XFactor, the pre-seed and seed-stage VC out of Flybridge Capital, has today announced that it has raised a second fund of $8.6 million.

XFactor first came on the scene in 2017 with $3 million. Flybridge Capital partner Chip Hazard started the fund alongside several female founders who were interested in getting into investment.

The idea is not just to fund startups led by at least one female, but also to give female founders a path into investing.

With Fund 2, XFactor is able to not only increase its check size from $100K to $150K, but it also makes room for more partners at the firm. From Fund 1, XFactor has grown from 9 investment partners to 23, operating in cities like LA, Seattle and Denver alongside original markets of Boston, NY and SF. Collectively, this group of women has raised more than $550 million in venture capital for their own businesses.

Some notable investments from Fund 1 include Chief, The Riveter, Choosy, CourtBuddy and MixLab, which today raised an $8.5 million seed round.

The increase in fund size will allow XFactor to invest in 53 companies, and the fund is looking to finance companies in new verticals, such as healthcare, fintech, agtech and frontier tech.

All of the partners at XFactor, which include Anna Palmer, Kathryn Minshew, Kate Ryder, Danielle Morrill, Allison Kopf, and Aubrie Pagano, work on the fund part-time while running their respective businesses.

“The greatest challenge is managing deal flow, given we’re all operators at our day jobs,” said Anna Palmer, co-founder and CEO of Dough and investment partner at XFactor. “We saw 1,500 opportunities come through on the first fund, and we’re expecting to see the same if not more this time around. The biggest challenge is seeing everything and managing that alongside our day jobs.”

Entering into the world of Anthemis is a bit like stepping into the frame of a Wes Anderson film. Eclectic, offbeat people situated in colorful interiors? Check. A muse in the form of a renowned British-Venezuelan economist? Check. A design-forward media platform to provoke deep thought? Check. An annual summer retreat ensconced in the French Alps? Bien sûr.

Sitting atop this most unusual fintech(ish) VC is its ponytailed founder and chairman Sean Park, whose difficult-to-place accent and Philosophy professor aura belie his extensive fixed income capital markets experience. He’s joined by founder and CEO Amy Nauiokas, who in addition to being one of Fintech’s most prominent female investors also owns a high-minded film and television production company.

When Arman Tabatabai and I recently sat down with Park and Nauiokas in their New York office, the firm’s leaders were in an upbeat mood, having blown past the temporary perception-setback associated with the abrupt resignation last year of Anthemis’ former CEO Nadeem Shaikh (for more on this, read TechCrunch writer Steve O’Hear’s coverage of the situation).

And as the conversation below demonstrates, Park and Nauiokas are well poised to bring the quirk into everything they touch, which these days runs the gamut from backing companies involved in sustainable finance, advancing their home-grown media platform and preparing a soon-to-be-announced initiative elevating female entrepreneurs.

Gregg Schoenberg: With the two of you now at the helm, how does Anthemis present itself today?

Sean Park: I’ll step back and say that when Amy and I were working at big financial institutions in the noughties, we saw that the industry was going to change and that existing business models were running into their natural diminishing returns.

We tried to bring some new ideas to the organizations we were working in, but we each had epiphany moments when we realized that big organizations weren’t built to do disruptive transformation — for bad reasons, but also good reasons, too.

GS: Let’s fast forward to today, where you have several strong Fintech VCs out there. But unlike others, Anthemis puts weirdness at the heart of its model.

Yes, you’ve backed some big names like Betterment and eToro, but you’ve done other things that are farther afield. What’s the underlying thesis that supports that?

Amy Nauiokas: Whatever we do at Anthemis has to be a non-zero-sum game. It has to be for good, not for evil. So that means that we aren’t looking in any place where you see predatory opportunities to make money.

The Valley’s rocky history with cleantech investing has been well-documented.

Startups focused on non-emitting-generation resources were once lauded as the next big cash cow, but the sector’s hype quickly got away from reality.

Complex underlying science, severe capital intensity, slow-moving customers and high-cost business models outside the comfort zones of typical venture capital ultimately caused a swath of venture-backed companies and investors in the cleantech boom to fall flat.

Yet, decarbonization and sustainability are issues that only seem to grow more dire and more galvanizing for founders and investors by the day, and more company builders are searching for new ways to promote environmental resilience.

While funding for cleantech startups can be hard to find nowadays, over time we’ve seen cleantech startups shift down the stack away from hardware-focused generation plays toward vertical-focused downstream software.

A far cry from past waves of venture-backed energy startups, the downstream cleantech companies offered more familiar technology with more familiar business models, geared toward more recognizable verticals and end users. Now, investors from less traditional cleantech backgrounds are coming out of the woodwork to take a swing at the energy space.

An emerging group of non-traditional investors getting involved in the clean energy space are those traditionally focused on fintech, such as New York and Europe-based venture firm Anthemis — a financial services-focused team that recently sat down with our fintech contributor Gregg Schoenberg and I (check out the full meat of the conversation on Extra Crunch).

The tie between cleantech startups and fintech investors may seem tenuous at first thought. However, financial services have long played a significant role in the energy sector and is now becoming a more common end customer for energy startups focused on operations, management and analytics platforms, thus creating real opportunity for fintech investors to offer differentiated value.

