Two Chairs nabs $7M for its client-therapist matching app and brick-and-mortar clinics

The future of healthcare isn’t entirely digital. For encounters as intimate as the client-therapist dynamic, a face-to-face relationship is still key.

For those able to afford tech-enabled therapy services, Two Chairs, a San Francisco-headquartered mental healthcare business, may be of interest. The startup believes in the power of in-person therapy, as opposed to the new variety of affordable digital tools meant to replace or coexist with therapy services. Today, the company is announcing a $7 million Maveron-led Series A financing to open additional brick-and-mortar clinics and build out its client-therapist matching app, which leverages technology to pair its customers with a therapist best-tailored to their needs.

The company currently operates four clinics in the Bay Area, where patients can access individual or group therapy. Each of those clinics was built with modern, young professionals in mind using “thoughtful design” to create “non-judgmental spaces.”

A Two Chairs clinic, which emphasizes “non-judgmental” design

The mobile app and clinic interior design are the key differences between Two Chairs and a neighborhood private practice, it says. As far as pricing, at $180 an hour, a session doesn’t differ terribly from a typical session at a Bay Area private practice (the company does accept insurance). The startup currently employs 30 therapists, who also are available over video chat should a client be sick or traveling, with a customer base of 2,000.

Two Chairs was founded in 2017 by former Palantir employee Alex Katz (pictured). In a conversation with TechCrunch, Katz admitted procuring real estate for Two Chairs’ brick-and-mortar clinics has been an expensive and difficult endeavor. It’s no wonder venture capitalists tend to favor IT startups devoid of the overhead costs associated with firms in the real estate business. Katz is hoping the latest investment, which brings Two Chairs’ total raised to $8 million, will help the business quickly sign additional leases outside of the most expensive city in the U.S.

The cash will also be used to advance Two Chairs’ matching app. The app surveys potential clients on their history, preferences and goals, then uses a library of data to match the client with the most suitable therapist in its roster and to create a customized treatment plan. Katz says they’ve provided clients with an accurate match 95 percent of the time.

“We know that the client-therapist relationship is the best predictor of an outcome with care and while it sounds intuitive, matching is not a concept that has existed in the mental health field historically,” Katz told TechCrunch.

Two Chairs is one of several mental health startups to capture the attention of venture capitalists lately. Basis, which helps people cope with anxiety and depression through guided conversations via chat and video, emerged from stealth in 2018 with a $3.75 million investment led by Bedrock. Wisdo, a community-focused app that connects people seeking help with those who can offer help, brought in an $11 million investment in December and emotional well-being app Aura raised $2.7 million from Cowboy Ventures in October.

Those three businesses have one thing in common: they are digital-first endeavors looking to innovate on top of a broken mental healthcare model. Two Chairs’ plan to build additional therapy clinics, however, doesn’t feel particularly inventive. Opening a chain of therapy offices, rather, sounds like a hard-to-scale, expensive business idea.

As for the uptick in capital for mental health tech, Katz is satisfied Silicon Valley has finally acknowledged the problem: “I think Silicon Valley venture has had a preference for models that don’t involve brick-and-mortar and minimize the use of people; they prefer software businesses,” he said. “The reason we are taking this approach is we know from the research that really well-matched in-person therapy is really effective. Still, at a high level, it’s exciting. There are a lot of people thinking in innovative ways of how we can provide improved mental healthcare.”

Goldcrest Capital also participated in Two Chairs’ Series A.

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SoFi founder Mike Cagney’s new company, Figure, just raised another $65 million

Figure, a 13-month-old, San Francisco-based company that says it uses blockchain technology to provide home equity loans online in as little as five days, has raised a whole lot of money in not a lot of time: $120 million to date, including $65 million in fresh funding from RPM Ventures and partners at DST Global, with participation from DCG, Nimble Ventures, Morgan Creek and earlier investors Ribbit Capital and DCM.

The money isn’t entirely surprising, given who founded the company — Mike Cagney, who founded SoFi and built it into a major player in student loan refinancing in the U.S. before leaving amid allegations of sexual harassment and an anything-goes corporate culture that saw at least two former employees sue the company.

Today, SoFi has moved on under the leadership of CEO Anthony Noto, a former Twitter executive who is working to reshape SoFi from a lending company into more of a full-fledged financial services company, with savings and checking accounts, as well as exchange-traded funds, all with the aim of making its platform stickier than in the past.

It may be a bigger endeavor than Noto had realized. Though Cagney once predicted the company would IPO in 2018 or 2019, SoFi isn’t even considering a public offering this year, Noto told reporters earlier this week.

Cagney has meanwhile moved on, too, though he still seems set on taking on traditional banks. Indeed, while Figure is providing home loans today — it says it has provided more than 1,500 home equity lines to date — it’s also moving to diversify into new areas, including wealth management, unsecured consumer loans and checking accounts offered (for now) in partnership with an existing bank.

Interestingly, Figure, which employs 100 people, is targeting a very different demographic than did SoFi, as Cagney told American Banker recently. Whereas SoFi marketed to young people earning high salaries, Figure is going after older customers who may not be seeing much in the way of income but have much of their wealth tied up in their homes instead.

Given that older Americans are projected to outnumber children for the first time in history by 2030, according to U.S. census data, Cagney clearly sees the writing on the wall.

Unsurprisingly, he’s not the only one. Other startups trying to make it easier for Americans to borrow against their homes include Point, a roughly four-year-old startup that lends capital to people and receives partial ownership in their homes in return.

Cagney co-founded Figure with his wife, June Ou, who is the company’s chief operating officer. She was previously chief technology officer at SoFi.

As for its culture and lingering questions that customers and potential partners may have about what happened at SoFi, Cagney — who has said he had consensual sexual relationships with female subordinates at SoFi — insists that Figure is benefiting from lessons learned.

At SoFi, he told American Banker, “[W]e grew so fast and we never really understood what we were going to grow into, and culture never took a front seat.” Figure meanwhile has a “very clear adherence to a no-asshole policy.”

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Ceros raises $14M for its interactive content platform

Ceros allows marketers to create animated, interactive content — but don’t call it a content marketing company.

“We think content is just a dry, bland, over-leveraged, oversaturated space,” said founder and CEO Simon Berg. “The goal is not to hack the system, the goal is to make a great experience for your customers.”

That’s why he describes Ceros as a platform for creating experiences. The company is focused on powering beautiful, well-designed graphics and web pages, instead of blog posts or white papers that mostly exist to snare search traffic.

Ceros is announcing today that it’s raised $14 million in Series C funding.

Ceros previously raised $19.5 million in funding, according to Crunchbase. The new round was led by Greenspring Associates, with participation from Grotech Ventures, CNF Investments, Sigma Prime Ventures, StarVest Partners, Greycroft and Silicon Valley Bank.

