FoodShot Global, a prize platform devoted to transforming the world’s food and agriculture industries, has awarded the first round of prizes for its Innovating Soil 3.0 competition. 

Trace Genomics, a startup developing an analytics service for soil health to optimize the use of farmland, has received an undisclosed investment from FoodShot’s investment partner, S2G Ventures.

Additional awards of $250,000 were given to Keith Paustian to speed up the global adaptation of his COMET tool systems, which provide farmers with metrics and information on regenerative farming; and Gerlinde De Deyn, for her work studying biodiversity over time. 

A $35,000 award was given to Dorn Cox to support the development of his open-source data project that will look to catalog knowledge around agriculture techniques and distribute that information freely to a global community of farmers. 

“I founded FoodShot Global envisioning a new way to harness the power of innovation, capital, and the collaborative spirit of the world’s leading stakeholders to effect change,” said FoodShot Global founder and chairman Victor Friedberg. “We chose to start with soil because any future that imagines 10 billion people eating healthy and sustainably with equal access will require healthy soil. The three people we announced today are all groundbreakers whose inspired work lays the foundation for the next generation of solutions to the urgency we now face as a civilization. I couldn’t be more impressed and inspired by these inaugural FoodShot Global award winners and look forward to sharing what they’re doing with a larger audience.”

Ticketmaster’s dominance has led to big service fees, scalpers galore and exclusive contracts that some people argue exploit venues and artists. The approval of venue operator and artist management giant Live Nation’s merger with Ticketmaster in 2010 produced an anti-competitive juggernaut. The Department of Justice is reviewing allegations brought by Ticketmaster’s biggest competitor AEG that it pressures venues to sign ticketing contracts. Given its ubiquity, it’s become difficult for venues, artists and fans to avoid Ticketmaster, which charges fees as high as 50% that some consider unfair.

The Ticket Fairy wants to wrestle away domination of venues from Ticketmaster while giving fans ways to earn tickets for referring their friends. The startup is attempting to do this by offering a technologically advanced ticketing platform that not only handles sales and check-ins, but acts as a full-stack Salesforce for concerts that can analyze buyers and run ad campaigns while thwarting scalpers. Co-founder Ritesh Patel says The Ticket Fairy has increased revenue for event organizers by 15% to 25% during its private beta focused on dance music festivals.

Now after 850,000 tickets sold, it’s officially launching its ticketing suite and actively poaching venues from Eventbrite as it moves deeper into esports and conventions. With a little more scale, it will be ready to challenge Ticketmaster for lucrative clients.

Ritesh’s combination of product and engineering skills, rapid progress and charismatic passion for live events after throwing 400 of his own has attracted an impressive cadre of angel investors. They’ve delivered a $2.5 million seed round for Ticket Fairy, adding to its $485,000 pre-seed from angels like Twitch/Atrium founder Justin Kan, Twitch COO Kevin Lin and Reddit CEO Steve Huffman.

The new round includes YouTube founder Steve Chen, former Kleiner Perkins partner (and Mark’s sister) Arielle Zuckerberg and funds like 500 Startups, ex-Uber angels Fantastic Ventures, G2 Ventures, Tempo Ventures and WeFunder. It’s also scored music industry angels like Serato DJ hardware CEO AJ Bertenshaw, Spotify’s head of label licensing Niklas Lundberg, and celebrity lawyer Ken Hertz, who reps Will Smith and Gwen Stefani.

“The purpose of starting The Ticket Fairy was not to be another Eventbrite, but to reduce the risk of the person running the event so they can be profitable. We’re not just another shopping cart,” Patel says. The Ticket Fairy charges a comparable rate to Eventbrite’s $1.59 + 3.5% per ticket plus payment processing that brings it closer to 6%, but Patel insists it offers far stronger functionality.

