WeWork, now known as The We Company, released its IPO prospectus Wednesday morning months after filing confidentially to go public. The company indicated plans to raise $1 billion in what is likely a placeholder amount.

Backed by billions from SoftBank and its mammoth Vision Fund, the highly anticipated float is expected as soon as next month.

The New York-based company, valued at $47 billion earlier this year, has long been rumored to be plotting a massive IPO despite towering losses. The business recently disclosed 2018 net losses of $1.9 billion on revenue of $1.8 billion. To convince Wall Street it’s a business worthy of their investment will be a challenge, to say the least.

In its S-1 filing, WeWork disclosed revenue north of $1.5 billion in the six months ending June 30 on losses of $904.6 million.

WeWork has raised a total of $8.4 billion in a combination of debt and equity funding since it was founded in 2011. According to earlier reports from The Wall Street Journal, it’s also pursuing an asset-backed loan worth upwards of $6 billion in what could be an effort to downsize its stock offering.

Its IPO is poised to become the second-largest offering of the year behind only Uber, which was valued at $82.4 billion following its May IPO on the New York Stock Exchange.

WeWork plans to sell shares of its stock under the ticker symbol “We” with the share price yet to be determined. The stock exchange was not listed.

SoftBank, unsurprisingly, JP Morgan and Benchmark are to be the big winners of the upcoming exit. The investment funds own roughly 114 million and 33 million pre-IPO shares, respectively. Benchmark, a venture capital fund, led a $17 million financing in the business in 2012.

Seven years later, WeWork operates 528 co-working spaces in 111 cities across 29 countries, with a total of 527,000 memberships, 50% of which are based outside the U.S.

Even with fast growth and a global presence, WeWork has come to represent Silicon Valley’s tendency to inflate valuations. WeWork, a real estate business with tech-enabled services built on top, burns through cash rapidly and has had a tough time plotting out a clear path to profitability.

“We have grown significantly since our inception,” the company writes in the S-1. “Our membership base has grown by over 100% every year since 2014. It took us more than seven years to achieve $1 billion of run-rate revenue, but only one additional year to reach $2 billion of run-rate revenue and just six months to reach $3 billion of run-rate revenue.”

As it gears up to transition into the public markets, WeWork, planning to open co-working spaces in an additional 169 locations, says it currently has 149 million potential members with a potential addressable market of $945 billion based on 2019 membership revenue figures. Ultimately, WeWork says it hopes to reach 255 million people across 280 target cities — a market opportunity worth an eye-popping $1.6 trillion, or more than that of Apple and Microsoft.

WeWork is also backed by T. Rowe Price, Fidelity, Goldman Sachs and several others.

This story is updating

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Audacious. Bold. Innovative. If those adjectives describe your early-stage startup, if you’re champing at the bit to launch your company to the world — we want you! Apply to compete in Startup Battlefield at Disrupt Berlin 2019.

Our premier pitch competition takes place on 11-12 December, and a select cohort of startups will compete for bragging rights, the Disrupt Cup and a $50,000 equity-free prize. And they’ll all bask in a bright spotlight of attention from influential global investors and worldwide media outlets. Apply to Startup Battlefield today.

You have nothing to lose — applying and participating in Startup Battlefield is free, and TechCrunch does not charge any fees or take any equity. Since 2007, more than 857 companies have launched at Startup Battlefield to great success. Collectively they’ve raised more than $8.9 billion in funding, with 112 successful exits (IPOs or acquisitions). If you’re selected, you’ll join the ranks of this alumni community that includes Dropbox, GetAround, SirenCare, Fitbit, Mint.com, Vurb and more.

Here’s how it all works. Early-stage startups from any country — and any tech category — can apply as long as they have a minimally viable product to demo. TechCrunch editors with years of Battlefield experience and a keen eye for potential success will vet the applications and choose 15-20 startups.

