Sourcing ingredients in the restaurant industry is a dirty process that still relies heavily on voicemails and fax orders. More tech-forward solutions have been pushed, but getting restaurants and suppliers to uniformly sign on to a platform has been a relatively daunting challenge.

Choco is a young startup with plenty of momentum that’s aiming to attract restaurants and suppliers to their mobile ordering platform, which gives restaurants their very own food delivery app for getting ingredients from suppliers, moving them away from daily voicemail orders.

“[Leaving voicemails] a very tedious process and one that’s very prone to error but [restaurants] are going to repeat it every day,” Choco CEO Daniel Khachab tells TechCrunch. “This ‘system’ is highly inefficient and wasteful, but it’s our main competitor.”

Choco’s mobile app has an interface reminiscent of popular consumer apps, with a Messenger-like chat interface for communication between suppliers and restaurants and a Postmates-like ordering list that makes ordering as easy as tapping away on one’s commonly purchased ingredients.

There’s a big opportunity here, and Khachab has been growing the Choco team at breakneck speeds to ensure that it is the solution to beat. The 18-month-old team has 100 employees already and is announcing that they’ve closed a $33.5 million Series A led by Bessemer Venture Partners . By the end of next year the company hopes to grow its business by 15x.

Choco is in 15 cities across Europe and the U.S. and says their early customers include everyone from Michelin-starred restaurants to burger chains. The company has now raised $41 million to date. Other investors include Atlantic Labs, Target Global, Visionaries Club and Greyhound.

As the company seeks to build up a user base among suppliers and restaurants keen to build out their networks, Choco currently isn’t monetizing its users. Khachab tells me the team is developing premium subscription features that will likely focus on monetizing suppliers’ abilities to reach restaurants and communicate with them about new offerings.

Khachab sees Choco’s solutions as one that makes restaurant/suppliers relationships better but also takes a step toward solving the broader problem of food waste in the restaurant industry. Better communication and analytics that aren’t on the back of a napkin mean more precise ordering that can prevent both sides from overstocking, increasing efficiency but also preserving resources. Khachab notes that estimates say that 30-40% of food produced each year is wasted and that nearly three-quarters of that waste happens in the supply chain before consumers are involved.

In 2017, when a destructive earthquake struck Puebla, Mexico, sending shock waves to Mexico City and destroying buildings in the nation’s megalopolis and its surrounding suburbs, both public and private emergency services sprung into action.

For multinational corporations operating in the city it was a test of their internal support services, which were established to meet the “duty of care” requirements that multinationals have to their foreign employees. That’s a minimum threshold which companies must meet to ensure the safety of their employees.

After the Mexico City earthquake, at least one Fortune 500 insurance company found its services lacking. It took two weeks for the company to contact all of its employees and account for everyone.

So the company turned to a new Washington-based startup called Base Operations to see if they could do a better job.

Founded by a former security and risk management consultant, Cory Siskind, Base Operations uses a suite of hosted software services and mobile applications to provide security updates to corporate customers and their employees.

The insurance company tested Base Operations’ check-in feature to see how it would perform in a simulated natural disaster and Siskind said that Base Operations had identified the location of 80% of the company’s workforce in less than two days. More than half of the company’s employees checked in within the first 24 hours.

Base Operations offers a dashboard for corporate customers to monitor their employees’ locations and for staff traveling abroad, the company has an app that provides geo-tagged alerts on potential risks based on an individual’s location.

“This is a compliance situation for companies… They have to do it,” says Siskind. “We work with a company’s chief security officers and travel security. If you send people off into an emerging market with a risk PDF… It’s not dynamic information and it just sits in a report and nobody reads it.”

Companies with a sales or marketing team traveling around need to have some sort of tool to meet their compliance regulations and duty of care standards, says Siskind.

“We have a whole set of features that nudge towards safer behaviors so that you don’t end up getting mugged and so that you don’t end up in a situation that would be damaging to you,” she says. 

Siskind recently raised $1 million for Base Operations from investors including Glasswing Ventures, Spiro Ventures, the Latin American early-stage investment firm Magma Partners and Good Growth Capital. Base Operations graduated from Techstars Impact Accelerator in 2018.

The money from the company’s most recent round will be used to expand the company’s sales and marketing efforts and continue its research and development.

So far, the company has three customers, including the undisclosed insurance provider, the energy company Enel and another, yet unnamed, corporation.

Base Operations provides its services in 15 cities, including: Mexico City, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Santiago, San Juan (Puerto Rico) and San Jose (Costa Rica).

