Rohan Silva is obsessed with social mobility and why certain groups are so under-represented in the technology industry.

He co-founded Second Home, a coworking space looking to bring together disparate civic-minded, cultural, creative and commercial entrepreneurs at sites in Lisbon, London and (now) Los Angeles, and he has spent years examining how gender, race and class impact access to technology as a now-reformed politician. Throughout that work though, one area that he says he overlooked was accessibility and entrepreneurship focused on people with disabilities.

“At Second Home, we pride ourselves on having a diverse community. I can count on one hand the number of founders with disabilities we have in our community, so there is definitely something going profoundly wrong,” Silva says.

Enlisting the help of the European venture capital fund Atomico, Silva has set up a micro-investment fund of £100,000 to tackle the problem.

“It’s a large amount compared to what I have and a small amount compared to most venture capital funds,” he explains. “The much bigger prize here is the ability to fund technologies that have the opportunities to improve the lives of people with disabilities.”

Silva isn’t alone. Organizations like Not Impossible Labs, a Los Angeles-based company, and startups like OrCam Technologies, eSight, B-Temia, Kinova Robotics, Open Bionics, Voiceitt and Whill are harnessing technology to bring solutions to people with disabilities across the world.

Managing people is perhaps the most challenging thing most people will have to learn in the course of their professional lives – especially because there’s no one ‘right’ way to do it. But Ottawa-based startup Fellow is hoping to ease the learning curve for new managers, and improve and reinforce the habits of experienced ones with their new people management platform software.

Fellow has raised $6.5 million in seed funding, from investors including Inovia Capital, Felicis Ventures, Garage Capital and a number of angels. The funding announcement comes alongside the announcement of their first customers, including Shopify (disclosure: I worked at Shopify when Fellow was implemented and was an early tester of this product, which is why I can can actually speak to how it works for users).

The Fellow platform is essentially a way to help team leads interact with their reports, and vice versa. It’s a feedback tool that you can use to collect insight on your team from across the company; it includes meeting supplemental suggestions and templates for one-on-ones, and even provides helpful suggestions like recommending you have a one-on-one when you haven’t in a while; and it all lives in the cloud, with integrations for other key workplace software like Slack that help it integrate with your existing flow.

Fellow co-founder and CEO Aydin Mirzaee and his co-founding team have previous experience building companies: They founded Fluidware, a survey software company, in 2008 and then sold it to SurveyMonkey in 2014. In growing the team to over 100 people, Mirzaee says they realized where there were gaps, both in his leadership team’s knowledge and in available solutions on the market.

“Starting the last company, we were in our early 20s, and like the way that we used to learn different practices was by using software, like if you use the Salesforce, and you know nothing about sales, you’ll learn some things about sales,” Mirzaee told me in an interview. “If you don’t know about marketing, use Marketo, and you’ll learn some things about marketing. And you know, from our perspective, as soon as we started actually having some traction and customers and then hired some people, we just got thrown into it. So it was ‘Okay, now, I guess we’re managers.’ And then eventually we became managers of managers.”

Mirzaee and his team then wondered why a tool like Salesforce or Marketo didn’t exist for management. “Why is it that when you get promoted to become a manager, there isn’t an equivalent tool to help you with that?” he said.

Concept in hand, Fellow set out to build its software, and what it came up with is a smartly designed, user-friendly platform that is accessible to anyone regardless of technical expertise or experience with management practice and training. I can attest to this first-hand, since I was a first-time manager using Fellow to lead a team during my time at Shopify – part of the beta testing process that helped develop the product into something that’s ready for broader release. I was not alone in my relative lack of management knowledge, Mirzaee said, and that’s part of why they saw a clear need for this product.

“The more we did research, the more we figured out that obviously, managers are really important,” he explained. “70% of customer engagements are due to managers, for instance. And when people leave companies, they tend to leave the manager, not the company. The more we dug into it the more it was clear that there truly was this management problem –  management crisis almost, and that nobody really had built a great tool for managers and their teams like.”

