Gaurav Maken, the chief executive officer of the online vegan grocery store Mylk Guys, doesn’t think of his company as a place to just buy food. For him, it’s a testing ground and platform for all of the new food products he expects to be developed as startup entrepreneurs and established food companies start tackling the plant-based and alternative-meat market in earnest.

The company has raised $2.5 million in support of that vision from investors, including Khosla Ventures, Pear Ventures and Fifty Years.

“Today we’re an online grocery store,” says Maken. “We are also a place for cultured meats and any genetically engineered food that allows us to scale our food production and allows us to keep feeding people.”

Maken isn’t wedded to plant-based products and envisions a virtual store stocked with products that create more sustainable consumption options for its customers. In fact, 40% of the company’s customers are not vegan, according to Maken.  

“We don’t only think about vegans. We think about sustainable food systems,” says Maken. “Our audience is an educated consumer who wants to have less of an impact from their diet… They’re just folks trying to do better with their eating habits.”

Right now, the company sells around 1,300 products through its site. And the pitch that Maken makes to suppliers is that they can access the data around their customers (unlike other online retailers, whose name rhymes with shmamazon).

“We provide analytics and a way for brands to unlock the data coming from their customers,” Maken says. “Our focus is how can we get you a personalized staple that works for you.” 

The company’s top sellers are vegan cheeses like Sparrow Camembert, lines of vegan jerkies and the Beyond Burger, Maken said.

“You can build brands that are successful that are $1 million brands or $5 million brands and the reason why you haven’t is because they haven’t had the platform to provide national distribution to be successful,” says Maken.  

Mylk Guys launched in 2018 and went through the Y Combinator accelerator program. Now, with its new capital, the company is focusing on expanding its sales and marketing on the East Coast, opening a new warehouse for distribution and reaching out to the vegan community on the Eastern Seaboard.

The model for selling more sustainable foods directly to the consumer has at least one precedent. Los Angeles-based Thrive Market raised $111 million in a 2016 round of funding for its online sustainable product-focused grocery store.

As recent reports indicate, the sustainable food business is only growing. Citing reports from Ecovia Intelligence, the publication Environmental Leader reported that organic food sales topped $100 billion for the first time in 2018.

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 451st FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, July 25, 2019, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious...

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Sramana Mitra: How much of your portfolio has this follow-on funding? Jose Deustua: All of them have raised funds. Sramana Mitra: All of them have received funding from what source? What is the...

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Tremend CEO Marius Hanganu has built a services company from Romania to over $5 million in revenue. Now, he is trying to bootstrap a product using the services business. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at...

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

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As competition from cable players and other channels heats up, Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX) appears to have stumbled in the recent quarter. In a surprising miss, subscriber growth was lower than estimated...

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Contract management isn’t exactly an exciting subject, but it’s a real pain point for many companies. It also lends itself to automation, thanks to recent advances in machine learning and natural language processing. It’s no surprise then, that we see renewed interest in this space and that investors are putting more money into it. Earlier this week, Icertis raised a $115 million Series E round, for example, at a valuation of more than $1 billion. Icertis has been in this business for 10 years, though. On the other end of the spectrum, contract management startup Lexion today announced that it has raised a $4.2 million seed round led by Madrona Venture Group and law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, which was also one of the first users of the product.

Lexion was incubated at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), one of the late Microsoft co-founders’ four scientific research institutes. The company’s co-founder and CEO, Gaurav Oberoi, is a bit of a serial entrepreneur, whose first startup, BillMonk, was first featured on TechCrunch back in 2006. His second go-around was Precision Polling, which SurveyMonkey then acquired shortly after it launched. Oberoi founded the company together with former Microsoft research software development engineering lead Emad Elwany and engineering veteran James Baird.

“Gaurav, Emad, and James are just the kind of entrepreneurs we love to back: smart, customer obsessed and attacking a big market with cutting-edge technology,” said Madrona Venture Group managing director Tim Porter. “AI2 is turning out some of the best applied machine learning solutions, and contract management is a perfect example — it’s a huge issue for companies at every size and the demand for visibility into contracts is only increasing as companies face growing regulatory and compliance pressures.”

