For the past decade, Brian Faux has been fighting on the front lines of housing finance. In between pursuing a career in mortgage lending and holding stints at Freddie Mac and Wells Fargo, Faux spent more than two years in the detritus of the 2008 financial crisis advising the Department of Housing and Urban Development on how to recover the housing markets through the creation of the Distressed Asset Stabilization Program.

Now Faux, along with co-founders Nora Apsel and Adam Rothblatt, is working to take those hard-learned lessons and build a streamlined and simple mortgage broker online, particularly for first-time homebuyers. Through New York City-based Morty, the trio and their team have launched a tool that allows homebuyers to understand exactly what their buying power is and which homes they can afford.

That product has captured the attention of investors. The company announced today an $8.5 million Series A fundraise led by Prudence Holdings, with participation from Lerer Hippeau and Thrive Capital, the firm which had led Morty’s seed round in 2017. Prudence, a family office managed by Gavin Myers, previously backed real estate brokering startup Compass, and the Morty team first met the firm through participation in Techstars New York.

Morty’s main product guides homebuyers through the process of getting mortgage pre-approval and then finding and signing a loan with a mortgage lender. Through a “Home Financing Score,” the platform visually breaks down the factors that can lead to approval or rejection of a mortgage application, allowing users to optimize their finances to maximize their buying power.

While code operates much of the underwriting and origination process, there is a human touch as well. Faux explained that with current mortgage options, “It’s still too scary. It’s still too opaque, [so consumers] want that human interaction, eventually, but they just wanted it on their terms. And nobody’s kind of brought that to them” before Morty.

Apsel said that “As well as having a digital platform that automatically verifies and underwrites people so that they know exactly how much they qualify for, we also have have mortgage experts on staff available to help people through every step of the home buying process.”

She says that transparency and education have been key to Morty’s early indicators of success. “What we have found is that as long as you are communicating those things to all of the necessary parties — the homebuyer, the realtor, the title agent, everybody — it works. It’s the lack of transparency, and it’s the lack of communication that I think has frustrated this industry for so long,“ she said.

Morty, which at launch had licenses to operate in 10 states, has now expanded to cover 34 states. One notable exception though is New York, which is well-known for its particularly stringent and slow-moving licensing processes. The company is hoping to have full nationwide coverage in the years ahead.

Faux says that while the startup focuses on first-time homebuyers, there is nothing preventing the company from expanding to repeat home sales as well. “Once you build trust, and once you show them who you truly are, unbiased and just looking out for their well-being, they’ll come back to you,” he said.

Startups related to home buying have received intense attention from investors, with companies like Blend and Opendoor receiving nine-figure infusions of capital over the past few weeks. That said, Morty can also take advantage of incumbents like LendingTree, which aggregates loans in a variety of categories and is a Morty strategic partner. Morty’s differentiation is ultimately its focus on ease-of-use, as well as its wide licensing.

Updated: Changed language to describe LendingTree as a partner and not competitor of Morty.

According to a Grand View Research report published earlier this year, the global cyber security market is estimated to grow 11% annually through to 2025. The researcher estimates the industry to...

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Toyota is enlisting the help of startup Preferred Networks, a Japanese company founded in 2014 with a focus on artificial intelligence and deep learning, to help move forward its goal of developing useful service robots that can assist people in everyday life.

The two companies announced a partnership today to collaborate on research and development that will use Toyota’s Human Support Robot (HSR) robotics platform. The platform, which Toyota created in 2012 and has been developing since, is a basic robot designed to be able to work alongside people in everyday settings. Its primary uses involve offering basic care and support assistance in nursing and long-term care applications. Equipped with one arm, a display, cameras and a wheeled base, it can collect and retrieve items, and provide remote control and communication capabilities.

Preferred Networks already has some experience with Toyota’s HSR — it demonstrated one such robot programmed to clean a room fully autonomously at Japan’s CEATEC robotics conference in 2018. The system could identify objects, respond to specific human instructions and, importantly, pick up and put down in a safe manner objects it couldn’t define from its database.Toyota will be providing “several dozen” HSR units to Preferred Networks for the startup to work on, and then over the next three years, the two will collaborate on R&D, sharing the results of their work and the resulting intellectual property, with no restrictions on how either party uses the results of the joint work.