Constantly clad in his golden disco hoodie over a Ticket Fairy t-shirt, Patel lives his product, spending late nights dancing and taking feedback at the events his clients host. He’s been a savior of SXSW the past two years, injecting the aging festival that shuts down at 2am with multi-night after-hours raves. Featuring top DJs like Pretty Lights in creative locations cab drivers don’t believe are real, The Ticket Fairy’s parties have won the hearts of music industry folks.

Now the Y Combinator startup hopes its ticketing platform will do the same thanks to a slew of savvy features:

Still, the biggest barrier to adoption remains the long exclusive contracts Ticketmaster and other giants like AEG lock venues into in the U.S. [Update: Live Nation/Ticketmaster claims it does not pressure venues or artists to work with it. It points to this blog post noting that anti-competitive actions are against its policy.]

Abroad, venues typically work with multiple ticket promoters who sell from the same pool, which is why 80% of The Ticket Fairy’s business is international right now. In the U.S., ticketing is often handled by a single company, except for the 8% of tickets artists can sell however they want. That’s why The Ticket Fairy has focused on signing up non-traditional venues for festivals, trade convention halls, newly built esports arenas, as well as concert halls.

“Coming from the event promotion background, we understand the risk event organizers take in creating these experiences,” The Ticket Fairy’s co-founder and Ritesh’s brother Jigar Patel explains. “The odds of breaking even are poor and many are unable to overcome those challenges, but it is sheer passion that keeps them going in the face of financial uncertainty and multi-year losses.” As competitors’ contracts expire, The Ticket Fairy hopes to swoop in by dangling its sales-boosting tech. “We get locked out of certain things because people are locked in a contract, not because they don’t want to use our system.”

The live music industry can be brutal, though. Events can have slim margins, organizers are loathe to change their process and it’s a sales-heavy process convincing them to try new software. But while the record business has been redefined by streaming, ticketing looks a lot like it did a decade ago. That makes it ripe for disruption.

“The events industry is more important than ever, with artists making the bulk of their income from touring instead of record sales, and demand from fans for live experiences is increasing at a global level,” Jigar concludes. “When events go out of business, everybody loses, including artists and fans. Everything we do at The Ticket Fairy has that firmly in mind – we are here to keep the ecosystem alive.”

Voatz, the four-year-old, Boston, Mass.-based voting and citizen engagement platform that has been at the center of debate over the merits and dangers of mobile voting, has raised $7 million in Series A funding. The round was co-led by Medici Ventures and Techstars, with participation from Urban Innovation Fund and Oakhouse Partners.

Voatz, which currently employs 17 people, is modeled after other software-as-a-service companies but geared toward election jurisdictions, working with state and local governments to conduct elections and provide related election management and cybersecurity services.

As we reported back in March, the city of Denver agreed to implement a mobile voting pilot in its May municipal election using Voatz’s technology, an opportunity that was offered exclusively to active-duty military, their eligible dependents and overseas voters using their smartphones.

The company hasn’t yet shared how many people wound up using the platform. As Voatz co-founder and CEO Nimit Sawhney told us late yesterday, “Our most recent election in Denver finished last night on June 4th and the post-election audit will be beginning shortly.”

Denver was not the company’s first pilot program. Rather, Voatz had conducted more than 30 pilots previously, including two in West Virginia last year that attracted the financial backing of Tusk Philanthropies, the philanthropic operation of investor and strategist Bradley Tusk.

As for where Voatz will be used next, Sawhney says to “stay tuned. The next phase of our pilot programs will be announced by the relevant jurisdictions a bit later in the summer.”

Voatz has become the best-known mobile voting app, which has also made it the target of some unflattering attention, including last summer, when numerous security experts criticized it roundly in a Vanity Fair piece. One said it was “going to backfire.” Another warned that the “United States needs some form of vetting process for online voting in elections.” A software expert separately called Voatz a “horrifically bad idea.”

Apparently investors, along with a growing number of city and state governments, are still willing to bet that it’s better than what’s currently available.

Voatz had previously raised $2.2 million in funding, led by the venture arm of Overstock.com.

