In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:

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Sramana Mitra: You don’t use off-the-shelf visualization tools like Tableau or FusionCharts? There’s a whole bunch of visualization capabilities available. You don’t use any of that. You do...

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I’m publishing this series on LinkedIn called Colors to explore a topic that I care deeply about: the Renaissance Mind. I am just as passionate about entrepreneurship, technology, and business, as I...

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Jared Shusterman bootstrapped his company with his bar mitzvah money. Read his wonderful story! Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you...

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During this week’s roundtable, we had Sean Dawes, Co-founder at Modded Euros, as our guest. We discussed the state of the union in niche e-commerce startups in the shadow of Amazon’s dominance....

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Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Nnamdi Okike was recorded in June 2019. Nnamdi...

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Hello and welcome back to Startups Weekly, a weekend newsletter that dives into the week’s noteworthy startups and venture capital news. Before I jump into today’s topic, let’s catch up a bit. Last week, I wrote about SoftBank’s second Vision Fund. Before that, I noted some challenges plaguing mental health tech startups.

Remember, you can send me tips, suggestions and feedback to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or on Twitter @KateClarkTweets. If you don’t subscribe to Startups Weekly yet, you can do that here.

What’s new?

This week DoorDash announced an agreement to acquire Caviar, an on-demand delivery business, from Square. DoorDash says it will pay $410 million for the company in a combination of cash and stock. If you’re thinking that seems like a lot of money, you are very much correct.

It’s so much money that all of us over here at TechCrunch were scratching our heads trying to understand why DoorDash would shell out that kind of cash. After all, Square paid only $90 million in stock for Caviar when it acquired the company back in 2014. However, DoorDash is VC cash-rich. The business, still privately-owned, has raised an astronomical sum of venture capital. This year alone it’s raised $1 billion, including a Series G funding of $600 million that valued it at $12.6 billion.

When a company raises that many huge rounds so close together, you can only assume it’s burning through a lot of cash. When it comes time for DoorDash to begin pitching Wall Street for an IPO — we’re thinking late next year — established subsidiaries like Caviar will at least help bolster its IPO-ready narrative.

With monster companies like DoorDash, Grubhub and UberEats owning the food delivery space, we will no doubt see more big M&A deals and more startups die. (Remeber the insane fall of Munchery, anyone?) But will any of these efforts ever become profitable? Or will DoorDash burn through cash until there’s just no more cash left to burn?

#Equitypod

If you enjoy this newsletter, be sure to check out TechCrunch’s venture-focused podcast, Equity. In this week’s episode, available here, Equity co-host Alex Wilhelm and I attempt to make sense of DoorDash’s acquisition of Caviar. Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast and Spotify.

Big Deals

Little Deals

M&A

Venture Fundraising

Extra Crunch

Here’s your weekly reminder that for a low price — a complete bargain really — you can learn more about the startups and venture capital ecosystem with a subscription to Extra Crunch. We offer exclusive deep dives, Q&As, newsletters, resources and recommendations, and fundamental startup how-to guides to our subscribers. Here are some of the best EC posts of the week:

Here are five words you’ll never hear spring from the mouth of an early-stage startupper. “I don’t mind paying more.” We feel you, and that’s why we’re letting you know that the price of admission to TC Sessions Enterprise 2019, which takes place on September 5, goes up next week.

Our $249 early-bird ticket price remains in play until 11:59 p.m. (PT) on August 9. Buy your ticket now and save $100.

Now that you’ve scored the best possible price, get ready to experience a full day focused on what’s around the corner for enterprise — the biggest and richest startup category in Silicon Valley. More than 1,000 attendees, including many of the industry’s top founders, CEOs, investors and technologists, will join TechCrunch’s editors onstage for interviews covering all the big enterprise topics — AI, the cloud, Kubernetes, data and security, marketing automation and event quantum computing, to name a few.

This conference features more than 20 sessions on the main stage, plus separate Q&As with the speakers and breakout sessions. Check out the agenda here.

Just to peek at one session, TechCrunch’s Connie Loizos will interview three top VCs — Jason Green (Emergence Capital), Maha Ibrahim (Canaan Partners) and Rebecca Lynn (Canvas Ventures) — in a session entitled Investing with an Eye to the Future. In an ever-changing technological landscape, it’s not easy for VCs to know what’s coming next and how to place their bets. Yet, it’s the job of investors to peer around the corner and find the next big thing, whether that’s in AI, serverless, blockchain, edge computing or other emerging technologies. Our panel will look at the challenges of enterprise investing, what they look for in enterprise startups and how they decide where to put their money.

