There’s a gap forming in Latin America between the growing digital food delivery market and the number of businesses in the region that are actually online. 

Food delivery startups continue to replicate and expand throughout the region, and VCs are channeling mega rounds into them with the hope of capitalizing on consumer online buying trends within growing digital populations.

VCs from all over the world have collectively invested billions into food delivery in the Latin American region. One of the largest rounds to date in Latin American startup history is Movile’s $400 million raise for Brazilian delivery business iFood. SoftBank recently confirmed a $1 billion investment into Colombia’s Rappi in March. 

As big checks, new business models and consolidation mold a new on-demand landscape in Latin America, smaller players are coming in to supplement existing marketplaces like Rappi and iFood.

Dataplor founder and CEO Geoffrey Michener saw an opportunity to bring more vendors online. That’s why he invented Dataplor, a platform that indexes micro businesses in emerging markets. Now, Dataplor has raised a third round of seed capital, bringing the company’s total raised to $2 million. Quest Venture Partners led the company’s most recent funding, along with participation from ffVC, Magma Partners, Sidekick Fund and the Blue Startups accelerator. 

What does Dataplor actually do? The 13-person company created a platform that recruits, trains and manages what has grown to more than 100,000 independent contractors — or what Dataplor calls Explorers.

Explorers are tasked with feet-on-the-street visits to businesses to capture information like latitude and longitude points, photos, hours of operation, owners’ names and contact info, and whether or not a business accepts credit cards. Dataplor then licenses that data to companies like American Express, iZettle and PayPal. Dataplor also works within a joint partnership to digitize Mexico with Google and Virket. 

Dataplor, founded in 2016, says it’s responsible for getting 150,000 businesses onto Google in its three years of operation. Michener says Dataplor pays Explorers above-market wages, and is careful about “not using the Uber model to drive down the cost of paying contractors.”

Michener likes to think of his business model as a trifecta of helping small businesses get onto Google for free, creating part-time opportunities for a growing workforce in LatAm and using its tech to help Google and Uber become better populated with accurate info in geos that might be more difficult for a foreign company to access.

Take Mexico for example. Michener says that 80% of Mexican businesses don’t have any digital footprint, and less than 5% of businesses have a website. This impacts the reach of what Google can index, as well as from where companies like iFood or Rappi can deliver. Basically, offline businesses are missing out on new digital distribution opportunities and, therefore, big cash.

In the United States and Europe, companies like Google and Uber scrape data from online directories in order to power their platforms. But this process works differently in Latin America. A small business’ chance of showing up in Google’s index is a lot slimmer, because most businesses are still offline in growing economies. Dataplor first launched in Mexico and bootstrapped its way into Brazil — an aggressive move for a young company due to Brazil’s competitive startup scene and Spanish-Portuguese language barriers. Dataplor says it will expand to Chile, Peru and Colombia in 2019.

Michener tested the minimum viable product by literally going on Craigslist Mexico City and sending money over PayPal to people willing to go out and gather data about small businesses. Turns out there was some traction.

What happens when all the businesses in Latin America are online? Dataplor plans to make money by licensing its data; but there’s another component to the equation. Dataplor is building a relationship with these businesses. Google will pay to know when a menu changes, hours of operation shift or a restaurant goes out of business. 

Dataplor’s tech stack could pique interest for any company that wants a hand in the digitization of growing markets. Now that they’ve built a playbook for Explorer logistics, that operational piece of their business may be interesting to companies like Google, Apple and Uber too. 

DoorDash CEO Tony Xu announced via Twitter that the company will be changing its model for compensating Dashers (a.k.a. DoorDash drivers and other delivery people).

The company faced criticism this year for its payment policies. Under the current system, a Dasher’s payment consists of a $1 base from DoorDash, the customer’s tip and — when the first two items fall below the guaranteed minimum — an additional payment boost from DoorDash.

In other words, although DoorDash insists that Dashers get to keep 100% of their tips, it starts to look like those tips are being used to subsidize payments that would otherwise come from DoorDash. (Instacart has been criticized and sued for similar practices, leading to a CEO apology and policy changes.)

Xu has defended this approach in the past. For example, when the company announced raising a $400 million round shortly after the controversy broke, he said the system was tested “not in a quarter, not in a month, but tested for months” before being implemented in 2017.

However, the issue didn’t go away. Last month, DoorDash tried to address it — not by changing the system, but by offering more transparency.

In his recent tweets, Xu insisted that the company designed the system “to prioritize transparency, consistency of earnings, and to ensure all customers get their food as fast as possible.” However, he acknowledged that DoorDash “didn’t strike the right balance.”

“We thought we were doing the right thing by making Dashers whole when a customer left no tip,” he said. “What we missed was that some customers who did tip would feel like their tip did not matter.”

So Xu said DoorDash will be changing that model. The company isn’t releasing all the details yet, but the key change is that “Dashers’ earnings will increase by the exact amount a customer tips on every order.”

Fintech startup Revolut announced changes to its business accounts this week. The good news is that if you were thinking about trying Revolut for your business needs, it’s now cheaper to get started. But there are some limits.

While Revolut is better known for its regular consumer accounts that let you receive, send and spend money all around the world, the company has been offering launched business accounts for a couple of years.

The main advantage of Revolut for Business is that you can hold multiple currencies. If you work with clients or suppliers in other countries, you can exchange money and send it to your partners directly from Revolut’s interface.

The company also lets you issue prepaid corporate cards and track expenses. Revolut for Business also has an API so you can automate payments and connect with third-party services, such as Xero, Slack and Zapier.