Want to attract (and retain) top talent, making your company’s workforce more competitive and cutting down on turnover costs to boot? The simplest way to do so starts with the benefits and policies you offer to employees.

We already know that benefits play a major hand in how candidates evaluate a job offer. One recent survey conducted by Fairygodboss, the largest career community for women, in partnership with Extend Fertility, found that 87% of professional women say a benefits package is important or very important to them when interviewing at a company. Respondents stated that the presence (or absence) of certain benefits would impact their likelihood to stay at an employer, too.

So, which specific benefits and policies are the ones that will set your company apart as a modern, desirable workplace? We spoke to experts — from CEOs to heads of HR — to find out exactly what the benefits package of today’s most relevant employers looks like.

1. Summer Fridays

Giving employees a few extra hours to jumpstart their weekend through “Summer Fridays” can lead to a whole spate of positive benefits, including improved morale, focus and engagement at work, according to Brian Kropp, Group Vice-President of HR at Gartner . “Most companies have told us that with this benefit in place, they’ve found employees work harder earlier in the week because they know they have to complete their work before Friday,” Kropp said.

2. Pay transparency

The days of salary and bonus conversations happening only behind closed doors are long gone. Thanks to whisper networks and a growing belief in salary sharing, for many companies, this information is available with or without their consent. Companies who want to appear modern (as well as do the right thing) should embrace this trend through official pay transparency policies.

“Companies that don’t want to appear outdated have written pay, incentive and bonus plans for all employees at all levels so that how pay is calculated is not a mystery,” Sarah Morgan, Senior HR Director of SafeStreets USA, said.

“The compensation is equitable across gender and races so everyone is paid fairly based on the position, experience, skills and responsibilities. Such companies are also open about their pay policies and share general information about how much people are earning at every level. This may be shared as ranges or as specific amounts.”

3. Inclusion initiatives

The competition for top talent today is more fierce than ever. And when it comes to attracting and retaining that talent, we know that benefits play a major hand in how well an employer fares.

To that end, Fairygodboss, the largest career community for women, in partnership with Extend Fertility recently conducted research on the benefits today’s female talent cares most about. After surveying 1,000 professional women, we found a full 87% of them said a company’s benefits package was either important or very important to them when evaluating a job offer.

The presence — or lack thereof — of certain benefits also had a noticeable impact on respondents’ likelihood to stay at an employer. Given that, when a worker leaves a company, it can cost 33% of their annual salary to replace them, ensuring benefits packages are up to snuff is crucial for companies that want to avoid turnover.

Not all benefits are created equal, though. If the package at your company seems outdated, it’s possible you could actually be driving top talent away. So, we spoke to thought leaders — from CEOs to heads of HR — to find out which benefits and policies send a red flag to job seekers that an organization is behind the times. If your company’s handbook includes any of the following eight policies, it’s possible you’re seen as outdated, according to experts.

Check out our accompanying article highlighting the 10 benefits and policies any modern workplace should have on Extra Crunch.

1. Paid maternity leave is offered — but other leave benefits aren’t.

Considering at least 40% of middle- and large-sized U.S. companies still offer zero paid maternity leave to employees, we’re not saying this benefit isn’t worth having. But as Sarah Morgan, a Senior HR Director of SafeStreets USA, said, to stop at a paid maternity leave benefit is to fail to acknowledge our expanding understanding of families and the ways those families need to be supported.

“The definition of family is changing, and people are living longer,” Morgan said. “Employees need more than just time away from work when they have a baby or someone dies. They also need time for school-aged children, aging parents, deployed spouses and even pets…when they need this time, they should not have to choose between their loved ones and financial hardship.”

2. There’s a gym reimbursement benefit.

Again, at face value, this isn’t exactly the worst benefit for a company to offer. The problem, as Tasia Duske, CEO of Museum Hack, put it, is that too many companies see a gym membership credit as checking off their “employee wellness” box in full.

