Prodly announces $3.5M seed to automate low code cloud deployments

Low code programming is supposed to make things easier on companies, right? Low code means you can count on trained administrators instead of more expensive software engineers to handle most tasks, but like any issue solved by technology, there are always unintended consequences. While running his former company, Steelbrick, which he sold to Salesforce in 2015 for $360 million, Max Rudman identified a persistent problem with low-code deployments. He decided to fix it with automation and testing, and the idea for his latest venture, Prodly, was born.

The company announced a $3.5 million seed round today, but more important than the money is the customer momentum. In spite of being a very early-stage startup, the company already has 100 customers using the product, a testament to the fact that other people were probably experiencing that same pain point Rudman was feeling, and there is a clear market for his idea.

As Rudman learned with his former company, going live with the data on a platform like Salesforce is just part of the journey. If you are updating configuration and pricing information on a regular basis, that means updating all the tables associated with that information. Sure, it’s been designed to be point and click, but if you have changes across 48 tables, it becomes a very tedious task, indeed.

The idea behind Prodly is to automate much of the configuration, provide a testing environment to be sure all of the information is correct, and finally automate deployment. For now, the company is just concentrating on configuration, but with the funding it plans to expand the product to solve the other problems as well.

Rudman is careful to point out that his company’s solution is not built strictly for the Salesforce platform. The startup is taking aim at Salesforce admins for its first go-round, but he sees the same problem with other cloud services that make heavy use of trained administrators to make changes.

“The plan is to start with Salesforce, but this problem actually exists on most cloud platforms — ServiceNow, Workday — none of them have the tools we have focused on for admins, and making the admins more productive and building the tooling that they need to efficiently manage a complex application,” Rudman told TechCrunch.

Customers include Nutanix, Johnson & Johnson, Splunk, Tableau and Verizon (which owns this publication). The $3.5 million round was led by Shasta Ventures with participation from Norwest Venture Partners.

Salesforce Grabs Quote To Cash Vendor SteelBrick for $360 Million

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Hello Heart raises $12 million for at-home monitoring and behavioral treatment for hypertension

Leveraging new remote sensing and monitoring technologies and the willingness of corporate insurance programs to provide more preventative treatment to reduce longterm costs, Hello Heart has raised $12 million in new financing to further develop its business.

The money came from Khosla Ventures and previous backer Blue Run Ventures. The company said it will use the financing to expand its business.

Hello Heart tackles high blood pressure and heart disease with early monitoring coming from an at-home sensing system to track blood pressure and an integrated smart phone application providing prompts on behaviors to reduce high blood pressure.

According to a retrospective study paid for by Hello Heart and conducted by researchers at UCLA and Harvard Medical School, 70% of Hello Heart users managed to reduce their blood pressure an average of 22mmHg.

“Delivering clinical outcomes at the scale of population health requires strong patient engagement across a variety of patient types.  Hello Heart’s ability to drive engagement is what led to these unprecedented results,” said Dr. Eyal Zimlichman a Harvard medical school faculty researcher, and the chief medical and innovation officer of Sheba medical center.

The company collects all the data on its patients in a randomized and anonymized fashion in order to provide information on population health, according to a statement. In an interview, Maayan Cohen, the chief executive officer of the company said that Hello Heart did not sell any data to third parties.

“Our mission is to empower patients to understand and improve their health, and we’re very proud to be able to help them do it so effectively in heart health — [the number one] cause of death in the world.”

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Direct-to-consumer lingerie brand Lively acquired for $85M

Lively, a lingerie business founded and led by former Victoria’s Secret executive Michelle Cordeiro Grant, has sold to intimate apparel brand Wacoal for $85 million.

The deal includes up to an additional $55 million in performance-based payouts.

Lively, headquartered in New York, had raised $15 million in venture capital funding, including a $6.5 million Series A investment from GGV Capital, NF Ventures and former Nautica CEO Harvey Sanders announced late last year. The Series valued the startup at $101 million, according to PitchBook.

The deal brings Wacoal’s parent company, Wacoal International Corporation, a team of highly-skilled e-commerce marketers, who’ve successfully managed to tap into the millennial customer sect.

Lively, founded in 2016, sells bras and intimates online and in two brick-and-mortar locations in Chicago and New York. It competes with a number of other direct-to-consumer lingerie and activewear upstarts, including ThirdLove, AdoreMe, TomboyX and Outdoor Voices.

“We built Lively to inspire women to live life passionately, purposefully, and confidently,” Grant wrote in a statement. “We invest in our community and customers to empower them to celebrate their individuality and enable them with products to look and feel their best. Wacoal’s core values have a beautiful synergy with Lively’s, enabling us to come together, not just to take market share, but to also create market share.”

Lively raises $6.5M to bring its comfortable and inclusive lingerie to brick-and-mortar stores

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Trueface raises $3.7M to recognise that gun, as it’s being pulled, in real time

Globally, millions of cameras are deployed by companies and organizations every year. All you have to do is look up. Yes, there they are! But the petabytes of data collected by these cameras really only become useful after something untoward has occurred. They can very rarely influence an action in “real time.”

Trueface is a U.S.-based computer vision company that turns camera data into so-called “actionable data” using machine learning and AI by employing partners who can perform facial recognition, threat detection, age and ethnicity detection, license plate recognition, emotion analysis and object detection. That means, for instance, recognising a gun, as it’s pulled in a dime store. Yes folks, welcome to your brave new world.

The company has now raised $3.7 million from Lavrock Ventures, Scout Ventures and Advantage Ventures to scale the team growing partnerships and market share.

Trueface claims it can identify enterprises’ employees for access to a building, detect a weapon as it’s being wielded or stop fraudulent spoofing attempts. Quite some claims.

However, it’s good enough for the U.S. Air Force, as it recently partnered with them to enhance base security.

Originally embedded in a hardware access control device, Trueface’s computer vision software inside one of the first “intelligent doorbell” Chui was covered by TechCrunch’s Anthony Ha in 2014.

Trueface has multiple solutions to run on an array of clients’ infrastructures, including a dockerized container, SDKs that partners can use to build their own solutions and a plug and play solution that requires no code to get up and running.

The solution can be deployed in various scenarios, such as fintech, healthcare, retail, humanitarian aid, age verification, digital identity verification and threat detection. Shaun Moore and Nezare Chafni are the co-founders and CEO and CTO, respectively.

The computer vision market was valued at $9.28 billion in 2017 and is now set to reach a valuation of $48.32 billion by the end of 2023.

Facial recognition was banned by agency use in the city of San Francisco recently. There are daily news stories about privacy concerns of facial recognition, especially in regards to how China is using computer vision technology.

