The Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, based in New York, is ready to once again unveil its latest class of startups. Thus far, ERA has produced 190 startup which have raised more than $450 imllion in capital and exceed $2 billion in valuation collectively, according to the accelerator.

So without any further ado, let’s take a look at these new startups:

CoolR is tackling the CPG retail and beverage industries with a machine learning platform that’s meant to not only track inventory and shelf performance but also detect planogram non-compliance, foreign products and pricing inconsistencies. The company does this by combining its machine learning platform with hardware such as wireless cameras and sensors.

Everybody loves online shopping, but no one likes dealing with returning unwanted products. Cricket Returns is looking to solve that by allowing retailers to optimize their online return policies based on the product, category, place and/or time. Cricket Returns is easily integrated with Shopify merchants and the company says it delivers a measurable ROI improvement for managing and accepting returns.

FoodFul is bringing tech to the dairy farm with the DairyX product. It uses sensors and cloud-based software to monitor cow health and measure feed efficiency, saving the farmers from making extra on-farm visual inspections and giving them the tools to make data-driven decisions.

Intenseye is focused on improving workplace safety through a machine-learning video analytics platform. The company allows manufacturing facilities to link their existing video infrastructure to the Intenseye cloud platform that analyzes worker body posture, protective equipment and danger zone violations in real time.

Maia is an employment platform that allows employers to capture and engage with the 92 percent of people that visit a job application site but don’t apply. The system integrates with an employer’s career site and offers exit forms for folks leaving without applying, giving them the opportunity to be on tap for future employment options, as well.

Much like ZocDoc connects patients to the right doctor, My Wellbeing is looking to connect therapists and mental health professionals with their clients. Therapists get new client leads and access to a professional community of other vetted therapists, and clients can find the right therapist using the My Wellbeing matching technology.

Navimize is a platform that will help healthcare professionals minimize wait times for their patients. The software integrates with electronic medical records systems to detect, and even predict, delays in real times and notify upcoming patients of those delays, allowing them to show up at the exact right time.

Polymer wants to bring the power of big data analytics and data science to small data, like raw spreadsheets in Excel, Google Drive or Salesforce. Polymer search users can visualize their small data, ask complex questions, and automatically receive insights about their data with absolutely no coding whatsoever.

Recapped is a communication platform for enterprise deals that consolidates the communication between salespeople and clients. Salespeople can simply create an action plan to close the deal and share a link with clients. Rather than hopping between tools like Zoom, Dropbox, Docusign, email, etc, Recapped allows both parties to collaborate on next steps for a deal much more efficiently by simply integrating with those tools in a single place.

She’s Well is a concierge service for women and couples seeking professional fertility services. The platform connects users to a wide variety of service providers, including IVF, egg freezing, and wellness coaching. She’s Well tries to bring pricing transparency to the industry by aggregating the nation’s largest network of fertility centers, labs, and financing partners.

Sigo is looking to offer insurance in a new way. The company offers mobile-first non-standard auto insurance to Spanish-speaking drivers. The demographic may have limited insurance histories, and Sigo uses data to provide non-standard, lower-cost policies offering quotes that are bilingual, clear, and compliant without charging extra to drivers.

Stix is a new d2c brand looking to offer products in the women’s health category, starting with pregnancy tests. The company delivers the product discreetly and conveniently at an affordable price point. The hope is to make awkward pharmacy visits a thing of the past.

Techmate offers on-demand technical support to businesses with remote workers and satellite offices. The company matches customers with a vetted, qualified technician within two hours by factoring in office location, appointment time and job scope.

Tembo Health is a telemedicine company serving retirement homes, senior care centers and skilled nursing facilities to connect patients with specialty services like psychiatry and cardiology. The platform connects the specialists to patient data and collaborates with the nursing staff to provide better care plans.

Today’s 458th FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Thursday, September 26, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to...

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As companies continue to expand the number of cloud-based tools and apps that are used to run their businesses, DevOps continues to grow as a field of IT to help developers meet those demands. In one of the more recent moves, Honeycomb.io, which developers use to observe code on live apps, microservices and other processes in order to identify where something is not working, is today announcing that it has raised a Series A of $11.4 million to expand its sales and support efforts for existing customers.

