U.K.-based lunar rover startup Spacebit, a company developing robotic exploration hardware for use on the Moon, announced two new partners that will help it develop and finalize its technology ahead of its target mission date of 2021. The Ecuadorian Civilian Space Agency (EXA) and Mexico’s Dereum will be providing the technology that Spacebit will employ on both its deployer and the robot rover it’s preparing for use on the Moon.

This marks the first time that Latin American companies will participate in a mission to the lunar surface, and Spacebit CEO Pavlo Tanasyuk was joined by Dereum CEO Carlos Mariscal and EXA COO Ronnie Nader to talk about the news at the International Astronautical Congress in Washington, D.C.

“We have Ecuador and Mexico as our technical partners,” Tanasyuk said. “So in addition to this being the first lunar mission from the U.K., it also is the first Latin American mission with a consortium of Latin American countries participating along with the U.K.”

Both the EXA and Dereum have strong technical chops when it comes to spacecraft and space-based robotics, with the EXA focusing on developing technology that is “efficient, cheap and reliable,” according to Nader, while Dereum’s Mariscal said that his organization is well-known globally for its work on building robots for use in space, with an extensive track record. Their expertise should help a lot in Spacebit’s efforts to build, test and validate its robotic lunar rover, which employs a novel walking system for getting around, whereas all rovers to date have used wheels for transportation.

“We are planning on doing a swarm technology exploration plan, where we have multiple small spider walking rovers deployed from a wheeled mothership, along with being able to have some redundancy and the ability to do 3D lidar scanning of the interior  lunar caves and lava tubes,” Tanasyuk said.

“It’s essentially a data as a service business model,” he added, explaining how they’ll seek to monetize the business. “Our primary focus for early missions are to do exploration and mapping of lunar lava tubes to be able to characterize the lunar subsurface environment for potential suitability for future human habitation.”

Spacebit, founded in 2014, is funded privately via Tanasyuk himself, along with a couple of other private investors. He said that his company is fully funded through its first mission, a berth aboard the Peregrine Moon lander being launched by Astrobotic in 2021 (which itself has a price tag of $1.7 million he said). The first mission won’t be an entire swarm, but a single rover sent up as a demonstration unit to prove out its technology.

Vendr has developed an enterprise SaaS solution for managing enterprise SaaS.

The new startup, founded by InVision’s former head of enterprise sales Ryan Neu, is another standout from Y Combinator’s latest batch. Contrary to the majority of those businesses, however, Vendr is already profitable.

In classic YC fashion, the company has created software to sell to other startups, and, as such, it was quick to gain the confidence of top venture capital investors. Headquartered in Boston, Vendr has raised a $2 million round led by F-Prime Capital, with participation from Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures, Joe Montana’s Liquid2 Ventures, Garage VC and angel investors including Canva co-founder and chief operating officer Cliff Obrecht and HubSpot COO JD Sherman.

The company offers subscription-based software, priced depending on company headcount, that helps fast-growing businesses buy and manage enterprise SaaS. In short, the product cuts the human out of the sales process, allowing companies to purchase or upgrade software using software. The goal isn’t to eliminate the sales profession, rather to put an end to “persuasion driven” sales, Neu explains, and to make enterprise software purchases as easy as consumer product purchases.

“We see software sales actually going away because most people are tired of being sold to, they are tired of being persuaded, they want to transact,” Neu, who previously led sales at HubSpot, tells TechCruch. “Vendr was created to allow people to transact software without actually having to talk to people.”

Founded 14 months ago, Vendr has reached $1 million in annual recurring revenue, which, for context, has historically been amongst the benchmarks necessary for a SaaS startup to raise its Series A. Neu says the company is growing 15% month-over-month with monthly recurring revenue currently sitting at $96,500. Already profitable, Neu says they want to put themselves in a position in which they don’t have to raise any additional outside capital.

“I can’t imagine looking at the bank account every month and watching it deplete,” Neu said. “We want to be in a position where we can control our own destiny.”

Vendr currently operates with a team of six employees and 19 customers, including Canva, Grammarly, GitLab, Brex, HubSpot and InVision. The company is also backed by Okta’s general counsel Jon Runyan, AppDynamics’ COO Dan Wright and YC partner Aaron Epstein.

America has an addiction problem.