Now the work begins. TechCrunch provides free pitch coaching to the participants. It’s rigorous and thorough, so you’ll be ready to present your best possible pitch and demo. Each team has six minutes to pitch to a world-class panel of judges — followed by a six-minute Q&A session.

If you make it through to the final round, it’s lather, rinse and repeat that experience in front of a fresh set of judges. The judges confer and declare one outstanding startup the Battlefield champion — winner of a $50,000 bottom-line boost.

It’s a wild ride that takes place in front of thousands of eager investors, journalists and startup fans. TechCrunch also live-streams the entire Battlefield to a global audience of millions. Win or lose, that kind of exposure benefits all the participants, and it can change a startup’s trajectory in the best way possible.

Participating in the Battlefield carries a lot of perks beyond the actual competition. We’re talking free exhibition space in Startup Alley for both days of Disrupt, invitations to private events, backstage access, CrunchMatch — our free business-matching platform — free subscriptions to Extra Crunch and a ticket to all future TechCrunch events. That’s some major value right there.

With nothing to lose and so much to gain, it’s the perfect time for every audacious, bold and innovative early-stage startup founder to take their shot. Stop champing at the bit and apply to Startup Battlefield today. We want to see you in Berlin!

If you’re not ready to compete in the Battlefield, why not apply for our TC Top Picks program? If you make the cut, you’ll receive a free Startup Alley Exhibitor Package along with VIP treatment and plenty of media and investor exposure.

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

We love Berlin’s electric, evolving, early-startup ecosystem. Let’s be perfectly blunt: Whether you’re a startup founder, investor, hacker or tech leader, you can’t afford to miss Disrupt Berlin 2019, which takes place on 11-12 December. Get your super early-bird passes here.

TechCrunch honors its Silicon Valley roots, and we pack that ethic in our carry-on bags to Berlin. Disrupt showcases the very best of now and future tech, and startups from more than 50 countries come to Berlin to learn, share insights and build the kind of relationships that transform businesses.

The two-day conference offers measurable benefits, and that’s not just our (totally biased) opinion. Your startup peers tell us they come away with long-term benefits. Here’s what Luke Heron, CEO of TestCard Diagnostics, said about his Disrupt Berlin experience.

Based in the United Kingdom and founded in 2017 by Heron and Dr. Andrew Botham, TestCard, an at-home urine test company, combines smartphone technology and traditional mail to deliver a medical test experience in the privacy of the home.

The company embeds a urine test kit into a postcard and mails it out in a security envelope. The recipient takes the test, uses TestCard’s mobile app and the camera on their smartphone — as a clinical-grade scanner — to immediately determine the results.

TestCard exhibited in Startup Alley at Disrupt SF ’17 and again at Disrupt Berlin ’18 — as one of the select TC Top Pick startups. More on that in a minute. In San Francisco, Heron set a goal to make connections and gain exposure for the company.

“We got fantastic coverage in Engadget,” said Heron. “Cash at the beginning of the startup journey is difficult to come by, and an article from a credible organization can help push things in the right direction.”

In addition to generating media interest, Heron sought access to capital. He scheduled seven meetings with VCs using CrunchMatch. The free business-matchmaking platform makes it easy for startup founders and investors to connect and schedule meetings at Disrupt based on shared goals and criteria.

The company’s success in San Francisco made the decision to attend Disrupt Berlin 2018 a simple one. This time, Heron submitted TestCard for consideration as a TC Top Pick. It’s a competitive program where TechCrunch editors select up to five outstanding startups to represent a range of tech categories like AI, Fintech and, in Heron’s case, Healthtech & Biotech.

TestCard earned a Top Pick designation and received a free Startup Alley Exhibitor Package and plenty of VIP treatment at Disrupt Berlin — including an interview with a TechCrunch editor on the Showcase stage.

“TechCrunch uses a curation process regarding the companies it accepts,” he said. “So being a Top Pick at Disrupt — among all these other fantastic startups — has a hugely positive impact when you’re fundraising.”