One of Toyota’s guiding goals as a company is to develop commercial home robotics that can work with people where they live. The automaker has a number of different projects in the works to make this happen, including through research at its Toyota Research Institute (TRI) subsidiary, which works with a number of academic institutions. Toyota also recently revealed a number of robotics projects it’s bringing to the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo, which will help it field test a number of its projects.

Sramana Mitra: When you look at Fortune 500 or Global 2000 customer base, what is the percentage of penetration of this kind of technology? Terrence McCrossan: Gartner’s data is probably the best...

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Brolly, the U.K. insurance app that lets you keep track of your various policies so you are correctly and competitively covered, is launching a new product to plug what it sees as a gap in home contents insurance.

Dubbed “Brolly Contents,” the new offering promises “flexible” monthly cover for all or a subset of the items you own, transparently priced and delivered in a more convenient way via Brolly’s mobile app. Features of Brolly Contents include the ability to insure up to £40,000 worth of belongings, suitable for renters or property owners, and no fees for updates to your cover.

In addition, there’s a promised loyalty discount of up to 25% that increases each month you stay with Brolly and haven’t made a claim. That’s the antithesis to incumbent providers who offer large discounts for new customers, which are then clawed back the following years on the premise that you are too lazy or time poor to bother switching.

Brolly founder and CEO Phoebe Hugh tells me her aim is to rid customers of what she calls the “loyalty tax,” while simultaneously upgrading contents insurance for the digital age.

“For the majority of consumers, contents insurance is the first voluntary insurance product they will come across,” says Hugh. “A digital native generation are approaching this for the first time and are confused and unhappy with what is currently available. Nine out of 10 households headed by someone between 65-75 have contents insurance, versus just 4 out of 10 of under 30s. This newer customer has become accustomed to digital delivery of everything, from banking to food delivery, and cannot find an insurance product that suits them. Brolly Contents is the first Brolly product to address these problems head on.”

Developed in partnership with specialist insurer Hiscox, Brolly Contents promises to be more flexible than similar products after Hugh and her team concluded that the current market wasn’t meeting existing Brolly customers’ needs, let alone expanding the market for contents insurance as a whole.

Contents insurance is typically sold as blanket cover but with lots of caveats, and/or requires tedious form filling and is still opaque at best. This leaves many not bothering to take out cover at all or discovering that the cover they have falls short when it’s time to make a claim.

In contrast, Brolly Contents claims to be more transparent, with a much simpler to understand product and an on-boarding experience delivered via in-app chat that walks you through how much cover you require and the amount of excess you wish to pay should you make a claim.

“With Brolly Contents, you can choose how much you want to insure and it doesn’t need to be everything in your home,” says Hugh. “You can get insured from as little as £4.50 a month, if you only want to protect a few things. There are no add-ons, and you can add valuables for no additional cost. Many businesses in this space, particularly some of the newer ones, are offering a branded product to customers which, in the background, consists of multiple underwriters with policies stitched together. As soon as you add some valuables and accidental damage, the price skyrockets. It’s pretty tricky to keep pricing competitive if this is how you operate.”

Meanwhile, Hugh — who before starting Brolly was an underwriter at Aviva — says that despite the insurtech hype, the insurance industry remains a “pre-disrupted market.” Incumbents are focused on where the profit currently is, and therefore the uninsured or beginner insurance customers aren’t well served. In the meantime, insurtech startups typically have to work with those same incumbents.

“A new business gaining traction in insurance is challenging; it’s unlikely you can underwrite yourself at the outset so you have to take a patient approach,” she says. “We found a world-class underwriting partner in Hiscox who shared our vision to simplify insurance, and who wanted to challenge the status quo, but are also trusted to pay out on claims. We’ve been working on Brolly Contents for over a year to deliver something genuinely new.”

Adds Matt Churchill, head of Hiscox Futures: “Consumer expectations of insurance are changing. We identified early on that Brolly were leading the charge in exploring new ways of engaging customers. Together, we’ve designed a simple insurance product and brought it to life on Brolly’s proven technology driven platform. We hope it brings positive benefits to consumers looking for simplicity and flexibility from a home contents policy.”

