Sramana Mitra: I want to comment a little bit on your personalized experience theme. I did one of the first ever online personalized fashion companies 20 years ago. The data was not quite there. Now,...
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Today’s 453rd FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Thursday, August 8 at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All are...
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Today’s 453rd FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Thursday, August 8, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join....
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Gaming continues to grow in popularity, with esports revenue growing 23% from last year to top $1 billion in 2019.
But the metrics by which talent is evaluated in gaming, and the methods by which gamers can train to better hone their craft, are varied and at times non-existent. That’s where Statespace, and specifically the company’s gaming arm Klutch, come into play.
In 2017, Statespace launched out of stealth with their first product, Aim Lab. Aim Lab is meant to mimic the physical rules of a game to give gamers a practice space where they can improve their skills. Moreover, Aim Lab identifies weaknesses in a player’s gameplay — one person might struggle with their visual acuity in the top-left quadrant of the screen, while another might have trouble spotting or aiming at targets on the bottom-right side of the screen — and allows gamers to focus in on their weaknesses to get better.
Today, the company has announced a $2.5 million seed funding round led by FirstMark Capital, with participation from Expa, Lux Capital and WndrCo. This brings the company’s total funding to $4 million.
Alongside growing Aim Lab, which is on track to soon reach 1 million users, one of the company’s main goals is to create a standardized metric by which gamers’ skills can be measured. In football, college athletes and NFL coaches have the Scouting Combine to make decisions around recruiting. This doesn’t necessarily take into account stats like yardage or touchdowns, but rather the raw skills of a player, such as 40-yard sprint speed.
In fact, Statespace has partnered with the Pro Football Hall of Fame for “The Cognitive Combine,” becoming the official integrative medicine program cognitive assessment partner of the organization. Statespace wants to create a similar “combine” for gaming.
The hope is that the company can offer this metric to publishers, colleges and esports orgs, giving them the ability to not only evaluate talent, but to better serve casual users through improved matchmaking and cheat detection.
“We want to go a level beyond your kill:death ratio,” said co-founder and CEO Dr. Wayne Mackey. Those metrics greatly depend on factors like who you’re playing with. You won’t always be matched against players who are on an even keel with you. So we want to look at fundamental skills like hand-eye coordination, visual acuity, spatial processing skills and working memory capacity.”
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Klutch has partnered with the National Championship Series as the official FPS training partner for 2019. NCS has majors for both CS:Go and Overwatch, two of the biggest competitive FPS games in the world. The company is also partnering with top Twitch streamers and Masterclass to create The Academy.
Academy users will be able to get advanced tutorials from streamers like KingGeorge (Rainbox Six Siege), SypherPK (Fortnite), Valkia (Overwatch), Drift0r (CoD) and Launders (CS:GO).
Obviously, gaming is a major part of Statespace’s business model. But the skeleton of the technology has a number of different applications, particularly in medicine. Statespace is currently in the research phase of rolling out an Aim Lab product that is specifically focused on helping people who have had strokes recover and rehabilitate.
Statespace wants to use the funding to build out the team and expand the Klutch Aim Lab platform beyond Steam to mobile and eventually console, with Xbox prioritized over PlayStation, as well as launching the Academy.
Opsani, a Redwood City, Calif. startup, wants to go beyond performance monitoring to continually optimizing cloud applications, using artificial intelligence to help the software learn what is the optimal state.
“We have come up with a machine learning technique centered around reinforcement learning to tune the performance of applications in the cloud,” company co-founder and CEO Ross Schibler told TechCrunch.
Schibler says each company has its own unique metrics and that’s what they try to optimize around. “We’re modifying these parameters around the resource, and we’re looking at the performance of the application. So in real time, what is the key business metric that the application is producing as a service? So it might be the number of transactions or it might be latency, but if it’s important to the business, then we use that,” he explained.
He claims that what separates Opsani from a monitoring tool like New Relic or AppDynamics is that they watch performance and then provide feedback for admins, but Opsani actually changes the parameters to improve the application performance in real time, based on what it knows about the application and what the developers want to optimize for.