Finance powering the world?

Though the conversation around energy resources and decarbonization often focuses on politics, a significant portion of decisions made in the energy generation business is driven by pure economics — is it cheaper to run X resource relative to resources Y and Z at a given point in time? Based on bid prices for request for proposals (RFPs) in a specific market and the cost-competitiveness of certain resources, will a developer be able to hit their targeted rate of return if they build, buy or operate a certain type of generation asset?

Alternative generation sources like wind, solid oxide fuel cells or large-scale or even rooftop solar have reached more competitive cost levels — in many parts of the U.S., wind and solar are in fact often the cheapest form of generation for power providers to run.

Thus as renewable resources have grown more cost competitive, more infrastructure developers and other new entrants have been emptying their wallets to buy up or build renewable assets like large-scale solar or wind farms, with the American Council on Renewable Energy even forecasting cumulative private investment in renewable energy possibly reaching up to $1 trillion in the U.S. by 2030.

A major and swelling set of renewable energy sources are now led by financial types looking for tools and platforms to better understand the operating and financial performance of their assets, in order to better maximize their return profile in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

Therefore, fintech-focused venture firms with financial service pedigrees, like Anthemis, now find themselves in pole position when it comes to understanding cleantech startup customers, how they make purchase decisions, and what they’re looking for in a product.

In certain cases, fintech firms can even offer significant insight into shaping the efficacy of a product offering. For example, Anthemis portfolio company kWh Analytics provides a risk management and analytics platform for solar investors and operators that helps break down production, financial analysis and portfolio performance.

For platforms like kWh analytics, fintech-focused firms can better understand the value proposition offered and help platforms understand how their technology can mechanically influence rates of return or otherwise.

The financial service customers for clean energy-related platforms extends past just private equity firms. Platforms have been and are being built around energy trading, renewable energy financing (think financing for rooftop solar) or the surrounding insurance market for assets.

When speaking with several of Anthemis’ cleantech portfolio companies, founders emphasized the value of having a fintech investor on board that not only knows the customer in these cases, but that also has a deep understanding of the broader financial ecosystem that surrounds energy assets.

Founders and firms seem to be realizing that various arms of financial services are playing growing roles when it comes to the development and access to clean energy resources.

By offering platforms and surrounding infrastructure that can improve the ease of operations for the growing number of finance-driven operators or can improve the actual financial performance of energy resources, companies can influence the fight for environmental sustainability by accelerating the development and adoption of cleaner resources.

Ultimately, a massive number of energy decisions are made by financial services firms and fintech firms may often know the customers and products of downstream cleantech startups more than most.  And while the financial services sector has often been labeled as dirty by some, the vital role it can play in the future of sustainable energy offers the industry a real chance to clean up its image.

Firefly, a startup that allows ride-hail drivers to make money from advertising, has raised $30 million in Series A funding.

The company is about to launch in New York City, where it’s also acquiring the digital operations of advertising company Strong Outdoor. Co-founder and CEO Kaan Gunay said this will allow Firefly to start working with traditional taxis in a big way.

“It’s essentially locking in the largest taxi advertising contract, partnering with the largest taxi trade organization in the United States,” Gunay said.

Firefly already operates in San Francisco and Los Angeles, where it works with drivers for Uber, Lyft and other services to install a “digital smart screen” that can run targeted, geofenced advertising from companies like Brex, Segment, Caviar and Zumper. And although the startup is starting to work with taxis too, Gunay said it won’t be ignoring ride-hail drivers: “Firefly is for everyone.”

The new funding comes just six months after Firefly announced a big seed round of $21.5 million. Gunay said that by raising even more money, the company can “make sure we are able to scale very quickly and very efficiently.”

The round was led by GV (formerly Google Ventures), with participation from NFX.

“Firefly is creating a significant new ad format at scale,” said GV’s Adam Ghobarah in a statement. “In addition to taxis, the scale of rideshare networks has created a large opportunity to provide digital out of home advertising with granular city-block and time targeting.”

The recent IPOs of Uber and Lyft have also brought more attention to the issue of driver compensation, with some drivers staging a brief strike. (Last year, Firefly said it was bringing its drivers an additional $300 per month on average.)

“In this current environment, where unfortunately it is becoming more difficult for our driver partners to make a livelihood in these expensive cities, I think having a platform like Firefly whose mission really is to help these drivers make a better living is incredible,” Gunay said. “We have been extremely lucky to see such an incredible reception from our driver partners, and we’re doing everything possible to make sure we continue to increase the income we are providing to them.”

He also described the Firefly approach as a “win-win-win scenario” — not just for drivers and advertisers, but also for local businesses, nonprofits and local governments, to whom the company has committed 10% of its inventory.

Sramana Mitra: Can you tell me how many years are we talking in this mode? When did you move out of your mom’s house to your own apartment? Sebastian Peterson: We only did that for about six months....

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Businesses have to keep the content flowing on social media, so a startup called soona says it’s developed a new way to provide all the photos and videos they need.