Want to boost your ROI? Take advantage of our group discount — save 20% when you buy four or more tickets at once. And remember, for every ticket you buy to TC Sessions: Enterprise, we’ll register you for a free Expo Only pass to TechCrunch Disrupt SF on October 2-4.

TC Sessions: Enterprise takes place September 5, but your chance to save $100 ends next week. No one enjoys paying more, so buy an early-bird ticket today, cross it off your to-do list and enjoy your savings.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Enterprise 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Ganes Kesari: The final aspect is the storytelling. There can be great insights from analytics, but unless it’s used by the organization, it is a waste. That’s where we bring in a data visualization...

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Yesterday, Tyler “Ninja” Blevins announced that he’s leaving Twitch, moving his streaming career over to Microsoft’s Mixer platform. This morning, Mixer has shot to the top of the App Store’s free app charts.

Microsoft acquired Mixer in 2016, back when it was called Beam, and has been trying to grow the platform since. However, Mixer has had a tough go of it with competition from the industry leader, Twitch, as well as other tech giants like Google (YouTube) and Facebook.

In fact, Mixer represented just 3% of game streaming viewership hours in the last quarter, according to StreamElements.

Microsoft had this to say about Ninja’s move:

We’re thrilled to welcome Ninja and his community to Mixer. Mixer is a place that was formed around being positive and welcoming from day one, and we look forward to the energy Ninja and his community will bring.

Ninja announced the news with a video, which didn’t offer much by way of reasons for the move. It’s highly likely that Microsoft paid a pretty penny for it, though that hasn’t been officially confirmed.

In less than 24 hours, his new Mixer channel has picked up more than 250,000 followers, and Mixer has risen to the top of the App Store charts.

It’s early days for the switch, but it’s still a long way to go to get back to the 14 million followers Ninja enjoyed on Twitch.

According to a recently published report, the global device vulnerability management market is estimated to grow 13% annually from $5.97 billion in 2019 to $16.3 billion by the end of 2025. Earlier...

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

This week Kate and Alex were back to dig through a surprising number of fresh rounds and new funds, along with a little breaking news. The traditional VC summer is nowhere to be seen in 2019, so expect the show to stay packed for the foreseeable future.

DoorDash’s decision to buy Caviar from Square upended our agenda. The decacorn’s decision to drop $410 million in cash and stock on an asset that Square had spent around $90 million on was nearly confusing. Square couldn’t offload the damn thing for $100 million back in 2016; Jack’s second company has now shed an unprofitable arm that looked less and less core to its operations as time has gone along. And DoorDash turned cash and stock into a bit of growth.

Next on the docket was Clearbanc. The company, which wants to disrupt venture capital by popularizing the revenue-based financing model, raised a $50 million round and announced a $250 million fund. We’re keeping a close eye on this company, as its fast-growth is relatively unmatched. Plus, Kate’s interviewing Clearbanc co-founder Michele Romanow at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco, our annual conference that brings together the leaders of tech today. So that’s fun.

In this week’s edition of SaaS Watch, Monday.com raised $150 million at a $1.9 billion valuation. The corporate task management and productivity company is another firm selling software to help teams work together more efficiently. Slack, Asana, Notion and others are working in related areas.

Our second to last topic was Compass. There wasn’t enough time to go too deep, but here’s the TL;DR: Compass raised a whopping $370 million on a valuation of $6.4 billion.

And finally, PowerPlant Ventures raised a second, larger fund. The new $165 million vehicle will follow the first (a $42 million capital pool, as TechCrunch reported), investing in plant-based food companies. With the epic rise of Beyond Meat on the public markets, plant-based foods are hot and investors want a bite of the results. Also, we dig niche, focused funds.

Reminder, you can connect with us via email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. We’re open to feedback, suggestions and even compliments!

Plans to open a new spaceport in Sutherland in Scotland have moved closer to final approval: The real estate companies working on the deal have signed a 75-year lease for the land to be used for Space Hub Sutherland, which will look to launch small satellites via private launch services from companies including startup Orbex, a micro-launch startup founded in 2015, and Lockheed Martin.

