David’s Bridal once owned 50% of the $36 billion wedding gown market before it filed for bankruptcy last year. Brides were growing sick of the lack of styles and sizes plus high prices at expensive brick & mortar shops. The industry was destined for disruption by software that would replace overhead costs and inflexibility with direct-to-consumer personalization.

That’s why I profiled a new custom wedding dress startup back in 2016 called Anomalie despite little funding or traction. The rise of Instagram meant every bride wanted to look unique on a budget, not pay $5000 for a cookie-cutter $200 dress that happened to be white. Anomalie was willing to embrace software to offer 4 billion design permutations and break the markup cartel by selling gowns starting at $1000.

2.5 years later, Anomalie has begun to prove that cheaper doesn’t have to look cheap and custom doesn’t have to cause a headache. 13% of US brides, 275,000 out of 2.1 million, created an Anomalie account in the last year. With David’s Bridal looking shaky and wedding dresses being a seven-times larger market than bedding and mattresses, investors eagerly proposed to Anomalie. Today the startup announces a $13.6 million Series A led by consumer product VC Goodwater Capital .

“I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of working with brides. Other companies would kill for this costumer. She’s so obsessed with every detail of her wedding dress. it’s just a perfect environment to collect data” says Anomalie co-founder and CEO Leslie Voorhees. “Long lead time, high margin, this industry that’s completely f*cked up —  it’s the perfect place to start this mass customization engine beginning with the wedding dress” she tells me, hinting at the startup’s potential to customize other clothing too.

Anomalie is also flexing its tech muscle today with the launch of its new dress sketch visualizer. Choose between a few options on shape, cut, color, pattern, and fabric, and you’ll see an algorithmic sketch of your dream dress appear instantly. Anomalie then pairs you with a squad of its designers to finalize the details, ship swatches, and get you your gown with a 100% refund policy if it’s not right.

The startup’s nest egg will go towards hiring more engineers plus bringing more of production in-house to offer additional features like this. But Voorhees insists that “I don’t think we’ll ever completely automate away the stylists. Customer don’t care about AI or machine learning, but they want to trust us to pull the ideas out of their heads.”

Anomalie was woven out of Voorhees’ frustrations picking her own wedding dress. She’d been managing factories and supply chains in Asia for Nike and Apple, and it made no sense why slapping “bridal” on a dress could make it up to ten-times more expensive.

Her investigation uncovered that most brands were outsourcing their manufacturing, so she did an end-run, contacted factories directly, and got her dress made custom for a fraction of the price. So many of her pals demanded help doing the same that the Harvard Business School grad soft-launched Anomalie with her husband Calley Means [Disclosure: who I know from college] in the summer of 2016.

The startup’s gowns now average $1,400. Growth has been swift since weddings are so photographed and shared, with Anomalie reaching an outstanding net promoter score of 91. A friend of mine recently bought her dess through the company and it looked stunning and one-of-a-kind without breaking the bank. And since they’re custom, Anomalie makes inclusivity and advantage by offering larger sizes absent elsewhere

Meanwhile, Anomalie’s incumbent competitors have struggled. Gap and J.Crew abandoned the wedding dress business in the last few years. David’s Bridal emerged from bankruptcy with its 300 retail stores still operating, but it’s slipped to 30 percent US market share. It’s now owned by lenders including Oaktree Capital Group, which is a bad omen given that firm was responsible for driving Toys”R”Us into liquidation instead of keeping it open. No other players have a sizable foot or well-known brand besides super high-end designer Vera Wang.

Anomalie capitalized on David’s troubles by poaching its head of bridal production Angela Ng, who now leads the startup’s Hong Kong team and relieves Voorhees of constant trips to China. It also hired former Sephora VP of digital Marcy Zelmar and former TrueCar VP of engineering Aaron Tavistock. Their goal is to sell more dresses to get Anomalie more data, more factory modularization, and more control over its manufacturing.

The new funding round that builds on its $4.5 million seed round was joined by Signia, SoGal Ventures, Lerer Hippeau’s BN Capital Fund, and Fin’s Sam Lessin also includes strategic angels like former Stitch Fix CTO Jeff Barrett and ThirdLove underwear CEO Heidi Zak. At Anomalie’s San Francisco headquarters, mannequins sporting design prototypes stand beside software teams optimizing the new dress visualizer. And when I say the dresses are custom, I mean they can get about as weird as you want. Anomalie is finishing up a dress with lyrics from the couple’s favorite song embroidered in a secret language from their favorite TV show…and it still looks beautiful.

