There are more seed funds than ever helping businesses get off the ground, but the Series A financing continues to be one of the toughest deals to close.

Not only will we welcome early-stage investors to teach entrepreneurs how to raise their first round of venture capital, we will have a group of investors intimately familiar with the Series A on deck at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin this December to offer their best tips and tricks.

Joining us onstage is Blossom Capital partner Louise Samet and Penta founder Jessica Holzbach .

Samet, for her part, joined Blossom Capital, a new European venture capital fund focused on leading Series A investments, earlier this year. Based in Stockholm, Samet’s career includes years of angel investing with standout bets including LendingHome, Bloom Credit and Stravito. Blossom portfolio companies include Duffel, Frontify, Fat Llama, Sqreen and Checkout.com. Before Blossom, Samet was the director of technical sales at Klarna, a high-profile European fintech startup.

Finally, Holzbach, who leads the digital-only banking platform for SMEs, Penta, has spent her career founding startups and working as a management consultant, supervising various CRM projects for financial institutions and insurance companies. Penta, where she is currently CCO, has raised millions in venture capital funding, including a €7 million Series A last year. She can speak to the process of securing funding and the challenges she faced as a founder.

Join us at Disrupt Berlin, running December 11 and December 12, to hear more from these experts on how to secure one of the most influential funding rounds in a company’s lifespan. Tickets to the show are available here!

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If the researchers, executives and investors behind Coda Biotherapeutics have their way, one day soon there really could be a cure for pain.

Co-founded by researchers Joseph Glorioso, from the University of Pittsburgh’s microbiology and molecular genetics department, and Dr. Nicholas Boulis, the founder of Emory’s Gene and Cell Therapy for Neurorestoration Laboratory, Coda uses gene therapies to treat neurological diseases starting with severe pain and epilepsy.

America is a country in pain. There are more than 19 million Americans who live with chronic neuropathic pain, according to Coda’s own statistics. And over the past 20 years the doctors treating those Americans and the drug companies developing therapies for them have managed to turn their treatment into a new epidemic — opioid addiction.

In 2017, 47,600 Americans died from opioid-involved overdoses, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Of those deaths, about 60% involved synthetic opioids.

“The incentives were there for people to prescribe more and more, particularly when they had already been convinced it was the right thing to do — the compassionate thing to do,” Keith Humphreys, a psychiatrist at Stanford University and a former White House drug-policy adviser, told the journal Nature.

As the pain epidemic and attendant opioid crisis began to skyrocket, several companies have been racing to find alternatives to the drug treatments that were now killing Americans by the thousands. Other approaches like electrical nerve stimulation can carry risks, and invasive surgeries are an unappealing last resort, according to Coda’s chief executive.

Coda’s experimental treatment is based on a science called chemogenetics, which uses a harmless virus to create new receptors in the sensory neurons that provide signals to the brain about physical stimuli. Those receptors can be unlocked by small-molecule drugs, which would instruct the sensory neurons to stop firing, thereby cutting off the signals of pain to the brain.

The idea behind chemogenetics is to engineer a receptor that when you put it in with a… gene therapy… it does nothing. We’ve engineered it so that it is no longer responsive,” says Michael Narachi, the president and chief executive officer at Coda. “Most of these receptors are naturally opened or closed by acetylcholine… We’ve engineered these receptors so that  they’re no longer responsive to acetylcholine, but they are responsive to a man-made drug.”

The company then draws from a portfolio of receptor small-molecule drug pairs that were developed and tested for their pharmacological and toxicological effects, but discarded because of a lack of efficacy, to create new therapies with receptors tailored to respond to those drugs.

“What we’ve done is flipped the whole paradigm on its head. We’re making the lock that can work with these keys,” says Narachi. 

So far, the company has raised $34 million as investors, including Versant Ventures, MPM Capital and Astellas Venture Management, have doubled down on their initial $19 million commitment to the new drug developer. 

“Since coming out of stealth mode last September, the CODA team has made tremendous progress in developing its gene therapy program that is tunable, durable and highly selective, which allows for better efficacy and safety with fewer off-target effects,” said Tom Woiwode, PhD, managing director at Versant Ventures and Coda Chairman, in a statement. “CODA’s platform holds great promise to significantly transform how we treat challenging conditions and disorders for which new therapeutic options are greatly needed.” 