Contract management is becoming a bit of a crowded space, though, something Oberoi acknowledged. But he argues that Lexion is tackling a different market from many of its competitors.

“We think there’s growing demand and a big opportunity in the mid-market,” he said. “I think similar to how back in the 2000s, Siebel or other companies offered very expensive CRM software and now you have Salesforce — and now Salesforce is the expensive version — and you have this long tail of products in the mid-market. I think the same is happening to contracts. […] We’re working with companies that are as small as post-seed or post-Series A to a publicly traded company.”

Given that it handles plenty of highly confidential information, it’s no surprise that Lexion says that it takes security very seriously. “I think, something that all young startups that are selling into business or enterprise in 2019 need to address upfront,” Oberoi said. “We realized, even before we raised funding and got very serious about growing this business, that security has to be part of our DNA and culture from the get-go.” He also noted that every new feature and product iteration at Lexion goes through a security review.

Like most startups at this stage, Lexion plans to invest the new funding into building out its product — and especially its AI engine — and go-to-market and sales strategy.

A future where drones can easily and cheaply do many useful things such as deliver packages, undertake search and rescue missions and deliver urgent medical supplies, not to mention unclogging our roads with flying taxis, seems like a future worth shooting for. But before all this can happen, we need to make sure the thousands of drones in the sky are operating safely. A drone needs to be able to automatically detect when entering into the flight path of another drone, manned aircraft or restricted area and to alter its course accordingly to safely continue its journey. The alternative is the chaos and danger of the recent incidences of drones buzzing major airports, for instance.

There is a race on to produce just such a system. Wing LLC, an offshoot of the Alphabet / Google-owned X company, has announced a platform it calls OpenSky that it hopes will become the basis for a full-fledged air-traffic control system for drones. So far, it’s only been approved to manage drone flights in Australia, although it is also working on demonstration programs with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.

But this week, Altitude Angel, a U.K.-based startup backed by Seraphim Capital and with $4.9 million in funding, has launched its own UTM (Unmanned Traffic Management) system.

Its Conflict Resolution System (anti-collision) is basically an automatic collision-avoidance technology. This means that any drone flying beyond the line of sight will remain safe in the sky and not cross existing flight plans or into restricted areas. By being automated, Altitude Angel says this technology will prevent any mid-air collisions, simply because by knowing where everything else is in the sky, there’ll be no surprises.

Altitude Angel’s CRS has both “strategic” and “tactical” aspects.

The strategic part happens during the planning stages of a flight, i.e. when someone is submitting flight plans and requesting airspace permission. The system analyses the proposed route and cross-references it with any other flight plans that have been submitted, along with any restricted areas on the ground, to then propose a reroute to eliminate any flight-plan conflicts. Eventually, what happens is that a drone operator does this from an app on their phone, and the approval to flight is automated.

The next stage is tactical. This happens while the drone is actually in flight. The dynamic system continuously monitors the airspace around the aircraft both for other aircraft or for changes in the airspace (such as a temporary flight restriction around a police incident) and automatically adjusts the route.

The key aspect of this CRS is that drones and drone pilots can store flight plans with a globally distributed service without needing to exchange private or potentially sensitive data with each other while benefiting from an immediate pre-flight conflict resolution advice.

Altitude Angel CEO and founder Richard Parker says: “The ability for drones and automated aircraft to strategically plan flights, be made aware of potential conflict and alter their route accordingly is critical in ensuring safety in our skies. This first step is all about pre-flight coordination, between drone pilots, fleet operators and other UTM companies. Being able to predict and resolve conflict mid-flight by providing appropriate and timely guidance will revolutionize automated flight. CRS is one of the critical building blocks on which the drone and automated flight industries will grow.”

Altitude Angel won’t be the last to unveil a CRS of this type, but it’s instructive that there are startups confident of taking on the mighty Google and Amazon — which also has similar drone delivery plans — to achieve this type of platform.