The company was founded by CEO Elizabeth Giorgi and Chief Creative Officer Hayley Anderson. Giorgi told me they both worked in production (Anderson as an animator, Giorgi as the founder of her own video production company), and “kept finding ourselves saying no to projects that needed to be done quickly — we could never find a way to make production move fast enough.”

At the same time, they saw a growing need, as small and medium businesses increasingly rely on email and social marketing to promote themselves, which means they either “go to a stock content site and buy something that isn’t even relevant to their brand, or they can do a DIY solution.”

With soona, customers can get the photos and videos they need within 24 hours, and at a relatively affordable price. Giorgi compared the company’s approach to Kinko’s, which “turned printing into a same-day business 20 years ago.”

Giorgi said soona combines “the best of retail innovation with a strong background in technology.” It operates actual studios where customers come in for photos and video shoots, but it’s also developed software to encode and upload the footage quickly, and to allow customers to “shop [their] content in real time.”

Soona started out with a studio in Denver and just launched in Minneapolis, and Giorgi said her hope is to open three to five studios in 2020. The service costs $393 per hour for a one-time shoot (with a guarantee of nine edited photos or one edited video), or $453 for a monthly membership.

The company has also launched a service called soona anytime for customers in other geographies — you send soona your product and you get your content in about a week.

Soona is announcing that it has raised $1.2 million in seed funding led by 2048 Ventures, with participation from Matchstick Ventures and Techstars Ventures.

Giorgi noted that the fundraising documents include something she’s calling the Candor Clause, which requires investors to disclose if they’ve ever faced issues with sexual assault, sexual harassment or sexual discrimination.

Giorgi said the team at 2048 fully supported this move. In addition, soona is publishing the clause in the hopes that other startups will take advantage of it, allowing founders and investors to “move past tweets, move towards action, move towards something that makes it clear that there will be consequences” for bad behavior.

“This is not just a woman’s issue, this is an everyone issue,” she added. “We all want to be treated fairly.”

For more than 25 years the founders of Thrive Earlier Detection have been researching ways to improve the accuracy of liquid biopsy tests.

The fruits of that labor from Dr. Bert Vogelstein, Dr. Kenneth Kinzler and Dr. Nickolas Papadopoulos — all professors and researchers at Johns Hopkins University — is CancerSEEK, a liquid biopsy test that has demonstrated specificity of over 99% in a retrospective study published by Science.

By minimizing false positives in cancer screening tools and providing a test with proven accuracy, doctors can take treatment actions earlier, which can lead to better survival rates for cancer patients.

Now, with FDA approval for its tests for pancreatic and ovarian cancer and a new study underway with a large healthcare provider, CancerSEEK is being rolled out to market through Thrive Earlier Detection with the help of a new $110 million round of funding.

Thrive works by analyzing highly targeted sets of DNA and proteins in the blood to detect cancer.

“Over the past 30 years we have made great strides in understanding cancer. Combining this knowledge with the latest in molecular testing technologies, our founders have developed a simple and affordable blood test for the detection of many cancers at relatively early stages,” said Christoph Lengauer, PhD, partner at Third Rock Ventures, and co-founder and chief innovation officer of Thrive, in a statement. “We envision a future where routine preventative care includes a blood test for cancer, just as patients are now routinely tested for early stages of heart disease. We know that if cancer is caught early enough, it can often be cured.”

As part of its rollout, the company’s screening tool is being evaluated in DETECT, a study of 10,000 currently healthy individuals that’s being conducted in conjunction with the healthcare organization Geisinger. So far, 10,000 women between the ages of 65 and 75 without a history of cancer have been enrolled in the trial.

“To be truly useful to patients, new medical technology must be developed with rigorous evidence and designed to be affordable and readily integrated into routine medical care,” Steven J. Kafka, PhD, partner at Third Rock Ventures and chief executive officer of Thrive, said in a statement. “With the help of experts and strategic partners, Thrive is launching today to advance a novel test for the earlier detection of multiple cancers, which we aim to augment with an integrated service that helps patients maneuver the often confusing path that follows a cancer diagnosis.”

Third Rock Ventures actually led the Series A financing for Thrive, and comprise the bulk of the company’s executive team, while Kinzler and Papadopoulos — the researchers from Johns Hopkins who developed the technology — will have seats on the company’s board.

Other investors in the round include Bill Maris’ Section 32 investment firm, Casdin Capital, Biomatics Capital, BlueCross BlueShield Venture Partners, Invus, Exact Sciences, Cowin Venture, Camden Partners, Gamma 3 LLC and others.

According to Thrive, ovarian, pancreatic and liver cancers are difficult to detect because they can develop in pathways that aren’t always well understood.

Using CancerSEEK, Thrive hopes to develop a blood-based test that can be used in routine medical care, with the goal of identifying multiple cancer types at earlier stages.

The technology works by following genomic mutations in circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) and cancer-associated protein markers in plasma to identify abnormalities that are common across multiple cancers. In a retrospective study published by Science in 2018, CancerSEEK was shown to perform with greater than 99% specificity and with sensitivities ranging from 69% to 98% for the detection of five cancer types — ovarian, liver, stomach, pancreas and esophageal, which the company says are cancers for which there are no screening tests available for average-risk individuals.

