Entrepreneurs are invited to the 447th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, June 20, 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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According to a Market research Future report, the global Cloud Communication Platform is estimated to grow 25% over the next few years to $5.7 billion driven by the increasing adoption of BYOD and...

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Sramana Mitra: What did you learn as you went through the customer base, started getting to know the customer base, understanding the customer base, and understanding who’s converting from free...

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During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest, Francis Simisim, Partner at Original Pitch Venture Capital based in the Philippines. We had a very good discussion on how that eco-system is...

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VMware has been trying to reinvent itself from a company that helps you build and manage virtual machines in your data center to one that helps you manage your virtual machines wherever they live, whether that’s on prem or the public cloud. Today, the company announced it was buying Avi Networks, a six-year-old startup that helps companies balance application delivery in the cloud or on prem in an acquisition that sounds like a pretty good match. The companies did not reveal the purchase price.

Avi claims to be the modern alternative to load balancing appliances designed for another age when applications didn’t change much and lived on prem in the company data center. As companies move more workloads to public clouds like AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform, Avi is providing a more modern load-balancing tool, that not only balances software resource requirements based on location or need, but also tracks the data behind these requirements.

VMware has been trying to find ways to help companies manage their infrastructure, whether it is in the cloud or on prem, in a consistent way, and Avi is another step in helping them do that on the monitoring and load-balancing side of things, at least.

Tom Gillis, senior vice president and general manager for the networking and security business unit at VMware sees, this acquisition as fitting nicely into that vision. “This acquisition will further advance our Virtual Cloud Network vision, where a software-defined distributed network architecture spans all infrastructure and ties all pieces together with the automation and programmability found in the public cloud. Combining Avi Networks with VMware NSX will further enable organizations to respond to new opportunities and threats, create new business models, and deliver services to all applications and data, wherever they are located,” Gillis explained in a statement.

In a blog post,  Avi’s co-founders expressed a similar sentiment, seeing a company where it would fit well moving forward. “The decision to join forces with VMware represents a perfect alignment of vision, products, technology, go-to-market, and culture. We will continue to deliver on our mission to help our customers modernize application services by accelerating multi-cloud deployments with automation and self-service,” they wrote. Whether that’s the case, time will tell.

Among Avi’s customers, which will now become part of VMware, are Deutsche Bank, Telegraph Media Group, Hulu and Cisco. The company was founded in 2012 and raised $115 million, according to Crunchbase data. Investors included Greylock, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Menlo Ventures, among others.

The switch has been flipped on the 24-hour shot clock, which means there’s only one day left to save $100 on your pass to TC Sessions: Mobility 2019 in San Jose, Calif. on July 10. Early-bird savings ends on Friday, June 14 at 11:59 p.m. (PT), so buy your ticket now and save.

Join more than 1,000 dreamers and makers at TC’s day-long event focused on the current and future state of mobility and transportation. Hear from the top minds in their fields and see demos of their latest work. They’re not just dreaming of the future. They’re determined to invent, fund and build the revolutionary technology required to create it.

If you want to place your tech startup in front of this very targeted audience, a demo table is the way to go. But we have only one demo table left, so get moving and book a demo table now.

With all those mobility big wigs in the house, you’ll be in high networking mode, right? CrunchMatch, TechCrunch’s business match-making service, simplifies the connection process for you. It’s free and, even better, it will help you find people based on specific mutual business criteria, goals and interests. You’ll save time meeting the right people. Sweet!

Take a look at just some of the speakers and presentations we have scheduled. And check out the full agenda while you’re at it.

Delivering the Future: We’ll talk with Nuro co-founder Dave Ferguson to hear all about the strengths and challenges of building a self-driving vehicle, with a focus on local deliveries like groceries, food and retail goods.

Rethinking Urban Mobility: Motorcycle racing pioneer Erik Buell returns with a new company and vision. We’ll talk to Buell, now chairman of EV startup Fuell, about the tech behind the Flow electric motorcycle and the Fluid electric bicycle.

Autonomous Robotaxis vs. Shuttles: Karl Iagnemma, Alisyn Malek and Lia Theodosiou-Pisanelli represent some of the top minds trying to bring autonomous vehicle technology to the masses. They’ll debate which approaches make the most sense and have the best chances for economic viability, and which safety and security vulnerabilities and other challenges could throw them off track.