However, Truface is only deployed “on-premise” and includes features like “fleeting data” and blurring for people who have not opted-in. It’s good to see a company building in such controls from the word go.

However, it’s then up to the company you work for not to require you to sign a statement saying you are happy to have your face recognized. Interesting times, huh?

And if you want that job, well, that’s a whole other story, as I’m sure you can imagine.

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Visa pitches a program offering fintechs faster market access through an ecosystem of partners

Visa is pitching a new way for startups in the fintech space to get to market faster by using its rails and a group of pre-approved partners.

The Fast Track program, a variant of an investment commitment and ecosystem of services the company has already launched in other geographies around the world, comes to the U.S. without an investment commitment, but with a pre-defined list of partners that will help new financial services startups launch more quickly, the company said.

Chiefly, the process makes it easier to integrate with Visa. It’s an attempt to put the payment processor’s network, VisaNet, at the center of a vast array of services ranging from payroll to business to business payments and online banking, online lending and even digital wallets.

“There’s about $17 trillion in cash and checks today that hasn’t gone digital and $20 trillion in business to business that’s happening over wires and check… those are all opportunities for Visa,” says Terry Angelos, a former fintech entrepreneur who now serves as a senior vice president at Visa and the company’s global head of fintech. 

“To some degree Visa has been the original fintech,” says Angelos. “Today, you would  pitch it as a SaaS platform for payment and commerce.”

For its new service, Visa has come up with a list of partners to provide the array of compliance services and infrastructure that a startup in the financial services space would need to get up and running quickly.

“These are vetted partners that are providing a fast track process and a concierge service so we can track the companies in the program,” says Angelos. 

What the program won’t include, Angelos said, is a commitment to invest in startups in the U.S. that would be equivalent to the $100 million investment fund the company has carved out for European investments as part of the fast track program there.

“We have investments that are happening that are in parallel,” Angelos says. “We don’t have a separate fund.”

Companies that are partnering with Visa on this program represent a different service offering for the ecosystem, including: Alloy, BBVA Open Platform, Cross River Bank, Galileo, Green Dot, Marqeta, Netspend (TSYS’ Consumer Segment), Stripe, TabaPay, TSYS, Q2 and Very Good Security. The company said its debit processing service will support some of the partners’ participation in the program.   

Last year, fintech companies raised $39.5 billion from investors globally, up 120% from the previous year, according to data provided by Visa. And as part of their outreach to this startup community, Visa is pre-qualifying for its program portfolio companies from investment firms like Andreessen Horowitz, Nyca Partners, Ribbit Capital and Trinity Ventures. 

“We see many entrepreneurs with big ideas that can add real value and solve problems in the global payments system; the problem can be the difficulty of distribution and connectivity to the essential infrastructure,” said Hans Morris, managing partner, Nyca Ventures, in a statement. “Fast Track solves for this, enabling some of our best companies to start working with Visa right away.”

Many of the firms’ portfolio companies are already partnering with Visa in some capacity. The company has already announced agreements (of an undefined and undisclosed nature) with startups like Currencycloud, Flutterwave, Ininal, N26, PayActiv, Rappi, Razer and Remitly. 

Visa has also invested in startups. In 2019 alone, the company added Anchorage, Bankable, Branch, Finix, Minna Technologies and Paymate to its stable of startups. 

The main thing that startups would get from the Visa Fast Track program is mentorship and access to the company’s experts in payments and fintech. And its effort to tie itself more closely to a financial services ecosystem comes as Visa finds itself under threat from some of the very startup technologies that the company may look to co-opt.

Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies offer the possibility of alternative payment mechanisms that don’t rely on the traditional money transfer systems developed decades ago by companies like Visa and Mastercard, and can offer potentially faster transaction times and charge lower fees.

To combat that threat, Visa has been aligning with some of the largest technology companies to head off challengers at the pass. The company (along with its largest rival, Mastercard) is collaborating with Facebook on its controversial proposed cryptocurrency, Libra, in an effort to head off any challengers with a new transaction system of its own.

Angelos insists that there’s nothing nefarious in Visa’s efforts to engage with startups, and says that the company is merely another actor supporting the movement of trillions of dollars into a digital economy.

“If you look at what’s happening in the fintech ecosystem… Fintechs are reducing friction and adding consumers that are underbanked,” Angelos says. “They can work on any payment rails they choose. [But] all those fintechs… are choosing to build at least part of their products on top of the rails that we built… if you look around the world, fintechs are probably leveraging the existing payment  rails to provide a lot of innovation and remove friction.”

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Clearbanc co-founder and president Michele Romanow is coming to Disrupt SF

Raising venture capital isn’t easy; for some, it’s impossible.

Clearbanc offers startups a fundraising alternative and in just a few short years, it’s become a household name in Silicon Valley circles. The company disrupts the startup funding process by providing companies cash to buy ads in exchange for a revenue share so those companies aren’t forced to give up equity to venture capitalists. 

2019 has been Clearbanc’s year. It was only natural to invite Romanow to join us on stage at Disrupt SF. Romanow will discuss the funding landscape for startups, Clearbanc’s plans to deploy billions of dollars, as well as a breakdown of when to raise equity cash vs. non-dilutive capital. Alongside Brex CEO Henrique Dubugras, Romanow will also talk through serving startups as customers.

This year alone, the company, under Romanow’s lead, launched a campaign to back 2,000 businesses with $1 billion in non-dilutive capital by the end of 2019, raised $120 million across three different equity rounds and just this week, announced a $250 million fund to continue backing startups through its rev-share model.

Romanow’s career took off as an angel investor on the Canadian version of Shark Tank, Dragons’ Den. Together with co-founder Andrew D’Souza, she started Clearbanc in 2015 with a goal of helping more founders maintain control of their company through larger equity stakes. In conversation with TechCrunch earlier this year, she and D’Souza explained that some 40% of VC dollars end up going to Facebook and Google for digital ad campaigns. That capital, they said, should be put into hiring and other scaling efforts. 

“We are essentially a non-dilutive co-investor,” Romanow said. “VC takes time; it’s a lot of nos and you’re really giving up equity that you can never get back.”

“A lot of founders in the early days don’t calculate what their equity could be worth,” she added. “Like the first $250,000 in Uber is worth $1 billion now.”

Clearbanc, founded less than four years ago, has already put hundreds of millions of dollars in its pockets and like Brex, it has ambitions to support each and every startup out there. Brex and Clearbanc’s leaders will undoubtedly provide a conversation on the state of startups & fintech that can’t be missed.

