book, which is a must read by the way, Hillbilly Elegy, he lays out his upbringing in Appalachia’s working class and explains the importance of striving to overcome obstacles — and startups outside the Valley have different obstacles to overcome than those located around San Francisco. As the managing partner of Revolution, we hear he has a keen focus that resonates with founders. Vance served in the Golf War, eventually graduating from The Ohio State and Yale and went on to serve as a law clerk and a principle at Peter Thiel’s  VC firm, Mithril Capital Management LLC.

Steve Case spoke at Disrupt NY last year about his current passion in shining a light on startups outside traditional tech hubs.

“It’s worth remembering that Detroit 75 years ago was like the Silicon Valley,” said Case at Disrupt NY in 2017. “At the time, it was the hottest innovation city in the country, because the automobile was the hot new technology at the time. Silicon Valley was like fruit orchards. These things change. But they lost their way. Detroit lost 60 percent of its population in the last 50 years and they went bankrupt because they lost their entrepreneur mojo.”

Case’s fireside chat was fascinating and we’re thrilled to have him back with Revolution’s managing partner, JD Vance. While Disrupt SF happens in the heart of Silicon Valley, there are plenty of founders, developers and investors who are constantly looking for opportunities in new regions — just like Steve Case and JD Vance.

If you’re looking to purchase tickets to Disrupt, you can grab those right here.

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Klaxoon gets $50M to try to make boring meetings more interactive and productive

If you’ve ever been in a pointless meeting at work, odds are you’ve spent part of the time responding to messages or just putzing around on the Internet — but Klaxoon hopes to convert that into something a bit more productive with more interactive meetings.

The French startup today said it’s raised $50 million in a new financing round led by Idinvest Partners, with early round investors BPI, Sofiouest, Arkea and White Star Capital Fund also participating. The company offers a suite of tools designed to make those meetings more engaging and generally just cut down on useless meetings with a room of bored and generally unengaged people that might be better off working away at their desk or even taking other meetings. The company has raised about $55.6 million in total.

The whole point of Klaxoon is to make meetings more engaging, and there are a couple ways to do that. The obvious point is to translate what some classrooms are doing in the form of making the whole session more engaging with the use of connected devices. You might actually remember those annoying clickers in classrooms used to answer multiple choice questions throughout a session, but it is at least one way to engage people in a room — and offering a more robust way of doing that may be something that helps making the session as a whole more productive.

Klaxoon also offers other tools like an interactive whiteboard (remember Smartboards, also in classrooms?) as well as a closed networks for meeting participants that aims to be air-gapped from a broader network so those employees can conduct a meeting in private or if the room isn’t available. All this is wrapped together with a set of analytics to help employees — or managers — better conduct meetings and generally be more productive. All this is going to be more important going forward as workplaces become more distributed, and it may be tempting to just have a virtual meeting on one screen while either working on a different one — or just messing around on the Internet.

Of course, lame meetings are a known issue — especially within larger companies. So there are multiple interpretations of ways to try to fix that problem, including Worklytics — a company that came out of Y Combinator earlier this year — that are trying to make teams more efficient in general. The idea is that if you are able to reduce the time spent in meetings that aren’t really productive, that’ll increase the output of a team in general. The goal is not to monitor teams closely, but just find ways to encourage them to spend their time more wisely. Creating a better set of productivity tools inside those meetings is one approach, and that’s what Klaxoon seems to hope is the one that plays out.

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This newly funded startup wants to help women gauge their reproductive health a lot sooner in life

It’s often the case that women don’t think much about their reproductive health until they have to. Sometimes it begins with an aside from a well-meaning gynecologist — or one’s impatient parents. Sometimes, it’s because a couple is ready to try conceiving and it’s proving harder than they imagined it would be.

A San Francisco-based startup called Modern Fertility wants to educate women about their reproductive health much earlier in their lives, enabling them to become more “proactive” instead of reactive, says cofounder and CEO Afton Vechery, who worked formerly as a product manager at the genetic testing company 23andMe and, before that, at a healthcare-focused private equity firm in Greenwich, Ct.

At both places, she learned a lot about the growing number of companies that are empowering customers with information about their own bodies. She also learned, particularly at 23andMe, about the important of making that information affordable. Indeed, after shelling out $1,500 for tests run by an reproductive endocrinologist to get a better picture of her own reproductive health, Vechery set out to create similar tests that are far more affordable. Toward that end, an at-home finger-prick hormone test that Modern Fertility began selling today sells for $199.

It owes to economies of scale, says Vechery. Though there are just 500 infertility clinics in the U.S. and roughly 6,000 endocrinologists — just 2,000 of which are focused on reproductive health — the cost of individual testing has been prohibitively high. Modern Fertility meanwhile has “systems and tech and integrations that support a high volume of tests” conducted at the same time, she explains (and with volume comes discounted pricing.

Modern Fertility is not analyzing its customers’ hormones itself. It is using Quest Diagnostics, the 50 year-old, publicly traded clinical laboratory company. (“We’re not making new instruments,” says Vechery. “Our differentiation is in access and the information that we provide to women.”)

