The daily Online Post: June 2018

Saturday, 30 June 2018

Announcing TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield Latin America in São Paulo on Nov. 8

TechCrunch is excited to announce that the Startup Battlefield Latin America is coming to São Paulo on November 8 this year. This is the first event TechCrunch has ever held in Latin America, and we are all in to make it a memorable one to support the fast-emerging startup ecosystem in the region.

The Startup Battlefield is TechCrunch’s premier startup competition, which over the past 12 years has placed 750 companies on stage to pitch top VCs and TechCrunch editors. Those founders have gone on to raise more than $8 billion and produce more than 100 exits. Startup Battlefield Latin America aims to add 15 great founders from Latin America to those elite ranks.

Here’s how the competition works. Founders may apply now to participate in Startup Battlefield. Any early stage (pre-A round) company with a working product headquartered in an eligible Latin American country (see list below) may apply. Applications close August 6. TechCrunch editors will review the applications and, based on which applicants have the strongest potential for a big exit of major societal impact, pick 15 to compete on November 8. TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield team will work intensively with each founding team to hone their six-minute pitch to perfection.

Then it’s game day. The 15 companies will take the stage at São Paulo’s Tomie Ohtake Institute in front of a live audience of 500 people to pitch top-tier VC judges. The judges and TechCrunch editors will pick five for a finals round. Those lucky finalists will face a fresh team of judges, and one will emerge as the winner of the first-ever Startup Battlefield Latin America. The winner takes home $25,000 and a trip for two to the next Disrupt, where they can exhibit free of charge in the Startup Alley and may also qualify to participate in the Startup Battlefield at Disrupt. Sweet deal. All Startup Battlefield sessions will be captured on video and posted on TechCrunch.com.

It’s an experience no founder would want to miss, considering the opportunity to join the ranks of Battlefield greats from years past, including Dropbox, Yammer, Mint, Getaround, CloudFlare, Vurb and many more.

Get that application started now.

Here’s the need-to-know about qualifying to apply:

Have an early-stage company in “launch” stage
Headquartered in one of these countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay, Venezuela (Central America) Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Panama (Caribbean – including dependencies and constituent entities), Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico.
Have a fully working product/beta reasonably close to, or in, production
Have received limited press or publicity to date
Have no known intellectual property conflicts
Apply by Aug. 6, 2018, at 5 p.m. PST

Tickets to attend Startup Battlefield Latin America will go on sale soon. Interested in sponsoring the event, contact us here

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Replacing pills with a Band-Aid? Avro Life Science thinks there’s a patch for that

Shak Lakhani, the 21-year-old chief executive and co-founder of Avro Life Science, started researching biomaterials when he was 15 years old.

Every summer and after school the teenager would travel nearly two hours by bus and train from the Richmond Hill neighborhood of Toronto where he lived to the tissue engineering lab at the University of Toronto and develop three-dimensional, in-vitro models of tumors using biomaterials.

For three years, Lakhani worked in the lab, before going on to study nanotechnology engineering at the University of Waterloo a short 73 miles away. It was there, in his first year, that Lakhani met another Richmond Hill resident, Keean Sarani, and launched Avro Life Science.

Sarani, also 21, had his own history in life sciences. A former epidemiologist who worked as a research assistant at the aptly named Hospital for Sick Children, Sarani spent his high school years working in community pharmacies before going on to graduate from the University of Waterloo with both an Honours Science degree and a doctorate in pharmacy directly from high school.

Sarani and Lakhani, who’re related by marriage, first met in the Village 1 dormitory complex at the university. Within months of their first meeting the two decided to start working on the company that would become Avro.

They formally launched the business in January 2016, a time when Lakhani said the two college students would hold “startup Sundays” where they would pitch ideas to each other in one dorm room or another on Sunday evenings, until they found an idea that seemed viable.

Given their experience — Sarani in pharmacies and treating patients and Lakhani in chemistry and material science, the two hit on the idea of drug delivery and patches.

Avro Life Science co-founders Keean Sarani and Shak Lakhani

The two initially toyed with a multivitamin patch for daily health, but through the sniffles, watery eyes and sneezes of perennial allergy sufferers the two hit on the idea of an antihistamine patch to cure their own ailments.

The two won their first pitch competition three months after hitting on the initial idea in March 2016, and formally incorporated their business in November 2016.

Fast-forward two years and the two co-founders are just about ready to make the final preparations for the first product with help from an initial seed round from investors led by Fifty Years, with participation from Susa Ventures, Garage Capital, Heuristic Capital, Embark Ventures, Uphonest Capital and Buckley Endeavours. Individual angel investors also participated in the round. In all, Avro has about $2.2 million in the bank.

According to Lakhani, the company has already developed a polymer that allows Avro to make patches that can deliver hundreds of different drugs. Now it’s just a matter of gearing up for clinical trials that the company will run before the end of the year.

The first product, Lakhani says, is “a medicated sticker for seasonal allergies.” The company’s plan to get to market involves revitalizing drugs that pharma companies haven’t been able to bring to market because oral delivery is difficult, Lakhani says.

“Really the breakthrough is the [proprietary] combination of materials that can hold all of these different drugs,” he said. “The method of drug delivery is the same as in nicotine patches. In our case as a result of the polymer and manufacturing method…. [the drugs] don’t bond with the polymer. They are micro-adhesives in the patch. Heat from the skin dissolves the polymer and allows the drugs to enter the blood stream.”

Basically, there are tiny bubbles on the patch and contact with (and heat from) the skin causes the bubbles to break and deliver any drugs in an unadulterated form to the bloodstream, Lakhani explained.

Because the company is using generic drugs for its first tests, it’s hoping to have an easier path to market to prove the viability of its delivery system.

Down the road, the company also has some pretty impressive pharmaceutical partners that it could tap. Avro is already working with Bayer as part of their accelerator program in Toronto, and that may lead to a deeper relationship down the road, according to Lakhani.

The first drug that the company is testing is Loratadine (a common antihistamine).

“In the coming years, we envision bringing a number of other patches to market for drugs addressing neurodegenerative diseases, cardiac health, analgesics and many more to improve drug delivery and compliance while revitalizing pharma pipelines,” Lakhani wrote in an email. “One day we hope to allow large pharmaceutical companies to ‘rescue’ drugs that they spent billions of dollars developing, but failed trials due to low bioavailability, high liver toxicity from an entire pill being metabolized at once.”

For Fifty Years co-founder Seth Bannon, Avro’s technology is a “Holy Grail” for drug delivery that can save pharmaceutical companies billions of dollars.

“The market for this is absolutely massive. Initially, Avro can manufacture and sell patches carrying generics direct to consumer to address issues like compliance with children and the elderly,” wrote Bannon, in an email. “Because Avro can deliver many drugs transdermally… When you deliver drugs transdermally, you significantly reduce liver toxicity and boost bioavailability. This means pharma can rescue drugs that just barely failed in Phase III. Pharma will pay a lot for this.”