“One of the coolest things about Anomalie is that they’re not just using digital as a distribution strategy, but to also deliver a differentiated product experience” says Goodwater partner Eric Kim. “Anomalie’s sketch-builder is a great expression of this emphasis on product and customer centricity.” Wedding dresses have been largely ignored by startups despite the market being bigger than luggage ($34 billion), or shaving ($21 billion), oral care ($10 billion) and hair loss ($4 billion) combined.

The challenge is that unlike those products, bridal gowns are “a zero failure game. This is like airplane engines and heart rate monitors” Voorhees stresses. Anomalie must maintain perfect quality, times, and customer experience to avoid ruining someone’s big day. “Never messing up a dress or losing a dress — we take this really, really seriously.” She knows a few viral disasters could sink the ship. It also has to stay ahead of fresh entrants like COUTURME, a new Y Combinator startup making custom evening gowns as well as wedding dresses.

Anomalie sees global demand for a better experience, and thinks it can apply its data set to wedding dresses for more cultures as well as additional types of clothing. “We are building up a large repository of female measurements and creating tech plus operational processes around ‘mass customization’ that can be applied to other garments” Voorhees reveals. “Our aspirations are around bringing more body inclusivity + customization to women’s fashion, not just bridal.”

And while Anomalie could always find a retail partner to get more exposure, it’s tough for brick & mortar brands to operate online without cannibalizing their sales. “We think the women’s closet of the future contains staples from Stitch Fix, rotating dresses from Rent the Runway, and signature custom garments from Anomalie.”

The Anomalie just needs to educate brides that they can actually have the dress of their dreams, and now it wants to inspire that dream on-site too. Full of ambition and verve, Voorhees concludes, “What’s Pinterest valued at when it’s basically a wedding dress search engine?”

Welcome to this week’s transcribed edition of This is Your Life in Silicon Valley. We’re running an experiment for Extra Crunch members that puts This is Your Life in Silicon Valley in words – so you can read from wherever you are.

This is Your Life in Silicon Valley was originally started by Sunil Rajaraman and Jascha Kaykas-Wolff in 2018. Rajaraman is a serial entrepreneur and writer (Co-Founded Scripted.com, and is currently an EIR at Foundation Capital), Kaykas-Wolff is the current CMO at Mozilla and ran marketing at BitTorrent. Rajaraman and Kaykas-Wolff started the podcast after a series of blog posts that Sunil wrote for The Bold Italic went viral.

The goal of the podcast is to cover issues at the intersection of technology and culture – sharing a different perspective of life in the Bay Area. Their guests include entrepreneurs like Sam Lessin, journalists like Kara Swisher and politicians like Mayor Libby Schaaf and local business owners like David White of Flour + Water.

This week’s edition of This is Your Life in Silicon Valley features Tim Kendall, the former President of Pinterest and current CEO of Moment. Tim ran monetization at Facebook, and has very strong opinions on smartphone addiction and what it is doing to all of us. Tim is an architect of much of the modern social media monetization machinery, so you definitely do not want to miss his perspective on this important subject.

For access to the full transcription, become a member of Extra Crunch. Learn more and try it for free. 

Sunil Rajaraman: Welcome to season three of This is Your Life in Silicon Valley. A Podcast about the Bay Area, technology, and culture. I’m your host, Sunil Rajaraman and I’m joined by my cohost, Jascha Kaykas-Wolff.

Jascha Kaykas-Wolff: Are you recording?

Rajaraman: I’m recording.

Kaykas-Wolff: I’m almost done. My phone’s been buzzing all afternoon and I just have to finish this text message.

Rajaraman: So you’re one of those people who can’t go five seconds without checking their phone.

Squire, a Y Combinator-backed business management platform for barbershops, just raised an $8 million Series A round led by Trinity Ventures. Since launching in 2016, Squire has grown to operate in 28 cities across three countries with more than $100 million in transactions processed to date.

Across the 28 cities where Squire operates, the company says it sees the most traction in cities like New York, San Francisco, Miami, Atlanta, Los Angeles and Toronto.

