Brazil continued to churn out unicorns this month, with Curitiba-based Ebanx becoming the first startup from the southern part of the country to top a $1 billion valuation. U.S.-based FTV Capital provided the investment but did not disclose the amount invested nor the exact valuation of Ebanx after the investment.

Ebanx is an end-to-end payment processor that helps international companies receive payments in the Latin American market, similar to Stripe. Their clients include Airbnb, AliExpress, Pipedrive, Spotify, Uber and Wish, and more than 50 million Latin Americans have conducted transactions with more than 1,000 companies through the Ebanx platform. This investment comes on the heels of exciting partnerships with Uber Pay, Shopify, Spotify and Visa to expand cross-border payment processing across the region.

Ebanx has operations in Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia, and will expand their local payment solution, Ebanx Pay, into Colombia in 2020. The company has grown its user base by offering a full-service product that includes market research, 24/7 customer service and anti-fraud technology.

The Ebanx investment is part of a growing interest in Latin American payments startups. Brazil’s PagSeguro and StoneCo had successful IPOs last year, while Mexico’s Conekta and Ecuador’s Kushki have raised large rounds to try to unite the region under a single processor as Latin America rapidly adopts e-commerce.

Uber acquires Cornershop, takes off where Walmart left off

The acquisition of the Chilean-Mexican grocery delivery startup Cornershop has been an emotional roller coaster for Latin American entrepreneurs and investors throughout 2019. First Walmart announced a $225 million deal that would be one of the bigger exits of the region, then the acquisition was blocked by Mexican antitrust institution COFECE. This announcement dealt a blow to the ecosystem as entrepreneurs and VCs had eagerly awaited this boost in liquidity in the local market.

Then in mid-October 2019, Uber announced it would take a 51% stake in Cornershop for a reported $450 million, quadrupling the startup’s value in the four months since the COFECE decision. This deal will consist of cash, investment in Cornershop’s growth and stock in Uber, which IPO’d earlier this year.

However, this deal must also be approved by the Chilean and Mexican antitrust boards, which are expected to release their decisions within the next two weeks. In the meantime, Cornershop will continue its expansion into the Colombian market after it added Peru and Canada in 2019.

Last-mile delivery and logistics became a very competitive space in Latin America in 2018, and many of the players are sitting on enormous pools of capital. Colombia’s Rappi raised $1 billion from SoftBank in early 2019, breaking records for startup investment for the region. Brazil’s iFood raised $500 million from Naspers at the end of 2018. However, delivery continues to be a cash-intensive business, with many of these companies burning through capital quickly to gain market share. Cornershop was an exception and had raised less than $50 million before the acquisition.

Brazil’s Buser, Olist, raise funding from SoftBank

Despite the WeWork crash, SoftBank has continued investing consistently in Brazilian startups. In early October 2019, the Japanese investor led an undisclosed Series B round for Brazilian collaborative bus chartering startup Buser. Buser’s team will invest more than $73 million in growth over the next 12 months to create new alliances for their network of operating partners.

Buser helps coordinate groups of people to charter buses at convenient times and lower prices, disrupting the bureaucratic, anti-competitive and inefficient bus system. The company has grown 1,500% over the past nine months and serves more than 3,000 people per day. While Buser has been popular with locals, traditional bus drivers are calling for regulation to slow the company’s meteoric growth. Buser plans to add more than 100 direct jobs in 200 cities over the next 12 months, and SoftBank’s most recent investment will help power this growth.

Brazil’s e-commerce marketplace integrator Olist also received investment from SoftBank for its Series C, coming in around $46 million. Redpoint eVentures and Valor Capital also participated in the round. 

Olist connects small businesses to larger product marketplaces to help entrepreneurs sell their products to a larger customer base. They will reportedly use this investment to investigate the development of financial products and look for collaboration with SoftBank’s other companies, like Rappi and Loggi. Based in Curitiba, Olist was founded in 2015 to help small merchants gain market share across the country through a SaaS licensing model to small brick and mortar businesses.

