Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week we were helmed by Kate Clark, Alex Wilhelm and yet another extra special guest. Unusual Ventures co-founder and partner John Vrionis joined us to talk soil investing (yes, it’s a thing), seed investing, growth investing and all the somewhat meaningless funding stages.

Vrionis was a longtime investor at Lightspeed Venture Partners and has made big bets on a number of companies, including AppDynamics, Heptio and MuleSoft.

It was a great episode that kicked off with some conversation around DoorDash, the food delivery company that continues to make headlines week after week. We’d like to stop talking about the company, but it intrudes regularly into our notes.

This time DoorDash bought a few companies, purchases that appear set to allow the firm to boost its investment and research into self-driving delivery robots. (Kate saw one in the wild recently!)

Next we went deep into the subject of seed. John, of course, has been a seed investor for years and has lots to say on the topic. Mostly, we discussed Kate’s latest piece on mega-funds making an increasing number of deals at the earliest stage. John doesn’t think “stage-agnostic” investing makes any sense. You need experts at each stage making bets on a specific type of company. In his words, “a heart surgeon wouldn’t deliver your baby, right.”

Then we moved on to one of our favorite subjects, namely direct listings, the IPO market and if money is too often left on the table. The question takes on extra import when we see results like Dynatrace’s IPO, which rose around 50% its first day. It seems likely that we’ll see other companies pursue the sort of direct listings that Spotify and Slack managed.

That segued us brilliantly into our final topic: Airbnb and its financial health. The firm, we reckon, is a good candidate for a direct listing itself. We talked over its numbers, and if we were to sum up our perspectives, we’d say that Airbnb is about as impressive as we expected.

All that and we had fun, as usual.

Some eight months after it was reported that Ping Identity’s owners Vista Equity had hired bankers to explore a public listing, today Ping Identity took the plunge: the Colorado-based online ID management company has filed an S-1 form indicating that it plans to raise up to $100 million in an IPO on the Nasdaq exchange under the ticker “Ping.”

While the initial S-1 filing doesn’t have an indication of price range, Ping is said to be looking at a valuation of between $2 billion and $3 billion in this listing.

The company has been around since 2001, founded by Andre Durand (who is still the CEO), and it was acquired by Vista in 2016 for about $600 million — at a time when a clutch of enterprise companies that looked like strong IPO candidates were going the private equity route and staying private instead.

But more recently, there has been a surge in demand for better IT security linked to identity and authentication management, so it seems that Vista Equity is selling up. The PE firm is taking advantage of the fact that the market’s currently very strong for tech IPOs, but there is so much M&A in enterprise right now (just yesterday VMware acquired not one but two companies, Carbon Black for $2.1 billion and Pivotal for $2.7 billion) that I can’t help but wonder if something might move here too.

The S-1 reveals a number of details on the company’s financials, indicating that it’s currently unprofitable but on a steady growth curve. Ping had revenues of $112.9 million in the first six months of 2019, versus $99.5 million in the same period a year before. Its loss has been shrinking in recent years, with a net loss of $3.1 million in the first six months of this year versus $5.8 million a year before (notably in 2017 overall it was profitable with a net income of $19 million. It seems that the change is due to acquisitions and investing for growth).

Its annual run rate, meanwhile, was $198 million for the first six months of the year, compared to $159.6 million in the same period a year ago.

The area of identity and access management has become a cornerstone of enterprise IT, with companies looking for efficient and secure ways to centralise how not just their employees, but their customers, their partners and various connected devices on their networks can be authenticated across their cloud and on-premise applications.

The demand for secure solutions covering all the different aspects of a company’s IT stack has grown rapidly over recent years, spurred not just by an increased move to centralised applications served through the cloud, but also by the drastic rise in breaches where malicious hackers have exploited vulnerabilities and loopholes in companies’ sign-on screens.

Ping has been one of the bigger companies building services in this area and tackling all of those use cases, competing with the likes of Okta, OneLogin, AuthO, Cisco and dozens more off-the-shelf and custom-built solutions.

The company offers its services on an SaaS basis, covering services like secure sign-on, multi-factor authentication, API access security, personalised and unified profile directories, data governance and AI-based security policies. It claims to be the pioneer of “Intelligent Identity,” using AI to help its system analyse user, device and network behavior to better identify potentially malicious activity.

More to come.