In fact, Modern Fertility is also billing itself as more of an educational company than anything else. While it tell consumers about nine hormone levels related to ovarian reserves and overall reproductive health — which can be important, especially when it comes to considerations around egg freezing —  much of what it offers is related content based on peer-reviewed studies about menopause and when women typically start to lose their fertility.

Customers also receive one optional one-on-one phone consultation with a fertility nurse who won’t give out medical advice but can share more information about which hormones are being tracked and why.

For the price, that may be enough for many women. It was enough for investors. They just provided the startup with $6 million in funding led by Maveron and Union Square Ventures, which were joined by Sound Ventures, #Angels, SV Angel and additional individual investors.

No doubt these backers see a future where an offering like that from Modern Fertility is a perk offered by employers, more of which are offering fertility benefits to keep their employees happy and in place. Already, Vechery says that a “handful of companies” are interested in layering Modern Fertility’s tests into their other wellness benefits.

Modern Fertility is also counting on repeat customers, given that re-taking every now and then will give a woman a better idea of how her “fertility curve” is changing over time.

In the meantime, she says, Modern Fertility — cofounded by Carly Leahy, a creative strategist who moved to California from Boston in 2014 after Google recruited her and who most recently logged two years at Uber —  will be adding to its current, eight-person team.

It will also be “trying to understand the best way it can get this information” to potential customers, says Vechery.

“We want to meet women where there are and educate them that this type of testing is important.”

Pictured above: Modern Fertility cofounders Afton Vechery, left, and Carly Leahy

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Scout.fm turns podcasts into personalized talk radio

Scout.fm wants to change the way people listen to podcasts. Instead of scouring through the over 500,000 available shows available in your current podcast app, this startup’s new curated podcast service will just ask you a few questions to find out what you like, then create a podcast station customized to you. The experience is primarily designed for use on smart speakers, like Amazon’s Alexa-powered Echo devices, but is also available as iOS and Android applications.

The company was founded just over a year ago by Cara Meverden (CEO), previously of Google, Twitter, Indiegogo, and Medium; along with Saul Carlin (President and COO), previously Head of Publisher Development at Medium, and before that, Politico; and Daniel McCartney, (CTO) previously an engineer at GrubHub, Klout and Medium.

At Medium, Meverden explains, they saw an explosion of people creating great written content; but now those publishers had begun to create great audio content, as well.

But unlike on Medium, which helps to guide readers to topics they like, people today have to seek out new podcasts for themselves. Scout.fm wants to offer a better system, and hopefully bring more listeners to podcasts as a result.

“We want to take podcast listening mainstream,” she says. “We think the key to that is making podcasts as easy to listen to as the radio – and we think that’s even more critically important, as we enter the smart speaker era.” 

The Scout.fm service began as a series of experiments on Alexa.

The company launched over 30 Alexa skills, including a “Game of Thones”-themed podcast radio that was popular while the show was airing on HBO. The goal was to test what worked, what topics and formats drew listeners, and gain feedback through calls-to-action to participate in user surveys.

The result is Scout.fm, a curated podcast service that’s personalized to your listening preferences – and one that improves over time.

Here’s how it works on the Alexa platform. You first launch the app by saying “Alexa, open Scout.fm.” The app will respond (using a human voice actor’s voice, not Alexa’s) by explaining briefly what Scout.fm does then asks you to choose one of three types of talk radio stations: “Daily news, brain food, or true stories.”

The first is a news station, similar to Alexa’s “Flash Briefing;” the second, “brain food,” focuses on other interesting and informative content, that’s not day-to-day news; and the last is a true crime podcast station.

The voice app will then ask you a few more questions as part of this setup process to find out what other subjects appeal to you by having you respond, on a scale of one to ten, how much of a history buff you are, or how much you’re interested in culture, like art, film and literature, for example.

On subsequent launches, the app will simply ask if you want to return to your “Brain Food” (or other selected) station. If you say no, you can try one of the other options.

However, once the setup process is over, the experience becomes very much like listening to talk radio.

A podcast will begin playing – Scout.fm favors those without ads at the very beginning – allowing you to listen as long as you’d like, or say “next” to move to the next one. Each new podcast episodes has a brief, spoken introduction that Scout.fm handwrites, so you know what’s coming up. Your listening can go on for hours, offering you a hands-free means of switching podcasts and discovering new favorites.

The app will also adjust to your preferences over time, removing those you tend to skip – much like how the thumbs down works on Pandora.

Scout.fm doesn’t include every podcast that’s out there. Instead, it’s a curated selection of a few hundred with high production values, narrative storytelling and tight editing.

“So if we listen to something and the two co-hosts kind of go on for half an hour at the beginning, that’s not a great podcast for this format,” Meverden says. “We want shows where they’re going to get right into it. That right away limits things, but there’s still an abundance of content.”

For example, some of the podcasts Scout.fm includes come from The Wall St. Journal, The New York Times, ESPN, and podcast networks like Gimlet, Wondery, Parcast and others.

The same curated selection of podcasts is also available in Scout.fm’s mobile apps for iOS and Android, which work with the voice assistant on the phone. (For example, you can tap your AirPods to wake Siri then say “Next” to move between podcasts.)