Fellow’s tool is flexible enough to work with specific management methodologies like setting SMART goals or OKRs for team members, and managers can use pre-set templates or build their own for things like setting meeting talking points, or gathering feedback from the colleagues of their reports.

Right now, Fellow is live with a number of clients including Shopify, Vidyard, Tulip, North and more, and it’s adding new clients who sign up on a case-by-case basis, but increasing the pace at which it onboard new customers. Mirzaee explained that it hopes to open sign ups entirely later this year.

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. I would definitely like to learn more about EverlyWell. I’ve seen a company like this – Iris Wellness, which dealt with the issue of the physicians not wanting...

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Fungible, a startup that wants to help data centers cope with the increasingly massive amounts of data produced by new technologies, has raised a $200 million Series C led by SoftBank Vision Fund, with participation from Norwest Venture Partners and its existing investors. As part of the round, SoftBank Investment Advisers senior managing partner Deep Nishar will join Fungible’s board of directors.

Founded in 2015, Fungible now counts about 200 employees and has raised more than $300 million in total funding. Its other investors include Battery Ventures, Mayfield Fund, Redline Capital and Walden Riverwood Ventures. Its new capital will be used to speed up product development. The company’s founders, CEO Pradeep Sindhu and Bertrand Serlet, say Fungible will release more information later this year about when its data processing units will be available and their on-boarding process, which they say will not require clients to change their existing applications, networking or server design.

Sindu previously founded Juniper Networks, where he held roles as chief scientist and CEO. Serlet was senior vice president of software engineering at Apple before leaving in 2011 and founding Upthere, a storage startup that was acquired by Western Digital in 2017. Sindu and Serlet describe Fungible’s objective as pivoting data centers from a “compute-centric” model to a data-centric one. While the company is often asked if they consider Intel and Nvidia competitors, they say Fungible Data Processing Units (DPU) complement tech, including central and graphics processing units, from other chip makers.

Sindhu describes Fungible’s DPUs as a new building block in data center infrastructure, allowing them to handle larger amounts of data more efficiently and also potentially enabling new kinds of applications. Its DPUs are fully programmable and connect with standard IPs over Ethernet local area networks and local buses, like the PCI Express, that in turn connect to CPUs, GPUs and storage. Placed between the two, the DPUs act like a “super-charged data traffic controller,” performing computations offloaded by the CPUs and GPUs, as well as converting the IP connection into high-speed data center fabric.

This better prepares data centers for the enormous amounts of data generated by new technology, including self-driving cars, and industries such as personalized healthcare, financial services, cloud gaming, agriculture, call centers and manufacturing, says Sindu.

In a press statement, Nishar said “As the global data explosion and AI revolution unfold, global computing, storage and networking infrastructure are undergoing a fundamental transformation. Fungible’s products enable data centers to leverage their existing hardware infrastructure and benefit from these new technology paradigms. We look forward to partnering with the company’s visionary and accomplished management team as they power the next generation of data centers.”

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The Customer Data Platform (CDP) has certainly been getting a lot of attention in marketing software circles over the last year as big dawgs like Salesforce and Adobe enter the fray, but Amperity, a Seattle-based startup, has been building a CDP solution since it launched in 2016, and today it announced some updates to give customers more control over the platform.

Chris Jones, chief product officer at Amperity, says this is an important step for the startup. “If you think about the evolution of our company, we started with an idea that turned into a [Marketing Data Platform], which was the engine that powered all of that, but that engine was largely operated by our delivery team. We’re now putting the power of that engine into the customers’ hands and giving them the full access to that,” Jones explained.

That is giving customers — which include Alaska Airlines, Nordstrom and The Gap — the power to control how the software works in the context of their companies, rather than using a black box approach where you have to use the software as delivered. He says that customers want the ability to start using the system to gain insights on their own.

One of the primary pieces in the newest version of Amperity to allow them to do that is Stitch, a tool that lets users pull together all of the interactions from a customer in a single view —  ingesting the data, sorting, deduplicating it and delivering a list of all the interactions a brand has had with a given customer. From there, they can use the new Customer 360 visualization to get a more graphical view of the data.