Today, Olist has more than 7,000 customers and uses a drop-shipping model to send products directly from stores to clients around the country, allowing them to grow with a capital-light model. They will use the investment to add up to 100 new employees.

Carrefour Brazil acquires 49% of Ewally

Grocery chain Carrefour acquired a large stake in Brazil-based Ewally after it completed Village Capital’s first regional acceleration program.

Ewally improves financial inclusion in Brazil through a mobile wallet app that allows unbanked clients to pay bills and make purchases online through the blockchain. Carrefour will reportedly use the acquisition to accelerate digital transformation and improve online payment mechanisms throughout Brazil.

Carrefour did not disclose the amount invested and the deal is still subject to approval by Brazilian financial regulation authorities. However, this investment signals the increased interest by traditional retailers in startups that are slowly chipping away at their market share across the region.

News and Notes: Early-stage rounds are getting bigger

Startups in Brazil, Colombia and Argentina raised several rounds this month, ranging from $1.5 million to $13 million. Brazil’s Xerpa, Colombia’s Sempli, Brazil’s Gorilla and Argentina’s Bitso and Worcket were among those that raised capital from local and international investors in October 2019.

Brazilian human resource management platform Xerpa raised $13 million from Vostok Emerging Finance to continue to help companies like MercadoLibre, iFood and QuintoAndar provide benefits for their employees. Previous investors include Nubank’s David Velez, Kaszek Ventures and QED Investors.

Sempli, an online lending platform for small businesses in Colombia, raised an $8 million Series A from new investors Oikocredit and Incofin CVSO, as well as previous investors BID LAB, XTPI Fund, Generación Exponencial, and Impulsum Ventures. To date, Sempli has raised more than $24 million in equity funding. The founders will use this round to grow their portfolio and improve their risk assessment technology to provide more small business loans in Colombia.

Brazil’s Quicko, an alternative mobility startup that uses big data, raised $10 million in October from Brazilian transport company CCR. Quicko’s technology integrates all mobility options — from bicycles to Uber and 99 — to help people get where they need to go as quickly and inexpensively as possible.

Also in Brazil, startup Gorilla Invest raised $8.4 million from Ribbit Capital, Monashees and Iporanga. Gorilla aggregates financial assets so that investors can review all their commitments in one place, and currently manages more than $1.2 billion for 40,000 clients.

Mexican cryptocurrency exchange Bitso raised an undisclosed round from Argentine startup Ripple to expand into the Southern Cone, especially Argentina and Brazil. Other investors in the round included Pantera Capital, Digital Currency Group, Jump Capital and Coinbase.

Looking ahead to November, with unsettled politics in several countries across the region, tech startups are growing despite governmental changes. Some of these changes will likely have a positive effect on the regional ecosystem as people push for more sustainable and equal economic growth.

What to watch next? Last year, Q4 was marked by a wave of large investments as funds and startups look to end the year strong. IFood raised its record-breaking $500 million round in December 2018. We may well see a similar uptick this year as mega-funds like SoftBank have been consistently investing multi-million dollar rounds since June. There is no sign international investment in Latin America will slow through the end of the year, so we can likely look forward to several more growth-stage rounds before the year is out.

Wearables are growing faster than any other Apple business

Apple's Wearables, Home, and Accessories business grew more than 50% year-over-year to $6.5 billion.

The group accounts for more revenue than Apple's iPad business, and is closing in on the Mac division, which earned the company $6.9 billion in revenue during the fiscal fourth quarter. Earlier this year, CEO Tim Cook said the wearables division alone is as big as a Fortune 200 company. 

Cook declined to break out specific details about the performance of the various products within the wearables group, such as the Apple Watch and the AirPods. 

But he noted that three out of four consumers who buy an Apple Watch are doing so for the first time, suggesting that the business is still expanding with new users rather than simply benefiting from die-hard Apple fans upgrading their devices.