It is also somewhat similar to a company like Spotinst, which optimizes for the cheapest cloud resources, but instead of simply trying to find the best price, Opsani is actually tuning the application.
The company recently announced a $10 million Series A investment led by Redpoint Ventures. Previous investors Zetta Ventures and Bain Capital also participated.
For now, it’s still early days for the startup. It has a dozen employees and a handful of customers, according to Schibler. With the recent $10 million round of funding, it should be able to hire more employees and continue refining the product.
According to a Research and Markets report, the global human capital management (HCM) market is expected to grow 9% annually over the next few years to $29.9 billion by 2023. The HCM industry...
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Customer experience is a term that gets bandied about quite a bit these days. If you can improve the customer experience, you can win more customers. Beynd, a Utah startup, wants to help by providing a better, more automated onboarding workflow. Today, it announced a $2 million seed round.
The round was led by Peak Ventures with participation from Prelude Ventures. The investors seem to be making a good bet. CEO and founder Peter Ord says the company has had a product for just 10 months, but already boasts 121 paying customers with 6,800 users on the platform.
Ord says the company’s genesis began, like so many startup ideas, out of frustration he experienced at his previous job. Getting people started on the company’s software was too hard. He thought there had to be a better way, so he built it, and Beynd (pronounced Beyond) was born.
“They say the best companies start with the founders’ biggest frustration. One of my biggest frustrations at my previous job was that in my everyday life, I could order a pizza and know exactly when that pizza was ready. But when our customers bought our software, we had no thoughtful or meaningful way to help our customers understand when we were going to deliver that,” Ord told TechCrunch.
The customer starts by creating an onboarding workflow template. Each client has its own unique requirements. The first interactions are by email (or communication channel of choice) giving instructions on how to proceed. If the customer gets stuck, there is a button to email the project manager that there is a problem.
The solution includes tools for projected launch dates, so that customers can understand when a product will be ready (or service completed). It also includes an analytics tool, so that customers can understand which processes are most likely to stall.
The company actually uses its own software to onboard its customers. “We drink our own champagne, we use our own products. And so we’re extremely efficient in the way we onboard our customers because they get an immediate sense of how they use the tool through us using our tool to onboard them,” Ord explained.
The company had bootstrapped the business to this point. He says that his goal is to continue to run it as a real business, but the funding will help him expand his vision and improve the experience. He just doesn’t want to get too caught up in the funding culture. “There’s an interesting culture in the VC space where it’s all about raise as much as you can, as fast as you can, and I actually have kind of the opposite opinion, he said.
For now, he has $2 million to try to scale the business further, and he’ll get more only if he feels he needs it. “Let’s continue to prove out the model with this money, then let’s raise more if we have to,” he said.
Sramana Mitra: When you look around, what are the open problems that you see from your vantage point? I ask this question to all the thought leaders that we bring on to this series. You’re doing one...
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Back in July it emerged that FlixMobility — the company behind the network of ubiquitous green FlixBus coaches that crisscross Europe and parts of the U.S. — had raised about €500 million in the largest-ever round of funding for a German tech company. That turned out not to be the full story. Today, the company is announcing that the round has now been extended substantially, according to founder and CEO Jochen Engert, with contributions from a new set of investors: Baillie Gifford, Luxor Capital Group and Odyssey 44, with additional investment provided through funds managed by BlackRock.
Engert said FlixMobility will be using the money to “move on from a business perspective” (I don’t think he meant it as a pun, but it’s a good one), and that means growth in a number of ways. They include expanding into new markets in South America and Asia and further into the U.S.; bringing trains onto its network by way of FlixTrain; launching a new group-focused service, FlixBus Charter; and, by next year, starting up a long-distance ridesharing brand, FlixCar. It’s also been working on a smaller “pilot” project, Flix2Fly, to consider how to bring some air routes into the mix, as well.
The aim, he said in an interview, is to build a wider “transportation marketplace for customers looking for affordable mobility.”