The funding is being led by Scale Venture Partners, with Storm Ventures, eVentures, NextWorld Capital, and Merian Ventures also participating. Honeycomb has now raised $26.9 million.

Paul Graham, the co-founder of Y Combinator, once famously described how a startup (Stripe) grew in part by building a tool (in payments) that was useful and needed by other startups. Honeycomb itself is embodiment of that model, too: the story is one of engineers building tools that engineers need. Charity Majors and Christine Yen came to Facebook by way of Parse, where they were both engineers, and in the bigger environment, they found that the coexistence of apps and other services both built in-house and those interacting with Facebook’s platform created a minefield when it came to things working harmoniously.

“Things were just going down, or [even worse] looked like they were going down, all the time,” Majors said, noting that one of the big issues was that “you couldn’t look at things at a finer level” to figure out what was going wrong, and to identify issues behind why things were not working.

“Testing platforms can only cover the things you predict in advance, things you know might go wrong,” Yen noted. “Observability is about capturing what is going wrong,” a critical piece of data that will subsequently help an engineer figure out how to best fix it, rather than spending time trying to identify where the actual problem is.

Without a performance monitoring product on the market that was able to provide insight into real-time activity and interactivity between apps — and with a large part of the process requiring yet more code to be deployed to search for and fix problems — Majors (who is now the CTO of Honeycomb) mapped out a way to do this by observing the overall environment. When she decided to leave Facebook and work further on the idea, she teamed up with Yen (now the CEO) to build Honeycomb. (The internal tool that Majors built as an infrastructure engineer, she said, is also still being used, and you can see more on the structure behind how Honeycomb works here.)

Honeycomb has resonated with developers at both smaller and very giant tech companies (that prefer not to be named), with the high correlation between those who trial and those who end up buying the product speaking both to the demand for Honeycomb’s solution and its impact on developers’ work.

The company says that it has doubled ARR in the last six months, doubling the number of six-figure contracts, and is on track to triple ARR by the end of 2019.

“Honeycomb is enabling a long-overdue shift in the way developers interact with and operate the software they build,” said Ariel Tseitlin, Partner at Scale Venture Partners, who is also joining the board with this round. “As production systems become more complex and distributed, the company is taking advantage of the massive market opportunity and establishing itself as a leader in real-time observability. It’s no wonder developers say they can’t live without it after they try it.”

The climate crisis continues to be just that… a crisis. And it’s spurring people across the country (and globe) to take action, particularly when it comes to their own lifestyle.

Lauren Singer is one such person. After studying Environmental Science and Politics at NYU, she started a blog called Trash Is For Tossers to make a zero-waste lifestyle more accessible and comprehensible to everyone. But there’s still an issue. Even with a steep rise in sustainable CPG products, these brands rarely have the scale to compete with traditional CPG products in price, and lack the distribution to be accessible to everyone.

That’s where Package Free comes into play. Today, Package Free is announcing that it has raised its very first capital since launch in 2017, with a fresh $4.5 million in seed funding led by Primary Ventures. Scooter Braun’s TQ Ventures, Day One Ventures, Ryan Engel of Peleton, Brooke Wall of The Wall Group, and Casper founder Neil Parikh also participated in the round, alongside others.

Package Free started as a little pop-up shop for sustainable CPG brands to show off their wares in a brick-and-mortar environment. The brands themselves paid between $1000 and $3000 to participate, and were given 100 percent of the profit from the pop-up.

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By the end of month one, says Singer, every brand had been paid back for their investment. By the end of month three, Package Free had become the primary revenue driver for those brands. At that point, they switched over to a traditional retail model to generate revenue to launch an ecommerce site.

Today, Package Free is a full-fledged reseller. The pop-up shop now has a permanent status in the trendy neighborhood of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, NY, with its own warehouse in Greenpoint. The company buys their inventory wholesale and enforces incredibly strict guidelines for the vendors they work with, not least of which is a no-exceptions no-plastic policy.

Brands that sell through Package Free not only have to use all natural ingredients and be plastic-free, but must also ship to the Package Free warehouse without using any plastic. The company actually charges vendors a percentage of the shipment if the shipment arrives with plastic, and increases that percentage on the second infraction. Three strikes, and that vendor is out for good.