The land lease is still dependent on final approval being given for the spaceport to be built, which is in process as the groups behind its development, including the U.K. Space Agency, are in process of working out the designs, funding and environmental impact studies. All of this will contribute to an overall planning application, which the partners are hoping will pave the way for construction to begin in 2020.

Sutherland isn’t the only spaceport the U.K. is looking to open in an effort to open up its commercial launch capabilities: There are also plans in the works to open one in Cornwall, with support and funding from both the UKSA and Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit.

Mark Geene: We don’t do a point-to-point mapping structure. We give companies the ability to define a data structure, create a virtual representation of that, and make them all look the same. The...

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The agriculture industry faces huge problems of sustainability. The world’s population is increasing, leading to higher food demand, but this then threatens increasing deforestation, pesticide use and some fertilizers that are responsible for greenhouse emissions. Farming can also be a source of carbon sequestration, but how to preserve that? Plus, land quality is being decreased due to over-farming. All this while agriculture has been an underserved industry in terms of technology development compared to others.

So it’s the right time to look at the importance of the “microbiome” in agriculture processes to understand what’s really happening in our crops. The microbiome comprises all of the genetic material within a microbiota (the entire collection of microorganisms in a specific niche, such as in farming). It’s like looking at your gut bacteria, but for a farm.

Soil contains millions of microbes that all play a crucial role in the health of the crop, and this is why microbes in the soil are an important “biomarker.” Thus, understanding the microbes in the soil can lead to important actionable data.

Today Biome Makers, a technology company that uses advanced data analytics and artificial intelligence to analyze a soil’s ecosystem and provide actionable data-driven insights to farmers, has closed a $4 million financing round led by Seaya Ventures and JME Ventures, with participation by London VC LocalGlobe. The financing will be used to keep expanding the company’s footprint across different geographies (U.S., Europe, LatAm) and crop types, as well as an assessment system for agricultural products.

The company was founded by Adrián Ferrero (CEO) and Alberto Acedo (CSO), who have previously co-founded a successful startup in digital healthcare and have a strong scientific background. This is the second financing round for the company, as it has previously raised $2 million from a group of international investors, including Illumina, the global leading manufacturer of DNA sequencing instruments, through the Illumina Accelerator, and Viking Global Investors, a leading U.S.-based investment management firm.

Although other companies such as Indigo Ag, Concentric, Pivot Bio or Marrone Bio Innovations use similar techniques for biome identification, they claim to be the only company providing an open digital service and portal aimed at farmers, in order to democratize the microbiological information that will help them make informed decisions about their agricultural practices.

Biome Makers takes a different approach and looks below the surface. Currently, there are many companies that carry out physical-chemical analysis of the soil, but until now the microbiome dimension has not been taken into account. They say it is a new way of looking at the soil that provides information that had not been taken into account when making decisions in the field.

Early-stage startuppers around the world are getting ready for Disrupt Berlin 2019, which takes place on 11-12 December. Our premier tech conference attracts an international startup community from more than 50 countries. It’s the intersection of current and future tech and an incomparable networking opportunity.

You reap big savings with our super early-bird pricing (up to €600), but you can save even more when you buy in bulk. We want to make Disrupt Berlin a team-friendly event, because nobody wants to play rock, paper, scissors, lizard, Spock to see who stays home. Take advantage of our group discounts and bring your whole squad to Berlin.

Bring the team and multiply your ROI. Split up and experience more of what Disrupt Berlin offers in two short days — world-class speakers, workshops, fireside chats, Q&A Sessions, the Extra Crunch stage and Startup Alley for starters. Let’s look a little closer, shall we?

You’ll hear advice and insight from leading founders and investors, like PicsArt founder and CEO Hovhannes Avoyan, UiPath founder and CEO Daniel Dines and SoftBank Vision Fund partner David Thevenon — to name just a few. We’re still adding speakers, and if you have someone you’d like to nominate, let us know.

Don’t miss out on Startup Battlefield. Our legendary pitch competition features the best early-stage startups launching their companies on a global stage in a bid for glory, the Disrupt Cup, investor love, media coverage and $50,000 cash. Keep your eyes peeled for the chance to enter this epic competition — sign up to get the latest Disrupt Berlin news.

We expect more than 3,000 attendees, and just about all of them will head to Startup Alley to explore our exhibition floor. They’ll find hundreds of creative early-stage startups displaying their latest innovations across the tech spectrum. It’s a networking opportunity like no other. Turn your team loose and let the startup magic begin.

