Peloton, the well-funded maker of internet-connected stationary bikes and treadmills, has finally revealed documents for its upcoming initial public offering. The business previously submitted a confidential draft submission of its S-1 statement to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in June.

The New York-based company, which plans to raise $500 million in its Nasdaq offering, will trade under the ticker symbol PTON.

Peloton reported $915 million in total revenue for the year ending June 30, 2019, an increase of 110% from $435 million in fiscal 2018 and $218.6 million in 2017. Its losses, meanwhile, hit $245.7 million in 2019, up significantly from a reported net loss of $47.9 million last year.

The company has reached 1.4 million total community members, defined as any individual who has a Peloton account.

Peloton customers subscribe to the company’s digital library of fitness content, streamed live and on-demand, for $39 per month, in addition to purchasing its hardware, which costs $2,200 to $4,295 apiece. The company says 58 million workouts were completed by Peloton users in fiscal 2019, while its paying subscriber base reached an all-time high of 511,202.

As for subscription revenue, Peloton reports $181 million for fiscal 2019, up from $80 million last year.

Envisioning a world in which 67 million households own connected fitness equipment, Peloton co-founder and chief executive officer John Foley writes in the S-1 that “Peloton sells happiness.”

“Peloton is so much more than a Bike — we believe we have the opportunity to create one of the most innovative global technology platforms of our time,” writes Foley. “It is an opportunity to create one of the most important and influential interactive media companies in the world; a media company that changes lives, inspires greatness, and unites people.”

Peloton, founded in 2012, raised $550 million in venture capital funding last year at a valuation of $4.15 billion. The startup, which initially struggled greatly to convince venture capitalists of its vision, has since inspired a new wave of fitness tech companies to launch, including a smart mirror company appropriately named “Mirror.”

In total, Peloton has raised $994 million in venture capital funding, according to PitchBook. Its S-1 filing lists CP Interactive Fitness (5.4% pre-IPO stake) — an entity connected to the private equity firm Catterton — TCV (6.7%), Tiger Global (19.8%), True Ventures (12%) and Fidelity Investments (6.8%) as principal stakeholders, or investors with at least a 5% stake in the company.

Goldman Sachs & Co. and J.P. Morgan Securities are managing the IPO as lead underwriters.

World-mapping computer vision startup 6D.ai is expanding support to new devices as its augmented reality platform exits beta.

The SF startup launched its beta in October and is now ready to let developers ship apps as it launches pricing for its services. The pay-as-you-go subscription rates for 6D move from a free tier to $20-$50 per app based on the number of map download calls that users prompt. 6D will have custom-pricing for customers ushering in more than 50,000 map downloads.

The startup boasts Autodesk, Nexus Studios and Accenture among its customers.

The company’s platform has previously been confined to iOS devices, but today, 6D announced that it is launching private beta support for Android phones and lightweight headsets.

Moving to the fractured Android platform presents more challenges than iOS, but 6D is beginning the rollout with recent ARCore-supported Samsung devices. The company plans to support all ARCore devices running Snapdragon 845 chips and newer.

The company is also announcing a partnership with Qualcomm, which is integrating the company’s tech into what basically seems to be a reference design for AR headset manufacturers. Headsets are a ways from being a central use case for the company’s technology, but 6D is pursuing early partnerships to ensure that future hardware plays nicely with their platform. They have also partnered with Chinese headset-maker Nreal.

Sebastian Thrun can’t be described easily.

He’s a serial entrepreneur and educator, a computer scientist and inventor. He helped bring self-driving cars out of academia through X, the Google moonshot factory he founded. (That little project is now known as Waymo.) Thrun went on to co-found Udacity, the $1 billion online education startup where he is executive chairman.

Now, Thrun is pushing the “future of transportation” idea beyond self-driving cars. As CEO of Kitty Hawk Corporation, Thrun is working on bringing two aircraft to market — the one-person Flyer and a two-person autonomous taxi called Cora. Kitty Hawk recently formed a strategic partnership with Boeing on Cora and more broadly on urban air mobility, particularly around safety and how autonomous and piloted vehicles will co-exist.