Disrupt SF runs October 2 – October 4 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Tickets are available here.

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Investors bet another $50M on Clearbanc’s revenue share model

That company disrupting venture capital just raised more venture capital.

Clearbanc has attracted $300 million, including a $50 million equity investment led by Highland Capital with participation from Arcadia, iNovia and Emergence Capital, and another $250 million from limited partners for its third fund. Clearbanc declined to disclose its valuation, but noted the company was not “forced to raise” and therefore “raised on terms that [they] liked.”

The Canadian business, headquartered in Toronto, offers startups an alternative to VC in the form of non-dilutive revenue-share agreements. Coupling data and machine learning technology, Clearbanc is quick to make decisions about potential investments, driven by a lofty goal of backing 2,000 companies by 2020.

Through its latest campaign, the “20-Min Term Sheet,” Clearbanc invests between $10,000 to $10 million in e-commerce upstarts with positive ad spend and positive unit economics. Charging 6% on its capital, Clearbanc collects a portion of a company’s revenue until they’ve paid back 106% of the original investment.

Clearbanc has invested in 791 online brands so far this year, including Le Tote, UNTUCKit, Leesa Sleep and Public Goods. The company says its investments have generated an average of $121 million in monthly revenue.

“The 20-minute term sheet was our take on showing the market how fast we could get startups access to capital,” Clearbanc co-founder and president Michele Romanow tells TechCrunch. Their method, she explained, saves both VCs and founders a lot of time.

“[Founders] don’t need to go and pitch their life story,” Clearbanc co-founder and chief executive officer Andrew D’Souza tells TechCrunch. “They don’t need to spend hours and hours on due diligence and they don’t need to get on a flight and meet VCs in person, we’ve automated all of that.”

The $50 million investment will be used to expand into new verticals beyond e-commerce and to launch a venture partner program, which will give its portfolio of founders access to experienced investors and operators, a resource a traditional venture capital fund typically provides its entrepreneurs.

Clearbanc has signed up Jack Abraham, the founder and managing partner of Atomic, Hubble co-founder Jesse Horwitz, Product Hunt founder Ryan Hoover and more to support the new venture partner network.

D’Souza and Romanow say Clearbanc’s revenue-share model could become a larger asset class than equity in the long term. Bullish about their prospects, D’Souza compares Clearbanc to SoftBank, the Japanese telecom giant behind The Vision Fund.

“I have no doubt we will raise billions and billions for funds in the coming years and I think we can be bigger than SoftBank,” he said. “If we aren’t aiming to do that, then we aren’t aiming to solve the problems that exist for entrepreneurs globally.”

Clearbanc’s third fund, a $250 million effort, is five times larger than its second fund. The company wouldn’t disclose the size of its debut fund.

Clearbanc has raised $120 million in equity funding to date.

Clearbanc plans to disrupt venture capital with ‘The 20-Min Term Sheet’

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Luna Labs creates playable ads, directly from Unity

It seems obvious that the best way to advertise a game is to let people play the game itself — and we’ve covered other startups tackling this problem, such as AppOnboard and mNectar.

But Luna Labs co-founder and CEO Steven Chard said that for most developers, the creation of these ads involves outsourcing: “It might take weeks to make an ad, and the quality of the content at the end could be limited.”

The problem, Chard said, is that most games are built on the Unity engine, while the ads need to be in HTML5, which means that developers often have to build playable ads from scratch — hence the outsourcing.

“There’s this huge demand for playables, but the tech hasn’t caught up with it,” he said. “Our view — and I think why it’s really resonating with developers — we’re saying to developers: Use that same [Unity] editor to create a playable ad. You’re going to give the user a playable ad which genuinely feels like the game.”

In fact, while Luna is officially launching its service to developers this week, it’s already been working with a few partners like Kwalee and Voodoo. Luna says that in Kwalee’s case, the results were good enough that the company spent 60% more than they did on other playable ads, and the Luna playables drove more than 250,000 installs per day.

“Luna is solving a real pain point for our studio, and the initial results have been tremendous,” said Kwalee CRO Jason Falcus in a statement. “Integrating the Luna service has allowed us to significantly scale our campaigns by a comfortable margin, to the best results so far.”

Luna’s investors include Ben Holmes (formerly of Index Ventures, backer of King and Playfish) and Chris Lee (who also invested in Space Ape and Hello Games).

Chard said the startup is currently focused on providing tools to developers, rather than getting involved in the ad-buying process. More generally, he said the company has been focused on the technology rather than the business model.

“We’re an early company with a very, very complex piece of technology — it’s taken a lot of time to get where we are,” he said. “We’re not doing it for free, but the focus isn’t on short-term profitability. It is, in the longer term, on creating a scalable product which can be used by developers.”

Chard added that eventually, he’s hoping Luna can become more involved in “at the content creation level.” For example, he suggested that developers could use the technology to test out playable concepts and see what resonates, before building a full game.

You can test it out for yourself on the Luna Labs website.

Google is launching playable in-game ads

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Porsche Digital expands U.S. presence beyond Silicon Valley with new Atlanta office

Porsche Digital, the subsidiary of carmaker Porsche, is opening its second U.S. location, after launching its first in 2017 in Silicon Valley. The second North American office for this software and digital product-focused wing of Porsche will open in Atlanta, which is also the seat of Porsche’s North American cars business. Porsche Digital cited proximity to their auto business headquarters as one reason why they picked Atlanta, but also pointed to Atlanta’s “local tech talent” and “robust and constantly growing startup and tech sector” as key factors in its selection.

The need for a second office is specifically about serving the U.S. market, Porsche Digital notes and the company expects to have 45 employees total in the U.S. across both offices within the next year. The subsidiary overall has 120 employees worldwide, with offices in Berlin, Shanghai, and Tel Aviv as well as the U.S.

Porsche Digital does focus on creating software and digital products for the automaker’s customers, but it’s actually probably more valuable to its parent company as a sort of distributed tech talent scouting and business development arm of the company. Its offices definitely occupy global hotspots when it comes to startup tech companies, and having a permanent presence in this locations has got to come in handy when looking to attract engineering talent and potential acquisitions of complimentary early-stage companies.

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Jamf acquires Digita Security to gain native Mac security

Jamf has been widely known as an enterprise Mac deployment and management tool company, but it has been looking for ways to expand beyond those core capabilities. One thing it heard from customers was that there was a dearth of native Mac security tools. It checked that box today, announcing it has acquired Digita Security, a startup with a native Mac security suite. The two companies did not reveal the purchase price.