Thrive’s research has attracted an all-star executive team in addition to Lengauer and Kafka from Third Rock. Former Goldman Sachs lead medical technology analyst Isaac Ro is joining the company as chief financial officer, and the company’s head of research is Isaac Kinde, a co-inventor of the CancerSEEK technology.

It’s hard to overstate how transformative the Thrive test could prove to be. Having a blood-based diagnostic test for cancer prevalence and the ability to initiate treatment earlier radically improves the chances for surviving a cancer diagnosis.

Weights & Biases, a startup building development tools for machine learning, has raised $15 million in its second round of funding.

The company was started by CrowdFlower founders Lukas Biewald and Chris van Pelt, along with former Google engineer Shawn Lewis. (Under its new name Figure Eight, CrowdFlower was acquired by Appen for up to $300 million in March.)

When Weights & Biases launched last year, Biewald (who I’ve known since college) said he wanted to create the tools needed to “build and deploy great deep learning models.” Its initial product allows companies to monitor those models as they develop and train them.

“When people build machine learning models they need to track everything that happens — the code that went into the model, the hyperparameters that go into the model and then basically how well the model does,” Biewald told me this week. “You add a couple lines of code to your … training code and then every time your model runs, it reports what happens to the server.”

Customers include OpenAI, GitHub, Qualcomm and Toyota Research Institute, as well as research institutions like Stanford and Columbia. The new round — led by Coatue Management, with participation from angels including GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Salesforce Chief Scientist Richard Socher — brings Weights & Biases’ total funding to $20 million.

The company has also launched Benchmarks, a new product that allows practitioners to collaborate on the same machine learning models. Biewald acknowledged that commercial enterprises probably won’t want to take this approach, but he suggested that researchers can use this so they “don’t have to rerun lots of training examples” and “just to move the state of the art forward.”

Looking at how the industry has evolved, Biewald said, “It’s gone really mainstream. What people don’t realize is how much machine learning is actually used in real companies today … Almost any company of reasonable size is doing machine learning. A lot of the applications are kind of boring but important to the company that’s doing them.”

Nor does Biewald think we should be discouraged by headlines like the news that Google’s Duplex service for restaurant reservations often relies on humans rather than bots.

“I don’t think it’s smoke and mirrors to combine humans and machine learning algorithms,” he said. “Every credit card company is using machine learning to prevent fraud, or whatever they do, they have humans check a lot of it … I don’t know why people feel it needs to be so binary, like we either automate everything or nothing. If you can automate half of it, that’s pretty good.”

A new startup aims to help you get your student loans under control. Today, an app called Pillar, backed by $5.5 million in seed funding led by Kleiner Perkins, is launching a simpler way for consumers to better understand their student loan debt — and even pay it off early.

To do so, the app connects with your student loan servicer and bank, then makes personalized suggestions based on your loans, your income and your spending. When it finds a way you can make a bigger dent in your overall student loan debt, it will send an alert to your smartphone.

Pillar co-founder and CEO Michael Bloch, an early DoorDash employee, said he came up with the idea after his wife graduated from law school with around $300,000 worth of student loans.

“We struggled to figure out the right way to pay them back,” he explains. “We read blog posts and articles. We made spreadsheets. We even talked to a financial advisor. But there really was no easy way for us to figure out what was the right thing for us to do. And I realized there are 45 million people with loans, and millions of those people have had the exact same experience as I did.”

Bloch decided then to drop out of Stanford Business School to instead focus on building Pillar along with co-founder and CTO Gilad Kahala.

Above: Michael Bloch (L) and Gilad Kahala (R)

The problem they’re attacking is massive. Student loan debt is the second largest type of consumer debt in the U.S., with 45 million borrowers owing more than $1.5 trillion in student loans. Seven out of 10 students take out loans to pay for college, and the average person graduates with $30,000 in debt, which takes 20 years to pay off. For those with $60,000 in debt, it can take more than 30 years to pay off. And nearly 20% of borrowers have more than $100,000 in debt.

In addition, women are disproportionately affected by this problem, notes Bloch. Women hold two-thirds of student loan debt, he points out. This is because there are more women (around 56%) than men attending college these days, and because of the gender pay gap — which means it takes longer for women to pay back their loans.

At launch, Pillar walks new users through a quick sign-up process where you authenticate with your loan provider and bank account. (The company says it uses security best practices, and doesn’t store any login information or passwords on its own servers.)

As Pillar analyzes your spending and pay schedule, it can figure out when you can start making an extra payment toward your loans. It also calculates what that means in terms of paying off your loan earlier. This is especially useful for those who don’t necessarily receive a steady paycheck, or whose income fluctuates for other reasons — they may have trouble determining how much they can actually afford to chip in.

The company does not offer to refinance loans, to be clear, nor will it point you toward those options. In fact, it expects many of its users wouldn’t be able to take advantage of refinancing options, anyway.

“Companies like SoFi actually turn away around 97% of everybody who applies for refinancing, because they’re too high a credit risk — they look at your credit scores, your income, the type of job you have — most people don’t qualify for lower rates on refinancing,” Bloch says.