None of this is changing today. Revolut is mostly tweaking the pricing structure.

Previously, you had to pay £25 per month to access the service with a £100,000 top-up limit per month. Bigger companies had to pay more to raise that ceiling.

Now, Revolut is moving a bit more toward a software-as-a-service approach. Instead of making you pay more to receive and hold more money, you pay more as your team gets bigger and you use Revolut for Business more intensively.

The basic plan is free with two team members, five free local transfers per month and 0.4% in foreign exchange fees. If you want to add more team members or initiate more transfers, you pay some small fees.

If you were paying £25 before, you can now top up as much money as you want in your Revolut account, but there are some limits when it comes to team members (10), local transfers (100 per month) and international transfers (10 per month, interbank exchange rate up to £10,000).

Once again, going over the limits doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to change to a new plan. You’ll pay £0.20 per extra local transfer, £3 per extra international transfer, etc.

Here’s a full breakdown of the new plans:

If you’re a freelancer, there’s now a free plan. You’ll pay 0.4% on foreign exchange and £3 per international transfer, but there’s no top-up limit anymore.

Similarly, the old £7 plan for freelancers has been replaced by a new £7 plan that removes the limit on inbound transfers but adds some limits on transfers.

It’s good news if you’re a small customer. But if you vastly exceed the transfer limit in one of the categories, you might pay more than before. With this change, the company wanted to make Revolut for Business more accessible instead of making small customers subsidize bigger customers with high entry pricing.

Existing customers can switch to a new plan starting today. Revolut plans to switch everyone to the new plans on October 1st, 2019.

In a field where the laboratory notebook is still considered the state of the art, it’s no wonder a company like Benchling, which provides software for managing life sciences research, was able to nab $34.5 million.

Considering how much detailed technical work goes into the research that produces all of our great leaps forward in biotechnology, it’s a wonder that the practice wasn’t digitized sooner.

Financiers certainly see the benefit in Benchling’s technology — a new twist on what’s now a standard verticalized software as a service for a niche industry. Y Combinator Continuity, Thrive Capital and Benchmark Lead Edge Capital joined lead investor Menlo Ventures in financing the company.

The company said it would use the money to grow internationally and develop new products and services.

“Life science R&D has become incredibly complex across molecules, processes, and data structures. And until Benchling, there had been no end to end purpose-built SaaS application to enhance, streamline, and drive collaboration across R&D processes,” said Matt Murphy, partner at Menlo Ventures, in a statement. “Biologics are the future of life sciences and the faster that innovation gets to market, the more society benefits. Benchling‘s software replaces pen and paper workflows and becomes the system of record for a wide range of biotech and pharma R&D projects from medicine and cancer treatment to plant-based meat and sustainable materials.”

Benchling’s software is used by more than 170,000 scientists around the world in academic labs at Harvard, Stanford, MIT and Berkeley, according to the company. Its paying customers include Beam Therapeutics, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Zoetis and Zymergen .

Benchling started out with free software for researchers to replace notebooks with an electronic records management system and a digital model of molecules that could be collaboratively updated by a team of researchers.

Since those initial products, the company added project management, cross-project visibility and real-time views of development progress for business customers, according to Menlo’s Murphy.

“Benchling was created for today’s researchers who are working on cutting-edge science, allowing them to focus on achieving the next breakthrough outcomes,” said Sajith Wickramasekara, co-founder and CEO at Benchling, in a statement. “The next generation of scientists is already on Benchling and at the forefront of establishing the future of the life science and biotech industries. We’ll use this investment to support deeper engagements with large commercial customers and bring the power of the cloud to tackle the complexity of biotech.”

Sramana Mitra: The key takeaway that I get from listening to you is that you can retrofit existing non-cloud software and turn them into SaaS implementation using your PaaS. Where you’re...

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Last week, SAP reported results of its second quarter, which were just short of analyst expectations. A major cause for worry was the 5% decline in software license revenue. The disappointing results...

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Jimmy Duvall: It’s a very interesting time in the industry because you have a consolidation of the high-end players. Adobe acquired Magento, Salesforce owns what used to be DemandWare, and Oracle has...

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Pomona, an Indonesian startup that creates omnichannel marketing and sales software for consumer brands, announced today it has raised a Series A-2 of $3 million led by Vynn Capital. The round also included participation from new investors Ventech China and Amand Ventures, and returning ones Stellar Kapital and Central Capital Ventura.

(As for why it’s an A-2, co-founder and CEO Benz Budiman explained the company already raised an undisclosed pre-A round, which was reported in the media last year as a Series A. To avoid confusion about this funding since it is not a Series B, they are referring to it as an A-2).

Founded in 2016 by Budiman and CTO Ari Suwendi, Pomona’s software enables brands to offer cashback incentives to Indonesian consumers and includes tools for analyzing customer engagement, offline sales conversion and the effectiveness of marketing and advertising campaigns. It was developed specifically for brands in two categories: consumer packaged goods, such as toiletries and cleaning supplies, and fast-moving consumer packaged goods, or items with a short shelf life and high turnover like food and seasonal items.

The company currently works with more than 50 brands, including Unilever, Japfa, ABC President, Sosro, Frisian Flag and Sungai Budi.

Pomona’s new funding will be used to add new services with the goal of becoming an end-to-end solution, says Budiman. “For brands, we want to provide more information and data points so they can better understand local Indonesian consumers and tailor their engagement strategies to improve outreach efficiency, cut costs and better address their needs.”

