Google and Facebook are increasingly slurping up every ad dollar on the internet. Their dominant position is upending the business models of traditional and startup media companies alike. The click-driven ad model of yore is leaving a graveyard in its wake, as once high-flying companies like Mic collapse.

Learning from the wave of SaaS startups that have launched and gone public over the past decade, media companies are increasingly exploring subscription models as a way to provide robust, recurring revenue while also building closer ties to customers, to boot (btw, have you heard of Extra Crunch?). And customers seem ready to open their wallets, as well.

That transition from ad revenue to subscription means that the infrastructure undergirding these companies needs to be completely ripped out and replaced with new solutions designed to solve a whole new set of problems — and opportunities.

Enter Pico. The brainchild of childhood friends and Stanford grads Nick Chen and Jason Bade, the company wants to imprint a customer-first mentality right into the software powering media companies. At its core, Pico is an identity layer for media — offering a way to implement paywalls, checkouts and analytics while actually knowing who your customers are. Essentially, it’s CRM for media companies, and the company is announcing the product’s general availability today.

That model has also caught the eye of investors. Precursor Ventures and payments processor Stripe are co-leading a $4.5 million seed round into the company, along with Bloomberg Beta, Village Global and Axel Springer Digital Ventures, the German media giant that acquired Business Insider in 2015. Charles Hudson, who was one of the startup’s first investors, will join the board.

Chen explained that there has been a sea change in the media world since the company’s founding in 2016 as PennyPass. Beyond Google and Facebook’s dominance of ad spend, he noted that “the other observation was that, wow, consumers are really ready to pay for content between The New York Times and Netflix and the App Store. This behavior isn’t just music, right? This behavior is now commonplace. So there’s an opportunity for a Cambrian explosion of media entrepreneurs.”

Bade argued that this change opens the opportunity for Pico to insert itself into media infrastructure. “If you’re going to start treating your readers as customers — and not anonymous impressions — [media companies] have to start thinking about a whole different tech stack, which isn’t adtech, which isn’t [Google Analytics] at the anonymized, audience cohort level. But it’s a customer tech stack, it’s marketing funnels, it’s moving people down from the top of the funnel into a payment, and then retention.”

While there are individual point solutions that may solve each of Pico’s features from payments to email address collection, Chen and Bade are betting that a great out-of-the-box experience with intense focus on conversion and retention can give them a competitive advantage in the marketplace. “When it comes to actually turning on Pico, it’s a matter of minutes. Our whole mantra is we know code,” Chen said. That allows media entrepreneurs to focus on what they do best — producing great content — and allows the Pico team to optimize its product for its customers’ revenue growth and reader satisfaction.

The company’s customer base includes projects funded by the blockchain news network Civil such as the Colorado Sun and Block Club Chicago, as well as niche publications like Teslarati, which obsesses about all things Tesla, and ImpactAlpha, which focuses on the impact-investing world.

Stripe’s investment follows the unicorn’s expanding engagement with the publishing industry. The company publishes Increment magazine, which analyzes engineering issues, and the company has also formed Stripe Press, which produces books on topics broadly in the startup and engineering space.

Pico joins a couple of different companies targeting the next-generation of media companies. For example, Substack, an SF-based startup, focuses on paid email newsletter businesses in the model of Ben Thompson’s Stratechery.

Ultimately, Pico wants to coin its own segment. As Chen explained, “What we see emerging is this product category of ‘audience relationship management.’ We see it as obviously a subcategory of CRM, but it is distinct.” He welcomes competition to the space. “It’s day one of this shift in the industry. And, you know, if it’s as big as we anticipate, there’s going to be a lot more activity in this space in the next few years.”

Logz.io announced a $52 million Series D investment today. The round was led by General Catalyst.

Other investors participating in the round included OpenView Ventures, 83North, Giza Venture Capital, Vintage Investment Partners, Greenspring Associates and Next47. Today’s investment brings the total raised to nearly $100 million, according to Crunchbase data.

Logz.io is a company built on top of the open-source tools Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana (collectively known by the acronym ELK) and Grafana. It’s taking those tools in a typical open-source business approach, packaging them up and offering them as a service. This approach enables large organizations to take advantage of these tools without having to deal with the raw open-source projects.