“What if an employee wants to join a yoga studio, or what if they want a massage instead? Especially with millennial employees, defining what’s ‘healthy’ varies from person to person,” Duske said. “A smart benefit to provide is a Healthy Lifestyle Credit where there’s a lot more flexibility and no judgment. Employees can use their credit to pay for a visit to the dentist, tai chi lessons, to see a therapist or anything in between.”

3. Employees are beholden to a set time and place to work.

A lack of flexibility is one of today’s biggest tell-tale signs of an outdated employer, something Matthew Ross, Co-owner and COO of The Slumber Yard, spoke to. “We don’t have a set time employees need to be in the office by and we frequently allow them to work from home, coffee shops and sometimes even bars for a change of scenery,” Ross said.

“I know how mentally draining it can be to sit down at the same desk all day, so it’s nice when employees are able to leave and work from different locations. I believe this helps keep the work fresh and boosts overall morale.”

4. There’s a strict dress code.

Unless a uniform is legitimately required for a role, companies that mandate strict employee dress codes should seriously rethink these policies, said Greg Kuchcik, VP of HR at Zeeto.io. “Almost all companies have moved to a business casual at most with a lot of companies moving to no dress code altogether,” Kuchcik said.

“If you have strong HR/management and trusted employees, there is no reason that you can’t allow your workers to be comfortable all day, every day.” Nicole Green, HR and Employee Engagement Manager at Perfect Search Media, echoed this. “Casual dress can lead to an environment that is more open-minded and allows for focus on ideas over a dress code,” she said.

5. There are policies that restrict employees’ social media use.

Not long ago, it wasn’t uncommon for companies to have set policies in place that regulated employees’ use of and access to social media platforms. But now, such a policy makes a company look outdated, as Lucas Group’s Chief People Officer, Carolina King, said.

“I certainly feel that limiting employee’s access to social media is a thing of the past and detrimental to a company’s ability to attract top talent,” King said. “I also think when companies do not offer bring your own device (cell phone) programs or policies, they feel behind the times.”

6. Performance reviews are the only policy for sourcing employee feedback.

Research shows that 75% of the causes for employee turnover are preventable. But companies that remain married to an outdated model of performance review-based feedback miss out on opportunities to address those causes. “Performance reviews are often the only official opportunity for an employee to share concerns, ask questions, and have a conversation with a manager,” Vivek Kumar, a recruiter, said.

“However, performance reviews are also used by companies to determine bonuses and raises, which restricts employees from speaking freely and without fear of consequences. Implementing a system of continuous employee feedback is an excellent replacement for an uncomfortable, high-pressure quarterly or yearly performance review.”

7. There’s an official bereavement leave benefit or policy.

On the surface, bereavement leave may seem like a humanitarian benefit for employers to offer. But by enforcing a set number of days for this kind of leave, companies are engaging in a form of employee hand-holding that has no place in the modern working world, said Cindy Harvey, CEO of Amelia Dee.

“Instead of dictating how long it should take someone to recover from an illness or to grieve, these policies should be more flexible, empower managers and employees to have conversations, and do what is right for the person and situation,” Harvey said. “Doing this also supports positive employee mental health and wellness practices in the workplace, two critical issues in workplaces today.”

8. There’s unlimited PTO.

A policy of flexibility, as referenced earlier, is crucial for any employer that wants to remain relevant today. An increasingly trendy benefit in this space is unlimited paid time off; but research around the detriments of this policy may soon make it an outdated offering, argued Samuel Johns, HR Specialist and Office Manager at Resume Genius.

“On the face of it, unlimited PTO is a blessing, since an employee can theoretically take off the time they need to recenter and recharge themselves. However, recent 180-degree about-faces by several companies have revealed that unlimited PTO policies are unworkable, since employees end up toiling away with less PTO than they would using a standard PTO system,” Johns said.

“At Resume Genius, we do offer unlimited PTO, but we also have a minimum PTO requirement of 10 days a year. On top of that, managers are notified if their team members haven’t taken a day off in the last six months, and are asked to schedule them some much-deserved time off.”