Jones says companies can use this data to help different groups within a company, whether marketing, sales or service, understand the customer better before or during an interaction. For example, a marketer can segment the data in a very granular way to find all of the regular customers who aren’t part of the company loyalty program, and deliver them an email listing all of the benefits of joining.

Amperity launched in 2016, and has raised $37 million across two rounds. Its most recent funding came in 2017, a $28 million investment led by Tiger Global Management, according to Crunchbase data.

Venture capital investors Andreessen Horowitz, Zeev Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Group 11 have valued TripActions, a travel booking service tailored for large enterprises, at $4 billion with a $250 million Series D.

The round, announced this morning, brings the business’s total raised to $480 million.

TripActions co-founder and chief executive officer Ariel Cohen tells TechCrunch the company’s revenue is growing 5x year-over-year but declined to disclose 2018 revenues. Currently, it has more than 2,000 customers, including WeWork, Zoom, Dropbox and Robinhood.

Founded in 2015, TripActions is out to replace antiquated travel booking systems with a platform that integrates company HR and expense systems. Using TripActions, business travelers can arrange flights, hotels and transportation, with 24/7 global support from the startup’s staff.

“We are going after a really big industry,” Cohen said. “We are replacing something people don’t like. They don’t like the tools corporates are giving them today to book business trips.”

TripActions plans to use the cash to accelerate its international expansion. Only 18 months ago, it operated just one office out of its headquarters in Palo Alto. Today, the company has 700 employees with offices in London, Sydney, Amsterdam and more.

Co-founder and chief technology officer Ilan Twig says once they brought on large enterprise customers like Box, for example, they had no choice but to better craft the service for markets located outside the U.S.

“In a year we went from a startup with an office in Palo Alto to having more than 100 employees in Europe,” Twig tells TechCrunch. “We need to meet users where they are … We need agents and operations in the various [geographies] that we are serving. And then of course sales and marketing in all of these [geographies].”

With the latest round, TripActions is sitting on a mountain of cash. The founders tell us they’ve yet to spend a dime of their $154 million Series C. Closed in November, the financing valued the company at $1 billion, cementing its position in the unicorn club.

“We want to make sure we are equipped to take the market,” Cohen said. “Do we need the entire amount of money we’ve raised to date? The answer is no. But do we want the means to seize the opportunity in the long term? The answer is hell yes.”

Bird’s somewhat weird but also very clever global expansion model is to let others handle it, and one of those others is bringing their service online this month. Bird Canada, which is a wholly Canadian-owned company entirely distinct from Bird, will begin offering on-demand electric scooter rental service in Alberta this month, with plans to offer its services across more Canadian communities on a gradual rollout schedule after that.

Bird Canada will be operating its service under the Platform plan that the original Bird announced earlier this year, which will see it acquire its scooters from the U.S. Bird at cost, and gain access to the Santa Monica-based startup’s tools, software and technology to operate the service, in exchange for a 20 percent cut of ride revenue.

The new Canadian e-scooter company is founded by Canadian serial entrepreneur and Toronto Raptors founder John Bitove (he led the bid that brought the NBA expansion team to Toronto in 1993), who will act as the company’s Chairman. Bird Canada’s day-to-day operations will be overseen by CEO Steward Lyons, who previously worked with Bitove on SiriusXM’s Canadian business and the startup national wireless provider Mobilicity which the two entrepreneurs founded together.

For its part, the Canadian entity will operate the fleet, including recharging the electric, battery-powered scooters and ensuring they’re in good working order. Local operators are also the ones who’ll need to work with city and any other relevant governing officials, which is a big reason why this probably seemed like the wisest or at least most expedient path to getting revenue from markets outside the U.S. for Bird.

Bird is also being selective about how it rolls out these franchise-like Platform partnerships, by picking only one partner per region and also by avoiding any such partnerships in markets where it does have an interest in eventually expanding itself.