It’s a problem that serial entrepreneur Josh Bruno has seen first hand. And it’s why he has launched a new company called Path, which pitches access to specialized substance addiction treatment professionals as an employee health benefit, to do something about it.

“I have unfortunately lost five friends now to alcohol and opioid overdoses. I went to five funerals in three years,” says Bruno. “Every time I would end up talking to friends and family afterwards… and everyone would ask, ‘What could we have done?’ “

Now Bruno is doing something. 

While Alcoholics Anonymous and rehabilitation facilities provide one solution, Bruno says that neither one has the scope to address the enormity of the problem. 

Bruno thinks Path may be the avenue to best address the issue. The idea is to provide near-instant access to specialized providers of substance abuse treatment as a benefit that employers can offer to their staff.

As the founder of HomeTeam, which provided in-home senior care and a software toolkit to manage that care, Bruno already has an understanding of the healthcare marketplace.

“We plug in to an employer and provide a holistic solution for the employees. We bring a doctor, a therapy and a coach,” says Bruno of the new service he’s launching. “We’re not a provider ourselves and we bring a network of providers.”

The business model evolved as Bruno began researching how things are currently done. “I have volunteered at AA and rehab facilities [and] I talked to labor union leaders across the country,” says Bruno. He also reached out to the nation’s 23 largest employers and shadowed treatment specialists to see how substance abuse treatment is currently handled.

“The first thing I saw is that 10% — or one in 10 adults across the U.S. — have a substance abuse disorder,” says Bruno. “That shocked people because it’s more than diabetes.”

What’s more, about 33% of mental health issues are actually addiction-related, which can add additional stress on an employers’ healthcare costs.

The founding team at Path, which includes Bruno and Gabriel Diop, who heads partnerships, and Greg Moore, who leads product development, all think of substance abuse treatment as an access issue. People looking for treatment simply don’t know where to go to get the most effective and affordable help.

“Today the health insurance company would give a list of in-network providers and it’s up to the patient to figure out where to go [and] 50% of time they go out of network,” says Bruno. 

When Path works with a large employer, a phone call is made directly to the company and that call goes to a clinical social worker, who handles the intake of a prospective patient. The company has deals with addiction doctors in the geographies where it operates and can ensure that an assessment can be done within 48 hours.

After the assessment, a treatment plan is drawn up and the company will manage that process for the employer, and the physician as well.

Path is already talking to two Fortune 100 companies about deploying its service. “It’s a targeted, regional service,” says Bruno. “Not a national service.”

The Los Angeles-based company has raised $5.35 million to date in a round of funding led by Upfront Ventures, with participation from Sequoia Benefits, Radian Street Capital and angel investors including Barbara Wachsman, the former head of benefits at Disney; Amy Shannon, the former head of benefits at Chevron; and Howard Cherny, the former head of benefits at Cisco.

“Put simply, Path plans to work with the best addiction treatment providers across the continuum in the U.S., which is exactly what is needed. Finally, a team is focusing on core issues of quality and cost-effective treatment,” said Kelly Clark, a member of the Path Clinical Advisory Board, and the former president of the American Society of Addiction Medicine.   

Not only can Path help to roll out access to treatment at scale, but the company can also reduce healthcare costs for companies, according to Bruno.

“It will lower the expense to the plan,” he says. “Approximately 30% to 50% of employees are going out of network for addiction treatment… that’s $25,000 to $50,000 per month.”

Path’s costs are substantially lower, and the company is only paid if members use the network, he said.

“Employers have made a commitment to the health and well-being of their employees. If mental health is a top priority for your organization, you can’t ignore [substance use disorders],” said Wachsman, in a statement.

In a perfect example of a small, new space startup teaming up with a legacy industry heavyweight with plenty of experience, Firefly is teaming up with Aerojet Rocketdyne. Firefly Aerospace was founded in 2013 and has raised $21.6 million so far to bring its first product, the Alpha small satellite launch vehicle, to market.

Firefly is on track to make its crucial first launch in time for the February to March time frame next year, according to Firefly founder and CEO Dr. Tom Markusic, who spoke at the International Astronautical Congress this year in Washington, D.C., to provide an update on his company’s progress and talk about the newly formed partnership between Firefly and Aerojet Rocketdyne.