In this edition of the TLCS interview series, we discuss the immense vulnerabilities in B2C security. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience briefly to Avast. We’ve covered the...

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Kris Lahiri: There is another angle which is what you were referring to. I’ll bring up Egnyte in the life sciences space. Nowadays, there’s a lot of very serious work being done by life sciences...

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New York-based startup Tastemakers has raised a $1 million seed-round — led by Precursor Ventures — for its business that connects Africa adventures to global consumers.

Tastemakers’ platform curates, prices and lists African travel and cultural experiences — from paragliding tours to wine-tasting to concerts.

The startup generates revenues by taking a 20% commission on each transaction. Community managers in Africa screen and select experiences that go up on the site.

Tastemakers will use the investment to grow the number of experiences offered from 200 to 10,000 and build out machine learning capabilities to better match suppliers, experiences and clients — CEO and founder Cherae Robinson told TechCrunch.

She likened the site to an Airbnb for commoditizing and connecting people to Africa travel experiences at scale.

On the startup’s addressable market, Robinson references a segment of culture-curious travelers: people who are traveling to experience things such as foreign art, food, music or dance workshops.

“We looked at who’s doing these kinds of tours and and the number of people booking…and we found that globally, based on triangulating that, there are about 700 million people globally booking culture-forward experiences,” said Robinson.

For different reasons — from negative stereotypes or the difficulty of identifying tourist options in Africa — most of these excursions are occurring in other parts of the world, according to Robinson.

She sees Tastemakers’ value proposition as the site that can bring a greater percentage of these culture travelers to Africa.

On revenue potential, Robinson is pretty upfront on numbers and goals. “If we can capture 1% of that [700 million] market in the next five years that’s, $2.2 billion generated on our platform,” she said, noting an average booking cost of $308. She believes Tastemakers could hit those figures by 2025 — and by applying their 20% commission — reach income of $434 million.

Precursor Ventures Managing Partner Charles Hudson invested in Tastemakers for its potential as an early entrant in an off the grid travel market attracting more curiosity.

“I just had a sense that Africa was having a moment, and whether its Black Panther or more startups that have a foot in Africa, that there were more people interested in going to Africa,” he told TechCrunch.

“And it’s not like going to New York City…You have providers that are hard to find and hard to book..that are not super well-marketed. If you can become an aggregator and curator of those, you could effectively become the largest source of lead generation,” Hudson said.

Tastemakers is looking at ancillary partnership and revenue share opportunities. It uses Stripe and WorldRemit to process mobile payments for transactions on the site and has done promotional partnerships with Uber Africa. The startup also counts Kempinski Hotels as its biggest lodging partner.

Tastemakers also offers advisory services to sellers on the site, to better determine price-points and on marketing their travel experiences more effectively online.

CEO Cherae Robinson is clear about the company’s for-profit status, but sees upside for Africa beyond generating business from tourism. “I strategically don’t brand Tastemakers as a social impact startup…but we’re driving benefits of the sharing economy to diverse populations both in Africa and in underrepresented communities in the technology and tourism sectors,” she said.

Update: This article has been updated to reflect that Tastemakers has closed a $1M round and is in the process of raising $1.4M total for the round. 

Summer’s fading fast, but our 2-for-1 summer flash sale on Innovator, Founder or Investor passes to Disrupt Berlin 2019 is fading even faster. Today’s the final day you can get 2-for-1 tickets to join us in Berlin for two jam-packed days of startup goodness and opportunity. Why not do it for the lowest price?

Our 2-for-1 summer flash sale ends tonight, August 23 at 11:59 p.m. (CEST). Buy your 2-for-1 passes right here.

There are so many reasons to attend Disrupt Berlin on 11-12 December — try these five on for size, buy your passes and get ready to take your startup to the next level.

Learn

We’re building out our roster of amazing speakers, and you’ll learn from some of the top innovators, founders and investors. Efe Cakarel, the founder and CEO of MUBI, is just one prime example. MUBI, a decade-old movie-streaming service, has survived — and thrived — in the shadow of Netflix. We’ll find out how Cakarel pulled it off and hear what comes next.

Compete

Don’t miss you opportunity to launch your early-stage startup on a world stage, live in front of an eager audience of investors, tech leaders and global media outlets. We’re talking Startup Battlefield, of course, our epic pitch competition. If you’re chosen, you’ll vie for bragging rights and $50,000. And it won’t cost you a euro to apply or to participate. Apply to compete in Startup Battlefield today.