Digita, a two-year old startup, was founded by a team of security experts led by Patrick Wardle, whose background includes a decade as a Mac security researcher, seeking out vulnerabilities on the Mac, and time at the NSA where he honed his security research skills.

Wardle says that because of the relatively low Mac marketshare, many traditional security vendors haven’t paid close attention, which can lead to trouble. “Mac marketshare is somewhat limited, maybe around 10%. So the average company is not going to spend a lot of time and resources developing Mac-specific capabilities,” he said.

“From the hacker’s point of view, this is great news, because their backdoor implants are generally not going to be detected by traditional tools. What I’ve been working on the last few years, and then most recently at Digita Security, is creating a system that is Mac specific, that leverages Mac-specific and Apple-specific frameworks and technologies,” he added.

The Digita Suite consists of three main tools. It takes advantage of and enhances XProtect, the Mac’s built-in malware detection system with a tool called UXProtect, that provides a valuable missing front end to the tool. It also offers a Mac laptop security tool called Do Not Disturb that sends you message if someone tries to access your laptop without permission, and finally it offers a tool called Gameplan, a heuristic-based malware detection system.

Jamf plans to continue to market the Digita toolset as a set of stand-alone package for the time being, while taking advantage of the Jamf policy engine when it makes sense, according to company CEO Dean Hagar. “With Digita, we’re going to be able to bring a whole solution to our customers, In addition to leaving Digita as a solution that can be offered on its own, we will be able to complete that journey for our customers by being able to monitor and hunt for threats and apply security policy,” Hagar told TechCrunch.

The deal has closed and the five Digita Security employees are now part of the Jamf security team. Having a security tool like this in the fold could help make companies more comfortable deploying Macs by giving security teams the tools they need to monitor and defend them, which could in turn expand Mac usage in the enterprise.

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Roxanne Varza to give an update on Station F at Disrupt Berlin

Station F is the world’s biggest startup campus and it’s based in Paris. Director Roxanne Varza first unveiled Station F at TechCrunch Disrupt back in December 2016. That’s why I’m excited to announce that Station F director Roxanne Varza is joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin to give us an update and tell us about future plans.

If you aren’t familiar with Station F, it starts with a beautiful building. Originally built in 1929, it is now classified as a historical monument. But now, it’s also a high-tech building and a cornerstone of the French tech ecosystem.

Varza has managed to create a community of entrepreneurs, VC funds and big tech companies that work, share knowledge and collaborate. In addition to Station F’s own Founders Program and Fighters Program, you can become a Station F member by joining a partner program.

Facebook, Naver (Line), Ubisoft, Microsoft and plenty of others all run their own incubator from Station F. And it’s been working really well as there are over one thousand startups based at Station F.

Station F is also a great signal for the international tech community. If you head over to its Instagram account, you can see that plenty of head of states and major tech CEOs come to Station F whenever they visit Paris, from Jack Dorsey to newly elected president of Ukraine Vlodomyr Zelensky. Around one third of Station F startups come from abroad and 600 members don’t even speak French.

More recently, Station F unveiled Flatmates, a co-living space for Station F members. Station F is creating a lifestyle and has become a cultural phenomenon for Paris. And I can’t wait to see what’s next.

Buy your ticket to Disrupt Berlin to listen to this discussion and many others. The conference will take place on December 11-12.

In addition to panels and fireside chats, like this one, new startups will participate in the Startup Battlefield to compete for the highly coveted Battlefield Cup.

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Roxanne Varza is Director of STATION F, the biggest startup campus in the world with more than 1.000 startups, located in Paris. She is originally from Silicon Valley. Before joining STATION F, she led Microsoft Ventures Paris and TechCrunch France. She also worked for several London-based startups and cofounded StarHer, Tech.eu and Failcon France.

Prior to her current role, Roxanne was the lead for Microsoft’s start-up activities in France, running both Bizspark and Microsoft Ventures programs for 3 years. She was also Editor of TechCrunch France from 2010-2011 and has written for several publications including Business Insider and The Telegraph. In April 2013, Business Insider listed her as one of the top 30 women under 30 in tech. She has also been listed in additional rankings by Business Insider, Vanity Fair and Le Figaro, The Evening Standard and more.

Roxanne also co-founded StartHer (ex Girls in Tech Paris) and is the co-organizer of the Failcon Paris conference. More recently, she co-founded Tech.eu, a European tech media backed by Dave McClure, Adeo Ressi, Daniel Waterhouse and more.

Prior to TechCrunch, Roxanne worked for the French government’s foreign direct investment agency helping fast-growing startups develop their activities in France. Roxanne has spoken, moderated, mentored and judged numerous startup events and programs throughout Europe and also helps European startups with content and communications. Roxanne is trilingual and holds degrees from UCLA, Sciences Po Paris and the London School of Economics. She is also an epilepsy advocate.

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NASA calls for more companies to join its commercial lunar lander program

NASA has opened up a call for companies to join the ranks of its nine existing Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) providers, a group it chose in November after a similar solicitation for proposals. With the CLPS program, NASA is buying space aboard future commercial lunar landers to deliver its future research, science and demonstration projects to the surface of the Moon, and it’s looking for more providers to sign up as lunar lander providers fo contracts that could prove put to $2.6 billion and extend through 2028.

The list of nine providers chosen in November 2018 includes Astrobotic Technology, Deep Space Systems, Draper, Firefly Aerospace, Intuitive Machines, Lockheed Martin, Masten Space Systems, Moon Express and OrbitBeyond. NASA is looking to these companies, and whoever ends up added to a list as a result of this second call for submissions, to bring both small and mid-size lunar landers, with the aim of delivering anything from rovers, to batteries, to payloads specific to future Artemis missions with the aim of helping establish a more permanent human presence on the Moon.

NASA’s goal in building out a stable of providers helps its Moon ambitions in a few different ways, including providing redundancy, and also offering a competitive field so that they can open up bids for specific payloads and gain price advantages.

At the end of May, NASA announced the award of over $250 million in contracts for specific payload delivery missions that were intended to take place by 2021. The three companies chosen from its list of nine providers were Astrobotic, Intuitive Machines and OrbitBeyond – OrbitBeyond told the agency just yesterday, however, that it would not be able to fulfill the contract awarded due to “internal corporate challenges” and backed out of the contract with NASA’s permission.

Given how quickly one of their providers exited one of the few contracts already awarded, and the likely significant demand there will be for commercial lander services should NASA’s Artemis ambitions even match up somewhat closely to the vision, it’s probably a good idea for the agency to build out that stable of service providers.