We’re still in the hunt for innovative early-stage hardware startup founders. And by that, we mean boundary-pushers, exceptional disrupters and all-around game-changers. If that sounds like you, you still have time to apply to compete in Hardware Battlefield at TC Shenzhen on November 11-12.

Don’t miss your chance to compete in our epic, hardware-focused pitch competition. Apply to TC Hardware Battlefield 2019. The grand prize is a cool $25,000, but there’s a lot more than money on the line. If you’re selected, you’ll launch your startup on a world stage — in front of eager investors and tech media. And you’ll do it in Shenzhen, the world’s hardware heartland. The exposure alone can be life-changing.

First things first. Does your startup qualify? The answer is yes — if you meet the following stipulations:

Our discerning TechCrunch editors will thoroughly review every qualified application and pick approximately 10-15 startups to compete. If you’re selected, get ready to work, because you’ll receive free pitch coaching from our editors. That’s six rigorous weeks to get you primed and prepped to pitch your hardware on a world stage — and outshine the competition.

Founders have just six minutes to pitch and demo their products — followed by an in-depth Q&A with the judges. If you make it to the final round, you’ll repeat the process in front of a new set of judges. After the hardware dust settles, the judges will name the Hardware Battlefield TC Shenzhen champion — who takes home the Battlefield Cup along with a check for an equity-free $25,000.

All the fast-paced action takes place in front of a live audience, and we capture the entire event on video and post it to our global audience on TechCrunch. That translates to a lot of exposure, and it can change the trajectory of your business — whether you win or not.

The Hardware Battlefield takes place during our second TC Shenzhen event (produced with TechNode, our partner in China). The show features top speakers from the startup world in China and beyond, plenty of startups exhibiting in Startup Alley and a hackathon. Stay tuned — we’ll have tickets available soon.

Take your shot — apply to TC Hardware Battlefield 2019 by August 14. Come to Shenzhen on November 11-12 and show us your hardware!

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

For nearly 15 years LanzaTech has been developing a carbon capture technology that can turn waste streams into ethanol that can be used for chemicals and fuel.

Now, with $72 million in fresh funding at a nearly $1 billion valuation and a newly inked partnership with biotechnology giant Novo Holdings, the company is looking to expand its suite of products beyond ethanol manufacturing, thanks, in part, to the intellectual property held by Novozymes (a Novo Holdings subsidiary).

“We are learning how to modify our organisms so they can make things other than ethanol directly,” said LanzaTech chief executive officer Jennifer Holmgren.

From its headquarters in Skokie, Ill., where LanzaTech relocated in 2014 from New Zealand, the biotechnology company has been plotting ways to reduce carbon emissions and create a more circular manufacturing system. That’s one where waste gases and solid waste sources that were previously considered to be un-recyclable are converted into chemicals by LanzaTech’s genetically modified microbes.

The company already has a commercial manufacturing facility in China, attached to a steel plant operated by the Shougang Group, which produces 16 million gallons of ethanol per year. LanzaTech’s technology pipes the waste gas into a fermenter, which is filled with genetically modified yeast that uses the carbon dioxide to produce ethanol. Another plant, using a similar technology, is under construction in Europe.

Through a partnership with Indian Oil, LanzaTech is working on a third waste gas converted to ethanol using a different waste gas taken from a Hydrogen plant.

The company has also inked early deals with airlines like Virgin in the U.K. and ANA in Japan to make an ethanol-based jet fuel for commercial flight. And a third application of the technology is being explored in Japan which takes previously un-recyclable waste streams from consumer products and converts that into ethanol and polyethylene that can be used to make bio-plastics or bio-based nylon fabrics.

Through the partnership with Novo Holdings, LanzaTech will be able to use the company’s technology to expand its work into other chemicals, according to Holmgren. “We are making product to sell into that [chemicals market] right now. We are taking ethanol and making products out of it. Taking ethylene and we will make polyethylene and we will make PET to substitute for fiber.”