How big an impact? The company recently closed on $1.7 million in funding, and Heron credits the TechCrunch Disrupt experience for making it possible.

“If you’re a startup founder or an entrepreneur,” said Heron, “attending Disrupt is a no-brainer.”

Disrupt Berlin 2019 takes place on 11-12 December. Come to Berlin, make some startup magic and keep your business moving in the right direction. Buy your super early-bird pass today.

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

Nigerian freight logistics startup Kobo360 has raised a $20 million Series A round led by Goldman Sachs and $10 million in working capital financing from Nigerian commercial banks.

The company — with an Uber -like app that connects truckers and companies to delivery services — will use the funds to upgrade its platform and expand to 10 new countries beyond current operating markets of Nigeria, Togo, Ghana and Kenya.

Since its launch in Lagos in 2017, Kobo360 has continued to grow its product offerings, VC backing and  customer base. The startup claims a fleet of more than 10,000 drivers and trucks operating on its app. Top clients include Honeywell, Olam, Unilever, Dangote and DHL.

In addition to customer focus, founders Ife Oyedele II and Obi Ozor have prioritized serving the startup’s drivers. They offer the company’s app in languages common to drivers, such as Hausa and Pidgin. 

Kobo360 also launched its own driver working capital finance program, KoPay, KoboSafe insurance product and KoboCare: a suite of driver services from HMO packages to family tuition assistance.

The startup is part of a growing e-logistics and transport space in Africa linking on-demand apps to mobile-based connectivity to move people and goods around the continent more effectively.

In the ride-hail space, global players such as Uber and Bolt are competing with each other and homegrown startups to digitize and capture revenues in the continent’s auto and motorcycle taxi markets.

In e-logistics freight delivery, two startups — Kobo360 and Lori Systems — have continued to compete tit for tat on investment, scale and expansion.

Kobo360 moved into Lori Systems’ HQ country Kenya this year. Lori Systems expanded into Nigeria in September of 2018.

Commercial research firm MarketLine estimated the value of Nigeria’s transportation sector in 2016 at $6 billion, with 99.4% comprising road freight.

Kobo360’s CEO Obi Ozor told TechCrunch the startup would make final decisions on the 10 new  countries by first quarter 2020.

As a cross-border freight service, the company looks to benefit from Africa’s Continental Free Trade Area (AFCFTA), signed this year by all the continent’s 54 countries to reduce barriers and friction on Pan-African commercial activity.

In addition to lower costs for Kobo360’s country to country freight movement, the startup expects to have a voice in AFCTA’s final implementation.

“We’re going to do some policy work through the IFC so we can help shape AFCTA. The key to the deal is really logistics, so if the logistics component doesn’t work out the deal isn’t going to work,” Ozor said.

Kobo360 will use part of its $30 million funding to build out its Global Logistics Operating System —  GLOS for short — a blockchain-enabled platform that will help the company transition to more supply-chain services.

By Digest Africa’s latest ranking, Kobo360’s $20 million Series A is the 5th largest investment in an African startup this year, after Egyptian ride-hail company Svwl’s $42 million raise in June. Kobo360’s existing investors IFC, TLCom Capital and Y Combinator joined the round.

Goldman Sachs confirmed to TechCrunch its lead on the Series A. Over the last several years the U.S. based finance firm’s Africa investments have included backing for e-commerce unicorn Jumia (which recently listed on the NYSE) and leading a $52 million investment in South African fintech startup Jumo in 2018.

Goldman Sachs’ Jules Frebault named Kobo360’s ability to scale quickly over a short period of time and use of tech to improve reliability and efficiency in Africa’s logistics ecosystem as a reason for leading the Series A.

“It’s also a business model that’s replicable across multiple geographies on the continent,” he told TechCrunch on a call.

Kobo360 has a mind toward international expansion but expects to remain focused on Nigeria and Africa for now. “We’re definitely thinking global, we just want to make sure we close out our home market first, then we’ll start looking outside,” Ozor said.