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India’s Cashify raises $12M for its second-hand smartphone business

Cashify, a company that buys and sells used smartphones, is the latest India startup to raise capital from Chinese investors after it announced a $12 million Series C round.

Chinese funds CDH Investments and Morningside led the round, which included participation from Aihuishou, a China-based startup that sells used electronics in a similar way to Cashify and has raised more than $120 million. Existing investors, including Bessemer Ventures and Shunwei, also took part in the round.

This new capital takes Cashify to $19 million raised to date.

The business was started in 2013 by co-founders Mandeep Manocha (CEO), Nakul Kumar (COO) and Amit Sethi (CTO) initially as ReGlobe. The business gives consumers a fast way to sell their existing electronics; it deals mainly in smartphones but also takes laptops, consoles, TVs and tablets.

“When we began we saw a lot of transaction for phone sales moving from offline to online,” Manocha told TechCrunch in an interview. “But consumer-to-consumer [for used devices] is highly opaque on price discovery and you never know if you’re making the right decision on price and whether the transaction will take place in the timeframe.”

These days, the company estimates that the average upgrade cycle has shifted from 20 months to 12 months, and now it is doubling down.

With Cashify, sellers simply fill out some details online about their device, then Cashify dispatches a representative who comes to their house to perform diagnostic checks and gives them cash for the device that day. The startup also offers an app which automatically carries out the checks — for example ensuring the camera, Bluetooth module, etc. all work — and offers a higher cash payment for the user since Cashify uses fewer resources.

A sample of the Cashify Q&A for selling a device

Beyond its website and app, Cashify gets devices from trade-in programs for Samsung, Xiaomi and Apple in India, as well as e-commerce companies like Flipkart, Amazon and Paytm Mall.

Used device acquired, what happens next is interesting.

The startup has built out a network of offline merchants who specialize in selling used phones. Each phone it acquires is then sold (perhaps after minor refurbishments) to that network, so it might pop up for sale anywhere in India.

With this new money, Cashify CEO Manocha said the company will develop an online resale site that will allow anyone to buy a used phone from the company’s network. Devices sold by Cashify online will be refurbished with new parts where needed, and they’ll include a box and six-month warranty to give a better consumer experience, Manocha added.

Today, Cashify claims to handle 100,000 smartphones a month, but it is planning to grow that to 200,000 by the end of this year. Cashify said its devices are typically low-end, those that retail for sub-$300 when new. A large part of that push comes from the online site, but the startup is also enlarging its offline merchant network and working to reach more consumers who are actually selling their device. That’s where Manocha said he sees particular value in working with Aihuishou.

Cashify is also developing other services. It recently started offering at-home repairs for customers and Manocha said that adding Chinese investors — and Aihuishou in particular — will help it with its sourcing of components for the repairs service and general refurbishments.

Cashify estimates that the used smartphone market in India will see 90 million phones sold this year, with as many as 120 million trading by 2020. That’s close to the 124 million shipments that analysts estimate India saw in 2017, but with surprisingly higher margins.

A reseller can make 10 percent profit on a device, Manocha explained, and Cashify’s own price elasticity — the difference between what it buys from consumers at and what it sells to resellers for — is typically 30-35 percent, he added. That’s more than most OEMs, but that doesn’t take into account costs on the Cashify side, which bring that number down.

“When I sell to a reseller, the margins aren’t that exciting, which is why we want to sell direct to consumers,” the Cashify CEO said.

The startup has plenty going on at home in India, but already it is considering overseas possibilities.

“We will focus on India for at least the next 12 months, but we have had discussions on markets that would make sense to enter,” Manocha said, explaining that the Middle East and Southeast Asia are early frontrunners.

“We are working very closely with one of the Chinese players and figuring out if we can do some business in Hong Kong because that’s the hub for second-hand phones in this part of the world,” he added.

Note: The original version of this article was updated to correct that Amit Sethi is CTO not CFO.

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Friday, 29 June 2018

Nigerian logistics startup Kobo360 accepted into YC, raises $1.2 million

Jake Bright Contributor

Jake Bright is a writer and author in New York City. He is co-author of The Next Africa.

Thousands of cryptocurrency projects are already dead

Two sites that are actively cataloging failed crypto projects, Coinopsy and DeadCoins, have found that over a 1,000 projects have failed so far in 2018. The projects range from true abandonware to outright scams and include BRIG, a scam by two “brothers,” Jack and Jay Brig, and Titanium, a project that ended in an SEC investigation.

Obviously any new set of institutions must create their own sets of rules and that is exactly what is happening in the blockchain world. But when faced with the potential for massive token fundraising, bigger problems arise. While everyone expects startups to fail, the sheer amount of cash flooding these projects is a big problem. When a startup has too much fuel too quickly the resulting conflagration ends up consuming both the company and the founders and there is little help for the investors.

These conflagrations happen everywhere are a global phenomenon. Scam and dead ICOs raised $1 billion in 2017 with 297 questionable startups in the mix.

There are dubious organizations dedicated to “repairing” broken ICOs including CoinJanitor from Cape Town but the fly-by-night nature of many of these organizations does not bode well for the industry.

ICO-funded startups currently use multi-level marketing tactics to build their business. Instead they should take a page from the Kickstarter and Indiegogo framework. These crowd-funding platforms have made trust an art. By creating collateral that defines the team, the project, the risks, and the future of the idea you can easily build businesses even without much funding. Unfortunately, the lock ups and pricing scams the current ICO market uses to incite greed rather than rational thinking are hurting the industry more than helping.

The bottom line? Invest only what you can afford to lose and expect any token you invest in to fail. Ultimately, the best you can hope for is to be pleasantly surprised when it doesn’t. Otherwise, you’re in for a world of disappointment.

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Leena AI builds HR chat bots to answer policy questions automatically

Say you have a job with a large company and you want to know how much vacation time you have left, or how to add your new baby to your healthcare. This usually involves emailing or calling HR and waiting for an answer, or it could even involve crossing multiple systems to get what you need.

Leena AI, a member of the Y Combinator Summer 2018 class, wants to change that by building HR bots to answer question for employees instantly.

The bots can be integrated into Slack or Workplace by Facebook and they are built and trained using information in policy documents and by pulling data from various back-end systems like Oracle and SAP.

Adit Jain, co-founder at Leena AI says the company has its roots in another startup called Chatteron, that the founders started after they got out of college in India in 2015. That product helped people build their own chatbots. Jain says along the way, they discovered while doing their market research, a particularly strong need in HR. They started Leena AI last year to address that specific requirement.

Jain says when building bots, the team learned through its experience with Chatteron, that it’s better to concentrate on a single subject because the underlying machine learning model gets better the more it’s used. “Once you create a bot, for it to really to add value and be [extremely] accurate, and for it to really go deep, it takes a lot of time and effort and that can only happen through verticalization,” Jain explained.