Sramana Mitra: A lot of these B2C trends are big in India as well. We cover India extensively. The Indian B2C market is more advanced than Latin America. A lot of these trends are very active trends...

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VertoFX, an Africa and emerging markets-focused currency trading and payment startup, has raised a $2.1 million seed round, led by Accelerated Digital Ventures.

The London-based company, with a subsidiary in Lagos, Nigeria, has created a platform that allows businesses and banks to exchange and make payments in exotic foreign currencies that don’t often convert or trade conveniently across businesses or banks.

For example, South Africa’s Rand is Africa’s most convertible and traded currency — with lower spreads and transaction costs — while currencies of countries such as Ethiopia or Egypt may be difficult or expensive to trade or transact B2B payments.

“That’s the reason we are utilizing technology to create a marketplace model and price discovery to create liquidity for these currencies,” VertoFX founder Ola Oyetayo told TechCrunch.

There are around 40 global currencies that are considered exotic or illiquid, most of them in frontier markets in Asia, Africa and the Middle-East, according to Oyetayo.

And there’s a revenue opportunity to creating a convenient online marketplace for trading and payments in these currencies.

“Our research says there’s about $400 billion being done by small and medium-scale businesses in Africa alone in transactional volume on an annual basis. If we take 1% of that as a commission or transaction fee, that’s a $4 billion addressable market, just in the continent,” said Oyetayo.

VertoFX was founded in 2017 by Oyetayo and Anthony Oduwole — both ex-global bankers born in Nigeria. The company was part of Y Combinator’s 2019 winter cohort and processed around $7 million in transaction volume last month, according to Oyetayo.

VertoFX is registered as a payment services provider with the U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority. Current clients include several undisclosed banks and San Francisco-based payment venture Flutterwave.

VertoFX doesn’t release revenue figures, but confirmed it earns a commission, or spread, on each transaction processed on its platform. There are currently 19 currencies on the platform and the ability to settle in 120 countries, including China and the U.S.

VertoFX is also moving into offering market research — toward potential subscription services — on the currencies it trades, according to Oyetayo.

The startup will use the round for platform development, expanding the currencies and gaining licenses in new countries. “We’ll also use the round for hiring, primarily in compliance and regulator type roles,” said Oyetayo. VertoFX already has a developer team in India and is looking at local developer talent for its Africa offices.

ADV’s Ryan Proctor confirmed the VC firm’s lead on the investment round, which also included participation from YC and several local angel investors in Africa, Oyetayo told TechCrunch.

On the possibility of becoming acquired by a big bank, VertoFX isn’t so interested, according to Oyetayo.

“We both come from big banks and if we’d wanted to go down that route we’d have developed this more as a software as a service platform,” he said.

“We’re playing the long game here, and I don’t think acquisition is the end game,” he said.

Adam Neumann, the co-founder and chief executive of the international real estate co-working startup WeWork has reportedly cashed out of more than $700 million from his company ahead of its initial public offering.

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.

Despite the loans and sales of stock, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, Neumann remains the single largest shareholder in the company.

According to the Journal’s reporting, Neumann has already set up a family office to invest the proceeds and begun to hire financial professionals to run it.

He’s also made significant investments in real estate in New York and San Francisco, including four homes in the greater New York metropolitan area, and a $21 million, 13,000-square-foot house in the Bay Area, complete with a guitar-shaped room (I guess a fiddle would be too on the nose). In all, Neumann reportedly spent $80 million on real estate.

Neumann has also invested in commercial real estate (the kind that WeWork leases to provide work space with more flexible leases for companies and entrepreneurs), including properties in San Jose, Calif. and New York. Indeed, four of Neumann’s properties are leased to WeWork — to the tune of several million dollars in rent. According to the Journal, Neumann will transfer those property holdings to a WeWork-controlled fund.

The WeWork chief executive has also invested in startups in recent years. He’s got an equity stake in seven companies: Hometalk, Intercure, EquityBee, Selina, Tunity, Feature.fm and Pins, according to CrunchBase.