Markusic was joined by Aerojet Rocketdyne SVP of Space Business Jim Maser, and the two executives explained how Aerojet will provide engines for Firefly to use on its next-generation launch vehicle, aptly named “Beta,” the full development of which will follow once Alpha has launched and enters into regular commercial service.

Beta will be a medium launch vehicle, with greater cargo capacity compared to Alpha and a maximum load of around 8.5 metric tons. Alpha, the startup’s first rocket, will be able to take 1 metric ton to orbit, which Markusic said his company has identified as the “sweet spot” for current unaddressed demand.

That medium band is also underserved, Markusic said, and because it’ll need a bigger booster to transport that larger cargo capacity to orbit, they looked around for solutions and found that Aerojet Rocketdyne’s AR-1 Engine, which can produce 500,000 pounds of thrust, was the perfect solution.

In general, Markusic and Maser both expressed the opinion that startup and younger companies just getting into the industry are prime partners for older companies like Aerojet, which was founded in 1942 and has been serving the rocket and missile industry ever since.

“It’s okay to move fast and it’s okay to make mistakes, but let’s not make other peoples’ mistakes and let’s not make our own mistakes twice,” Markusic said, characterizing the benefits of teaming up with someone with lots more experience. This partnership goes beyond just the engine supply arrangement, Markusic said, and will provide more far-ranging benefits for the startup.

“Aerojet Rocketdyne has a whole corral of amazing in-space propulsion options, for example the XR-5,” Markusic said, “which is a five kilowatt hull thruster that can be utilized on our OTV (orbital transfer vehicle), and advanced OTV, we could do some heavier missions in cis-lunar space, and they also have a large corral of flight proven by proposed chemical thrusters that can be used on these other stages as well.”

Firefly plans to do an orbital transfer vehicle to provide more advanced launch capabilities, and its ambitions extend even beyond launchers and to in-space manufacturing, which Markusic said is attractive to the company since the ultimate way to reduce launch costs is to obviate the need for launch costs altogether. The company’s ultimate goal is to get more commercial satellites into orbit, regardless of method. Still, there’s plenty of opportunity, but Markusic says ultimately, the company’s biggest challenge right now is remaining focused on their most immediate, and most important goal.

“There are at least 100 companies like Firefly talking about going to space,” he said. “We’re in that crowd of talkers right now, and it is my focus with this company to get us out of that crowd of people talking about it as soon as possible, and into the elite crowd of people that are actually flying a spacecraft to space.”

Harnessing new networking technologies that can turn any real estate developer into their own wireless internet service provider, Wander is launching a $25 per month high-speed networking service for the lucky citizens of Santa Monica, Calif.

The brainchild of a former Disney analyst, David Fields, and a former Intuit engineer, Dan Rahmel, Wander uses low-cost wireless hardware and proprietary software to bring last-mile wireless Internet to a customer’s home.

“The idea behind Wander was created around some deep frustration with the net neutrality repeal,” says Fields. “We could look at utilizing some of the existing wireless infrastructure and cover that last mile at a fraction of the cost… we have a strong perspective on the data demands of consumers.”

The problem, as Fields sees it, is that internet service providers are over-billing for capacity that most consumers don’t even use. As an August report from The Wall Street Journal revealed, high-speed internet just isn’t worth it.

Traditional internet service providers are marketing high-speed internet at 200 to 1K megabits per second, while average homes use less than 5 megabits per second during peak usage times, according to a report from the networking infrastructure technology provider, Cisco.

Even with streaming services, the average customer is going to use less than 15 megabits per second by 2022, according to some projections. Wander’s existing service will provide 50 megabits per second.

“We see an ability to come out in market and deliver to 99% of consumers something that is a package that more than covers their streaming needs, their connected home needs,” says Fields. 

Using existing fiber infrastructure and low-cost wireless transmitters from companies like Ubiquiti, Wander is driving down costs and pitching real estate developers on a new way to make money.

The company already has signed deals with property managers and developers to gain access to 200 buildings across Santa Monica and Van Nuys, Calif. Those locations will be the first commercial testing grounds for Wander’s pitch.

“Think of the way we partner with them as a two-pronged approach. For the value of bringing the rooftop real estate to the Wander network, they get a share of the subscribers that are tapping into that rooftop real estate.  They can have their property management teams acquire customers for us and that revenue share is incremental for them,” Fields says. 

Basically, Wander owns and operates the network and gives real estate owners a share of the revenue coming in.