TC Sessions: Mobility 2019 takes place July 10 in San Jose, Calif. You have just 24 hours left before the early-bird pricing ends on Friday, June 14 at 11:59 p.m. (PT). Why spend more than necessary? Buy your ticket and save yourself $100.

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

Nothing says summer in Silicon Valley better than the TechCrunch Summer Party. In its 14th year, we’re celebrating the startup spirit and culture at the Park Chalet, San Francisco’s coastal beer garden, on July 25. Who doesn’t love ocean views?

And nothing says relaxed networking in Silicon Valley more than showcasing your early-stage startup at our summer soiree. It’s a great opportunity to demo your business and place your face in front of influential people in a convivial atmosphere. Each demo table includes four summer party tickets — bring your whole crew. There’s a limited number of tables available, so book your startup demo package now.

Experience world-class networking and still have time to enjoy the venue, drink craft beer, sip a signature a cocktail or two and nosh on yummy appetizers. Maybe it’s the relaxed setting, the shared camaraderie or maybe it’s the libations — who can say for sure — but TechCrunch parties tend to be the place where start-uppers meet the people who go on to change their lives — future investors, co-founders or buyers.

Plus there’ll be several VC firms in attendance who are partnering with us for the event.

August CapitalBattery VenturesData CollectiveUncork Capital

Summer Party details you need to know:

When: July 25 from 5:30 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.Where: Park Chalet in San FranciscoAttendee ticket: $95Startup demo package: $2,000 — includes four attendee tickets, one cocktail table, tabletop sign, power and internet access

There will be plenty of games and prizes. Yes, we love giving away prizes, like TechCrunch swag, Amazon Echos and tickets to Disrupt San Francisco 2019.

Come to the TechCrunch Summer Party at the Park Chalet and showcase your early-stage genius to a passel of influential start-uppers in a fun, relaxed setting. It’s a great opportunity to meet your future. Buy your demo table today, and we’ll hoist a craft beer to your success.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at the TechCrunch 14th Annual Summer Party? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Xprize CEO and Prodea founder Anousheh Ansari dreamed of being an astronaut as a child growing up in Iran, but, understandably, most people around her were skeptical about her ambitions. Yet in 2006, she made that dream come true when she became the first woman to visit the International Space Station as a privately funded citizen (as well as the first Iranian citizen and the first Muslim woman), traveling aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket as a trained and paying guest of the Russian Space Agency.

At the time, NASA wasn’t thrilled about the idea and definitely did not want Ansari to pay a visit. Thirteen years later, the U.S. space agency announced earlier this week that the ISS is officially “open for business,” and revealed that pricing for a night’s stay will be around $35,000 per person (that’s just lodging — you still have to figure out your own transportation). At a Creative Destruction Lab event in Toronto this week, I spoke to Ansari about what this milestone announcement means for commercial space interests, and her perspective on the field and opportunity for space-focused startups in general.

“Actually, I wish I had my laptop to I could show a slide from probably six, seven years ago, maybe even longer, which I used that said ‘ISS for rent. It’s coming true! I’m telling you, I can predict the future,” Ansari joked. “But I think it makes so much sense.”

There are a number of reasons the situation has changed regarding how NASA views commercial and private interest in visiting and using the space station. Not least of which is that the station has now aged beyond its original mission parameters, and is definitely nearing its true functional end of life.

“The space station is […] already on extended life right now,” Ansari said. “So now they can generate revenue from, make good use of the space station [beyond its intended mission] so they can invest in the next generation.”

Even if its original, official mission is technically ended, there’s a lot of advantage that private companies can still derive from the facility in the interim.

“There’s so much interest in doing research and experimentation on board the space station, I think the cost is incredibly low,” she added, referring to the pricing quoted in NASA’s guidelines for private astronauts. “I mean, there’s still the cost of access, which will mean it’s not affordable for everyone. But renting the space station for $35,000 a night and doing experiments. It’s incredible.”

“I think there will be a lot of companies, a lot of, you know, pharma, medical and health companies will definitely take advantage of that and do experiments,” Ansari continued. “And, and I’m excited. I’m glad it’s happening.”