“Ceros is well known for empowering marketers to think creatively, but we have also come to know Ceros as a highly capital efficient business, which is a refreshing change in the burn-rate happy world of digital,” said Greenspring’s John Avirett, General Partner in a statement. “We’re confident that this investment will catalyze Ceros’ continued growth while enabling their team to opportunistically pursue acquisitions that enhance the core product and further penetration of key markets.”

For examples of the different between Ceros “experiences” and run-of-the-mill content marketing, check out Ceros/Inspire, where some of the most viewed projects include a comic book-style blockchain explainer from Ozy and a “friend versus pro” created to promote H&R Block.

“What we’ve continued to work on over the last seven years is to comply with laws of physics that are laws of internet, whilst giving as much creative freedom as possible,” Berg said. “We want to put the creative and the design piece first.”

The company says it’s now working with more than 400 customers, including well-known brands like United Airlines and Red Bull, as well as publishers including Condé Nast and Vice, plus sports teams like the Baltimore Ravens and Detroit Lions.

“Both in terms of the revenues that we’ve reached and the clients that we’ve worked with … you never really ‘arrive,’ but I feel like we’ve reached a critical milestone,” Berg said.

Interactive Content Can Save Content Marketing From The Dark Side

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Zūm, a ridesharing service for kids, raises $40 million

Ride-sharing isn’t just for transporting teenagers and adults anymore. Zūm, a ridesharing startup for kids, just raised a $40 million Series C round led by BMW i Ventures with participation from Spark Capital and Sequoia Capital. This brings the company’s total funding to $70 million.

Zūm is a mobile app that enables parents to schedule rides for their kids from fully-vetted drivers. It also partners with school districts to support their transportation needs. To date, the company has partnered with 150 school districts across the country and transported more than 500,000 students.

“Zūm has proven itself as a force to be reckoned with in a market that has a lot of untapped opportunity,” BMW i Ventures Managing Partner Ulrich Quay said in a statement. “Its leadership is strong not only because of their drive to help working families, but because they themselves have families and understand the need for better child transportation, today. We’re proud to be supporting Zūm and look forward to seeing its momentum as it continues driving funds back into schools.”

The plan with the funding is to support the increase of partnerships with schools throughout the nation. Additionally, Zūm plans to use the funding to further develop its one-stop platform technology for schools. This platform features route optimization, vehicle and quality tracking and real-time vehicle dashboards for schools.

“I’m honored to gain the support of our incredible investors who believe in what Zūm does, and our mission to build the world’s largest and safest transportation service for students,” Zūm founder and CEO Ritu Narayan (pictured above) said in a press release. “It is beyond exciting to have investors who have supported transportation, tech and marketplace startups across the globe, and to know they see in Zūm what I’ve seen since the beginning—ineffective, inefficient school transportation is a massive issue and we need to build a better future for our children.”

Zūm, however, is not the only startup tackling transportation for kids. HopSkipDrive, a rideshare service that picks up your kids, similarly partners with school districts for school bus alternatives. In 2017, HopSkipDrive raised a $7.4 million round to bring its total funding to $21.5 million. There’s also Kango, a more Uber-like service for kids. However, you may recall Shuddle’s shutdown of its Uber-like service for kids in 2016. Shuddle had raised $12.2 million prior to shutting down. Perhaps partnering with schools and school districts is the way to go in this kid ridehailing business.

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Mirakl raises $70 million to manage the marketplace of your e-commerce website

French startup Mirakl raised a $70 million funding round. Bain Capital is leading the round with existing investors 83North, Felix Capital and Elaia Partners also participating.

If you’ve bought a few products from a third-party seller on an e-commerce website that isn’t Amazon or Alibaba, chances are you’ve used Mirakl in the past. The company has built a solution to manage the marketplace of your e-commerce platform.

While Mirakl doesn’t have a ton of customers, each customer is very valuable. The company has worked with some of the biggest names in e-commerce so that they could add a new revenue stream with a marketplace. Examples include Best Buy in Canada, Walmart in Mexico, Office Deport and Darty.

The startup also lets you create B2B marketplaces for bulk selling and other complicated transactions. Sellers can set minimum and maximum quantities and customize their listings.

In 2018, the startup managed to add 60 customers and launch 37 marketplaces — it doubled the gross merchandise volume compared to 2017. And it’s true that marketplaces are attractive. You can greatly increase your sales without any physical infrastructure investment as third-party sellers handle logistics.

Behind the scene, Mirakl has developed connectors that work with multiple e-commerce platforms. After setting up Mirakl, your third-party sellers will also get their own on-boarding back end. And Mirakl continuously helps you when it comes to maintaining a certain level of quality and handling orders.

More recently, Mirakl has developed a catalog manager so that you can more easily manage product listings. It lets you get product information, merge product listings and moderate your platform in general. Any e-commerce website can use it, not just websites that operate a Mirakl marketplace.

The company has also launched a services marketplace so that you can upsell your customers before they check out with extended warranties and insurance products from third-party companies.

Mirakl works with global B2B platforms as well as retail websites that usually operate in a country or a handful of countries. 30 percent of retail clients are French, 30 percent are American and 40 percent are from the rest of the world. The startup charges an upfront fee as well as a monthly subscription that varies according to the success of your marketplace.

With today’s funding round, the company plans to do more of the same, at a bigger scale. Mirakl will expand the team, expand to new countries and improve its product offering.

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Presto raises $30M to bring its AI platform and tabletop ordering hardware to restaurant chains

The “restaurant of the future” may elicit thoughts of a chrome diner with robot servers and an otherwise hefty amount of Tokyo futurist kitsch, but the fact is that the forthcoming sit-down dining experience may just end up looking a lot like ordering from a takeout app.

Presto is working with restaurants to update the 21st century dine-in experience, letting customers order and pay from their table with a tablet device while also providing hardware like wearables for servers so they can be alerted when they are needed by customers.

The company announced today that they’ve raised $30 million in growth funding from Recruit Holdings and Romulus Capital. I2BF Global Ventures, EG Capital and Brainchild Holdings also participated in the raise. 

Considering how much online shopping has shaped commerce and apps like Instacart and Uber Eats are changing how we get food delivered to our houses, it’s a bit peculiar that physical restaurants with hundreds of locations have been so slow to shift the customer experience toward a greater reliance on tech.

Presto has launched partnerships with a number of restaurant chains like Applebee’s, Red Lobster, Denny’s and Outback Steakhouse. These aren’t exactly mom-and pop locations, but Presto CEO Raj Suri says these large restaurant groups are always looking to shift their weight to improve efficiencies across the board with new tech in a way that most small businesses just aren’t.

“I would say most restaurant groups are looking at how they can become more of a tech company… and adopt technology that could help them become more efficient,” Suri tells TechCrunch. “The industry is moving in this direction in a pretty significant way and it won’t be long before you see our technology in every restaurant.”

Beyond the ordering hardware, Presto’s new AI platform is aiming to give restaurants a more robust look at the state of each individual business and insights that help managers make decisions about staffing or deciding which food items to stock. The platform leverages a variety of data inputs so that things like nearby sporting events or weather patterns can be integrated into suggestions about how many servers should be staffed on a given Tuesday.