Photo: Leena AI

What’s more, as the founders have become more knowledgeable about the needs of HR, they have learned that 80 percent of the questions cover similar topics like vacation, sick time and expense reporting. They have also seen companies using similar back-end systems, so they can now build standard integrators for common applications like SAP, Oracle and Netsuite.

Of course, even though people may ask similar questions, the company may have unique terminology or people may ask the question in an unusual way. Jain says that’s where the natural language processing (NLP) comes in. The system can learn these variations over time as they build a larger database of possible queries.

The company just launched in 2017 and already has a dozen paying customers. They hope to double that number in just 60 days. Jain believes being part of Y Combinator should help in that regard. The partners are helping the team refine its pitch and making introductions to companies that could make use of this tool.

Their ultimate goal is nothing less than to be ubiquitous, to help bridge multiple legacy systems to provide answers seamlessly for employees to all their questions. If they can achieve that, they should be a successful company.

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Ben Horowitz is coming to Disrupt SF

It’s been more than four years since “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” was published and it remains — including to minds of many of us at TechCrunch — one of the best, most authentic, most instructive business books ever written. It’s partly for this reason that we’re so excited to announce its author, Ben Horowitz, cofounder of the venture firm Andreessen Howoritz, is coming to Disrupt this September.

Why do people care about Horowitz’s management advice, as opposed to many other venture capitalists? Much of it boils down his operating experiences and his candid descriptions of his ups and downs on the job. Horowitz, for example, was the cofounder and CEO of Opsware (formerly Loudcloud), which was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 2007 for $1.6 billion. But as Horowitz has very publicly elucidated, Opsware looked like a goner more than once, including when one of its biggest clients shut down in the aftermath of the dot.com bubble’s implosion.

Horowitz also ran several product divisions at Netscape Communications when the company was still very young yet was already publicly traded. (It IPO’d an astonishing 16 months after it was founded.) While a thrilling ride, Horowitz has been frank about pissing off Netscape’s young cofounder, Marc Andreessen, after complaining that Andreesseen gave away too much of Netscape’s strategy to a reporter ahead of a public launch that Horowitz and others were planning. (Andreessen’s reply: “Next time do the f*cking interview yourself.”)

It’s funny now, but at the time, Horowitz — already married with three children — thought he might have to find another job.

Indeed, a big part of Horowitz’s appeal to founders is that given his career, he knows about which he speaks. Horowitz doesn’t sugarcoat anything, either. Whereas many management coaches and books can be abstract and theoretical — even squishy — Horowitz gets straight to the point. He knows what CEOs mess up most commonly, how to think about demoting versus firing people, and when and how to give out raises. All tie to a concept that Horowitz advises that entrepreneurs learn: that they need to take every point of view into consideration when making a decision, so they can see the decision through the eyes of the company and not just the person who may be most directly impacted by it.

It isn’t easy to do, particularly given that leaders are often making decisions under a great deal of pressure, as Horowitz readily admits when offering management advice. But it’s also crucial to running a healthy organization.

It is because of Horowitz’s acumen and more that we’e very eager to sit down with him this fall to talk about entrepreneurship, including how it has evolved in the nine years since Andreessen Horowitz was founded, as well as how the firm is evolving alongside it.

If you’re a founder, or you’re thinking about becoming one, you won’t want to miss this conversation. To buy tickets to the show, taking place in San Francisco September 5th through September 7th, you can click right over here.

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TrendKite expands its PR analytics platform by acquiring Insightpool and Union Metrics

TrendKite is making its first two acquisitions — according to CEO Erik Huddleston, they give the company “the last two components” needed for a complete PR analytics platform.

Until now, TrendKite’s main selling point was the ability to look at the articles written about a company and measure things like the audience reached and the impact on brand awareness.

But while that kind of journalistic coverage remains important, Huddleston said, “The world now is more complicated in terms of who has influence on the public.” That’s where Insightpool and its database of social media influencers comes in, allowing PR teams to find and pitch influencers who can help spread the company’s story.

Union Metrics, meanwhile, provides social media analytics. As Huddleston put it, “they do the same analytics about the conversation around the story as we do around the media coverage.”

With these acquisitions, he said TrendKite can build deeper integrations with products that were already being used together. In fact, he noted that the company had an existing partnership with Union Metrics, and he started thinking about Insightpool in the same context when a customer showed him how they were using TrendKite and Insightpool side-by-side, literally open in adjacent tabs.

The details of how Insightpool and Union Metrics will be packaged and priced as part of the TrendKite platform have yet to been determined. In the meantime, Huddleston said TrendKite will continue to support them as standalone products.

In addition, he said the entire teams of both companies (including Insightpool CEO Devon Wijesinghe and Union Metrics CEO Hayes Davis) will be joining TrendKite, with Insightpool giving Austin-based TrendKite a footprint in Atlanta.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. According to Crunchbase, Insightpool had raised $7.5 million from investors including TDF Ventures and Silicon Valley bank.

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Hellman & Friedman acquires controlling interest in SimpliSafe

SimpliSafe, the company behind the well-received SimpliSafe home security service, today announced that Hellman & Friedman, the massive venture fund and private equity firm, has taken a controlling interest in the company. While the two companies didn’t disclose the terms of the transaction, sources close to SimpliSafe tell us that the deal valued the company at about $1 billion.

Hellman & Friedman also currently own a number of other brands. ranging from Grocery Outlet to insurance software specialist Applied Systems (and which owned companies like Getty Images, Scout24 and others in the past).

Ahead of today’s announcement, SimpliSafe had raised about $57 million, mostly thanks to a funding round led by Sequoia Capital in 2014. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter of 2018, “subject to the waiting period under the HSR Act and other customary closing conditions.” There will be no changes in the company’s leadership due to this acquisition.

Hellman & Friedman have made a number of deals in the past that involved investments, acquisition and acquiring the controlling interest (sometimes as part of a syndicate) in companies like DoubleClick, Nielsen, Nasdaq, OpenLink and others. Today’s deal fits the group’s overall pattern of acquiring similar companies and then selling them for a profit at a later time — or guiding them to an IPO.

For SimpliSafe, the news comes on the heels of the launch of its updated hardware platform in February. But it also comes shortly after Amazon closed its acquisition of Ring, which not also offers its own security system, and the launch of Nest’s home security system. SimpliSafe says it currently protects over two million people, but while there are now more players in the market, this is also still a market with plenty of growth potential. “Home security is at an inflection point. Despite the market’s growth, today still only 20% of homes are protected,” notes SimpliSafe CEO Chad Laurans in today’s announcement.

SimpliSafe upgrades the DIY home security experience

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Doctrine raises $11.6 million for its legal search engine

French startup Doctrine is raising a $11.6 million funding round (€10 million) from existing investors Otium Venture and Xavier Niel. Doctrine is building a search engine for court decisions and other legal texts.

This is a key tool if you’re a lawyer or you’re working in the legal industry in general. There are now a thousand companies using the service. It currently costs around €129 per user per month.