We’re excited to announce that Thrun will be joining us onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF to give a behind the scenes look at Kitty Hawk and what the future of flight might look like.

Disrupt SF runs October 2 to October 4 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Tickets are available here.

Thrun’s visits to Disrupt SF always deliver something new. Who can forget the puppy? This year, we’re focused on flying cars, what they’ll look like and how Kitty Hawk, which is backed by Google’s Larry Page, will deliver on this promise of the future. 

Did you know Extra Crunch annual members get 20% off all TechCrunch event tickets? Head over here to get your annual pass, and then email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to get your 20% off discount. Please note that it can take up to 24 hours to issue the discount code.

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You can’t talk enterprise software without talking SAP, one of the giants in a $500 billion industry. And not only will SAP’s CEO Bill McDermott share insights at TC Sessions: Enterprise 2019 on September 5, but the company will also sponsor two breakout sessions.

The editors will sit down with McDermott and talk about SAP’s quick growth due, in part, to several $1 billion-plus acquisitions. We’re also curious to hear about his approach to acquisitions and his strategy for growing the company in a quickly changing market. No doubt he’ll weigh in on the state of enterprise software in general, too.

Now about those breakout sessions. They run in parallel to our Main Stage set and we have a total of two do-not-miss presentations for you to enjoy. On September 5, you’ll enjoy three breakout sessions –two from SAP and one from Pricefx. You can check out the agenda for TC Sessions: Enterprise, but we want to shine the light on the sponsored sessions to give you a sense of the quality content you can expect:

Innovating for a Super-Human Future 
Martin Wezowski (SAP) We talk about change, but what are the mechanics and the dynamics behind it? And how fast is it? The noted futurist will discuss what it means to be an innovator is transforming faster than before, and this transformation is deeply rooted in the challenges and promises between cutting-edge tech and humanism. The symbiosis between human creativity & empathy and machine intelligence opens new worlds for our imagination in a time when “now” has never been so temporary, and helps us answer the question: “What is human, and what is work in a superhuman future?” (Sponsored by SAP)Pricing from Day One
Madhavan Ramanujam (Simon-Kucher & Partners, Gabriel Smith) and Darius Jakubik (Pricefx) A key ingredient distinguishing top performing companies is clear focus on price. To maximize revenue and profits, pricing should be a C-level / boardroom consideration. To optimize pricing, you should think about price when determining which products and features to bring to market; put the people, process and technology in place to optimize it; and maintain flexibility to adjust strategy and tactics to respond to changing markets. By doing so, companies unlock the single greatest profit lever that exists. (Sponsored by Pricefx)Cracking the Code: From Startup to Scaleup in Enterprise Software 
Ram Jambunathan (SAP.iO), Lonnie Rae Kurlander (Medal), Caitlin MacGregor (Plum) and Dimitri Sirota (BigID) The startup journey is hard. Data shows that 70% of upstart tech companies fail, while only 1% of these startups will go on to gain unicorn status. Success in enterprise software often requires deep industry experience, strong networks, brutally efficient execution and a bit of luck. This panel brings together three successful SAP.iO Fund-backed enterprise startups for an open discussion on lessons learned, challenges of scaling and why the right strategic investors or partners can be beneficial even at early stages. (Sponsored by SAP)

TC Sessions: Enterprise 2019 takes place in San Francisco on September 5. It’s a jam-packed day (agenda here) filled with interviews, panel discussions and breakouts — from some of the top minds in enterprise software. Buy your ticket today and remember: You receive a free Expo-only pass to TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2019 for every ticket you buy.

Calling all budget-conscious, bargain-loving members of the early-stage startup community. Here’s a real quick way for you to save up to $1,300 on your pass to Disrupt San Francisco 2019 (October 2-4). Buy your passes before early-bird pricing flies the coop. You have until 11:59 p.m. (PST) on August 30. That just four days left to reap serious savings.

TechCrunch’s flagship event is an epic, three-day startup adventure spanning the tech spectrum. Join more than 10,000 attendees, 1,200 exhibiting early-stage startups and sponsors, take in the world-famous Startup Battlefield pitch competition, the TC Hackathon, the workshops and the Q&A sessions — and so much more.