“We know it’s completely possible to do these things without plastic, it’s just not the norm now,” said Singer. “So we’re trying to change the foundational benchmarks of what it means to package sustainably. I truly believe that the burden of waste should never fall on the consumer. It should fall on the manufacturer first, and then the reseller.”

Once products are at the warehouse, Package Free reuses the dunnage (packaging materials) that the original shipment came with, meaning the company never uses ‘virgin dunnage’. The boxes that Package Free ships to consumers are 100 percent recycled, and shipping labels are also 100 percent recyclable. In fact, every Package Free box is printed with the words “I’m not trash” with further facts about trash.

With the funding, Package Free wants to expand to creating its own sustainable CPG products, first tackling the ‘white space’ of products that aren’t currently available via vendor partners. Singer declined to share any more details around what Package Free’s first products might be.

Package Free is also looking to hire, with a specific focus on the marketing vertical as the company has yet to do any formal marketing or paid marketing up until this point.

The ultimate goal is to put sustainable CPG on the same playing field as traditional CPG products simply by way of economies of scale. Price is the primary obstacle between everyday consumers and accessible sustainable products, and Singer’s goal is to scale up the sustainable CPG category as a whole to the point where it can reasonably compete with the Unilevers and P&Gs of the world.

Online-only banks have become a viable option for many people who would have traditionally used a brick-and-mortar bank but are now looking for more flexible, potentially cheaper ways to handle their monthly incoming and outgoing finances, their savings and loans, and their payment cards. That maxim has also extended to the world of business, and today a startup that has built a business-focused challenger bank, specifically for startups like itself, is announcing a round of funding as starts its growth in earnest.

Mercury, which describes itself as a bank for startups, has banked $20 million of its own in funding, a Series A that is being led by CRV with support also from Andreessen Horowitz, the VC that led its investor-heavy $6 million seed round earlier this year. The company, I understand, has a post-money valuation now of $100 million.

And by investor-heavy, I mean that on two counts: it featured a lot of heavyweights, and there were nearly 40 individuals and firms chipping in. Others in this latest round include Kevin Hartz, CEO of Eventbrite; Scott Belsky, co-founder of Behance; Ryan Petersen, CEO of Flexport; Kevin Durant of the Brooklyn Nets; and Andre Iguodala of the Memphis Grizzlies. Its bigger list of backers now totals over 100 and also includes the founder of Silicon Valley Bank Roger Smith, Bill Clerico of WePay, and Naval Ravikant, among many others.

This latest funding comes on the heels of Mercury having launched only in April 2019, and is a result of what appears to be very strong demand for what it has to offer. In the first week of its launch it had 1,500 signups, and it has been growing at 40% each month since.

To be sure, there are already a number of options on the market for a startup looking for a bank. Aside from traditional institutions that all offer special accounts for small businesses (which essentially is what a startup is), there is Silicon Valley Bank), and other challengers like Revolut and N26 that started first with consumers but are now increasingly also targeting smaller SMBs.

That’s before you consider the wave of other fintech juggernauts out there, like Stripe, that are slowly building a suite of services that could be a natural complement (and, thus, potential precursors) to basic banking, too. (No plans from Stripe to build something like this at the moment, co-founder John Collison told me earlier this month when I asked about it.)

Immad Akhund, the CEO and co-founder of Mercury, is aware of what the shortcomings are today in the market from a couple of perspectives. His previous startup, mobile ad network Heyzap, regularly “was constrained by cashflow” that inhibited growth and operations and needed to do run of the paying out processes of the business (which included a programmatic ad network) manually.

After he and his co-founders sold Heyzap in 2016, Akhund used some of the proceeds to become an investor in early-stage startups (120 in all), he saw the same challenge continue to persist. “Nothing had really changed,” he said, “and I thought a bank could do a better job. With Mercury I saw that I had the opportunity to build something that was needed.”

Inspired by the proliferation of challenger banks that have sprung up across Europe that were mostly targeting consumers (and now potentially stand to be competitors with newer business services), he set out to build Mercury with a lot of services that are very specific to the kinds of things that a startup might need to be managing when it comes to its money.