Building effective propulsion systems for satellites has traditionally been a highly bespoke affair, with expensive, one-off systems tailor-made to big, expensive spacecraft hardware. But increasingly, companies, including startups, are looking at ways to provide propulsion tech that can scale with the projected boom in demand for orbital satellites, including CubeSats and small sats, as the commercialization of space and advances in sensor, communication and launch technology broaden the scope of those working in this bold new frontier.

Morpheus Space, which began life as a research project at the University of Western Germany, has accomplished a lot when it comes to propulsion in the short time since its official founding around a year and a half ago. The Dresden-based startup already has sent some of its thrusters to space, where they’re actually providing propulsion, and it’s working with a number of clients and potential clients, including NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The startup also just wrapped up its participation in Techstars’ inaugural Starburst Space Program in LA.

“Our motivation behind starting Morpheus Space was the lack of maneuverability of, especially small satellites in space,” explained Morpheus CEO and co-founder Daniel Bock, with whom I spoke at last week’s International Astronautical Congress in Washington, D.C. “We have around 2,000 active satellites in space, and in the next few years this will increase by 10x. We have to deal with that. So the first step in how we want to solve that is with our proportion systems, to give mobility to small satellites.”

The startup has seen a ton of inbound interest, and has even had conversations with the CTO of NASA and the CEO of Aerospace Corporation based on the strength of its technology. But what’s so special about what they’re doing, versus what has already been available for satellite propulsion? Put simply, “it’s the world’s smallest and most efficient propulsion system,” according to Morpheus Space co-founder István Lőrincz.

Morpheus’ thruster uses gallium as its fuel source, which allows it to be very efficient, with an operating linespace of up to three or more years — non-stop, Lőrincz told me. When you factor in the low cost of these thrusters versus other solutions, and the ability to make them incredibly small (one thruster, along with electronics, is not that much larger than your average USB charger), you get a product that’s tailor-made for the cost-sensitive emerging new space industry. Ensuring the mass of these thrusters is small pays off big dividends when it comes to thinking about launch costs, and the fact that these are “Lego-like” in their modularity means they can suit a variety of different clients’ needs.

“You can build propulsion systems for satellites that are below one kilogram, up to those the size of trucks, just by creating arrays,” Lőrincz says.

Size is important, but so is scalability, and that’s another strength that the Morpheus thrusters bring to the market. Lőrincz told me that their technology allows you to quickly and easily build a large batch of the thrusters, instead of having to tailor-make your propulsion system to fit the satellite, which provides big benefits in terms of manufacturing and design costs — which Morpheus can then pass on to its customers, opening up to a whole new, much more price-sensitive segment of the market the possibility of including true orbital maneuvering capabilities.

Next up for Morpheus Space, after it gets its hardware business fully up and running, is to develop and deploy software that complements its thrusters and can offer clients things like fully automated route planning and navigation, Bock told me.

“For example, you can imagine you just have to command ‘Okay I want to go from A to B,’ and everything is handled on board,” he said. So when and how you turn, all the routing. And the next step will be an automated way of handling whole constellations.”

It’s a big goal, but there’s a big potential pay-off. More and more companies are getting into the constellation game, including SpaceX and Amazon, and there’s a lot more to come on that front as companies build out new use cases for collecting and making use of data gathered from orbit. Orbital traffic management and collision avoidance is one reason big industry groups like the Space Safety Coalition are being formed, and anyone who can help supply with a solution players at all budget levels of the industry stands to benefit.

Identity Verification-as-a-Service (“IVAAS”?!) is a pretty tortuous phrase. But it’s now established as a key tech area for the tech industry as startups like Onfido, Jumio and others have proved with large funding raises in the last few years. Verifying ID is now also a key part of the gig economy.

Joining them today is a German startup that first emerged in 2014. It has announced a $40 million growth equity investment from Corsair Capital LLC, a private equity firm focused on the financial and business services industries.

IDnow lets consumers verify their identity online, using their smartphone, tablet or webcam via image recognition of their ID document.

Andreas Bodczek, CEO of IDnow, commented: “IDnow is well-positioned to capture greater market share in Europe and beyond, as we continue to lead the way in the growing digital identity verification space.”

Raja Hadji-Touma, partner at Corsair Capital, said: “Our investment is the result of a thematic focus on businesses that address new requirements arising from the digitalization of many financial transactions and processes, such as security. ”

Following the closing of the transaction, Raja Hadji-Touma and Edward Wertheim, principal at Corsair, will join the IDnow board of directors.