The rewards that Neumann is reaping from the loans and stock sales are among the highest recorded by a private company executive. In recent years, Evan Spiegel sold $8 million in stock and borrowed $20 million from Snap before its 2017 public offering, and Slack Technologies chief executive Stewart Butterfield sold $3.2 million of stock before Slack’s public offering in June.

The only liquidation of stock and other payouts that have been disclosed that come close to Neumann’s payouts are the $300 million that Groupn co-founder Eric Lefkofsky sold before his company’s IPO and the over $100 million that Mark Pincus took off the table ahead of Zynga’s offering.

WeWork declined to comment for this article.

During this week’s roundtable, we had Rahul Chandra, Managing Director at Unitary Helion Ventures, as our guest. Rahul provided an excellent overview of the opportunity around India’s next 400...

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Software grabs so much attention that it even has its own catchphrase — there’s an app for that. It’s not a bad thing, but we know nothing happens without hardware. That’s why we’re hunting for the best early-stage hardware startups to take center stage at Hardware Battlefield at TC Shenzhen on November 11-12 in China.

Apply here to compete in TC Hardware Battlefield 2019, our hardware-focused pitch competition. If selected, you’ll go head-to-head against some of the world’s most innovative hardware makers for a shot at $25,000. What’s more, you’ll pitch your creations to the world’s top investors. Imagine what that kind of exposure could do for your bottom line.

This is our fifth Hardware Battlefield and our first in China. Shenzhen has a global reputation for the support it offers hardware startups through a combination of accelerators, rapid prototyping and world-class manufacturing. We’re thrilled to collaborate with our partner TechNode to host TC Hardware Battlefield 2019 as part of the larger TechCrunch Shenzhen that runs November 9-12.

Any early-stage hardware startup — from any country — can apply to this competition. We’ve seen an impressive range of hardware in previous Battlefields, including robotic arms, food testing devices, malaria diagnostic tools, smart socks for diabetics and e-motorcycles. Show us what you’ve got!

Meet the minimum requirements listed below, and you’re qualified for consideration:

Fill out the TC Hardware Battlefield 2019 application before the August 14 deadline.You must have a minimally viable product to demo onstageYour product has received little if any, press coverage to dateYour product must be a hardware device or component

If you’ve never experienced one of our Battlefield pitch competitions, you’re in for the ride of a lifetime. Here’s how this Hardware Battlefield works.

The vetting process is very selective, and TechCrunch editors thoroughly review every qualified application. They’ll pick 10-15 outstanding hardware startups to compete. Every participating team receives extensive coaching from TechCrunch editors wise in the ways of Battlefield competitions. How extensive? Try six weeks of training that leaves you ready to step on the main stage in front of a panel of judges comprised of expert VCs, founders and technologists.

Each team has just six minutes to pitch and demo their products and then respond to an in-depth Q&A from the judges. One team will rise above the rest to become the Hardware Battlefield champion and take home a check for $25,000.

Even if you don’t win the whole shooting match, you’ll walk away with invaluable — some might say life-changing — media and investor exposure. Of course, we’ll capture the entire event on video and publish it on TechCrunch to a global audience.

Hardware Battlefield at TC Shenzhen takes place on November 11-12. Don’t miss your chance to launch your hardware startup on the world’s most famous tech stage. Apply today!

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

VMware today announced that it has acquired Bitfusion, a former participant in our Startup Battlefield competition. Bitfusion was one of the earliest companies to help businesses accelerate their complex computing workloads on GPUs, FPGAs and ASICs. In its earliest iteration, over four years ago, the company’s focus was less on AI and machine learning and more on other areas of high-performance computing, but, unsurprisingly, that shifted as the interested in AI and ML increased in recent years.

VMware will use Bitfusion’s technology, which is vendor- and hardware-agnostic, to bring similar capabilities to its customers. Specifically, it plans to integrate Bitfusion into its vSphere platform.

“Once closed, the acquisition of Bitfusion will bolster VMware’s strategy of supporting AI- and ML-based workloads by virtualizing hardware accelerators,” writes Krish Prasad, senior vice president and general manager of VMware’s Cloud Platform Business Unit. “Multi-vendor hardware accelerators and the ecosystem around them are key components for delivering modern applications. These accelerators can be used regardless of location in the environment – on-premises and/or in the cloud.”