Pain isn’t the only condition that Coda hopes to treat. The company is also working on therapies that can reduce the severity of epilepsy for the nearly 3.4 million people in the U.S. who have the condition. While the company can’t treat all kinds of epilepsy, Coda says that it could address focal epilepsy, which represents 60% of all manifestations of the condition, and is linked to a specific region of the brain.

By engineering neurotransmitter receptors that are activated by medicines that can be taken orally, Coda thinks it can control the activity of neurons responsible for both chronic pain and focal epilepsy.

The next step for the company — and part of the use of proceeds from its new $15 million cash infusion — will be to proceed with early animal trials. These clinical trials will be followed by human trials.

“This is a research platform,” says Narachi. “We have this portfolio of engineered receptors and we’re testing them in cells. The next step is to go into human clinical trials.”

Cloud-based security service provider Qualys (Nasdaq: QLYS) continues to surge past market expectations. The recently reported quarterly results were significantly better than the Street’s forecast,...

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Florian Quarre: We do have affinity to healthcare, finance, and retail primarily because we try to mix together the techno-functional aspects. On the functional side, quite a few of us either have...

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These days it’s not enough to have meetings. Now tech companies need to have meetings about meetings — and to ensure that this can happen efficiently(?), a Los Angeles company called Parabol has just raised $4 million.

Founded in Brooklyn with a workforce that’s mostly virtual, the new-ish company managed to raise cash from three firms that know a thing or two about enterprise operations — CRV, Haystack and the Slack Fund.

Parabol’s software allows distributed and in-house teams to talk about how effective different processes and meetings have been.

The company says that more than 500 organizations use the company’s suite of software services.

Think of it as a programmatic view of structuring a meeting and feedback — “Robert’s Rules of Order” for the internet age.

“There are about 20 million engineers that run the agile development process today,” says Parabol founder and chief executive, Jordan Husney. “In the past everyone would show up to the same office and they would have these highly structured meetings. But as soon as great video conferencing software developed, people started thinking more openly about labor and started hiring people all around the world.”

These distributed workforces required even more organizational structure for their meetings as they collaborated on projects, Husney said. This is especially true for adherents to the agile development process, who break down work into sprints that then need to be assessed, he said.

“Parabol was created so that every meeting held amongst team members is actually worth the time invested. With the support of CRV and Haystack, we will make Parabol useful to more kinds of teams, and scale Parabol’s infrastructure to match our rate of growth,” said Husney in a statement.

The tools Parabol developed allow workers to conduct retrospective meetings and check-ins, the company said.

The software allows teams to work through five structured meeting phases, where teams evaluate their processes and make improvements at the end of a project, said the company.

“Parabol is transforming the way agile teams across industries work together,” said Izhar Armony, partner at CRV, in a statement. “We’ve been tracking the rapidly rising need for teams to collaborate at a distance, and believe in the way Parabol is enabling people to meet and work more effectively together.”

The countdown to serious savings continues here at TechCrunch, and this is a timely reminder that you have only four days left to save on early-bird passes to Disrupt Berlin 2019 (11-12 December). Kommst du nun, oder was — you are coming, aren’t you?

Pricing starts at €445 + VAT and, depending on which pass you buy, you can save as much as €500. Das ist gut! If you want to reap the savings, you need to buy your early-bird pass before the deadline: 8 November at 11:59 p.m. (CEST). 

Let’s talk about some of the reasons so many people attend Disrupt Berlin. It’s an opportunity to connect with and learn from an international community of early-stage startuppers — founders, investors, engineers, marketers and more. Be inspired by both your contemporaries and by the folks who’ve paved the way, achieved success and want to share their insights.

Don’t take our (admittedly biased) word for it. Here’s what some of your peers have to say about their time at Disrupt:

Get ready to hear from a stellar group of speakers on both the Main and Extra Crunch stages — or in our Q&A Sessions. Start planning now by perusing the Disrupt Berlin agenda, and don’t be surprised if we add a few more surprise speakers to it in the coming weeks.