Instead, Pillar targets the larger majority who make less than $100,000 per year and have fewer options.

“What we found is that these small actions that people can take — where it’s not necessarily a hundred dollars this month. But even making a $5 a week extra payment can make a really big difference to somebody’s financial life in the long run,” he explains.

Users can opt to make these additional payments through Pillar itself, instead of having to go through the sometimes clunky student loan provider’s website.

Pillar works with nearly all major student loan servicers — including Nelnet, Navient, Great Lakes, Fedloan Servicing and others.

Prior to today, the company had been running a private beta with an undisclosed number of users who are now using Pillar to manage their collective $50 million-plus in loan debt. During this period, the average borrower saved around $6,000 and about four years on repayment, Bloch claims.

What Pillar does not do, at this point, is help borrowers navigate student loan forgiveness programs. That’s on its roadmap, however. It plans to offer tools and automation to help its users navigate those programs in the future. Longer-term, Pillar wants to do for all consumer debt — including credit cards — what it’s now doing for student loans.

While Pillar is attacking a real problem, it’s not yet a comprehensive solution — or even the best way for a consumer to handle their overall debt.

As Genevieve Dobson, founder and CEO of debt management company Degrees of Success, points out, the interest rates on consumers’ student loans may be lower than the high interest rates on their credit cards and other debt that should be paid down first.

Plus, she notes, “it would not be suggested for anyone who qualifies for an income-based repayment or other lower payment option. It’s also not a good option for those who qualify for any of the forgiveness programs. And unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to tell people to utilize the income-driven repayment options instead, which could end up harming someone rather than helping them.”

In time, hopefully, Pillar will become more comprehensive to address the needs of all borrowers. For now, however, it makes the best sense for those who only hold student loan debt and are looking to pay it down more quickly.

Pillar says it will keep all its advice free, but will charge a low (around $1 per month) subscription fee for premium features at some point in the future. The company will also provide (not sell) anonymized loan data to nonprofits and research institutions who are working to advance the national conversation and policy around student loans.

In addition to Kleiner Perkins, other seed round participants include Rainfall Ventures, Great Oaks VC, Financial Venture Studio, Kairos and Day One Ventures. Individual investors include Adam Nash, the former CEO of Wealthfront and Acorns board member; Noah Weiss, former SVP of Product at Foursquare; Zach Weinberg and Nat Turner, co-founders of Flatiron Health; Misha Esipov, CEO and co-founder of Nova Credit; and Robinhood’s head of International, Patrick Kavanagh, and head of Finance, Nadia Asoyan.

The Pillar team is currently 10 people in New York, and looking to double the size of the team over the next year with a particular focus on hiring engineers.

Pillar is available on iOS and Android. You will still need to join the waitlist, as people are being allowed into Pillar in stages as it launches.

The pace of malicious hacks and security breaches is showing no signs of slowing down, and spend among enterprises to guard against that is set to reach $124 billion this year. That’s also having a knock-on effect on the most innovative cybersecurity startups, which continue to raise big money to grow and meet that demand.

In the latest development, a New York startup called BlueVoyant — which provides managed security, professional services and, most recently, threat intelligence — has picked up $82.5 million in a Series B round of funding at a valuation in excess of $430 million.

The funding is coming from a range of new and existing investors that includes Fiserv, the fintech giant that’s acquiring First Data for $22 billion. (The startup is not disclosing any other names at this time, it said.) It has raised $207.5 million to date.

BlueVoyant has a notable pedigree that goes some way to explaining how the idea for the startup first germinated.

Co-founder and CEO Jim Rosenthal met his co-founder Tom Glocer (the former CEO of Thomson Reuters) when Rosenthal was COO of Morgan Stanley and Glocer was a director at the financial services giant (Glocer is still on the board). Glocer said that in 2012 and 2013, a fair amount of Rosenthal’s work involved cyber defense, and he came into close contact there with Glocer, who was chairing the operations and technology committee at the time.

“Here was an incredibly strategic, smart fellow in charge of operations,” he said of Rosenthal. “When it came time for him to retire, he told me he wanted to do one more big thing, but in a more entrepreneurial fashion. I suggested to him that the next step could be to work on [cybersecurity], which we were focusing on at Morgan Stanley.”

Glocer noted that the bank was spending some $300 million annually on cybersecurity at the time. It effectively had all the resources of the world at its disposal to invest in tackling the risks, but the two were all too aware of how even that could prove not to be enough — and of course for any company with fewer resources, or that wasn’t billed as a tech company or with technology as part of its DNA.

BlueVoyant was built with those kinds of challenges in mind.

The startup has amassed talent from the world of private enterprise, but also a number of government organizations such as the NSA, FBI, GCHQ and Unit 8200 — which are alternately renowned and somewhat notorious for their work in cybersecurity and hacking. Its offices span a multitude of geographies that speaks to the customers that it has picked up in its quiet growth to date (which also gives some color to its valuation, too). In addition to the U.S., it has operations in Israel, the United Kingdom, Spain and the Philippines.

Tapping that talent pool, the company focuses on three areas of service for its customers: threat intelligence, managed security and professional services (with the latter focused specifically on those related to security implementations and operations).