The company also has plans to expand into new markets in Southeast Asia, but is keeping which countries under wraps for now.

Pomona’s solutions let customers redeem cashback offers by scanning a receipt with the Pomona app, or its partners can use Pomona’s white-label solutions to create their own branded cashback rewards app. In addition to increasing sales, Pomona’s solutions can help increase offline-to-online conversion rates, since most purchases are still made in brick-and-mortar stores. This gives companies a new way to examine what motivates customer engagement and their purchasing behavior.

In a press statement, Vynn Capital founding partner Victor Chua said, “As a major driver for private consumption in Southeast Asia, Indonesia is an increasingly important market for global brands. Understanding the behavioral traits of local consumers is essential for brands entering and operating in this dynamic market as consumers become more educated and preferential in their spending options.”

WeWork chief executive officer Adam Neumann is already rich, but soon all of the early employees and investors of the co-working giant will be too.

The business, now known as The We Company, has accelerated its plans to go public, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal. WeWork is expected to unveil is S-1 filing next month ahead of a September initial public offering.

WeWork declined to provide comment for this story.

The New York-based company, valued at $47 billion earlier this year, has long been rumored to be plotting a massive IPO. The WSJ reports it’s now in the process of meeting with Wall Street banks to secure an asset-backed loan upwards of $6 billion in what could be an effort to downsize its upcoming stock offering. WeWork disclosed massive 2018 net losses of $1.9 billion in March 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. Seeking capital elsewhere ahead of the IPO manages expectations and ensures WeWork ultimately has the cash it needs to continue its global expansion. Here’s a look at WeWork’s expanding revenues and losses:

WeWork has raised a total of $8.4 billion in a combination of debt and equity funding since it was founded in 2011. 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 is said to have initially filed paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for an IPO in December, in part so it was ready to hit the public markets if other avenues for cash fell through. The business is one of several tech unicorns to attract billions from the SoftBank Vision Fund. Recently, the Japanese telecom giant eyed a majority stake in the company worth $16 billion, but scaled back their investment down to $2 billion at the last minute.

WeWork, despite mounting losses, is growing — fast. The company established a 90% occupancy rate in 2018 as membership totals rose 116%, to 401,000.

Still, whether WeWork, backed by SoftBank, Benchmark, T. Rowe Price, Fidelity and Goldman Sachs, will be able to match its $47 billion valuation when it goes public this fall is questionable. Early investors will be sure to see a nice return, but late-stage investors may be nervous about their prospects.

Neumann, for his part, has reportedly cashed out of more than $700 million from his company ahead of the IPO. The size and timing of the payouts, made through a mix of stock sales and loans secured by his equity in the company, is unusual, considering that founders typically wait until after a company holds its public offering to liquidate their holdings.

Digital health startups seem to be struggling to the point of failure. Many insights into why have addressed how technology’s traditional model of quickly putting out a minimum viable product then finding useful applications and business models isn’t working. The model might work in the general technology startup space, but it rarely goes well in the complex world of healthcare. Dr. Paul Yock, a cardiologist and founder of the Byers Center for Biodesign at Stanford University, built his brainchild program on one philosophy to help healthcare startups: need-based innovation.

Need-based innovation is a process in which problems are identified and sorted based on impact and opportunity. Once the top problem has been selected, solutions and commercialization are approached.

While I completely agree with need-based innovation, our healthcare system is set up to discourage all forms of  innovation right now. We also must tackle changing the ecosystem that healthcare startups need to navigate. As a physician-innovator, I have experienced how institutional policies, hierarchical and administrator-driven systems and pilot program dynamics are creating a stunted ecosystem that is not reaching its full potential.

When approaching any stakeholder a health startup usually works with — an advisor, a healthcare system, a pilot site — the wheel often needs to be reinvented. The entrepreneur is faced with a time-consuming and costly disadvantage that frequently forces them to enter deals that hurt them. The deals also counter-intuitively hurt the stakeholder that they are bringing on board because the technologies and companies on which they are counting are set up to fail. There needs to be a clear set of rules for everyone to play by to accelerate growth, with the philosophy that “a rising tide lifts all boats.”

These are the most crushing challenges of the current ecosystem that need a hard look and innovation themselves before healthcare startups can deliver.

Challenge 1: Institutional policies and hierarchical systems stunt innovation

Many healthcare startups are born during a founder’s time at a healthcare or educational institution. The institution promises to foster the innovation and make the nuances of the legal landscape easier. However, institutional innovation policies are not optimized to foster innovation, but rather to maximize ownership and financial returns. Most policies will require all filed patents to run through a “Tech Transfer Office,” which is assumed to provide value by performing Freedom to Operate searches and helping file for provisional patents.

Unfortunately, in today’s world of software, patents are somewhat less valuable and relevant than they once were. If any IP is filed, the institution will claim ownership and will consider licensing it to the inventor for a royalty agreement. Sometimes, if the institution does not believe in the ability of the inventor to carry the IP forward to commercialization, they will even cut them out entirely from the agreement.

An additional approach that is becoming more common within innovation policies is an equity stake in any companies started by an institutional employee, regardless of the existence of IP or whether the institution was interested in it. All of the above scenarios obviously take more from the healthcare startup than they give before an innovator even has time to blink.

Challenge 2: Healthcare doesn’t understand early-stage tech companies

Why are these policies designed this way? Part of the problem stems from stakeholders confusing medical technology with biotechnology (aka pharma). The innovation pathway within biotech is very well-defined, with established business models, established precedent and understandable risk profiles. It is quite common for drug discovery to start in the academic setting. Investors, boards and executive teams are accustomed to this model and can plan accordingly. Licensing patents and collecting a royalty on biotech sales is a market norm.