Both Lyons and Bird CEO Travis VanderZanden provided quotes around this news that emphasize how scooter charing can offer sustainable, affordable transportation that helps alleviate traffic, and Lyons specifically said that Alberta is “leading the way in Canada.” The regulatory environment around scooters is at best murky in most Canadian cities, and local governing authorities are scrambling to figure out what the formal rules should be ahead of the scooter explosion traveling north of the U.S. border in a bigger way.

Bird Canada is likely hoping to set the tone for that conversation and be involved in encouraging more communities beyond those in Alberta to open its arms to on-demand rental businesses, but it’ll be interesting to see what kind of reception these receive, and what approach Bird Canada takes to managing their fleet in the country’s harsher winter conditions.

Startup campus Station F is expanding beyond its original building in Paris with a co-living space called Flatmates. 600 people will be able to rent a room in shared apartments.

Compared to traditional accommodation in Paris, it’s much easier to get a room as you don’t need a French full-time work contract, guarantors and all the stupid stuff that landlords and professionals ask you — trust me, it’s a nightmare in Paris.

Station F says that it is the biggest co-living space in Europe. Flatmates is actually three different buildings designed by Jean-Michel Wilmotte. Just like Station F, French billionaire Xavier Niel is the owner.

There are 100 different apartments, which represent 600 rooms in total. You get to share the living room, kitchen and sometimes bathroom with other Station F members.

In addition to these common areas, there are multiple services accessible to Flatmates residents. You can access a café, a grocery store, a gym, a laundry, a lounge and an event space. There are also car and bike parking spaces.

Here’s a gallery of photos (click to expand):

[gallery ids="1848966,1848965,1848962,1848967,1848969,1848968,1848974,1848975,1848976"]

Everything has been designed to be a seamless experience for Station F members. For instance, you can unlock your room with your Station F badge — you don’t need a traditional key.

Flatmates is located in Ivry-sur-Seine, the city outside of Paris closest to Station F. It’s not the most charming location (1 rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau) as you’re surrounded by train tracks, highways and malls.

But it’s convenient if all you plan to do is work at Station F and sleep at Flatmates. Citymapper says that it takes roughly 25 minutes to go to Station F by bus, or 15 minutes by bike.

When it comes to rent, you can get a standard room with a shared bathroom for €399 per month. A premium room with a private bathroom costs €549 per month. And a couple room with a private bathroom and a dressing costs €799 per month.

If you’re a Station F member, you can access the application form from Station F’s intranet. Flatmates has partnered with Whoomies to match up residents based on your eating habits, interests and personality. It’s going to be interesting to see if people end up staying just a few months or much longer if they feel at home.

Creative technology and innovative ideas know no boundaries, which is why thousands of early-stage startup founders, investors, innovators and entrepreneurs — from more than 50 countries — will convene at Disrupt Berlin 2019 on 11-12 December.

In keeping with an international focus, we’re searching for countries that want to shine a spotlight on their best and brightest early-stage startups. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to apply for a Country Pavilion and bring your delegation to exhibit in Startup Alley.

The exhibition floor — the epicenter of opportunity — features hundreds of dynamic startups displaying their technology, products, platforms and services. Hosting a Country Pavilion in Startup Alley gives you the chance to showcase your country’s emerging startups and to be recognized as a world leader in technology.

Jana Rosenfelder, co-founder and COO of Actijoy, exhibited in a Startup Alley country pavilion sponsored by Czech Invest — a governmental agency that supports startups by defraying conference costs. The following year, Actijoy earned a TC Top Pick spot at Disrupt San Francisco 2018.

“TechCrunch Disrupt is one of the best startup conferences,” said Rosenfelder. “It’s so well organized, and the media exposure is much better than at other events. Startup Alley’s a great place for startups to network for leads, investors, industry contacts and partnerships.”

Here’s what you need to know about hosting a County Pavilion. Your delegation can consist of international startup groups, government innovation centers, incubators and accelerators. All startups must be less than two years old and have secured less than $2.5 million in funding.

Still with us? Good. Next, simply This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and tell us which country or region you want to highlight at Disrupt Berlin. We also want to know a bit about the startups in your delegation. The events team will contact you with a price quote.