Engert would not specify the exact size of the round, but he confirmed that it was at the same valuation as the first close of the Series F (which was just over $2 billion), and that the extra funding was “not double” the earlier amount, “but substantial.” (The company has always kept quiet about the exact amount it has raised, and from whom, in part to focus on the business, but also in part to keep competition guessing. We’re still trying to find out the actual number.)
Considering the investors in the round, it means it’s likely it has added hundreds of millions more to the mix alongside the €500 million from TCV, Permira and HV Holtzbrinck Ventures. Previous investors in the company have included Silver Lake and General Atlantic.
The company, similar to other on-demand transportation giants like Uber or RedBus in India, does not own a large fleet of vehicles, but works with individuals and companies that own these that want to tap into its logistics platform, which helps build efficient long-distance (intercity) routes — its shortest connection is 50km, most are beyond 100km, and the “sweet spot” Engert said is 200km — and source passengers who collectively want to travel on them.
Typically, Engert said these companies do not go all-in on the Flix platform, but they contribute a proportion of their fleets, which in turn get rebranded with Flix’s distinctive green logo. The idea — similar to a key building block for intracity car services — is to give the operators of those vehicles a steady, predicable stream of usage and business, which offsets the fact that those operators may make smaller margins on those routes because they are not operating them directly. It has also acquired other companies operating on a similar business model to grow its network.
In 2018, some 45 million people used FlixBus and FlixTrain, along 350,000 daily connections to more than 2,000 destinations, the company says. Its network currently spans 29 countries and 300 independent bus and train partners, and it attributes some 10,000 jobs in the industry to its business.
In doing so, FlixBus (and latterly FlixMobility) have tapped into an interesting segment of the world of transportation. While there has been a lot of focus on the next generation of transportation machines — whether that is scooters, or self-driving cars, or electric vehicles, or planes that do not burn as much fuel — Flix is instead working on ways of applying technology to bring some of the dinosaurs of the current (old) generation of vehicles into the 21st century. That has given it an interesting status of working in markets that have typically had less competition, or at least attention, leaving open water for companies like Flix.
That may not be the case longer term. Today companies like Uber are focusing on the urban mobility question, although as it grows to cover all modes of urban transport, there is a clear opportunity for it to extend to the next leg of the journey, too.
A number of startups are bringing technology and innovation to the fertility industry, with a growing few focused specifically on male fertility.
“Society at large doesn’t understand the subject of fertility,” Tom Smith, the co-founder and chief executive officer of men’s sperm storage startup Dadi tells TechCrunch. “People see it as a female issue.”
Dadi has raised a $5 million seed extension led by TCM, an investment advisory firm affiliated with The Chernin Group, with existing investors including London seed-fund Firstminute Capital and New York’s Third Kind Venture Capital also participating. The company, which sends at-home fertility tests and sperm storage kits, closed a $2 million seed round earlier this year.
Dadi’s funding event comes shortly after another men’s fertility business, Legacy, raised a $1.5 million round for its sperm testing and freezing service. Both companies hope to leverage venture capital funding to become the dominant men’s fertility brand.
Bain Capital Ventures -backed Legacy, which won TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield competition at Disrupt Berlin 2018, allows men to get their sperm tested and frozen without visiting a clinic or meeting with a doctor. Founder and chief executive officer Khaled Kteily said the company, which is based out of the Harvard Innovation Labs in Boston, planned to use the capital to expand its sperm analysis and cryogenic storage services.
Sarah Steinle, head of marketing, Khaled Kteily, founder and CEO, and Daniel Madero, head of clinic partnerships at Legacy .
Like many startups today, Dadi and Legacy are capitalizing on the direct-to-consumer business model to educate men about their fertility. Customers of both Dadi and Legacy simply order a DIY sperm collection kit online, collect a sperm sample and send it back to the company for a full fertility report. Both companies offer sperm storage services too. Dadi charges a total of $199.98 for its sperm testing kit and one year of sperm storage, while Legacy asks for $350 for clinical fertility analysis and lifestyle recommendations. To store your sperm in Legacy’s cryogenic storage facilities, it’s an additional $20 per month.