When it comes to early-stage technology companies, their challenges and early development are drastically different. The two critical resources an early-stage company has are cash and time. The goal is to unlock additional capital with product-market fit, and these companies need maximum flexibility to be able to move quickly to find it. Unfortunately, investors see the healthcare space as complex and high risk, which is true. So these startups face fundraising challenges for the space they are in, as well as unnecessary additional hurdles from the home institutions, increasing the likelihood of scaring away already skittish investors.

Challenge 3: Pilots are set up to hurt more than help

Startups are often completely dependent on partnerships or deals with larger healthcare organizations in order to grow and survive. These deals often start with a pilot. Unfortunately, the dynamic between giant healthcare institutions and tiny idealistic startups for pilots is not actually set up to be mutually beneficial.

In this scenario, healthcare systems have nothing to lose, orders of magnitude more resources and seemingly infinite amounts of time. Their incentive is to differentiate and “own” unique technologies so their competitors cannot get their hands on them. This is where startups often and understandably can make a big mistake — they believe the partner brings more value to the table than they do. For example, just having a pilot, even if it’s unpaid, with a major institution seems like it could help win over investors or additional customers. This leads to a spiral of events that frequently ends in sending startups into a trajectory toward failure (aka death by pilots).

Due to the lack of urgency and the intense bureaucracy, the sales cycle is long, sometimes one to two years, often lasting longer than startups have cash left to burn. Second, as mentioned, the pilot is frequently unpaid, or I have seen situations where an institution will even charge a startup for a pilot, leading to less cash and equity, which is already in short supply. Finally, onerous terms are often instituted, in which companies agree to unnecessary exclusivity or impossible goals. This doesn’t even take into consideration the challenges around deployment with HIPAA, security concerns and data sharing.

The ultimate result is that healthcare institutions that want to add value to their system by improving outcomes and decreasing costs will often doom the very technologies they believe are worthwhile. This dynamic is so well-established that many investors, even those well-versed in healthcare, will refuse to invest in institutional-oriented technology companies. My company, Osso VR, has had representatives of hospital systems approach us saying, “Don’t work with us. It will kill your company.”

Promising opportunities ahead

What if innovation policies were designed so that instead of focusing on what they can take from their spin-out companies, they focus on what value they can add? Stanford’s StartX accelerator program has a model where they commit to investing in 10% of any round a company raises after they leave the program, but it’s up to the company to choose whether or not they want StartX to participate. Unsurprisingly, almost all companies take advantage of the investment offer. These incentives help companies succeed and allow StartX to share in that success.

We need innovators and administrators to come together and agree on common standards and rules to make the process more efficient, fair and effective. One example we might follow is from Y Combinator. Raising money used to be expensive due to the amount of confusing legal documents required and corresponding legal fees. The time and expense could sometimes cause a deal to fall through, or a company would run out of money.

Its SAFE note investment document solves accounting difficulties and challenges around early-stage investment. This document has been validated by founders and investors, allowing entrepreneurs to raise money with little to no legal fees and a turnaround time of a day or two. Organizations like the American Medical Association, AdvaMed and the Consumer Technology Association have the buy-in, validation and potential to start tackling these processes. Standards could be set for protected innovation time, structured innovation positions and fellowships for organizational employees, and deal templates and best practices to shorten sales cycles and avoid onerous terms.

These problems are large, endemic and complex, but I am optimistic we can begin to work together to solve them to maximize our common interest: increasing the value of global healthcare.

Axis is selling its first product, the Axis Gear, on Amazon and direct from its own website, but that’s a relatively recent development for the four-year-old company. The idea for Gear, which is a $249.00 ($179.00 as of this writing thanks to a sale) aftermarket conversion gadget to turn almost any cord-pull blinds into automated smart blinds, actually came to co-founder and CEO Trung Pham in 2014, but development didn’t begin until early the next year, and the maxim that “hardware is hard” once again proved more than valid.

Pham, whose background is actually in business but who always had a penchant for tech and gadgets, originally set out to scratch his own itch and arrived upon the idea for his company as a result. He was actually in the market for smart blinds when he moved into his first condo in Toronto, but after all the budget got eaten up on essentials like a couch, a bed and a TV, there wasn’t much left in the bank for luxuries like smart shades — especially after he actually found out how much they cost.

“Even though I was a techie, and I wanted automated shades, I couldn’t afford it,” Pham told me in an interview. “I went to the designer and got quoted for some really nice Hunter Douglas. And they quoted me just over $1,000 a window with the motorization option. So I opted just for manual shades. A couple of months later, when it’s really hot and sunny, I’m just really noticing the heat so I go back to the designer and ask him ‘Hey can I actually get my shades motorized now, I have a little bit more money, I just want to do my living room.’ And that’s when I learned that once you have your shades installed, you actually can’t motorize them, you have to replace them with brand new shades.”

With his finance background, Pham saw an opportunity in the market that was ignored by the big legacy players, and potentially relatively easy to address with tech that wasn’t all that difficult to develop, including a relatively simple motor and the kind of wireless connectivity that’s much more readily available thanks to the smartphone component supply chain. And the market demand was there, Pham says — especially with younger homeowners spending more on their property purchases (or just renting) and having less to spare on expensive upgrades like motorized shades.