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NASA taps SpaceX, Blue Origin and 11 more companies for Moon and Mars space tech

NASA has selected 13 companies to partner with on 19 new specific technology projects it’s undertaking to help reach the Moon and Mars. These include SpaceX, Blue Origin and Lockheed Martin, among others, with projects ranging from improving spacecraft operation in high temperatures, to landing rockets vertically on the Moon.

Jeff Bezos-backed Blue Origin will work with NASA on developing a navigation system for “safe and precise landing at a range of locations on the Moon” in one undertaking, and also on readying fuel cell-based power system for its Blue Moon lander, revealed earlier this year. The final design spec will provide a power source that can last through the lunar night, or up to two weeks without sunlight in some locations. It’ll also be working on further developing engine nozzles for rockets with liquid propellant that would be well-suited for lunar lander vehicles.

SpaceX will be working on technology that will help move rocket propellant around safely from vehicle to vehicle in orbit, a necessary step to building out its Starship reusable rocket and spacecraft system. The Elon Musk-led private space company will also be working with Kennedy Space Center on refining its vertical landing capabilities to adapt it to work with large rockets on the moon, where lunar regolith (aka Moon dust) makes and the low-gravity, zero atmosphere environment can complicate the effects of controlled descents.

Lockheed Martin will be working on using solid-state processing to create metal powder-based materials that can help spacecraft deal better with operating in high-temperature environments, and on autonomous methods for growing and harvesting plants in space, which could be crucial in the case of future long-term colonization efforts.

Other projects will tap Advanced Space, Vulcan Wireless, Aerogel Technologies, Spirit AeroSystem, Sierra Nevada Corporation, Anasphere, Bally Ribbon Mills, Aerojet Rocketdyne, Colorado Power Electronics and Maxar, and you can read about each in detail here.

NASA’s goals with these private partnerships are to both develop at speed, and decrease the cost of efforts to operate crewed space exploration, as part of its Artemis program and beyond.

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Inside the history of Silicon Valley labor, with Louis Hyman

As I wrote for TechCrunch recently, immigration is not an issue always associated with tech — not even when thinking about the ethics of technology, as I do here.

So when I was moved to tears a few weeks ago, on seeing footage of groups of 18 Jewish protestors link arms to block the entrances to ICE detention facilities, bearing banners reading “Never Again” in reference to the Holocaust — these mostly young women risking their physical freedom and safety to try to help the children this country’s immigration service is placing in concentration camps today, one of my first thoughts was: I can’t cover that for my TechCrunch column. It’s about ethics of course, but not about tech.

It turns out that wasn’t correct. Immigration is a tech issue. In fact, companies such as Wayfair (furniture), Amazon (web services), and Palantir (the software used to track undocumented immigrants) have borne heavy criticism for their support of and partnership with ICE’s efforts under the current administration.

And as I discussed earlier this month with Jaclyn Friedman, a leading sex ethics expert and one of the ICE protestors arrested in a major demonstration in Boston, social media technology has been instrumental in building and amplifying those protests.

But there’s more. IBM, for example, has an unfortunate and dark history of support for Nazi extermination efforts, and many recent commentators have drawn parallels between what IBM did during the Holocaust and what companies like Palantir are beginning to do now.

Dozens of protestors huddle in the rain outside Palantir HQ.

I say “companies,” plural, with intention: immigrant advocacy organization Mijente recently released news that Anduril, the company founded by Palmer Luckey and composed of Palantir veterans, now has a $13.5 million contract with the Marine corps for their autonomous surveillance “Lattice” towers at four different USMC bases, including one border base. Documents procured via the Freedom of Information Act show the Marines mention “the intrusion dilemma” in their justification for choosing Anduril.

So now it seems the kinds of surveillance tech we know are badly biased at best — facial recognition? Panopticon-style observation? Algorithms of various other kinds — will be put to work by the most powerful fighting force ever designed, for expanded intervention into our immigration system.

Will the Silicon Valley elite say “no”? To what extent will new protests emerge, where the sorts of people likely to be reading this writing might draw a line and make work more difficult for their peers at places like Anduril?

Maybe the problem, however, is that most of us think of immigration ethics as an issue that might touch on a small handful of particularly libertarian-leaning tech companies, but surely it doesn’t go beyond that, right? Can’t the average techie in San Francisco or elsewhere safely and accurately say these problems don’t actually implicate them?

Turns out that’s not right either.

Which is why I had to speak this week with Cornell University historian Louis Hyman. Hyman is a Professor at Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, and Director of the ILR’s Institute for Workplace Studies, in New York. In our conversation, Hyman and I dig into Silicon Valley’s history with labor rights, startup work structures and the role of immigration in the US tech ecosystem. Beyond that,  I’ll let him introduce himself and his extraordinary work, below.

Louis Hyman. (Image by Jesse Winter)

Greg Epstein: I discovered your work via a piece you wrote in the Washington Post, which drew from your 2018 book, Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary. In it, you wrote, “Undocumented workers have been foundational to the rise of our most vaunted hub of innovative capitalism: Silicon Valley.”

And in the book itself, you write at one point, “To understand the electronics industry is simple: every time someone says “robot,” simply picture a woman of color. Instead of self-aware robots, workers—all women, mostly immigrants, sometimes undocumented—hunched over tables with magnifying glasses assembling parts, sometimes on a factory line and sometimes on a kitchen table. Though it paid a lot of lip service to automation, Silicon Valley truly relied upon a transient workforce of workers outside of traditional labor relations.”

Can you just give us a brief introduction to the historical context behind these kinds of comments?

Louis Hyman: Sure. One of the key questions all of us ask is why is there only one Silicon Valley. There are different answers for that.

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DigitalOcean gets a new CEO and CFO

DigitalOcean, the cloud infrastructure service that made a name for itself by focusing on low-cost hosting options in its early days, today announced that it has appointed former SendGrid COO and CFO Yancey Spruill as its new CEO and former EnerNOC CFO Bill Sorenson as its new CFO. Spruill will replace Mark Templeton, who only joined the company a little more than a year ago and who had announced his decision to step down for personal reasons in May of this year.

“DigitalOcean is a brand I’ve followed and admired for a while — the leadership team has done a tremendous job building out the products, services and, most importantly, a community, that puts developer needs first,” said Spruill in today’s announcement. “We have a multi-billion dollar revenue opportunity in front of us and I’m looking forward to working closely with our strong leadership team to build upon the current strategy to drive DigitalOcean to the company’s full potential.”

Spruill das have a lot of experience, given that he was in CxO positions at SendGrid through both its IPO in 2017 and its sales to Twilio in 2019. He also previously held the CFO role at DigitalGlobe, which he also guided to an IPO.