Check out our accompanying article highlighting the 10 benefits and policies any modern workplace should have on Extra Crunch.

Thumbtack, one of the first players in what is now known as the gig economy, has hit the fundraising circuit once again.

The online services marketplace that matches customers with nearby professionals is raising up to $120 million in Series H shares, according to a Delaware stock authorization filing uncovered by the Prime Unicorn Index. Thumbtack did not respond to a request for comment.

At more than 10 years old, the business has previously raised nearly $300 million in a combination of debt and equity funding. The upcoming round comes at a flat valuation to its 2015 Series G funding of $125 million, which valued Thumbtack at $1.3 billion. Scottish asset manager Baillie Gifford led that round, which increased its valuation roughly 60% from $804 million, according to PitchBook:

Thumbtack’s funding history

June 2009: $650,000 Series A | $3.3M valuation

Jan. 2012: $4.4M Series C | $16.5M valuation

June 2013: $12.5M Series D | $46.5M valuation

May 2014: $30M Series E | $230M valuation

Aug. 2014: $100M Series F | $804M valuation

Sept. 2015: $125M Series G | $1.3B valuation

June 2019: ~$120M Series H | ~$1.3B valuation

Source: PitchBook

As Thumbtack has worked its way through the fundraising alphabet, the business has sought acquisition offers, TechCrunch has learned. Ahead of filing to raise another nine-digit round, we’ve heard Thumbtack was exploring M&A opportunities with a competing or complementary companies.

Raising venture capital at a flat valuation is typically a sign a company’s investors are dubious of the business’s future prospects. It’s possible an acquisition deal fell through and Thumbtack, not yet prepared for an initial public offering, turned back to its investors for a necessary capital infusion.

Founded by Marco Zappacosta, whose parents were the founders of Logitech, Thumbtack helps professionals find work close by, from home maintenance, to gardening, to DJing a party. The business is supported by investment firms such as CapitalG, Sequoia Capital and Draper Associates, as well as individual investors Scott Banister, Cyan Banister and Jason Calacanis, among others.

Here’s a full look at Thumbtack’s Delaware stock authorization:

Lip-syncing jumpstarted TikTok’s rise to the center of teen culture, arguably displacing Instagram . Now the Facebook-owned app is striking back with a new feature that lets you displays lyrics on your video Story synced to a soundtrack you’ve added with the Music sticker. Lyrics could help creators and their fans sing along, and the visual flare could make the amateur MTV content more watchable.

Instagram scored a big endorsement from teen scare-pop phenomenon Billie Eilish who’s featured in the demo video for Story lyrics, which are now available in all the countries where Instagram Music has launched including the US, Germany, and France.

To play with the feature, first select the Music lens type (amidst Boomerang and other options) before you shoot or the Music sticker after. Once you pick a song, you’ll see lyrics pop up which can help you cue the segment of the music you want to play. Then you can cycle through a bunch of animation styles like traditional karaoke teleprompter, a typewriter version that preserves mystery by only revealing lyrics as they’re sung, and big flashy billboard font.

“Music can be a big part of expression on Instagram – between adding music to Stories, connecting with artists, sending song recs back-and-forth, there are lots of ways to connect with music on IG” an Instagram spokesperson tells me. “Now, we’re building on our music features and introducing the ability to add lyrics when you add a song to your story.” As with pretty much everything Instagram launches, it was first dug out of Android code and revealed to the world by frequent TechCrunch tipster and reverse engineering master Jane Manchun Wong. She first spotted Lyrics in March and we wrote about the prototype in April.

But TikTok isn’t waiting up. Today it launched its own text feature for adding overlaid captions to videos. Typically, creators had to use Snapcat, Instagram Stories, or desktop editing software to add text. Creators are sure to find plenty of hilarious use cases for text on TikTok, and it could help replace the common trope of writing captions on paper and holding them up during clips.