Network

What can you do with 3,000 startup fans from more than 50 countries? Network, network, network! Our Startup Alley expo floor is fertile soil and rife with opportunity. And CrunchMatch, our free business-matchmaking tool, makes it easier for you to connect with the people who can help move your business forward.

Exhibit

It’s time to showcase your early-stage startup and there’s no better way to do that than to exhibit in Startup Alley. Plant your company in front of more than 3,000 attendees, including investors and tech journalists. You have two Alley options. Buy a Startup Alley Exhibitor Package (note: this package does not qualify for the 2-for-1 flash sale) or apply to our TC Top Picks program and you might just win a free Startup Alley Exhibitor Package, VIP treatment and an interview with a TechCrunch editor on the Showcase Stage.

Save

Our super early-bird pricing can save you up to €600, but when you take advantage of our 2-for-1 summer flash sale, you’ll double your savings on Innovator, Founder or Investor passes. This time-sensitive deal disappears tonight at 11:59 p.m. (CEST). Beat the deadline, buy your tickets right now and we’ll see you in Berlin!

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

3D printing has become commonplace in the hardware industry, but because few materials can be used for it easily, the process rarely results in final products. A Swiss startup called Spectroplast hopes to change that with a technique for printing using silicone, opening up all kinds of applications in medicine, robotics and beyond.

Silicone is not very bioreactive, and of course can be made into just about any shape while retaining strength and flexibility. But the process for doing so is generally injection molding, great for mass-producing lots of identical items but not so great when you need a custom job.

And it’s custom jobs that ETH Zurich’s Manuel Schaffner and Petar Stefanov have in mind. Hearts, for instance, are largely similar but the details differ, and if you were going to get a valve replaced, you’d probably prefer yours made to order rather than straight off the shelf.

“Replacement valves currently used are circular, but do not exactly match the shape of the aorta, which is different for each patient,” said Schaffner in a university news release. Not only that, but they may be a mixture of materials, some of which the body may reject.

But with a precise MRI the researchers can create a digital model of the heart under consideration and, using their proprietary 3D printing technique, produce a valve that’s exactly tailored to it — all in a couple of hours.

Although they have created these valves and done some initial testing, it’ll be years before anyone gets one installed — this is the kind of medical technique that takes a decade to test. So in the meantime they are working on “life-improving” rather than life-saving applications.

One such case is adjacent to perhaps the most well-known surgical application of silicone: breast augmentation. In Spectroplast’s case, however, they’d be working with women who have undergone mastectomies and would like to have a breast prosthesis that matches the other perfectly.

Another possibility would be anything that needs to fit perfectly to a person’s biology, like a custom hearing aid, the end of a prosthetic leg or some other form of reconstructive surgery. And of course, robots and industry could use one-off silicone parts as well.

There’s plenty of room to grow, it seems, and although Spectroplast is just starting out, it already has some 200 customers. The main limitation is the speed at which the products can be printed, a process that has to be overseen by the founders, who work in shifts.

Until very recently Schaffner and Stefanov were working on this under a grant from the ETH Pioneer Fellowship and a Swiss national innovation grant. But in deciding to depart from the ETH umbrella they attracted a 1.5 million Swiss franc (about the same as dollars just now) seed round from AM Ventures Holding in Germany. The founders plan to use the money to hire new staff to crew the printers.

Right now Spectroplast is doing all the printing itself, but in the next couple of years it may sell the printers or modifications necessary to adapt existing setups.

You can read the team’s paper showing their process for creating artificial heart valves here.

From the time he was a high school student, Rohit Kalyanpur thought it was peculiar that although it’s possible to create energy from a solar panel, the panels have long been used almost exclusively on rooftops and as part of industrial-scale solar grids. “I hadn’t seen [anything solar-powered] in the things people use every day other than calculators and lawn lights,” he tells us from him home in Chicago — though he’s moving to the Bay Area next month.

It wasn’t just a passing thought for Kalyanpur. Through research positions in high school, he continued to learn about energy and work on a solar charging prototype — initially to charge his iPhone — while continuing to wonder what other materials might be powered spontaneously just by shining light on it.