"We're still significantly in the build mode," Cook said of the Watch business. "We dont' think of the penetration as anywhere near a mature penetration."

Many of Apple's services, however, are driven by the iPhone — and as such the iPhone remains an important tenant of Apple's business. The company expects the iPhone to return to growth in 2020 following the launch of four new iPhones, including three models that support 5G and one cheaper variant, Bloomberg reported earlier on Wednesday. Analysts also believe the introduction of 5G will be drive upgrades following next year's expected iPhone launch. 

If you’ve ever tried buying a bike online, or ski equipment, or any number of expensive goods where it would be useful to know a lot more than you do, you might check out Curated, a two-year-old San Francisco-based startup that wants to help busy shoppers who know generally what they want but don’t necessarily have time to visit a specialty store to learn more.

It isn’t the first startup to help with shopping recommendations. Among its predecessors is Hunch, a company that delivered customized recommendations to users based on signals around the web (and sold to eBay in 2011). Another variation on the same theme can be traced back to the dot com era company Keen.com, a live answer community where people could get answers to their questions over the phone.

Still, Curated makes enough sense in today’s market that Forerunner Ventures, which has established a name for itself as the preeminent investor in e-commerce companies, just led its $22 million Series A round. It was the only venture firm in the round by design, says cofounder and CEO Eddie Vivas, who says the funding was filled out by the same friends and family who’d participated in Curated’s $5.5 million seed round.

As part of the deal, Forerunner founder Kirsten Green has also joined the board.

It’s easy to appreciate the company’s appeal. Curated works by matching bewildered shoppers with people who are passionate and knowledgeable and “expert” in their fields. Right now, those experts are mostly athletes or coaches, as the platform is starting out with a handful of verticals, including golf, cycling, and a few winter sports. Longer term, the idea is to launch new sections on the site every six to eight weeks, including fly fishing, kiteboarding, camping and hiking.

How the economics work: Curated strikes deals with manufacturers — say makers of snowboard equipment or mountain bikes — that sell Curated their goods at wholesale prices. Curated can then sell them at retail prices to its customers. (Curated fulfills the order itself.)

Part of that markup is used to pay its experts, who tend to be people who have jobs in related fields but could use more income and who love sharing what they know about a topic. To ensure that these experts know as much as they claim, they are vetted by other experts on the platform, answering a battery of questions as part of that process.

Vivas stresses that experts are in no way incentivized to recommend anything in particular to a customer, but he says customers can tip the experts if they wish. (Curated suggests tips of 5%, 7.5%, or 10%, and Vivas says they are sometimes given much more than that by shoppers who are thankful for their time and effort, especially when their interactions end up leading them to products that cost less than they might have paid otherwise.)

The end goal is for customers to complete transactions on the platform that they wouldn’t otherwise feel comfortable completing at a site where they aren’t actively educated.

The platform is seizing on a number of trends that make it a smart idea for this day and age. For one thing, it uses artificial intelligence to connect shoppers with the right advisors. Though everyone tosses around AI as a competitive advantage, Curated seemingly has a genuine competitive advantage on this front, owing to the background of Vivas, who sold to LinkedIn an earlier company that used AI to automate the recruiting process.

At the time, in 2014, it was LinkedIn’s biggest acquisition ever. And Vivas stayed at LinkedIn for another 3.5 years as the head of product within its talent solutions business, which is where LinkedIn derives most of its revenue. (In fact, it’s where he met some of the 32 people who now work at Curated.)

Curated is also putting to work far-flung knowledge workers who, like a lot of Americans, increasingly work for themselves or in part-time roles that they’re looking to supplement with other part-time roles.

But perhaps most meaningfully, Curated is a kind of antidote to Amazon, where shoppers can turn when they need something fast but that’s incredibly limited when it comes to providing the kind of information needed to comfortably make big purchases. Consumers may pull the trigger on items anyway, but often, they end up with merchandise that they then have to send back or never wind up using.