Prasad also notes that to get the most out of hardware accelerators like GPUs, most enterprises deploy them on bare metal. VMware, however, argues that this leads to poor utilization and poor efficiencies (as it would, of course, given that it is in the business of virtualization). “This provides a perfect opportunity to virtualize them—providing increased sharing of resources and lowering costs,” writes Prasad.

The two companies did not disclose the price of the acquisition. Bitfusion had raised $5 million in 2017 and a smaller, strategic investment from Samsung Ventures in 2018.

Submittable is announcing that it has raised $10 million in Series B funding.

When I first wrote about the company in 2012, it was focused on helping literary magazines manage their submissions — useful, but maybe not the kind of thing that venture capitalists write big checks for.

Since then, Submittable raised a $5 million Series A and expanded by helping companies in a number of industries manage their submissions and applications. Co-founder and CEO Michael FitzGerald said the company has built products for four main verticals (corporate, academic, philanthropy and publishing) and has signed up big customers like AT&T, HBO, Conde Nast, Harvard and MIT.

And while publishing may no longer be the main focus, FitzGerald — a published novelist himself — noted that “in the publishing world, we’re pretty much the way you do it.” I’ve certainly been seeing more Submittable submissions pages, (although FitzGerald acknowledged that the service hasn’t quite taken hold among science fiction magazines).

He also said the product has been getting increasingly sophisticated, for example, allowing a publisher to review and rank submissions based on very specific qualities like sentence structure and voice.

Besides expanding into additional verticals and launching on mobile, one of FitzGerald’s main goals it to create what he called “ZipRecruiter for Opportunities,” a marketplace that uses Submittable data to connect individuals and organizations that seem like a good fit, whether they’re writers and magazines, scholarships and students or any other pairing for “any opportunity that isn’t a job.”

Submittable is based in Missoula, Mont., and the round was led by Next Coast Ventures, a firm that invests in startups outside the big coastal tech hubs. (Previous investors True Ventures, Next Frontier and Flywheel Ventures also participated.) Next Coast co-founder and managing director Michael Smerklo is joining the startup’s board of directors.

“Submittable is a perfect example of what is possible outside Silicon Valley,” Smerklo said in a statement. “The platform is modernizing the often painful undertaking of managing the submission process and leveraging that data for genuine opportunity creation.”

FitzGerald (who’s spoken elsewhere about his experience working as a startup CEO while also facing a Stage 4 cancer diagnosis) said the plan is to expand the Submittable team from 88 to 240 people by the end of 2020. He acknowledged that the location has created some challenges in hiring, particularly when it comes to experienced executives, but he said he’s been assisted by the fact that ClassPass and OnxMaps have also opened offices in Missoula.

Plus, he said that one of the most effective tactics involves searching LinkedIn for executives who went to high school in Missoula between 1985 and 2000: “Everyone is looking for a way home.”

Rent the Backyard is one of the rare startups with a name that perfectly suits what it does.

The company, which is part of Y Combinator’s current batch, builds studio apartments in homeowners’ backyards, which are then rented out for income.

Of course, if you already own a house with a yard, you could theoretically do this for yourself, without getting a startup involved, but co-founder Brian Bakerman told me, “The goal is to have no headaches for the homeowners.”

That means Rent the Backyard works with a partner to build the apartment, finances the construction, lists the property, selects the tenant, collects the rent and serves as the landlord. In exchange for all that, it has an ownership stake in the unit and keeps 50% of the rent.

The startup also handles the permitting, which co-founder Spencer Burleigh said has become much easier with recent changes in California law. In fact, he pointed to stories about how these changes have led to skyrocketing applications (16 in 2016, 350 in 2018) to build “in-law” units in San Jose, which is where the startup is focused for now.

Bakerman said that many homeowners simply can’t afford the upfront cost of building these units, so by providing the financing, Rent the Backyard can unlock new income and make home ownership more affordable. At the same time, it’s also helping renters by creating more apartments.