What he quickly discovered, he says, is there were no developer tools to build a self-charging project. Unlike with hardware projects, where developers can turn to the open-source electronic prototyping platform Arduino, and to Raspberry Pi, a tiny computer the size of a credit card and was created in 2012 to help students understand how computers work, there was “nothing you could use to optimize a solar product,” he says.

Fast-forward, and Kalyanpur says there is now — and he helped build it.

It’s been several years in the making. After attending the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for two years and befriending a fellow student, Paul Couston, who helped manage and invest the university’s $10 million green fund, the pair dropped out of school to start their now four-person company, Optivolt Labs. Entry into the accelerator program Techstars Chicago was the impetus they needed, and they’ve been gaining momentum since. In fact, Kalyanpur, now 21, was recently given a Thiel Fellowship, a two-year-long program that includes a $100,000 grant to young people who want to build new things, along with a lot of mentorships and key introductions.

Now, the company has closed on a separate $1.75 million round of seed funding from a long list of notable individual investors, including Eventbrite co-founders Kevin & Julia Hartz; TJ Parker, who is the founder and CEO of PillPack (now an Amazon subsidiary); Pinterest COO Francoise Brougher: and Jeff Lutz, a former Google SVP.

What they’re buying into exactly is the promise of a scalable technology stack for solar integration. Though still nascent, Optivolt has already figured out a way to provide efficient power transfer systems, solar developer and simulation tools and cloud-based API’s to enable fleets of machines to self charge in ambient light, says Kalyanpur. Think e-scooters, EVs, drones, sensors and other connected devices.

Asked how it all works on a more granular level, Kalyanpur declines to dive into specifics, but he says the company will begin testing its technology soon with a number of “enterprise fleets” that have already signed on to work with Optivolt in pilot programs.

If it works as planned, it sounds like a pretty big opportunity. Though some companies have begun making smaller solar-powered vehicles, there are presumably many outfits that would prefer to find a way to retrofit the hardware they already have in the world, which Kalyanpur says will be possible.

He says they can use their existing batteries, too — that the solar won’t just power the devices or vehicles in real time but allow them to store some of that energy, too. Optivolt’s technology “seamlessly integrates into everyday products, so you don’t have to change the product design meaningfully,” he insists.

We’ll be curious to see if see if it does what he thinks it can. It sounds like we aren’t the only ones, either.

Asked about Optivolt’s road map, Kalynapur suggests that one is coming together. The company’s top priority, however — beyond hiring more engineering talent with its brand new round — it to see first how it works in the field.

DoorDash announced last month that it would be changing its controversial tipping model. Today it’s revealing the basics of how the new system will work.

Under the past model, Dashers (DoorDash drivers and other delivery people) were guaranteed a minimum payment per delivery, with DoorDash paying a $1 base, then providing an additional payment boost when a customer’s tip wasn’t enough to meet the minimum — a system that made it seem like tips were being used to subsidize DoorDash payments.

Under the new system, DoorDash will pay a base between $2 and $10 (the amount will depend on things like delivery distance and duration), with additional bonuses from DoorDash.

Most crucially, as CEO Tony Xu put it in a blog post, “Every dollar customers tip will be an extra dollar in their Dasher’s pocket.”

Now, you might think that’s how tips are always supposed to work, but Xu said the old system was developed “in direct response to feedback from Dashers,” while the new one will result in “greater variability in total earnings from order to order” (that variability is one of several reasons why tipping is a flawed compensation model in general).

So why change?

“We thought we were doing the right thing for Dashers by making them whole if a customer left no tip, but the feedback we’ve received recently made clear that some of our customers who were leaving tips felt like their tips didn’t matter,” Xu said. “We realized that we couldn’t continue to do right by Dashers if some customers felt we weren’t also doing right by them. To ensure that all of our users have a great experience on DoorDash, we needed to strike a better balance.”

Plus, he said, “Dashers will [now] earn more money on average — both from DoorDash and overall.”

The company plans to roll out these changes to all Dashers next month.

Solving information scatter inside enterprises seems to be the founding idea behind dozens of enterprise software startups. Capacity, which recently rebranded from Jane.ai, is raising new cash to tackle the issue with its corporate data search platform.

The company just closed a $13.2 million Series B, funded entirely by Midwestern private investors and angels.