Holmgren said that LanzaTech’s operations were currently reducing carbon dioxide emissions by the equivalent of taking 70,000 cars off the road.

“LanzaTech is addressing our collective need for sustainable fuels and materials, enabling industrial players to be part of building a truly circular economy,” said Anders Bendsen Spohr, senior director at Novo Holdings, in a statement. “Novo Holdings’ investment underlines our commitment to supporting the bio-industrials sector and, in particular, companies that are developing cutting-edge technology platforms. We are excited to work with the LanzaTech team and look forward to supporting the company in its next phase of growth.”

Holmgren said that the push into new chemicals by LanzaTech is symbolic of a resurgence of industrial biotechnology as one of the critical pathways to reducing carbon emissions and setting industry on a more sustainable production pathway.

“Industrial biotechnology can unlock the utility of a lot of waste carbon emissions,” said Holmgren. “[Municipal solid waste] is an urban oil field. And we are working to find new sources of sustainable carbon.”

LanzaTech isn’t alone in its quest to create sustainable pathways for chemical manufacturing. Solugen, an upstart biotechnology company out of Houston, is looking to commercialize the bio-production of hydrogen peroxide. It’s another chemical that’s at the heart of modern industrial processes — and is incredibly hazardous to make using traditional methods.

As the world warms, and carbon emissions continue to rise, it’s important that both companies find pathways to commercial success, according to Holmgren.

“It’s going to get much, much worse if we don’t do anything,” she said.

Gogoro, the Taiwanese electric vehicle company, has announced its first manufacturing partners. Yamaha, Aeon Motor and PGO will all launch new scooters this summer that run on Gogoro’s swappable batteries and charging infrastructure.

This means consumers who like Gogoro’s battery system will have a choice between buying Gogoro’s own scooters or scooters from its three partners. All scooters that use Gogoro’s energy network can exchange batteries at the 1,300 GoStations currently in Taiwan.

Beyond its own electric scooters, Gogoro sees its technology, most of which is developed in-house, as an open platform for electric vehicles, with the goal of reducing pollution in cities with heavy traffic. It recently launched a ridesharing platform that can be used as a white-label solution by companies that want to launch their own electric scooter-sharing program (Gogoro’s scooters are already use by Coup, the European ridesharing startup).

For a deeper look into the company’s origins and plans, Extra Crunch subscribers can read a recently published interview with Gogoro co-founder and CEO Horace Luke.

Eleven million women in the U.S. live more than an hour from an abortion clinic, a number expected to increase as facilities close up shop following new restrictions on women’s healthcare in several states.

Planned Parenthood and other leading nonprofits continue to put up a good fight while private “mission-driven” companies in the burgeoning women’s health tech sector are all talk and little action. But a new effort from The Pill Club, an Alphabet-backed birth control and prescription delivery startup, may lead to change in the nascent sector.

The Pill Club has partnered with Power To Decide, a nonprofit campaign to prevent unplanned pregnancies, to dole out free emergency contraception to women in need. Together they’ll distribute 5,000 units of a generic form of Plan B, a pill taken after sex to stop a pregnancy before it starts. For the next three months The Pill Club will also match all donations up to $10,000 made to Power To Decide’s Contraceptive Access Fund, which helps low-income women access contraception. Anyone can sign up now to receive free units.

The Pill Club’s decision to share resources with a nonprofit comes as several states this year have imposed new laws restricting or outlawing abortion procedures. Alabama, for example, earlier this year passed a Senate bill banning abortion in the state. Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky and others have also OK’d new restrictions on abortion.

This is The Pill Club’s first effort to donate emergency contraception to populations in need, as well as its first partnership with a not-for-profit entity. Co-founder and chief executive officer Nick Chang says the startup thought long and hard about how it could be most helpful to women in this political climate.

“We thought, what can we do to support women in these states in ways that other companies may not be able to?,” Chang tells TechCrunch. “This is the moment where private companies can really go out and benefit women in ways that may not be supported in other avenues. Since we have the means and ability to do it in ways that are more convenient and private, it’s our opportunity to drive access and support.”