You certainly won’t want to miss out on Startup Battlefield, our thrilling pitch competition with a $50,000 prize. And be sure to catch the Hackathon finalists on the Extra Crunch stage as they pitch products they designed, coded and created in roughly 24 hours. Who will win the $5,000 prize for best overall hack?

Disrupt Berlin 2019 takes place on 11-12 December, but you have only four days left to take advantage of early-bird pricing. Beat the deadline — 8 November at 11:59 p.m. (CEST) deadline, buy your passes and save up to €500. Kommst du nun, oder was — you are coming, aren’t you?

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

Medopad, the U.K. startup that has been working with Tencent to develop AI-based methods for building and tracking “digital” biomarkers — measurable indicators of the progression of illnesses and diseases that are picked up not with blood samples or in-doctor visits but using apps and wearables — has announced another round of funding to expand the scope of its developments.

The startup has picked up $25 million, led by pharmaceuticals giant Bayer, which will be working together with Medopad to build digital biomarkers and therapeutics related to heart health. Separately, Medopad is also working on developing diagnostics to track biomarkers related to Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and diabetes.

The Series B is being made at a post-money valuation of between $200 million and $300 million. In addition to Bayer, Hong Kong firm NWS Holdings and Chicago VC Healthbox also participated. All three are previous investors, with NWS leading its $28 million Series A in 2018, bringing the total raised by Medopad to more than $50 million.

The bump in valuation — Medopad had a $110 million post-money valuation after its previous round — also comes on the heels of the company last year signing high-profile deals totaling some $140 million with a string of firms in China, including Tencent, Ping An, as well as the Chinese divisions of GSK, Johnson & Johnson and more.

The world where medicine mixes with tech in the name of doing things faster, better and with less expense had a big knock with the rise and calamitous fall of Theranos. The blood-testing startup claimed to have developed technology to perform a multitude of tests tracking biomarkers using only a few drops of blood — tests that used to require significantly more blood (and expense) to run accurately. Great concept, if only it weren’t a scam.

Medopad also tracks biomarkers, but it’s taking a very different, non-invasive route to building its solutions. The company constructs its algorithms and tests working with pharmaceutical and tech partners to build solutions end-to-end, leaning on advances in software and hardware to fulfill ideas that have been unattainable goals for a long time.

“For the past 25 years, we have been talking about connected healthcare, but no one has done it,” CEO Dan Vahdat, who co-founded the company with Rich Khatib, said in an interview. “The nature of the concept has just been too challenging. The approach is established but the computing and device technology weren’t able to detect and read these things outside of hospital settings.”

In one example, a classic Parkinson’s test would have required a patient to go to a doctor’s office for a 30-minute assessment to determine how a patient is walking. In recent times, with the advent of advanced computer vision and far better sensors on devices, a new category of digital biomarkers, as Vahdat describes them, are being created — for example, by tracking how a person is walking to measure her/his gait and other metrics — to provide similar guidance to a clinician on the patient’s progress.

“These can be collected, for example, based on how you walk and talk, along with other vital signs,” he said.

The startup is also working with teaching hospitals to build other clinical trials. For example, it has a partnership with the Royal Hospital, Wolverhampton to better track aortic stenosis, when heart valves narrow and restrict blood flow.

“This is a very exciting project and fits with our ethos of ‘proactive’ and ‘one to many care’ which, we think, will benefit patients and release valuable clinical time,” said Professor James Cotton at The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust, in a statement.

Longer term, it’s also working with Janssen (a division of Johnson & Johnson) on a possible way of tracking early signs and progress of Alzheimer’s by way of cognitive tests that someone can take at home.

Medopad has a healthy approach to the work it is doing reminiscent of the kind of collaboration that is typical in the world of science.

“We won’t claim that we can do what others can’t, but we are using foundations that were built years ago, to discover and commercially deploy solutions via our channel,” said Vahdat. He added that Babylon in the U.K. and Collective Health in the U.K. are two companies he admires for taking a similar approach in their respective fields of doctor/patient care and health insurance.

The fact that the company works so closely with Tencent and other Chinese companies is notable at a time when there is a lot of scrutiny of China and how its companies may be using or working with personal data in countries like the U.S. and U.K.