The St. Louis workplace startup helps its customers pull all of their organizational data together into a platform that makes company information more accessible to people inside the company. It’s all done through a chat interface and directory that employees can use to search for information. There’s a pretty high degree of flexibility in customizing how questions are answered and when a line of questioning gets routed to a person onsite.

Alongside Capacity’s name change, the company opened its platform to let developers connect apps to the Capacity network so that more information can be integrated.

“We got to this point where we realized that we’re never going to be the experts in building out every one of these tailored apps, so opening up our developer platform has been crucial to helping expand the number of apps that we’ll be able to connect to,” CEO David Karandish told TechCrunch.

These automated chat bots aren’t silver bullets, but the fact is a lot of this content is usually found in disparate places, and tools that can crawl through documents and pull out the key context solve a pretty clear pain point for companies.

As the technologies that were once considered science fiction become the purview of science, the venture capital firms that were once investing at the industry’s fringes are now finding themselves at the heart of the technology industry.

Investing in the commercialization of technologies like genetic engineering, quantum computing, digital avatars, augmented reality, new human-computer interfaces, machine learning, autonomous vehicles, robots, and space travel that were once considered “frontier” investments are now front-and-center priorities for many venture capital firms and the limited partners that back them.

Earlier this month, Lux Capital raised $1.1 billion across two funds that invest in just these kinds of companies. “[Limited partners] are now more interested in frontier tech than ever before,” said Bilal Zuberi, a partner with the firm.

He sees a few factors encouraging limited partners (the investors who provide financing for venture capital funds) to invest in the firms that are financing companies developing technologies that were once considered outside of the mainstream.

This week, nearly 200 startups convened at Y Combinator Demo Day to pitch venture capitalists, angels and other folks looking to spend some money.

YC chief executive officer Michael Seibel took some time out of his busy schedule to join us on a special episode of Equity, TechCrunch’s venture-capital-focused podcast. Given that we had Seibel to chat with, Kate and Alex decided to drop the regular format and riff interview-style about what the accelerator program is up to.

We discussed the new startup batch (roundups here, here, and here), recent changes to the program, rising deal prices, SAFEs versus convertible notes and the future of technology in San Francisco. Regarding price, here’s what Seibel had to say:

“It’s a competitive market where investors are bidding against each other. So if you see pricing go up you have to ask yourself the question, ‘where is the money supply coming from?’ The big trend over the last six years has been institutional investors moving from just kind of Series A funds and growth funds down to the seed level. When you looked at Demo Day when I was going through the first time it was full of angels – people investing off their own personal balance sheet. And if you look at the room today it’s full of funds. The reality is that, as the pool of capital increases in the seed world, the seed investors are competing against each other and one of the easier ways for investors to compete is to bid up price.”

But, Seibel continued, YC doesn’t necessarily consider the situation a net-positive, because companies that raise such huge rounds can spend money as though they had reached the fabled “product-market fit,” when in reality they have not. They just have money, which can feel the same but is not.

Ultimately, the thing that’s going to kill you, Seibel says, isn’t fundraising or who you raised from. The thing that’s going to kill you, he says, is that you didn’t build something your customers wanted.

Watch a clip from the interview here:

To hear more from Seibel and watch four more video clips discussing YC, the new class, and the startup game in San Francisco and beyond, become an Extra Crunch member. You can learn more and try it for free. 

After months of rumors, Verizon finally sold off Tumblr for a reported $3 million — a fraction of what Yahoo paid for the once mighty blogging service back in 2013.

The media conglomerate (which also owns TechCrunch) was clearly never quite sure what to do with the property after gobbling it up as part of its 2016 Yahoo acquisition. All parties have since come to the conclusion that Tumblr simply wasn’t a good fit under either the Verizon or Yahoo umbrella, amounting to a $1.1 billion mistake.

For Tumblr, however, the story may still have a happy ending. By all accounts, its new home at Automattic is a far better fit. The service joins a portfolio that includes popular blogging service WordPress.com, spam filtering service Akismet and long-form storytelling platform, Longreads.

In an interview this week, Automattic founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg discussed Tumblr’s history and the impact of the poorly received adult content restrictions. He also shed some light on where Tumblr goes from here, including a potential increased focused on multimedia such as podcasting.

Brian Heater: I’m curious how [your meetings with Tumblr staff] went. What’s the feeling on the team right now? What are the concerns? How are people feeling about the transition?