“They’ve been very effective and efficient in acquiring these businesses,” Trinity Ventures General Partner Schwark Satyavolu told TechCrunch. “They’ve been very cost effective and figured out a product model that is efficient.”

With the funding in tow, Squire plans to recruit additional engineers, build out a sales team and start spending money on marketing.

Squire has a tiered business model that ranges from $30 per month to $250 per month, depending on the size and needs of the barbershop. The most basic plan includes features like booking capabilities and reports while the complete plan features all of that plus a custom app, support for multiple locations, loyalty rewards and a wait list.

Squire initially didn’t charge barbershops, but quickly realized shops were willing to pay for what it was offering.

“In talking to customers, we realized there was a lot of opportunity to build value in a backend management system,” Squire co-founder Songe LaRon told TechCrunch. “And when we started working on those features, they would often expect to pay something. When we said it was free, they were actually a bit skeptical.”

Down the road, Squire sees a future where it could extend its model into other verticals, but says it’s currently focused on barbershops and the $20 billion market opportunity in men’s grooming.

Startup Join wants to modernize the back office for an industry that’s everywhere, but maybe not top of mind, especially when it comes to project management software: Commercial construction. The company has raised a $4 million seed round, co-led by Signalfire and Building Ventures and including participation by existing investor Bolt.

The startup’s core product is a collaborative decision-making platform designed to facilitate more effective working relationships between everyone involved in the preconstruction phase of a building project, including owners, contractors, designers, tradespeople and suppliers. The platform includes visualization tool, including timeline and budget planners, along with trend predictions so that you can see how changes to the plan will affect the project overall.

It also includes permission-based account access control, so that you can ensure everyone working on the project has the visibility they need to the pieces they touch. Join’s product also provides insights based on past project performance so that future ones can benefit from the successes of the past.

Join’s foundation is based on the observation that commercial construction industry is following a path blazed by the software industry before it, from a so-called ‘waterfall’ product development mode, whereby you more or less follow rigid steps in sequence, to a more agile mode in which each phase is more fluid and the project’s scope can change in the execution. Join believes construction is following a similar path, hence the need now for a tool like this.

The founding team behind Join includes co-founder and CEO Andrew Zukoski, Drew Wolpert, Ye Wang and Jim Forester. Both Zukoski and Wolpert have experience at Flux.io, a startup borne of Google X, that focused on supporting architecture, engineering and construction industry improvement via cloud-based solutions, and Wang has a background in manufacturing design technology from past work at both Onshape and Autodesk .

Join will make use of this round, which brings its total funding to $5.2 million including a pre-seed round led by Bolt, to bring on additional product development talent to help it set up for public launch of the platform to customers.

At Uber’s Elevate summit in Washington, DC earlier this month, researchers, industry leaders and engineers gathered to celebrate the approaching advent of on-demand air service. For Dr. Anita Sengupta, co-founder and Chief Product Office at Detroit’s Airspace Experience Technologies (abbreviated ASX), it was an event full of validation of her company’s specific approach to making electric vertical take-off and landing craft a working, commercially viable reality.

ASX’s eVTOL design is a tilt-wing design, which is distinct from the tilt-rotor design you might see on some of the splashier concept vehicles in the category. As you might’ve inferred from the name of each type of aircraft, with tilt-wing designs the entire wing of the aircraft can change orientation, while on tilt-rotor, just the rotor itself adjust independent of the wing structure.

The benefits of ASX’s tilt-wing choice, according to Sengupta, is speed to market and compatibility with existing regulatory and pilot licensing frameworks – and that’s why ASX could be providing cargo transport service relatively quickly for paying customers, with passenger travel to follow once regulators and the public get comfortable with the idea.

“Depending upon the aircraft configuration you selected, like us, for example, we’re basically a fixed wing aircraft,” Sengupta explained. “So we would not be classified as a rotorcraft, we’d be classified as a fixed wing aircraft with multi-engine, just with obviously special certification features for the VTOL capability. And of course, special check out for the pilots, but the pilots also would be fixed wing aircraft, pilots, they wouldn’t be helicopter pilots.”

ASX’s vehicle design means that it can either take off vertically when space is tight, or do a more traditional short horizontal take off like the airplanes we use every day. That not only makes it easier to use for pilots with more conventional training and experience, but it also means it can slot into existing infrastructure relatively easily and make use of underused regional airports that already dot the U.S.