The Axis solution is relatively affordable (though its regular asking price of $249 per unit can add up, depending on how many windows you’re looking to retrofit) and also doesn’t require you to replace your entire existing shades or blinds, so long as you have the type with which the Gear is compatible (which includes quite a lot of commonly available shades). There are a couple of power options, including an AC adapter for a regular outlet, or a solar bar with back-up from AA batteries in case there’s no outlet handy.

Pham explained how in early investor meetings, he would cite Dyson as an inspiration, because that company took something that was standard and considered central to their very staid industry and just removed it altogether — specifically referring to their bagless design. He sees Axis as taking a similar approach in the smart blind market, which has too much to gain from maintaining its status quo to tackle Axis’ approach to the market. Plus, Pham notes, Axis has six patents filed and three granted for its specific technical approach.

“We want to own the idea of smart shades to the end consumer,” he told me. “And that’s where the focus really is. It’s a big opportunity, because you’re not just buying one doorbell or one thermostat – you’re buying multiple units. We have customers that buy one or two right away, come back and buy more, and we have customers that buy 20 right away. So our ability to sell volume to each household is very beneficial for us as a business.”

Which isn’t to say Axis isn’t interested in larger-scale commercial deployment — Pham says that there are “a lot of [commercial] players and hotels testing it,” and notes that they also “did a project in the U.S. with one of the largest developers in the country.” So far, however, the company is laser-focused on its consumer product and looking at commercial opportunities as they come inbound, with plans to tackle the harder work of building a proper commercial sales team. But it could afford Axis a lot of future opportunity, especially because their product can help building managers get compliant with measures like the Americans with Disabilities Act to outfit properties with the requisite amount of units featuring motorized shades.

To date, Axis has been funded entirely via angel investors, along with family and friends, and through a crowdfunding project on Indiegogo, which secured its first orders. Pham says revenue and sales, along with year-over-year growth, have all been strong so far, and that they’ve managed to ship “quite a few units so far” — though he declined to share specifics. The startup is about to close a small bridge round and then will be looking to pin down its Series A funding as it looks to expand its product line — with a focus on greater window coverings style compatibility as top priority.

Early-stage enterprise startup founders listen up. That sound you hear is opportunity knocking. Answer the call, open the door and join us for TC Sessions: Enterprise on September 5 in San Francisco. Our day-long conference not only explores the promises and challenges of this $500 billion market, it also provides an opportunity for unparalleled exposure.

How’s that? Buy a Startup Demo Package and showcase your genius to more than 1,000 of the most influential enterprise founders, investors, movers and shakers. This event features the enterprise software world’s heaviest hitters. People like SAP CEO Bill McDermott; Aaron Levie, Box co-founder, chairman and CEO; and George Brady, executive VP in charge of technology operations at Capital One.

Demo tables are reserved for startups with less than $3 million, cost $2,000 and include four tickets to the event. We have a limited number of demo tables available, so don’t wait to introduce your startup to this very targeted audience.

The entire day is a full-on deep dive into the big challenges, hot topics and potential promise facing enterprise companies today. Forget the hype. TechCrunch editors will interview founders and leaders — established and emerging — on topics ranging from intelligent marketing automation and the cloud to machine learning and AI. You’ll hear from VCs about where they’re directing their enterprise investments.

Speaking of investors and hot topics, Jocelyn Goldfein, a managing director at Zetta Venture Partners, will join TechCrunch editors and other panelists for a discussion about the growing role of AI in enterprise software.

Check out our growing (and amazing, if we do say so ourselves) roster of speakers.

Our early-bird pricing is still in play, which means tickets cost $249 and students pay only $75. Plus, for every TC Sessions: Enterprise ticket you buy, we’ll register you for a complimentary Expo Only pass to TechCrunch Disrupt SF on October 2-4.

TC Sessions: Enterprise takes place September 5 at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Buy a Startup Demo Package, open the door to opportunity and place your early-stage enterprise startup directly in the path of influential enterprise software founders, investors and technologists.

Looking for sponsorship opportunities? Contact our TechCrunch team to learn about the benefits associated with sponsoring TC Sessions: Enterprise 2019.

Another day, another monster fintech venture round.

This morning, it was personalized banking app MoneyLion, which raised $100 million at a near unicorn valuation. Last week, it was N26, which raised another $170 million on top of its $300 million round earlier this year. Brex raised another $100 million last month on top of its $125 million Series C from late last year. Meanwhile, companies like payments platform Stripe, savings and investment platform Raisin, traveler lender Uplift, mortgage backers Blend and Better, and savings depositor Acorns have also raised massive new rounds this year.

That’s all on top of 2018’s record-breaking year for fintech, which saw $52.5 billion of investment flow into the space according to KPMG’s estimate.

What’s with all the money flowing into the fintech world? And what does all this investment portend not only for the industry and other potential entrants, but also for customers of financial services? The answer is that this new wave of fintech startups has figured out embedded finance, and that it is changing the entire economics of disruptive financial services.

First, this isn’t (really) about blockchain

Let’s get one thing out of the way right away, for whenever the topic of financial services and digital disruption come together, some blatherer always yells blockchain from the proverbial back row (often with a bit of foaming at the mouth I might add).

As the ways we consume content multiply and change, media creators are hard-pressed to adapt their methods to take advantage. Short-form audio and video news is one growing but labor-intensive niche — and Agolo aims to help automate the process, pulling in the AP as a client and Microsoft, Google and Tensility as investors.