“If you’re jogging, our apps are an excellent companion because you don’t have to go back to your phone and try to find a new thing to listen to,” notes Meverden.

Since Scout.fm’s launch, it has accrued 1.5 million minutes listened across its network of experimental apps ahead of today’s public debut. The Alexa user base listened for twice as long as mobile users.

Currently, the service is not generating revenue, but, in the future, the team envisions call-to-action ads that could work with the Alexa app to share more information about the products, as well as ways it could utilize the newer in-app purchase mechanisms for Alexa skills.

The company is backed by $1.4M in seed funding from Bloomberg Beta, Precursor Ventures, Advancit and #Angels.

“The Scout team’s unique insight is that podcasts, no matter how good, won’t go mainstream until it is much simpler for consumers to find and listen to the content that’s right for them,” said Charles Hudson, managing partner at Precursor Ventures, in a statement about the investment. “The fast adoption of smart speakers changes this. We can open up podcasts to an entirely new audience,” he said.

Scout.fm is available on Alexa, iOS and Android.

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Neighborhood Goods raises $5.75M to reinvent the department store

Neighborhood Goods, a startup rethinking the traditional department store experience, is announcing that it has raised $5.75 million in seed funding.

Co-founder and CEO Matt Alexander told me via email that while the largely static layout and offerings of a department store provide a degree “consistency and reliability,” they’re also “dull and unchanging,” as well as “fairly transactional with little more to provide.”

So instead, Neighborhood Goods will allow around 15 brands to create their own “activations,” each highlighting the aesthetic and products that the brands choose. (Bulletin is another startup looking to bring a pop up approach to traditional retail.) The store will also have a restaurant and bar, and communal spaces that could be used for things like speaking events or art installations.

“At Neighborhood Goods, we’re creating something more social and communal around an ever-changing landscape of products,” Alexander said, later adding, “Neighborhood Goods ostensibly takes the polish and approachability of the typical department store, but combines it with the dynamism and community of a pop-up store or pop-up marketplace.”

He also said technology will play a big role in the experience — particularly with an iOS app that will allow customers to learn more about the brands, text the staff, have products brought to them and make purchases.

The funding was led by Forerunner Ventures, with participation from Maveron, CAA Ventures, Global Founders Capital, NextGen Venture Partners, Dollar Shave Club founder Michael Dubin and Retail Connection co-founder Alan P. Shor (who’s also joining the board of directors).

“Community and emotional connection are a big part of what drives consumer spending — something Matt and [co-founder Mark Masinter] understand wholeheartedly,” said Forerunner’s Kirsten Green in the funding announcement. “The delicate balance of both experience and discovery is reshaping the retail industry as shoppers crave brands that are unique and worth getting excited over.”

Neighborhood Goods plans to open its first location — a 13,000-square-foot store in Plano, Texas — this fall. Asked why he chose Plano, Alexander said:

Specifically, we’re able to tap into an aggressive consumer market, whilst bringing brands closer to exceptional customers. And we’re able to do so without the brands having to invest exorbitant amounts, hiring extensive retail teams, or developing marketing initiatives from the ground-up in new markets … That’s not to say we won’t look at markets like LA, NY, and SF in future, but, as a launchpad for a new concept, Plano is uniquely good for us today.

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Trilogy Education gets $50M to build a market-driven bootcamp program for universities

While coding bootcamps may be in the middle of a shakeout, technology companies around the world are still going to be struggling to fill slots with people equipped with the skills to tackle real-world problems right from the get-go — and Dan Sommer hopes the answer is through universities.

That’s the premise behind Trilogy Education, which today said it is raising another $50 million round after raising $30 million last year. This round is led by Highland Capital Partners, with participation from new investorsDan Sommer and Macquarie Group. The company works with around 35 universities to identify skills gaps that they can fill with programs — such as through continuing education — that can get students ready to work at a variety of technology companies right away. Throughout all this, the startup works to collect data and feedback on each course and tune it as workforce needs change over time.

“The mission of these institutions through these programs is to open access to new types of learning,” Sommer said. “The average age of the student that takes one of these programs is approximately 32. We have students in classes that are 19 and some that are 76. If you zoom out and you think about the transformation that’s happening overall in the workforce, and you think about the number of open positions in the areas, that’s where we focused. I believe universities are the place where individuals should go to learn new skills.”

All this is increasingly relevant as tasks that machine learning-driven tools can tackle — such as autonomous driving — may end up displacing millions of jobs and requiring those individuals to learn a new set of skills in order to find some new employment. Companies are internally recognizing that in some ways, such as through tools like Degreed, which look to help employers identify those same skills gaps and find ways to train their own employees to fulfill those more complex knowledge worker roles. Degreed raised $42 million earlier this year, and there are still other programs like MissionU (which raised $8.5 million late last year) looking to rethink education as the tech economy booms.

Still, there has indeed been a shakeout in the coding bootcamp world. Whether a product of just not keeping up with workforce demands or struggling business models, there have been several that have shut down. Galvanize in August last year said it would lay off around 11% of its staff, while Dev Bootcamp and Iron Yard shut down altogether. And for some employers, all it takes is a few bad interviews from one of those bootcamps to lay down a layer of pessimism across the board, depending on who you talk to out here in the Valley.