Disrupt events are famous for incredible speakers across four unique stages, and Disrupt SF will not disappoint. Let’s take a look at just some of the presentations you’ll enjoy:

Getting to IPO: PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada led the company to a successful IPO earlier this year. She’ll join Box CEO Aaron Levie to talk about how these two companies charted their path to an IPO, the pros and cons of doing so and life after ringing the bell on Wall Street.How to Raise My First Dollars: Venture funding may have boomed over the last decade, but the decisions around your initial funding are as tricky as ever. Hear how to take advantage of the current landscape from top Silicon Valley early-stage thinkers, including pre-seed investor Charles Hudson of Precursor Ventures, early-stage investor Annie Kadavy of Redpoint Ventures and Russ Heddleston, CEO of DocSend.When Spies Meet Startups: Since leaving the world of intelligence, former NSA director Adm. Mike Rogers and ex-Israeli cyber-intelligence chief Nadav Zafrir talk shop about what startups need learn about security.The Business and Ethics of Real Tech Diversity: There’s both a moral and a business imperative to building and fostering a diverse and inclusive workforce. Hear from Project Include’s Ellen Pao and Tracy Chou about what it takes to get there, and from Harry Glaser, general manager and CMO of Sisense, on how focusing on diversity has positively impacted his bottom line.

That’s merely a taste of greatness, and we’ll be adding even more content in the coming weeks. You can check out the full agenda here.

Disrupt San Francisco 2019 runs from October 2-4. Early-bird pricing ends in just four days — 11:59 p.m. on August 30. Don’t miss out — buy your pass and save up to $1,300.

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

Rahul Chandra, Managing Director at Unitary Helion Ventures, provides an excellent overview of the opportunity around India’s next 400 million consumers.

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TechCrunch will partner with General Catalyst for Include Office Hours on September 4th from 1:30pm – 3:30pm. Partners Niko Bonatsos and Kyle Doherty will meet with underrepresented and underserved entrepreneurs to provide key feedback and advice. Founders, apply here!

Founded in 2014, TechCrunch launched the Include Program in an effort to leverage the extensive TechCrunch network to facilitate opportunities for underserved groups and founders. The Include Office Hours Program is one such initiative.

TechCrunch collaborates with investors to host private 20-minute sessions with startups, where founders can ask for guidance on critical business issues. During September’s Include Office Hours, General Catalyst will be meeting with 12 lucky companies. To be considered for a session with these investors, fill out this application.

Unlike previous Office Hours, TechCrunch is looking for startups in the following verticals: Enterprise, B2B, Healthcare, Security, Infrastructure, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, SaaS, Fintech, Digital Commerce, Travel, Real Estate, Marketplaces, Messaging, E-commerce, Gaming and Crypto.

Underserved and underrepresented founders include but are not limited to female founders, black, Latino/a, Asian, LGBTQ, veteran, formerly incarcerated and people with disabilities.

Let’s meet our investors:

Niko Bonatsos

Niko Bonatsos is a managing director at General Catalyst, a venture capital firm with approximately $5 billion in total capital raised. Working from the firm’s San Francisco Bay Area offices, Niko focuses his investment strategy on finding first-time technology founders with strong product instincts, a robust appetite for learning and a desire to create innovations with the potential to benefit millions of consumers or business end users.

In his eight years with GC, Niko has been instrumental in the firm’s investments in Snap (NYSE: SNAP), 6d.ai, Atrium, Audius, Cover, Hive, HubHaus, ClassDojo, Paribus (acquired by CapitalOne), and Wag!, among others.

Prior to joining General Catalyst, Niko attended Stanford University as a Fulbright Scholar, earning an MS in Management Science and Engineering. He has studied in several countries, earning additional degrees in Manufacturing Engineering & Management and Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, and worked as a part of the R&D team for Yokogawa Electric Corporation in Japan. Find Niko on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Kyle Doherty

Kyle Doherty is a managing director at General Catalyst, a venture capital firm with offices in Boston, New York, Palo Alto and San Francisco and with approximately $5 billion in total capital raised. At GC, Kyle focuses on investing in large, greenfield opportunities in consumer internet and software companies. Notable investments he’s made at GC include Canva Common Networks, and GitLab.