Presto is looking to supercharge their platform with the funding and rapidly expand their footprint. The 11-year-old company is now supporting 5,000 restaurant locations, but Suri says that Presto will double that number in 2019.

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Coterie, a young New York startup, promises to deliver charming party kits to your doorstep

Party planning can be fun if you have the time for it and happen to know what you’re doing. For the rest of us, it can be a daunting, time-consuming endeavor, one that requires visits to numerous websites, in-store visits when those products invariably don’t arrive in time, then return visits to pick up those last items that you could have sworn you’d thrown in your shopping cart but did not.

Enter Coterie, a nine-month-old, New York-based startup that was incubated with the help of the investment firm Female Founders Fund and that is assembling party kits that it’s delivering to customers’ doorsteps, for everything from birthday parties to baby showers to friendversary get-togethers.

Just tell the site how many people you expect, whether it’s 10 or 50, then pick a kit. For example, the “lux” version of its “shine on” package — which could pretty much suit any occasion — comes with glittery plates, metallic flatware, votives, string lights, gold paper straws, dressed-up paper cups and napkins and confetti. Oh, also, gold paper fans as either wall or table decoration.

In the near future, customers of the site will also be able to handpick their products.

It’s less expensive to assemble your own party items, particularly if they are made of paper. That “lux” kit for 50 guests costs $329, with free shipping. These are also mostly items that can’t be reused.

Still, many of Coterie’s products can be recycled and, more to the point for Coterie, the sum of their parts can make a party sparkle in photos. Indeed, ease aside, a big motivator for Coterie customers seemingly will be how their parties look on social media, though venture capitalist Laura Chau disagrees with this assessment.

In fact, Chau, an investor at Canaan Partners who wrote a check to Coterie on behalf of her firm — Coterie has raised $2.75 million altogether, including from Female Founders Fund — says the company more or less pokes fun at social media. As she explains it, Coterie is building a modern brand that gives consumers a “frictionless, elevated and more beautiful experience. But the goal is not to feed on the fake perfection of Instagram but to blow up the idea that such perfection is real.”

Either way, party kits done the right way looks like a big business opportunity to Chau, who says she sees dozens of direct-to-consumer brands every month that might be interesting but don’t fit the venture model because the market is too small or too crowded. With Coterie, she says, it’s a “massive category with only one legacy player — Party City. And no one likes Party City.”

This last part is true, though there are also other, legacy players that no one really likes, including Oriental Trading Company.

Canaan and Female Founders Fund also appear to be betting that the tailwinds from Instagram and Pinterest will drive consumer demand for this kind of product. Just look up “festive planning” on Pinterest to see what we mean.

Coterie was founded by Sarah Raffa and Linden Ellis, two early employees of another e-commerce brand, Daily Harvest. According to an interview with CNN earlier this week, the friends were determined to start their own company, bouncing ideas off the partners at Female Founders Fund until collectively striking on Coterie.

The service launched on Monday.

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Compass acquires Contactually, a CRM provider to the real estate industry

Compass, the real estate tech platform that is now worth $4.4 billion, has made an acquisition to give its agents a boost when it comes to looking for good leads on properties to sell. It is acquiring Contactually, an AI-based CRM platform designed specifically for the industry, which includes features like linking up a list of homes sold by a brokerage with records of sales in the area and other property indexes to determine which properties might be good targets to tap for future listings.

Contactually had already been powering Compass’s own CRM service that it launched last year so there is already a degree of integration between the two.

Terms of the deal are not being disclosed. Crunchbase notes that Contactually had raised around $18 million from VCs that included Rally Ventures, Grotech and Point Nine Capital, and it was last valued at around $30 million in 2016, according to PitchBook. From what I understand, the startup had strong penetration in the market so it’s likely that the price was a bit higher than this previous valuation.

The plan is to bring over all of Contactually’s team of 32 employees, led by Zvi Band, the co-founder and CEO, to integrate the company’s product into Compass’s platform completely. They will report to CTO Joseph Sirosh and head of product Eytan Seidman. It will also mean a bigger operation for Compass in Washington, DC, which is where Contactually had been based.

“The Contactually team has worked for the past 8 years to build a best-in-class CRM that aggregates relationships and automatically documents every touchpoint,” said Band in a statement “We are proud that our investment into machine learning has resulted in new features like Best Time to Email and other data-driven, follow-up recommendations which help agents be more effective in their day-to-day. After working extensively with the Compass team, it was apparent that joining forces would accelerate our missions of building the future of the industry.”

For the time being, customers who are already using the product — and a large number of real estate brokers and agents in the US already were, at prices that ranged from $59/month to $399/month depending on the level of service — will continue their contracts as before, for the time being.

I suspect that the longer-term plan, however, will be a little different: you have to wonder if agents who compete against Compass would be happy to use a service where their data is being processed by it, and for Compass itself, I would suspect that having this tech for itself would give it an edge over the others.

Compass, I understand from sources, is on track to make $2 billion in revenues in 2019 (its 2018 targets were $1 billion on $34 billion in property sales, and it had previously said it would be doubling that this year). Now in 100 cities, it’s come a long way from its founding in 2012 Ori Allon and Robert Reffkin.

The bigger picture beyond real estate is that, as with many other analog industries, those who are tackling them with tech-first approaches are sweeping up not only existing business, but in many cases helping the whole market to expand. Contactually, as a tool that can help source potential properties for sale that owners hadn’t previously considered putting on the market, could end up serving that very end for Compass.

The focus on using tech to storm into a legacy industry is also coming at an interesting time. As we’ve pointed out before, the housing market is predicted to cool this year, and that will put the squeeze on agents who do not have strong networks of clients and the tools to maximise whatever opportunities there are out there to list and sell properties.

The likes of Opendoor — which appears to be raising money and inching closer to Compass in terms of valuation — is also trying out a different model, which essentially involves becoming a middle part in the chain, buying properties from sellers and selling them on to buyers, to speed up the process and cut out some of the expenses for the end users. That approach underscores the fact that, while the infusion of technology is an inevitable trend, there will be multiple ways of applying that.

This appears to be Compass’s first full acquisition of a tech startup, although it has made partial acquihires in the past.

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On the strength of its Mixer partnership, streaming toolkit developer Lightstream raises $8 million

Lightstream, a Chicago-based company that develops tools to augment live streams, has raised $8 million in new funding as it looks to add monitoring, management and monetization services to its suite of editing technologies.

Last year, the company inked a partnership with Microsoft‘s live-streaming Twitch competitor, Mixer, to let streamers on the platform add professional flourishes like images, overlays, transitions and text to streams or to edit streams, without a lot of professional editing tools or expertise.

“We got started when Twitch was the only game in town,” says Stu Grubbs, Lightstream’s co-founder and chief executive. “Twitch was the only big name back in 2014 when we started and to be a live streamer you needed to understand bit rates and codex. We set out to make that easier.”