For Ansari, the growth in the commercial space sector has its origins in Xprize, the organization she leads as CEO as of last October. The Ansari Xprize, a $10 million prize so-named thanks to a multimillion-dollar contribution provided by Ansari and her brother-in-law Amir Ansari, was awarded in 2004, and paved the way for the kind of business SpaceX operates today.

“The first prize was a $10 million prize, to go to space twice within two weeks, because we wanted to show that it can be repeated, which means that it is commercially viable — it’s not a science fiction project, and it can be done at a reasonable cost,” Ansari recalled. “We had a requirement, I think it had to be 95% reusable, outside of the mass of the fuel. We didn’t want someone to build two spaceships, fly this one, and then fly this other one. So it was all designed because we wanted to make sure it can really be a business.”

The key ingredient here was to show, for the first time, that this could be a commercially viable interest at investment levels that were not out of reach for private companies to pursue. And another key ingredient was that the project involved making sure participants actually could launch, and were cleared by relevant agencies to do so.

“We had to work with regulators and the FAA to figure out how people could even launch, because the FAA didn’t know how to deal with this,” Ansari said. “They’d never had a private company wanting to launch something to space. So because of our work, and the work we did with NASA and the regulators, they opened up, they created this division — now it’s called the FAA Office of Commercial Space Transportation.”

While her work to date has broken a lot of ground and opened up avenues for startups, Ansari had specific requests about new areas of opportunity and consideration for entrepreneurs in attendance at the Creative Destruction Lab event during a keynote talk she gave to kick off the first day. She noted that there exists plenty of potential for “cloud systems that exist above the clouds,” since data warehouse facilities operating in space would have immediate benefits in terms of energy collection and thermal management.

She also called for startups to focus on making sure they consider knock-on effects of the things they build. Space debris, as one example in the specific — and more generally, a reminder that exponential change naturally engenders a reaction of fear.

“It’s a difficult thing, because as engineers we just like to play with toys and play with technology,” she said. “But it’s up to us in this room to help make sense of this.”

Investments by U.S. venture capital firms into Latin America are skyrocketing and one of the firms leading the charge into deals is none other than Silicon Valley’s Andreessen Horowitz .

The firm that shook up Silicon Valley with potentially over-generous term sheets and valuations and an overarching thesis that “software is eating the world” has been reluctant to test its core belief… well… pretty much anywhere outside of the United States.

That was true until a few years ago when Andreessen began making investments in Latin America. It’s the only geography outside of the U.S. where the firm has committed significant capital and the pace of its investments is increasing.

Andreessen isn’t the only firm that’s making big bets in companies south of the American border. SoftBank has its $2 billion dollar investment fund, which launched earlier this year, to invest in Latin American deals as well. (Although the most recent SoftBank Innovation Fund investment in GymPass is likely an indicator that the fund, much like SoftBank’s “Vision” fund, has a pretty generous interpretation of what is and is not a Latin American deal.)

“We previously didn’t invest internationally, [because] we weren’t as well set up to help these companies,” says Angela Strange, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “Part of the reason for why LatAm is proximity.”

There are numerous challenges to finding effective treatments for mental disorders. However, BlackThorn Therapeutics, a neurobehavioral health company using machine learning to create personalized medicine for mental health, is betting its technological approach to finding drugs that work will put it ahead of the competition. Lucky for them, GV and other biotech investors have shown they agree by adding another $76 million in Series B financing to the coffers.

Today, BlackThorn announced the close of its $76 million Series B round from GV, Scripps Research, Johnson & Johnson Innovation and a bevy of other biotech investment firms, including Polaris Partners, Premier Partners, Vertex Ventures HC, Alexandria Venture Investments, Altitude Life Science Ventures, ARCH Venture Partners and Biomatics Capital.

BlackThorn has been heads-down the last couple of years on a clinical trial for a drug that could potentially treat mood disorders. In April, the company announced positive results from its phase I trial for the drug.

The company plans to use the funding to advance its clinical-stage programs for mood disorders as well as for potential treatment of autism spectrum disorder, advancing toward a clinical investigation in 2020.

Brian Chee, a managing partner at Polaris Partners, Lori Hu, a managing director at Vertex Ventures HC and Julie Sunderland, a managing director at Biomatics Capital have joined BlackThorn’s board as directors in conjunction with the funding.

BlackThorn also recently added two people to its executive team. Jane Tiller has joined as chief medical officer and Laura Hansen as vice president, corporate affairs.