Of course, for a homeowner, that means giving up a big piece of your backyard (which must be at least 30 feet by 30 feet in size), but Bakerman said that many yards are “underutilized” anyway.

“In places like the Bay Area … people are spending a ridiculous amount on their homes,” he added. “They often can’t afford those lifestyles, but everyone wants to attain home ownership.”

The company’s website includes a calculator of how much rental income you might earn, and it says that most owners will be able to make more than $10,000 of additional income each year.

Over time, Rent the Backyard will give the homeowner an increasing share of equity in the apartment, until they own it completely after 30 years. Homeowners also can buy out the startup’s equity and take full ownership at any time (which they’ll need to do if they sell their home and move out).

To be clear, Rent the Backyard hasn’t actually built any apartments yet, but it’s already signed up construction partners, and the goal is to get 10 units permitted and ready for construction by the end of the summer.

“It’s a pretty fast process,” Bakerman said. “It could just be a handful of weeks before we’re able to start building” — and because the units use prefabricated construction methods, the actual building could take as little as a week and a half.

Private spaceflight company Blue Origin has its sights set on the Moon, and in May unveiled a new lander to help it get there. This October, Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith will join us onstage at Disrupt SF 2019 to talk about how the company plans to get to the Moon, and beyond — and what the opportunities are for private space companies once it does.

Smith and the Jeff Bezos -backed Blue Origin have been busy with more than just building lunar landers: It has been testing the company’s New Shepard spacecraft since 2015 and through this year, when it plans to perform its first crewed mission. To date, its tests have largely been successful and are a strong indicator that it’s well-positioned among the various companies hoping to return the U.S. to crewed launches.

That’s a key milestone in Blue Origin’s goal of getting to the Moon by 2024, which is the timeline the company declared in May. But their plan isn’t strictly about human achievement or scientific discovery — it’s about business, and establishing a permanent presence in space to provide access to resources and help humanity expand beyond its finite, Earth-bound constraints.

We’ll talk to Smith about what it means to go from today’s launches to low Earth orbit to making the trip to the Moon in just five short years, and what Blue Origin believes the commercial spaceflight industry will look like once we’ve gotten there and established a permanent commercial presence.

Blue sky opportunity is old news — Smith will help us suss out what the blue space opportunity is for the next generation of entrepreneurs.

Disrupt SF runs October 2 to October 4 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Tickets are available at an early-bird rate here.

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The rise of data breaches, along with an expanding raft of regulations (now numbering 80 different regional regimes, and growing) have thrust data protection — having legal and compliant ways of handling personal user information — to the top of the list of things that an organization needs to consider when building and operating their businesses. Now a startup called InCountry, which is building both the infrastructure for these companies to securely store that personal data in each jurisdiction, as well as a comprehensive policy framework for them to follow, has raised a Series A of $15 million. The funding is coming in just three months after closing its seed round — underscoring both the attention this area is getting and the opportunity ahead.

The funding is being led by three investors: Arbor Ventures of Singapore, Global Founders Capital of Berlin and Mubadala of Abu Dhabi. Previous investors Caffeinated Capital, Felicis Ventures, Charles River Ventures and Team Builder Ventures (along with others that are not being named) also participated. It brings the total raised to date to $21 million.

Peter Yared, the CEO and founder, pointed out in an interview the geographic diversity of the three lead backers: he described this as a strategic investment, which has resulted from InCountry already expanding its work in each region. (As one example, he pointed out a new law in the UAE requiring all health data of its citizens to be stored in the country — regardless of where it originated.)

As a result, the startup will be opening offices in each of the regions and launching a new product, InCountry Border, to focus on encryption and data handling that keep data inside specific jurisdictions. This will sit alongside the company’s compliance consultancy as well as its infrastructure business.

“We’re only 28 people and only six months old,” Yared said. “But the proposition we offer — requiring no code changes, but allowing companies to automatically pull out and store the personally identifiable information in a separate place, without anything needed on their own back end, has been a strong pull. We’re flabbergasted with the meetings we’ve been getting.” (The alternative, of companies storing this information themselves, has become massively unpalatable, given all the data breaches we’ve seen, he pointed out.)