That may be why Trilogy Education is partnering directly with universities. By doing that and running the programs through those universities, it can piggyback on the substantial brand equity they’ve built up over time. Trilogy Education says it gathers feedback from each class — either through surveys or other data points — and uses that to provide its university partners with robust reports on ways to tune the model and what specific roles to go after for potential programs. Trilogy Education works with programs in UI/UX, data analytics and visualization, cybersecurity and web development. The curriculum itself is developed centrally in Github. The goal here is to ensure that the programs are future-proofed and to “teach students how to learn,” Sommer said.

That software extends to the programs’ connections with students as well. Trilogy Education helps track student performance, helping universities identify which students might be falling behind and need additional tutoring. For students that are outperforming, it helps connect them with the resources to progress even faster and potentially begin teaching some elements themselves as a way to acquire additional soft skills in addition to the core program.

“The sincerest sign of learning is when a student that has learned Angular in class all of the sudden builds a portfolio project in React,” he said. “We’re focused on teaching people how to learn more so than teaching people how to learn any particular technology or skill. We’ve made over 7,000 changes to the curriculum over the last 3 years. It’s truly a piece of software, it changes over time. We bring in a market-driven curriculum fully vetted through the institution.”

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Virtru secures $37 million Series B led by Iconiq

Virtru, the security startup that came out of research at the NSA, announced a $37 million Series B financing round today led by Iconiq Capital.

The company also announced the formation of Virtru Labs, an entity to be led by company co-founder and CTO Will Ackerly. The Lab will act as an innovation engine for the company, while trying to make Virtru’s underlying technology, Trusted Data Format (TDF), an industry standard for exchanging data securely in a similar manner that PDF developed into a standard way of exchanging documents.

CEO and co-founder John Ackerly (and brother of Will) says this has been a goal since the earliest days of the company and starting the lab is one of the reasons they wanted to raise this round. “My brother and I firmly believe you need an open framework in order to achieve the vision of true default security,” he told TechCrunch.

They believe by investing time and dollars to get third parties to adopt the TDF and adopting all tiers of this data format, it could remove the friction we have today when data is being shared across systems, while eliminating vendor lock-in.

The company currently offers tools for end-to-end email encryption in G-Suite and Office 365, but they hope to expand to file sync and share applications and chat. They also want to promote technical partnerships through the SDK they launched earlier this year. Finally, they want to expand globally by growing a channel partner system.

Ackerly says all of that takes money and that’s why they went looking for this round. It didn’t hurt that the company has experienced explosive growth over the last year adding 3000 new customers for a total of over 8000 using their products, while tripling revenue (they did not provide an exact figure).

Ackerly says one of the reasons for this growth is an increasing desire on the part of users to have a trust mechanism for sharing information online. “If you look at our partnership with Google, with Microsoft, with Amazon; these are all platform companies that are coming to grips with this privacy imperative. We are in a crisis of trust as a society and Virtru has always taken the approach of partnering closely because these workflows matter to end users,” he said. He adds that this really wouldn’t work if the company tried to create a new set of tools.

Vitru has around 80 employees today and Ackerly expects that to grow by around 50 percent over the coming year as they move into new markets, grow the lab and expand channel and partner support.

The round was led by Iconiq Capital with participation from returning investors Bessemer Venture Partners, New Enterprise Associates, Samsung, Blue Delta Capital, and Soros Capital. Today’s round brings the total raised to over $76 million since the company was founded in 2011.

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Researchers create the first 3D-printed corneas

Researchers at Newcastle University have been able to 3D-print a biocompatible corneal framework using a new gel formulations that “keeps the stem cells alive whilst producing a material which is stiff enough to hold its shape but soft enough to be squeezed out the nozzle of a 3D printer.”

There is a significant shortage of corneas available to transplant, with 10 million people worldwide requiring surgery to prevent corneal blindness as a result of diseases such as trachoma, an infectious eye disorder,” wrote the researchers. “In addition, almost 5 million people suffer total blindness due to corneal scarring caused by burns, lacerations, abrasion or disease.”

The product uses “human corneal stromal cells” from a donor cornea mixed with alginate and collagen to create bio-ink that can turn into a living cornea. This means that one donor cornea can help multiple patients.

““This builds upon our previous work in which we kept cells alive for weeks at room temperature within a similar hydrogel. Now we have a ready to use bio-ink containing stem cells allowing users to start printing tissues without having to worry about growing the cells separately,” said researcher Che Connon. He built the technology with Dr. Steve Swioklo.

The corneas take ten minutes to print on a cheap 3D printer, a vast improvement on previous efforts. Further, the gel can keep stem cells alive for days, allowing you to print a few corneas over the course of a week.

“This builds upon our previous work in which we kept cells alive for weeks at room temperature within a similar hydrogel. Now we have a ready to use bio-ink containing stem cells allowing users to start printing tissues without having to worry about growing the cells separately,” said Connon.