Security is everything — more so than ever in startup land. But with the constant pressures to launch and scale, how do you build a secure startup from the ground up without slowing growth?

Whether you’re starting out small or you’re a multinational unicorn, your customers and their data will be your greatest asset. We’re excited to announce three cybersecurity industry experts who know better than anyone how to keep their organizations safe from phishing emails to nation-state attackers — and everything in between.

We’ll be joined by Google’s Heather Adkins, IOActive’s Jennifer Sunshine Steffens and Duo’s Dug Song, who will discuss those startup security questions at TechCrunch Disrupt SF.

Adkins, a 16-year Google veteran, runs Google’s information security shop. As an early employee, Adkins built a global team responsible for maintaining the safety and security of Google’s networks, systems and applications as the company has ballooned in size. Her extensive background in network and systems administration has led her to work to build and secure some of the world’s largest infrastructure.

Steffens, who has spent over a decade at penetration testing and ethical hacking company IOActive, knows all too well how to build a security company. Her team goes into enterprises large and small and finds the weak spots in their security in an effort to fix the flaws before bad actors exploit them. Having worked during the early stages at several successful startups, Steffens brings a world of corporate and security knowledge to the table.

And Song, who co-founded security giant Duo, led one of the most successful exits in Silicon Valley security startup history following the company’s $2.35 billion acquisition by Cisco last year. Song is a leading voice in the security community, with broad experience in developing security solutions for the enterprises.

How do these cybersecurity leaders keep ahead of the bad guys — and the insider threats? Join us on the Extra Crunch stage to find out. Tickets to the show, which runs October 2 to October 4, are available here.

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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Sramana Mitra: In the history of venture capital, the traditional venture capital model has been that in your portfolio of ten companies, nine will fail and one is a homerun. That’s how you make your...

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SpotHero, the Chicago-based company that has developed an on-demand parking app, has raised $50 million in a Series D round led by Macquarie Capital.

Union Grove Venture Partners participated in the round, along with existing investors, including Insight Venture Partners, Global Founders Capital, OCA Ventures, AutoTech Ventures and others, according to the company. SpotHero has raised $118 million to date.

The new capital will be used to expand its reach in the 300 U.S. and Canadian cities where it is already operating, build out its digital platform and strengthen partnerships with mobility companies, CEO and co-founder Mark Lawrence told TechCrunch.

SpotHero, which has operations in San Francisco, New York, Washington, D.C. and Seattle, initially set out to develop software that connects everyday drivers to parking spots in thousands of garages across North America.

Its secret sauce is its software, which can sit on top of the 40 or so different point-of-sales systems used by parking garages. This acts as a single protocol, allowing SpotHero to bring some kind of standardization to an otherwise fragmented system. From this single protocol, SpotHero can add features that will allow for automated parking services, such as license plate recognition.

“We’ve built the pipes, so to speak, and this powers our consumer app,” Lawrence said in a recent interview. Now the company focus is on building out partnerships, features in the software and services, he added.

Capital will also be used to hire talent to support these new endeavors. SpotHero has 210 employees, and is working on hiring 50 more engineers this year.

In the eight years since its founding, SpotHero has expanded beyond its core consumer-focused competency. The company has added other services as urban density has increased and on-street parking has become more jumbled and confused thanks to an increase in traffic, ride-hailing and on-demand delivery services that take up valuable curb space. It has locked in more than 900 distribution partnerships and integrations, including Google Assistant for voice-enabled parking and Waze in-app navigation to parking. Other partners include Hertz and car2go for fleet parking, WeWork for commuter parking and Moovit for multi-modal parking.

Most recently, SpotHero launched a new service dubbed “SpotHero for Fleets” that targets shared mobility and on-demand services.

The service aims to be a one-stop shop for car sharing and commercial fleets to handle all that goes into ensuring there is access and the right number of designated parking areas on any given day within SpotHero’s large network of 6,500 garages across 300 cities. That means everything from managing the relationships between garage owners and the fleet companies to proper signage so car-sharing customers can find the vehicles, as well as flexible plans that account for seasonal demands on businesses.

Under the new service, customers are able to source and secure parking inventory in high-traffic areas across multiple cities and pay per use across multiple parking facilities on one invoice to streamline payments. 

The company has signed on car-sharing companies and other commercial fleets, although it’s not naming them yet.