“Most people who don’t fly for fun don’t realize that there are general aviation airports all over the place, that are underutilized, because only people like me, who fly for fun [Sengupta is also a pilot], use them frequently,” she said. ” Like where we’re located at Detroit City Airport, on a given day, there could sometimes only be like three planes that go in and out of it. So this is infrastructure, which is already funded, paid for and operated by governments, but isn’t utilized. And you can use them in this new UAM [Urban Air Mobility] space, whether it’s for people or for cargo, it’s actually a really good thing, because the challenge of any new transportation system is the cost of infrastructure.”

ASX has also moved quickly to get aircraft up in the sky, which is better help in terms of its own path to commercialization. It’s built six scaled down demonstration and testing aircraft, including five one-fifth scale and one that’s one-third the size of the eventual production version. These testing aircraft can demonstrate all their modes of flight within easy view of the Detroit City Airport airspace control and monitoring.

“We believe, and when you’re really cash strapped your small company, getting a lot of work at the subscale just allows you to do a lot more iterating, prototyping, and learning, basically how to control the vehicle,” Sengupta told me. “From a software perspective, it’s only when you get to that point, when you’re comfortable with a configuration, that it’s really worth your while to go off and build the full scale one. So with this next round [of funding, ASX’s second after raising just over $1 million last year]we’re going to go off and build this out at scale.”

Ultimately, Sengupta and ASX want to help usher in an era of air travel that creates efficiencies by changing the economics of regional and electric flight, and its attracting interest from investors and industry partners alike, including global transportation service provider TPS Logistics, with which it just signed a new MOU to work together on sussing out the opportunities of the eVTOL logistics market.

“Right now you you see a lot of congestion in airports, within beings, you’re going to have congestion coming in, you’re going to have to build a different professional parking lots and runways and all kinds of huge expense, if you can use these general aviation airports as regional centers to do that travel, you can take it away from the commercial, so they actually solve a lot of other problems,” Sengupta said. “For routes of let’s say 300 miles, you probably would need to do a hybrid power solution first, just because the energy density better isn’t there yet. But that’s the whole nicer than having it be fully fueled. And then hopefully […] hydrogen fuel cells is obviously something where you can get the energy needed in each of those regional flights. So by kick-starting this electric aviation use case for the shorter range, urban flights, you kind of kickstart the industry to push it over to fully electric vehicles for regional travel.”

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 448th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, June 27, 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: What is the current fund size? $50 million is a small fund size to do $5 million to $10 million checks. Michael Smerklo: We ended up being way oversubscribed for fund one. We ended up...

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Instead of emailing a term sheet, Ilya Fushman paid $150 to have ‘Deep Blue Sea’ actor Michael Rapaport send the Cameo founders Steven Galanis, Martin Blencowe and Devon Townsend a video message congratulating them on their $50 million Series B. A general partner at Kleiner Perkins, Fushman tapped Cameo’s own service, which sells personalized video messages from celebrities, influencers, athletes and thought leaders, to win over the startup amid what he says was a “highly competitive deal.”

Fushman and Galanis, Cameo’s chief executive officer, declined to disclose the startup’s valuation with the new funds, but Delaware stock authorization filings uncovered by PitchBook, as well as previous reporting from Axios’ Dan Primack, indicate a valuation of $300 million. The Chernin Group, Spark Ventures, Bain Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners also participated in the round.

Chicago-based Cameo emerged in 2017 and quickly popularized a new type of thank you note, at least among the Gen Z crowd. For a low price of $5 to a whopping fee of $3,000, customers pay Cameo for lightly scripted messages from some of their favorite personalities. On the high end, messages from Snoop Dogg, a Cameo investor and member of its talent lineup, have sold for $3,000. A few words from the former basketball star and author Kareem Abdul-Jabbar run for $500. And for the low price of $55, YouTube star Joe Santagato will tell your best friend happy birthday.

At about two years old, Cameo’s growth is exploding. In December, the company recorded roughly 100,000 transactions. By the end of this month, they will have done over 300,000, fulfilling an average of 2,000 video requests per day.

“People use Cameo as often as they used to go to Hallmark to buy a card,” Galanis tells TechCrunch. “We have power users that have literally bought hundreds of these and we have these interesting use cases. A lot of enterprise sales teams are buying these to get in front of a contact that maybe went cold. We are seeing customers using these as job offers.”