The company works with Twitch, YouTube and Mixer, but it was when the partnership with Mixer came along that the company’s user base began to explode.

Key to the adoption was Microsoft’s adoption of Beam, which lowered the latency on Mixer’s video streams and made that product more compelling to users. Coupled with Microsoft’s reach as one of the most popular platforms for PC and console gamers, Lightstream’s toolkit gained a powerful, and large, user base.

For the past few years, the company has had between 1,000 and 2,000 streamers signing up every week to use its tools. There are now roughly 10,000 streamers on the platform, according to a rough estimate.

Now, with the new money, the company will look to double the size of the team and add some features that have been requested by Lightstream’s growing community of users, Grubbs said.

As a result of the new round, which included a $6 million equity commitment from investors including Drive Capital, MK Capital and Pritzker Group, and a $2 million debt facility from Silicon Valley Bank, Drive Capital general partner Andy Jenks will take a seat on the company’s board of directors.

“Lightstream is an incredible company that has seen tremendous growth because of smart and efficient practices. Stu and his team stand at the convergence of multiple massive and rapidly growing industries,” said Jenks, in a statement. “Stu has immense passion and a keen vision for what they can do for creators and the impact Lightstream can have in live streaming, gaming, and beyond. They have assembled an incredible team, made smart strategic moves, created massive partnerships and are building towards something so big that we had to be a part of it.”

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This is the Stanford thesis presentation that launched Juul

Against a backdrop of public backlash and looming federal regulations, the world’s biggest e-cigarette manufacturer has released video of the original thesis presentation that launched Juul, with the hopes of making the case that its purpose is to do no harm — or at least less harm.

The founders of Juul have told their story before — the two met and became friends over smoke breaks at Stanford University, and eventually decided to design an alternative product to cigarettes. Juul today released a video of that thesis, presented by James Monsees (MFA in Product Design) and Adam Bowen (MSME in Product Design).

Bowen and Monsees say they started with the principle of harm reduction, aiming to keep the “good” and eliminate the “bad” from cigarettes. The people they spoke to said they were attracted to the ritual of smoking, and the satisfaction of basic human cravings like an oral fixation. However, smokers were tired of smelling like a cigarette and complained that, even if they weren’t being judged, they felt judged. Of course, hanging over all of this like a storm cloud is the fact that smoking is inherently bad for your health.

Monsees says in his presentation:

“Is it even possible to make a safe cigarette? What if smoking were safe? And even better, what if smoking wasn’t offensive to others?”

Back in 2004, when the presentation was given, Monsees and Bowen identified one of the strongest pillars of Juul’s value proposition as a cigarette replacement.

“It’s not the nicotine that’s really hurting you,” said Monsees. “It’s burning tobacco, the combustion and burning plant material.”

Professor at NYU’s College of Global Public Health David Abrams, who has advised Juul but not been compensated by them, told the New Yorker that the stigma of cigarettes has followed e-cigarettes.

“Cigarettes were a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” he said. “Now, with vaping, we have a sheep in wolf’s clothing, and we cannot get the wolf out of our minds.”

Part of the reason we can’t get the wolf out of our minds is the fact that minors have taken up e-cigarettes, and Juul in particular, in staggering numbers. For young people, nicotine and nicotine addiction have a far more egregious affect on health than they would for an adult former smoker. To teenagers, nicotine is indeed a wolf.

And it’s this issue that poses the greatest existential threat to Juul Labs. The FDA has asked for Juul and other e-cig companies to create and enforce new policies that will stymie use of these products by minors, but thus far Commissioner Gottlieb doesn’t seem too impressed.

In the presentation from 2004, Bowen presents a slide that shows the future company’s predicted demographic. On a scale from social smokers to pack-a-day smokers, Monsees and Bowen estimated that it would pick up users across the spectrum, with the majority of adoption coming from social/light smokers.

Ten years later, however, when the thesis project had evolved into the Ploom which then evolved into the Juul we know today, the company made a marketing decision that surely still haunts them. The early marketing campaign for the device showed young, hip models using the device. To this day, the campaign is cited by critics of the company for starting the youth craze over the device, which the FDA calls an epidemic.

Juul Labs has taken action to reverse this trend, including a $30 million investment in youth prevention, removal of non-tobacco-flavored nicotine pods from retail stores, deleting its social media, enforcing stricter age verification for online sales, an offensive legal push against counterfeiters and copycats, and a new $10 million ad campaign focused on attracting smokers to ‘make the switch’ to Juul.

“It [underage use] is an issue we desperately want to resolve,” Chief Product Officer and co-founder James Monsees said in August. “It doesn’t do us any favors. Any underage consumers using this product are absolutely a negative for our business. We don’t want them. We will never market to them. We never have. And they are stealing life years from adult cigarette consumers at this moment, and that’s a shame.”

Whether Juul’s efforts will be enough to prevent further regulation remains to be seen.

But from an entrepreneurial perspective, it’s interesting to see the earliest seed of a company that has now become a behemoth in its respective industry. In fact, Juul has grown to the point where Altria, makers of Marlboro cigarettes, have invested $12.8 billion in the company.

Alongside the thesis video, Juul also released a video of present-day Monsees and Bowen recalling the product design process for Juul.

“We started this project with the firm belief that innovation could address all the problems associated with smoking,” said Bowen in the video. “I would tell people, anyone who would listen, ’50 years from now no one will smoke cigarettes, they’re going to look back and think ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe people used to do that.” And now I think that’s actually going to happen much faster. In large part because of the progress that we’ve made.”

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The Shadow Ghost turns cloud gaming into a seamless experience

French startup Blade, the company behind Shadow, is launching a new set-top box to access its cloud gaming service — the Shadow Ghost. I’ve been playing with the device for a couple of weeks and here’s my review.

The Shadow Ghost is a tiny little box that doesn’t do much. The true magic happens in a data center near your home. When you sign up to Shadow, you don’t even have to get a box. You can simply subscribe to the service without any hardware device and use the company’s apps instead.

Shadow is a cloud computing service for gamers. For $35 per month, you can access a gaming PC in a data center and interact with this computer. Right now, Shadow gives you 8 threads on an Intel Xeon 2620 processor, an Nvidia Quadro P5000 GPU that performs more or less as well as an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080, 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. You can optionally get more storage with an extra subscription. It’s a full Windows 10 instance and you can do whatever you want with it.

Most subscribers now access Shadow using one of the company’s apps on Windows, macOS or Linux. You can also connect to your virtual machine from your iOS or Android phone or tablet. And now, you can also buy the Shadow Ghost if you want to use the service on a TV or without a computer.

I first used Shadow during the early days of the service back in early 2017. My first experience of the service felt like magic. Thanks to my high-speed fiber connection, I could play demanding games on a laptop. The best part was that the laptop fan would remain silent.

But it wasn’t perfect. Nvidia driver updates failed sometimes. Or your virtual machine would become completely unaccessible without some help from the customer support team.

