Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Rahul Chandra was recorded on July 2019. Rahul...

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Today’s 456th FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Thursday, September 12 at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All are...

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Today’s 456th FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Thursday, September 12, 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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According to a Grand View Research report published earlier this year, the global cyber security market is estimated to grow 10% annually to reach $300.32 billion by 2025 from $139.67 billion in...

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Javed Muhammedali: What has happened in the industry, in general, is that a lot of those insights are available, but it’s locked away behind a huge reporting application. The end-user has to leave...

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French startup Akeneo has raised a $45 million Series C round led by Summit Partners, with existing investors Alven, Partech, Salesforce Ventures and Stephan Dietrich also participating. The company develops a popular product information management (PIM) service to manage all information about products in your stores, online and in paper catalogs.

Akeneo started as a sort of CRM for product information. Instead of managing your catalog using Excel spreadsheets or an outdated ERP, Akeneo provides a service that works across all your communication channels. You can also collaborate in Akeneo directly.

Akeneo started as an open source PIM application. Today, thousands companies actively use that open source version. But Akeneo also offers an enterprise edition with a more traditional software-as-a-service approach. The startup has managed to attract 300 clients, such as Sephora, Fossil and Auchan.

“With the open source edition, we have 60,000 companies actively using Akeneo. It means that we are the most used PIM solution in the world,” co-founder and CEO Frédéric de Gombert told me.

Over the years, Akeneo has expanded beyond product information management. The company acquired Sigmento, a startup that collects public data about millions of products in order to automatically generate descriptions, specifications, keywords and more.

Akeneo has integrated Sigmento into its core product and now has a database of 50 million different products. Akeneo uses machine learning to clean up that data set. For Akeneo customers, it lets you automate several tasks and fix mistakes in specifications for instance.

“Investing in this technology is one of the goals of this funding round,” Frédéric de Gombert said.

With today’s funding round, the company also wants to hire more people and focus even more on the U.S. — it currently has 180 employees and they will be 300 by the end of 2020. 75% of its revenue is coming from abroad, and the company generates 20% of its revenue in the U.S.

Backed by over $200 million in VC funding, Kobalt is changing the way the music industry does business and putting more money into musicians’ pockets in the process.

In Part I of this series, I walked through the company’s founding story and its overall structure. There are two core theses that Kobalt bet on: 1) that the shift to digital music could transform the way royalties are tracked and paid, and 2) that music streaming will empower a growing middle class of DIY musicians who find success across countless niches.

This article focuses on the complex way royalties flow through the industry and how Kobalt is restructuring that process (while Part III will focus on music’s middle class). The music industry runs on copyright administration and royalty collections. If the system breaks — if people lose track of where songs are being played and who is owed how much in royalties — everything halts.

Kobalt is as much a compliance tech company as it is a music company: it has built a quasi “operating system” to more accurately and quickly handle this using software and a centralized approach to collections, upending a broken, inefficient system so everything can run more smoothly and predictably on top of it. The big question is whether it can maintain its initial lead in doing this, however.

The business of a song

Neighborhood Goods, the direct to consumer department store hawking brands like Rothy’s, Dollar Shave Club, Buck Mason, Draper James and Stadium Goods, has new cash to expand its storefront for e-commerce juggernauts.

The company has raised $11 million in a new round of financing led by Global Founders Capital, with participation from previous investors Forerunner Ventures, Serena Ventures, NextGen Venture Partners, Allen Exploration, Capital Factory and others.

The Dallas-based startup has raised $25.5 million to date and is expanding into a new location in Austin to complement its stores in Plano, Texas and a location in New York, opening soon, according to the company’s chief executive and co-founder Matt Alexander.

The Neighborhood Goods concept, providing a brick and mortar outlet for online brands, is one that dovetails nicely with backers like Global Founders Capital and Forerunner Ventures, which are both longtime investors in direct to consumer startups.

“As we expand our network of brands, we’re so thrilled to have Neighborhood Goods as a core element of our portfolio for them to test, assess, explore and learn about the impact of physical retail as they grow,” said Global Founders Capital investor Don Stalter.

As the company expands its geographic footprint, it’s also experimenting with different online features, like online browsing of in-store collections and the option for physical, in-store pickup of digital orders. Neighborhood Goods also said it will begin offering an analytics back-end for brand partners to provide data on activations and branded events at the company’s stores.