“BlackThorn was founded to bring new therapies to patients by applying advances in computational sciences to address patient heterogeneity, one of the biggest historical challenges in the field of neuropsychiatric drug development,” said BlackThorn’s president and COO Bill Martin, PhD. “Three years later, insights from our data-driven approaches are yielding patient enrichment strategies that could increase probability of clinical trial success and improve patient outcomes. We are grateful for our investors’ support to continue advancing our platform and therapeutic pipeline as we build out a world-class team at the intersection of technology and clinical neuroscience.”

Right Side Up is not your typical growth marketing agency. As a former entrepreneur and in-house growth marketer for startups like Eventbrite, founder Tyler Elliston says he created RSU as a way to help his former self. RSU recruits a collective of expert growth marketers and partners them with various companies, but unlike a traditional agency, RSU actively encourages growth teams to hire their top talent.

It may seem counterintuitive, but two and a half years later, with more than 250 marketers in their “growth collective”, and having helped 120+ companies, Tyler seems to be fulfilling his vision. Learn more about RSU’s unique approach to growth marketing for startups.

On what makes Right Side Up unique

“There are a number of lessons that I learned as an in-house marketer and a founder, that have become the underpinning for how we operate the business. Great performance comes from great marketers, not from companies or brands. It’s really about the person doing the work. So, our goal is to find the best marketers as they are today, instead of training junior talent, which is a common agency practice.”

Advice to startup founders

“A lot of what we consider growth marketing is simply scaling a one to one conversation with a prospective customer. So, if you can get a prospect in front of you and you can persuade them, how do you do that? How do you talk about it? That’s your positioning. What are you offering them?

That’s your value prop. I would recommend doing one on one conversations at a small scale before you try scaling it. Be in touch with your customer and then think about growth as automating what’s happening on a very small scale.”

 

Below, you’ll find the rest of the founder reviews, the full interview, and more details like pricing and fee structures. This profile is part of our ongoing series covering startup growth marketing agencies with whom founders love to work, based on this survey and our own research. The survey is open indefinitely, so please fill it out if you haven’t already.

Interview with Right Side Up founder Tyler Elliston

Yvonne Leow: Tell me a little bit about how you got into growth and why you decided to start Right Side Up.

Tyler Elliston: I came to the Bay Area in 2006 because I wanted to help build tech companies. I went to Berkeley to get my MBA and basically gave myself two years to figure out how to best plug into the startup community.

I eventually started a company and raised venture capital, but I really struggled to crack customer acquisition, and of all the hats I wore as an entrepreneur, growth marketing felt particularly fun and challenging. So, I went on this quest to find the answers to customer acquisition, and it was difficult to find people who could help me unlock growth channels. I often heard, “Oh, I did this for my company,” but it wouldn’t work for us.

Why is there no app where you can follow party animals, concert snobs or conference butterflies for their curated suggestions of events? That’s the next phase of social calendar app IRL that’s launching today on iOS to help you make and discuss plans with friends or discover nearby happenings to fill out your schedule.

The calendar, a historically dorky utility, seems like a strange way to start the next big social network. Many people, especially teens, either don’t use apps like Google Calendar, keep them professional or merely input plans made elsewhere. But by baking in an Explore tab of event recommendations and the option to follow curators, headliners and venues, IRL could make calendars communal like Instagram did to cameras.

“There’s Twitter for ‘follow my updates,’ there’s SoundCloud for ‘follow my music,’ but there’s no ‘follow my events’ ” IRL CEO Abe Shafi tells me of his plan to turbocharge his calendar app. “They’re arguably the best product that’s been built for organizing what you’re doing, but no one has Superhuman’d or Slack’d the calendar. Let’s build a super f*cking dope calendar!” he says with unbridled excitement. He’ll need that passion to persevere as IRL tries to steal a major use case from SMS, messaging apps and Facebook .

Finding a new opportunity for a social network has attracted a new $8 million Series A funding round for IRL led by Goodwater Capital and joined by Founders Fund and Kleiner Perkins. That builds on its $3 million seed from Founders Fund and Floodgate, whose partner Mike Maples is joining IRL’s board. The startup has also pulled in some entertainment and event CEOs as strategic investors, including Warner Bros. president Greg Silverman, Lionsgate Films president Joe Drake and ClassPass CEO Fritz Lanman to help it recruit calendar influencers users can follow.