IDnow was the first startup to come out of JET A, the holding company set up by the former founder of Amiando, Felix Haas, (who is also co-founder and executive chairman) and his Amiando co-founders, Sebastian Baerhold, Dennis von Ferenczy and Armin Bauer.

Entrepreneurs, founders, investors and all startup fans in between — take heed. The days for saving serious dough on tickets to Disrupt Berlin 2019 are seriously numbered. Right now, early-bird pricing starts at €445 + VAT and, depending on the type of pass you purchase, you can save up to €500.

But this bird takes flight for parts unknown on 8 November at 11:59 p.m. (CEST). Get serious, beat the deadline and save. Buy your early-bird pass to Disrupt Berlin.

Now that you have your pass, you can start planning how to take in as much of Disrupt Berlin as possible. Two programming-packed days will keep you engaged and on the move — check out the agenda to find out all the knowledge that will be dropped. They’ve done the work, reaped the rewards and they’ll be on hand to share their hard-won experiences and insight on crucial topics facing startups.

Speaking of crucial topics, Brexit is the 800-pound gorilla in the room. We’re thrilled to have three experts take the Main Stage to share their up-close-and-personal experiences. Don’t miss hearing from Bindi Karia, an investor with deep ties to Europe; Glenn Shoosmith, a founder who’s expanding his startup internationally; and Volker Hirsch, a VC born in Germany but currently living in the U.K. All three will examine the Brexit landscape and discuss how to make the right decisions in the face of chaotic obstacles.

Be sure to experience the glory that is Startup Battlefield. Cheer on 15-20 outstanding startups as they pitch and demo their creation to a discerning panel of veteran VCs and technologists. Who will claim the Disrupt cup and win the $50,000 prize? Be in the room where future unicorns are born.

One of the best ways to save time at Disrupt — and connect with the people who share your interests and goals — is to network using CrunchMatch. Our free business match-making service takes the hassle out of finding and meeting with the right people.

And one of the best places to connect is Startup Alley, our exhibition floor. That’s where you’ll find hundreds of early-stage startups displaying their tech and talent. Whether you’re a founder, investor, engineer or startupper of a different stripe, you’ll find potential customers, funders, collaborators — you name it. Startup Alley is a networker’s paradise.

There’s plenty more we could mention in detail: The Hackathon, Q&A Sessions, workshops. Bottom line? You’ll find nothing but opportunity at Disrupt Berlin 2019 on 11-12 December. But it’s time to get serious. Buy your early-bird pass before 8 November at 11:59 p.m. (CEST), and all that opportunity will cost you a whole lot less.

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

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Kandji, a new Apple MDM solution that promises to go far beyond Apple’s base MDM protocol and other solutions on the market, emerged from stealth today with a $3.375 million seed investment. The product is also publicly available for the first time starting today.

The round, which closed in March, was led by First Round Capital with help from Webb Investment Network, Lee Fixel, John Glynn and other unnamed investors.

Company co-founder and CEO Adam Pettit says the company’s founders have a deep knowledge in Apple. They all worked at Apple before leaving to run an Apple IT consultancy for more than 10 years.

He said that while they were at the consultancy, they developed a proprietary stack of tools to help with highly sophisticated Apple device deployments at large organizations, and it occurred to them that there was an unserved market opportunity to turn that knowledge into a new product.

Two years ago they sold the consultancy, took that knowledge and built Kandji from the ground up. Pettit says the new product gives customers access to a set of management tools that they would have charged six figures to implement at that their old firm.

One of the key differentiators between Kandji and other MDM solutions, or even Apple’s base MDM functionality, is a set of one-click compliance tools. “We’re the only product that has almost 200 of these one-click policy frameworks we call parameters. So an organization can go in and browse by compliance framework, or we have pre-built templates for companies that don’t necessarily have a specific compliance mandate in mind,” he said.

The parameters have all of the tools built-in to automatically deploy a set of policies related to a given compliance framework without having to go through and manually set all of those different switches yourself. On the flip side, if you want to get granular and create your own parameters, you can do that too.

He says one of the reasons he and his partners were willing to give up the big-dollar consultancy was because they saw a huge opportunity for firms that couldn’t afford those kind of services, but still had relatively large Apple device deployments. “I mean there’s a big need outside of just the specific kind of sophisticated compliance work we would do [at our previous firm]. We saw this big need in general for an Apple MDM solution like ours,” he said.