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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Digital payments startup QFPay announced today that it has raised $20 million in new funding led by returning investors Sequoia Capital China and Matrix Partners. MDI Ventures, the investment arm of state-owned Indonesian telecom Telkom Indonesia, Rakuten Capital and VentureSouq also participated as new strategic investors.

According to Crunchbase, this brings QFPay’s total raised so far to $36.5 million. The funding will be used to develop new digital payment products.

QFPay is the largest global partner of WeChat Pay and Alipay, enabling them to process payments to merchants around the world. Founded in 2012, QFPay first launched in China and is known for its QR code-based technology. Its products include end-to-end online and offline mobile payment solutions and add-on services like food ordering and customer loyalty programs. The company claims that it has served over 1.2 million merchants and processed over 1 billion transactions.

QFPay is currently present in 13 markets: Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and United Arab Emirates.

In a statement, co-founder and CEO Tim Lee said “We have built our track record, know-how and expertise in this industry since we launched in China, which is dubbed as the birthplace of digital payment. We are excited to leverage what we have learned in the past seven years to help lead the cashless movement in the rest of Asia as demand for digital payment, particularly QR-code payment method, heats up.”

Zhihu, the largest question and answer platform in China, has raised a $434 million Series F. This is not only the company’s biggest round since it launched in 2011, but also one of the largest secured over the past two years by a Chinese Internet culture and entertainment company, said China Renaissance, which served as the funding’s financial advisor.

The Series F was led by Beijing Kuaishou, the video and live-streaming app, with participation from Baidu . Existing investors Tencent and CapitalToday also returned for the round, which Zhihu will use for technology and product development. Baidu told Bloomberg that it will add 100 million Zhihu posts to its main app.

While Zhihu has downplayed reports that it is planning an IPO, it embarked on plans to hire a CFO and restructure last year.

Zhihu users tend to be educated with relatively high incomes and the platform has developed a reputation for hosting experts and organizations that are knowledgeable in tech, marketing and professional services like education. Like Quora and other Q&A platforms, Zhihu lets users post and answer text-based questions. But it also has other features, including discussion forums, a publishing platform and live videos for brands and companies to answer questions in real-time. Instead of making its streaming video feature, called Zhihu Live, open to all users, it is available to only to experts and organizations, differentiating it from other streaming apps like Douyin, the domestic version of TikTok (ByteDance is an investor in Zhihu but did not participate in this round).

In a post about the round on his Zhihu page, founder and CEO Victor Zhou wrote the company plans to keep up with rapid changes in China’s media and Internet landscape. “Over the past 8 years, users have gone from expecting simple entertainment to using the Internet to deal with real-life and work problems. The focus of competition has also shifted from traffic to traffic + quality.”

This discussion explores the evolution of influencer marketing and how brands are working with content creators to gain credibility and leverage. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our...

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Exchanges like Coinbase have ballooned in size by taking the mechanics of equity markets and fitting them to cryptocurrency markets, but as the space expands in its scope and craftiness, new exchanges trading asset classes native to cryptocurrency are taking off and attracting the attention of top Silicon Valley VCs. Oh, and Coinbase, too.

Blade is a new cryptocurrency derivatives exchange launching in three weeks. Prior to starting the company, CEO Jeff Byun and his co-founder Henry Lee founded OrderAhead, a delivery startup platform that was eventually acquired in-part by Square in 2017. The pair’s newest company shares little in common with their previous venture, but they are bringing aboard some of the same investors to support them.

Blade is announcing that they’ve raised $4.3 million in seed funding from a host of investors, including Coinbase, SV Angel, A.Capital, Slow Ventures, Justin Kan and Adam D’Angelo.

The exchange is tackling perpetual swap contracts.