Filling your social calendar

In Shafi, investors found a consummate extrovert who can empathize with event-goers. He dropped out of Berkeley to build out his recruitment software startup getTalent before selling it to HR platform Dice, where he became VP of product. He started to become disillusioned by tech’s impact on society and almost left the industry before some time at Burning Man rekindled his fever for events.

Shafi teamed up with PayPal’s first board member Scott Banister and early social network founder Greg Tseng. Shafi’s first attempt Gather pissed off a ton of people with spammy invites in 2017. By 2018, he’d restarted as IRL, with a focus on building a minimalist calendar where it was easy to create events and invite friends. Evite and Facebook Events were too heavy for making less formal get-togethers with close friends. He wisely chose to geofence his app and launch state by state to maximize density so people would have more pals to plan with.

IRL is now in 14 states, with a modest 1.3 million monthly active users and 175,000 dailies, plus 3 million people on the waitlist. “Fifty percent of all teens in Texas have downloaded IRL. I wanted to focus on the central states, not Silicon Valley,” Shafi explains. Users log in with a phone number or Google, two-way sync their Google Calendar if they have one, and can then manage their existing schedule and create mini-events. The stickiest feature is the ability to group chat with everyone invited so you can hammer out plans. Even users without the app can chime in via text or email. And unlike Facebook, where your mom or boss are liable to see your RSVPs, your calendar and what you’re doing on IRL is always private unless you explicitly share it.

The problem is that most of this could be handled with SMS and a more popular calendar. That’s why IRL is doubling-down on event discovery through influencers, which you can’t do anywhere else at scale. With the new version of the app launching today, you’ll be recommended performers, locations and curators to follow. You’ll see their suggestions in the Explore tab that also includes sub-tabs of Nearby and Trending happenings. There’s also a college-specific feed for users that auth in with their school email address. Curators and event companies like TechCrunch can get their own IRL.com/… URL people can follow more easily than some janky list of events of gallery of flyers on their website. Since pretty much every promoter wants more attendees, IRL’s had little resistance to it indexing all the events from Meetup.com and whatever it can find.

IRL is concentrating on growth for now, but Shafi believes all the intent data about what people want to do could be valuable for directing people to certain restaurants, bars, theaters or festivals, though he vows that “we’re never going to sell your data to advertisers.” For now, IRL is earning money from affiliate fees when people buy tickets or make reservations. Event affiliate margins are infamously slim, but Shafi says IRL can bargain for higher fees as it gains sway over more people’s calendars.

Unfortunately, without reams of personal data and leading artificial intelligence that Facebook owns, IRL’s in-house suggestions via the Explore tab can feel pretty haphazard. I saw lots of mediocre happy hours, crafting nights and community talks that weren’t quite the hip nightlife recommendations I was hoping for, and for now there’s no sorting by category. That’s where Shafi hopes influencers will fill in. And he’s confident that Facebook’s business model discourages it moving deeper into events. “Facebook’s revenue driver is time spent on the app. While meaningful to society, events as a feature is not a primary revenue driver so they don’t get the resources that other features on Facebook get.”

Yet the biggest challenge will be rearranging how people organize their lives. A lot of us are too scatterbrained, lazy or instinctive to make all our plans days or weeks ahead of time and put them on a calendar. The beauty of mobile is that we can communicate on the fly to meet up. “Solving for spontaneity isn’t our focus so far,” Shafi admits. But that’s how so much of our social lives come together.

My biggest problem isn’t finding events to fill my calendar, but knowing which friends are free now to hang out and attend one with me. There are plenty of calendar, event discovery and offline hangout apps. IRL will have to prove they deserve to be united. At least Shafi says it’s a problem worth trying to solve. “I know for a fact that the product of a calendar will outlive me.” He just wants to make it more social first.

Sramana Mitra: If you look at your last 12 months of deal flow, what do you see as standout trends in the Indian market? What do you see as interesting? Sateesh Andra: We look for B2B companies that...

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Monzo, the U.K. challenger bank with more than two million customers and a unicorn valuation to go with it, has formally announced its U.S. expansion.

The tentative move — which TechCrunch exclusively reported was underway five months ago — will see a U.S. Monzo app and connected Mastercard debit card made 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.