Vahdat said that all patient data is only collected with consent, and if any data from Medopad is passed to its partners, it’s anonymised. A patient’s data, furthermore, does not leave the country in which it is collected.

The Tencent partnership, he added, was largely to help build the company’s AI engine, with China’s massive population providing a ripe background to train machine learning algorithms.

Medopad’s main asset, in any case, is not data, but the algorithms and methods it uses to collect and process digital biomarkers, he added.

“We are a big believer in the fact that data is not our product,” Vahdat said. “That is something we are really proud of.”

Gradeup, an edtech startup in India that operates an exam preparation platform for undergraduate and postgraduate-level courses, has raised $7 million from Times Internet as it looks to expand its business in the country.

Times Internet, a conglomerate in India, invested $7 million in Series A and $3 million in seed financing rounds of the four-year-old Noida-based startup, it said. Times Internet is the only external investor in Gradeup, they said.

Gradeup started as a community for students to discuss their upcoming exams, and help one another with solving questions, said Shobhit Bhatnagar, co-founder and CEO of Gradeup, in an interview with TechCrunch.

While those functionalities continue to be available on the platform, Gradeup has expanded in the last year to offer online courses from teachers to help students prepare for exams, he said. These courses, depending on their complexity and duration, cost anywhere between Rs 5,000 ($70) and Rs 35,000 ($500).

“These are live lectures that are designed to replicate the offline experience,” he said. The startup offers dozens of courses and runs multiple sessions in English and Hindi languages. As many as 200 students tune into a class simultaneously, he said.

Students can interact with the teacher through a chatroom. Each class also has a “student success rate” team assigned to it that follows up with each student to check if they had any difficulties in learning any concept and take their feedback. These extra efforts have helped Gradeup see more than 50% of its students finish their courses — an industry best, Bhatnagar said.

Each year in India, more than 30 million students appear for competitive exams. A significant number of these students enroll themselves to tuitions and other offline coaching centers.

“India has over 200 million students that spend over $90 billion on different educational services. These have primarily been served offline, where the challenge is maintaining high quality while expanding access,” said Satyan Gajwani, vice chairman of Times Internet.

In recent years, a number of ed tech startups have emerged in the country to cater to larger audiences and make access to courses cheaper. Byju’s, backed by Naspers and valued at more than $5.5 billion, offers a wide range of self-learning courses. Vedantu, a Bangalore-based startup that raised $42 million in late August, offers a mix of recorded and live and interactive courses.

But still, only a fraction of students take online courses today. One of the roadblocks in their growth has been access to mobile data, which until recent years was fairly expensive in the country. But arrival of Reliance Jio has solved that issue, said Bhatnagar. The other is acceptance from students and, more importantly, their parents. Watching a course online on a smartphone or desktop is still a new concept for many parents in the country, he said. But this, too, is beginning to change.

“The first wave of online solutions were built around on-demand video content, either free or paid. Today, the next wave is online live courses like Gradeup, with teacher-student interactivity, personalisation and adaptive learning strategies, delivering high-quality solutions that scale, which is particularly valuable in semi-urban and rural markets,” said Times Internet’s Gajwani.

“These match or better the experience quality of offline education, while being more cost-effective. This trend will keep growing in India, where online live education will grow very quickly for test prep, reskilling and professional learning,” he added.

Gradeup has amassed more than 15 million registered students who have enrolled to live lectures. The startup plans to use the fresh capital to expand its academic team to 100 faculty members (from 50 currently) and 200 subject matters and reach more users in smaller cities and towns in India.

“Students even in smaller cities and towns are paying a hefty amount of fee and are unable to get access to high-quality teachers,” Bhatnagar said. “This is exactly the void we can fill.”

Better than expected revenues couldn’t divert investor attention from the fact that Uber still managed to lose more than $1 billion in the most recent quarter as the company’s stock fell in after-hours trading.

There are bright spots in the latest earnings report, not least that the company managed to stanch the bleeding that had cost the company over $5 billion in the previous quarter.