Perpetuals are a crypto-native trading instrument that Byun says are “arguably the fastest growing segment of cryptocurrency trading.” They allow traders to bet on the future values of cryptocurrencies in relation to another and the instruments have no expiration dates, unlike fixed maturity futures. Traders can bet on how the price of Bitcoin can increase relative to USD, but they can also make bets relative to other altcoins like Monero, DogeCoin, Zcash, Ripple and Binance Coin. Here’s what’s on the Blade menu at the moment.

Blade’s noteworthy spins on perpetuals trading — compared to other exchanges — are that most of the contracts will be set up on simplified vanilla contracts, the perpetuals will also be margined/settled in USD Tether and the company is offering higher leverages (up to 150x on BTC-USD and BTC-KRW) on trades.

Blade is raising funds from Silicon Valley’s VCs, but U.S. investors won’t be legally able to participate in the exchange. U.S. government agencies have been a bit more stringent in regulating cryptocurrencies, so there’s more trading activity taking place on exchanges outside the jurisdiction. Blade itself is an offshore entity with a U.S. subsidiary; its primary market is East Asia.

“It’s kind of a bifurcated market,” Byun tells TechCrunch. “Either you have exchanges like Coinbase or Gemini or Bitrex that cater to the U.S. market that are highly regulated or the exchanges that cater to the non-U.S. market that are much less regulated, but that’s where most of the volume is.”

While the company is still three weeks away from launch, the founders have bold ambitions.

“In the long term, we want to be the CME (Chicago Mercantile Exchange) of crypto,” Byun tells me. “Coinbase and Binance are building this foundational structure for crypto, but I think we are too and in a sense that derivatives are at their core about risk transfer, we want to be building the foundational layer for risk transfer in the crypto markets.”

London-based edtech startup pi-top has cut a number of staff, TechCrunch has learned.

According to our sources, the company has reduced its headcount in recent weeks, with staff being told cuts are a result of restructuring as it seeks to implement a new strategy.

One source told us pi-top recently lost out on a large education contract.

Another source said sales at pi-top have been much lower than predicted — with all major bids being lost.

Pi-top confirmed to TechCrunch that it has let staff go, saying it has reduced headcount from 72 to 60 people across its offices in London, Austin and Shenzhen.

Our sources suggest the total number of layoffs could be up to a third. 

In a statement, pi-top told us:

pi-top has become one of the fastest growing ed-tech companies in the market in 4.5 years.  We have a unique vision to increase access to coding and technical education through project based learning to inspire a new generation of makers.

As part of this vision we built up our global team with a view to winning a particularly exciting national project in a developing nation, where we had a previous large scale successful implementation. We were disappointed this tender ultimately fell through due to economic factors in the region and have subsequently made the unfortunate but unavoidable decision to reduce our team size from 72 to 60 people across our offices in London, Austin and Shenzhen.

Moving forward we are focusing on our growth within the USA where we continue to enjoy widespread success. We are rolling out our new learning platform pi-top Further which will enable schools everywhere to access a world of content enhanced by practical hands-on project based learning outcomes. We have recently completed a successful Kickstarter campaign and we look forward to releasing our newest product pi-top [4].

We are also proud to have appointed Stanley Buchesky as our new Executive Chairman. Stanley brings a wealth of experience in the ed-tech sector and will be a great asset to our strategy going forward.

Pi-top sells hardware and software designed for educational use in schools. It’s one of a large number of edtech startups that have sought to tap into the popularity of the “learn to code” movement by piggybacking atop the (also British) low-cost Raspberry Pi microprocessor — which provides the computing power for all pi-top’s products.

Pi-top adds its own OS and additional education-focused software to the Pi, as well as proprietary cases — including a bright green laptop housing with a built-in rail for breadboarding electronics.

Its most recent product, the pi-top 4, which was announced back in January, looks intended to move the company away from its first focus on educational desktop computing to more modular and embeddable hardware hacking that could be used by schools to power a wider variety of robotics and electronics projects.

Despite raising $16M in VC funding just over a year ago, pi-top opted to run a crowdfunding campaign for the pi-top 4 — going on to raise almost $200,000 on Kickstarter from 521 backers.