Prior to joining General Catalyst, Kyle worked with Coatue Management, where he helped conceive and launch the firm’s private investment practice and grew it into a leading private technology investment platform. Before Coatue, Kyle spent time as an investor at Morgenthaler and as an equity analyst.

Kyle studied economics and finance at MIT and earned an MBA from Harvard Business School. Though now living in the Bay Area, he’s stayed true to his hometown roots and remains a big fan of the Celtics and the Patriots. On non-game weekends, he can be found hiking the great outdoors with his family and border collie, Brady.

If you are an investor, partner or managing director at a fund interested in hosting Include Office Hours, email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

What comes first: Sales or Customer Success? Many growing startups pressure themselves to start selling as soon as there’s a viable product to sell. “Set up Customer Success functions” goes on the to-do list. After all, we don’t have to worry for another year, right?

Using the proprietary Scale Studio dataset of hundreds of SaaS startups, we’ll look at the metrics that venture investors use to link your company’s valuation to success in Customer Success — then dive into the tactics for adapting your CS program to your company’s high-touch or low-touch sales model

A year passes, and the company’s first renewals come due. Everyone from the CEO on down scrambles to do whatever it takes to make those charter customers happy and win contract extensions. After all, those customers aren’t just any customers — they’re the company’s first references, critical to landing new business and raising funds from investors. Every effort goes into making them happy.

The problem is, of course, that bringing in the CEO and CTO and VP of Sales on every renewal isn’t exactly a scalable process. Nor the basis for a long-term Customer Success strategy. 

Customer Success — a formal, process-driven, value-creating operational activity — needs to be structured to scale. And it needs to be top-of-mind from day one. Here is a look at the data and strategic rationale for launching CS early in a startup’s growth to avoid inefficiency and mistakes down the line. 

The case for customer success: Valuation

To venture investors, a well-run CS operation at an early-in-revenue startup communicates that your company has a sophisticated go-to-market strategy with a customer-centric foundation. This can translate into a valuation boost along two paths: accelerated revenue growth and increased predictability. And growth is a key driver for valuation with venture investors. 

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 454th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, August 29, 2019, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious...

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While Slack is trying to kill email, a new email startup backed by Kleiner Perkins is trying to make corporate email more like Slack.

Consider is an email service for startups that balances some premium individual features with collaboration tools that it hopes will help them bring startups on board.

The founders of Consider both met at Intercom as the 1st and 10th employees there. While at Intercom, CEO Ben McRedmond met Kleiner Perkins’ Mamoon Hamid, who was an early investor there. Hamid also wrote the first check for Consider before the founders even had a product to demo. That 2017 check combined with a more recent investment from Bedrock brings the total funding for the startup to $5 million.

As the product emerges from stealth, it’s also signaling a shift in its customer focus from individuals wanting an email experience that’s “calm and focused” to startup teams that are looking to keep more of their team’s collaboration happening inside email.

The central part of this strategy is the addition of a Slack-like Groups feature, which allows people to join shared inboxes inside their company that people can forward messages to or cc on emails. The founders started the company with the idea that the inbox was essentially a list of to-dos, with this idea also extending to group-work, allowing engineers to amass bug reports and create a shared repository of emails with relevance to the whole group.

The startup says they aren’t actually trying to kill Slack or other synchronous chat tools but they want people to use email in a more collaborative way, and part of that means categorizing the emails you receive and putting them in front of the right eyeballs. The fact is, the bulk of this functionality — though not all — is possible inside of stock Gmail with the right filters, but it’s all pretty messy and people will generally pay for an interface that is built to be effective.

The premium email service space has been gathering attention; most of that attention has been directed toward $30/month Superhuman, which was recently valued at $260 million.