After selling their previous firm, the founders bootstrapped for a year while they developed the initial version of Kandji before seeking funding. Today, the company has 16 employees and a set of initial customers that have been testing the product.

Searchable.ai wants to solve an old problem around search in the enterprise. The stealthy startup announced a $2 million seed round.

Defy Partners led the round with a slew of other participants, including Paul English, co-founder of Kayak; Wayne Chang, co-founder of Crashlytics; Brian Halligan, co-founder and CEO of HubSpot; Jonathan Kraft, president and COO of the Kraft Group and the New England Patriots; MIT Prof. Edward Roberts; Eric Dobkin, founder and chairman emeritus of Goldman Sachs Global Equity Capital Markets; and Susquehanna International Group.

The prestigious group of investors saw that Searchable.ai is trying to solve a big problem around findability. Company co-founder Brian Shin says that knowledge workers have been struggling for years trying to find a way to better utilize all of the information that exists within an organization.

“The problem we’re really solving is that there are a trillion documents created every year in Microsoft Office, Google Docs, etc., and it’s really difficult if you’re a knowledge worker to find what you need in terms of either a document, an asset like a slide or worksheet within a document or the actual answer to a question that you have,” Shin said.

The questioning part could be particularly valuable because it lets you ask a natural language question and find a specific piece of information within a document, rather than just the document itself. “Let’s say you have a giant spreadsheet, you could actually ask a question of all your spreadsheets and find the atomic unit of knowledge that you’re actually looking for,” he said.

The product itself is not quite ready for the big reveal, but if it works as described, it will be a huge boost to knowledge workers who have continually struggled to find a nugget of information they know is out there across the myriad documents in an organization.

Shin is an experienced entrepreneur who has helped launch and sell three companies. He reports he has raised $100 million in venture capital and most recently has worked as a venture capitalist himself, but he saw this opportunity and decided to jump back into the development side of things.

He admits he’s giving up a lot to go back to the startup lifestyle, but he and his co-founders decided this was worth it. “You know the draw, the compulsion to do another startup is is really what this is about. So my three other colleagues and I have have all started companies before and we’re all giving up big jobs to do this, and I’m so excited about the team and the massive opportunity.”

He promised more details about the company and the solution would be coming early next year.

It was a surprising quarter for Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN). For the first time in more than two years, the company saw its earnings fall. The market was clearly not impressed, and the stock fell 7% in the...

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Veronica Chou’s family has made its fortune at the forefront of the fast fashion business through investments in companies like Michael Kors and Tommy Hilfiger . But now, the heiress to an estimated $2.1 billion fortune is launching her own company, Everybody & Everyone, to prove that the fashion industry can be both environmentally sustainable and profitable.

There’s no argument about the negative impacts of the fashion industry on the environment.

The textiles industry primarily uses non-renewable resources — on the order of 98 million tons per year. That includes the oil to make synthetic fibers, fertilizers to grow cotton and toxic chemicals to dye, treat and produce the textiles used to make clothes. The greenhouse gas footprint from textiles production was roughly 1.2 billion tons of CO2 equivalent in 2015 — more than all international flights and maritime shipments combined (and a lot of those maritime shipments and international flights were hauling clothes).

The litany of catastrophes that can be attributed to the clothing industry extends to pollution, as well. About 20% of industrial water pollution globally can be traced to the dyeing and treatment of textiles — and microplastics from polyester, acrylic and nylon are polluting the world’s oceans.

Meanwhile, the rise of fast fashion has encouraged consumers to accelerate waste. Roughly one garbage truck full of clothes is landfilled around the world every second, according to a 2017 report from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. That means consumers are throwing away around $400 billion worth of valuable goods every year as low prices and more “seasons” create an illusion of disposability.

As the fashion business has expanded, so has the wealth of the Chou family. South Ocean Knitters, the knitwear manufacturer started by Chou’s grandfather, was responsible for one of the first foreign investments into mainland China in 1974. It is now one of the largest suppliers of knitwear in the world, and, together with the Hong Kong manufacturer Li & Fung, is behind the Cobalt Fashion Holding conglomerate.

And her father, Silas Chou, made millions as an investor in Michael Kors and Tommy Hilfiger. As an executive at Iconix Brand Group China, Veronica Chou played a role in the acceleration of the industry — bringing American brands to Chinese consumers. Chou also served as the co-founder of the Beijing-based private equity fund China Consumer Capital and as a director of Karl Lagerfeld Greater China.