In other words, the concept was great but the service wasn’t there yet.

Things have changed quite drastically after years of iteration on the apps, the streaming engine, the infrastructure and even the GPUs in the data centers. Blade co-founder and CEO Emmanuel Freund told me that the service has been working fine for just a few months.

It’s no surprise that those technical improvements have led to less churn, more referrals and more subscriptions. In July 2018, the startup had 20,000 subscribers. Now, there are 65,000 subscribers. There’s even more demand, but the company has had a hard time keeping up with new machines in data centers.

Shadow is currently available in France, the U.K., Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland and parts of the U.S. The company simply can’t accept customers from anywhere in the world because they need to live near a data center with Shadow servers.

Playing with the Shadow Ghost

The original Shadow box was a bit clunky. You could hear the fan, you had to rely on dongles if you wanted to pair a Bluetooth device or connect to a Wi-Fi network and there was no HDMI port — only DisplayPort. Internally, Blade has been debating whether the company needs another box.

In 2017, it was too hard to explain the product without some sort of physical device — you can replace a PC tower with a tiny box. But now that gamers understand the benefits of cloud gaming, there’s no reason to force you to buy a box.

And yet, the Shadow Ghost can be a useful little device in some cases. For instance, while the company has released an Android TV app and is testing a new app for the Apple TV, your current TV setup might not be compatible with Shadow. Or maybe you primarily use a laptop and you want to create a desktop PC setup with a display, a keyboard, a mouse and a Shadow Ghost.

Everything has been improved. It is now a fanless device that consumes less than 5W when it’s on. It has an Ethernet port, two USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, an audio jack and a single HDMI port. Bluetooth and Wi-Fi have finally been integrated in the device.

When you boot up the device, you get a menu to connect to a Wi-Fi network or control your Bluetooth devices. You can also change some streaming settings, like in the app launcher.

Once you press the start button, the video stream starts and it feels like you’re using a Windows computer. With Steam’s Big Picture mode, you get a convenient setup for couch gaming. I had no issue playing demanding games, such as Hitman 2. It works perfectly fine with a Wi-Fi connection and a Bluetooth controller.

Using the Shadow Ghost feels just like using the Shadow app on a computer. So it’s hard to say whether you need the Shadow Ghost or not. It depends on your setup at home and how you plan on using the service.

Last summer, Blade planned to manufacture 5,000 units. But now that the user base has grown significantly, that first batch could disappear in no time. It is available starting today for $140.

A gold rush

Cloud gaming is a hot space right now. While some companies have been experimenting with this concept for a while (Nvidia, Sony), it feels like everyone is working on a new service of some sort. Maybe the next Xbox is going to be about streaming a game from a data center. Maybe Amazon will offer a game library in the cloud as part of your Amazon Prime subscription.

Emmanuel Freund believes that it could be an opportunity for Shadow. Everybody is going to talk about cloud gaming if Apple and Google announce new services. But the startup has years of experiences in the space and has tried hard to compensate when it comes to latency and internet speeds.

It’s going to be harder to compete on content though. Game publishers and console manufacturers could start releasing exclusive titles on their cloud gaming services. That’s why Blade is thinking about new gaming experiences and exclusive content that would make Shadow more than a technical service.

(Controller for scale)

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Cequence Security hauls in $17M Series B investment to help protect applications

Cequence Security, a startup that helps companies protect applications against business logic attacks, announced a $17 million Series B investment today.

The round was by led by Dell Technologies Capital with participation from Shasta Ventures, the firm that had led the company’s $8 million A round last year. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $30 million, according to the company.

What the company does, according to CEO Larry Link, is protect applications against attacks that look like they could be normal behavior, yet are actually trying to do harm to a service. Specifically, it looks for automated bot attacks on business logic such as content scraping, account takeovers, reputation bongs, shopping bots, fake account creation and denial of inventory.

The company has a three-part approach to protecting applications from these kinds of attacks. First, the discovery phase where it finds vulnerabilities are in an application. Next, it detects who is taking advantage of these openings, and finally it defends against the attack and helps turn them away.

Screen: Cequence Security

Deepak Jeevankumar, who is leading the investment for Dell, sees a seasoned leader in Link, who spent 5 years running sales at Palo Alto Network, helping build the company into a powerhouse. Jeevankumer also likes the technical team, which helped build Symantec’s anti-malware platform. “It’s the perfect combination of top-notch go-to-market leadership and cyber technologists that is winning the confidence of many Fortune 100 customers in a short period of time,” he told TechCrunch.

One of the things that Jeevankumer liked about this approach was how it differed from more traditional application security strategy. “Traditional web application firewalls, DDOS products, RASP/IAST/DAST application security vendors can’t look in to these business logic level attacks as they focus on code-level issues. We are seeing enterprises moving a good part of their cyberspend in to this ‘business logic security’ category,” he said.

While it’s still early days for the company, which came out stealth in November, it is attracting large deals with an average size of $500,000, according to Link. Part of this is investment is going to go toward building its sales and marketing team to create awareness and sell directly to companies like financial services, social media, retail and gaming that could benefit from this kind of protection.

The company was founded in 2014, but spent a fair amount of time building the product before going to market for the first time last year. It currently has 34 employees working out of its Sunnyvale, California headquarters. That number is expected to increase fairly substantially with the new investment.

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Threads emerges from stealth with $10.5M from Sequoia for a new take on enabaling work conversations

The rapid rise of Slack has ushered in a new wave of apps, all aiming to solve one challenge: creating a user-friendly platform where coworkers can have productive conversations. Many of these are based around real-time notifications and “instant” messaging, but today a new startup called Threads coming out of stealth to address the other side of the coin: a platform for asynchronous communication that is less time-sensitive, and creating coherent narratives out of those conversations.

Armed with $10.5 million in funding from Sequoia, the company is launching a beta of its service today.

Roussau Kazi, the startup’s CEO who co-founded threads with Jon McCord, Mark Rich and Suman Venkataswamy, cut his social networking teeth working for six years at Facebook (with a resulting number of patents to his name around mechanics of social media), says that the mission of Threads is to become more inclusive when it comes to online conversations.

“After a certain number of people get involved in an online discussion, conversations just break and messaging becomes chaotic,” he said. (McCord and Rich are also Facebook engineering alums, while Venkataswamy is a Bright Roll alum who worked with McCord on another startup before this.)

And if you have ever used Twitter, or even been in a popular channel in Slack, you will understand what he is talking about. When too many people begin to talk, the conversation gets very noisy and it can mean losing the “thread” of what is being discussed, and seeing conversation lurch from one topic to another, often losing track of important information in the process.

And there is an argument to be made for whether a platform that was built for real-time information is capable of handling a difference kind of cadence. Twitter, as it happens, is trying to figure that out right now. Slack, meanwhile, has itself introduced threaded comments to try to address this too — although the practical application of its own threading feature is not actually very user friendly.