One in six couples struggles to get pregnant after one year of trying. According to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, one-third of the infertility cases amongst those couples are caused by fertility problems in men, another one-third of issues are connected to women and the remaining cases are a result of a combination of male and female fertility issues. By making sperm storage more accessible, startups hope to encourage a conversation around family planning and fertility among young men.
“Men also have a biological clock,” Smith said. “From your late 20s and onward, your overall sperm count absolutely declines and, more importantly, the number of mutations that can be passed on to that potential child grows.”
Dadi, a New York-based company, plans to use its latest bout of funding to continue developing a number of yet-to-be-announced products, as well as offer new support services to customers who’ve taken Dadi’s fertility tests: “If we are going to live up to our overall objective of being this encompassing business helping men through the fertility stack, the next step for us is investing in next-step support,” Smith explains.
Dadi’s founding team lacks experience in the healthcare sector, which is likely to pose problems as the company expands and forges partnerships in the greater healthcare field. Smith previously led a custom emoji business, Imoji, which was acquired by Giphy in 2017. Dadi co-founder Mackey Saturday, for his part, was previously a graphic designer responsible for creating Instagram’s logo.
Aiming to make up for its lack of expertise, Dadi has formed a Science and Technology Advisory Board with participation from Dr. Michael Eisenberg, associate professor of urology at Stanford’s Medical Center, and Dr. Jacques Cohen, the laboratory director at ART Institute of Washington at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
Legacy’s Kteily previously worked as a consultant focused on health & life sciences before serving as a senior manager at the World Economic Forum. Daniel Madero and Sarah Steinle, also Legacy co-founders, previously worked at Medifertil, a Colombian fertility clinic, and Extend Fertility, respectively.
In addition to Dadi and Legacy, other companies close to the space have recently secured notable investments including Hims, the provider of direct-to-consumer erectile dysfunction (ED) and hair loss medication, which raised a $100 million this year. Another seller of ED meds, Ro, has raised a total of $91 million. And Manual, an educational portal and treatment platform for men’s issues, raised a £5 million seed round in January from Felix Capital, Cherry Ventures and Cassius Capital.
Most entrepreneurs who have tried to compete with Netflix have failed. But Efe Cakarel isn’t one of them. As the founder and CEO of MUBI, he has created a beloved movie streaming service. That’s why I’m excited to announce that MUBI founder Efe Cakarel is joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin.
MUBI has been around for more than a decade. Back then, Netflix was just launching its on-demand streaming service. It was still mostly a DVD rental company.
Instead of focusing on quantity and mainstream content, MUBI went the opposite direction with a subscription tailored for cinephiles. Every day, MUBI adds a new movie to its catalog. It remains available for 30 days before it disappears from the service.
With this rolling window of 30 movies, there’s always something new, something interesting. The limited selection has become an asset as you can take time to read about each movie and watch things you would have never considered watching on a service with thousands of titles.
More recently, the company started purchasing exclusive distribution rights and even producing its own original content. The service is available in most countries around the world.
But it hasn’t always been an easy ride. A few years ago, MUBI had plans to form a joint venture with a Chinese partner in order to launch a service in China. The company had to cancel the project.
And yet, MUBI is still around after all those years. I’m personally impressed by Cakarel’s resilience and I can’t wait to see what’s next for the company.
Buy your ticket to Disrupt Berlin to listen to this discussion and many others. The conference will take place on December 11-12.
In addition to panels and fireside chats, like this one, new startups will participate in the Startup Battlefield to compete for the highly coveted Battlefield Cup.
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Robinhood, the Silicon Valley-based stock trading app that was recently valued by investors at $7.6 billion, has received regulatory approval in the U.K., breaking cover on its plans to set up shop in London (as reported exclusively by TechCrunch 7 months ago).
Specifically, Robinhood International Ltd., a Robinhood subsidiary, has been authorised to operate as a broker (with some restrictions) in the U.K. by the Financial Conduct Authority, which regulates U.K. financial services. This gears Robinhood up for a U.K. launch, although the company is staying tightlipped on when exactly that will be.