For Chou, an understanding of the environmental toll that the family business was taking on the planet began six years ago — a few years before Iconix Brand Group acquired the China subsidiary she had co-founded with her father in a transaction reportedly worth $56 million.

It was around the time that Chou had her children, she says, that she realized the importance of making a brand that was both environmentally sustainable and inclusive.

“It was six years ago I started learning about sustainability and five years ago that I said that I needed to have a sustainable brand,” says Chou. 

Since that revelation, Chou dove into the world of sustainable manufacturing head-first. Through her family’s investment vehicles she has worked with companies like Modern Meadow, which uses bio-engineering to make leather goods in a lab. Chou has also led investments in Thousand Fell, a soon-to-launch manufacturer of fully recyclable shoes; Dirty Labs, which is developing more sustainable laundry cleaning products; and Carbon Engineering, which is developing a direct air capture technology for carbon dioxide.

Everybody & Everyone applies the lessons that Chou has learned about sustainability to a new fashion brand that she hopes can serve as a model for how to weave sustainability into every facet of the industry.

The new brand, which sells women’s clothes for every size from 00 to 24 and at prices ranging from $18 to $288 (most fall in the $50 to $150 range, given a quick scroll through the company’s new website) partners with companies like Naadam and Ecoalf for sustainable cashmere and recycled fabrics made from plastic.

“For our brand, recycled is a big story for us,” says Chou. “Our t-shirts, our socks, our packaging, our mailers, our labels, our stickers are all made from recycled materials that can be recycled again.”

The company’s attention to its environmental impact also extends to its supply chain. “Most of our fabrics are knit close to where our garments are manufactured. That is definitely reducing our carbon footprint,” says Chou. “I put an emphasis on having factories in America… our denim is manufactured in America and in the future we’re looking at t-shirts and athletics to be manufactured in America.”

Some clothes are also made with fabrics that have recycled silver in them — so that the clothes can be worn multiple times without smelling or the need for a wash. 

Digital printing is used in place of screens to prevent tons of water waste, the company said, and several of the company’s fabrics are not dyed at all. instead, the company relies on an upcycling process by separating recycled fibers mechanically by color.

Everybody & Everyone has also partnered with the organization One Tree Planted to plant a tree for each purchase that’s made with the company. In addition, the company has calculated its carbon footprint from all of its pre-launch activities and has bought and retired offsets to balance its emissions, Chou says.

“I started building Everybody & Everyone from the ground-up, first by getting the best team in place then by finding the right vendors, manufacturers and partners who were already making strides in the sustainability space,” Chou said in a statement. “I wanted this brand to be for every woman, so body positivity, inclusivity and sustainability were going to be the backbone of everything we did. We then constructed the brands sustainable & technical pillars, which consist of activation, recycled, dyeing & printing, naturals done better, bio-based fibers and end use to ensure our products would minimize negative impacts. We are sustainable down to the labels sewn into each garment.”

Having trouble pitching your startup to investors? This year at Disrupt Berlin, we’re going to help you solve that problem. We’ve invited a panel of experts to tear down real pitch decks live onstage, to help any founder in the room learn about the right way to tell a startup’s story.

If you’re attending, you can apply to have your pitch deck chosen for the stage — just fill out this form.

We had a packed house for the first teardown we did, at Disrupt SF this year. We’re excited to bring it to you. Investors onstage will include Sitar Teli, a London-based co-founder and managing partner at Connect Ventures, who has helped make more than 40 investments across Europe, including Fiit, Kheiron, Citymapper, Typeform, OurPath and Soldo, and Karen Stafford, a Berlin-based director at Intel Capital who focuses on European startups and has invested in companies including iZettle, dataArtisans, Elmodis and Volocopter.

Also joining us will be Russ Heddleston, the founder and CEO of San Francisco-based DocSend, a document management company that helps thousands of founders in Silicon Valley and around the world track things like how investors are responding to their decks. By collaborating with his users, Heddleston and his company have gained new insights into major trends in what works (and what doesn’t) in venture funding pitches — like what time of year is actually best for pitching. Check out his articles on TechCrunch for more.

To have your deck considered, just fill out this form. If the panel picks yours to tear down, we’ll provide you with a free ticket to any TechCrunch event in 2020.

Disrupt Berlin runs December 11 and December 12. Tickets are available right here!

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The document transfer and management process in the healthcare industry is archaic and full of holes. John discusses innovation and opportunities. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning and have...

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