Consider is charging $10 per user per month. They’re not discouraging individual users curious for a new inbox experience either, though without Groups there is less to differentiate the app. On an individual basis the app brings functionality focused on sorting emails and sending you batches of the ones it has deemed non-critical at certain times of the day so you aren’t being inundated with notifications.

The app is out of beta and live for sign-ups of Gmail users on Web, Mac, iOS and Android.

PlaceIQ is announcing a strategic investment from Experian.

CEO Duncan McCall said the investment is part of a growth round that PlaceIQ raised after divesting itself of its advertising business (which is being taken over by Zeta Global). He declined to disclose the size of the round, or of the Experian investment.

“It’s a multi-year, strategic partnership, where we will work together to license data [to Experian], and they also proactively become an investor in the company,” McCall said, adding that this “coincided nicely with us divesting of our media business and raising a modest growth round.”

While Experian is best-known for credit reporting, this partnership involves its marketing services business. Under the deal, the Experian Marketing Services will incorporate PlaceIQ’s LandMark location data product into its broader suite of data and measurement tools.

“With the mindset that consumers need to be at the heart of every marketing strategy, brands and agencies need to find ways to reach them and deliver more relevant messages,” said Experian’s president of marketing services Kevin Dean in a statement.” We believe quality data and advanced technology underpin that entire approach, and our collaboration and investment with PlaceIQ reinforce our commitment to helping brands meet that expectation.”

Asked about the direction of PlaceIQ’s business going forward, McCall explained that the company started with a focus on selling location data, and now, it’s gone back to “being a data-only company again.”

“Of course, we would have preferred to have focused on just one business model all these years, but life’s not that simple,” he said.

In his telling, PlaceIQ had to expand into the ad sales business because the infrastructure didn’t exist at the time to incorporate that data into the ad-buying process. Now that the infrastructure is there, PlaceIQ can focus once more on selling location data, which can then be used for targeting on a broad range of ad-buying platforms.

According to Crunchbase, PlaceIQ previously raised a total of $52 million in funding.

This post goes out to a special group of early-stage hardware startup founders — the procrastinators, the vacillators and the last-minute decision-makers. You have just 24 hours left to submit your application to compete in the Hardware Battlefield at TC Shenzhen on November 11-12. The application window closes at precisely 11:59 p.m. (PT) on August 28. Apply right here, right now.

The Hardware Battlefield — sibling to our Startup Battlefield pitch competition — is your chance to launch your startup on a world stage in front of some of the hardware industry’s most influential VCs, technologists and journalists — and win a $25,000 equity-free prize. It won’t cost you a thing to apply or to participate, and an opportunity like this doesn’t come along every day. So, what are you waiting for?

TechCrunch editors look for the best of the best, and they’ll vet every qualified application before choosing 10-15 startups to compete. If you make the cut, you’ll have six rigorous weeks of free pitch coaching with our Battlefield team. When the big day comes, you’ll be ready to put your best pitch forward to a panel of expert judges.

Each team has six minutes to pitch and demo their product — followed by an in-depth Q&A with the judges. If you make it to the final round, you’ll do it all over again — this time in front of a new set of judges. From that select group, one team will rise above the rest to become the TC Shenzhen Hardware Battlefield champ and claim the $25,000 prize.

Even if your team doesn’t win, you still reap big benefits. Hardware Battlefield participants receive invaluable exposure to the media, investors and other influencers. The event takes place in front of a live audience, and we also record the Battlefield on video and publish it on TechCrunch to a global audience.

Meet these low bars in order to qualify for Hardware Battlefield:

Submit your application by 11:59 p.m. (PT) on August 28You must have a minimally viable product to demo onstageYour product has received little, if any, press coverage to dateYour product must be a hardware device or component

Time is running out. You have 24 hours left to take advantage of an opportunity to transform your business. Join us in Shenzhen, the hardware heartland. Apply to compete in TC Hardware Battlefield 2019 before the clock runs out at 11:59 p.m. (PT) on August 28.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Hardware Battlefield at TC Shenzhen? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Tesorio, a startup that helps businesses aggregate and analyze their cash flow data, today announced that it has raised a $10 million Series A round led by Seattle’s Madrona Venture Group. Existing investors First Round Capital, Floodgate, Y Combinator, Fathom Capital and Fuel Capital participated. This brings Tesorio’s total funding to $17 million. Madrona’s Hope Cochran will join the company’s board.