In his announcement, Spruill notes that he expects DigitalOcean to focus on its core business, which currently has about 500,000 users (though it’s unclear how many of those are active, paying users). “My aspiration is for us to continue to provide everything you love about DO now, but to also enhance our offerings in a way that is meaningful, strategic and most helpful for you over time,” he writes.

Spruill’s history as CFO includes its fair share of IPOs and sales, but so does Sorenson’s. As CFO at EnerNOC, he guided that company to a sale to investor Enel Group. Before that, he led business intelligence firm Qlikto an IPO.

It’s not unusual for incoming CEOs and CFO’s to have this kind of experience, but it does make you wonder what DigitalOcean’s future holds in store. The company isn’t as hyped as it once was and while it still offers one of the best user experiences for developers, it remains a relatively small player in the overall cloud game. That’s a growing market, but the large companies — the ones that bring in the majority of revenue — are looking to Amazon, Microsoft and Google for their cloud infrastructure. Even a small piece of the overall cloud pie can be quite lucrative, but I think DigitalOcean’s ambitions go beyond that.

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Special offer: discounted hotels and flights for Disrupt SF 2019

Disrupt San Francisco 2019 takes place on October 2-4, and we’re working every angle to make it financially accessible to as many people as possible. It starts with early-bird pricing on four types of passes for different needs and budgets. Plus, we offer discounts for students, nonprofit organizations, government employees and military personnel.

But did you know you can score discounted rates on flights and hotels for your Disrupt adventure? Yup. United Airlines offers Disrupt SF attendees discounted fares on flights to San Francisco International Airport or San Jose International Airport. Head on over to United.com and book your flight under “Advanced Search” using offer code ZFWZ101320. It’s an easy way to save.

Whether it’s just you or your entire team, you can reserve discounted hotel rooms through room blocks TechCrunch has secured at multiple hotels throughout the City by the Bay. Many of the hotels also offer special perks, including free Wi-Fi and gym access, when you book through this website. Your extras may vary depending on which hotel you choose. The supply of rooms is limited, so get booking!

Once you have your Disrupt pass and your travel reservations well in hand, you can start strategizing to make the most of your time at Disrupt SF — three short days packed with early-startup programming across four stages.

Whether on the Main stage, the Extra Crunch stage, on a panel or during a fireside chat, Disrupt speakers represent an impressive range of expertise. We’re talking up-and-coming boundary-pushers to the top players in the startup world — iconic technologists, investors and founders.

Witness the glory that is Startup Battlefield, TechCrunch’s epic pitch competition. Watch as the world’s most innovative startups launch and compete for the Disrupt Cup, investor and media love and, of course, $100,000.

Explore and network your way through Startup Alley, where you’ll find more than 1,200 startups and sponsors displaying products, platforms and services spanning the tech spectrum. While you’re there, be sure to visit the TC Top Picks, our hand-picked cadre of outstanding startups.

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Grab your discounts, people, and join us at Disrupt San Francisco 2019 on October 2-4. Buy your early-bird passes today, and then book your discounted flights and hotel rooms before they all disappear.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt San Francisco 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

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The dreaded 10x, or, how to handle exceptional employees

The “10x engineer.” Shudder. Wince. I have rarely seen my Twitter feed unite against an idea so loudly, or in such harmony.

I refer of course to the thread last month by Accel India’s Shekhar Kirani, explaining “If you have a 10x engineer as part of your first few engineers, you increase the odds of your startup success significantly” and then going on to address, in his opinion, “How do you spot a 10x engineer?”

The resulting scorn was tsunami-like. The very concept of a 10x engineer seems so… five years ago. Since then, the Valley has largely come to the collective conclusion that 1) there is no such thing as a 10x engineer 2) even if there were, you wouldn’t want to hire one, because they play so poorly with others.

The anti-10x squad raises many important and valid — frankly, obvious and inarguable — points. Go down that Twitter thread and you’ll find that 10x engineers are identified as: people who eschew meetings, work alone, rarely look at documentation, don’t write much themselves, are poor mentors, and view process, meetings, or training as reasons to abandon their employer. In short, they are unbelievably terrible team members.

Is software a field like the arts, or sports, in which exceptional performers can exist? Sure. Absolutely. Software is Extremistan, not Mediocristan, as Nassim Taleb puts it.

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Real estate platform Compass raises another $370M on a $6.4B valuation en route to an IPO

The real estate market regularly goes through ups and downs, but today comes big news for a startup in the space that has built a platform that it believes can help all players in it — buyers, sellers and those who help with the buying and selling — no matter what stage of the cycle we happen to be in.

Compass — a company that has built a three-sided marketplace for the industry, along with a wide set of algorithms to help make it work — has raised a $370 million round of funding, money that it plans to use to continue expanding geographically (within existing markets in the U.S. such as New York, Connecticut, Philadelphia, Washington, Atlanta, SF and LA and other areas), as well as for more tech and product development. Sources tell me that it’s also now eyeing up an IPO, likely sometime in the next 24 months.

“From day one we knew, when we had just a small amount of people at the company, we had a very clear focus,” co-founder and chairman Ori Allon said in an interview. “We wanted to bring more tech and data and transparency to real estate, and I think it’s paid off.”

Based out of New York, Compass earlier this year established an engineering hub in Seattle run by the former CTO of AI for Microsoft, Joseph Sirosh. It’s continuing to hire there and elsewhere (alongside also making acqui-hires for talent).

The Series G funding — which brings the total raised by Compass to $1.5 billion — is coming in at a $6.4 billion valuation, a huge uptick for the company compared to its $4.4 billion valuation less than a year ago. Part of the reason for that has been the company’s massive growth: in the last quarter, its revenues were up 250% compared to Q2 2018.

The investor list for this latest round includes previous investors Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB), Dragoneer Investment Group and SoftBank Vision Fund. Other backers since it was first founded in 2012 have included Founders Fund, the Qatar Investment Authority (a construction and real estate giant), Fidelity and others.

The company was co-founded by Ori Allon and Robert Reffkin — respectively the chairman and CEO, pictured here on the right and left of COO Maelle Gavet. The company first caught my eye because of Allon. An engineer by training, he has a string of notable prior successes in the field of search to his name (his two previous startups were sold to Google and Twitter, which used them as the basis of large areas of their search and discovery algorithms).

In this latest entrepreneurial foray, Allon’s vision of using machine learning algorithms to improve decisions that humans make has been tailored to the specific vertical of real estate.

The platform is not a mere marketplace to connect buyers to real estate agents to sellers, but an engine that helps figure out pricing, timing for sales and how to stage homes (and more recently how to improve them with actual building work by way of Compass Concierge) to get the best prices and best sales.