In addition, Robinhood is disclosing that it has appointed Wander Rutgers as President of Robinhood International. He joins from London fintech Plum, where he headed up the startup’s investing and savings product, and prior to that is said to have led product, compliance and operations teams at TransferWise.
At Robinhood, Rutgers will lead the U.K. business and oversee the company’s new London office, which has already begun staffing up. Sources told me in April that Robinhood was busy hiring for multiple U.K. positions, including recruitment, operations, marketing/PR, customer support, compliance and product.
The company tells me it is also building out a London-based user research team so it can better find product-market fit here. Crudely building a localised version of Robinhood obviously won’t cut it.
Meanwhile, news that Robinhood is ramping its planned U.K. launch is interesting in the context of local fintech startups that have launched their own fee-free trading offerings.
First out of the gate was London-based Freetrade, which chose very early on to build a bona-fide “challenger broker,” including obtaining the required license from the FCA, rather than simply partnering with an established broker. The app lets you invest in stocks and ETFs. Trades are “fee-free” if you are happy for your buy or sell trades to execute at the close of business each day. If you want to execute immediately, the startup charges a low £1 per trade.
And just last week, Revolut finally launched its fee-free stock trading feature, albeit tentatively. For now, the feature is limited to some Revolut customers with a premium Metal card (which itself entails a monthly subscription fee) and covers 300 U.S.-listed stocks. The company says that it plans to expand to U.K. and European stocks as well as Exchange Traded Funds in the future. Noteworthy, my understanding is that Revolut doesn’t have its own broker license but is partnering with US broker DriveWealth for part of its tech and the required regulatory authorisation (it also explains why, for now, Revolut is offering access to U.S. stocks only).
In contrast, Freetrade has long argued that to innovate within trading, you need to build and own the full brokerage stack. It was the first mover in this regard amongst the new crop of “fee-free” trading apps in the U.K., though others, including Netherlands-based Bux and now Robinhood, have since taken the same path. Only time will tell if Revolut will be forced to do the same.
Another tidbit is that Revolut and Robinhood share investors, namely Index and DST. That makes for an interesting subplot as the two unicorns encroach on each other’s lawn. No conflict, no interest.
On-demand delivery business Postmates says it’s been granted the first-ever permit for sidewalk robotics operations in the city of San Francisco.
According to San Francisco Public Works, the permits are active for 180 days and authorize the testing of up to three autonomous delivery devices. We’ve reached out to the Public Works department for comment.
Postmates has since 2017 been working alongside San Francisco supervisor Norman Yee and labor and advocacy groups to develop a framework for sidewalk robotics. The issuance of the permit makes San Francisco one of the first cities to formally allow companies to test autonomous delivery robots under a new pilot program.
Previously, companies were testing autonomous robots in various San Francisco streets sans permits, until the city voted to ban street robots from testing without official government permits, akin to the electric-scooter saga of 2018.
“We’ve been eager to work directly with cities to seek a collaborative and inclusive approach to robotic deployment that respects our public rights of way, includes community input, and allows cities to develop thoughtful regulatory regimes,” a representative of Postmates said in a statement provided to TechCrunch.
Postmates semi-autonomous sidewalk rover, Serve, was unveiled in December. Using cameras and lidar to navigate sidewalks, Serve can carry 50 pounds for up to 25 miles after one charge. Postmates has a human pilot remotely monitoring the Serve fleets and each rover has a “Help” button, touchscreen and video chat display for customers or passers-by to use if necessary. The company originally said they planned to roll out the bots in 2019, though no pilots have been officially announced yet.
Postmates semi-autonomous delivery robot, Serve
Postmates says they’ve made a number of changes to Serve in recent months, including implementing new lidar tech that’s smaller, more lightweight and durable, with zero-emission capabilities. Under Ken Kocienda, an Apple veteran that joined Postmates recently, the Serve team has also developed a new scripting language for animating Serve’s “eyes.”
“We are spending a lot of time going in and refining and inventing new ways that Serve can communicate,” Kocienda told TechCrunch in an interview earlier this year. “We want to make it socially intelligent. We want people, when they see Serve going down the street, to smile at it and to be happy to see it there.”