The company’s solutions intelligently scan logs looking for anomalies. When it finds them, it surfaces the problem and informs IT or security, depending on the scenario, using a tool like PagerDuty. This area of the market has been dominated in recent years by vendors like Splunk and Sumo Logic, but company founder and CEO Tomer Levy saw a chance to disrupt that space by packaging a set of open-source logging tools that were rapidly increasing in popularity. They believed they could build on that growing popularity, while solving a pain point the founders had actually experienced in previous positions, which is always a good starting point for a startup idea.

“We saw that the majority of the market is actually using open source. So we said, we want to solve this problem, a problem we have faced in the past and didn’t have a solution. What we’re going to do is we’re going to provide you with an easy-to-use cloud service that is offering an open-source compatible solution,” Levy explained. In other words, they wanted to build on that open-source idea, but offer it in a form that was easier to consume.

Larry Bohn, who is leading the investment for General Catalyst, says that his firm liked the idea of a company building on top of open source because it provides a built-in community of developers to drive the startup’s growth — and it appears to be working. “The numbers here were staggering in terms of how quickly people were adopting this and how quickly it was growing. It was very clear to us that the company was enjoying great success without much of a commercial orientation,” Bohn explained.

In fact, Logz.io already has 700 customers, including large names like Schneider Electric, The Economist and British Airways. The company has 175 employees today, but Levy says they expect to grow that by 250 by the end of this year, as they use this money to accelerate their overall growth.

Grace Gould has spent her life thinking about the intersection of retail and tech. She started out in Apple Retail, and then moved on to Index Ventures where she worked on early-stage investments. She then worked at PCCH International as the VP of Global Retail Strategy, working with companies and hardware makers to develop, manufacture, package and distribute products.

But throughout her career, Gould has always seen a hole in the consumer electronics retail space.

“The interesting thing about consumer electronics is that you have these brands — Apple stores, Microsoft stores, Samsung stores &mdash that sell a very limited number of products,” said Gould. “And then you have big-box retailers like Best Buy. No one is doing an interesting lifestyle business within consumer electronics.”

That’s where Soda Says comes in.

Soda Says is an e-commerce marketplace focused on lifestyle gadgets, such as the Elvie Smart Breast Pump and the Gingko Edge alarm clock.

The company curates useful, aesthetically pleasing gadgets and puts them in categories like Accessories, Wellness, Lifestyle and Kids, with a specific aim to help small hardware companies grow.

Today, Soda Says launches in the United States with a new vertical: women’s sex tech.

As it stands now, there isn’t really a retail experience that makes sense for women’s sex tech. Customers either have to wander into a sex toy store or go for a little internet adventure. But Soda Says is taking an offline approach to this online business, partnering with department stores like Nieman Marcus and Nordstrom to offer pop-up experiences where shoppers already are.

The Sex Tech collection includes products from brands such as Dame, MysteryVibe and Le Wand.

Soda Says operates on a hybrid model, sometimes buying inventory of products for resale and other times simply listing the product on the website.

The company has raised a total of $2.5 million from lead investor, U.K.-based LocalGlobe, with participation from investors including ADV, and founder and CEO of PCH International, Liam Casey, among others.

After a few lackluster quarters, eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) recently delivered results that surpassed all market expectations. The company continues to experiment with its sales model to drive additional...

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The San Diego-based software developer eSub Construction Software has raised $12 million in a new round of financing for its project management platform for contractors.

The company’s funding was led by Catalyst Investors with participation from previous investor Revolution Ventures.

Software for the construction industry is becoming a big business and attracting more capital from investors. Construction management software vendor Procore is now worth $3 billion, thanks to a $75 million investment late last year from Tiger Global.

Indeed, unicorns are galloping across the construction industry these days. SoftBank kicked off 2018 by investing $865 million in Katerra — one of many early mega-deals from the firm’s giant Vision Fund — which touts itself as a one-stop shop for everything from planning to permitting to filling new building construction. In November, another software developer that was contending for the construction market, PlanGrid, was acquired by Autodesk in an $875 million transaction.

Slotting in the space where project developers outsource to contractors and crews, eSub provides oversight on operations in the field for developers. The company’s software is integrated with its strategic backer, Autodesk, as well as construction estimation and accounting software to provide an overview and budget for the entire construction process from design through the build on-site.

“eSub takes a differentiated approach to solving the needs of the construction industry. By creating an easy-to-use, purpose-built platform, the company empowers trade contractors to have their own system of record and productivity optimization solutions,” said Catalyst partner Susan Bihler. “We’re excited to be part of this next stage of growth.”

Last year, eSub estimates that investors put roughly $3.1 billion in financing into construction technology companies, but the startup maintains that the bulk of those investments overlooked trade contractors, which represent some $1.1 trillion of construction spending.