A little back-of-the-envelope calculation lets you see that Doctrine currently has a monthly recurring revenue of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Doctrine competes with Dalloz and LexisNexis. These databases have been hugely popular because it’s been so hard to list court decisions. Not only Doctrine managed to get a ton of data, but they also have better technology to search through all these entries.

France is currently trying to share as much open data as possible. Eventually, court decisions could be accessible to anyone. But there are many challenges to overcome as each decision needs to be anonymized.

So it might not be a data-driven industry in a few years, but a tech-driven industry. Automating the indexation of court decisions and new laws is going to be key as more and more data becomes accessible. That’s why Doctrine seems to be in a good position against legacy software in the legal industry.

The startup is currently growing by 20 percent month over month. Doctrine plans to hire 160 people over the next 18 months.

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Thursday, 28 June 2018

Bird has officially raised a whopping $300M as the scooter wars heat up

And there we have it: Bird, one of the emerging massively-hyped Scooter startups, has roped in its next pile of funding by picking up another $300 million in a round led by Sequoia Capital.

The company announced the long-anticipated round this morning, with Sequoia’s Roelof Botha joining the company’s board of directors. This is the second round of funding that Bird has raised over just the span of a few months, sending it from a reported $1 billion valuation in May to a $2 billion valuation by the end of June. In March, the company had a $300 million valuation, but the Scooter hype train has officially hit a pretty impressive inflection point as investors pile on to get money into what many consider to be the next iteration of resolving transportation at an even more granular level than cars or bikes. New investors in the round include Accel, B Capital, CRV, Sound Ventures, Greycroft and e.ventures, and previous investors Craft Ventures, Index Ventures, Valor, Goldcrest, Tusk Ventures, and Upfront Ventures are also in the round. (So, basically everyone else who isn’t in competitor Lime.)

Scooter mania has captured the hearts of Silicon Valley and investors in general — including Paige Craig, who actually jumped from VC to join Bird as its VP of business —with a large amount of capital flowing into the area about as quickly as it possibly can. These sort of revolving-door fundraising processes are not entirely uncommon, especially for very hot areas of investment, though the scooter scene has exploded considerably faster than most. Bird’s round comes amid reports of a mega-round for Lime, one of its competitors, with the company reportedly raising another $250 million led by GV, and Skip also raising $25 million.

“We have met with over 20 companies focused on the last mile problem over the years and feel this is a multi-billion dollar opportunity that can have a big impact in the world,” CRV’s Saar Gur, who did the deal for the firm, said. “We have a ton of conviction that this team has original product thought (they created the space) and the execution chops to build something extremely valuable here. And we have been long term focused, not short term focused, in making the investment. The “hype” in our decision (the non-zero answer) is that Bird has built the best product in the market and while we kept meeting with more startups wanting to invest in the space – we kept coming back to Bird as the best company. So in that sense, the hype from consumers is real and was a part of the decision. On unit economics: We view the first product as an MVP (as the company is less than a year old) – and while the unit economics are encouraging, they played a part of the investment decision but we know it is not even the first inning in this market.”

There’s certainly an argument to be made for Bird, whose scooters you’ll see pretty much all over the place in cities like Los Angeles. For trips that are just a few miles down wide roads or sidewalks, where you aren’t likely to run into anyone, a quick scan of a code and a hop on a Bird may be worth the few bucks in order to save a few minutes crossing those considerably long blocks. Users can grab a bird that they see and starting going right away if they are running late, and it does potentially alleviate the pressure of calling a car for short distances in traffic, where a scooter may actually make more sense physically to get from point A to point B than a car.

There are some considerable hurdles going forward, both theoretical and in effect. In San Francisco, though just a small slice of the United States metropolitan area population, the company is facing significant pushback from the government and scooters for the time being have been kicked off the sidewalks. There’s also the looming shadow of what may happen regarding changes in tariffs, though Gur said that it likely wouldn’t be an issue and “the unit economics appear to be viable even if tariffs were to be added to the cost of the scooters.” (Xiaomi is one of the suppliers for Bird, for example.)

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Cerebri AI raises $5M Series A round led by M12, Microsoft’s venture fund

M12, Microsoft’s venture fund which was previously simply known as Microsoft Ventures, has been making a series of investments in the last few weeks. Today, it’s leading a $5 million Series A round into Cerebri AI, a startup that uses machine learning to help companies track, analyze and predict their customer’s behavior.

The University of Texas Horizon Fund, WorldQuant Ventures and Leawood Venture Capital also participated in this round for the Austin-based startup, which brings Cerebri’s total funding to date to $10 million. The company plans to use the fresh cash to expand its operations.

Microsoft’s involvement here is maybe no major surprise, given the company’s interest in machine learning and that the Cerebri platform sits on top of Microsoft Azure.

“Cerebri has created a product that is fundamentally changing how customer-facing sales and success professionals can analyze the customer journey,” said Elliott Robinson, a partner at M12. “By enabling companies to follow an individual customer across the various touchpoints within the enterprise, Cerebri has proven they’re able to improve customer experiences and generate revenue lift.”

In addition to today’s funding announcement, Cerebri also today officially launched its Cerebri Values product, which it describes as “this industry’s first universal measure of customer success.” The idea here is to quantify a customer’s commitment to a brand or product and then predict the “next best action” for each of these customers to seal the deal. Like similar products, Cerebri Values also allows marketers to create cohorts of similar customers for marketing campaigns. The focus here is on grouping customers by behavior, not demographics, which is a bit different from how similar tools often work.

To do all of this, Cerebri allows its users to combine data from a variety of sources and then uses its machine learning models to predict what will work best for this customer. In an age where customers are increasingly wary of companies that harvest their data, all of this may sound a bit dystopian. Cerebri says it has already ingested more than two billion customer touchpoints and events across 12 million consumers and that all of this data sits securely behind its corporate firewall, “ensuring the highest level of security and safeguarding personally identifiable information.”

We have asked the company whether consumers can access this data or opt out of being tracked and have not received an answer yet, but it looks like the company’s privacy policy argues that it’s up to its corporate customers to comply with local laws, including the likes of the European Union’s GDPR.

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Doug Leone, the global managing partner of powerhouse Sequoia Capital, is coming to Disrupt

Sequoia Capital has been at the top of its game in the U.S. for decades, thanks to early investments in Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, and PayPal, as well as, more recently, its stakes in the messaging startup WhatsApp, the payments company Stripe, and the video conferencing unicorn company Zoom.

Yet unlike a lot of top tier firms in Silicon Valley, Sequoia is far from reliant on the Bay Area companies for huge returns. Instead, a dozen years ago, anticipating that the most impactful tech ideas could come from anywhere and be built around the world, the firm founded Sequoia China and Sequoia India, assembling local teams to invest in startup and help founders build their companies.

That strategy is right now paying off, big time. As we reported earlier this week, Sequoia now makes more than 50 cents from every dollar returned to its investors from its overseas bets.