According to documents provided by Postmates, another autonomous delivery company, Marble, was not granted a permit after labor union Teamsters said the startup lacked an adequate Labor Dispute statement in its permit application. Marble is a last-mile logistics business based in San Francisco. Last year, the company closed a $10 million round with support from Tencent, CrunchFund and others.
Postmates, for its part, is expected to go public later this year in a highly anticipated initial public offering. The business filed confidentially for its offering in February after lining up a $100 million pre-IPO financing that valued the business at $1.85 billion. Postmates is said to be simultaneously exploring an M&A exit, according to Recode, which recently wrote that Posmates has discussed a merger with DoorDash, another top food delivery provider.
In June, Postmates announced Google’s vice president of finance, Kristin Reinke, had joined its board of directors, a sign it was sticking to IPO plans.
Postmates is backed by Tiger Global, BlackRock, Spark Capital, Uncork Capital, Founders Fund, Slow Ventures and others.
Disrupt San Francisco 2019 takes place on October 2-4. More than 10,000 people — tech founders, investors, hackers, leaders, makers and shakers — will gather for three days focused on early-stage startups. And if you work for a government agency or a nonprofit, we have great news in the form of a deep discount on Innovator passes.
We want as many different voices at the Disrupt table as possible, so take advantage of this opportunity and let your voice be heard. Your price of admission: $495, which saves you $800 over the early-bird price. Only your Innovator pass is discounted — not your Disrupt experience.
You’ll have access to the full conference and all the programming across the Main Stage, the Extra Crunch Stage, the Showcase Stage and Q&A sessions. That includes Startup Battlefield, our epic pitch competition, where extraordinary startups compete for $100,000.
Explore more than 1,000 early-stage startups and sponsors camped out in Startup Alley, participate in interactive workshops and network, network, network. Speaking of networking, you can use CrunchMatch, our free attendee networking platform, to seek out and make appointments with the people who can move your business forward.
Your pass also gets you into the always-awesome TechCrunch networking events. When the conference ends, you also have access to our library of event video content, so no worries if you miss anything.
And in a classic “but wait, there’s more” moment, your Innovator pass also gives you access to discounted airline fares and hotel rooms. Ka-ching.
That’s a whole lotta value, amirite? And now here comes the fine print.
All discounted tickets are non-refundable, and you can’t combine them with any other offer. To qualify for the discount, you must be a current, full-time employee of a nonprofit organization, a federal, state or local government agency, an international government agency or be an active military member.
Nonprofit employees must provide their email address from their organization during the online registration process. Government employees must provide their valid .gov email address during the registration process.
At the on-site registration check-in, you must show proof of current employment at your nonprofit (copy of 501c3 documentation) or government organization. Government contractors, including contractors working on government “Cost Reimbursable Contracts,” are not eligible for the government discount.
We accept the following forms of valid government ID:
Government-issued Visa, MasterCard or American ExpressGovernment picture IDMilitary picture IDFederally Funded Research Development Corp (FFRDC) IDIf you don’t present valid nonprofit documentation or government ID at registration, you’ll have to pay the full on-site price ($1,995).
Disrupt San Francisco 2019 takes place on October 2-4, and we have a limited number of these tickets. Buy your discounted Innovator pass today and secure your place at the table.
If you go back about a decade, Hadoop was hot and getting hotter. It was a platform for processing big data, just as big data was emerging from the domain of a few web-scale companies to one where every company was suddenly concerned about processing huge amounts of data. The future was bright, an open source project with a bunch of startups emerging to fulfill that big data promise in the enterprise.
Three companies in particular emerged out of that early scrum — Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR — and between them raised more than $1.5 billion. The lion’s share of that went to Cloudera in one massive chunk when Intel Capital invested a whopping $740 million in the company. But times have changed.
Just yesterday, HPE bought the assets of MapR, a company that had raised $280 million. The deal was pegged at under $50 million, according to multiple reports. That’s not what you call a healthy return on investment.