The company is tackling an interesting market that is surprisingly underserved, given that every company likely wants to be able to track its cash flow as closely as possible. In most companies, though, that’s still done with the help of Excel spreadsheets. The fact that Jeff Epstein, former CFO of Oracle; Ron Gill, former CFO of NetSuite; and Greg Henry, CFO of Couchbase and former SVP of Finance at ServiceNow all gave angel funding to Tesorio shows how big a problem this is.

“Billion-dollar companies are running their cashflow in Excel — and that’s real,” Tesorio co-founder and CEO Carlos Vega told me. “What that doesn’t allow you to do is use all that data that goes into that cashflow in a smart way. […] Imagine all of that could be connected and interconnected — and that’s basically what we’re building.”

Tesorio helps businesses aggregate all of their cash flow — in some ways, you can think of it as a Mint for businesses — and then runs its AI models over it to predict a company’s overall financial health. Current customers include the likes of Veeva Systems, Box and WP Engine, which use the company’s systems to, for example, automate their accounts receivable operations to understand when customers are likely to pay. While there are other tools that help you manage the overall workflow, Vega argues that Tesorio is different because it can pull in data from all of these disparate systems and create a cash flow forecast based on this.

“Many departments have systems of record to log things like accounting entries, bank info, billings, customer interactions, spend, etc.,” Vega explained. “The exciting opportunity is to tie that data together dynamically so you can have a multifaceted view on the trajectory of your business (with a focus on the effects to cash flow) and then automate the levers that can help you impact cash.”

While the company didn’t disclose any revenue numbers, it did note that its revenue grew 4x year-over-year in 2018.

As Vega told me, it’s usually the financial teams and CFOs that adopt Tesorio. The company focuses on bringing on companies with 100 to 3,000 employees and it already has a number of international customers, too. In total, the platform has analyzed $56 billion in payments, 10 million invoices and 5 million user activities. As with all machine learning services, every new transaction also helps to make its models more precise.

As usual, Tesorio will use the new funding to expand its product — with a special focus on adding integrations with other finance systems — and its expand its go-to-market initiatives.

Madrona’s Hope Cochran, who herself was a public company CFO during her time at Clearwire and King Digital, stressed the need for a service like this. “The ultimate financial metric for a company is Cash,” she writes in today’s announcement. “Not just the current balance, but the trajectory of the balance. In the vast majority of companies, this analysis is performed on a spreadsheet. One containing many links, often circular references, and pulling in data from multiple sources. The risk of an error, a break, is high.”

Sramana Mitra: We actually work only with IT and IT-enabled companies. We don’t do energy. We don’t do biotech. We don’t do cleantech. Where we overlap is in the robotics area mostly. If you have...

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Serverless technology offers developers a way to develop without thinking about the infrastructure resources required to run a program, but up until now it has mostly been limited to function-driven programming. CloudState, a new open-source project from Lightbend, wants to change that by moving beyond functions.

Lightbend CTO Jonas Bonér believes this ability to abstract away infrastructure could extend beyond functions and triggers into a broader developer experience. “I think people sometimes [don’t distinguish] between serverless and Function as a Service. I think that’s actually cutting the technology short. What serverless really brings to the table is this completely new developer experience and operations experience by trying to automate as much as possible,” Bonér told TechCrunch.

He says that when he talks to customers, they are hankering for a more complete serverless developer experience that includes all parts of the program. “A lot of people say that I have this excellent use case for the current incarnation of serverless and Function as a Service, but the rest of my application doesn’t really work running there,” he said. That’s exactly what CloudState is trying to address.

Bonér is careful to point out that he’s not looking to replace function-driven programming. He only wants to augment it. CloudState takes advantage of some existing technologies like KNative, the open-source project that is trying to bring together serverless and containerization, as well as gRPC, Akka Cluster and GraalVM on Kubernetes.