“Trade contractors are the lifeblood of the construction industry,” said Wendy Rogers, founder and CEO of eSub. “They are the true builders who construct commercial construction projects. However, they are underserved by the majority of disjointed point solutions in the marketplace and are forced to utilize systems that are developed for general contractors.”

In 2016, former World Bank analyst Eka Pamitra teamed up with five friends to start a business that would help farmers in their native Indonesia. Today their company — TaniGroup — closed a $10 million Series A round that’s aimed at expanding its service nationwide with the support of the government.

TaniGroup works for more than 25,000 farmers in Indonesia to help them get fairer rates for their crops, and grow their businesses. It does that in two ways. It operates a B2B platform that helps farmers sell their produce direct to retailers, which reaches a registered user base of 400 SMEs and 10,000 consumers. The company also manages a microloan fund that grants farmers access to working capital for growth.

TaniHub is the sales service and TaniFund is, as the name suggests, the microloan fund. The fund arrived in 2017 when the product had landed initial traction, and it is registered with the Financial Services Authority (OJK) and is a member of Indonesian Fintech Lenders Association (AFPI).

Pamitra said a combination of factors mean TaniGroup can help farmers grow their overall income by 60% or more. That is driven more by sale volumes than price, the latter of which he said is usually 30-40% higher than traditional reseller channels.

“The most important thing is not necessarily pricing; farmers care more about the certainty of sales,” he explained to TechCrunch in an interview. “Many are afraid to plant too many crops because local aggregators or middlemen don’t have the capacity to absorb everything.”

“The fund focuses on preferred farmers we want to fund to help produce more or release them from the middlemen that currently fund them,” Pamitra added.

While middlemen have a reputation for operating like cartels and adding costs and complications, Pamitra said that in many cases they are actually farmers who help coordinate sales with others. For example, going to other farmers if they need additional produce to fulfill a higher-than-usual order that they can’t complete themselves.

“Some middlemen are the smartest in their group of farmers. We try to empower them through TaniFund; they often start teaching others their tips and can have a positive impact,” he said.

The company plans to spend its new money on general growth, which will include hiring more staff, improving the tech, expanding logistics and upgrading warehouses. That’s much needed since the government has tapped the startup to help improve Indonesia’s farming community — Pamitra said TaniGroup has been given access to government research on farmers that includes a database of some 3 million farmers. (President Joko Widodo previously namechecked the startup as a company that is helping Indonesia’s agricultural industry.)

For now, TaniGroup’s ambitions are firmly focused on Indonesia, but Pamitra said there is a belief that the business can expand overseas. Already it has exported orders to markets like Switzerland, Singapore, Malaysia and beyond, but there is real potential to expand the farmer network into new markets, he said. Officials from the Malaysia government have already expressed interest in making such a move, but Pamitra admitted that “there’s a lot to do here” in Indonesia first.

TaniGroup raised its Series A from Openspace Ventures — which led the round — Intudo Ventures, Golden Gate Ventures and The DFS Lab, a fintech accelerator that’s funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The startup previously raised an undisclosed seed round last April from Alpha JWC Ventures and several angel investors.

Equalum, an Israeli startup that helps companies gather data from a variety of enterprise sources, announced an $18 million Series B investment today.

The round was led by Planven Investments . Other participants included United Ventures and prior investors Innovation Endeavors and GE Ventures, along with a group of unnamed individuals. Today’s haul brings the total raised to $25 million, according to data provided by the company.

Equalum CEO and founder Nir Livneh says his company essentially acts as the data pipes to feed artificial intelligence, machine and more traditional business intelligence requirements. “Equalum is a real-time data ingestion platform. The idea of the platform is to be able to [gather] data coming from a bunch of enterprise system sources and be able to centralize that data and send it in real-time into analytic environments and feed those analytic environments,” Livneh explained.

He sees the money from this round as a way to continue to expand the original vision he had for the company. His approach in many ways is a classic Series B play. “I think the original thesis was validated. We have proven that we can go into Fortune 100 companies and get our solution adopted quickly,” he said. The next step is to expand beyond the original set of several dozen large customers and accelerate growth.

The company was founded in 2015 in Tel Aviv, Israel. It still maintains its R&D arm there today, with sales, marketing and management in Silicon Valley. Interestingly, its first customer was GE, which was also an early investor via GE Ventures.