If enterprise software makes your entrepreneurial heart beat faster, you do not want to miss TC Sessions: Enterprise 2019 on September 5 in San Francisco. And if you really want to make your heart sing, buy an early-bird ticket and save $100. But act quickly, because that deal disappears in just 48 hours on August 9 at 11:59 p.m. (PT).
Join more than 1,000 enterprise software experts and aficionados — leaders, rising founders and VCs — to discuss, explore and gain insight into the current and future state of enterprise companies, trends and technology.
This day-long conference features more than 20 sessions on the Main stage including interviews, panel discussions, plus separate speaker Q&As and breakout sessions. You’ll hear from industry giants like these (to name just a few):
George Brady, CTO at Capital OneJim Clarke, Intel’s director of Quantum HardwareScott Farquhar, co-founder and co-CEO at AtlassianAaron Levie, Box co-founder and CEOAparna Sinha, Google’s director of product management for Kubernetes and AnthosOur presentations cover a wide range of crucial topics — like this one featuring Martin Casado (Andreessen Horowitz) and Wendy Nather (Duo Security):
Keeping the Enterprise Secure: Enterprises face a litany of threats from both the inside and outside the firewall. Now more than ever, companies — especially startups — have to put security first. From preventing data from leaking to keeping bad actors out of your network, enterprises have it tough. How can you secure the enterprise without slowing growth? We’ll discuss the role of a modern CSO and how to move fast… without breaking things.
You’ll find the lineup of events in the agenda, and we might even add a few surprises between now and September.
No TechCrunch Session would be complete without world-class networking, and you’ll have plenty of opportunities to build new connections. Even better, you’ll have CrunchMatch at your disposal. Our free business match-making platform helps you cut through the noise, zero in on the right people and produce better results.
You can’t clone yourself (yet), but you can bring your team and cover more ground. Take advantage of our group discount and save 20% when you purchase four or more tickets at once.
One more ROI checkpoint. For every ticket you buy to this Session, we’ll register you for a free Expo-only pass to TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2019.
TC Sessions: Enterprise takes place in less than one month, but the early-bird price evaporates in just 48 hours. Buy your early-bird ticket before the deadline — August 9 at 11:59 p.m. (PT). Save $100 and make your heart sing.
Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Enterprise? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.
Over the past couple decades, retail has fundamentally changed. Amazon has swept in and devoured mom and pop stores, while incumbent brands face increased competition from a new crop of digital-first companies.
But not everything changes. People still want to see and feel the goods they’ll purchase, and most brands still see huge benefits from having a physical outpost.
At Disrupt SF 2019, we’ll hear from three founders and CEOs who have managed to not only build successful D2C brands, but also take those brands into the physical world.
So without any further ado, we’re delighted to announce that Brooklinen cofounder and CEO Rich Fulop, Framebridge founder and CEO Susan Tynan, and thredUP founder and CEO James Reinhart will join us at Disrupt SF 2019, which runs October 2 – October 4.
Brooklinen launched in 2014 with a straightforward value proposition: luxury sheets for a relatively affordable price. The company was founded by Rich and Vicki Fulop, a married couple, who have expanded the brand to encompass not only bed linens but towels, bath mats, and even loungewear. Through a combination of word of mouth and fantastic brand design, the products have grown in popularity over the years. But one of the real breakthroughs of the company was the decision to move forward with a physical space.
The Fulops thought carefully about timing, location, whether or not to hold inventory, how to design the space, and some of the other details that might seem like minutiae but that make a meaningful difference in the success of the store. We’re amped to hear more from Fulop about how he made these decisions and which ones worked out.
Framebridge, founded by Susan Tynan, launched in 2014 and has raised a whopping $82 million to dramatically simplify the process of getting things framed. Framebridge helps users visualize how their items will look in different style frames, and then sends shipping labels to the user. By letting users shop online, and centralizing the framing process in a single location, the company has been able to offer customers lower prices than traditional framers. Lower prices then translates to users getting more things framed.