At launch, Wander will be able to cover about 20,000 homes in the Santa Monica area using the company’s point to multi-point networking services, which have a range of about half-a-mile.

Fields stresses that improving customer service is just as important as lowering prices at Wander. The company gives users access to a Wander dashboard that provides information about network performance and uptimes, and the average megabits per second that a home uses, as well as its peak consumption.

“That dashboard provides you with a look into the network as well,” says Fields.

The service costs $25 per month along with a $3 fee for the company’s proprietary, mesh-capable router (which is important because to ensure uptimes Wander built software that monitors and resolves performance issues on the fly, the company said).

The company raised a small, strategic round of financing from venture investors and strategic angel investors, including: Distributed Global, an infrastructure-focused investment firm, and individuals like Eric Bender, co-founder of Wilcon, fiber and data center business which sold to Crown Castle; and Michael Barker, founder and CEO of Barker Pacific Group, a real estate holding company. Other angels include Louis Beryl, founder and CEO of Earnest, and Jeff Morris Jr., former director of Product at Tinder.

“With 97% profit margins, it’s no secret that traditional ISPs overcharge and underdeliver,” said Bender,  in a statement. “Wander’s unique and affordable model is bringing next-generation internet to an industry that has relied on dated technology, outrageous and unexpected fees and poor customer service. I’m excited to be supporting Wander as a pioneering internet provider that is equally focused on building a happy customer base.”

While Santa Monica, and greater Los Angeles are the company’s first markets, Wander intends to… well… wander to other parts of the country where its services can make the most sense.

“We want to use a  data-driven approach to the next set of sub-markets that we’re going to go into,” says Fields. “Some of these places will be less interesting than the suburban to urban mix where 5G is not going to propagate, where they have one or at most two internet options today.”

To see if a home is among the lucky few that qualifies for Wander’s low-cost services now, check out wander.net/live. Subscribers who sign up within the next 30 days will get their first month free.

Electric-bike maker Cowboy recently let me spend a couple of weeks with one of their e-bikes. It’s a well-designed e-bike that makes biking effortless, even if you’re going uphill.

Cowboy is a Brussels-based startup. The company raised a $3 million seed round a couple of years ago and an $11.1 million (€10 million) Series A round last year.

The company designs e-bikes from scratch. Components feel more integrated than in a normal e-bike. And it also opens up some possibilities when it comes to connectivity and smart features.

Cowboy sells its bikes directly to consumers on its online store. It is currently available in Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Austria for €2,000 ($2,220).

I rode 70 kilometers (43 miles) in the streets of Paris to try it out. For context, riding a bike in Paris is nothing new for me. I primarily use my non-electric bike to go from point A to point B — bikes are commuting devices for me. And given that Cowboy is primarily designed for densely populated cities, I thought I’d give it a try.

From the outside, the Cowboy e-bike is a sleek bike. It features a seamless triangle-shaped aluminum frame, integrated lights and a low-key Cowboy logo near the saddle. The handlebar is perfectly straight like on a mountain bike. The only sign that this is an e-bike is that the frame is much larger below the saddle.

The e-bike is relatively light at 16 kg (35 lbs). Most of the weight is at the back of the Cowboy e-bike because of the battery. But an investor in the startup told me that it wasn’t a problem and that he was even able to attach a baby seat at the back.

There are two things you’re going to notice quite quickly: there are no gears and there’s a rubber and fiberglass belt. Cowboy has opted for an automatic transmission — motor assistance kicks in automatically when you need it the most, such as when you start pedaling, accelerate or go uphill.

If you usually ride on a normal bike, this feels weird at first. I constantly shift from one gear to another. With the Cowboy e-bike, you have to trust the bike and forget about gears.

The electric motor kicks in a second after you start pedaling. It means that you are much faster than people using regular bikes. And you can reach a speed of 30 to 35 kmph in no time (18 to 22 mph). Yes, this bike is fast.

Fortunately, the brakes work surprisingly well. You have to be careful with them. If you’re braking too hard, you’ll skid, especially if it’s raining.

I was able to ride from one end of Paris to another without breaking a sweat. Sure, the Cowboy e-bike is fast, but I only saved a few minutes compared to my non-electric bike. You still spend a lot of time waiting at big intersections.