Agolo is an AI startup focused on natural language processing; specifically, how to take a long article, like this one, and boil it down to its most important parts (assuming there are any). Summarization is the name of the process, as it is when you or I do it, and other bots and services do it, as well. Agolo’s claim is to be able to summarize quickly and accurately, producing something of a quality worthy of broadcast or official documentation. Its deal with the AP provides an interesting example of how this works, and why it isn’t as simple as picking a few representative sentences.

The AP is, of course, a huge news organization, and a fast-moving one. But its stories, while spare as a rule, are rarely concise enough to be read aloud by a virtual assistant when its user asks “what’s the big news this morning?” As a result, AP editors and writers manually put together scores or hundreds of short versions of stories every day specifically for audio consumption and other short-form contexts.

Because this isn’t a situation where creative input is necessarily required, and it must be done quickly and systematically, it’s a good fit for an AI agent trained in natural language. Even so, it isn’t as easy as it sounds, explained Agolo co-founder and CEO Sage Wohns.

“The way that we have things read to us is different from the way we read them. So the algorithm understanding that and reproducing it is important,” he said. And that’s without reckoning with the AP’s famous style guide.

“This is one of the most important points that we worked on with them,” Wohns said. “The AP has their style bible, and it’s a brick. We have a hybrid model that has algorithms pointed at each of those rules. We never want to change the language, but we can shorten the sentence.”

That’s a risk with algorithmic summarizing, of course: that in “summarizing” a sentence you change its meaning. That’s incredibly important in the news, where the difference between a simple statement of fact and an egregious error can easily be in a single word or phrase. So the system is careful to preserve meaning if not necessarily the exact wording.

While the AP may not be given, as I am, to circumlocutions, it may still be beneficial to shift things a bit, though. Agolo worked closely with the news organization to figure out what’s acceptable and what’s not. A simple example would be changing something like “Statement,” said the source to The source said “Statement.” That doesn’t save any space, but you get the idea: essentially lossless compression of language.

If the AP team can trust the algorithm to produce a well-worded summary that follows their rules and only takes a quick polish by an editor, they could serve and even grow the demand for short-form content. “The goal is to enable them to create more content than was humanly possible before,” said Wohns.

The investment from and collaboration with Google falls along these lines as well, though not as laser-focused on turning news stories into sound bites.

“What we’re working on with them is making the web listenable,” said Wohns. “Right now you can ask Google a question, but it often doesn’t have an answer it can read back to you.”

It’s primarily a bid to extend the company’s Assistant product as it continues its combat with Alexa and Siri, but may also have the extremely desirable side effect of making the data Google indexes more accessible to blind users.

The scope of Google’s data (Agolo is probably now getting the full firehose of Google News, among other things) means that the AI model being used has to be lightweight and quick. Even if it takes only 10 seconds to summarize every article, that gets multiplied thousands of times in the complex workings of sorting and displaying news all over the world. So Agolo has been very focused on improving the performance of its models until they are able to turn things around very quickly and enable an essentially real-time summary service.

This has a secondary application in large enterprises and companies with large backlogs of data like documentation and analysis. Microsoft is a good example of this: After decades of running an immense software and services empire, the number of support docs, studies, how-tos and so on are likely choking its intranet and search may or may not be effective on such a corpus.

NLP-based agents are useful for summarizing, but part of that process is, in a way, understanding the content. So the agent should be able to produce a shorter version of something, but also tell you that it’s by this person (useful for attribution); it’s about this topic; it’s from this date range; it applies to these version numbers; its main findings are these; and so on and so forth.

Not all this information is useful in all cases, of course, but it sure is if you want to digest 30 years of internal documentation and be able to search and sort it efficiently. This is what Microsoft is using it for internally, and no doubt what it intends to apply it to as part of future product offerings or partnerships. (Semantic Scholar has applied a similar approach to journals and academic papers.)

It would also be helpful for, say, an investment bank analyst or other researcher, who can use Agolo’s timeline to assemble all the relevant documents in order, grouped by author or topic, with the salient information surfaced and glanceable. One pictures this as useful for Google News, as well, in browsing coverage of a specific event or developing story.

The new (undisclosed amount of) funding has Microsoft (M12 specifically) returning, with Google (Assistant Investment Group specifically) and Tensility Venture Partners joining for the first time. The cash will be used in the expected fashion of a growing startup: chasing sales and a few key hires.

“It’s about building out the go-to-market side, and the core NLP abilities of the team, specifically in New York and Cairo,” said Wohns. “Right now we’re about a 90% technical team, so we need to build out the sales side.”

Agolo’s service seems like a useful tool for many an application — anywhere you have to reduce a large amount of written content to a smaller amount. Certainly that’s common enough — but Agolo will need to prove that it can do so as non-destructively and accurately as it claims with a wide variety of data sets, and that this process contributes to the bottom line more than the time-tested method of hiring another intern or grad student to perform the drudgery.

Transitioning between different types of professional roles can be challenging — new expectations arise, and fresh ways of seeing the world are required to be successful. A few weeks ago, I interviewed Anjul Bhambhri of Adobe about how she transitioned from engineering into product, where she now leads the company’s customer experience cloud.

This week, I chatted with Toby Russell, the co-CEO of online used car marketplace Shift, which generated $135 million in revenue last year and has raised $293 million in venture capital according to Crunchbase. The company is targeting an IPO in 2021.

While we have written a lot about Shift, we have written far less about Russell, whose career spans a model he calls “learn, earn, and serve.” He received a PhD in international relations at Oxford, switched to founding a startup, then served in the Obama Energy Department, before heading over to Capital One to lead digital and eventually rejoining his friend George Arison and Shift’s co-founder as co-CEO.