He acknowledges that CloudState is still a work in progress, but he has the basic building blocks in place, and he’s hoping to use the power of open source to drive the development of this early-stage project. Today, it includes several key pieces — a specification outlining the goals of the project, a protocol to begin implementing it and a testing kit.

The goal here is to bring to fruition this broader vision of what serverless means, where developers can just write code without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure where the program will run. It’s a bold approach, but as Bonér says, it’s still early days, and will take time and a community to really build this out.

Enjoy, the e-commerce startup led by former Apple VP of retail operations, Ron Johnson, has raised an additional $150 million in Series C funding from L Catterton’s new consumer technology platform, LCH Partners. The funds will be used to fuel Enjoy’s U.K. expansion and other international growth. The startup is also today launching a partnership with British mobile network operator EE, which will allow the company to serve over 80% of U.K. households by 2020.

The company announced the funding but not the size of the round. An SEC filing shows $150 million was offered, but only half had closed. However, a source familiar with the round confirmed $150 million had been raised.

The new growth funding brings Enjoy’s total raise to date to $350 million, following its May 2015 launch. Prior investors include Riverwood Capital, Stamos Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Highland Capital and Oak Capital Management.

Having spent more than a decade at Apple, Johnson is best known for pioneering the concept of Apple’s retail stores and Genius Bar. He previously held an executive position at Target as VP of Merchandising and, following Apple, had a less successful run as J.C. Penney’s CEO, which led to his ouster. (Though in hindsight, it’s been argued that J.C. Penney should have just stuck with his plan, after all.)

With Silicon Valley-based Enjoy, Johnson combined the convenience of online shopping with the personal service that comes from shopping in a physical, brick-and-mortar store and the help you’d receive at Genius Bar, for example.

As Johnson explained around the time of launch, the goal was to figure out how to provide personal service to those who want to buy online.

“One of the observations from my time at Apple is that Apple makes the easiest to use products on the planet, but look at how busy the stores are with people asking questions and needing help. So what about the rest? How do you deliver help in this digital world we live in?,” he said, during an interview at TechCrunch Disrupt 2015.

Through partnerships with other companies, including AT&T, Sonos, Google and now EE, Enjoy creates an online mobile store where customers can shop for devices and receive same-day delivery. They also can opt to have an Enjoy expert deliver the item and help them get set up, free of charge.

Enjoy generates its revenue from its business partners, who pay to have their products sold through an online storefront. Enjoy then returns information like what sort of challenges customers face with their setups, and help to reduce calls to tech support while also increasing brand loyalty.

“One of the highlights of my retail career was creating a new channel for Apple customers, which was the Apple Retail Store,” said Ron Johnson, CEO and co-founder of Enjoy, in a statement. “Now I get to do it again by creating the mobile retail store for not just one company, but for many great companies around the world. As we look to drive the next phase of our growth, L Catterton was a natural choice as our partner, given their expertise in building consumer and technology brands on a global scale.”

Including today’s expansion by way of its EE partnership, Enjoy now operates in more than 54 U.S. markets and covers more than 50% of the U.S. population, and will be offered in 11 U.K. markets, covering more than 60% of the population, by year-end. As of 2020, it will reach 80% of the U.K. population.

The company also plans to expand to at least one other country this year, and additional countries in 2020.

At a time when the industry appears to bet that AI will replace most human jobs, starting with the tens of millions currently residing in call centers, one startup is working to use the same technology to empower the jobs it is pegged to displace.

VoiceOps, a San Francisco-based startup, today announced it has raised $9 million in a Series A financing round led by Bain Capital Ventures. Existing investors Accel and Y Combinator also participated in the round. As part of the new fundraise, Ajay Agarwal of Bain Capital Ventures is joining VoiceOps’ board of directors, the startup said.

VoiceOps works with companies to help them coach and train their call center representatives. The idea is simple: Sales people are often not putting their best foot forward when they make the pitches. There is some gap between what they should be presenting in their calls and what they end up pitching.