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Pinterest gives advertisers a way to show promoted videos that take up the screen

Pinterest is continuing its push into video as a potential avenue for advertisers by today saying that it will offer advertisers a promoted video tool that takes up the width of the entire screen.

While Pinterest normally offers users a grid that they can flip through — compressing a lot of content into a small space — taking up the full width of the screen with a promoted video would offer advertisers considerable real estate if they’re looking to get the attention of users. Pinterest pitches itself to advertisers as a strong alternative to Facebook or Google, giving marketers a way to reach an audience that behaves a little more differently than when on those other platforms and coming to Pinterest to discover new things.

The company also said it’s hired Tina Pukonen as an entertainment strategist and Mike Chuthakieo as an industry sales lead. Pinterest says more than 42 million people in the U.S. come to Pinterest for entertainment ideas, and that potential tool offers an interesting niche opportunity for advertisers to capture the attention of a user for a product — say, a movie — that needs a lot of awareness marketing. Getting a user’s attention for just a few seconds can be more than enough time to at least plant the seed of potentially buying a product down the line.

It’s that argument that what gives Pinterest potential value for advertisers. The company offers an array of advertising products designed to target users at all phases of a potential buying cycle, whether that’s just clicking around on the platform looking for ideas down to actually saving an idea or buying it — through Pinterest or through a referral. Most of Pinterest’s content consists of images and other content from brands or businesses. That makes sense given that it’s a place where people tend to go to plan life events, whether that’s parties, or weddings, or home improvement — and those events center around products that they may in theory one day buy. All the while Pinterest is accumulating a lot of different plays at advertising products and an experienced level of senior hires, including hiring its first COO Françoise Brougher, who was the former VP of SMB global sales and operations at Google and business lead at Square.

Pinterest, interestingly, seems to have been a little more tolerant of making what might seem like small design changes but may have substantial user implications. The company added a tab for followers at the bottom of the app, shaking up what is often seen as a core navigation bar for any app. But the company continues to grow, crossing 200 million monthly active users in September last year.

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More speakers, panels at The Europas, and how to get your ticket free

The Europas Unconference & Awards is back on 3 July in London and we’re excited to announce more speakers and panel sessions as the event takes shape. Crypto and Blockchain will be a major theme this year, and we’re bringing together many of the key players. TechCrunch is once again the key media partner, and if you attend The Europas you’ll be first in the queue to get offers for TC events and Disrupt Europe later in the year.

You can also potentially get your ticket for free just by sharing your own ticket link with friends and followers. See below for the details and instructions.

To recap, we’re jumping straight into our popular breakout sessions where you’ll get up close and personal with some of Europe’s leading investors, founders and thought leaders.

The Unconference is focused into zones including AI, Fintech, Mobility, Startups, Society, and Enterprise and Crypto / Blockchain.

Our Crypto HQ will feature two tracks of panels, one focused on investing and the other on how blockchain is disrupting everything from financial services, to gaming, to social impact to art.

We’ve lined up some of the leading blockchain VCs to talk about what trends and projects excite them most, including Outlier Ventures’ Jamie Burke, KR1’s George McDonaugh, blockchain angel Nancy Fenchay, Fabric Ventures’ Richard Muirhead and Michael Jackson of Mangrove Capital Partners.

Thinking of an ICO vs crowdfunding? Join Michael Jackson on how ICOs are disrupting venture capital and Ali Ganjavian, co-founder of Studio Banana, the creators of longtime Kickstarter darling OstrichPillow to understand the ins and outs of both.

We’ve also lined up a panel to discuss the process of an ICO – what do you need to consider, the highs, the lows, the timing and the importance of community. Linda Wang, founder and CEO of Lending Block, which recently raised $10 million in an April ICO, joins us.

We are thrilled to announce that Civil, the decentralised marketplace for sustainable journalism, will be joining to talk about the rise of fake news and Verisart’s Robert Norton will share his views on stamping out fraud in the art world with blockchain. Min Teo of ConsenSys will discuss blockchain and social impact and Jeremy Millar, head of Consensys UK, will speak on Smart Contracts.

Our Pathfounders Startup Zone is focused purely on startups. Our popular Meet the Press panel is back where some of tech’s finest reporters will tell you what makes a great tech story, and how to pitch (and NOT pitch them). For a start, TechCrunch’s Steve O’Hear and Quartz’s Joon Ian Wong are joining.

You’ll also hear from angels and investors including Seedcamp’s Carlos Eduardo Espinal; Eileen Burbidge of Passion Capital; Accel Partners’ Andrei Brasoveanu; Jeremy Yap; Candice Lo of Blossom Capital; Scott Sage of Crane Venture Partners; Tugce Ergul of Angel Labs; Stéphanie Hospital of OneRagtime; Connect Ventures’ Sitar Teli and Jason Ball of Qualcomm Ventures.

Sound great? You can grab your ticket here:

Early bird ticket sales end on Friday! Remember, you can end up getting your ticket for free.

All you need to do is share your personal ticket link. Your friends get 15% off, and you get 15% off again when they buy.

The more your friends buy, the more your ticket cost goes down, all the way to free!

The Public Voting in the awards ends 11 June 2018 11:59: https://ift.tt/2sqYJX3

We’re still looking for sponsor partners to support these editorially curated panels.