It also helps real estate agents — it currently works with some 13,000 of them — manage their time and their customers (by way of an acquisition it made of CRM platform Contactually earlier this year). Starting with high-end homes for private individuals, Compass has expanded to commercial real estate and a much wider set of price brackets. Its traction in the market among its three customer bases of realtors, buyers and sellers has also meant that it’s been the subject of around 10 lawsuits from the likes of Zillow (over IP theft from former employees) and Realology (which owns firms like Coldwell Banker and Century21).

There is a wide opportunity for vertical search businesses at the moment. People want more accurate and targeted information to make purchasing decisions; and companies that are in the business of providing information (and selling things) are keen for better platforms to bring in online visitors and increase their conversions.

I understand that this has led to Compass getting approached for acquisitions, but that is not in the blueprint for this real estate startup: the longer-term plan will be to take the company public, likely in the next 24 months.

“It has been incredible to see the growth of our Product & Engineering team, including the addition of Joseph Sirosh as CTO,” said Allon, in a statement. “We are excited to partner with new investors, and deepen our relationship with our existing partners to accelerate our growth and further our technology advancements.”

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Vacasa to acquire Wyndham Vacation Rentals for $162M

Vacasa, a provider of vacation rental management services akin to Airbnb, has agreed to agree Wyndham Vacation Rentals from Wyndham Destinations.

Portland-based Vacasa will pay Wyndham a total of $162 million, including at least $45 million in cash at closing and upwards of $30 million in Vacasa equity.

Vacasa, founded in 2009, had raised $213 million in venture capital funding to date from investors such as Assurant Growth Investing and NewSpring Capital.

Its acquisition of Wyndham Vacation Rentals will bring a number of brands, including ResortQuest, Kaiser Realty and Vacation Palm Springs, under its ownership and will expand its portfolio to include 23,000 new homes across North America, Central and South America, Europe and Africa.

“We are excited to partner with the pioneering company in the short-term rental industry that helped make vacation homes popular for so many families around the world,” Vacasa founder and chief executive officer Eric Breon said in a statement. “Combining Wyndham Vacation Rentals’ decades of operational excellence with Vacasa’s next-generation technology will deliver the industry’s best vacation rental experiences.”

The deal comes amid a period of growth for the Oregon business, which says it expects to bring in more than $1 billion in gross bookings and roughly $500 million in net revenue in the next year.

The acquisition, announced this morning, is projected to close this fall.

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Mobile messaging financial advisory service Stackin’ adds banking features and raises cash

When Stackin’ initially pitched itself as part of the Techstars Los Angeles accelerator program two years ago, the company was a video platform for financial advice targeting a millennial audience too savvy for traditional advisory services.

Now, nearly two years later, the company has pivoted from video to text-based financial advice for its millennial audience and is offering a new spin on lead generation for digital banks.

The company has launched a new, no-fee, checking and savings account feature in partnership with Radius Bank, which offers users a 1% annual percentage yield on deposits.

And Stackin’ has raised $4 million in new cash from Experian Ventures, Dig Ventures and Cherry Tree Investments, along with supplemental commitments from new and previous investors including Social Leverage, Wavemaker Partners and Mucker Capital.

“Stackin’ has a unique and highly effective approach to connect and communicate with an entire generation of younger consumers around finance,” said Ty Taylor, group president of Global Consumer Services at Experian, in a statement.

Founded two years ago by Scott Grimes, the former founder of Uproxx Media, and Kyle Arbaugh, who served as a senior vice president at Uproxx, Stackin’ initially billed itself as the Uproxx of personal finance.

It turns out that consumers didn’t want another video platform.

“Stackin’ is fundamentally changing the shape and context of what a financial relationship means by creating a fun, inclusive and judgement free environment that empowers our users to learn and take action through messaging,” said Scott Grimes, CEO and co-founder of Stackin’, in a statement. “This funding allows us to build out new features around banking and investing that will enhance the relationship with our customers.”

Later this fall the company said it would launch a new investment feature that will encourage Stackin’ users to participate in the stock market. It’s likely that this feature will look something like the Acorns model, which encourages users to invest in diversified financial vehicles to get them acquainted with the stock market before enabling individual trades on stocks.

According to Grimes, the company made the switch from video to text in March 2018 and built a custom messaging platform on Twilio to service the company’s 500,000 users.

“In a short time, we have built a large customer base with a demographic that is typically hard to reach. Having financial institutions like Experian come on board as an investor is a testament that this model is working,” Grimes wrote in an email.

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Conflura snags $9M Series A to help stop cyber attacks in real time

Just yesterday, we experienced yet another major breach when Capital One announced it had been hacked and years of credit card  application information had been stolen. Another day, another hack, but the question is how can companies protect themselves in the face of an onslaught of attacks. Conflura, a Palo Alto startup wants to help with a new tool that purports to stop these kinds of attacks in real time.

Today the company, which launched last year, announced a $9 million Series A investment led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. It also has the backing of several influential technology execs including John W. Thompson, who is chairman of Microsoft and former CEO at Symantec, Frank Slootman, CEO at Snowflake and formerly CEO at ServiceNow and Lane Bess, former CEO of Palo Alto Networks.

What has attracted this interest is the company’s approach to cyber security. “Conflura is a real-time cyber security company. We are delivering the industry’s first platform to deterministically stop cyber attacks in real time,” company co-founder and CEO Abhijit Ghosh told TechCrunch.

To do that Ghosh says, his company’s solution watches across the customer’s infrastructure, finds issues and recommends ways to mitigate the attack. “We see the problem that there are too many solutions which have been used. What is required is a platform that has visibility across the infrastructure, and uses security information from multiple sources to make that determination of where the attacker currently is and how to mitigate that,” he explained.

Microsoft chairman John Thompson, who is also an investor, says this is more than just real-time detection or real-time remediation. “It’s not just the audit trail and telling them what to do. It’s more importantly blocking the attack in real time. And that’s the unique nature of this platform, that you’re able to use the insight that comes from the science of the data to really block the attacks in real time,” Thompson said.

It’s early days for Conflura as it has 19 employees and 3 customers using the platform so far. For starters, it will be officially launching next week at Black Hat. After that, it has to continue building out the product and prove that it can work as described to stop the types of attacks we see on a regular basis from happening.

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‘The Operators’: Experts from WeWork and Brex talk marketing – Getting the most bang for your buck

Vymo raises $18M to help salespeople manage their leads

Vymo, a New York-headquartered startup that operates an eponymous mobile-first service to help salespeople manage their leads, has raised $18 million in a new financing round to expand its footprint in the U.S. and other markets.