Among the many companies Sequoia Capital China alone has funded: Meituan-Dianping, the group-discount service that sells locally found products and retail services and just filed to go public in Hong Kong; Ele.me, the food ordering company that sold a controlling stake in its business to Alibaba in April for $9.5 billion; DJI, the drone company, which was reported to be raising $1 billion in new funding this spring at a $15 billion valuation; VIP.com, the commerce platform that went public in 2012 and currently boasts a $7.2 billion market cap; and Didi, the mobile transportation giant that’s in a race against its U.S. rival Uber to conquer the global ride-hailing market.

To learn more about the new reality facing Silicon Valley startups — that competition is no longer next door, it’s global — we’re thrilled to announce that Sequoia Managing Partner Doug Leone is coming to Disrupt for a fireside chat. Leone oversees the firm’s global operations with Neil Shen, the founder and managing partner of Sequoia Capital China, and he knows better than nearly anyone in Silicon Valley how the investing and technology landscapes are evolving — and what founders globally should be mindful of as they build the next legendary company.

Leone also knows the value of grit. Leone immigrated to the U.S. from Italy and was reportedly called “Pasta” in high school before rising to the top of one of the most admired venture firms in history. It’s no wonder Leone is particularly passionate about founders from humble backgrounds like his own.

If you care about the bigger global shifts that are majorly reshaping the tech industry right now, and the stuff that great founders are made of, you’re definitely going to want to catch this conversation.

You can buy tickets to the show, taking place in San Francisco September 5th through September 7th, right here.

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Lies, damn lies, and crypto analytics

For the past twelve years I’ve followed the rise of the startup – defined as a small business with global ambitions – from my perch at TechCrunch. During that period I watched business reporting change from a sleepy backwater on the back of the Sports section into a juggernaut, a force that controls the global conversation. Why? Because business reporting became war reporting and the battles fought were between VCs, businesses, and ideas that changed the world.

In that period, VCs rose from glorified bank tellers to rock stars. Incubators popped up to socialize nervous founders and turn them into capital F Founders and the path for startups became a codified journey from failure to success.

Now we’re seeing the same thing happen in ICOs. But something is wrong. The startups coming out of the ICO craze aren’t being judged on the character of their founders, on their technologies, or their probability for success. They are being judged, quite simply, on quantitative metrics that interrogate a token with one question: “When Lambo?”

This is the wrong approach. Token-based startups must receive the same level of socialization and scrutiny as the old VC-based startup vetting process. But something is different, and it’s an important difference.

In the old VC model a group of men – and it was mostly men for a long time – would stand in judgement over an idea. If any number of arbitrary points of risk appeared they would smile and say “No” to the founder, sending them down the road for another “No.” Unless you were plugged in professionally, went to https://ift.tt/29itl4g, or had your own cash, seed to even late stage investment wasn’t available and the resulting https://twitter.com/kteare/status/391689067370278912 of undercapitalization sunk countless startups.

Now, however, something new is afoot. While it’s always nice to look at tokens in comparison with other tokens, this sort of quantitative masturbation can easily hide a multitude of sins. Due diligence on token-based companies must be done, but it must be done through the wisdom of crowds. Instead of trying to impress one dude in a fleece vest and chinos on Sand Hill Road a founder must impress the world. They must tell a true, human story of actual value and explain their product without mumbling and hand waving. And they have to do it again and again.

Cryptocurrencies were supposed to bring us an egalitarian age of decentralized decision-making and a mathematical certainty. But the founders forgot one thing: humans offer no mathematical certainty. Instead of looking at numbers, these startups must be assessed on the basis of their value to humanity, on their technical ability to solve a real problem, and on their understanding of human-to-human interaction. The future isn’t a number. Instead, the future is a many-to-one investigation of a startup and the decision – by the decentralized crowd – whether or not to continue funding.

Again, if your primary driver is greed then by all means check out a chart that compares TRON to TRON. It’s your right. But if your goal is to make startups that will drive us deep into the future, then the old ways are best. A lot of things are about to change.

A few years ago I spoke to Deepak Chopra about his vision for a global voting system. In short, he was working on a way to take the global temperature. If a politician wanted to spend money on a road or, god forbid, go to wore, they could put the question to the crowd via their cellphones. One vote per person, defined by biometric controls. This pie-in-the-sky idea is slowly coming to fruition and I think it’s going to be very exciting. And it will find its perfect home in the future of startup funding.

The age of centralized decision-making in which analytics were used to help make seat-of-the-pants decisions is over. Now we enter a new world and the folks used to the old ways should probably watch out. After all, when the crowd speaks even VCs listen.

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The International Olympic Committee is curious about eSports

If there’s still any doubt that eSports is coming into the mainstream, just look to the world’s biggest sporting event: The Olympics.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Global Association of International Sports Federations (GAISF) have announced that they will host an eSports Forum, looking to gauge whether or not esports has a place in the Olympics.

According to the release, the IOC and GAISF will host esports players, game publishers, teams, media, sponsors and event organizers, as well as National Olympic Committees, International Sports Federations, athletes and the IOC. The group as a whole is looking to “explore synergies, build joint understanding, and set a platform for future engagement between esports and gaming industries and the Olympic Movement.”

In the release, GAISF President Patrick Baumann said:

Along with the IOC, the GAISF looks forward to welcoming the esports and gaming community to Lausanne. We understand that sport never stands still and the phenomenal growth of esports and gaming is part of its continuing evolution. The Esports Forum provides an important and extremely valuable opportunity for us to gain a deeper understanding of esports, their impact and likely future development, so that we can jointly consider the ways in which we may collaborate to the mutual benefit of all of sport in the years ahead.

Some of the panels at the forum include an interview on “The Key to Twitch’s Success,” “Future Opportunities for Collaboration,” an interview on “A Day in the Life of an Elite Player” and a panel on “Gender Equality in All Sports.”

eSports have continued to grow at an impressive clip. The Overwatch League has introduced city-based teams into the mix, while Fortnite had a huge Pro-Am tournament at e3, not to mention Epic’s introduction of a $100 million tournament prize pool for competitive play.

Considering how bizarre some of the Olympic sports are — I’m looking at you, Biathlon — the potential introduction of esports to the Olympic slate almost seems ordinary.

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Cyber startup Baffin Bay Networks takes in $6.4M funding led by EQT

For a long time, it has been hard to buy a cloud-first security platform that delivers full-stack security in a single data path. Current market solutions offer a “one trick pony”, leaving companies with overly complex routing setups or abnormal latency of traffic to get a solution that fulfills their needs.

Swedish cybersecurity startup Baffin Bay Networks thinks it has the answer, with distributed “threat protection centers” which interfere with the traffic before it reaches its customers’ services and removes any potential threats.

It has today announced the closing of a $6.4 million Series A round. The investment was led by European VC EQT Ventures and the capital will be used for further international expansion.

“We’re passionate about building a world-class threat protection platform – one that is easy to use for any company or service provider to protect their key assets and services,” said Joakim Sundberg, CEO at Baffin Bay Networks.

Competitors include Incapsula, Cloudflare, Akamai, Arbor and the like.