In addition to checking and savings accounts (FDIC-insured, by way of Mercury’s white-label partnership with Evolve) that come with up to 1.75% interest, the service features clean, modern dashboards; easy interfaces for setting up payments; an online sign-up that Mercury says takes only 10 minutes to go through, with the account ready to use within 24 hours; and a facility to manage and monitor activities of different employees that have access to the account.

These are just the basics, however. The service integrates with a company’s existing accounting software or any software that already manages recurring payments. And on the horizon are a number of new features that Mercury is building, along with an API, that will let its clients manage the money in their accounts and all of the places where it might typically be getting paid in and paid out.

“We are talking to customers and building what they need,” Akhund said. 

This will including lending, but also a number of other features around payments, with an API that will let users access who paid the company, without logging into Mercury’s actual dashboard to do that. This could be useful, for example, for integrating this into another piece of accounting software. He also noted that in marketplace-style business, you are not only receiving money from many places but also needing to pay people out, so having a way of being able to do that more easily and immediately could be a big boost to a business.

The aim is to automate and speed up the way money moves, or “to pay out programmatically,” as Akhund describes it.  Much further down the line, you could imagine this to also include interesting insights and other services based on all the data Mercury amasses about a business.

This idea has resonated with founders — who are both signing up to the service and also coming in as backers. Despite the work that having a huge investor pool might entail for the business (many ideas, many voices to be heard) Akhund said that having a big pool of them involved financially was important to him, given his target market.

“Any founder that’s worked with a bank before knows the experience as it has been is fundamentally broken. Banking has been the crucial missing piece of the startup stack that hasn’t yet been modernized. I think entrepreneurs know something special is being built right now,” said Justin Kan, the repeat entrepreneur who is now the CEO of Atrium, said in a statement.

Mercury’s current customers include​ ​YC startup Tandem​, Remote​, and​ ​Linear​. “​Using Mercury was a no-brainer for me,” said Rajiv Ayyangar, CEO and co-founder of Tandem, in a statement. “After decades of dealing with terrible banking systems, it’s been amazing to use Mercury, where things just work. I’m never worried I did something wrong nor am I frustrated because I can’t find a piece of information I need. The delta is so large that I actually look forward to the odd finance task!​” Given what a headache working with banks can be, I’m not there could be a better endorsement, so the ball’s in Mercury’s court now to deliver and be more than a short-lived startup to these startups.

The modern office worker is heavily engaged with expenses. From buying SaaS products and purchasing team lunches to securing freelancers for outsourced work, employees need access to purchasing power on behalf of their companies on a regular basis.

Unfortunately, offering that purchasing power is fraught with difficulty. Companies want to manage their cash carefully to ensure audit compliance and prevent fraud, which often means that rather than empowering employees to spend what they need, they force them to work with byzantine “p-card” rules to make anything happen.

Teampay wants to change that calculus by giving every employee a beautiful platform to buy the goods, tools, and services they need while keeping them within defined company policy.

The New York City-based startup announced today that it raised a $12 million series A round from Jonathan Hsu of Tribe Capital . Existing investors Crosscut, Silicon Valley Bank, and Charles Hudson of Precursor Ventures also participated.

When I chatted with the company last year, founder and CEO Andrew Hoag had just locked in a $4 million seed round and had recently launched the platform. Since then, “We brought in our first sales reps, brought in one marketing hire, and we’re growing by double digit percentages, month-over-month in 2018,” Hoag said.

He noted that Teampay has been carefully refining its pitch to customers. “Even comparing 2018 to 2019, I think we spend — no pun intended — a lot more time working with our customers on solutions, as opposed to talking now about the pain points, because they’re hyper aware of those pain points,” he said.

What Teampay discovered is that while the pain point for organizations is the actual purchase of a particular good or service, what companies are really looking for is better tools to manage expenses across the board, or what Hoag calls “distributed spend management.”

That includes the challenges of managing spend even outside of a company’s walls. With more and more businesses hiring freelancers these days, it can be challenging to offer contingent workers access to spending power without onerous bureaucratic systems that ultimately cost more in lost salary and productivity than savings in cost management.