The question now is whether the company can scale. To do so, it’ll need to rise above the din of other e-commerce platforms to attract enough customers to support its network of experts (and vice versa), and it’s a pretty crowded landscape out there, even with the magic of search-engine optimization and Facebook ads.

Curated will also need to strike enough deals with goods manufacturers to make the platform compelling for shoppers, and to ensure that the level of the advice that’s provided to those consumers is, and remains, high.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Vivas doesn’t sound concerned. He thinks he’s built a strong team. He’s also excited about the growing network of experts the team has pieced together since founding the company in the summer of 2017.

“You take someone who is passionate about something and you let them make money off it, and good things happen,” he says.

“In allowing people to monetize their knowledge, the unlock is just unbelievable.”

Time will tell. The service launches publicly today.

The cloud kitchen craze has reached Latin America. Food tech startup Muy landed a fresh $15 million Series B to expand into Mexico and soon Brazil. The service is currently operative in Colombia. 

Muy is a “cloud kitchen meets Chipotle,” says one investor. The company describes itself as a virtual kitchen and smart chef system that uses AI to produce food based on forecasts of demand, which can help to reduce food waste. Muy, translated from Spanish to English as “very,” allows users to place personalized orders in one of Muy’s physical restaurants or through a mobile app. Muy’s concept also exists as 20 physical dining locations offering what it says are quick, fresh and personalized dishes. Founder Jose Calderon says Muy is serving more than 200,000 dishes per month. 

The round was led by Mexico-based investor ALLVP, with previous investor Seaya returning. The $15 million Series B brings MUY’s total funding to $20.5 million.

Calderon is no newcomer to the takeaway experience space. He previously raised $47.7 million for a Colombian online food ordering startup called Domicilios, which he exited to Delivery Hero. 

The explosion of delivery apps has kept options competitive for customers not only in the U.S. but across Latin America. The congested highways of São Paulo, Mexico City, Bogotá and beyond are filled with motor couriers running deliveries with Rappi, UberEATS and the like.  

Calderon notes that cloud kitchens are poised to make on-demand ordering and delivery more efficient in these high-density cities due to the long commute times that keep the growing middle class out of their homes for extended periods of 12 hours or more.  

Alternatives like full service restaurants can be prohibitively expensive and time consuming, and traditional casual restaurants don’t meet quality standards. A large part of the market, around 40%, brings a lunch to work, says Calderon. But as disposable income increases, he predicts that more people will avoid cooking at home and will opt for faster and higher-quality options like Muy.

Cloud kitchens — the fully equipped, shared, commercial grade spaces for restaurant owners — have left U.S. investors balking. Journalists have described these virtual spaces as “ghost kitchens” and many have noted the threat they pose to independently owned restaurants. My colleague Danny Crichton wrote that “cloud kitchens are the WeWork for restaurant kitchens,” adding that suddenly sharable kitchen space will lead to bidding wars between these virtual food brands.  

This rhetoric isn’t hindering the rise of cloud kitchens and the services that support them from launching in the U.S. and down to Latin America. According to Calderon, the food service market opportunity in Latin America will reach $270 billion by 2021.

The founder also notes that the Latin America market is highly fragmented; the top 10 chains only hold around 5% of market share in comparison to countries like the U.S. where this figure reaches 24%. “Large players will consolidate and win, and small ones will face pressure,” he says. 

Larger incumbents have already begun to dip into the cloud kitchen opportunity. Earlier this year, Amazon took a $575 million bite into Deliveroo, which opened its first shared kitchen in Paris in 2018. City Storage Systems, the holding company of CloudKitchens, was backed with a $150 million controlling stake from Uber founder and ex-CEO Travis Kalanick. 

For better or worse, delivery apps and cloud kitchens are revolutionizing the way we eat in the U.S., Asia and now in Latin America. The winners among the various global delivery apps, cloud kitchens and controlling incumbents have yet to emerge, but what we do know is that everyone needs to eat lunch.