Cameo takes a 25% cut of every transaction made on its website. The team prefers to sell a higher volume of videos rather than make big sells, like that of Snoop Dogg, because the more videos delivered, the more are shared on social media and the more shared on social media, the more free advertising for Cameo. Because they’ve prioritized volume, they’ve increased revenue 5x year-over-year, Galanis explained, without detailing specific revenue figures.

With its latest infusion of capital, which brings its total to $65 million, Cameo plans to revamp its mobile app and implement purchasing features (currently, one can only buy Cameos on the company’s website). The real focus, however, will be on the international market.

Cameo has a roster of 15,000 celebrities that they believe could expand to 5 million. For now, the roster is majority American icons of sorts. To hire talent acquisition teams abroad, Cameo, which already has offices in London and Australia, is sending co-founder Martin Blencowe to London. He will focus on developing the London team, as well as identifying additional talent in Europe, South America and Asia. 

In addition to grand global ambitions, Cameo is looking to expand its range of talent. There is no shortage of B-list celebrities available for booking, but when it comes to CEOs, investors and business influencers, for example, Cameo is lacking. Kleiner Perkins’ Fushman recently became available for booking and to his surprise, an engineering team paid to have him give a shout out to one of their lead engineers almost immediately.

“Everybody’s got role models and this is a way for you to be more directly impacted,” Fushman tells TechCrunch. 

What emerged as a friendly way to treat friends has become an avenue for wedding proposals, “promposals,” baby gender reveals, teens coming out to their parents, sports fans roasting their nemeses and more. 

“It’s a new way for people to connect and the delight generated from this platform is unparalleled,” Galanis said.

It has been under a year since the cloud-based enterprise planning services provider Anaplan (NYSE:PLAN) went public. The stock has almost tripled since it listed. It recently announced its first...

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Tundra, a new zero-commission wholesale marketplace, has today announced the close of $12 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Redpoint’s Annie Kadavy, with participation from investors such as Initialized Capital, Peterson Ventures, FJ Labs, Switch Ventures and Background Capital.

Tundra was founded by married couple Arnold and Katie Engel who previously ran a global supply chain company called Vox Supply Chain. In that world, they quickly realized just how much inefficiency is built into the wholesale market, from disorganized trade shows to transaction fees from the incumbents to a business that’s largely done on phone with pen and paper.

That’s where Tundra comes in.

Tundra allows suppliers to list their products on the platform, which is built to look and feel like a B2C marketplace. Buyers can come on the platform and shop for products, complete with ratings and reviews, supplier performance metrics, and free shipping with easy tracking.

“The wholesale market is set up to benefit big businesses, with other platforms and distributors charging anywhere from 5 percent to 30 percent commission,” said Engel. “That can be particularly pronounced for small businesses.”

Plus, it can be perilous for small players to depend on big platforms like Amazon. Just a few weeks ago, there were rumors that Amazon would focus its attention on big brands like P&G and purge smaller suppliers from the platforms. Amazon denied the rumors, saying it evaluates suppliers on an individual basis.

For Tundra, the hope is to eliminate both the time-consuming and tedious process of negotiating deals at trade shows as well as the cost of simply buying and selling wholesale products online. And, importantly, Tundra has a zero-fee model, which means that buyers and suppliers can operate on the platform without spending a penny if they so choose.

Of course, the company has to generate revenue in some way, which is why Tundra offers premium options at checkout, such as faster shipping, order insurance, and additional custom clearance and logistics services for international orders.

Having spent a year serving as Head of Strategic Operations growing Uber Freight, Redpoint Managing Director Annie Kadavy saw first-hand just how gargantuan the wholesale market is. During a phone interview, she reminded me that almost every item within view at any given moment was shipped on a truck and purchased at a wholesale price before it was purchased by a consumer in a store.

“Tundra’s greatest challenge ahead is execution, because the market opportunity here is very obvious,” said Kadavy. “It’s a huge business that is currently transacted by fax, phone call and pen and paper, so the opportunity is very clear.”

There is clearly movement in the space. Just last month, Shopify acquired Handshake to handle B2B e-commerce directly for customers. That followed its acquisition of dropshipping platform Oberlo in 2017, signaling the fact that existing platforms realize the opportunity of wholesale e-commerce, as well.

And a recent report stated that B2B e-commerce passed the $1 trillion mark for the first time in 2018.