Did you know that all startups exhibiting in Startup Alley — including pavilions — have a chance to be voted the Wild Card company? The Wild Card winner gets a shot to compete in Startup Battlefield, TechCrunch’s epic pitch competition with a $50,000 cash prize.

True story: RecordGram won the Wild Card at Disrupt NY ’17. The next day it competed in Startup Battlefield and went on to win the whole shebang. Pretty amazing stuff, right there.

You can get in on the exhibition action of Startup Alley even if you’re not part of a country delegation. Simply purchase a Startup Alley Exhibitor Package for €745 + VAT, and that price includes three Founder passes.

Disrupt Berlin 2019 takes place on 11-12 December. Come and showcase your country’s best and brightest startups to the world. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. about reserving your country pavilion today.

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

Sramana Mitra: Talk about some examples of what you have really invested in and more about the ones that are conviction investment. Michael Smerklo: I’ll give you one example. I’m on the Board of a...

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Oracle’s (NYSE: ORCL) recently announced fourth quarter results were a pleasant surprise for the stock. After two quarters of shrinking revenue, the company finally reported marginal growth in...

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Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down on some of the companies that you have funded. As you talk about them, talk about what situation were they in when you got involved. What did they have by way...

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Big money continues to flow in India’s growing education market. Bangalore-based Unacademy, which operates an online learning platform to help millions prepare for competitive exams in India, has raised $50 million to further scale its reach.

The Series D financing round was led by Steadview Capital, Sequoia India, Nexus Venture Partners and Blume Ventures, with Unacademy’s own co-founders Gaurav Munjal and Roman Saini also participating in it. The new round means the startup has raised close to $90 million to date.

The four-year-old startup is aimed at students who are preparing for competitive exams to get into a college and those who are pursuing graduation level courses. Unacademy allows students to watch live classes from educators and later engage in sessions engage to go over topics in more detail. It has 10,000 registered educators and 13 million learners — up from 3 million a year ago.

The startup said it will use the new fund to expand the number of educators it has on the platform, and also add more exam courses, Unacademy CEO Munjal told TechCrunch. It will also improve its product and expand the team.

Unacademy began its journey as a YouTube channel, but has since expanded to its own app where it offers some courses for free and others through a recently launched subscription business. The subscription service — called Unacademy Plus Subscription — has 50,000 users.

Unacademy also maintains an archive of all the classes, giving students the option to reference to older lectures at any time through the app. The startup says YouTube is still its largest distribution channel. Overall, the platform sees more than 100 million monthly views across the platforms.

“We are seeing unprecedented growth and engagement from learners in smaller towns and cities, and are also very humbled to see that top-quality educators are choosing Unacademy as their primary platform to reach out to students. In the last few months, we have taken bigger strides toward achieving this mission. We have more than 400 top educators from across the country taking live classes every day on Unacademy Plus. This is available to every student, irrespective of their location,” said Munjal.

Unacademy competes with unicorn Byju’s, which is widely believed to be the largest edtech startup in the world with its valuation nearing $4 billion. Byju’s, which has more than 2.4 million paid subscribers (and over 30 million users), offers courses for students in kindergarten to year 12, in addition to those preparing for competitive under graduation level courses.

India has the largest population in the world in the age bracket of 5 to 24 years. The education space in the nation is estimated to grow to $35 billion in next six years.

In recent months, Unacademy has grown more aggressive with marketing. Last year it tied up with web producing house The Viral Fever to fund a show called “Kota Factory”, which revolves around the lives of students who are preparing to go to an engineering college. In the midst of it, Unacademy also offered low-cost, discounted subscription plans to attract users to its subscription platform.

Unacademy has presence in Indonesia as well, where as of last year, it had about 30 educators. The startup did not offer an update on how its international ambitions are holding up. A representative of Unacademy told TechCrunch recently that the platform does not rely on ads for monetization.

WeWork announced today that it will acquire Waltz, a building access and security management startup, for an undisclosed amount. Waltz’s smartphone app and reader allows users to enter different properties with a single credential and will make it easier for WeWork’s enterprise clients, such as GE Healthcare and Microsoft, to manage their employees’ on-demand memberships to WeWork spaces.