In fact, riding the Cowboy e-bike felt more like riding a moped-style scooter. You start your engine at a green light, ride as quickly as possible, brake aggressively at a red light and spend more time waiting at intersections. I believe an e-bike makes more sense in larger cities with huge hills. Paris is much, much smaller than London or Berlin, after all.

You may have noticed that the Cowboy e-bike doesn’t have fenders. Cowboy will start selling custom-designed fenders for €89 in a few weeks ($100).

Another thing worth noting is that you have to be relatively tall to use the Cowboy e-bike. I’m 1.75 m tall (5’ 8”) and I lowered the saddle as much as possible. If you’re just a tiny bit smaller than me, chances are it’s going to be too high for you. Similarly, naming your brand “Cowboy” doesn’t make your bike particularly attractive for women.

When it comes to connectivity, the Cowboy e-bike isn’t just an electric bike — it’s also a smart bike. It has built-in GPS tracking and an integrated SIM card.

After pairing the bike with your phone using Bluetooth, you can control it from a mobile app. In particular, you can lock and unlock the bike, turn on and off the lights and check the battery. It would have been nice to put a light sensor on the bike itself as you may forget to turn on the lights at night. You also can get a rough idea of the current battery level without the mobile app — there are five LEDs on the frame of the device.

Thanks to GPS capabilities and the integrated SIM card, you can locate your bike using a feature called “Find my Bike.” The company also sells insurance packages for €8 to €10 per month with theft insurance and optionally damage insurance.

I recharged the battery once during my testing. According to the company, you can get up to 70 km on a single charge (43 miles). I got less than that, but I also tried the off-road mode, which consumes more battery. Unless you’re going on a long bike trip, range isn’t an issue for city rides.

When it’s time to recharge the battery, you can detach the battery with a key and bring it back home. This is a great feature for people living in apartments, as you can leave your bike at its normal parking spot and plug in the battery at home. The battery was full after three to four hours.

Overall, the Cowboy e-bike is the perfect commuting bike for people living in large cities. It’s a smooth and well-designed experience. If you’re looking for an e-bike, you should definitely consider the Cowboy e-bike as one of your options. I recommend you book a test ride before buying one though.

If you’re happy with a normal bike like me, the Cowboy e-bike is 100% an e-bike. Don’t expect to get the same experience on a Cowboy e-bike. It’s a completely different thing. But I’m glad e-bikes exist, because they are going to convince more people to ditch their cars and moped-style scooters.

Sramana Mitra: B2B need less money, I think. Doug Atkin: It all depends. If you’re building a business like an analytics package which you’re selling to the big banks, you need a decent amount of...

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There’s no shortage of lidar solutions available for autonomous vehicles, drones and robots — theoretically, anyway. But getting a lidar unit from theory to mass production might be harder than coming up with the theory in the first place. Sense Photonics appears to have made it past that part of the journey, and is now offering its advanced flash lidar for pre-order.

Lidar comes in a variety of form factors, but the spinning type we’ve seen so much of is on its way out, and more compact, reliable planar types are on the way in; Luminar is making moves to get ahead, but Sense Photonics isn’t sitting still — and anyway, the two companies have different strengths.

While Luminar and some other companies aim to create a forward-facing lidar that can detect shapes hundreds of feet ahead in a relatively narrow field of view, Sense is going after the short-range, wide-angle side of things. And because they sync up with regular cameras, it’s easy as pie to map depth onto the RGB image:

These are lidars that you’d want mounted on the rear or sides of the vehicles, able to cover a wide slice of the surroundings and get accurate detection of things like animals, kids and bikes quickly and accurately. But I went through all this when they came out of stealth.

The news today is that these units have gone from prototype to production design. The devices have been ruggedized so they can be attached outside of enclosures even in dusty or rainy environments. And performance has been improved, bumping the maximum range in some cases out to more than 40 meters, well over what was promised before.

The base price of $2,900 covers a unit with an 80×30 degree field of view, but others cover wider areas, up to 95×75 degrees — a large amount by lidar standards, and in higher fidelity than other flash lidars out there. You do give up some other properties in return for the wide view, though. The proprietary tech created by the company lets the lidar’s detector be located elsewhere than the laser emitter, too, which makes designing around the things easier (if not exactly easy).

Obviously if people are meant to order these online from the company these are not going to be appearing in next year’s autonomous vehicles. No, it’s more for bulk purchases by companies doing serious testing in industry settings.