Sex, despite being one of the most fundamental human experiences, is still one of those businesses that some advertisers reject, banks are hesitant to financially support and some investors don’t want to fund.

Given how sex is such a huge part of our lives, it’s no surprise founders are looking to capitalize on the space. But the idea of pleasure versus function, plus the stigma still associated with all-things sex, is at the root of the barriers some startup founders face.

Just last month, Samsung was forced to apologize to sextech startup Lioness after it wrongfully asked the company to take down its booth at an event it was co-hosting. Lioness is a smart vibrator that aims to improve orgasms through biofeedback data.

Sextech companies that relate to the ability to reproduce or, the ability to not reproduce, don’t always face the same problems when it comes to everything from social acceptance to advertising to raising venture funding. It seems to come down to the distinction between pleasure and function, stigma and the patriarchy. 

This is where the trajectories for sextech startups can diverge. Some startups have raised hundreds of millions from traditional investors in Silicon Valley while others have struggled to raise any funding at all. As one startup founder tells me, “Sand Hill Road was a big no.”

A market worth billions or trillions?

Brexit has taken over discourse in the UK and beyond. In the UK alone, it is mentioned over 500 million times a day, in 92 million conversations — and for good reason. While the UK has yet to leave the EU, the impact of Brexit has already rippled through industries all over the world. The UK’s technology sector is no exception. While innovation endures in the midst of Brexit, data reveals that innovative companies are losing the ability to attract people from all over the world and are suffering from a substantial talent leak. 

It is no secret that the UK was already experiencing a talent shortage, even without the added pressure created by today’s political landscape. Technology is developing rapidly and demand for tech workers continues to outpace supply, creating a fiercely competitive hiring landscape.

The shortage of available tech talent has already created a deficit that could cost the UK £141 billion in GDP growth by 2028, stifling innovation. Now, with Brexit threatening the UK’s cosmopolitan tech landscape — and the economy at large — we may soon see international tech talent moving elsewhere; in fact, 60% of London businesses think they’ll lose access to tech talent once the UK leaves the EU.

So, how can UK-based companies proactively attract and retain top tech talent to prevent a Brexit brain drain? UK businesses must ensure that their hiring funnels are a top priority and focus on understanding what matters most to tech talent beyond salary, so that they don’t lose out to US tech hubs. 

Brexit aside, why is San Francisco more appealing than the UK?

For a very long time, the venture industry was stubbornly resistant to change. The same people sat back in their chairs on Sand Hill Road while nervous founders made the rounds, hoping one of these firms would champion their cause.

No longer. Since roughly the advent of Y Combinator, the landscape has seemed to shift by the year, with more startups raising capital every year, more people becoming VCs, more Medium posts, more newsletters, more events, more great founders, more bad behavior, more congestion, and more money from all over the world finding its way to Silicon Valley and a growing number of smaller but fast-growing hubs.

How to make sense of it all? At Disrupt, we do our best to answer that question by sitting down each year with top venture capitalists who tell us what they are seeing. In 2015, for example, we talked with VCs about why you can start, but not always scale, a company from anywhere. In 2016, the discussion turned to why VCs were gathering up so much capital when the IPO market was (at the time) all but closed to new tech issuers. In 2017, we examined how then-new U.S. President Donald Trump might impact the venture and startup industry. By last year, we were talking about Softbank, mega rounds, and whether Silicon Valley is losing its gravitational pull.

This year, we’re again going to be taking stock of what trends have so far defined 2019 — and what may be around the corner — and we’re thrilled to announce the VCs who will help us to answer some of these questions: Ann Miura-Ko, a cofounder of the seed- and early-stage venture firm Floodgate, and Theresia Gouw, a cofounder of the early-stage venture firm Aspect Ventures.

Both of these longtime investors bring a lot of deep insights to any venture discussion. Miura-Ko has been in the industry since before the last major tech boom, starting in the late ’90s. Then a McKinsey analyst who was focused on wireless technologies, she went on to become an analyst at the venture firm CRV before cofounding with partner Mike Maples the venture firm Floodgate in 2008. Since joining forces, Floodgate has backed a long list of powerful companies, including Twitch, Sonos, Chegg, AdRoll, BazaarVoice, and Lyft, where Miura-Ko remains on the board of directors. She has seen plenty of ups and downs, within both Floodgate’s portfolio and the broader startup industry.