The opportunity is there, as is the competition, but Tundra comes to the table armed with fresh capital.

Sales teams have long turned to tech solutions to help improve how they source leads, develop relationships and close deals. Now, one of the startups that helps out at a key point in that trajectory is announcing a round of growth funding to help fuel its own rapid growth. Showpad, a sales enablement platform that lets salespeople source and organise relevant content and other collateral that they use in their deals, has raised a Series D of $70 million.

The funding, which brings the total raised by Showpad to $160 million, is coming in the form of debt and equity. The equity part is co-led by Dawn Capital and Insight Partners, with existing investors Hummingbird Ventures, and Korelya Capital also participating. Silicon Valley Bank is providing debt financing. This is one of the first big investments out of Dawn’s Opportunities Fund that we wrote about last week.

The company is not disclosing its valuation but Pieterjan Bouten, the CEO who co-founded the company with Louis Jonckheere (currently CPO) and Peter Minne (CTO), confirmed that it has doubled since last year, and is seven times the valuation it had when it raised a $50 million Series C in 2016. The company is growing 90% year-on-year at the moment in terms of revenues.

And as a point of reference, another sales enablement player, Seismic, last December raised a Series E of $100 million at a $1 billion valuation.

Founded in Ghent, Belgium, Showpad today operates across two main headquarters, its original European base and Chicago. The latter was the homebase of LearnCore, a company that Showpad acquired last year that focuses on sales coaching and training. This became a strategic acquisition to expand Showpad’s primary product, a platform that acts as a kind of content management system for sales collateral. (Today, while Chicago is where Showpad builds its go-to market efforts and professional services, Ghent focuses on engineering and product, he said.) As it happens, Chicago is also the headquarters of Seismic.

As Bouten described in an interview, Showpad is part of what he considers to be the fourth pillar of the technology marketing stack: storage (the cloud services where you keep all your data), CRM, marketing automation and sales enablement, where Showpad sits.

While the first three are key to helping to manage a salesperson’s activities and work, the fourth is a crucial one for helping to make sure a salesperson can do his or her job more effectively.

Traditionally a lot of the content that salespeople used — presentations, white papers, other materials — to help make their cases and close their deals would be managed offline and directly by individual salespeople. Showpad has taken some of that process and made it digital, which means that now teams of salespeople can more effectively share materials amongst each other; and interestingly the material and its link to successful sales becomes part of how Showpad “learns” what works and what doesn’t.

That, in turn, helps build Showpad’s own artificial intelligence algorithms, to help suggest the best materials for a particular sales effort either to someone else in that team, or to other salespeople using the platform.

“To date there has been enormous innovation in automating the marketing and sales workflow. However, in the end, sales comes down to one person selling to another,” said Norman Fiore, General Partner at Dawn Capital and member of the Showpad Board, in a statement. “Historically, this has been an offline process that has been wildly inconsistent and opaque. Showpad’s suite of products succeeds in bringing this process online for the first time with data-rich feedback loops on the effectiveness of teams, managers, salespeople and even individual pieces of sales content.”

This is a crowded area of the market with a number of standalone companies building sales enablement solutions, but also other companies within the sales stack also adding on enablement as a value-added service.

For now, though, Bouten notes that these are more strategic partners than competitors. For example, Salesforce and Microsoft are partners, and, he adds, “We integrate with Salesloft to make sure sure emails that are sent out are using the right content. We become the single source of truth but also are being used for outreach.”

Today, the company has around 1,200 enterprise customers, including Johnson & Johnson, GE Healthcare, Bridgestone, Honeywell, and Merck. The plan going forward will be to continue building out the services that it offers around its sales enablement software, alongside the core product itself.

“You can equip sales people with the best content, but if they are not trained and coached in the right way, it goes nowhere,” Bouten said.

Motorway, the U.K. used car marketplace, has raised £11 million in Series A funding. Leading the round is Marchmont Ventures, the fund managed by Hugo Burge and Alan Martin (the former CEO and CFO of Momondo Group, respectively), along with participation from existing backer LocalGlobe.

Founded by the team behind Top10 — the mobile and broadband comparison site that exited to uSwitch in 2011 — Motorway has set out to make it easier to sell your used car online. The website lets car sellers instantly see live offers from multiple car buying services and specialist dealerships. You can compare headline offers, buyer reviews, and fees and collection options to find the best deal.