Threads answer is to view its purpose as addressing the benefit of “asynchronous” conversation: topics and conversations that can stretch out over hours, days or even longer, around specific topics. Threads doeesn’t want to be the place you go for red alerts or urgent requests, but where you go when you have thoughts about a work-related subject and how to tackle it.

[gallery ids="1789615,1789614,1789613,1789612,1789611,1789609,1789608,1789607,1789606"]

These resulting threads can in turn be looked at as straight conversations, or as annotated narratives.

For now, it’s up to users themselves to annotate what might be important to highlight for readers, although it sounds like Kazi would like to incorporate over time more features that might use natural language processing to summarize and pull out what might be worth following up or looking at if you only want to skim read a longer conversation.

Indeed, in this initial launch, the focus is all about what you want to say on Threads itself — not trying to compete against the likes of Slack, or Workplace (Facebook’s effort in this space), or Teams from Microsoft, or any of the others in the messaging mix. There are no integrations of other programs to bring data into Threads from other places, but there is a Slack integration in the other direction: you can create an alert there so that you know when someone has updated a Thread.

“We don’t view ourselves as a competitor to Slack,” Kazi said. “Slack is great for transactional conversation but for asynchronous chats, we thought there was a need for this in the market. We wanted something to address that.”

It’s may not be a stated competitor, but Threads actually has something in common with Slack: the latter’s launched with the purpose of enabling a certain kind of conversation between co-workers in a way that was easier to consume and engage with than email. You could argue that Threads has the same intention: email chains, especially those with multiple parties, can also be hard to follow and are in any case often very messy to look at: something that the conversations in Threads also attempt to clear up.

The company was actually formed in 2017, and for months now it has been running closed, private version of the service to test it out with a small amount of users. So far, however, the company sizes have ranged between 5 and 60 employees, Kazi tells me.

“By using Threads as our primary communications platform, we’ve seen incredible progress streamlining our operations,” says Perfect Keto & Equip Foods Founder and CEO, Anthony Gustin. “Internal meetings have reduced by at least 80 percent, we’ve seen an increase in participation in discussion and speed of decision making, and noticed an adherence and reinforcement of company culture that we thought was impossible before. Our employees are feeling more ownership and autonomy, with less work and time that needs to be spent — something we didn’t even know was possible before Threads.”

Kazi said that the intention is ultimately to target companies of any size, although it will be worth watching what features it will have to introduce to help handle the noise, and continue to provide coherent discussions, when and if they do start to tackle that end of the market.

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Challenger bank N26 plans to expand to Brazil

Fintech startup N26 plans to launch its retail banking service in Brazil in 2019. The company announced the news on stage at MWC in Barcelona.

N26 has already announced that its next market would be the U.S. at some point during the first half of 2019. Brazil should launch after that.

Right now, N26 is available in 24 European countries, including all of the Eurozone, the U.K., Denmark, Norway, Poland, and Sweden, Liechtenstein and Iceland.

The company reached 2 million customers back in November 2018. N26 says that it now has 2.5 million customers. It has processed €20 billion in transaction volume since its creation in 2013, and customers currently hold over €1 billion in N26 accounts.

Eduardo Prota will be the General Manager for Brazil. He’s worked for Santander, Cielo and various startups. N26 will compete with another challenger bank in Brazil, Nubank. The startup already has 5 million customers and has raised hundreds of millions of dollars.

N26 also recently raised $300 million at a $2.7 billion valuation. It’s clear that the company doesn’t want to stop at Europe. Let’s see if N26 can reproduce the same success on another continent.

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For a monthly subscription fee, this startup will send out customized gifts to current and prospective clients at scale

In today’s noisy, fast-paced world, finding a way to let clients and potential customers know that they are top of mind can be a major challenge for companies.

Enter Sendoso, a 2.5-year-old, San Francisco-based online-to-offline startup that promises to source, store and ship anything a business ever needs to send — and track its return on investment, to boot.

How does it work? According to CEO and co-founder Kris Rudeegraap, Sendoso, founded in 2016, already has 110 full-time employees, hundreds of vendor relationships and six warehouses, including its biggest, an 80,000-square-foot space in Las Vegas.

It also has relationships with dozens of workers on whom it can call to help it as it needs them and, as crucially, it integrates with Salesforce, Marketo and Engagio, among other platforms where companies largely live.

Collectively, these various pieces enable an employee to log into Sendoso and — according to a budget that has been preset — click on a contact, type out a customer message and choose a gift if desired, and that directive will show up as a campaign on the company’s end and as an order over at Sendoso, which then gets to work.

Want to send cupcakes to a client in New York? Done. A handwritten note to a prospect in Washington? No problem. See something on Amazon? Sendoso will have it sent to one of its warehouses, then repackage it so that it looks like you did it yourself. Then out the door it goes with a major carrier like FedEx or UPS.

Sendoso — which charges a monthly subscription fee for its services based on a company’s number of users and its sending volume — caters to both tech startups as well as Fortune 1,000 companies, with a client list that includes the marketing data company LiveRamp, the construction management software company ProCore and the call center platform TalkDesk, where Rudeegraap was most recently a senior account executive — and where he says the idea for Sendoso was born.

“Having worked in sales for 10 years, it was clear that customer success was shifting away from this dependence on email because of the digital noise being created.” He sensed that a channel with offline gifts like wine and handcrafted notes (penned by Sendoso warehouse workers) might be the solution.

The idea of business-to-business gifting is far from new, of course, and even though Sendoso is customizing the experience, it also isn’t alone, with other upstarts like Knack in Seattle and Alyce in Boston among many others focused on power gifting.

Still, investors like Sendoso’s packaging, so to speak. Indeed, Rudeegraap tells us the company just closed on $10.7 million in Series A funding to bolster its ranks and accelerate its reach beyond the 15 countries where the service is already available. The round was led by David Sack’s Craft Ventures, with participation from Signia Partners, Storm Ventures, Struck Capital and Hack VC.

Sendoso has now raised $13.2 million to date.

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Polis, the door-to-door marketer, raises another $2.5 million

Polis founder Kendall Tucker began her professional life as a campaign organizer in local Democratic politics, but — seeing an opportunity in her one-on-one conversations with everyday folks — has built a business taking that shoe leather approach to political campaigns to the business world.

Now the company she founded to test her thesis that Americans would welcome back the return of the door-to-door salesperson three years ago is $2.5 million richer thanks to a new round of financing from Initialized Capital (the fund founded by Garry Tan and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian) and Semil Shah’s Haystack.vc.

The Boston-based company currently straddles the line between political organizing tool and new marketing platform — a situation that even its founder admits is tenuous at the moment.

Polis is reinventing the door-to-door salesman

That tension is only exacerbated by the fact that the company is coming off one of its biggest political campaign seasons. Helping to power the get-out-the-vote initiative for Senatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke in Texas, Polis’ software managed the campaign’s outreach effort to 3 million voters across the state.

However, politically focused software and services businesses are risky. Earlier this year the Sean Parker-backed Brigade shut down and there are rumblings that other startups targeting political action may follow suit.