Startup Alley is also home to the TC Top Picks. That’s our curated cadre of startups representing the very best in their tech categories. Check out our TC Top Picks from 2018. Think your startup can make the cut? You’ll have the opportunity to apply soon — another great reason to keep tabs on Disrupt Berlin news.

Join us at Disrupt Berlin 2019 on 11-12 December. So many excellent reasons to go and a limited amount of time to experience it all. Take advantage of our super early-bird group discounts and bring your whole team to amplify your presence and your ROI. We’ll see you in Berlin!

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

Babylon Health, the U.K.-based startup that has developed a number of AI-based health services, including a chatbot used by the U.K’.s National Health Service to help diagnose ailments, has confirmed a massive investment that it plans to use to expand its business to the U.S. and Asia, and expand its R&D to diagnose more serious, chronic conditions. It has closed a $550 million round of funding, valuing Babylon Health at more than $2 billion, it announced today.

This is the largest-ever fundraise in Europe or U.S. for digital health delivery, Babylon said.

“Our mission at Babylon is to put accessible and affordable healthcare into the hands of everyone on earth,” said Dr Ali Parsa, founder and CEO of Babylon, in a statement. “This investment will allow us to maximise the number of lives we touch across the world. We have a long way to go and a lot still to deliver. We are grateful to our investors, our partners and 1,500 brilliant Babylonians for allowing us to forge ahead with our mission. Chronic conditions are an increasing burden to affordability of healthcare across the globe. Our technology provides a solid base for a comprehensive solution and our scientists, engineers, and clinicians are excited to work on it. We have seen significant demand from partners across the US and Asia. While the burden of healthcare is global, the solutions have to be localised to meet the specific needs and culture of each country.”

Before today’s announcement, the investment — a Series C — had been the subject of a lot of leaks, with reports over recent days suggesting the investment was anywhere between $100 million and $500 million.

The round brings together a number of strategic and financial investors, including PIF (Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund); a large U.S.-based health insurance company (which reports suggest to be Centene Corporation, although Babylon is not disclosing the name); Munich Re’s ERGO Fund; and returning investors Kinnevik and Vostok New Ventures. (Previous investors who do not appear to be in this round also include Demis Hassabis, the AI expert who co-founded DeepMind, which is now a part of Google.)

This is a big leap for the company, which had raised more modest rounds in the past, such as $60 million investment three years ago (it had only raised about £72 million in total prior to this round). Babylon said that of this latest Series C, $450 million has been secured already, with another $50 million agreed to be exercised at a later date, and the remainder getting closed “shortly.” (The PIF has been a prolific, if controversial, investor in a number of huge startups, such as Uber, and wider investment vehicles like SoftBank’s Vision Fund.)

We’re at a moment right now when it seems like a daily occurrence that a new company or service launches using AI to advance health. (Among that group, competitors to Babylon Health include MDLive, HealthTap, Push Doctor and many more.)

But even within that bigger trend, Babylon has emerged as one of the key players. In addition to its work in the U.K. — which includes an NHS service that it offers to “take over” a user’s local GP relationship to diagnose minor ailments remotely, as well as a second-track Babylon Private paid tier that it’s built in partnership with private insurer Bupa — it says other partners include Prudential, Samsung and Telus.

The NHS deal is an interesting one: The state’s health service is thought of by many as a national treasure, but it’s been very hard hit by budget problems, the strain of an ageing and growing population and what seems sometimes like a slow-release effort to remove some of its most important and reliable services and bring more privitisation into the mix.

Bringing in AI-based services that remove some of the overhead of people managing problems that machines can do just as well is one way of taking some of that pressure off the system — or so the logic goes, at least. The idea is that by handling some of the smaller issues, it helps prioritise the more urgent and difficult problems for people and face-to-face meetings.

That additionally gives Babylon (and others in digital health) a big opportunity to break down some of the more persistent problems in healthcare, such as providing services in developing economies and remote regions: one of its big efforts alongside rollouts in mature markets like the U.K. and Canada has been a service in Rwanda to bring health services to digital platforms for the first time.

Babylon has been growing and says it delivers 4,000 clinical consultations each day, or one patient interaction every 10 seconds. It says that it now covers 4.3 million people worldwide, with more than 1.2 million digital consultations completed to date, with more than 160,000 five-star ratings for appointments.

That is the kind of size and potential that has interested investors.