In part because of the nature of data protection, in its short six months of life, InCountry has already come out of the gates with a global viewpoint and global remit.

It’s already active in 65 countries — which means it’s already equipped to store, process and regulate profile data in the country of origin in these markets — but that is actually just the tip of the iceberg. The company points out that more than 80 countries around the world have data sovereignty regulations, and that in the U.S., some 25 states already have data privacy laws. Violating these can have disastrous consequences for a company’s reputation, not to mention its bottom line: In Europe, the U.K. data regulator is now fining companies the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars when they violate GDPR rules.

This ironically is translating into a big business opportunity for startups that are building technology to help companies cope with this. Just last week, OneTrust raised a $200 million Series A to continue building out its technology and business funnel — the company is a “gateway” specialist, building the welcome screens that you encounter when you visit sites to accept or reject a set of cookies and other data requests.

Yared says that while InCountry is very young and is still working on its channel strategy — it’s mainly working directly with companies at this point — there is a clear opportunity both to partner with others within the ecosystem as well as integrators and others working on cloud services and security to build bigger customer networks.

That speaks to the complexity of the issue, and the different entry points that exist to solve it.

“The rapidly evolving and complex global regulatory landscape in our technology driven world is a growing challenge for companies,” said Melissa Guzy of Arbor Ventures, in a statement. Guzy is joining the board with this round. “InCountry is the first to provide a comprehensive solution in the cloud that enables companies to operate globally and address data sovereignty. We’re thrilled to partner and support the company’s mission to enable global data compliance for international businesses.”

Newsflash for all female founders of the early-stage startup variety. Your chance to meet with leading women VCs at Disrupt SF 2019 on October 2-4 ends on July 19 at 5 p.m. (PT). Apply for an AMA session before the deadline expires.

We’re serious when it comes to supporting women in tech, which is why we partnered with All Raise — a startup nonprofit dedicated to accelerating female founder success. They’re hosting a day-long AMA (“ask me anything”) event, where you and about 100 other female founders can schedule a session to pick the brain of a leading female VC.

Here’s what you need to know about the All Raise AMA event. It takes place on October 3 in a reserved area within Startup Alley. The sessions are 30 minutes, and there will be at least 30 scheduled throughout the day.

Each AMA session consists of three founders and one All Raise community VC. You’ll be face-to-face with one of the best investors around; someone who’s willing to share and support your dream — talk about a rare opportunity. In fact, here are some of the female VCs you might meet:

Dayna Grayson, NEASusan Lyne, BBGShauntel Garvey, Reach CapitalEurie Kim, ForerunnerJess Lee, SequoiaKara Nortman, UpfrontSara Guo, Greylock,Anarghya Vardhana, MaveronEva Ho, Fika VenturesSarah Smith, Bain Capital VenturesJess Lin, Work-Bench

You qualify to apply for an All Raise AMA if you meet the following criteria: you’re a U.S.-based woman founder and you’ve raised at least $250,000 in a Seed, A or B round. All Raise gives special consideration to founders from underrepresented groups (e.g. Black, Latinx or LGBTQIA women).

All Raise will review the applications and base acceptance on availability for session spots, investor fit with industry sector and company stage, as well as demand for certain categories.

If they select you to participate, all you need to do is buy any pass to Disrupt SF (including Expo Only). All Raise will contact you via email to let you know when your AMA session takes place.

An opportunity like this doesn’t come along every day, and your chance to take advantage of it ends soon. Don’t wait, apply to the All Raise AMA event before the deadline expires on July 19 at 5 p.m. (PT). Get your burning questions answered!

If you are interested in sponsoring this event or exhibiting at Disrupt San Francisco 2019, fill out this form to get in contact with our sales team.

Jose Deustua: We also have a platform called Anvi. They teach English. Currently, we know that most people in Latin America are not good in speaking English. They need to speak English to progress in...

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