All of these features are about keeping social video from going stale. The manicured, painstakingly posed Instagram aesthetic is over, as The Atlantic’s Taylor Lorenz deftly identified. Fans are sick of perfection, which breeds envy and feels plastic or inauthentic. Comedy, absurdity, and the rough edges of reality are becoming the new ‘look’ of social media. Tools to overlay lyrics and text give creators more freedom to express complex jokes or just act silly. The popularity of Billie Eilish’s own dirtbag chic fashion and willingness to reveal her own insecurities exemplifies this shift, so it’s smart Instagram is using her as the face of its next wave of visual communication.

Extra Crunch offers members the opportunity to tune into conference calls led and moderated by the TechCrunch writers you read every day. This week, TechCrunch’s Connie Loizos sat down with Scott Kupor, managing director at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz to dig into his new book Secrets of Sand Hill Road, discuss his advice for new founders dealing with VCs and to pick his brain on the opportunities that excite him most today.

Scott gained inspiration for Secrets of Sand Hill Road after realizing he was hearing the same questions from different entrepreneurs over his decade in venture. The book acts as an updated guide on what VCs actually do, how they think and how founders should engage with them.

Scott offers Connie his take on why, despite the influx of available information on the venture world, founders still view VC as a black box. Connie and Scott go on to shed some light on the venture thought process, discussing how VCs evaluate new founders, new market opportunities, future round potential and how they think about investments that aren’t playing out as expected. 

“[Deciding on the right amount of money to raise] is one of the areas where I think people will rely on convention too much, rather than figuring out what makes sense for them. And what I mean by convention is, they say, “Hey, my friends down the street just raised a $7 million A round, so $7 million must be the right size for an A round.”

The way we try to help entrepreneurs think about it is think about the pitch that you’re going to give at the next round of financing. Let’s say you’re raising a Series A, imagine sitting here 18 or 24 months from now doing the Series B financing, what’s the story you’re going to want to be able to tell the investor then, as to what you accomplished over that last 18 to 24 months?

And then, almost work your way backwards to say, “If that’s the story that I want to tell, and we all agree that’s a compelling story where somebody will come in hopefully, and fund it at a valuation that’s higher to reflect the progress of the business, then let’s work our way back, and say “how do we de risk that?””

Connie and Scott also dive deeper into Andreessen Horowitz’ investing and post-investing structure, and what the future of the firm and its key investments may look like down the road.

For access to the full transcription and the call audio, and for the opportunity to participate in future conference calls, become a member of Extra Crunch. Learn more and try it for free. 

Connie Loizos: Hi, everyone. It’s time to kick off today’s call with Scott Kupor, a managing partner at the venture firm, Andreessen Horowitz, and more recently, the author of the book, Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It. Thank you so much for making time for us today.

Scott, I’m still in the process of reading the book, but I have to say, much like your colleague, Ben Horowitz’s book, and this is really true, I’m really enjoying it.

Scott Kupor: Well, thank you.

Connie: It doesn’t really feel remotely like work, which I find to be true with the vast majority of business books.

Scott: Well, I appreciate that. I had great help from Ben [Horowitz] in terms of inspiration from his book. So I’m glad to hear that. Thank you very much.

Postmates has hired Apple veteran and author Ken Kocienda as a principal software engineer at Postmates X, the team building the food delivery company’s semi-autonomous sidewalk rover, Serve.

Kocienda, author of “Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs,” spent 15 years at Apple focused on human interface design, collaborating with engineers to develop the first iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch. Kocienda left Apple in 2017 to focus on his book.

Now, he’s picked Postmates as his next project, citing the team’s spirit and energy as motivation for joining.

“My goal throughout my career has not been technology for the sake of opportunity, I am interested in making product experiences that people out in the world will find useful and meaningful,” Kocienda tells TechCrunch. “It’s not about the technology or just the design, it’s about the technology and design coming together.”