John Harrison: Another application that we’re seeing is more on clinical data analytics. Being able to surface data contained in these repositories of unstructured content is already helping...

___

Particle, a platform for Internet of Things devices, has raised $40 million in its latest round of funding.

Qualcomm Ventures and Energy Impact Partners led the Series C raise, with backing from existing investors including Root Ventures, Bonfire Ventures, Industry Ventures, Spark Capital, Green D Ventures, Counterpart Ventures and SOSV.

With its latest round of funding, Particle has raised $81 million to date.

The San Francisco-based startup provides the back-end for its customers to bring Internet of Things devices to market without having to shell out for their own software infrastructure. The platform aims to be the all-in-one solution for IoT devices, with encryption and security, as well as data autonomy and scalability.

That means more traditional businesses can buy a fleet of sensors and other monitoring devices, hook them up to their own machines and use Particle’s infrastructure for monitoring.

That’s a common theme that Particle sees, according to Zach Supalla, the company’s chief executive.

“More and more of our customers are in old-fashioned, even unglamorous, businesses like stormwater management, industrial equipment, shipping or monitoring any number of compressors, pumps and valves,” he said in remarks. “These businesses are diverse, but the common thread is that they need to monitor and control mission-critical machines, and we see it as our mission to help bring their machines, vehicles and devices into the 21st century.”

Particle said the funding round follows “significant growth” for its enterprise platform, seeing 150% year-over-year growth in revenue.

The company currently has 100 staff working to support 85 enterprise clients across agriculture, automotive, smart city and other industries.

Stampli, the Mountain View-based company looking to automate invoice management, has today announced the close of a $25 million Series B round. The funding round was led by SignalFire, with participation from existing investors such as Hillsven Capital and Bloomberg Beta, as well as new investors such as NextWorld Capital.

Stampli launched in 2015 to build software specifically focused on invoice management. Part of the problem with invoice management is that many people in the organization procure services and contract vendors, but the people who deal with the majority of the paperwork are siloed off from that process. This means the folks in the finance department are often tasked with chasing down co-workers from other departments to resolve their issues.

With Stampli, the entire procure to pay process happens in a collaborative software suite. Each invoice is turned into its own communications hub, allowing people across departments to fill in the blanks and answer questions so that payments are handled as efficiently as possible. Moreover, Stampli uses machine learning to recognize patterns around how the organization allocates cost, manages approval workflows and what data is extracted from invoices.

In other words, over time, Stampli gets better and better for each individual organization.

Stampli charges based on the amount of transactions an organization has in the system, as well as how many “advanced users” are taking part in that action. Stampli recognizes the difference between users in the finance department, making high-level decisions, and other users from the organization who are simply collaborating on the platform much more infrequently.

Co-founder and CEO Eyal Feldman believes that another big differentiator for the company is that it has specifically decided to be payments-agnostic, letting customers choose their payments provider and maintain control of that part of the system.

As of right now, Stampli is processing more than $12 billion in invoices annually, with more than 1,900 businesses and 40,000 users on the platform.

This new round comes on the heels of a $6.7 million Series A round from August 2018, also led by SignalFire, with participation from UpWest Labs, Bloomberg Beta and Hillsven Capital. This brings Stampli’s total funding to $34.7 million.

The ubiquity of APIs and cloud solutions have opened up a world of interesting ways for businesses to create a service without having to build every part of it themselves. But they have unleashed something else, too: an increased risk of breaches resulting from data being moved and used in multiple places and in multiple ways. Now, a startup that has built a way to help safeguard against that threat — using homomorphic encryption — is announcing funding, a sign of market demand and the opportunity it presents for cybersecurity.

Duality, which builds solutions based on homomorphic encryption — a technique that encrypts an organization’s data in a way that lets it stay encrypted even as the company collaborates with third parties that also process the data — is today announcing that it has raised $16 million in funding.

The Series A round is being led by Intel Capital, with participation from Hearst Ventures and Team8.