It competes with a number of other used car selling options including having to visit multiple car dealers to negotiate a sale, or list privately on websites like AutoTrader or eBay. The other option is to use one of a number of online car buyers, such as WeBuyAnyCar, that provide a quick disposal option but where prices paid are typically low. Motorway says that by comparing offers, consumers can get up to £1,000 more than going direct to one buyer.

The London and Brighton-based company has also launched a dedicated product for dealers, dubbed “Motorway Pro”. Sellers complete a detailed online profile of their car and if it is relatively new or higher priced they have the option to make it accessible to dealers on the Motorway Pro platform. Dealers then have 24 hours to bid for the vehicle, after which the winning dealer is connected to the seller to complete the transaction.

The Pro platform is built on mobile messaging: dealers get alerted about vehicles that fit their requirements via text message or WhatsApp. “The process removes middlemen from the sale process, making it much more efficient, resulting in a better deal for both the car seller and the dealer,” says Motorway.

Meanwhile, Motorway co-founder and CEO Tom Leathes tells me the startup is now driving over 100,000 sales enquiries per month — a sales enquiry every 30 seconds, apparently. A year ago that sat at 25,000 per month, representing 4x growth. “We’ve closed over £130 million in completed car sales,” he adds.

To help achieve this, Motorway on-boarded online buyers to the site, including Arnold Clark and Motor Depot. The startup also has partnerships with major car buying websites such as motors.co.uk and Parkers. Last month, Motorway’s first TV ad launched too.

Technology never stops evolving and neither do we. That’s why we’re excited to tell you about the new Extra Crunch Stage at Disrupt Berlin 2019. Our premiere tech conference dedicated to early-stage startups takes place 11-12 December. Now’s the time to book your super early-bird ticket, because the earlier you buy, the more you save.

Okay, it’s time to get extra crunchy. We named the Extra Crunch Stage after the eponymous how-to content we create for our most engaged readers. It offers in-depth exclusive content on topics like startup building fundamentals, resources and recommendations, unicorn deep dives, and much more.

The Extra Crunch Stage replaces last year’s Next Stage, but with more programming. You’ll still hear fireside chats and panel discussions focused on founder and investor success. You’ll also see and hear lots of how-to content and take away practical insights — the kind of advice you can actually use when the conference ends and the real work begins — from the folks who’ve done the hard work of getting things done.

If you want to glean every speck of startup knowledge from the Extra Crunch Stage programming, you’ll need to buy an Innovator, Founder or Investor pass. You’ll also have access to the speakers, panelists and founders on the Main Stage, the Showcase Stage in Startup Alley and the Q&A Stage.

Don’t miss all the action that Disrupt Berlin offers. Starting with our legendary pitch competition, the crown jewel of Disrupt — Startup Battlefield. Where else can you find bold, innovative, and dare we say unique, startups competing for $50,000 cash, glory and the Disrupt Cup? We’re not kidding about unique. A startup called Legacy won the Battlefield at Disrupt Berlin 2018, with its focus on addressing reduced sperm motility.

Join more than 3,000 attendees from more than 50 countries as they flow through Startup Alley, our exhibition floor. Hundreds of boundary-pushing, early-stage startups will display their talent, products, platforms and services.

Come ready to network, because you never know when or where you’ll meet that special someone who can change your business trajectory. And with a crowd that size, you’ll be relieved to have CrunchMatch, our free business networking platform, to help you connect with the specific people who share your business goals, criteria and interests.

Disrupt Berlin 2019 takes place on 11-12 December. Come check out the new Extra Crunch Stage and all the other opportunity just waiting for you. We have super early-bird tickets priced for every budget, and the sooner you buy your passes, the more you save.

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Monzo, the fast-growing U.K.-based challenger bank with more than two million account holders, has raised £113 million (~$144m) in additional funding.

Confirming TechCrunch’s scoop in April, the Series F round is led by Y Combinator’s “Continuity” growth fund, and gives the company a new £2 billion (~$2.5b) post-money valuation. That’s double the £1 billion valuation it garnered in October last year.

A number of other new and existing investors have also participated in the Series F. They include Latitude, General Catalyst, Stripe, Passion Capital, Thrive, Goodwater, Accel, and Orange Digital Ventures.