Livneh says that he sees lots of room to grow in this market, which he says is still dominated by legacy vendors. He believes he can swoop in and replace aging offerings by providing a more modern and streamlined approach to data collection. Time will tell if he is right.

Away from the limelight of urban cities, where an increasingly growing number of firms are fighting for a piece of India’s digital payments market, a South Korean startup’s app is quietly helping millions of Indians pay digitally and enjoy many financial services for the first time.

The app, called True Balance, began its life as a tool to help users easily find their mobile balance, or topping up pre-pay mobile credit. But in its four-year journey, its ambition has significantly grown beyond that. Today, it serves as a digital wallet app that helps users pay their mobile and electricity bills, and it also lets users pay later.

One thing that has not changed for the parent company of True Balance, BalanceHero, which employs less than 200 people, is its consumer focus. It is strictly catering to people in tier-two and tier-three markets — often dubbed as India 2 and India 3 — who have relatively limited access to the internet, and lower financial power. And it remains operational just in India.

Even as India is already the second largest internet market with more than 500 million users, more than half of its population remains offline. In recent years, the nation has become a battleground for Silicon Valley giants and Chinese firms that are increasingly trying to win existing users and bring the rest of the population online.

And like many other companies, BalanceHero’s bet on India is beginning to pay off. The startup told TechCrunch today that it has clocked $100 million in GMV sales and has amassed about 60 million registered users. Yongsung Yoo, a spokesperson for the startup, added that BalanceHero, which has raised $42 million to date, is also nearing profitability.

The South Korean firm’s playbook is different from many other players that are racing to claim a slice of India’s burgeoning digital payments market. True Balance competes with the likes of Paytm, MobiKwik, Google, Amazon and Walmart-owned Flipkart, though its competitors are still largely catering to the urban parts of India.

In the last two years, many firms have begun to explore smaller cities and towns, but their services are still too out-of-the-world for local residents. Raising awareness about digital services is a big challenge in such markets, Yoo said, so the startup is relying on existing users to help others make their first transactions and in paying bills.

Yoo said the startup rewards these “digital agents” with cash back and other benefits. For these digital agents, many of whom do not have a day job, True Balance has emerged as a side project to make extra money.

Later this year, Yoo said the startup, which recently also added support for UPI in its service, will open an e-commerce store on its app and also offer insurance to users. To accelerate its growth and expansion, True Balance is in the final stages of raising between $50 million to $70 million in a new round that it expects to close in July this year, Yoo said.

Even before Computex officially started yesterday in Taipei, Lian Li’s combination chassis and standing workstations were already turning heads as attendees got to take a look at their interiors before the glass tops were installed. The insides of the DK-05 were clearly visible, looking like miniature water parks with a labyrinthine arrangement of tubes and lights.

The desks’ interiors aren’t completely obscured once the top is in place. Their tempered glass tops are foggy when the workstations are turned off, but once switched on, everything inside — its liquid cooling system, motherboards, graphics cards, fans, reservoirs, pumps and whatever else else you add — are clearly visible. The bright lights inside Nangang Exhibition Center made it hard to see, but the photo above from Lian Li’s website gives you a better idea of the full effect.

The larger DK-05 has USB 3.1 Type-C, USB 3.0 and HDMI ports and a 140 cm by 78 cm surface, making space for two monitors and plenty of peripherals (though you probably won’t want to cover it up). It boasts space for two extended ATX motherboards and a motorized height adjustment feature that takes it from 69 to 118 cm. You can preset four heights, useful if more than one person is using the workstation (and with a price tag of about $1,999, it makes sense to share). A smaller version, the DK-04, costs about $1,300.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to when you decided to get together and start this company. What was the idea? What did they want to do? It sounds like they brought the technical and domain...

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On the heels of customer service company Zendesk announcing an acquisition to expand its omnichannel offering, one of the upstarts nipping at its heels has announced a round of funding to continue growing its own platform.

Kustomer, a customer service startup that calls in data from multiple external channels and the software and apps that a company uses to manage its business internally and speak to customers externally, has raised a Series D of $40 million, led by Tiger Global, with participation from previous investor Battery Ventures. The plan will be to bring in more automation and AI processes to reduce more of the repetitive tasks around CRM — a move specifically aimed to help it target large enterprise customers — and to expand further into Europe, CEO Brad Birnbaum said in an interview.