Via the customer portal Riverview, users can configure their own security settings and level of protection. The user interface allows for real-time tracking of traffic and delivers real-time results from threat analysis, providing current and complete information on the activity in their online environment.

Should users wish not to configure settings on their own, they can rely on preset, sensible defaults which are calculated using sophisticated algorithms.

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Unblockable raises $5M to create crypto collectibles around pro athletes

Unblockable is tackling a new area for blockchain technology — sports fandom, specifically collectibles and fantasy sports.

CEO Jeb Terry (a former Fox Sports executive, and before that a former offensive lineman for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers) said the goal is to connect pro sports and pro athletes with the technology, and to “create new means of access and really empower the fans to celebrate their fandom, to show off who they’re fans of and create new relationships.”

Terry founded Unblockable with Eben Smith, a former derivatives trader, as well as Greg Dean and Kedric Van de Carr, entrepreneurs who have founded multiple crypto projects in the past.

The startup is announcing that it has raised $5 million from Shasta Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners, with Shasta’s Jacob Mullins joining the board of directors. (Mullins and I have been friends since we worked together at VentureBeat a decade ago.)

“Taking advantage of the unique characteristics of the emerging blockchain platform, UNBLOCKABLE is defining a new category of fun, engaging and approachable experiences and games for consumers as well as new ways for stars, athletes and leagues to build new relationships with fans,” Mullins said in the announcement.

Unblockable isn’t launching its consumer product yet – Terry told me that will probably happen later this year. But the basic idea is to release collectible crypto tokens tied to pro athletes. The goal is to have tokens representing every player (including their likeness), not just the big stars, and to create “true, authentic scarcity.”

Terry argued that the tokens will function as a kind of virtual collectible, with “a limited volume ever minted.” The value of each token should also fluctuate depending on the player’s performance on the field, especially since there will be a fantasy sports component of the platform — you’ll need to own a player’s token in order to include them on your team.

“There will be market dynamics in play,” Terry said. “With the value of the performance of the athletes in the field, it will be basic supply-demand behavior.”

When asked about reaching the (presumably) huge swath of sports fans that have no real familiarity with cryptocurrencies, Terry said, “It’s the core crypto enthusiasts that are going to get this right away.” At the same time, he’s hoping to “bridge that gap” to all those other fans, partly by making sure the buying and selling process is as “frictionless” as possible.

Unblockable hasn’t announced any partnerships with specific leagues or athletes, aside from naming NFL Hall of Famer Ronnie Lott as the head of its advisory panel. But it sounds like Terry’s working on that.

“There are a lot of opportunities for playeres to get involved,” he said. “As a former player, as a guy that’s worked with players in the past, it’s something that we really know and live. We want to make sure [they] trust us to take care of their brands. That’s important here. You can’t just take that lightly in this space.”

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Self-driving car startup Nuro teams up with Kroger for same-day grocery delivery

Nuro, an autonomous vehicle startup focused on local deliveries, has partnered with 135-year-old grocery retailer Kroger to offer same-day deliveries. The two have yet to announce which market this will be live in, but the plan is to launch the several-month-long pilot this fall.

Nuro’s intent is to use its self-driving technology in the last mile for the delivery of local goods and services. That could be things like groceries, dry cleaning, an item you left at a friends house or really anything within city limits that can fit inside one of Nuro’s vehicles. Nuro has two compartments that can fit up to six grocery bags each.

When it came to going to market, Nuro CEO Dave Ferguson told me groceries were most exciting to him. And Kroger particularly stood out because of its smart shelf technology and partnership Ocado around automated fulfillment centers.

“With the pilot, we’re excited about getting more experience interacting with real customers and understanding exactly what they want,” Ferguson said. “The things they love about it, the things they don’t love as much. As an organization for us, it’s also very valuable for us to have to exercise our operational muscle.”

Throughout the pilot program, Nuro will be looking to see how accurate its estimated delivery times are, how the public reacts to the vehicles and how regular, basic cars interact with self-driving ones.

The pilot will be live in just one market, but Kroger has 2,800 stores nationwide so Nuro sees the partnership as an opportunity to reach the vast majority of America. Kroger already offers same-day delivery to 75 percent of its customers. With Nuro on board, the idea is to deploy the self-driving cars in areas where Kroger has yet to offer delivery services.

“We want to be available to every single customer of ours,” Kroger Chief Digital Officer Yael Cosset told TechCrunch.

On the customer side, the experience will surely be different from what they’re used to. Currently, Kroger customers expect the grocery delivery drivers to bring their items to their front door. With Nuro’s vehicles, they’ll only go as far as curbside.

“This is an area where we’re going to learn a lot from the pilot,” Cosset said. “We have theories and assumptions about high density and low density and we want to see how that plays out.”

Cosset went on to describe how he doesn’t see the current model for delivery and autonomous vehicle-powered delivery as mutually exclusive.

“We believe they’re complimentary,” Cosset said. “We may realize the optimal time to use autonomous vehicles is between 10 – 11 in the morning and the rest of the day have a fully-staffed model.”

Down the road, Nuro will continue looking at additional partners for its local delivery ambitions. Although Nuro is excited about the partnership with Kroger, it’s not an exclusive one.

“Given we’re a startup, we can’t afford to put our eggs in one basket,” Ferguson said. “But we do have the full intention of going big with Kroger and trying to do as much as we can together.”

Other potential partners for Nuro may include those like local dry cleaners, bakeries and florists.

“I think the only way realistically to do that is to provide a way for customers to access all of these local services through one spot,” Ferguson said. “That way, we’ll be able to collectively provide this local community delivery service and have some way to get all these local businesses within the same experience.”

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Electric scooter and bike parking has arrived

Zagster, the bike-share company behind the Pace brand, is launching what it’s calling Pace Parking. The idea is for it so serve as a parking platform for bikes, electric bikes and electric scooters. Pace is first launching these in Chicago, Austin and Bloomington, Ind., with the plan to launch in additional cities this year.

This parking platform is designed to support dockless lock-to vehicles, like JUMP bikes and Skip scooters. In partnership with cities, private landowners and local businesses, the idea is to make sure communities have proper parking infrastructure.

“With the meteoric rise of dockless bikes, ebikes and scooters in the U.S., our cities are now in the early stages of a massive transformation in how people get around — one as significant as the personal automobile in 20th century,” Zagster CEO Tim Ericson said in a statement. “Imagine a city with tens of thousands of cars and nowhere to park them — this is the huge challenge faced by every major U.S. city right now. Without mobility parking infrastructure, cities have no solution to secure the flood of new vehicles descending upon their streets and sidewalks, and we are the first company to do something about it. As the pioneer of lock-to dockless bike sharing, we’re proud to deliver the first ever universal, secure, smart parking platform for parking not just Pace bikes, but other shared bikes, personal bikes, electric scooters, and future mobility vehicles.”

Earlier this year, Zagster raised a $15 million round led by Edison Capital Partners. The startup has also unveiled its new bike parking system for both shared and personal bikes.