The investment by London-based Latitude, the growth fund from prolific seed investor LocalGlobe, is particularly noteworthy given that LocalGlobe itself didn’t previously back Monzo. The same might be said of YC’s Continuity, considering that Monzo isn’t a YC alumni (although GoCardless, Monzo co-founder Tom Blomfield’s previous startup, did take part in the Silicon Valley accelerator).

The take-away: a growth fund attached to an early-stage fund can be a great antidote to the anti-portfolio (the list of successful companies a VC firm either missed, were unable or chose not to invest in).

Meanwhile, Monzo’s new funding round and YC’s backing should be viewed within the context of not only fast growth and increasingly convincing product-market fit in the U.K. — the challenger bank is currently adding 200,000 new sign-ups for its current account each month — but also recently unveiled plans to tentatively launch across the pond.

We first reported that Monzo was busy assembling a U.S.-based team over five months ago, and the U.K. company made its U.S. plans official last week. This will see a U.S. Monzo app and connected Mastercard debit card available via in-person signups at events to be held soon. The rollout will initially consist of a few thousand cards, supported by a waitlist in preparation for a wider launch.

The U.S. launch is being done in partnership with a local bank, but in the longer term Monzo plans to apply for its own U.S. bank license, similar to the strategy it employed in the U.K. so as to own and operate as much of its technical, product and regulatory infrastructure as possible.

In the U.K., this has helped Monzo achieve an NPS score of 80, which Blomfield previously told me is unusually high for a bank. This is seeing 60% of U.K. signups remain long-term active, transacting at once per week. As a counterpoint, however, the percentage of Monzo users that pay a salary into their Monzo account sits at between about 27% and 30% of active users, suggesting that a significant number of Monzo customers aren’t yet using it as their main account (Monzo’s definition of salaried is anyone who deposits at least £1,000 per month by bank transfer).

Success in the U.S., therefore, isn’t a given, conceded Blomfield when I had a call with him earlier this month. Instead, he argued that the key to cracking North America will be creating a fully localised version of Monzo based on carefully listening to U.S. users and once again finding product-market fit. He says there are obvious and less obvious cultural and technical differences in the way Brits and Americans save, spend and manage their finances, and this will require significant product divergence from the U.K. version of Monzo. Today’s new £113 million injection of capital is clearly designed to provide some of the breathing space required to achieve that.

As a side note, there are encouraging signs from other London-based fintechs that have ventured across the pond. One recent example is the financial “digital assistant” chatbot Cleo, which entered the U.S. around a year ago and has been more successful than the company anticipated, seeing Cleo add 650,000 active U.S. users to date. In fact, the U.S. currently makes up more than 90% of new Cleo users, prompting one source to describe the U.K. startup as effectively a U.S. company now.

Entrepreneurs take a long journey when naming their brainchild, comparable to a parent naming their own flesh and blood.

There are many reasons behind naming – one untalked-of and probably the most important. This is, how to choose a name that gets you more business.

Technology changes how we do business. So, when developing a business name, putting some thought into how people are going to find you and what you want them to do after they find you could go a long way.

Ignoring this could do just the opposite and result in being harder to find, getting less return from your advertising and having your competitors capitalize off your brand.

Businesses have been using things like alphabetical order, call to action, keywords and more to shape business names for optimized discovery, recall and responsiveness since the phone book.

When looking for a business, I’m sure you’ve seen at least one of these two business name optimizations frequently used in the past for discovery:

1. Optimizing for discovery in phone books

Pre-internet, a listing in the phone book was key to getting your business discovered – but how did businesses get to the top of the list in their category? Piece of cake. Free listings in the white pages were categorized by business type and ordered alphabetically. Many companies ended their name with a describing word of their category and started it with something like “AAA” “AA”, “AA1” and “A AAA” to be one of the first listings in their category. You will still find thousands of these business names in different locations by typing “AAA” into yellowpages.com.

2. And a similar strategy was used for search-engine discovery

Prior to 2012, search engine algorithms gave weight in their rankings to sites that included keywords in their domain, otherwise known as exact-match domains. So, Google was more likely to rank “accountantsmelbourne-dot-com” higher than “abc-partners-dot-com” if a user searched for “Accountants Melbourne” because the keywords matched the search with similar words in its domain.

Over time, domain names and business names alike grew longer. Many were purposefully packed with every major keyword applicable to their niche.

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