Founded in 2014 and backed with more than $60 million in venture capital funding, one might argue The Pill Club should have forged partnerships like this from the get-go. Curious what efforts other well-funded birth control startups were making to support women in 2019, especially women in contraceptive deserts who are likely unfamiliar with the new line of consumer birth control brands, I reached out to The Pill Club’s competitors Nurx, a fellow birth control delivery company, and Hers, a line of women’s healthcare products owned by the billion-dollar startup Hims.

Both companies emphasized the fact that many of their customers live in Southern states, or the region most impacted by new limitations to abortion care, but didn’t mention any new efforts to increase access, like partnerships with nonprofits or donations. (Update: Nurx has also partnered with Power To Decide to give 1,000 women birth control for free for one year via the Contraceptive Access Fund program). Hers provided this quote from the company’s co-founder Hilary Coles, which didn’t answer my question but did make clear the company is thinking about serving contraceptive deserts:

“At Hers, our mission is to provide women with more convenient and affordable access to the healthcare system,” Hers co-founders Hilary Coles said in a statement. “Approximately 3.5 million patients go without care because they cannot access transportation to their providers and 19.5 million women have reported not having access to a clinic that provides birth control specifically. That’s simply unacceptable. Closing the gaps caused by geographic barriers between patients and their doctors was one of the primary challenges we set out to address when founding Hers. We’re proud to be a resource for women nationwide, including those who live in contraceptive deserts who may not otherwise have access to the care they need. It’s crucial to Hers to be part of the solution in alleviating the pain points women experience within the healthcare system.” 

It’s not the responsibility of these companies to improve the political landscape of the U.S., but with $340 million in private capital shared between them, the trio does have a unique opportunity to innovate, share, collaborate and influence. After all, that’s what’s so great about healthtech; it brings new, innovative solutions to an industry characterized by antiquated systems and slow movers. For once, Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” mantra may be appropriately applied to a facet of healthcare. Women need sustained access to contraception and abortion care. Fast.

“This is the time when private companies can step in,” Chang concluded. “We can come in and help out and it’s our responsibility to do that.”

Private rocket launch startup and SpaceX competitor Rocket Lab made a big announcement today: It’ll be looking to re-use the first stage of its Electron rockets, returning them to Earth with a controlled landing after they make their initial trip to orbit with the payload on board. The landing sequence will be different from SpaceX’s however: They’ll attempt to catch the returned first stage mid-air using a helicopter.

That’s in part because, as Rocket Lab founder and CEO Peter Beck told a crowd when announcing the news today, the company is “not doing a propulsive re-entry” and “we’re not doing a propulsive landing,” and instead will leach off its immense speed upon return to Earth through a turnaround burn in space before releasing a parachute to slow it down enough for a helicopter to catch it.

There are a number of steps required to get to that point, but already, Rocket Lab has been looking to measure all the data it needs to ensure this is possible through its last few launches. It’s upgrading the instrumentation for its eighth flight to gather yet more data, and then on flight 10 it’ll have the rocket splash down into the ocean to recover that rocket for even more learning. Then, during a flight to be determined later (Beck is unwilling to put a number on it at this stage) they’ll try to actually bring one down in good enough shape to reuse it.

As for why, there’s a clear advantage to being able to re-fly rockets, and it’s a simple one to understand when you realize that there’s a huge amount of demand for commercial launches.

“The fundamental reason we’re doing this is launch frequency,” Beck said. “Even if I can get the stage done once, I can effectively double production ratio.”

Beck also added that the biggest difficulty will be braking the rocket’s speed as it returns to Earth — a feat next to which he said the actual mid-air capture of the Electron via helicopter is actually pretty easy, from his POV as an amateur helicopter pilot in training.

Rocket Lab has an HQ in Huntington Beach, Calif. and its own private launch site in New Zealand; it was founded in 2006 by Beck. The company has been test launching its orbital Electron rocket since 2017, and serving customers commercially since 2018. It also intends to launch from Virginia in the U.S. starting in 2019.

The company revealed its Photon satellite platform earlier this year, which would allow small satellite operators to focus on their specific service and use the off-the-shelf Photon design to skip the step of actually designing and building the satellite itself.