Within these, Rosenthal said in an interview that it both builds its own IP, and also brings in software from a range of trusted partners (which include many of the biggest security software companies around today). Key to the proposition, though, is also the implementation of that technology. The theory is that technology will only get a company so far: you need a multi-level strategy when it comes to cybersecurity, and part of that will involve people able to identify vulnerabilities and figuring out how to fix or defend around them.

BlueVoyant believes the opportunity for it is twofold: targeting small and medium enterprises — the pitch being that it can provide the same kind of software and level of services that large enterprises enjoy; and targeting larger enterprises that may already have large IT budgets and teams tasked with cybersecurity, but could still use supplementary work from a world-class team of experts that would be a challenge to amass directly.

“My view is that for firms with very good cyber defenses, external cyber intelligence is important because you can’t defend everything equally,” Rosenthal said. “Having good actionable defense makes it better.

“Then for firms that are unable to afford an excellent cyber defense instructed by themselves and may not be able to attract the talent necessary, a managed security service is the right and important answer,” he continued. “That kind of managed security now needs to be available to companies of all sizes, not just the big ones but small and medium organizations, too. We have created a tech stack and level of talent capable of providing those.”

The formula appears to be working. Since launching the first tranche of its offering, managed services, in 2018, BlueVoyant has picked up some 150 customers in verticals like financial services, manufacturing, municipal government and education.

Working with partners is one way that BlueVoyant plans to expand that customer base over time. Fiserv is backing the startup as a strategic investment and the two will collaborate on providing respective services to each other’s clients. Specifically, Glocer noted that many of the banks that Fiserv currently works with are typical targets: businesses that have a lot to lose in a breach, but may lack the size to ever adequately secure its infrastructure and other assets.

“The strategic alliance between Fiserv and BlueVoyant brings advanced cyber defense capabilities to banks and credit unions of all sizes,” said Byron Vielehr, chief administrative officer of Fiserv. “Our continued investment in BlueVoyant underscores the value these capabilities can bring to our clients.”

BlueVoyant is not the only big security startup to raise at a high valuation in recent times. Auth0 raised $103 million at a $1 billion valuation last week. In April, Bitglass closed a $70 million round. 2018 had seen a high-water mark for security funding, with startups raking in a record $5.3 billion in the year; it will be worth watching to see whether the ongoing march of breaches will see those figures rise again this year.

Last year, San Francisco-based, Eventbrite, finally listed on the NYSE. The company had been trying to stay independent for a while. But being under public scrutiny hasn’t been very helpful....

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Sramana Mitra: The first customers that you were getting traction with, how much were they paying you? Tarek Sherif: We tried a couple of different charging models. At first, we thought about a...

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Brex, the fintech business that’s taken the startup world by storm with its sought after corporate card tailored for entrepreneurs, is raising millions in Series D funding less than a year after it launched, TechCrunch has learned.

Bloomberg reports Brex is raising at a $2 billion valuation, though sources tell TechCrunch the company is still in negotiations with both new and existing investors. In response to a request for comment, Brex co-founder and chief executive officer Henrique Dubugras told TechCrunch they have no news to announce at this time.

Kleiner Perkins is leading the round via former general partner Mood Rowghani, who left the storied venture capital fund last year to form Bond alongside Mary Meeker and Noah Knauf. As we’ve previously reported, the Bond crew is still in the process of deploying capital from Kleiner’s billion-dollar Digital Growth Fund III, the pool of capital they were responsible for before leaving the firm.

Bond, which recently closed on $1.25 billion for its debut effort and made its first investment, is not participating in the round for Brex, sources confirm to TechCrunch. Bond declined to comment.

Brex, a graduate of Y Combinator’s winter 2017 cohort, has raised $182 million in VC funding, reaching a valuation of $1.1 billion in October 2018 three months after launching its corporate card for startups and less than a year after completing YC’s accelerator program.

Most recently, Brex attracted a $125 million Series C investment led by Greenoaks Capital, DST Global and IVP. The startup is also backed by PayPal founders Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, and VC firms such as Ribbit Capital, Oneway Ventures and Mindset Ventures, according to PitchBook.

The company’s pace of growth is unheard of, even in Silicon Valley where inflated valuations and outsized rounds are the norm. Why? Brex has tapped into a market dominated by legacy players in dire need of technological innovation and, of course, startup founders always need access to credit. That, coupled with the fact that it’s capitalized on YC’s network of hundreds of startup founders — i.e. Brex customers — has accelerated its path to a multi-billion-dollar price tag.

Brex doesn’t require any kind of personal guarantee or security deposit from its customers, allowing founders near-instant access to credit. More importantly, it gives entrepreneurs a credit limit that’s as much as 10 times higher than what they would receive elsewhere.

Investors may also be enticed by the fact the company doesn’t use third-party legacy technology, boasting a software platform that is built from scratch. On top of that, Brex simplifies a lot of the frustrating parts of the corporate expense process by providing companies with a consolidated look at their spending.

“We have a very similar effect of what Stripe had in the beginning, but much faster because Silicon Valley companies are very good at spending money but making money is harder,” Dubugras told me late last year.