In addition to hiring in sales and engineering, Teampay has also hired several senior executives over the past year. Peter Nesbitt joined as VP of Finance, and was formerly VP of Finance at Unified and director of finance at Bitly. Nicole Lindenbaum joined as VP of Marketing from PeopleDoc and Yodle, while Matt Petcoff joined as head of sales from Inturn and Movable Ink.

Spend management has heated up acutely in the past year, with Brex reaching unicorn status with its now ubiquitous cards targeting startups and Stripe announcing its Stripe Corporate Card along a similar vein.

Hoag emphasized that Teampay targets a different problem in several ways. First, “We don’t require a customer to switch their card program in order to be able to use Teampay,” he explained. Instead, Teampay acts as a sort of collaboration software layer on top of the existing card infrastructure that a company has to better manage spend across the organization.

Second, Teampay doesn’t focus on startups so much as larger enterprises where the needs around spend are different and more complicated. “Most of our customers are fairly large, and they have strong balance sheets,” Hoag said. “And so they’re not looking to optimize for working capital, they don’t have a problem of getting access to credit, they have a problem about controlling credit.”

The company noted that it has customers like Wistia, Chime, Mixpanel, and RiskIQ using the platform.

Hoag’s goal for the new round of capital is to continue to expand Teampay’s partnerships and integrations (for instance, expanding Teampay to work in concert with IT ticketing systems to make software and hardware procurement easier) as well as increasing sales and marketing. The company was founded in 2016.

Enterprise cloud computing player Nutanix (Nasdaq: NTNX) has had a roller coaster year so far. The stock has lost nearly 40% in value since the start of the year. It has been transitioning to a...

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Two of Africa’s powerhouse tech incubators will join forces. Nigerian innovation center and seed-fund CcHub has acquired Nairobi based iHub, CcHub CEO Bosun Tijani confirmed to TechCrunch.

The purchase amount is undisclosed, but Tijani said CcHub will finance the deal out of its real-estate project to build a new 10-story innovation center to replace its Herbert Macaulay Way building in Lagos.

Details are emerging on how the two entities will operate together, but Tijani noted some degree of autonomy.

“The names will stay the same…iHub will remain iHub…it is a strong brand…but iHub will be supported from the central CcHub, which will help them strengthen what they do,” he said.

Per the acquisition, Tijani becomes CEO of both organizations, while Nekesa Were continues as iHub managing director. And iHub’s existing programs will remain, according to Tijani, but CcHub will extend to Kenya some of its existing activities in education, healthcare and governance.

CcHub will also use the iHub addition to expand its investment scope. “We’ll now have access to pipeline in Nigeria, Kenya and Rwanda,” he said.

Tijani views the arrangement as a boost to the continent’s tech ecosystem. “It strengthens our ability to support innovation. iHub and CcHub…coming together makes us stronger; it gives us a chance to attract greater resources and talent,” he said.

The acquisition joins two of the Africa’s most recognized tech hubs. These innovation spaces, accelerators and incubators — which tally 618 per GSMA stats — have become focal points for startup formation, training and IT activity on the continent.

There aren’t official rankings for Africa’s most powerful tech hubs, but if there were, CcHub and iHub would arguably be up top. This would be based on the size of their membership networks, volume of tech-related programs, startups incubated, partnerships and global visibility.

Founded in 2011 in Lagos’ tech-synonymous Yaba suburb, the Co-Creation Hub has grown into a multi-faceted innovation center. The organization manages digital skills programs for entrepreneurs and school kids, startup incubation and a portfolio of investments through its Growth Capital Fund.

CcHub is considered a go-to spot for any tech-related visit to Nigeria. It was Mark Zuckerberg’s first public stop on his 2016 Africa trip. While leaving a CcHub event in 2018, I noticed the vice president of Nigeria, Yemi Osinbajo, and his entourage packing into the elevator.

Tijani and team have mastered gaining partnerships with big global tech names. When Facebook launched its tech space in Nigeria — NG_Hub — CcHub was named lead partner. Google for Startups sponsored CcHub’s Pitch Drive, an African startup tour to Europe and Asia. CcHub also collaborated with the government of Rwanda this year to open its Design Lab in Kigali, focused on innovating impact solutions in health, education and governance.