Postmates unveiled Serve, their human-like delivery robot, in December. The semi-autonomous rover uses cameras and lidar to navigate sidewalks and can carry 50 pounds for up to 25 miles after one charge. To ensure safety, the team has a human pilot remotely monitoring the Serve fleets, and each rover has a “Help” button, touchscreen and video chat display for customers or passers-by to use if necessary. The company said they had planned to roll out the bots in 2019, though no pilots have been officially announced yet.

Kocienda said he is working on a variety of tasks within the Postmates X team. Just yesterday, he was focused on creating more expressions for the robot.

“We are spending a lot of time going in and refining and inventing new ways that Serve can communicate,” he said. “It’s not like we are a robotics startup. We have a business rolling, so part of what is interesting to me is that we can mine the data we have and use the intelligence we have to improve the [Serve] experience end-to-end.”

The purpose of Postmates’ incoming fleet of semi-autonomous rovers is not to eliminate the role of human drivers but to make their routes more efficient. If, say, a Postmates customer orders food from a nearby restaurant, Serve could pick up the food, potentially even get back into a car with a human driver, then get back out of the car to complete the last-mile delivery. This saves the driver from sitting in traffic and gets the customer their food much faster, ideally.

One questions how humans might respond to these rovers, however, if they are roaming the streets independently. To protect them from damage or defacement, Postmates is making them as human-like as possible, complete with a set of “eyes.”

“We want to make it socially intelligent,” Kocienda explained. “We want people, when they see Serve going down the street, to smile at it and to be happy to see it there … It’s going to have this halo effect for Postmates. It’s going to be a brand ambassador for Postmates.”

Postmates, headquartered in San Francisco, is expected to go public later this year. Most recently, the company lined up a $100 million pre-IPO financing that valued the business at $1.85 billion. Postmates is backed by Tiger Global, BlackRock, Spark Capital, Uncork Capital, Founders Fund, Slow Ventures and others.

For entrepreneurs interested to meet and chat with Sramana Mitra in person, please join us for our bi-monthly and informal group meetups. If you are living in the San Francisco Bay Area or are just...

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Manifold, a startup known for providing all of the tools developers need in a single marketplace, has decided to make its core product available as a service, so that other companies can build a catalog of related services without a fuss.

Everyone wants to be a platform these days, but creating the infrastructure to offer a set of related services often might not be worth the effort. Beyond developing the actual catalog of services, it requires skills like collecting money and distributing revenue. Most companies don’t have the skill set or resources to set all of that up, and Manifold decided to use its expertise to help out.

Jevon MacDonald, co-founder and CEO, says they set out to build a complete management solution when they released their initial product last year. “The way we do that is by bringing things like billing, a single transaction for a developer, account management, teams and all the sort of things you have to do every time you use a cloud-based service or API.”

They felt the next logical step was to help their customers do something similar within their own ecosystems. “Now we’re here to talk about a Marketplace as a Service, which brings that power to these developer ecosystems directly by integrating with their existing products and platforms to make all the services the developers love to use available no matter where they run the code,” MacDonald explained.

He says that today, companies are really struggling to create marketplaces themselves, and this gives them the ability to do that in a fairly straightforward fashion. “There’s a lot more companies attempting to launch marketplaces, and what we’re hearing from customers is that they’re going back to the drawing board on a lot of these fundamental pieces every time, and this is our bread and butter.”

Manifold’s plan is to make that capability available as an out-of-the-box service to allow anyone who wants to launch a marketplace to do it. The company launched in 2016 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and has raised more than $13 million (18.5 million Canadian).

Customers have described Ampush as the “McKinsey of growth marketing,” and in many ways, it’s apt. Ampush has a relentlessly quantitative, full-funnel approach to growth marketing, and they’ve built proprietary software to back it up. Co-founder and CEO Jesse Pujji explains why Ampush exclusively works with direct to consumer companies, and why they went from serving 100 companies in 2015 to forming deeper partnerships with less than 20 companies today.

On Ampush’s evolution

“From 2011 to 2015, we were one of a handful of companies that could do Facebook really well, although that’s all we did.  As a result, we ended up working with a ton of growth brands and Fortune 1000 brands, like Dollar Shave Club, Uber, Stitch Fix, and all of these direct to consumer brands and businesses.