Please get in touch with Petra@theeuropas.com for more details.

SPEAKERS SO FAR:

Jamie Burke, Outlier Ventures

Jeremy Millar, ConsenSys

Linda Wang, Lending Block

Robert Norton, Verisart

George McDonaugh, KR1

Eileen Burbidge, Passion Capital

Carlos Eduardo Espinal, Seedcamp

Sitar Teli, Connect Ventures

Michael Jackson, Mangrove Capital Partners

Min Teo, ConsenSys

Steve O’Hear, TechCrunch

Joon Ian Wong, Quartz

Richard Muirhead, Fabric Ventures

Nancy Fechnay, Blockchain Technologist + Angel

Candice Lo, Blossom Capital

Scott Sage, Crane Venture Partners

Andrei Brasoveanu, Accel

Tina Baker, Jag Shaw Baker

Jeremy Yap

Candice Lo, Blossom Capital

Tugce Ergul, Angel Labs

Stéphanie Hospital, OneRagtime

Jason Ball, Qualcomm Ventures

The Europas Awards
The Europas Awards are based on voting by expert judges and the industry itself. But key to the daytime is all the speakers and invited guests. There’s no “off-limits speaker room” at The Europas, so attendees can mingle easily with VIPs and speakers.

Vote for your Favourite Startups

Public Voting is still humming along. Please remember to vote for your favourite startups!

Awards by category:

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Hottest Startup Accelerator

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Hall Of Fame Award – Awarded to a long-term player in Europe

The Europas Grand Prix Award (to be decided from winners)

The Awards celebrates the most forward thinking and innovative tech & blockchain startups across over some 30+ categories.

Startups can apply for an award or be nominated by anyone, including our judges. It is free to enter or be nominated.

Instead of thousands and thousands of people, think of a great summer event with 1,000 of the most interesting and useful people in the industry, including key investors and leading entrepreneurs.

• No secret VIP rooms, which means you get to interact with the Speakers

• Key Founders and investors speaking; featured attendees invited to just network

• Expert speeches, discussions, and Q&A directly from the main stage

• Intimate “breakout” sessions with key players on vertical topics

• The opportunity to meet almost everyone in those small groups, super-charging your networking

• Journalists from major tech titles, newspapers and business broadcasters

• A parallel Founders-only track geared towards fund-raising and hyper-networking

• A stunning awards dinner and party which honors both the hottest startups and the leading lights in the European startup scene

• All on one day to maximise your time in London. And it’s sunny (probably)!

That’s just the beginning. There’s more to come…

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Here’s Mary Meeker’s essential 2018 Internet Trends report

Want to understand all the most important tech stats and trends? Legendary venture capitalist Mary Meeker has just released the 2018 version of her famous Internet Trends report. It covers everything from mobile to commerce to the competition between tech giants. Check out the full report below, and we’ll add some highlights soon. Then come back for our slide-by-slide analysis of the most important parts of the 294 page report.

• Internet adoption: As of 2018, half the world population, or about 3.6 billion people, will be on the internet. That’s thanks in large part to cheaper Android phones and Wifi becoming more available, though individual services will have a tougher time adding new users as the web hits saturation.
• Mobile usage: While smartphone shipments are flat and internet user growth is slowing, U.S. adults are spending more time online thanks to mobile, clocking 5.9 hours per day in 2017 versus 5.6 hours in 2016.
• Mobile ads: People are shifting their time to mobile faster than ad dollars are following, creating a $7 billion mobile ad opportunity, though platforms are increasingly responsible for providing safe content to host those ads.
• Crypto: Interest in cryptocurrency is exploding as Coinbase’s user count has nearly quadrupled since January 2017
• Voice: Voice technology is at an inflection point due to speech recognition hitting 95% accuracy and the sales explosion for Amazon Echo which went from over 10 million to over 30 million sold in total by the end of 2017.
• Daily usage – Revenue gains for services like Facebook are tightly coupled with daily user growth, showing how profitable it is to become a regular habit.
• Tech investment: We’re at an all-time high for public and private investment in technology, while the top six public R&D + capex spenders are all technology companies.

Mary Meeker, analyst with Morgan Stanley, speaks during the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Tuesday, Nov. 16, 2010. This year’s conference, which runs through Nov. 17, is titled “Points of Control: The Battle for the Network Economy.” Photographer: Tony Avelar/Bloomberg via Getty Images