Earlier this year, however, Framebridge shook things up with the introduction of two physical stores: one in Bethesda, MD and one in downtown Washington D.C. According to Tynan, average order volumes are 40 percent higher in store than they were online. Tynan brings a unique perspective to the panel in that the stores are built specifically to mimic the process of buying through Framebridge’s website, with the hope to turn physical buyers into online buyers. Plus, Framebridge operates two stores in very different markets, with one location in a concentrated metropolitan area and one in a more suburban neighborhood.
Meanwhile, thredUP founder and CEO James Reinhart has paved his own way in the offline retail world. The company claims to be the largest online marketplace for secondhand clothing, and is looking to take that same dominance into brick-and-mortar. But not without a certain level of calculation.
thredUP is using its troves of consumer behavior data to make decisions in offline, including the locations of the stores. The first store, for example, was launched in San Marcos, TX because the company has an unusually high concentration of shoppers in that area. Moreover, thredUP uses data about what types of clothing shoppers in a certain geographical area are interested in, and stock their stores accordingly. Plus, the company has built technology to let offline shoppers browse the entire online inventory based on the things they like in the stores.
Obviously, there is plenty to learn from these founders about all the finer points of taking a digital-first brand into the real world. We’re thrilled to have them all in the same room, and hope you’ll join us.
Disrupt SF runs October 2 – October 4 at the Moscone Center in the heart of San Francisco. Tickets are available here.
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Sramana Mitra: What trends are you seeing in your deal flow? What strikes you as emerging trends? Nnamdi Okike: There are three themes that we use to drive our sourcing strategy. These themes have...
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August is often considered the black hole of venture capital fundraising. Everyone is on vacation (well, everyone who’s not a founder anyway), while half of Silicon Valley is slogging down to Black Rock City for Burning Man. It understandably can just seem like an exercise in futility to try to raise any funding at all.
I’m here to tell you though that August is not the bleakest month of the year for fundraising (that actually would be December according to data from DocSend we’ve published). In fact, using August effectively for fundraising is perhaps the single most important factor for success in the coming fundraising season (there is a reason that YC Demo Day, one of the largest fundraising events in the calendar, is set for August 19-20 after all).
Let’s walk through a plan of attack.
Let’s get one thing out of the way: Yes, VCs take vacation, sometimes sparklingly expensive ones, like the kinds with yachts or the kinds where someone rents out a whole ski chalet (or two). It can seem like an incredibly enviable lifestyle, and it is at a certain point of success, particularly in comparison to the context of a founder who is working around the clock and eating instant ramen.
Rookout, a startup that provides debugging across a variety of environments, including serverless and containers, announced an $8 million Series A investment today. It plans to use the money to expand beyond its debugging roots.
The round was led by Cisco Investments along with existing investors TLV Partners and Emerge. Nat Friedman, CEO of GitHub; John Kodumal, CTO and co-founder of LaunchDarkly; and Raymond Colletti, VP of revenue at Codecov also participated.
“Rookout from day one has been working to provide production debugging and collection capabilities to all platforms,” Or Weis, co-founder and CEO of Rookout told TechCrunch. That has included serverless like AWS Lambda, containers and Kubernetes and Platform-as-a-Service like Google App Engine and Elastic Beanstalk.
The company is also giving visibility into platforms that are sometimes hard to observe because of the ephemeral nature of the technology, and that go beyond its pure debugging capabilities. “In the last year, we’ve discovered that our customers are finding completely new ways to use Rookout’s code-level data collection capabilities and that we need to accommodate, support and enhance the many varied uses of code-level observability and pipelining,” Weiss said in a statement.
It was particularly telling that a company like Cisco was deeply involved in the round. Rob Salvagno, vice president of Cisco Global Corporate Development and Cisco Investments, likes the developer focus of the company.
“Developers have become key influencers of enterprise IT spend. By collecting data on-demand without re-deploying, Rookout created a Developer-centric software, which short-circuits complexities in the production debugging, increases Developer efficiency and reduces the friction which exists between IT Ops and Developers,” Salvagno said in a statement.
Rookout, which launched in 2017, has offices in San Francisco and Tel Aviv, with a total of 20 employees. It has raised more than $12 million.
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