Gouw, meanwhile, also has a perspective on the industry that many newer investors don’t enjoy, having worked as a VP at a Bay Area startup during the dot.com run-up, then joining the venture firm Accel in 1999, just a year before the industry imploded. It could have been a short-lived stint. Instead, she helping the firm sift through the wreckage and right itself before leaving in 2014 to start her own firm — Aspect —  with partner and former DFJ partner Jennifer Fonstad. Since then, the firm has backed a wide variety of companies, from The RealReal to Exabeam, HotelTonight to Forescout. Put another way, Gouw also knows what the deal is.

We can’t wait to sit down with both of these top investors to talk about the trends shaping the industry right now, from the growing secondary market to IPO trends, from what excites them the most to what their biggest concerns are for their firms and their portfolio companies as we sail toward 2020.

It’s a conversation you will not want to miss if you want a better understanding of what’s happening on the ground right now. Join us at Disrupt SF, which runs October 2 to 4 at the Moscone Center. Tickets are available here.

Explorium, a data discovery platform for machine learning models, received a couple of unannounced funding rounds over the last year — a $3.6 million seed round last September and a $15.5 million Series A round in March. Today, it made both of these rounds public.

The seed round was led by Emerge with participation of F2 Capital. The Series A was led by Zeev Ventures with participation from the seed investors. The total raised is $19.1 million.

The company founders, who have a data science background, found that it was problematic to find the right data to build a machine learning model. Like most good startup founders confronted with a problem, they decided to solve it themselves by building a data discovery platform for data scientists.

CEO and co-founder, Maor Shlomo says that the company wanted to focus on the quality of the data because not much work has been done there. “A lot of work has been invested on the algorithmic part of machine learning, but the algorithms themselves have very much become commodities. The challenge now is really finding the right data to feed into those algorithms,” Sholmo told TechCrunch.

It’s a hard problem to solve, so they built a kind of search engine that can go out and find the best data wherever it happens to live, whether it’s internally or in an open data set, public data or premium databases. The company has partnered with thousands of data sources, according to Schlomo, to help data scientist customers find the best data for their particular model.

“We developed a new type of search engine that’s capable of looking at the customers data, connecting and enriching it with literally thousands of data sources, while automatically selecting what are the best pieces of data, and what are the best variables or features, which could actually generate the best performing machine learning model,” he explained.

Shlomo sees a big role for partnerships, whether that involves data sources or consulting firms, who can help push Explorium into more companies.

Explorium has 63 employees spread across offices in Tel Aviv, Kiev and San Francisco. It’s still early days, but Sholmo reports “tens of customers.” As more customers try to bring data science to their companies, especially with a shortage of data scientists, having a tool like Explorium could help fill that gap.

Goop is cashing in on pseudoscience and, in the process, giving natural health practices a bad name. Krista Berlincourt, the co-founder and chief executive officer of a new startup, Kenshō Health, hopes she can take back the narrative.

“We’re the antithesis of Goop,” Berlincourt, a fintech veteran who previously led marketing and product at Simple Finance, tells TechCrunch. “What we are creating is less of a consumer magazine. We are a holistic health platform that approaches things as more of a holistic health medical journal — everything is backed by science.”

Kenshō, launching into private beta today, is an invite-only subscription-based platform for holistic healthcare providers to list their services and share knowledge. The startup has also collected information to construct a research-backed guide to holistic health, something the team believes has been missing from the natural health sector.

Berlincourt and Kenshō co-founder Danny Steiner, who previously worked at NBC Universal, Conde Nast and Hulu before pivoting to health and wellness, have raised $1.3 million in seed funding from Crosscut, a Los Angeles-based venture capital firm, and Female Founders Fund. [Updated 9/11/19 at 2:18 p.m.] The pair, based in LA, both have deeply personal ties of holistic health – Berlincourt treated her 2014 chronic adrenal failure holistically when conventional medicine failed, while Steiner’s family has a long history of digestive autoimmune disease.

“I had two years of working with a team of incredible Western physicians and then I had a crash that landed me in the ER. That’s when I realized, OK, this isn’t working,” Berlincourt said. “When you’re caring for yourself or someone you love, there are standards. I am focused on elevating and creating those standards in a way that can be better advised.”

The global wellness economy represented a $4.2 trillion market in 2017, according to The Global Wellness Institute, as subcategories like personalized medicine, healthy eating and fitness/mind-body accelerate growth.