• Ecommerce vs Brick & Mortar: Ecommerce growth quickens as now 13% of all retail purchases happen online and parcel shipments are rising swiftly, signaling big opportunities for new shopping apps.
• Amazon: More people start product searches on Amazon than search engines now, but Jeff Bezos still relies on other surfaces like Facebook and YouTube to inspire people to want things.
• Subscription services: They’re seeing massive adoption, with Netflix up 25%, The New York Times up 43%, and Spotify up 48% year-over-year in 2017. A free tier accelerates conversion rates.
• Education: Employees seek retraining and education from YouTube and online courses to keep up with new job requirements and pay off skyrocketing student loan debt.
• Freelancing: Employees crave scheduling and work-from-home flexibility, and internet discovery of freelance work led it to grow 3X faster than total workforce growth. The on-demand workforce grew 23% in 2017 driven by Uber, Airbnb, Etsy, Upwork, and Doordash.
• Transportation: People are buying fewer cars, keeping them longer, and shifting transportation spend to rideshare, which saw rides double in 2017.
• Enterprise: Consumerization of the enterprise through better interfaces is spurring growth for companies like Dropbox and Slack.
• China: Alibaba is expanding beyond China with strong gross merchandise volume, though Amazon still rules in revenue.
• Privacy: China has a big opportunity as users there are much more willing to trade their personal data for product benefits than U.S. users, and China is claiming more spots on the top 20 internet company list while making big investments in AI.
• Immigration: It is critical to a strong economy, as 56% of top U.S. companies were founded by a first- or second-generation immigrant.

TechCrunch – Mary Meeker 2018 Internet Trends Report from Josh Constine

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Here’s where it’s cheaper to take an Uber than to own a car

Ride-sharing companies have long touted the cost benefits of its platforms. Well, depending on the city, it can be cheaper on a weekly basis to take an UberX or UberPOOL than it is to own a personal car, according to Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers Partner Mary Meeker’s 2018 annual internet trends report.

In four of the five largest cities in the U.S., it is indeed cheaper to rely on Uber than it is to own a car. Meeker’s analysis took into account cost of gas, car insurance, maintenance and parking.

So, if you live in New York City, Chicago, Washington D.C. or Los Angeles, it’s cheaper to take an Uber. But that’s not the case in Dallas, where the average weekly cost of car ownership is $65 compared to the average weekly Uber cost of $181.

Meeker’s report also looked at the rise of on-demand workers in the U.S. Last year, there were 5.4 million on-demand workers in the country. This year, there are an estimated 6.8 million people working in the on-demand economy.

“These are big numbers,” Meeker said on stage, noting how these types of jobs are helping to supplement income for people, provide greater flexibility and improve work-life balance.

You can check out the full deck below.

Here’s Mary Meeker’s essential 2018 Internet Trends report

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GIF and sticker platform Emogi gets $12.6M as the battle of GIF startups continues to heat up

It looks like the capital continues to flow into startups looking to provide some easy way for users to share GIFs, with another startup called Emogi announcing today that it’s raised $12.6 million in a new financing round.

Already there’s enormous activity in the GIF space, of all things. Google earlier this year acquired Tenor, a GIF platform that supplies a GIF search engine across multiple messaging channels (the company recently added LINE as one service). Tenor earlier had said it had around 12 billion GIF searches every month. Meanwhile, Gfycat, which focuses on creator tools, says it has around 180 million monthly active users with more than 500 million views every month. Giphy, one of the other largest GIF platforms, says it has around 300 million daily active users (and we hear recently held talks for a massive funding round).

So, in total, this is a very hot space, and potentially for good reason. As messenger services — iMessage or otherwise — become the dominant form of communication, users are looking for ways to compress more and more information into a small amount of space. Whether that’s stickers on LINE or animoji for iMessage, there’s a clear hole for companies to find some new or creative way to help users send over what amounts to some snippet of emotion baked into a clip of their favorite game, movie, or huge moment in a basketball game.

“We were looking at the behavior of consumers [in our previous app and] we realized they weren’t even reading the content,” co-founder Travis Montaque said. “They were literally reacting with emoji, and that’s it. That behavior was interesting to us. At the time it was me, a team of several engineers and data scientists, and we decided this way of expressing yourself could increase engagement. We decided we should take a look at how the environment is treating these types of formats, and that caused us to transition the business to being Emogi, working with lead investors to provide richer content experiences across their apps — whether that’s in the camera or the keyboard.”

Partners integrate Emogi’s SDK into their keyboards, which then sends information about the user’s context — like typing or other attributes — to figure out the best GIFs to show and drop a model onto the phone. Montaque, however, stressed that delivers the model to a user’s keyboard and does analysis on the device without sending any info back to its servers about the user’s conversations. Amid the massive privacy-related snafu Facebook faces, it does seem like many of these communications companies are tuning their tone to emphasize that. That information includes views, shares, and other kinds of information about what type of content users engage with as a means to understand what content to deprecate over time.

There’s also a consumer-facing side with the Emogi app, where users can move up stickers or GIFs within messaging services. Emogi’s goal is to surface that content directly based on context, rather than providing a search engine like something like Tenor. Obviously that search component was a tantalizing one, as Google found it an attractive company to acquire. But Tenor, too, sought to find ways to figure out the exact right GIF for the exact right moment — and removing that clicking around and lowering the barrier to getting a GIF out the door is one that makes sense in the scope of messaging.

Like some other GIF platforms (including Tenor), Emogi works with brands like Proctor & Gamble to give them an alternative vertical for their marketing efforts that can capture a different slice of a user’s behavior outside of the advertising juggernauts. All of this is still in the sort of experimental case — while some of these platforms have a lot of engagement, they obviously aren’t Facebook — it does offer a second or third option to the traditional firms as a way to find new buckets of users that they might otherwise not reach.