In a call, Monzo co-founder and CEO Tom Blomfield told me he thinks the key to cracking North America is to create a fully localised version of Monzo based on carefully listening to U.S. users in order to find market fit. 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.

In other words, Monzo isn’t presuming that specific features of the U.K. offering, which is currently seeing 200,000 people sign up each month, will automatically resonate with customers across the pond. To equally succeed in the U.S., it will be about the details, and in a sense the company will need to act like a startup within what is now a scale-up if it is to repeat much of the Monzo playbook.

In the U.K., Monzo currently has an NPS score of 80, which Blomfield says is unusually high for a bank. He also tells me 60% of U.K. signups remain long-term active, transacting at once per week. However, as a counterpoint, the percentage of Monzo users that pay their salary into the 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.

Returning back to America, Monzo says it will develop the U.S. version into a “fully-featured digital account” that can be accessed on your smartphone and will have the ability to extend into various “Monzo and third-party financial services.”

Initially, the challenger bank is partnering with an established U.S. bank, but is also working on applying for its own U.S. bank license. As in the U.K., the plan is to build and own as much of its technology stack as possible, which Blomfield says will be needed to give Monzo the agility to serve U.S. customers successfully.

To achieve this, Monzo will open an office in Los Angeles, Calif., chosen “because it isn’t San Francisco,” says Blomfield. He says he was mindful of putting Monzo within the Silicon Valley bubble where rents are not only ridiculously high but product groupthink could be detrimental.

Meanwhile, Monzo joins a growing list of London-based B2C fintechs hoping to conquer America. Earlier today, money management app Emma announced that it had launched in the U.S. via a partnership with Plaid. Another example is banking chatbot and app Cleo, which quietly entered the U.S. nine months ago.

Added to this, Blomfield has always talked openly about his ambition to bring Monzo to the U.S. Over the years the challenger bank has attracted an array of U.S. investors. They include General Catalyst, Thrive Capital, Goodwater Capital, Stripe, Michael Moritz and Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom. Most recently, TechCrunch reported that Y Combinator is also set to join the company’s cap table.

Today’s 446th FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Thursday, June 13 at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All are...

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Today’s 446th FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Thursday, June 13, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All...

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Emma, the U.K. money management app (now calling itself your “best financial friend”), has launched in the United States and Canada — and is now one of a plethora of London fintechs venturing States-side.

Competing banking app Cleo entered the U.S. nine months ago, and challenger bank Monzo is thought to be gearing up to launch across the pond soon, to name just two.

Emma says the U.S. launch comes after partnering with Plaid, the U.S.-based fintech that specialises in bank account aggregation. The London startup says that with its U.S. launch, 350 million people will now be able to have access to Emma’s money management features.

Described as your “financial friend,” the Emma app connects to your bank accounts (and crypto wallets) to help you budget, track spending and save money. It aims to help you understand things like how much money you have left to spend until your next payday, track and find wasteful subscriptions and preemptively avoid going into your bank’s overdraft.

The PFM-styled app was launched in the U.K. in January 2018 and claims more than 100,000 downloads in just a year “without any marketing spend.” Furthermore, the company says users open the app five times a week, twice a day and are using it as a “true alternative” to their traditional banking app.

Airbnb has debuted a new extension of its growing business in providing travel experiences in addition to temporary housing. Called Airbnb Adventures, it’s effectively a collection of tours and trips lasting between three days and a week that go beyond the usual city walking tour.

One such trip, for example, is a wildlife excursion in Kenya that spans three days and centers around a walking trip with a promise to “encounter lions,” as well as a campfire learning session and “bush tea.” The cost is $500 per person, which includes five meals, drinks and two nights’ stay in a tent.

To source these “adventures,” Airbnb is working with local experts and tour companies, and doing so directly rather than working with larger tour providers that can be a one-to-many connection for sourcing like it does with some of its more vanilla Experiences. The direct route is probably necessary for these types of experiences, which have more implications in terms of liability and insurance. The company is also working with a third-party for verifying the certifications that are often required to provide these kinds of activities safely.

Airbnb is increasingly investing in ares that complement its core product of short-term peer-to-peer vacation housing rentals, and it debuted Experiences, of which Adventures is a part, in 2016. It’s also recently been reported that the company is exploring streaming media. It’s also expected to go public sometime this year, and recently claimed profitability in its operations.