Pi-top 4 backers have been told to expect the device to ship in November.

Postmates plans to make its IPO paperwork public in September, TechCrunch has learned. Despite previous reports indicating the on-demand delivery company is seeking an M&A exit, sources close to the matter say Postmates is on track to go complete an initial public offering this year.

With the S-1 dropping in September, San Francisco-based Postmates is expected to debut on the stock exchange by the end of the third fiscal quarter of 2019. The company has tapped JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America Corp. as lead underwriters, Bloomberg previously reported, though other details of the float, including the size and price range of the proposed offering, have yet to be announced.

“We can’t comment on the IPO process and we don’t comment on rumor or speculation,” a Postmates spokesperson told TechCrunch.

In February, Postmates confidentially filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for an IPO. Shortly after, Postmates held M&A talks with DoorDash, another food delivery unicorn, according to people familiar with the matter, but failed to come to mutually favorable terms. DoorDash declined to comment for this story.

Postmates has raised $681 million to date with its latest round coming in earlier this year at a $1.85 billion valuation. DoorDash, on the other hand, reached a $12.6 billion valuation in May with a $600 million Series G.

As Postmates gears up for its IPO, the food delivery business continues to consolidate. DoorDash last week purchased another food delivery service, Caviar, from Square in a deal worth $410 million. Uber is said to have considered buying Caviar, which had been looking for a buyer at least since 2016, according to Bloomberg.

DoorDash has been under heavy scrutiny as of late for the way it pays its drivers. Back in February, we reported how DoorDash offsets the amount it pays drivers with tips from customers. It wasn’t until after much backlash that DoorDash finally said it would change its policies. DoorDash has yet to implement the new policy.

How Postmates will fare on the public markets is up for debate. The billion-dollar company will go head-to-head with other public businesses in the space, including powerhouses Uber and Grubhub.

Uber last week shared disappointing second-quarter earnings. The company’s food delivery unit, UberEats, however, continues to grow at an impressive rate. UberEats did $3.39 billion in gross bookings last quarter with monthly active platform consumers (MAPCs) growing more than 140% year-over-year. Still, the unit is years away from profitability, Uber chief Dara Khosrowshahi told CNBC on Thursday.

Postmates’ updated IPO plans follow a report from Bloomberg that WeWork expects to make its IPO prospectus available in the next week. Eyes will be on both WeWork, which hopes to raise more than $3.5 billion, and Postmates, as the companies occupy two unproven categories.

Postmates follows Uber, Lyft, Pinterest and many others to the public markets in 2019, a year when many of Silicon Valley’s most notable unicorns finally decided to make the transition from private to public.

Postmates, founded in 2011 by Bastian Lehmann, is backed by Spark Capital, Founders Fund, Uncork Capital, Slow Ventures, Tiger Global, Blackrock and others.

Reference docs and spreadsheets seemingly make the world go ’round, but what if employees could just close those tabs for good without losing that knowledge?

One startup is taking on that complicated challenge. Predictably, the solution is quite complicated, as well, from a tech perspective, involving an AI solution that analyzes everything on your PC screen — all the time — and highlights text onscreen for which you could use a little bit more context. The team at Polarity wants its tech to help teams lower the knowledge barrier to getting stuff done and allow people to focus more on procedure and strategy than memorizing file numbers, IP addresses and jargon.

The Connecticut startup just closed an $8.1 million “AA” round led by TechOperators, with Shasta Ventures, Strategic Cyber Ventures, Gula Tech Adventures and Kaiser Permanente Ventures also participating in the round. The startup closed its $3.5 million Series A in early 2017.

Interestingly, the enterprise-centric startup pitches itself as an AR company, augmenting what’s happening on your laptop screen much like a pair of AR glasses could.

The startup’s computer vision software that uses character recognition to analyze what’s on a user’s screen can be helpful for enterprise teams importing things like a company Rolodex so that bios are always collectively a click away, but the real utility comes from team-wide flagging of things like suspicious IP addresses that will allow entire teams to learn about new threats and issues at the same time without having to constantly check in with their co-workers. The startup’s current product has a big focus on analysts and security teams.