Team8 is the heavyweight Israeli cybersecurity incubator that counts Intel as a strategic partner and itself has an impressive list of backers, including Microsoft, Walmart, Eric Schmidt and Accenture.

Intel is a financial and strategic backer here: last year the two worked on a project to expose the security challenges of AI workloads, which utilised homomorphic encryption on Intel platforms in order to minimise data exposure. Intel’s are used in a wide range of use cases that include cloud services and massive hardware companies; you could see where the two might work together more in the future.

Other companies that Duality works with are in the financial markets, healthcare and insurance, although it says it cannot disclose who because of NDAs. One customer it did name was the CDA, the Cyber Defense Alliance, in the U.K., a cross-bank security alliance.

Another may well be Hearst, the other investor named in this round.

“As a leading global, diversified media, information and services company with more than 360 businesses across industries, we are acutely aware of the increasing importance of data and data collaboration in companies across many market segments,” said Kenneth Bronfin, senior managing director of Hearst Ventures, in a statement. “Sensitive data is constantly being generated by both individuals and businesses; there needs to be technology available that protects such data while allowing us to extract insights. We are excited by Duality’s mission and its ability to deliver complex technology to real-world use cases and applications.”

There are a handful of cybersecurity startups and larger companies emerging that are building solutions on the principle of homomorphic encryption.

They include Enveil, CryptoNext Security and IBM. Duality, however, has an interesting pedigree when it comes to the field: one of its co-founders, Shafi Goldwasser, won a Turing Award for her groundbreaking work in cryptographic algorithms that form the basis of homomorphic encryption.

As with a lot of high-level math, that work is largely theoretical, and so the work that Duality — led by its other co-founders Alon Kaufman, Rina Shainski, Vinod Vaikuntanathan and Kurt Rohloff, all of whom also have long lists of cybersecurity and data science credentials — has done has involved making the algorithms into something that is commercially viable and usable by most businesses.

That being said, there is still a lot of time and computing energy needed to process encrypted data, and so the idea with Duality is that it’s used on a company’s most sensitive information. With some of the funding going toward R&D, it will be interesting to see whether algorithms can improve enough to extend that kind of encryption in a practical way to wider data sets.

“There is no free lunch here,” said Kaufman, the CEO, in an interview this week. “Homomorphic encryption is the Holy Grail of security and privacy since it removes huge challenges. But there are overheads. When we deploy it with a customer, we don’t say, ‘from now on encrypt everything and assume nothing is open.’ That’s because it’s a storage and computational overhead. That is why we focus on sensitive data sets.” He added that one of Duality’s unique qualities is that its overhead is dramatically improved compared to others that are also building solutions on this principle, but all the same, “you apply it only when you need to.”

“The ability to secure data during analysis is a critical component in the future computation stack, specifically in the context of AI. Intel Capital has been following the space closely, and we are excited to see secure computing and homomorphic encryption becoming practical and broadly applicable,” said Anthony Lin, vice president and senior managing director of Intel Capital, in a statement. “We believe privacy-preservation in AI and ML represents a huge market need, and we’re investing in Duality because of its unique founding team and world-leading expertise in both advanced cryptography and data science.”

Why raise venture capital when you can raise debt and keep your equity?

That’s the question a whole slew of new financial technology companies are hoping entrepreneurs will ask themselves as they begin to think about collecting outside capital for their businesses. Clearbanc made waves with its “20-Minute Term Sheet” campaign, with a goal of backing 2,000 businesses with $1 billion in non-dilutive capital by the end of 2019. Now, Capital is launching to educate founders about the possibility of debt funding.

Founded by former Draper Fisher Jurvetson (now known as Threshold Ventures) investor Blair Silverberg, Csaba Konkoly and Chris Olivares, Capital is launching today with $5 million from Future Ventures, Greycroft, Wavemaker and others. Additionally, it’s raised from “prominent institutional pools of capital” to invest between $5 million and $50 million in promising companies, determined using “The Capital Machine.”