For entrepreneurs interested to meet and chat with Sramana Mitra in person, please join us for our bi-monthly and informal group meetups. If you are living in the San Francisco Bay Area or are just...

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The CareVoice, a Shanghai-based health insurance software startup with ambitions to expand throughout Asia, announced today that it has raised about $10 million in Series A funding.

The investment was led by LUN Partners Group and an undisclosed global investment manager that specializes in financial services, with participation from DNA Capital and returning investors SOSV and Artesian Capital. It will be used on research and development and to grow The CareVoice’s business in Hong Kong, which it entered last year. After that, the company plans to expand into other markets in Asia.

Founded in 2014, The CareVoice started as an app that let patients leave reviews about medical providers before focusing on software like its flagship product, an SaaS solution that makes healthcare and insurance products more accessible to customers on mobile, with the goal of increasing sales and retention. There are several other startups in China focused on simplifying the process of buying health insurance, like Instony, Datebao, eBaoTech and Bowtie, but a representative for The CareVoice says it focuses less on sales tools and is instead building an end-to-end platform for insurers that can integrate with their existing solutions.

The startup is currently used by 15 insurance providers in China and Hong Kong, including Ping An and AXA. While The CareVoice’s focus has been on improving the enrollment process, customer experience and how claims are processed, it is currently developing 10 new insurance products tailored for segmented consumer groups with health insurance partners, which the company’s founders believe will “revolutionize the way products are designed.”

The CareVoice also recently released a platform for insurers called CareVoiceOS, designed to enable insurers to create more customized plans and connect to other online healthcare services, and launched a new unit called StartupCare that allows startups to give founders and employees health benefits.

Remediant, a startup that helps companies secure privileged access in a modern context, today announced a $15 million Series A led by Dell Technologies Capital and ForgePoint Capital.

Remediant’s co-founders, Paul Lanzi and Tim Keeler, worked in biotech for years and saw a problem first-hand with the way companies secured privileged access. It was granted to certain individuals in the organization carte blanche, and they believed if you could limit access, it would make the space more secure and less vulnerable to hackers.

Lanzi says they started the company with two core concepts. “The first concept is the ability to assess or detect all of the places where privileged accounts exist and what systems they have access to. The second concept is to strip away all of the privileged access from all of those accounts and grant it back on a just-in-time basis,” Lanzi explained.

If you’re thinking that could get in the way of people who need access to do their jobs, as former IT admins, they considered that. Remediant is based on a Zero Trust model where you have to prove you have the right to access the privileged area. But they do provide a reasonable baseline amount of time for users who need it within the confines of continuously enforcing access.

“Continuous enforcement is part of what we do, so by default we grant you four hours of access when you need that access, and then after that four hours, even if you forget to come back and end your session, we will automatically revoke that access. In that way all of the systems that are protected by SecureOne (the company’s flagship product) are held in this Zero Trust state where no one has access to them on a day-to-day basis,” Lanzi said.

The company has bootstrapped until now, and has actually been profitable, something that’s unusual for a startup at this stage of development, but Lanzi says they decided to take an investment in order to shift gears and concentrate on growth and product expansion.

Deepak Jeevankumar, managing director at investor Dell Technologies Capital, says it’s not easy for security startups to rise above the noise, but he saw something in Remediant’s founders. “Tim and Paul came from the practitioner’s viewpoint. They knew the actual problems that people face in terms of privileged access. So they had a very strong empathy towards the customer’s problem because they lived through it,” Jeevankumar told TechCrunch.

He added that the privileged access market hasn’t really been updated in two decades. “It’s a market ripe for disruption. They are combining the just-in-time philosophy with the Zero Trust philosophy, and are bringing that to the crown jewel of administrative access,” he said.

The company’s tools are installed on the customer’s infrastructure, either on-prem or in the cloud. They don’t have a pure cloud product at the moment, but they have plans for a SaaS version down the road to help small and medium-sized businesses solve the privileged access problem.

Lanzi says they are also looking to expand the product line in other ways with this investment. “The basic philosophies that underpin our technology are broadly applicable. We want to start applying our technology in those other areas as well. So as we think toward a future that looks more like cloud and more like DevOps, we want to be able to add more of those features to our products,” he said.

According to an Orbis Research report, the global online survey software market is expected to grow 11% annually over the next few years from $1.01 billion in 2018 to double that by the year 2024....

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