Revenue grew to $3.8 billion, up from $2.9 billion in the year-ago period, representing a 30% boost. But even as Uber’s core business shows signs of stabilizing and its core markets continue to show growth, its other business units appear to be hemorrhaging cash at increasingly high rates.

“Our results this quarter decisively demonstrate the growing profitability of our Rides segment,” said Dara Khosrowshahi, the company’s chief executive, in a statement. “Rides Adjusted EBITDA is up 52% year-over-year and now more than covers our corporate overhead. Revenue growth and take rates in our Eats business also accelerated nicely. We’re pleased to see the impact that continued category leadership, greater financial discipline, and an industry-wide shift towards healthier growth are already having on our financial performance.”

Losses in earnings at the company’s Uber Eats business grew 67% to $316 million from $189 million in the year-ago period. And performance in the company’s freight division looks even worse. Losses in freight ballooned by 161%, growing to $81 million from $31 million in the same quarter of 2018.

Also contributing to the company’s losses for the quarter were stock-based compensation expenses, which added another $401 million to the tallies against the company.

Given that the lock-up period is about to end for institutional investors, that could spell even more trouble for the company — as institutional investors who bought into the company before its public offering may look to sell.

That said, Uber has taken a number of steps to correct its course and put the company on a path to profitability, which Khosrowshahi says should happen in the next two years.

In October, the company announced the last of three rounds of sweeping layoffs at the company that saw 1,185 staffers lose their jobs. Khosrowshahi called the layoffs a chance to ensure that the company was “structured for success for the next few years.” In an email to staff, he wrote, “This has resulted in difficult but necessary changes to ensure we have the right people in the right roles in the right locations, and that we’re always holding ourselves accountable to top performance.”

With the layoffs behind it, Uber can now focus on some of the big operational challenges it had set for itself through the reorganization that the company has announced. That includes adding new features and technologies to its Uber Eats delivery program (despite what recent losses at GrubHub may imply about the food delivery business) and pressing forward with another darling of the tech set these days — the company’s financial services platform.

The launch of this new platform, coupled with a slew of announcements from the company in September, show that Uber may have dialed back on its ambitions, but not by much. As Khosrowshahi said at the event, “We want to be the operating system for your everyday life…. A one-click gateway to everything that Uber can offer you.”

Workday announced this afternoon that it has entered into an agreement to acquire online procurement platform Scout RFP for $540 million. The company raised more than $60 million on a post valuation of $184.5 million, according to PitchBook data.

The acquisition builds on top of Workday’s existing procurement solutions, Workday Procurement and Workday Inventory, but Workday chief product product officer Petros Dermetzis wrote in a blog post announcing the deal that Scout gives the company a more complete solution for customers.

“With increased importance around the supplier as a strategic asset, the acquisition of Scout RFP will help accelerate Workday’s ability to deliver a comprehensive source-to-pay solution with a best-in-class strategic sourcing offering, elevating the office of procurement in strategic importance and transforming the procurement function,” he wrote.

Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research says that Workday has been trying to be the end-to-end cloud back office player. He says, “One of their big gaps has been in procurement.”

Wang says that Workday has been investing with eye toward filling gaps in the product set for some time. In fact, Workday Ventures has been an investor in Scout RFP since 2018, and it’s also an official Workday partner.

“A lot of the Workday investments are in portfolio companies that are complimentary to Workday’s larger vision of the future of Cloud ERP. Today’s definition of ERP includes finance, HCM (human capital management), projects, procurement, supply chain and asset management,” Wang told TechCrunch.

As the Scout RFP founders stated in a blog post about today’s announcement, the two companies have worked well together and a deal made sense. “Working closely with the Workday team, we realized how similar our companies’ beliefs and values are. Both companies put user experience at the center of product focus and are committed to customer satisfaction, employee engagement and overall business impact. It was not surprising how easy it was to work together and how quickly we saw success partnering on go-to-market activities. From a culture standpoint, it just worked,” they wrote. A deal eventually came together as a result.

Scout RFP is a fairly substantial business, with 240 customers in 155 countries. There are 300,000 users on the platform, according to data supplied by the company. The company’s 160 employees will be moving to Workday when the deal closes, which is expected by the end of January, pending standard regulatory review.