By 2015, we realized, “what got us here won’t get us there,” and so we started to question how we would evolve our offering and our company. Just doing Facebook would be okay, it would be good, but it wouldn’t be great, and we always said, “We want to be really great.”

Advice to early-stage founders

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 Ampush CEO & Co-Founder Jesse Pujji

Yvonne Leow: Tell us about your journey. How did you find yourself working in growth?

Jesse Pujji: I was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. My dad was an immigrant so I learned early on how to also be a small business entrepreneur. I was always running a snow-shoveling business, a lemonade stand business, a DJ-ing company. We cornered the Indian DJ-ing market in St. Louis. It turns out there weren’t a lot of Indian DJs in Missouri!

The City of Paris has had enough. There are currently 12 (yes, twelve) scooter startups in Paris. As reported by Le Monde, the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, announced in a press conference a series of restrictions to regulate the space.

First, there are just too many scooter startups — Bird, Bolt, Bolt by Usain Bolt, Circ, Dott, Hive, Jump, Lime, Tier, Voi, Ufo and Wind. They all have funny-sounding names and there are even two different companies with the same name (Bolt).

Paris plans to hand out two or three licenses to operate. The French government is currently working on a mobility law. The City of Paris plans to select companies after the parliament approves the law. As part of the selection process, they want to make sure that companies have a sustainable approach when it comes to fixing broken scooters and not dumping them after a few weeks. Companies will also be selected based on how they pay workers charging scooters overnight.

Paris had already taken some actions against scooter startups before today. You can’t ride a scooter on the pavement and scooter operators have to pay €50 per scooter per year.

And yet, there are already 20,000 scooters in the streets of Paris. That’s why the city is going one step further and banning scooters from parks. You also won’t be able to park a scooter on the pavement.

You have to find a parking spot for cars and put your scooter there. That sounds like a mess, and I’m not sure how it’s going to work, but it’s clear that there are too many scooters and not enough areas to park them in Paris right now.

While electric scooters aren’t as fast in Europe as in the U.S., Paris wants to limit top speed even more. The maximum speed will be 20kmph instead of 25kmph (12mph, down from 16mph).

Let’s see if Paris can implement those restrictions quickly and if scooter startups are going to comply with this new set of rules.

Hernan Fernandez is Managing Partner at Angel Ventures Mexico, a firm that invests in Mexico, Chile, Peru and Colombia. This is an excellent discussion on trends in Latin America.

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Fintech startup Bunq provides full-fledged bank accounts. But if you’re happy with your existing bank, the company is launching a new free tier so that you can cut down on banking fees.

The Bunq Travel Card is a Mastercard without any foreign exchange fee. The company uses the standard Mastercard exchange rate but doesn’t add any markup fee — N26 also uses Mastercard’s exchange rate. Most traditional banks charge you 2 or 3 percent for foreign transactions.

When you get a card, you can then top up your account in the Bunq app. You can also send and request money with other Bunq users. But it isn’t a full bank account.

While there is no fee on foreign transaction, you still have to pay €0.99 per ATM withdrawal. It also costs €9.99 to order a card, but there’s no monthly fee.

The company insists on one thing in particular. The Travel Card is a credit card. Revolut has been issuing prepaid cards for years, and it can create some issues. For instance, some hotels, rental car companies or gas stations don’t accept prepaid cards.

It isn’t a normal credit card as you can’t spend money you don’t have. You have to top up your Bunq account before using the card and overdrafts are disabled. In other words, if you don’t have enough money on your account, the transaction gets rejected.

The Bunq app lets you freeze and unfreeze your travel card. You can receive a notification every time a transaction is processed and you can set your own limits.

This new offering should boost signups for Bunq. And it could be a good way to attract premium subscribers. If you have bigger needs beyond a travel card, you’ll have to subscribe to a premium account for €7.99 per month.