Whether the Sense Photonics kit or some other lucky lidar company’s ends up on the robo-fleets of tomorrow is up in the air, but it does help for your product to actually exist. You can find out more about the company’s lidar platform here.

Demodesk, an early-stage startup that wants to change how sales meetings are conducted online, announced a $2.3 million seed investment today.

Investors included GFC, FundersClub, Y Combinator, Kleiner Perkins and an unnamed group of angel investors. The company was a member of the Y Combinator Winter 2019 cohort.

CEO and co-founder Veronika Riederle says that the fact it’s so closely focused on sales separates it from other more general meeting tools like Zoom, WebEx or GoToMeeting. “We are building the first intelligent online meeting tool for customer-facing conversations. So that is for inside sales and customer service professionals,” Riederle explained.

One of the key pieces of technology is what Riederle calls “a unique approach to screen sharing.” Whereas most meeting software involves downloading software to use the tool, Demodesk doesn’t do this. You simply click a link and you’re in. The two parties online are seeing a live screen and each can interact with it. It’s not just a show and tell.

What’s more, in a sales scenario with a slide presentation, the customer sees the same live screen as the salesperson, but while the salesperson can see their presentation notes, the customer cannot.

She said while this could work for any number of scenarios, from customer service to IT Help desks, at this stage in the company’s development she wants to concentrate on the sales scenario, then expand the vision over time. The service works on a subscription model with tiered per user pricing starting at $19 per user, per month.

When they got to Y Combinator, the company already had a working product and paying customers, but Riederle says the experience has helped them grow the business to moew than 100 customers. “YC was extremely important for us because we immediately got access to an extremely valuable network of founders and potential customers, and also just a base for us to really [develop] the business.

Riederle founded the company with CTO Alex Popp in 2017 in Munich. Prior to this seed round, the founders mostly bootstrapped the company. With the $2.3 million, it should be able to hire more people and begin building out the product further, while investing in sales and marketing to expand its customer base.

The Plug and Play network of accelerator programs is partnering with the nonprofit organization Alliance to End Plastic Waste to create an accelerator focused on developing technologies to reduce, remove or replace plastics in the industrial ecosystem.

Like Techstars, Plug and Play operates a number of industry-focused accelerator programs around the world, and for this program, targeting solutions that will lower the impact of plastic waste on the environment, the accelerator will operate two programs annually in three different regions — Silicon Valley, Paris and Singapore.

For its part, the Alliance to End Plastic Waste will work with the companies that support the organization, which include some of the largest chemical companies and manufacturers of plastic waste, to select focus areas and source specific startups working on solutions.

Representative members of the organization include:  BASF, Berry Global, Braskem, Chevron Phillips Chemical Company LLC, Dow, ExxonMobil, Formosa Plastics Corporation USA, Gemini Corporation, Geocycle, Grupo Phoenix, Henkel, LyondellBasell, Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings, Mitsui Chemicals, PepsiCo, PolyOne, Pregis, Procter & Gamble, Sealed Air Corporation, Shell, Sinopec, SKC co., ltd., Storopack, SUEZ, Sumitomo Chemical, TOMRA and Total.

Industrial companies don’t have the best history when it comes to reinventing their entire business models with new technologies, but at least there’s some effort being put toward these initiatives.

Each program will run for 12 weeks and accept 10 startups. In true accelerator fashion there will be a demo day where AEPW and Plug and Play would have the opportunity to invest in participating companies.

“I believe when we bring together all the stakeholders—large corporations, entrepreneurs, startups, and universities—you can create real change,” said said Saeed Amidi, founder and chief executive of Plug and Play, in a statement. “By devoting resources and attention to this global issue of plastic waste, we can make a difference in the environment. Through this platform I commit to spend more of my time on sustainability-focused initiatives and will invest in 20 startups in this space per year.”

Applications are now open for the first program, which will run from February through May 2020.

Nooruldeen Agha has been thinking about what’s next for fashion retail for years.

The serial entrepreneur behind the Dubai-based online fashion retailer Elabelz and marketing studio Elephant Nation had always wanted to redesign the shopping experience for how customers actually shopped in stores and online.

“If it was 1994 and we knew what technology is today and we want to reinvent this [shopping] experience… one thought was how we bought our whole life and how we go to the mall,” says Agha. 