Capital’s underwriting technology, dubbed The Capital Machine, determines if businesses have the growth potential necessary for an infusion of debt (by analyzing revenue and other financial considerations), then delivers term sheets within 24 hours. The expedited process cuts out the time-consuming elements of pitching venture capitalists, the company says, allowing businesses to go from zero to $5 million — or more — in a matter of hours.

For companies that are’t ready for a debt round, or that don’t meet Capital’s qualification, the company is offering access to a free calculator that determines the cost of a company’s capital based on their fundraising and valuation data.

“We are trying to create a business that is the place that all founders go to start their fundraising process,” Silverberg tells TechCrunch. “We just want entrepreneurs to understand that step one in building a balance sheet is to understand your cost of capital. Step two is you can now use that to compare your financing options. We hope we can make this process simpler and more transparent.”

Capital charges a 5% to 15% flat fee on its capital, investing a maximum of $50 million over time. The company has ambitions of becoming a holistic investment bank of sorts, says Silverberg, ready and willing to advise companies on fundraising possibilities and connect them with VCs for future deals.

Historically, Silverberg explains, venture capital dollars went to risky upstarts poised to disrupt a category. Today, loads of equity funding is funneled into predictable business models that could be funded entirely with non-dilutive capital: “I saw what the venture process was like,” Silverberg said, referencing his stint at DFJ. “Tech companies do not utilize debt … this is extremely expensive for founders.”

There’s a culture surrounding venture capital fundraising in Silicon Valley and beyond. One in which startups seek to become “unicorns,” hoping for stories on this very site to laud their accomplishments — including the loads of venture capital dollars they’ve pulled in. In reality, much of that capital is plowed into things like Facebook and Google to fuel digital ad campaigns, which is not how VC is intended to be used and can result in founders taking a company public with just a few percentage points of ownership.

Solutions like Capital, Clearbanc, Lighter Capital and others should remind entrepreneurs that venture capital isn’t the only route to getting a company off the ground and can be raised in addition to venture debt.

“There’s no excuse for not knowing your cost of capital,” Silverberg adds.

Digital media startup Brut is announcing that it has raised $40 million in Series B funding. The money will be used, in part, to finance its launch in the United States.

CEO Guillaume Lacroix said that he and his co-founders all come from the French TV industry, where they were all “frustrated not to be able to follow up the conversation” on social media. So they created Brut as a way to deliver video news that felt conversational and authentic, hoping to spark viewer conversation, then take advantage of that commentary to find future stories.

“We always say to journalists, ‘Forget the audience, think about your two best friends,’ ” Lacroix told me. “Would you be excited to have this conversation tonight with your friends? If yes, let’s do it.”

The publisher focuses on topics like social good and social impact — for example, it published the first viral video featuring climate change activist Greta Thunberg. Lacroix argued that Brut’s audience is looking for solutions, not just problems, in contrast to the “negative news cycle” that they see on traditional media.

“People are not waiting anymore — they don’t wait for institutions to do it, they don’t wait for the collectivity to do it,” he said. “It’s very inspiring to see someone who takes even a small action.”

At the same time, he doesn’t want Brut’s journalists to veer too heavily into advocacy or activism themselves: “We don’t do a call to action, we’re not activists, we don’t point a finger. We just shine a light on people who are trying to do something to change the world.”

In many ways, Brut seems to check off the same boxes (it aims to reach a millennial/Gen Z audience with short videos on Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat) that many U.S. digital media startups did before they started to struggle and consolidate over the past few years.

But Lacroix said the startup’s approach is working — not just in terms of reaching an audience, but also building a real business. Brut is already profitable in France, and it plans to be profitable in the U.S. within three years.

Asked whether he’s worried about relying on social platforms to reach his audience, Lacroix argued that even if you focus on publishing on your own website, you’re reliant on Google for traffic.