“Bikes have always locked to things,” Zagster CEO Tim Ericson said in a press release. “Cities have been willing to experiment with dockless bikes that don’t lock to anything because they lack sufficient bike parking and, until Pace, lacked a partner willing to install this infrastructure at no cost.”

Zagster’s Pace is one of the newer entrants to the bike-share space, which consists of a number of startups and larger companies battling for contracts with cities all over the world.

Pace, which launched in December, currently operates in Tallahassee, Florida and Knoxville, Tennessee. With the funding, Zagster plans to launch Pace in additional cities this year. Zagster also operates a bike-share solution for municipalities looking to offer their own city-specific services. Zagster, which launched in 2007, operates more than 200 bike-shares across 35 states in the U.S. This move to support multi-modal transportation options likely signals the entrance of yet another electric scooter service.

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Instead of points, Bumped gives equity in the companies you shop at

What does brand loyalty even mean anymore? App downloads, points, stars, and other complex reward systems have not just spawned their own media empires trying to decipher them, they have failed at their most basic objective: building a stronger bond between a brand and its consumers.

Bumped wants to reinvent the loyalty space by giving consumers shares of the companies they shop at. Through Bumped’s app, consumers choose their preferred retailer in different categories (think Lowe’s vs The Home Depot in home improvement), and when they spend money at that store using a linked credit card, Bumped will automatically give them ownership in that company.

The startup, which is based in Portland and was founded in March 2017, announced the beta launch of its service today, as well as a $14.1 million series A led by Dan Ciporin at Canaan Partners, along with existing seed investors Peninsula Ventures, Commerce Ventures, and Oregon Venture Partners.

Bumped is a brokerage, and the company told me that it has passed all FINRA and SEC licensing. When consumers spend money at participating retailers, they receive bona fide shares in the companies they shop at. Each retailer determines a loyalty percentage rate, which is a minimum of 1% and can go up to 5%. Bumped then buys shares off the public market to reward consumers, and in cases where it needs to buy fractional shares, it will handle all of those logistics.

Bumped’s app allows users to track their shares

For founder and CEO David Nelsen, the startup doesn’t just make good business sense, it can have a wider social impact of democratizing access to the public equity markets. “A lot of brands need to build an authentic relationship with the customers,” he explained to me. “The brands that have a relationship with consumers, beyond price, are thriving.” With Bumped, Nelsen’s goal is to “align the interests of a shareholder and consumer, and everybody wins.”

His mission is to engage more Americans into the equity markets and the power of ownership. He notes that far too many people fail to setup their 401k, and don’t invest regularly in the stock market, citing a statistic that only 13.9% of people directly own a share of stock. By offering shares, he hopes that Bumped engages consumers to think about their relationship to companies in a whole new way. As Nelsen put it, “we are talking about bringing a whole new class of shareholders into the market.”

This isn’t the first time that Nelsen has built a company in the loyalty space. He previously was a co-founder and CEO of Giftango, a platform for prepaid digital gift cards that was acquired by InComm in late 2012.

Consumers will have to choose their Bumped loyalty partner in each category, like burgers

That previously experience has helped the company build an extensive roster for launch. Bumped has 19 brands participating in the beta, including Chipotle, Netflix, Shake Shack, Walgreens, and The Home Depot. Another 6 brands are currently papering contracts with the firm.

Ciporin of Canaan said that he wanted to fund something new in the loyalty space. “There has been just a complete lack of innovation in the loyalty space,” he explained to me. “I think about it as Robinhood meets airline points programs.” One major decider for Ciporin in making the investment was academic research, such as this paper by Jaakko Aspara, showing that becoming a shareholder in a company tended to make consumers significantly more loyal to those brands.

In the short run, Bumped heads into a crowded loyalty space that includes companies like Drop, which I have covered before on TechCrunch. Nelsen believes that the stock ownership model is “an entirely different mechanism” in loyalty, and that makes it “hard to compare” to other loyalty platforms.

Longer term, he hints at exploring how to offer this sort of equity loyalty model to small and medium businesses, a significantly more complex challenge given the lack of liquid markets for their equity. Today, the company is exclusively focused on publicly-traded companies.

Bumped today has 14 people, and is targeting a team size of around 20 employees.

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Bannersnack makes it easy to punch the monkey (and more)

An app like Bannersnack is something you never think you need until you do. Designed by a digital marketer from Romania, Gabriel Ciordas, the app was originally called FlashEff and was used to create Flash banners for online marketers. Over time, however, HTML5 and graphics overtook Flash and the company pivoted to offering easy-to-use design tools for marketers and business owners.

The service is free to try and costs $7 a month 30 thirty static images and $18 a month gets you embedded banners with full analytics. The company is completely bootstrapped and has been working in the space since 2008.

“Bannersnack has always been self-funded. We built our resources step by step, as our business grew together with our efforts. We think it’s fair to say that we worked for every penny we’ve ever gotten and further invested it back into growing our business,” said Ciordas.

The service has 100,000 monthly users who create 180,000 visuals a month. They offer standalone graphics as well as responsive HTML5 images. The most interesting tool, the Banner Generator, creates banners in multiple sizes instantly, freeing business owners up to do what they do do best: sell stuff.

Again, it is rare to see a product so focused on a single, important niche and Bannersnack fits the bill. While you could fire up Pixelmator and try to make your own banners, this tool is surprisingly pleasant to use and works quite well.

“Our main objective is to empower marketers, designers, and business owners, while reshaping the way agencies and businesses create visuals for their marketing purposes,” said Ciordas. After all, not everyone has the skills or talent to create flashing banners featuring exciting mortgage reduction opportunities and free iPad sweepstakes.

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Wednesday, 27 June 2018

Warby Parker’s Dave Gilboa is coming to Disrupt SF

In 2010, the eyewear industry got its long-awaited new player. Warby Parker entered the market with a simple offering: stylish Rx glasses, bought online, for a reasonable price.

While this sounds like a pretty obvious concept in 2018, the world of ecommerce was just beginning its insane growth streak back in 2010. And glasses, of all things, weren’t something that many people thought could be purchased online.

But through a simple try-before-you-buy system, Warby Parker made it possible.

Flash forward eight years, and Warby Parker has become a household name, with more than 50 stores across the United States and Canada, and more than $290 million raised. The brand has evolved beyond a simple set of glasses to become an example for many startups, particularly where social good is concerned.

For each pair of glasses sold, Warby Parker donates a pair to someone who needs glasses but doesn’t have access to them.

All that said, we’re obviously thrilled to have Warby Parker cofounder and Co-CEO Dave Gilboa join us on stage at Disrupt SF.

Gilboa has helped Warby Parker grow from a small ecommerce startup to a massive brand, and has helped evolve the company beyond an ecommerce brand, providing vision tests alongside the product.

At Disrupt SF, we’ll discuss how Warby grew its ecommerce presence, the company’s approach to offline retail vs online, and what’s next in store for Warby Parker.