Sean Parker’s govtech Brigade breaks up, Pinterest acqhires engineers

“Essentially, we got really excited about going into the corporate space because online has gotten so nasty,” says Tucker. “And, at the end of the day, digital advertising isn’t as effective as it once was.”

Customer acquisition costs in the digital ad space are rising. For companies like NRG Energy and Inspire Energy (both Polis clients), the cost of acquisitions online can be as much as $300.

Polis helps identify which doors for salespeople to target and works with companies to identify the scripts that are most persuasive for consumers, according to Tucker. The company also monitors for sales success and helps manage the process so customers aren’t getting too many house calls from persistent sales people.

“We do everything through the conversation at the door,” says Tucker. “We do targeting and we do script curation (everything from what script do you use and when do you branch out of scripts) and we have an open API so they can push that out and they run with it through the rest of their marketing.”

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Zone7 raises $2.5 million seed round to predict injury risk for athletes

Zone7, the company using data and analytics to identify the potential for injuries with athletes, has raised $2.5 million in seed funding.

The company monitors athletes’ performance to determine when they need to be rested to avoid the potential for career threatening injuries.

The company’s technology has managed to attract investors including Resolute Ventures, UpWest, Amicus Capital, Dave Pell, PLG Ventures, along with athletes like the National Basketball Association star Kristaps Porzingis.

Teams in the MLB, La Liga, Champions League, MLS, collegiate athletic departments and Olympic teams are all using the company’s technology, according to a statement.

“Getting injured is one of the worst experiences for any athlete,” said Porzingis, in a statement. “The technology behind Zone7 is extremely impressive and has the potential to change the landscape of sports forever.”

Zone7 uses pattern recognition based on an athlete’s past performance and medical history to determine what course of action is best for the player to ensure that they don’t get hurt. So far, the company says it has achieved a 95% accuracy rate when it comes to predicting injuries and reduced the potential for injuries by 75%, according to a statement.

“Injuries in professional sports cost billions annually, but in the era of big data it doesn’t have to be that way,” said Tal Brown, co-founder and CEO of Zone7. “Professional sports franchises have massive amounts of untapped health and performance data that, when unlocked by AI, can become one of a team’s most valuable assets. By better understanding every athlete’s breaking points and implementing personalized intervention plans to prevent injuries before they occur, teams no longer have to accept injuries as an inevitability.”

Founded by Tal Brown and Eyal Aliakim, two Israelis who served in the military’s elite technology division called the 8200, Zone7’s executive team has years of experience working with Salesforce on the development of its Einstein product and with professional soccer franchises in Israel.

“Professional sports is, for the most part, slow to embrace medical and performance data, and as such, this has historically been a difficult target market to break into. Tal and Eyal have built a compelling product that is making teams stand up and take notice. It’s literally a game changer,” said Raanan Bar-Cohen, general partner at Resolute Ventures, in a statement. “The fact that Zone7 is the first company to show injuries can be avoided by using artificial intelligence, makes us extremely excited to partner with the Zone7 team.”

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Sapling, an employee management and on-boarding platform, lands $4 million in seed funding

Sapling, a three-year-old, San Francisco-based company whose employee management and onboarding software is being adopted by a small but growing number of mid-size companies with far-flung workforces, is announcing today that it has raised $4 million in funding from Gradient Ventures, which is Google’s AI fund, and Tuesday Capital, formerly known as CrunchFund.

It quietly secured the funding several months ago and has been using it to ramp up to the 50 people it currently employs.

The company’s founding team is the kind that investors like to see, meaning that in many ways, their previous work experiences led them to start Sapling.

Cofounder and CEO Bart Macdonald has spent his entire career in HR, working most recently in Melbourne, Australia, as a regional director for the global coding school General Assembly, where he hired and managed a 10-person marketing, sales and operations team.

Meanwhile, cofounder Andy Crebar (born in the same Sydney hospital as Macdonald, a day later) also knows the plight of individuals trying to seamlessly onboard new hires, having worked most recently on business development initiatives at a fintech startup called Credible Labs where adding headcount was, as at many companies, a point of frustration.

“I liked that Bart and Andy had lived through their own experiences dealing with crappy HR software in previous positions and thus really understood how customers view the problem,” says Tuesday Capital cofounder Pat Gallagher.  “The fact that neither are technical would have been an issue if we were investing pre product, but by the time we invested, they had proven they could build software that their customers loved.”

In fact, says Gallagher, his team was drawn to Sapling specifically because a handful of the firm’s portfolio companies has been using its onboarding software and “really raving about it.  It’s hard to find HR software that people really like, so that was a big positive for us and helped cut through the noise of the space that they operate in.”

So what’s so special about Sapling? Mostly, it seems, its approach brings together the tools and software that HR execs are already using, including ADP for payroll, or G Suite for productivity, and Lever for recruiting, integrations that also employ a heavy dose of AI to anticipate the behaviors of employees, making it easier for managers to recruit, aid, manage and support current and future staffers.

As Macdonald explains it on the simplest level, Sapling not only provisions software for them but it connects their tools “so they don’t have to  open 10 tabs. All they have to do is run their workflow inside of Sapling so that, for example, an employee can ask for time off in Slack,” and that request will automatically be reflected in the employer’s payroll and benefits systems (once approved).

Sapling currently works with companies with anywhere from 100 to 1,500 employees, including InVision, an eight-year-old commercial platform used by design teams to create digital products for mobile and desktop that is currently investing its Series F round. InVision, which has a large distributed workforce, says Sapling has saved the company 1,000 hours by speeding up communications and making employee engagement far more seamless.

What comes next for Sapling remains to be seen. It’s in an awfully crowded category, with no shortage of all-in-one HR solutions attracting venture capital. In the meantime, with low unemployment creating headaches for many outfits looking to keep its talent, Sapling is smartly positioning itself as an important tool in specifically helping companies with geographically distributed teams to retain and engage employees. Customers like Invision, along with Digital Ocean, KPMG, and Kayak, say it’s working, too.

Above, left to right: founders Bart Macdonald and Andy Crebar, courtesy of Sapling.

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Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI fund, leads $7M investment in English learning app Elsa

Google’s Gradient Ventures, the search giant’s dedicated AI fund, is casting its eye to Asia after it led a $7 million Series A round for Elsa, a startup that operates an app for English language learners.

The deal is Gradient’s first in Asia, and it includes participation from existing investors Monk’s Hill Ventures and SOSV. Elsa has now raised $12 million to date.

Elsa was founded in 2015 as a way to help non-English speakers improve their accent and general speaking ability. Vu Van, CEO and one half of the founding team, is a Vietnamese national who, despite being fluent in English, struggled to be understood after moving to the U.S. to study and then work. Together with speech recognition researcher Dr. Xavier Anguera — the startup’s CTO who leads its Portugal-based tech team — Van started Elsa to help people in the same predicament.