“For me, it’s not a problem of distribution, if you’re diversified enough,” he said. “It’s a problem of: What’s your business model? Why did Spotify explode from day one? They have a global DNA. It’s exactly the same for us.”

For example, Lacroix said that Brut’s audience is concerned about many of the same issues no matter what country they’re in. And the company is able to produce content for them in a relatively low-cost way, because it can shoot a video in French or English, then add subtitles in a variety of languages — most audiences won’t even notice because they’re watching on their phones, with the sound off.

To be clear, Brut hasn’t exactly been ignoring the U.S. market before this. The company said it has an audience of 30 million daily active viewers across the globe, including in the United States, and it opened an office in New York City a couple of years ago. By “launching” here, Brut means it’s hiring an advertising sales force to start monetizing that audience.

The company previously raised €10 million (approximately $11.1 million) from Kima Ventures, according to Crunchbase. The new funding was led by Red River West and blisce, with participation from Aryeh Bourkoff, Eric Zinterhofer and others.

“When deciding where to invest, we look for mission-driven companies whose values are aligned with our own,” said blisce founder and CEO Alexandre Mars in a statement. “Like blisce’s previous investments in Spotify, Pinterest and Bird, we believe that Brut’s unique global approach represents a special competitive advantage, as well as an understanding that business success and positive social impact are inextricably linked.”

Workiz, a startup whose software helps field service professionals manage their work, said today it has raised $5 million in Series A funding. The funding was led by Magenta Venture Partners, with participation from returning investor Aleph. The company announced the launch of Workiz Voice, an Amazon Alexa-powered feature that allows the app to be controlled with voice commands, making it safer to use while field service workers are driving.

Magenta Venture Partners general partner Ran Levitzky will join Workiz’s board of directors. The Series A brings Workiz’s total funding so far to $7.3 million. The company says it grew 247% last year and CEO Adi Azaria told TechCrunch that the company currently has thousands of customers in the U.S. and Canada. Many are home or equipment maintenance companies, including locksmiths, garage door repair, junk removal, appliance repair and carpet cleaning businesses. The software has also been used by medical transport companies, including Trinity Air Medical, to manage highly time-sensitive delivery of organ donations to their recipients. The company targets field services businesses with fewer than 50 employees, but can scale up to organizations with many more technicians and franchises.

Workiz’ new funding is being used on its automation platform for field service workers and Workiz Voice, as well as hiring for its North American team and operations.

The startup was founded in 2015 by Saar Kohanovitch, Idan Kadosh and Erez Marom. Kadosh and Marom worked as locksmiths for more than 15 years in San Diego, Calif. They were frustrated by the field service management software options available and reliance on pen, paper and Excel spreadsheets to manage their business. They also carried multiple cell phones, as most customer appointments were arranged by phone calls and they could not hide their personal numbers.

Workiz was created to give field service companies a full set of tools, including the ability to monitor interactions between technicians and customers, keep detailed records of client calls and texts, send clients reminders, track advertising spending and effectiveness and process credit card payments.

“At Workiz, we have a vision to transform tradespeople into business professionals, and the Workiz platform is able to successfully do so. While 75% of small businesses close within their first five years of business, businesses who are using Workiz are able to slash that number down to just 20%,” said Azaria.

About 52% of field services companies still rely on pen and paper to manage their businesses, presenting a growth opportunity for Workiz. To get them to switch, Workiz provides free help for onboarding, which can be completed in as little as one or two days. The software syncs with QuickBooks or CSV files.

The startup says Workiz Voice, which enables workers to look up job schedules, sort through leads, communicate with team members or clients and find directions to their next job, is the first feature of its kind on the market. It helps Workiz Voice differentiate from other field service management software like Jobber or HouseCall Pro.

In a press statement, Levitzky said “We are constantly on the lookout for exciting companies transforming industries, and Workiz ticked all of the boxes. The company’s approach levels the playing field so that businesses of all sizes can better secure and manage job opportunities, given the on-demand nature of the field service industry.”