Gilboa joins other notable speakers such as Drew Houston, Priscilla Chan, Ashton Kutcher, Reid Hoffman, and many more.

Tickets to the conference, which runs September 5 to September 7, are available here.

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Taster creates restaurants for Deliveroo and UberEats

French startup Taster, formerly known as Mission Food, is building restaurants around big cities specifically for Deliveroo, UberEats and Glovo. These restaurants don’t have any table, they’re all about serving food on online platforms.

The startup just raised a $4 million funding round led by Sunstone Capital, with Global Founders Capital, Thierry Gillier and LocalGlobe also participating. Kima Ventures and Marc Menasé participated in the previous round.

If you look at food startups, it all started with Just Eat, GrubHub and Seamless listing restaurants with delivery fleets. This way, instead of keeping a pile of flyers with phone numbers, you can find all the pizza and sushi places on one single site.

But Deliveroo, UberEats, Glovo and Postmates introduced a new chunk of restaurants to deliveries. For the first time, regular restaurants could start accepting online orders. Startups could take care of the orders and deliveries.

And some restaurants have become instant hits on those platforms. But it doesn’t necessarily scale as much as they would want. They’re still constrained by the size of their kitchens, and opening a new restaurant is a big deal.

That’s why Deliveroo started investing in satellite kitchens for the most popular restaurants — these kitchens are basically containers on car parks.

Taster doesn’t want to work with existing restaurants. The company wants to create new restaurant chains instead and control the menu and the kitchens.

The name Taster might not be familiar, but you may have already ordered from a Taster virtual restaurant. The company has set up three Mission Saigon in Paris, one in Madrid and one in Lille.

You may have also ordered from O Ke Kai’s two restaurants in Paris. More recently, Taster launched Out Fry.

As you can see, Taster has been quite aggressive when it comes to rolling out new restaurants. When you find those “restaurants” on Deliveroo or another platform, nothing tells you that it isn’t actually a restaurant but just a kitchen.

This is a smart approach as Taster can keep the costs down. It doesn’t need to rent big spaces, it doesn’t need as much staff and it doesn’t handle deliveries. By listing its restaurants on third-party platform, Taster can also more easily compete with full-stack startups, such as Frichti, Nestor, FoodChéri and others.

But Taster’s success might be an issue. If the startup manages to take over Deliveroo and UberEats, traditional restaurants might complain. Deliveroo and UberEats could also change their rules and delist them overnight.

Taster is highly dependent on those third-party platforms. But it shouldn’t be an issue for now as more restaurants bring more customers for delivery companies.

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Hoodline launches a content recommendation widget that’s all about local news

Hoodline continues to serve as a reliable source of neighborhood news for San Francisco and Oakland, but it’s also been building tools that help other publications supplement their local coverage.

Earlier this year, the company launched a news wire that automates the creation of local news stories using on online data sources like Yelp and Zumper. Now it’s also releasing a content recommendation widget that’s similarly focused on local news.

We’ve all seen widgets from companies like Outbrain and Taboola, usually with celebrity-focused, gimmicky or otherwise sensationalistic headlines. COO Jessica Wolfe said the Hoodline module was built in response to requests from the “hundreds” of publishers and broadcasters that the company works with — they wanted to provide content recommendations that were genuinely relevant to readers, not just “generic clickbait.”

The stories being recommended come from several different sources — the individual publisher (in fact, they can limit the recommendations to their own articles if they want), the Hoodline Local Data Wire and the broader network of publishers.

Whatever the source, CTO Shwetank Kumar said Hoodline’s Atlas platform can automatically tag articles with things like geolocation and sentiment. So when the module shows up next to an article, it can recommend other stories that are locally relevant and have a similar topic and tone.

By limiting recommendations to local news from the Hoodline network, the company should be able to avoid most of the clickbait filling up other content widgets. In addition, Head of Product Melissa Mazman said Hoodline is trying to “strike a balance” by surfacing content that people actually want to read without prioritizing clicks at the cost of quality or other engagement metrics.

Kumar added that the location-focused approach also means that Hoodline can provide these recommendations without tracking your online behavior. Or as he put it, “We try to do personalization through localization rather than through privacy violation.”

Of course, not every neighborhood will have a rich supply of relevant stories, but Mazman said the module “keeps zooming out” to the city or even state level until it finds relevant content. (Not that going statewide is generally necessary — Mazman said pulling back to the metropolitan area is usually enough.)

Hoodline says that in the initial tests, the module resulted in an average clickthrough rate that was more than double those of existing products.You can actually judge the recommendations side-by-side with Outbrain on the websites of local ABC TV stations (Hoodline participated in the startup accelerator run by ABC’s parent company Disney), for example in this story about a Taqueria fire on Houston — Outbrain’s recommendations appear on top, while Hoodline powers the “More from Houston” headlines.

By the way, I should note that Hoodline’s editorial team is led by former TechCrunch Editor (and my longtime friend) Eric Eldon. The startup was acquired by Ripple News (now known as Pixel Labs) in 2016, and since then, Hoodline has become the brand for all of the company’s consumer-facing products.

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Puppet raises $42M led by Cisco as its DevOps automation platform passes 40,000 businesses

Cordial raises $15M for smarter emails and messaging

Cordial, a San Diego startup building what CEO Jeremy Swift described as a “truly next-generation platform” for email marketing, has raised $15 million in Series B funding.

Swift and his co-founders come from email marketing company BlueHornet/Mapp Digital, which he said gave them the background to see “the market was really screaming: There needs to be a better way.”

We’ve written about plenty of other email marketing products. For example, last week I covered Stensul, which focuses on the email creation process. But Swift argued that most startups are building “point solutions” that sit on top of existing email platforms, whereas Cordial is “unequivocally” taking on the big marketing clouds offered by Oracle, Adobe, IBM and Salesforce.

“Cordial has gone to market to say you don’t need a legacy solution, plus a whole host of other point solutions, to try and do real-time messaging in a better way,” he said.

When Swift and Sales Engineering Manager Justin Soni gave me a quick demo of the Cordial platform, one of the big distinctions they pointed to was the way it uses customer data. Rather than targeting and customizing emails based on broad customer segments, they showed me how a Cordial email can incorporate dynamic elements that are updated with real-time, personal data — as Soni clicked around on different products on the merchant website, the email he was creating changed based on that behavior.

Cordial Machine Learning

In addition, Cordial applies machine learning technology to optimize the emails — not just testing out variations on a one element, but every part of the email, from the subject line to the call-to-action button.

And while Cordial started out with email, Swift said it’s expanded to include other messaging channels like push notifications and SMS. All of that can be coordinated from within a tool called Podium, where a marketer uses a visual interface to build different communication flows based on customer actions.

Cordial previously raised $6 million in Series A funding. Companies using the platform include Freshly, La Quinta and 1-800-Contacts.

The new funding was led by PeakSpan, with participation from Upfront Ventures and High Alpha. Swift said this will allow Cordial to continue adding new marketing channels (the goal is one per quarter) and to continue investing in the technology.

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