Across these roles, Russell has had to adapt to very different environments, and we chatted about those transitions, his lessons learned, and his approach to leadership.

Earlier this month, TechCrunch held its annual Mobility Sessions event down in San Jose, where leading mobility-focused auto companies, startups, executives and thought leaders joined us to discuss all things autonomous vehicle technology, micromobility and electric vehicles.

Extra Crunch is offering members access to full transcripts key panels and conversations from the event, including a mainstage conversation between Waymo CTO Dmitri Dolgov and TechCrunch mobility axe Kirsten Korosec. Dmitri and Kirsten dove into Waymo’s full product evolution, and dissect the path ahead for the company and the AV industry as a whole.

Dmitri Dolgov: So essentially, what makes this problem interesting in my mind is that it’s not one or two things where you say “there’s only this one challenge that remains and then you solve everything.” It’s really across a whole number of different areas — a whole number of different disciplines from hardware, to more advanced sensors, more powerful sensors, sensors you can manufacture at scale, cheaper sensors, more powerful compute, cheaper compute software.

You mentioned sensor fusion — this is actually where the software plays very nicely with the hardware and that connection is very deep. And our approach at Waymo is interesting in that we build our own software and hardware in house.

So this is where we have access to very powerful sensors, and not just having the increased range and increased resolution, but also having access to the raw sensor data, like the raw measurements that you get from lidars from cameras from radars, and doing sensor fusion at a later stage, where you can really bring to bear modern, deep learning algorithms to have models that learn to pick out the best signal from those different sensing modalities. That’s a very active area of improvement.

Dmitri also goes into more depth on the specific technical areas of improvements for AV technology and the importance of simulation miles when building a polished mobility product. Dmitri and Kirsten also talk through the regulatory road map and the impact it will play on AV rollouts, AV product quality, as well as on cities and society as a whole.

For access to the full transcription below and for the opportunity to read through additional event transcripts and recaps, become a member of Extra Crunch. Learn more and try it for free. 

Kirsten Korosec: Thanks, everyone for coming out. And we’re all here to talk to the CTO [Dmitri Dolgov] of Waymo. So I’m going to just let you roll with it. I’m wondering if you showed up in a self-driving car today, How’d you get here?

Dmitri Dolgov: I took a self-driving car to work today. Then I met with some folks there. And we took another car to here.

Korosec: So manually driven car from Mountain View. But My understanding is that you actually use Waymo self-driving cars quite a bit. You’re one of the most prolific users of the vehicle, correct?

Dolgov: Yeah. Nowadays, this is my default mode of transportation around town, I take our cars to work pretty much every day. I take them to get around town to run some errands. And actually, recently, there was a change that happened in California – we got the permit from the CPUC, the California Public Utilities Commission, that allowed us to take passengers in cars that are not employees of Waymo.

So now I can take my family and I have to go to the grocery store and I actually did that recently. I had to go with my son and instead of me doing the silly old thing of me driving around in my own car, we hopped into a Waymo. And that was cool.

Since the launch of its first electric scooter in 2015, Gogoro co-founder and CEO Horace Luke has frequently been asked when the startup is going to expand beyond Taiwan. In its home country, Gogoro’s two-wheel vehicles, with their distinctive swappable battery system, are now the top-selling electric scooters.

But Luke says the company has always seen itself as a platform company, with the ultimate goal of providing a turnkey solution for energy-efficient vehicles. Now with the launch of GoShare*, its new vehicle-sharing platform, and partnerships with manufacturers such as Yamaha, Gogoro is ready to go global.

Founded by Luke, HTC’s former chief innovation officer, and chief technology officer Matt Taylor in 2011, Gogoro develops most of its technology in-house, including scooter motors, telematics units, backend servers and software. GoShare’s pilot program will launch next month in Taoyuan City, where Gogoro’s research and development center is located, with the goal of expanding with partners into cities around the world over the next year, starting in Europe, Australia and Southeast Asia.

“Gogoro has always been out with a thesis that we will be a platform enabler,” Luke told Extra Crunch during an interview in the company’s Taipei City headquarters. “Now you’ve seen the transformation of the company. Doing something this big, like what Gogoro is doing, takes time.”

Since the release of Gogoro’s first Smartscooter in 2015, the company says it has become the best-selling brand of electric two-wheel vehicles in Taiwan, holding a 17 percent share of the country’s vehicle market, including gas vehicles.

Last year, the company began licensing its technology to manufacturers Yamaha, Aeon and PGO to produce scooters that run on Gogoro’s batteries and charging infrastructure. It also has a partnership with Coup, the European electric-scooter sharing startup that plans to increase its fleet to more than 5,000 scooters on the streets of Paris, Berlin, Madrid and Tübingen this year, and is seeking similar deals with other vehicle-sharing services, as well as local governments that want to reduce traffic and pollution (the GoShare pilot program is being launched in collaboration with Taoyuan City’s government).

GoShare’s platform is meant to be a “very robust and cost-effective, very worry-free solution for municipalities and entrepreneurs,” Luke says. Parts of the system can be licensed separately or packaged as a turnkey solution that can be deployed in as little as two weeks.

The company describes GoShare as a “mobility solution.” When asked if this means the platform can be used for other electric vehicles, including cars, Luke says “just think of us as batteries and a motor.”

“It’s just like computers and processing ram,” he adds. “It can be any form factor. It just happens to be that the two-wheel form factor is the one we’re working on and focusing on at the moment.”

Startups looking to expand the reach of financial services continue to receive a nod from investors. Zeta, a fintech firm that runs a full stack neo-banking platform and offers enterprise payments solutions, said today its valuation reached $300 million in its maiden outside funding.