“I was very good at grammar, reading and writing but I realized people had a hard time understanding me because I had a very strong accent and my pronunciation wasn’t proper,” Van, who is based in San Francisco but travels extensively, told TechCrunch in an interview. “This impacts confidence when you apply for jobs or are even just meeting friends.”

“There are so many English learning solutions but they are mostly focused on expanding vocabulary or grammar, very few deal with pronunciation,” she added.

Elsa uses voice recognition and AI to grade a user’s speaking versus standard American English (and I thought us Brits were the global standard…) giving them a score at the end. That helps track their progress, while it focuses on pronunciation with a detailed review on how a user is speaking.

The service uses a freemium model that grants users full access to 1,000 courses for around $3-6 per month depending on the length of the package they select. That ranges from one month of access to 12 months. New content is added every week, Van said.

With this money in the bag, Elsa is going after growth in a number of its most promising markets.

The service has users in more than 100 countries, but Vietnam is its top market, with two million paying users. Partly because it is Van’s home market, Elsa has doubled down on Vietnam with a local sales team and localized payments, including the likes of bank transfers and local wallets.

That’s the blueprint for expansion in its next three target countries: Japan, Indonesia and India. Elsa has opened an office in Tokyo and is planning to introduce more localized content for Japanese users. Similar efforts will happen in Indonesia and India, where Van said the app sees strong engagement and downloads without any paid marketing efforts.

Elsa is also working on expanding its content from English to include other languages. Spanish is currently on the horizon and the company is already preparing the back-end technology to make it possible.

“We have to build the voice recognition technology to recognize those languages accurately. We have the infrastructure but now just need to collect voice data to train the model,” explained Van.

Vu Van started Elsa in 2015 with Dr. Xavier Anguera to help non-English speakers improve their accent and general speaking ability.

Beyond geographic expansion, Elsa is also going after schools and classrooms. Already, in Vietnam, it is working with a handful of schools that have added the app to their classroom work. The company allows schools to upload their specific content or curriculum to Elsa to make it part of a student’s homework or assessment. Teachers can see if a student has completed oral homework, and the app grades their efforts.

“We want to help these teachers help their students,” Van said. “Even with the best intentions, they simply can’t teach speaking.”

The model for the education push sees schools pay a licensing fee per student, which Van said is subsidized, while uploading their content is free.

Snagging investment from Gradient is a notable achievement for Elsa, but it will also allow the startup to tap into the company’s talent, too. That’s because Gradient operates a rotational program that allows Google employees to spend three to six months working at portfolio startups on secondment. That process hasn’t kicked off for Elsa just yet, but Van is hopeful of securing an engineer who might otherwise be prohibitively expensive for her company.

Gradient Ventures was founded in 2017 and this deal is the fund’s 18th, according to Crunchbase. Its previous investments include Canvass Analytics and Test.ai.

The Elsa team

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Search marketing company Botify raises $20M

Botify, a search engine optimization company that works with customers like Expedia and Nike, announced today that it has raised $20 million in Series B funding.

Co-founder and CEO Adrien Menard said that the opportunity in SEO is “even bigger now than in the past,” and that the problem is much broader problem than many realize.

“Most people think about SEO in terms of keyword optimization, but
more than 50 percent of the pages in large websites are not being indexed,” he said. So Botify can identify which pages aren’t being crawled by Google, and then make recommendations on how to better organize your content.

Over time, Botify has also launched a keyword product, as well as tools like a JavaScript crawler and mobile versus desktop analysis. Menard said the company now offers a platform designed for “optimization of every stage of the search process.”

Botify is an SEO crawler that helps your website optimize for Googlebot

The new funding was led by France’s Idinvest Partners, with participation from Ventech. Botify has now raised a total of $27 million.

The company was founded in France, launching in the United States after taking the stage at TechCrunch’s Disrupt NY conference in 2016. Next, it’s opening what it calls a “second U.S. headquarters” in Seattle (the first is in New York City), which Menard said will mostly provide sales and support for West Coast customers.

In addition to announcing the funding and the new office, Botify has also grown its leadership team, with the hiring of Christophe Frenet as senior vice president of product and Rachel Meranus as chief marketing officer, as well as the addition of Neolane co-founder Stephane Dehoche and former BuzzFeed President Greg Coleman to its board of directors.

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Dipsea raises $5.5M for short-form, sexy audio stories

A new wave of female-led businesses want to help women get off.

Dipsea, an app-based platform for short-form erotic audio stories, is the latest to grab funding from venture capital investors. The female-founded San Francisco-headquartered startup, which officially launched in December, has raised $5.5 million in a round led by Bedrock Capital and Thrive Capital. The funding comes amid a notable explosion in interest and investment in audio content consumption and creation, as well as an uptick in AirPod sales, easily removable wireless earbuds that encourage listeners to enjoy snackable audio like Dipsea’s erotica.

In addition to Dipsea’s seed financing, podcasting platform WaitWhat secured a $4.3 million round this month. Days earlier, Himalaya nabbed $100 million to scale its podcast distribution tool and a pair of podcast startups, Gimlet and Anchor, sold to Spotify in a nine-figure deal.

Meanwhile, as the audio content space booms, more attention is being paid to female entrepreneurs eyeing venture capital. Enter Dipsea, whose founders say the business captures the zeitgeist of female empowerment.

Dipsea’s subscription-based app, available for $8.99 per month or $48 per year, offers  short audio stories meant to turn women on. The app’s library, which is poised to expand with the new cash, includes narrative sexy stories and non-narrative guided audio pieces. The stories are designed to be listened to at any time, with the companies examples including solo in bed, while getting ready for a date, or to help turn off boss brain on the way home from work. The subscription business model made me wince at first but auditory erotica doesn’t exactly lend itself to an advertising business model after all and once I listened to a few of Dipsea’s short stories, I understood that service is something many women would pay for.  

Since the onset of internet porn, there’s been a gaping hole in content crafted specifically for women. Most women use “mental framing” to get turned on, meaning they imagine scenarios, often with detailed story-lines and characters to stimulate themselves, per a study by OMGYes & The Kinsey Institute. Dipsea’s sensorial audio storytelling sets the mood and sparks the listener’s imagination.

“Audio is amazing because it’s imaginative, it requires you to paint a picture in your brain that’s very stimulating and it’s super intimate and very personal,” Dipsea co-founder and chief executive officer Gina Gutierrez told TechCrunch.

The brand and design strategist started Dipsea alongside chief technical officer Faye Keegan, a former product manager at Neighborly. Gutierrez said she came up with the idea while meditating with Headspace, a wellness app.

The founders have prioritized diversity of perspective, working with freelance writers of different backgrounds on various episodes, as well as consensuality, ensuring a form of verbal consent is worked into storylines. They recently hired their first staff writer. 

“To me the future of entertainment is sensory,” Gutierrez said. “This felt like it could be a medium for women that hadn’t been harnessed or attempted before.”

Podcasting startup WaitWhat raises $4.3M as interest in audio content explodes

 

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