Stripe, for context, was founded in 2010. Not until 2014 did the company raise its unicorn round, landing a valuation of $1.75 billion with an $80 million financing. Today, Stripe has raised a total of roughly $1 billion at a valuation north of $20 billion.

Dubugras and Brex co-founder Pedro Franceschi, 23-year-old entrepreneurs, relocated from Brazil to Stanford in the fall of 2016 to attend the university. They dropped out upon getting accepted into YC, which they applied to with a big dreams for a virtual reality startup called Beyond. Beyond quickly became Brex, a name in which Dubugras recently told TechCrunch was chosen because it was one of few four-letter word domains available.

Brex’s funding history

March 2017: Brex graduates Y Combinator

April 2017: $6.5M Series A | $25M valuation

April 2018: $50M Series B | $220M valuation

October 2018: $125M Series C | $1.1B valuation

May 2019: undisclosed Series D | ~$2B valuation

In April, Brex secured a $100 million debt financing from Barclays Investment Bank. At the time, Dubugras told TechCrunch the business would not seek out venture investment in the near future, though he did comment that the debt capital would allow for a significant premium when Brex did indeed decide to raise capital again.

In 2019, Brex has taken steps several steps toward maturation.Recently, it launched a rewards program for customers and closed its first notable acquisition of a blockchain startup called Elph. Shortly after, Brex released its second product, a credit card made specifically for ecommerce companies.

Its upcoming infusion of capital will likely be used to develop payment services tailored to Fortune 500 business, which Dubugras has said is part of Brex’s long term plan to disrupt the entire financial technology space.

Let’s go beyond the high-level fundraising advice that fills VC blogs. If you have a compelling business and have educated yourself on crafting a pitch deck and getting warm intros to VCs, there are still specific questions about the strategy to follow for your fundraise.

How can you make your round “hot” and trigger a fear of missing out (FOMO) among investors? How can you fundraise faster to reduce the distraction it has on running your business?

Unsurprisingly, I’ve noticed that experienced founders tend to be more systematic in the tactics they employ to raise capital. So I asked several who have raised tens (or hundreds) of millions in VC funding to share specific strategies for raising money on their terms. Here’s their advice.

(The three high-profile CEOs who agreed to share their specific playbooks requested anonymity so VCs don’t know which is theirs. I’ve nicknamed them Founder A, Founder B, and Founder C.)

Have additional fundraising tactics to share? Email me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Table of Contents

You need to create a market for your sharesThe one month fundraiseThursday/Friday meetingsThe bicoastal monthEarly relationship buildingOrganize your pitch betterResearch each VC’s styleYou’re not just being judged on your startupThe money is already yours

You need to create a market for your shares

“You’re trying to make a market for your equity. In order to make a market, you need multiple people lining up at the same time.”

That advice from Atrium CEO Justin Kan (a co-founder of companies like Twitch and former partner at Y Combinator) was reiterated by all the entrepreneurs I interviewed. Fundraising should be a sprint, not a marathon, otherwise the loss of momentum will make it more difficult.

Startups are often associated with the benefits and toys provided in their offices. Foosball tables! Free food! Dog friendly! But what if the future of startups was less about physical office space and more about remote-first work environments? What if, in fact, the most compelling aspect of a startup work environment is that the employees don’t have to go to one?

A remote-first company model has been Seeq’s strategy since our founding in 2013. We have raised $35 million and grown to more than 100 employees around the globe. Remote-first is clearly working for us and may be the best model for other software companies as well.

So, who is Seeq and what’s been the key to making the remote-first model work for us?  And why did we do it in the first place?

Seeq is a remote-first startup – i.e. it was founded with the intention of not having a physical headquarters or offices, and still operates that way – that is developing an advanced analytics application that enables process engineers and subject matter experts in oil & gas, pharmaceuticals, utilities, and other process manufacturing industries to investigate and publish insights from the massive amounts of sensor data they generate and store.

To succeed, we needed to build a team quickly with two skill sets: 1) software development expertise, including machine learning, AI, data visualization, open source, agile development processes, cloud, etc. and 2) deep domain expertise in the industries we target.

Which means there is no one location where we can hire all the employees we need: Silicon Valley for software, Houston for oil & gas, New Jersey for fine chemicals, Seattle for cloud expertise, water utilities across the country, and so forth. But being remote-first has made recruiting and hiring these high-demand roles easier much easier than if we were collocated.

Job postings on remote-specific web sites like FlexJobs, Remote.co and Remote OK typically draw hundreds of applicants in a matter of days. This enables Seeq to hire great employees who might not call Seattle, Houston or Silicon Valley home – and is particularly attractive to employees with location-dependent spouses or employees who simply want to work where they want to live.

But a remote-first strategy and hiring quality employees for the skills you need is not enough: succeeding as a remote-first company requires a plan and execution around the “3 C’s of remote-first”.

The three requirements to remote-first success are the three C’s: communication, commitment and culture.

CrowdStrike, in preparation for its Nasdaq initial public offering, has inked plans to sell 18 million shares at between $19 and $23 apiece. At a midpoint price, CrowdStrike will raise $378 million at a valuation north of $4 billion.