WeWork’s announcement said “with deep expertise in mobile access and system integrations, Waltz has the most advanced and sophisticated products to provide that single credential to our members and to help us better connect them with our spaces.” Waltz was founded in 2015 by CEO Matt Kopel and has offices in New York and Montreal. After the acquisition, Waltz will be integrated into WeWork, but maintain its current customer base.

WeWork has been on an acquisition spree over the past year as it evolves from co-working spaces to a software-as-a-service provider. Companies it has bought include office management platforms Teem (for $100 million) and Managed by Q, as well as Euclid, a “spatial analytics platform” that allows companies to analyze the use of workspaces by their employees and participation at meetings and other events.

Likewise, Waltz isn’t just an alternative to keys or access cards. Its cloud-based management portal gives companies data about who enters and exits their buildings and also allows teams to set “Door Groups,” which restricts the use of some spaces to certain people. According to Waltz’s help site, it can also be used to make revenue through ads displayed in its app.

San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors unanimously approved an ordinance today that prohibits the sale of e-cigarettes within the city. If signed into law, the new legislation would amend the city’s health code, making it illegal for stores to sell vaping products or for online retailers to ship them to San Francisco addresses, which means it would become the first city to enact such a ban.

San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera, who co-sponsored the ban on sales, told Bloomberg that products will be allowed to be sold in the city again if they receive approval from the Food and Drug Administration. The FDA oversees e-cigarettes, but will not require vape companies to submit for approval until 2022.

The ordinance is now waiting to be signed by Mayor London Breed, who has 10 days to review the legislation. If she signs it, the ban goes into place in seven months. Juul, the San Francisco-based company that captured 75 percent of the e-cigarette market last year, according to Nielsen, is already fighting back. The company, which has been blamed for lowering the barrier to nicotine addiction for underage users, told Bloomberg that it has already collected enough signatures to add a ballot measure that would allow San Francisco stores to keep selling e-cigarettes to customers over 21 if it passed by voters in November.

The ordinance passed today cites the increase in vaping among underage users as a key reason for the ban. “According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (“CDC”), the number of middle and high school students who reported being current users of tobacco products increased 36%—from 3.6 million to 4.9 million students—between 2017 and 2018,” the proposal said. “This dramatic increase, which has erased past progress in reducing youth tobacco use, is directly attributable to a nationwide surge in e-cigarette use by adolescents.”

Though it markets itself as a device to help adult smokers who want to stop using cigarettes, Juul has been blamed for getting more teens hooked on nicotine because its discreet e-cigarettes are carried in many retail stores, including convenience stores and easy to hide. Juul pods all contain nicotine, unlike other vaping companies that make liquids with lower levels of nicotine or none at all. As cigarette sales in the U.S. are decreasing, cigarette makers have turned to vaping, creating their own products or investing in e-cigarette companies. Altria Group, the tobacco products conglomerate that includes Philip Morris, bought a 35 percent stake in Juul last year, giving the company a valuation of $38 billion.

On Tuesday, San Francisco also passed a separate ordinance that would ban the sale, manufacturing and distribution of e-cigarettes on city property. Though the ordinance does not mention Juul by name, the company’s headquarters are at Pier 70 in office space leased from the city. Juul would be able to stay in Pier 70 if the ordinance passes, since the ordinance would not apply retroactively, but it has already purchased its own office tower in downtown San Francisco.

A Juul spokesperson told Bloomberg that it is committed to preventing the sale of its products to customers under 21, but that “this full prohibition will drive former adult smokers who successfully switched to vapor products back to deadly cigarettes, deny the opportunity to switch for current adult smokers and create a thriving black market instead of addressing the actual causes of underage access and use.”

Juul is not the only business that will be affected by the ban, with many stores in San Francisco worrying about the ordinance’s impact on their sales if it is passed. Moe Mohomed, who works at a smoke shop in the Mission District, told Mission Local that last year’s ban on flavored e-cigarettes caused profits to fall by about 30 to 50 percent. According to the news site, 800 businesses in San Francisco sell e-cigarettes.