Sodexo BRS funded Zeta’s Series C round to take a minority stake in the company. Zeta executives declined to reveal the size of the funding, but a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch the amount was less than $60 million.

This is the first time Zeta — or its CEO and co-founder Bhavin Turakhia — has raised money from an outside party, he told TechCrunch in an interview.

Turakhia, 39, has co-founded a number of web companies over the years, which he sold for $160 million in 2014, and team collaboration and productivity app Flock. Flock too has not raised any outside capital to date.

Zeta operates in Asia and Latin America and counts as its potential clients companies and banks looking to bring retail and corporate fintech products. Its full stack cloud-native neo-banking platform supports issuance of credit, debit and prepaid products. Its enterprise solutions features support for TnE cards, P-cards, expense management, salary disbursement and corporate gifting.

The firm has already amassed over 2 million users, and three different banks and financial institutions, including Sodexo, that use Zeta’s platform, and more than 14,000 corporate clients, including Amazon . Multiple banks in India are using Zeta’s corporate gifting service.

The new capital will be used to expand the company’s business in the United States, United Kingdom, Europe and Southeast Asia, Turakhia and Ramki Gaddipati, the startup’s CTO and co-founder, told TechCrunch in an interview. It has already signed contracts with many partners to facilitate the expansion in the next six months.

The firm, which today employs about 450 people, also plans to grow its team and set up offices in many more places across the globe.

“There hasn’t been many zero to one innovations in the banking ecosystem in the last 20 years,” said Turakhia. “If you look at the banking space, it has been dominated by licensed software from legacy organizations. Many of these companies still provide most of the stacks that run most of the payment systems around the world for banks and non-banks.”

So like a growing number of companies, Zeta is betting that it is a pivotal time to disrupt this. “That was the genesis of starting Zeta, building a new and innovative technology stack that enables interesting use cases for banks and other bank-line financial institutions that want to issue credit, debit, or prepaid products and provide their customers with enhanced functionalities,” he said.

And that opportunity is what led Turakhia to seek outside capital, he said. “In the next five to seven years, I want to make Zeta 20 to 30 times bigger than any exit I have ever had,” he said.

Additionally, Zeta also saw value that Sodexo, which operates globally, could bring to its platform.

In a statement, Aurelien Sonet, CEO, BRS at Sodexo, said, “Sodexo has been a strategic partner of Zeta since 2017. This investment will enable the Sodexo group to benefit from Zeta’s comprehensive suite of solutions and offer a seamless payment experience to our consumers. Zeta and Sodexo are already working together on deploying Zeta’s platform across several Sodexo subsidiaries across different regions.”

Last call, startuppers! TechCrunch’s Silicon Valley summer soiree — a.k.a. the 14th Annual TechCrunch Summer Party — is nearly sold out. If you want to join the brightest members of the startup community on July 25 and celebrate your intrepid entrepreneurial spirit, you’d best buy a ticket while you can. It’s now o’clock, people!

This annual event is a true startup tradition. It’s a chance to enjoy the company of your peers and make new connections in a beautiful setting. It’s tough to beat an evening at San Francisco’s Park Chalet. Relax and enjoy the ocean views, craft beer, imaginative cocktails and tasty appetizers.

In between the drinks, the food and the fun you might find that startup magic happens at TechCrunch parties. Who knows, you could meet future co-founders, collaborators or investors — it can and does happen.

How often do you have the chance to build connections with top investors over a cold beer? You do at this shindig. Along with our lead VC partner, Merus Capital, August Capital, Battery Ventures, Cowboy Ventures, Data Collective, General Catalyst and Uncork Capital will be in the house.

We’ll also have a group of exciting early-stage startups displaying their tech and talent, so be sure to check ’em out.

Here are the essential Summer Party details:

As always, we’ll mix things up with games and great door prizes. You could win TechCrunch swag, Amazon Echos and tickets to Disrupt San Francisco 2019.

The 14th Annual TechCrunch Summer Party takes place on July 25. So much fun, so much opportunity, so few tickets left. Don’t end up on the wrong side of “sold out.” Buy one of the last remaining tickets right now.

Thumbtack just closed a new funding round of $150 million. Sequoia is leading the round, and the company is now valued at $1.7 billion. TechCrunch’s Kate Clark previously reported that the startup was raising again, but that it was a tough process.

In a candid blog post, co-founder and CEO Marco Zappacosta admits that the company faced multiple challenges. Thumbtack started as a simple marketplace for local professionals.

Clients could post a message saying that they were looking for carpenters, wedding planners or house cleaning services. Professionals then scrolled through listings and sent quotes. Customers eventually picked a professional.

While it was a huge hit, it didn’t scale well and created a ton of issues. “We took a business that was growing more than 80% year over year and we pressed pause,” Zappacosta wrote.

The startup rewrote the back end, created a new front end, pivoted to a new business model and essentially created a new product.

Thumbtack now automatically generates quotes based on your needs and your location. Given that you can get quotes in a few minutes, it didn’t make sense to charge professionals every time they send a quote. Now professionals pay Thumbtack a small fee when customers contact them after a quote.

“Now growth has reaccelerated dramatically, and we have the runway to make Thumbtack the only platform they need to find the right customers,” Zappacosta wrote.

So it sounds like Thumbtack has seen the light at the end of the tunnel. With today’s new funding round, the company can now focus on attracting service providers again. According to The Wall Street Journal, this could be the last funding round before Thumbtack files to go public.