The Series B round for the six-year-old startup was led by Emergence Capital, a VC firm that focuses on enterprise cloud firms. Existing investor Sequoia India also participated in the round. Vymo has raised more than $23 million to date.

Vymo serves as a CRM (customer relationship management) solution and also works with other popular CRMs such as Salesforce. The service helps salespeople automatically capture their business calls, visits, messages, emails, calendar, and the engagement levels to better track and manage their leads, Yamini Bhat, co-founder and CEO of Vymo, told TechCrunch in an interview.

The ease is crucial for salespeople. “CRMs have existed for more than a decade. But they still see under 15% to 20% day-to-day adoption,” Bhat explained. “Salespeople don’t actively log their activities into the CRM, which creates management challenges. People don’t know which deal will close and when it will close.”

Research and advisory firm Gartner said in a report that “field representatives aren’t going to “live” in [sales force automation systems]…that ship has sailed.” In contrast, over 75% of Vymo’s registered users log in and take actions on the app every day. Vymo’s offering also looks at a salesperson’s activities to identify what is working best for them and makes recommendations for “high-value activities” to other members based on that.

Vymo, which employs about 100 people, has amassed over 40 enterprise customers including life insurance firms AIA Group and AXA in seven nations. More than 100,000 salespeople use Vymo’s service. The startup will use the fresh capital to expand its business in many parts of the world and also begin operations in the U.S. market, Bhat said.

“With its exceptionally high user adoption metrics and steadily expanding user base — 100,000 salespeople at over 40 global enterprises and counting — Vymo is delivering transformational value. It’s the kind of company we at Emergence love partnering with — one that stands to drastically improve the day-to-day work lives of millions of people,” Jake Saper, a partner with Emergence Capital, who joins Vymo’s board as part of the financing, said in a statement.

Shailesh Lakhani, Managing Director of Sequoia Capital India Advisors, said, “As early partners, we’ve seen Vymo grow rapidly across all metrics, but most importantly in avid adoption by mobile-first workers at some of the largest global enterprises. Vymo is uniquely positioned to become the standard by which sales and distribution is run in these institutions.”

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NakedPoppy launches curated beauty marketplace for wellness junkies

NakedPoppy co-founders Jaleh Bisharat and Kimberly Shenk are an impressive duo. Bisharat, the startup’s chief executive officer, is a commanding presence and a bona fide marketing savant. The perfect compliment to Shenk, a reticent and data-focused chief product officer.

Together they’re building a cosmetics startup, NakedPoppy, where people can purchase high-quality “clean” makeup, or sustainable, ethically-made and cruelty-free products produced without harmful chemicals. It launches today with $4 million in venture capital backing from top investors, including Cowboy Ventures (the seed-stage fund led by Aileen Lee), Felicis Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Maveron, Polaris Ventures and Slow Ventures.

“Conventional makeup is considered hazardous waste by the EPA,” Bisharat tells TechCrunch. “You can look better and go clean.”

But NakedPoppy isn’t just another website for buying makeup. Like all companies today, it’s a tech company. NakedPoppy’s patent-pending personalization algorithm helps customers quickly find makeup that matches or complements their skin tone. To do this, customers are asked to complete a three-minute assessment and submit a photo of their wrist, which is used to pinpoint their base skin color.

“I’m not the person that is up to trends or is keeping up with the YouTube stars,”  NakedPoppy’s product chief Shenk tells TechCrunch. “When I walk into Sephora my stomach drops … I am the kind of woman that wants to set it and forget it. Just give me the right thing and let’s move on.”

Bisharat adds that NakedPoppy targets the busy woman: “The one for whom it’s not entertainment to go shopping for makeup.”

The NakedPoppy team hopes its algorithm expedites the makeup shopping process for those who view the task as a chore not a hobby. Accounting for skin type, skin color, skin undertone, age, eye color, hair color, allergies, sensitivities and more, the startup presents each customer a filtered and tailored list of the 400 items its carries, ranging from lipsticks to foundation to blush and more. Cosmetic chemists screen all NakedPoppy products to ensure they were made with only clean ingredients.

Alongside its official launch, NakedPoppy is announcing its debut original product: Liquid eyeliner. The product was screened and tested by a number of clean beauty experts and even a VC: “This is a hero product, no doubt about it,” BBG Ventures’ managing partner Susan Lyne said in a statement. Lyne, of course, is a NakedPoppy angel investor. “Most eyeliners start drying out after a few weeks and get harder to apply. This one is still as supple as the day I got it. It looks natural, lasts all day and washes off easily with soap. It’s pretty perfect.”

For the record, I tried out the NakedPoppy eyeliner too and can attest to its greatness.

NakedPoppy co-founders Jaleh Bisharat (CEO, left) and Kimberly Shenk (CPO, right).

The women behind NakedPoppy, as I alluded to earlier, know what they’re doing. In fact, I’d go as far as to say they could’ve paired their marketing and data science expertise to build just about anything. Makeup, however, was their shared passion.

“For us, it’s a personal passion and an area of information asymmetry, like most people know that with the food you eat, you should try to eat organic or as healthy as you can, but you’d be surprised how few women — they just assume the FDA protects them,” Bisharat said. “The idea is to educate the world and help women move toward new solutions.”

Bisharat got her start in marketing two decades ago. Shortly after the e-commerce giant went public, she served as the vice president of marketing at Amazon. A career peak for many, Bisharat went on to lead marketing efforts at OpenTable, Jawbone, UpWork and, most recently, Eventbrite, where she met Shenk.

Before moving into the private sector, Shenk got her start as a data scientist in the U.S. Air Force, ultimately ending up as the director of data science at the now-public ticketing and events business, Eventbrite.

Bisharat and Shenk remained mum on what marketing tactics they’ll deploy to capture the attention of potential customers. Will they partner with social media influencers to spread the word? Double down on Instagram ads? Open brick-and-mortar shops? They wouldn’t say. Additional original products are definitely in the works, though, as is a foray into skincare and ultimately, a full-fledged dive into all self-care products.

The hope is to making buying clean makeup easy. Historically, the big makeup brands have been owned and operated by one of a dozen or so large companies dominating the space. Increasingly, however, direct-to-consumer brands and startups, most notably Glossier, have attracted customers that prioritize ease-of-access.

As the beauty industry adjusts, an influx of digital-first upstarts, NakedPoppy included, will be poised to steal market share from the long-reigning giants. Perhaps NakedPoppy’s push toward transparency in ingredients and production will encourage the big brands to do the same.

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