Using character recognition to analyze a screen for specific keywords is useful in itself, but that’s also largely a solved computer vision problem.

Polarity’s big advance has been getting these processes to occur consistently on-device without crushing a device’s CPU. CEO Paul Battista says that for the average customer, Polarity’s software generally eats up about 3-6% of their computer’s processing power, though it can spike much higher if the system is getting fed a ton of new information at once.

“We spent years building the tech to accomplish [efficiency], readjusting how people think of [object character recognition] and then doing it in real time,” Battista tells me. “The more data that you have onscreen, the more power you use. So it does use a significant percentage of the CPU.”

Why bother with all of this AI trickery and CPU efficiency when you could pull this functionality off in certain apps with an API? The whole deliverable here is that it doesn’t matter if you’re working in Chrome, or Excel or pulling up a scanned document, the software is analyzing what’s actually being rendered onscreen, not what the individual app is communicating.

When it comes to a piece of software analyzing everything on your screen at all times, there are certainly some privacy concerns, not only from the employee’s perspective but from a company’s security perspective.

Battista says the intent with this product isn’t to be some piece of corporate spyware, and that it won’t be something running in the background — it’s an app that users will launch. “If [companies] wanted to they could collect all of the data on everybody’s screens, but we don’t have any customers doing that. The software is built to have a user interface for users to interact with so if the user didn’t choose to subscribe or turn on a metric, then [the company] wouldn’t be able to force them to collect it in the current product.”

Battista says that teams at seven Fortune 100 companies are currently paying for Polarity, with many more in pilot programs. The team is currently around 20 people and with this latest fundraise, Battista wants to double the size of the team in the next 18 months as they look to scale to larger rollouts at major companies.

Attentive, a startup helping retailers personalize their mobile messages, is announcing that it has raised $40 million in Series B funding.

The startup was founded by Brian Long and Andrew Jones, who sold their previous startup TapCommerce to Twitter. When they announced Attentive’s $13 million Series A last year, Long told me the startup is all about helping retailers find better ways to communicate with customers, particularly as it’s harder for their individual apps to stand out.

Attentive’s first product allowed for what it calls “two-tap” sign-up, where users can tap on a promotion link from a brand’s website, creating a pre-populated text that opts them in to for SMS messages from that retailer.

Since then, it’s built a broader suite of messaging tools, with support for cart abandonment reminders, A/B testing, subscriber segmentation and other features that allow retailers to get smarter and more targeted in their messaging strategy.

The startup says mobile messages sent through its platform are seeing click-through rates of more than 30%, and that it now works with more than 400 customers, including Sephora, Urban Outfitters, Coach, CB2 and Jack in the Box.

The Series B was led by Sequoia, with participation from new investors IVP and High Alpha, as well as previous backers Bain Capital Ventures, Eniac Ventures and NextView Ventures. The plan for the new funding is to grow the entire team, especially sales and engineering.

“CRM is changing,” Long said in a statement. “Businesses can’t build a relationship with the modern consumer through email alone. Email performance, as measured by how many subscribers click-through on a message, is down 45% over the last five years. Rather than continuing to shout one-way messages at consumers, smart brands will stay relevant by embracing personalized, real-time, two-way communication channels.”

Ro, a two-year-old startup known for its online pharmacy of men’s health products, has named BuzzFeed’s former Todd Levy its chief technology officer.

Levy first joined BuzzFeed in 2014 as the digital media company’s vice president of engineering; he was named CTO in 2016. Prior to BuzzFeed, Levy co-founded and led link management tool bit.ly. Levy begins his new role Wednesday, August 14.

BuzzFeed declined to comment.