Shopping is, for most people, a social activity. Friends go to the mall or department store together to try on clothes and ask each other for advice. Most online and offline shopping experiences are completely divorced from that, Agha said.

So he wanted to take the social aspects of Instagram and the subscription box and retail elements of StitchFix to create the new Los Angeles-based startup, FlipFit. 

But to do it, Agha needed a push. His businesses in Dubai were successful, he says, and there was no need for him to pursue another new venture — especially one in America.

Then he met Jonathan Ellman at the Summit conference in Los Angeles.

“We met at a party. At midnight,” Ellman says. “At 10 o’clock the next morning we were sitting on a balcony talking to each other and came to an understanding that Noor with his dynamics and understanding the industry… that he could not stay in Dubai.”

Ellman has a history as an investor and an operator. He was the founder of the scout program at GreatPoint Ventures and spent years at HoneyBook. And he knew immediately that Agha’s idea had legs.

For the next year, the two laid the foundation for the business. Noor had all of the connections already. Elabelz was pulling in $23 million in revenue off of the sale of 150,000 boxes of clothes — so the logistics and fulfillment and brand partnerships would be a breeze. The company has 200 brands that have already signed on as of today’s launch, including: AG, JBrand, Hudson, Retrobrand, Boyish, MadeWorn, Junkfood, Mavi and Edwin.

FlipFit works by creating a social network based on friends and followers. The company isn’t borrowing from Facebook or Instagram, but instead is trying to build out its network from scratch. Users of the app are encouraged to vote on selfies their friends take in different outfits. Each vote garners in-app cash that can be redeemed whenever someone purchases an item ($10 for each new voting user and $1 per vote).

As users vote on the styles they like, they also can add clothes to a virtual wardrobe. When they’re ready they can select a few styles from that closet to be shipped out to them to try on. If the user doesn’t like the clothes, they just return them.

The mechanics aren’t that different from a number of other online retailers, but the difference is in the company’s decision to create an entirely new social graph.

Initially, Agha and Ellman are tapping influencers to hook in their target customers. Over the next 90 days roughly 500 influencers across social media will be encouraging their audiences to vote on different outfits using the FlipFit app. The influencers are getting $150 in store credit twice-a-month or getting paid sponsorships (depending on the size of their following). The outfits with the most votes are the ones the influencers will keep… training their audiences on the mechanics of how to shop as they market the product.

Agha says the user experience is most akin to TikTok or Snap, rather than Instagram. There’s a publicly available feed for those who want to use it or the feed can be made private and shared among friends. And the app is only available for children 13 and up.

On the business side, the company is keeping 33% of the cash from any item sold. Its cut is higher because FlipFit handles all the back-end logistics of shipping and returns, according to the co-founders. Every box the company ships includes the standard pre-printed return label.

“Returns are our default. While the rest of the industry is fighting this phenomena, we are leaning into it,” said Ellman, co-founder and co-CEO of Flip. “Almost half of all fashion shoppers bracket their online purchases, buying several pieces to try on at home with the intention of returning what doesn’t fit or what doesn’t match what they saw online. We believe returns should be as easy as the purchase and by making the shopping process more efficient and effective, we’re keeping clothes out of landfills and in your closet.”

The company is, to date, backed by a $3.75 million seed round led by TLV Partners with participation from Lool Ventures.

“Flip is the evolution of social media and e-commerce — birthing the baby of Instagram and Amazon and creating the first physical product marketplace where your likes and actions impact the products you receive,” says Rona Segev, a general partner at TLV.

Raydiant, a startup promising to turn TVs into interactive digital signs, is making several announcements today — a new company name, a new CEO, new partners and $7 million in new funding.

Until today, the company was known as Mira, and it was founded by Tuan Ho (who previously founded internet TV company Philo), along with venture studio Atomic. The goal is to offer an alternative to existing digital signage solutions, which it says are often improvised, bespoke or expensive.

With Raydiant, customers just plug the company’s HDMI device into a TV or other screen and connect that device to the internet. Then they can edit and update the content from Raydiant’s online dashboard, and they get access to a number of other digital signage applications.

Customers include Westin, Ramada, Harvard University and Wahlburgers, the restaurant chain owned by the Wahlberg brothers. In fact, Raydiant/Mira was featured in an episode of the Wahlburgers TV show, with Mark Wahlberg testing out the technology as a way to create a virtual presence in Wahlburgers restaurants.