But all this does mean Emogi is entering an increasingly crowded space, and one that larger companies are definitely starting to take notice of. While platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn look to tap ones like Tenor, it’s clear that all these companies are seeing that figuring out a way to compress that emotion into a short window is increasingly important when it comes to messaging. It may be that Tenor and Giphy end up building a strong enough content base and moat, though alternative players like Gfycat are still showing they’re able to grow. Montaque says the company’s content shows up in messaging apps around 1 billion times a month, which seems like at least a good start to see if it can keep rolling.

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Starling Bank raising another £80M, ends partnership with TransferWise

Starling, the U.K. challenger bank founded by banking veteran Anne Boden, is in the early stages of raising a significant new funding round as part of plans to double down on its newly launched business current account, TechCrunch has learned.

According to a person familiar with the matter, Starling is looking to raise around £80 million in additional capital from new investors. To assist in the process, the company is hiring a new international advisory firm, pointing to an investor search that potentially goes beyond the U.K. and could include large international institutional investors. Up until now, Starling has been funded to the tune of £48 million by hedge fund manager Harald McPike, who, as a result, owns more than 50 per cent of the venture.

The need for Starling to increase its capital is thought to be related to the bank’s bid to be one of the recipients of the Capability and Innovation fund, which was set up by Royal Bank of Scotland to fulfil European state aid conditions arising from the bank’s £45 billion U.K. government bailout during the financial crisis. The fund will be split into different grants to help “challenger banks and other financial services providers” diversify and develop their business current account offerings for small and medium-sized enterprises.

Thought to be up against incumbents Santander, Metro Bank, Clydesdale Bank, and TSB, Starling is increasingly confident of winning the £120 million “Pool A” grant, which is being decided by an independent panel — not least if the fund is to meet its remit of genuinely increasing competition within SME banking. ( Starling’s Boden has been quite outspoken on the matter.)

Starling and TransferWise integration as it might have looked

Related to this, Starling is busy recruiting a “double-digit” team for its SME banking unit. I understand from sources that executive search consultants have been engaged to work on senior hires and that this will include a new head of SME banking.

Meanwhile, Starling recently launched international payments within its consumer-facing current account, news it published on its blog and that was picked up in the fintech media. However, less well reported it that the bank has quietly dropped its previously announced partnership with fintech unicorn TransferWise.

Bank in March 2017, the two companies issued a joint press release detailing the partnership that would have given Starling customers “direct, in-app access” to TransferWise’s international money transfer service. The functionality was due to launch the following summer but never materialised (something that seemingly went unnoticed by most outlets). Now I understand the partnership has dissolved entirely as Starling has chosen to go it alone.

Asked what happened, TransferWise’s Head of Business, Stuart Gregory, issued the following statement:

“TransferWise is working with many banks to transform international payments for their customers, with more to come in the near future. In this instance Starling have chosen another route but it’s fantastic to see they’ve kept the price transparency of the real exchange rate and clear separate fees.”

Likewise, Starling’s Boden told TechCrunch: “Our partnership with TransferWise was always about meeting customer demands. As we developed out our payments business it became clear to us that integrating with a third party payments provider in the Starling Marketplace didn’t offer the best customer experience. We figured that we could provide a better user experience by doing it ourselves. As you know, Starling is all about customer service”.

Of course it’s never a good look when two companies announce with fanfare a major partnership that delivers nothing vapourware — Starling were still briefing that it was working with TransferWise in late 2017 — even if it is perfectly reasonable for both an upstart bank to switch strategy as the broader competitive climate changes. In this instance, since the original announcement, Starling has made significant headway on its own Starling Payments business, and TransferWise launched its own “borderless” banking product and debit card. Perhaps this is simply the case that partnering whilst increasing feature parity doesn’t always make for happy bedfellows.

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Tradeshift raises $250M Series E, Goldman Sachs joins the round

Tradeshift, a supply chain payments and marketplaces late-stage startup which recently added blockchain to its armory, has today raised $250 million in a Series E funding round led by Goldman Sachs and Public Sector Pension Investment Board (PSP Investments). Additional participation comes from HSBC, H14, GP Bullhound and Gray Swan, a new venture company established by Tradeshift’s founders. The new round of financing brings Tradeshift’s total funding to more than $400 million. The company claims it’s valuation has now passed $1.1 billion.

The new investors join existing backers, including HSBC, American Express Ventures, the CreditEase Fintech Investment Fund, Notion Capital, Santander InnoVentures and others. Mikkel Hippe Brun, Tradeshift’s GM of China and co-founder, will join Tradeshift’s board of directors.

Tradeshift CEO and co-founder Christian Lanng said in a statement: “We have always believed that the future of supply chains is 100 percent digital and that connecting trade is just the first step to a digitally connected economy. This investment will enable us to continue our rapid growth and consolidate our leadership position.”

“Given the rapid increase in B2B online transactions, online marketplaces are no longer just for consumers. Tradeshift has established itself as a leader in supply chain commerce by enabling corporations around the globe to take greater control of their supply chains,” said Darren Cohen, global head of Principal Strategic Investments at Goldman Sachs.

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