That’s where VoiceOps comes in. It claims to have built one of the world’s biggest data sets of sales behavior. It works with companies to understand what they are trying to sell and how they wish to go about it, Ethan Barhydt, co-founder and CEO of VoiceOps, told TechCrunch in an interview.

The startup uses an AI-powered system to transcribe and analyze the sales calls and evaluates how often sales people adhere to the guidelines.

After the analysis, VoiceOps shares these insights with its clients. This helps the company quickly understand and address gaps in their reps’ sales behaviors. Thousands of calls originate from a call center each day. With the existing tools, it is hard to track exactly what improvements or changes a rep needs to make, Barhydt explained.

Barhydt likened VoiceOps’ approach to how self-driving car companies are improving their AI models. “Self-driving car companies take millions of images, where they have people manually label the cars in the stop signs, in the street lights, on the road, and then they feed that data into these models, and train the models to be able to do this accurately at scale. So we are doing the same thing. But instead of doing it on images, we’re doing it on conversation. The underlying technical problem that we have to solve is how do you take these complex unstructured conversations and turn it into structured data,” he said.

VoiceOps declined to share the number of clients it has, but said its customers today run some of the largest call centers in insurance, real estate, travel and insurance businesses, making as many as 50,000 calls each in a day. Additionally, the startup said its clients are able to see their conversion rate improve between 5% to 20% in the first 60 days itself, which helps them generate tens of millions of dollars in additional revenue.

In the last 12 months, Barhydt said VoiceOps’ solutions have helped several of its customers hit historic highs. “Early customers who spent $50K with us last year have 5X’d their spend to $250K after seeing stellar results,” he said. Education group Penn Foster, one of VoiceOps’ clients, is seeing the best rate of conversion in more than 100 years of its existence, he said.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Bain Capital Ventures’ Agarwal said the startup will use the fresh capital to scale its product offerings, hire more engineers and attract more customers. “This is a company that we think will grow at extraordinary rates — four to five times kind of growth. The kind of momentum that they have demonstrated in the past six months, we want to see it continue and grow that over the course of the next year,” he said.

VoiceOps, which currently serves customers in the U.S., intends to focus on expanding its footprint within the nation. “There is a conception that all the call center jobs are going outside of the U.S., but if you look at the data, call center jobs are growing about 5% year-over-year,” VoiceOps’ Barhydt said.

According to official U.S. government figures, there are about 3.5 million Americans who work in this space today. VoiceOps wants to help them. “When reps receive effective coaching, their calls improve, they hit quota more often, and they make more money,” Barhydt said.

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The hype around blockchain seems to have cooled a bit, but companies like Kadena have been working on enterprise-grade solutions for some time, and continue to push the technology forward. Today, the startup announced that Kadena Scalable Permissioned Blockchain on Azure is available for free in the Azure Marketplace.

Kadena co-founder and CEO Will Martino says today’s announcement builds on the success of last year’s similar endeavor involving AWS. “Our private chain is designed for enterprise use. It’s designed for being high-performance and for integrating with traditional back ends. And by bringing that chain to AWS marketplace, and now to Microsoft Azure, we are servicing almost all of the enterprise blockchain market that takes place in the cloud,” Martino told TechCrunch.

The free product enables companies to get comfortable with the technology and build a Proof of Concept (PoC) without making a significant investment in the tooling. The free tool provides 2,000 transactions a second across four nodes. Once companies figure this out and want to scale, that’s when the company begins making money, but Martino recognizes that the technology is still immature and companies need to get comfortable with it, and that’s what the free versions on the cloud platforms like Azure are encouraging.

Martino says Kadena favors a hybrid approach to enterprise blockchain that combines public and private chains, and in his view, gives customers the best of both worlds. “You can run a smart contract on our public Chainweb protocol that will be launching on October 30th, and that smart contract can be linked to a cluster of private permission chain nodes that are running the other half of the application. This allows you to have all of the market access and openness and transparency and ownerlessness of a public network, while also having the control and the security that you find in a private network,” he said.

Martino and co-founder Stuart Popejoy both worked on early blockchain projects at JPMorgan, but left to start Kadena in 2016. The company has raised $14.9 million to date.