Kenshō, nestled in the personalized and complementary medicine category, says it ensures all of the care providers featured on its platform are 100% validated. Before being allowed to list their services, providers complete a background check and their provider credentials are verified. Kenshō then affirms the providers use research-backed methods and that they have vetted peer references and clients who can provide positive feedback.

Kenshō’s launch features providers from Stanford University, Harvard University, Columbia University and more.

“When you look at health as a whole today in the U.S., we only treat the physical,” Berlincourt explains. “The reason that is destructive is 70% of death is premature and lifestyle related. We are dying faster and people are dying more quickly, generally speaking, as the world turns.”

Many, of course, are skeptical of natural care practices because they can be untested or dependent on unscientific principles. Additionally, holistic care often forces patients to pay out-of-pocket. Nonetheless, patients across the globe are turning to non-traditional methods.

”There’s been a massive shift in the zeitgeist in the way people look at health,” she adds. “One in three people have paid for supplemental care out of pocket from a holistic health provider.”

According to a recent Zion Market Research report, the global Identity and Access Management Market is estimated to grow 12.8% annually to reach $23.38 billion by 2025 from $10.12 billion in 2018....

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There are a lot of open-source databases out there, and ScyllaDB, a NoSQL variety, is looking to differentiate itself by attracting none other than Amazon users. Today, it announced a DynamoDB migration tool to help Amazon customers move to its product.

It’s a bold move, but Scylla, which has a free open-source product along with paid versions, has always had a penchant for going after bigger players. It has had a tool to help move Cassandra users to ScyllaDB for some time.

CEO Dor Laor says DynamoDB customers can now also migrate existing code with little modification. “If you’re using DynamoDB today, you will still be using the same drivers and the same client code. In fact, you don’t need to modify your client code one bit. You just need to redirect access to a different IP address running Scylla,” Laor told TechCrunch.

He says that the reason customers would want to switch to Scylla is because it offers a faster and cheaper experience by utilizing the hardware more efficiently. That means companies can run the same workloads on fewer machines, and do it faster, which ultimately should translate to lower costs.

The company also announced a $25 million Series C extension led by Eight Roads Ventures. Existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Magma Venture Partners, Qualcomm Ventures and TLV Partners also participated. Scylla has raised a total of $60 million, according to the company.

The startup has been around for six years and customers include Comcast, GE, IBM and Samsung. Laor says that Comcast went from running Cassandra on 400 machines to running the same workloads with Scylla on just 60.

Laor is playing the long game in the database market, and it’s not about taking on Cassandra, DynamoDB or any other individual product. “Our main goal is to be the default NoSQL database where if someone has big data, real-time workloads, they’ll think about us first, and we will become the default.”

The recruitment industry is ripe for massive automation. This discussion deep dives into the topic. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as Bullhorn.  Javid...

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Bux, the Amsterdam-based fintech that wants to make investing more accessible, is launching its fee-free trading app today.

Dubbed “BUX Zero,” the new offering is available first to users in the Netherlands who previously signed up to the wait-list. Further European launches are to follow, with Germany and Austria up next.

The BUX Zero app promises to demystify investing in public markets for people who perhaps haven’t done so before, and also make it cheaper.

“It will offer a unique combination of a simplified investing experience along with a vibrant community where they can follow, learn from fellow investors and explore new investing opportunities,” Nick Bortot, CEO and founder of Bux, told TechCrunch in June.

In addition, the idea is by removing fees it makes investing small sums more viable — a high fee per buy/sell can make it prohibitively expensive to do so.

At launch, both market orders and limit orders are commission-free until the end of this year, after which Bux will charge €1 and €2 per order, respectively.

A “market order” executes as quickly as possible at the market price, and a “limit order” sets the maximum/minimum price you are willing to buy or sell.

Once the special offer ends, BUX Zero will also introduce a third order type called a “basic order”, which will be commission-free “forever” and is executed at a fixed time, once per day.

A subscription plan is also being tested. This will give BUX Zero users the option of paying a fixed monthly fee to get access to unlimited commission-free market, limit and basic orders. “The subscription fee will be lower than the commission of a single transaction at a traditional online broker,” says Bux.

All of this is made possible because, like a number of competitors, such as Freetrade, Bux recently brought its brokering in-house.

Bortot has previously said this gives the company control over “the full value chain,” including a full brokerage license, back-end technology and operation — and, of course, lowers overheads per trade.

It’s a similar argument made by challenger banks that have built out their own banking stack.