The new applications being announced today show the range of what customers can do with these screens — the partners include BlueJeans (videoconferencing), Soundtrack Your Brand (licensed music), SinglePlatform (digital menus) and PosterMyWall (drag-and-drop content editing).

Ho and Atomic have also brought on Bobby Marhamat, the former COO of Revel Systems, as Raydiant’s new CEO.

“We are thrilled to have so much energy around the company with everything from our new brand, the financial support from our investors and incredible partnerships with the industry’s top enterprise companies,” Marhamat said in a statement. “Raydiant is a thriving and growing company, and we are committed to providing businesses with first-class service to bring any screen to life and create an interactive experience within a brick & mortar location.”

Lastly, the company is announcing that it has raised $7 million in funding led by 8VC, with participation from Atomic, Bloomberg Beta, Lerer Hippeau, SV Angel and Transmedia Capital. It says the money will be used to develop new applications, sign more partners, grow the team and bring on more customers.

With two months of 2019 still to go, Indian tech startups are already having their best year as a record amount of capital flows into the local ecosystem in a major rebound since the darkened funding environment of 2016.

The unlisted tech startups in India have raised $11.3 billion this year, a substantial jump from last year’s $10.5 billion fundraise, research firm Tracxn told TechCrunch.

This year’s fundraise, the largest sum for the local ecosystem in any year, further moves the nation’s burgeoning startup space on a path of steady growth. Since 2016, when tech startups accumulated just $4.3 billion — down from $7.9 billion the year before — flow of capital has increased significantly in the ecosystem. In 2017, Indian startups raised $10.4 billion, according to Tracxn.

Startups with consumer-facing offerings including financial services have attracted most of the venture capital this year — about $8.2 billion, Tracxn said. Following that is retail startups that have bagged about $2.3 billion and those that offer enterprise services, with $1.5 billion. (There is some overlap of startups whose offerings fall under more than one category.)

Investors’ growing appetite for equity in India’s startups shows that the local ecosystem is maturing, said Dev Khare, a partner at VC fund Lightspeed Venture Partners . In an interview with TechCrunch, Khare noted that in 2014 and 2015, startups were largely focused on building e-commerce solutions and replicating ideas that worked in Western markets.

“But today, they are tackling a wide-range of categories and opportunities and building some solutions that have not been attempted in any other market,” he said. He attributes much of this change to the arrival of telecom operator Reliance Jio and some government efforts, such as introduction of GST taxation system for businesses and introduction of UPI payments infrastructure.

Jio, a three-year-old telecom operator run by India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, has disrupted the market with incredibly low-cost mobile data. The low-cost data meant that overnight, tens of millions of Indians were able to come online for the first time.

This, alongside a cash crunch created by New Delhi in late 2016, led to a sudden explosion in demand for content and services, including mobile wallets that created a massive opportunity for local startups to innovate, Khare said.

Financial services firm Paytm, which has raised more than $2 billion to date, has more than 200 million registered users in India, while Google Pay has amassed over 67 million active customers in less than two years of its existence.

Additionally, Khare said more people than ever in India today are willing to work at a startup. Citing Lightspeed’s internal research, he said in 2010, only 10% of founders of startups that had reached a Series A financing round had worked at a startup before. That figure went up to 36% in 2014 and ballooned to 70% last year.

There are some other promising signals as well: Of the top 150 Indian startups that raised capital in the first half of this year, 17.3% of them were either led or co-led by women, Indian news outlet The Morning Context reported on Wednesday, citing data from research firm Venture Intelligence. This is a massive jump from last year, when just 10% of startups counted women as their founder or co-founder.

A trend that appears to continue from the last several years is concentration of funds in a smaller number of startups. So far, tech startups in India have participated in 872 financing rounds, compared to 924 last year, and 1,141 in 2017.

But that number, as well as total fundraise amount, could change substantially by the end of the year as many more startups prep to close new financing rounds. Zomato, Swiggy and Paytm alone are expected to close rounds worth as much as $3 billion in the coming months.

It’s fascinating turnaround for the nation, which just 10 years ago had a very small startup ecosystem. In a recent interview with TechCrunch, Paytm founder and CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma recounted the early days of One97, the parent firm of Paytm, and how difficult it was for him to raise a few hundred thousand dollars.