The Design Lab launch extended CcHub’s West Africa reach further east and closer to iHub. The innovation center was co-founded by Erik Hersman in 2010 out of what he saw as a need in Africa’s emerging tech scene “for…creating community spaces…in major cities [for] young entrepreneurs. The nexus point for technologists, investors, [and] tech companies.”

iHub became that central spot in East Africa. Along with M-Pesa mobile-money and a vibrant startup scene, it is one of the pillars that inspired Kenya’s Silicon Savannah moniker.

iHub is also widely seen as giving rise to the Africa’s innovation center movement that inspired the upsurge in tech hubs across the continent.

Since 2010, 170 companies have formed out of iHub. It has 16,000 members and has played host to most major visitors to Kenya’s tech scene. After seeing CcHub in Nigeria in 2016, Zuck then headed to Kenya and toured iHub.

There’ll be plenty for continuing coverage on how these two prominent African incubators settle into becoming one big Africa mega-hub. That includes the sustainability question and what this all means to the continent’s startup scene.

At a high level, for now, the CcHub-iHub union creates a direct innovation link between two of Africa’s most active markets for VC and startup formation — Nigeria and Kenya.

In the past, both countries’ techies have shared a healthy rivalry. That could now turn to more collaborations, as CcHub’s acquisition connects East and West in African tech.

Sramana Mitra: I have a slightly different question based on all the things that we just talked about. What is the penetration of the kind of data normalization and cleansing work that you’re...

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As any CFO can attest, corporate finance is extraordinarily complicated. From tax preparation, to financial controls, to cash flow estimation and more, the finance department of any major company often has to turnaround sophisticated analyses with extreme attention to detail — and quick.

Most of the time, businesses outsource at least part of those financial functions to the big four accounting firms or to smaller firms, but as with all consulting firms, getting contracts signed and work underway can take significant time and effort.

That’s where Paro comes in. The Chicago-based expert marketplace wants to provide corporate clients with on-demand sophisticated expertise across a range of financial functions.

The company announced today that it has raised a $10 million series “A” venture capital round led by Mark Fernandes of Sierra Ventures. Existing investors Revolution Ventures, KGC Capital, and Tom Williams also participated.

When we last checked in with Paro 18 months ago, it had just raised a $5 million series A from Clara Sieg at Revolution. The company said that it is now retrospectively dubbing that round a series “AA” round, since round sizes have increased “exponentially.” Since that time, the marketplace has continued to expand, and CEO and co-founder Michael Burdick says that the company is increasingly zero-ing in on the types of clients that best match the platform’s offerings.

“The cognitive load is huge,” Burdick explained for companies trying to find this talent on existing marketplaces. “You’re posting project descriptions, you’re wading through all these mountains of unfiltered proposals, you’re having to shortlist candidates.” That often leads CFOs right back to the incumbent accounting firms, since they are much more plug-and-play.

Paro has taken a different tact, focusing instead on recruiting and retaining the highest-quality financial talent on its marketplace. The company has built out and continues to improve tools to help the marketplace’s experts focus on the work that makes them unique rather than the drudgery that can come as part of their jobs. We’re “automating a lot of their back office functions [and] giving them workflow automation tools to make them more productive and efficient and earn more,” Burdick said. He dubbed this the “freelancer operating system.”

Sieg of Revolution also noted that the pursuit of quality has been beneficial for Paro’s bottom line. “Unlike a consulting gig, where it’s a one-time analysis and a sort of lumpy engagement, you need monthly financials, you need annual tax reporting, you need audit work, and so these are really ongoing relationships,” she said. That “gets us away from some of the informal problems that you’ve seen in labor marketplaces, which is really high customer acquisition costs, and relatively low take rates, and not very much recurring business.”

As Paro scales, Burdick sees an opportunity to leverage the firm’s data network effects to build a moat around its business. “There is inherently a wealth of data at our fingertips that we’re leveraging, giving back to the freelancers and the clients,” he said.