The company, which develops cloud-native endpoint protection software to prevent cyber breaches, has raised $480 million in venture capital funding to date from Warburg Pincus, which owns a 30.2% pre-IPO stake, Accel (20.2%) and CapitalG (11.1%), according to its IPO prospectus. The business was valued at $3.3 billion with a $200 million January 2018 Series E funding.

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based CrowdStrike outlined its IPO plans two weeks ago. The company plans to trade under the ticker symbol “CRWD.”

The cybersecurity unicorn follows several other highly valued venture-backed startups to the public markets, including Uber, Lyft, Pinterest, PagerDuty and Zoom. CrowdStrike’s offering will represent only the second cybersecurity IPO in 2019, however. It follows Israel’s Tufin Software Technologies, which went public earlier this year. Last year, for its part, saw the IPOs of Zscaler, Carbon Black and Tenable.

Founded in 2011 by former McAfee executives George Kurtz and Dmitri Alperovitch, CrowdStrike is up against steep competition in the cyber protection space. It’s battling the likes of McAfee, Cylance, Palo Alto Networks, Symantec, Carbon Black and more.

The business’ revenues, fortunately, are growing at an impressive rate, increasing from $53 million in 2017 and $119 million in 2018 to $250 million in the year ending January 31, 2019. In the quarter ending April 30, 2019, its revenues shot up from $47.3 million in 2018 Q1 to between $93.6 million to $95.7 million.

CrowdStrike is also backed by IVP, March Capital Partners, General Atlantic and others.

Most of the buzz about esports focuses on high-profile professional teams and audiences watching live streams of those professionals.

What gets ignored is the entire base of amateurs wanting to compete in esports below the professional tier. This is like talking about the NBA and the value of its sponsorships and broadcast rights as if that is the entirety of the basketball market in the US.

Los Angeles-based PlayVS (pronounced “play versus”) wants to become the dominant platform for amateur esports, starting at the high school level. The company raised $46 million last year—its first year operating—with the vision that owning the infrastructure for competitions and expanding it to encompass other social elements of gaming can make it the largest gaming company in the world.

I recently sat down with Founder & CEO Delane Parnell to talk about his company’s formation and growth strategy. Below is the transcript of our conversation (edited for length and clarity):

Founding PlayVS

Eric P: You have a fascinating background as a serial entrepreneur while you were a teenager.

Delane P.: I grew up on the west side of Detroit and started working at the cell phone store of a family friend when I was 13. When I turned 16 or so, I joined two guys in opening our own Metro PCS franchise. And then two additional franchises. And I was on the founding team of a car rental company called Executive Rental Car.

Eric P: And this segued into tech startups after meeting Jon Triest from Ludlow Ventures?

Delane P: He got me a ticket to the Launch conference in SF, and that experience inspired me to start a Fireside Chat series in Detroit that brought in people like Brian Wong from Kiip and Alexis Ohanian from Reddit to speak. Starting at 21, I worked at a venture capital firm called IncWell based in Birmingham, Michigan then joined a startup called Rocket Fiber.

We were focused on internet infrastructure – this is 2015-ish – and I was appointed to lead our strategy in esports. So I met with many of the publishers, ancillary startups, tournament organizers, and OG players and team owners. Through the process, I became passionate about esports and ended up leaving Rocket Fiber to start a Call of Duty team that I quickly sold to TSM.

Eric P: What then drove you to found PlayVS? Did it seem like an obvious opportunity or did it take you a while to figure it out?

Delane P.: What esports means is playing video games competitively bound to governance and a competitive ruleset. As a player, what that experience means is you play on a team, in a position, with a coach, in a season that culminates in some sort of championship.

What a wonderful story of an ecommerce company bootstrapping to $12 million from a small town called Horsens in Denmark. All 60 employees work out of Horsens currently. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at...

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Talkspace, the platform that lets patients and therapists communicate online, has today announced the close of a $50 million financing round led by Revolution Growth. Existing investors, such as Norwest Venture Partners, Omura Capital, Spark Capital and Compound Ventures, are also participating in the round.

As part of the deal, Revolution Growth’s Patrick Conroy will join the Talkspace board of directors.

Talkspace launched back in 2012 with a mission to make therapy accessible to as many people as possible. The platform allows users to pay a subscription fee for unlimited messaging with one of the company’s 5,000 healthcare professionals. Since launch, Talkspace has rolled out products specific to certain users, such as teenagers or couples.

The company also partners with insurance providers and employers to offer Talkspace services to their members/employees as part of a commercial business. Today, Talkspace has announced a partnership with Optum Health. This expands Talkspace’s commercial reach to 5 million people.

According to the release, Talkspace will use the funding to accelerate the growth of its commercial business.

Here’s what Talkspace CEO and co-founder Oren Frank had to say in a prepared statement:

Our advanced capabilities in data science enable us to not only open access to therapy, but also identify the attributes of successful therapeutic relationships and apply that knowledge throughout the predictive products we build, to the therapists that use our platform, and in the content we provide.

This brings Talkspace’s total funding to $110 million.