Ro, valued at $500 million earlier this year, has raised $176 million in venture capital funding from Canaan Partners, FirstMark Capital, BoxGroup, Initialized Capital, General Catalyst, SignalFire and others. The fast-growing startup poised to enter the unicorn club in the next year represents an opportunity for Levy to get back in the business of early-stage startups.

The news comes months after BuzzFeed announced its largest layoffs to date. Despite having raised $500 million over the last decade, the site has struggled to find a path to profitability. BuzzFeed chairman Ken Lerer, a prolific media investor, stepped down this June.

In an email announcement to staffers, Ro co-founder Saman Rahmanian said the new hire will help usher the business into a new phase of growth: “First and foremost, we needed a great team builder – someone who cares about team spirit not just the code,” Rahmanian wrote:

Given the high growth state of our business, we also needed a leader who has seen or led the scaling of an engineering team like ours into the next stage (from 30 engineers to 200). We also needed someone with a strong technology background who has gone through the ranks and is fluent in modern software architecture. And equally as important, we needed someone that was the right fit for Ro – someone who will provide strong mentorship, who is excited about a distributed team, and who will evangelize the engineering team inside the business as well as outside of Ro to attract top talent.

New York-based Ro was founded in 2017 and has quickly become a leader in the direct-to-consumer health and wellness movement. The company competes with Hims, another online service for health products, as well as Numan, Manual and Thirty Madison, which have raised capital recently.

Ro was started by a trio of entrepreneurs: Rob Schutz, the former vice president of growth at Bark&Co; Rahmanian, a co-founder of the WeWork-acquired business Managed by Q; and chief executive officer Zachariah Reitano, who previously co-founded a Y Combinator -backed startup called Shout.

The startup initially launched under the name Roman, which became its flagship brand when the business adopted the umbrella name Ro last year.

In a 2017 interview with TechCrunch’s Josh Constine, Reitano said he began experiencing ED at 17 years old: “I think in a good way I’ve become numb to the embarrassment,” he said. “I remember the embarrassment of having the condition with no solution, and that’s much worse than sharing the fact that I had it and was able to fix it myself.”

Roman offers men a $15 online doctor’s consultation and access to an instant prescription for Viagra, Cialis or generic drugs that can be filled at Roman’s in-house cloud pharmacy. The company also sells hair loss, cold sore medication and more under the Roman brand.

Ro also operates Zero and Rory, purveyors of a quit smoking kit and a line of women’s health products, respectively.

Although 3D TVs may have grabbed all the headlines a decade ago at CES, the tech never found a useful inroad into consumers’ homes. Not everyone has given up on them, though they look a bit different now.

Light Field Lab, a Bay Area startup that emerged from stealth two years ago, wants to build holographic screens that enable viewers to see “volumetric” 3D without wearing special glasses. You won’t only see depth in the images, you’ll be able to physically move around the display and see new perspectives of the action, giving you the sensation that the digital content is floating mid-air.

“Light field” technology has had a rough go finding its way to market. Lytro, which was developing light field capture cameras, was bought by Google for a pittance and Magic Leap was unable to fully crack the technology for its first augmented reality product even after raising billions.

Light Field Lab hopes that the tech advances they’ve made for light field displays will be enough to get consumers onboard eventually, though the company certainly has plenty of residual problems from the 3D TV era that need new solutions.

For now, Light Field Lab isn’t focused on at-home light field experience; rather, they want to build a modular platform that lets entertainment venues stack together tons of their devices to create huge 3D video walls that deliver a very unique 3D experience.

It’s a bold prospect, but the company now has millions of VC dollars to carry it out.

Light Field Lab announced today that it has scored a $28 million Series A from Bosch Venture Capital and Taiwania Capital, with further investment from Khosla Ventures, Samsung Ventures, Verizon Ventures and Comcast also investing, among others. Last year, the company raised $7 million from Khosla Ventures and Sherpa Capital.

“Although Light Field Lab will initially target large format location-based entertainment venues, a version of its holographic technologies will ultimately be developed for the consumer market,” a press release from the company reads.