Online labor marketplaces targeting business functions have grown dramatically in popularity in recent years, with companies like Pilot raising large rounds of venture capital. Burdick says that Paro differentiates from bookkeeping services like Pilot by focusing on elite financial talent which ultimately leads to higher margins.

The company intends to use the capital to continue expanding its product and sales staffs.

Update: Changed Series B to Series A , and Series A to Series AA by request of Paro.

Calling all code poets. It’s time to strut your stuff at the TC Hackathon at Disrupt Berlin 2019. Are you ready to test your physical, mental and technical limits in this intense, high-pressure code-a-thon for cash, prizes and bragging rights? Then apply to compete right here.

How does the Hackathon work? First of all, it’s free. And we give each participant a free Innovator pass. The Hackathon takes place during the Disrupt conference in a dedicated section of Arena Berlin. We’re limiting participation to 500 hackers who will have just 36 hours to form teams, choose one of several sponsored contest hacks and complete their project.

We’ll announce the specific sponsors and challenges in the coming weeks. But you’ll get a good sense of what to expect by looking at the sponsored contests, prizes and winners from the Hackathon at Disrupt SF 2018.

Your skill and talent will be put to good use because, regardless of which hack challenge you select, sponsors are looking for working products that address real-world problems. Do your very best to impress, and you could take home thousands of dollars.

Judges will review the completed projects science fair-style, and they’ll choose 10 teams for the final round on day two. Each (very) tired team gets two minutes to present and pitch their project on the Extra Crunch Stage.

In addition to the cash and prizes from individual sponsors, TechCrunch’s panel of judges will select one team for the best overall hack — and they’ll take home a $5,000 cash prize.

Cash, prizes, bragging rights, free food, drink, caffeine and a free Innovator’s pass — yowza! Need more reasons to apply? Think networking. If you’re this good under pressure, imagine the impression you’ll make on potential partners or employers.

TC Hackathon takes place during Disrupt Berlin 2019 on 11-12 December. Don’t miss your chance to dazzle us with your physical, mental and technical capabilities — and build something great in the process. Apply to the Hackathon today.

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

Despite the inexorable rise of social media influencers, several problems remain when it comes to brands trying to use these stars to push their products. The marketing tools and processes are fragmented (read: chaotic). Attaining some level of authenticity, quality and creativity in influencer-driven campaigns is tough, to say the least. And the whole thing has to look like the influencers are only promoting brands that they truly believe in, whether they are or not.

Perhaps that’s unkind? Some social influencers really do try to “curate” the products they are pushing. Plenty just do it only for the money, and it shows. The whole thing is largely a shitshow, to use a technical term. Some startups are trying to bring order to this tedious state of affairs.

Influencer is a social media influencer marketing platform, which has now announced the close of a £3 million (± $3.6 million) Series A round led by Puma Private Equity.

Its platform claims to simplify the influencer marketing process for both advertisers and creators, giving advertisers access to a network of “macro and micro creators” pre-vetted for authenticity, quality and creativity based on first-party data. This unites “creator discovery, creator relationship management, campaign management and campaign reporting along with actionable insights,” they say.

Key competitors include Whalar, Tribe, Takumi, Influential.co and FameBit.

But Influencer says it differentiates from these companies in that it puts a lot of the elements needed onto one platform for self-service and managed campaigns. It also has a white-label solution.

Influencer has so far worked with brands including Boohoo, Alibaba, Pepsi, Starbucks, Pantene, Uber Eats, PrettyLittleThing and Apple Music, to get them in front of audiences via social media influencers.

The startup was launched in 2017 by 23-year-old Ben Jeffries who leads the company as CEO, and 25-year-old YouTuber and creator Caspar Lee.

It’s now brought on Adam Ludwin, co-founder of search intelligence company Captify and growth marketing agency Inflecto Media, as director of the board.

The company will open its first U.S. office in New York, led by CEO Ben Jeffries, with expansion planned to the West Coast over the next year.

It’s also released a mobile app, which “allows brands and content creators to create meaningful relationships,” claims Jeffries.

Caspar Lee says: “At Influencer we pride ourselves in being by creators, for creators, with a team who embody this new era of creativity and enjoy unrivaled relationships with the world’s leading creators.”