The valuation is not being disclosed with this round, although Birnbaum noted that it is a “very significant uplift” on its previous valuation. PitchBook, as one data point, notes that in its Series B, it was valued at around $121 million post-money. Adding another $75 million to that (Series C and D together), it’s close to $200 million, although that’s likely lower than its actual valuation now, given that uplift. It has raised just under $114 million to date.

More tellingly, Kustomer has been on a fundraising tear in the last 12 months. It was just in January of this year that it announced a Series C of $35 million. Before that, in June 2018, it raised $26 million. (It was not on the hunt to raise another round so soon, and didn’t need the funding immediately, but it was approached by Tiger with an offer Kustomer did not want to pass up.)

In that time, Birnbaum — who co-founded the startup with Jeremy Suriel in 2015 — has told me multiple times about how Kustomer was increasingly winning more clients off Salesforce and Zendesk, with revenues growing by about 350% in the process, with customers including Ring, Rent the Runway, Glossier, Away, Glovo, Slice and UNTUCKit.

So you might guess that Kustomer’s traction, along with a general swing in terms of what enterprises are looking for in a customer service solution, has had something to do with Zendesk’s own turn toward a more omnichannel approach.

Birnbaum and Suriel know something about how the bigger incumbents work — a previous startup they had worked on together, Assistly (where Birnbaum had been a founder too), was acquired by Salesforce.

Birnbaum does not shy away from talking about how Kustomer is faring against competitors, or why its platform is better than theirs.

“We are most proud of the fact that we do omnichannel really well. On our platform you have a threaded conversation, whereas on others the same input might resolve in four separate tickets,” he said. “In many ways, from a product perspective, I think Zendesk is chasing us, but our product is about 10 years younger.”

Kustomer’s decision to use some of this latest investment to continue building out its automation and AI capabilities lines up with bigger developments that we have seen in enterprise software. Birnbaum, indeed, describes Kustomer’s automation of routine tasks as “a form of RPA” (robotic process automation, which has been one of the fastest-growing areas in enterprise software). “If you’re a retailer and someone ordered a shirt and it’s too small, through the Kustomer platform you can both take the order but also fix it if it’s not the right size, or take the return, rather than passing the customer on to another department,” he said. “You will start to see more and more of these developments as we continue building a system of record beyond a simple CRM tool.”

The next step, he said, will be building even more tools to understand the customer. “We are not a marketing platform today, but already people are using it that way, for example to find recently unhappy customers to send them offers, or do promotional outreach to those who have dropped off on their purchases.”

In addition to Tiger Global joining as an investor, Wendi Sturgis, the CEO of Yext Europe and chief client officer at Yext, has joined Kustomer’s board of directors.

“Kustomer is one of the fastest-growing startups in its space, and I am pleased to join them on their mission to redefine what it means to truly put the customer first, radically shift the approach to customer management and ultimately manifest this in state-of-the-art marketing automation,” she said in a statement. “Plus, when it comes to leadership teams, I am drawn most to disruptors — but only those with the highest integrity. I could not have chosen better, in coming to work with Brad Birnbaum and the incredible team he has assembled.”

Roger, an accounting automation tool that runs on top of accounting software to automate various processes, has raised $7.35 million in Series A funding.

Leading the round is QED Investors, with participation from 9Yards, Silicon Valley Bank, Financial Venture Studio and BootstrapLabs. A number of individual investors, including Dan Wernikoff, the former GM of QuickBooks and TurboTax, have also backed the Series A.

Claiming to cut the time businesses spend on day-to-day financial processes by as much as 80%, Roger works on top of existing accounting software to automate financial processes, such as paying bills, approvals, receipt scanning, compliance and bookkeeping. This is achieved via “simple workflows” that the Denmark and U.S.-based company says anyone can set up and manage.

Customers range from small to mid-sized businesses across virtually any industry to bookkeeping and major accounting firms.

“For businesses, we’re cutting down the time you have to spend in your accounting software dramatically, and help you save time and money on your external accountant or allocate resources better in your in-house finance team,” Roger CEO and co-founder Cathrine Andersen tells me. “You’ll be able to scale your accounting department more easily without adding new headcount.”

To achieve this, Roger consists of a simple web and mobile app that scans incoming documents and ensures that they are seen by the correct person within an organisation. That way they can quickly and efficiently get “coded, approved and reconciled.”

“Roger’s workflow builder is almost like a Zapier for accounting, letting business owners and finance departments set up rules to govern all financial flows, so they can lean back and watch their work get done. Accounting without accounting,” says Andersen.

Meanwhile, for the accountants Roger sells into, Andersen says the startup is helping them stay competitive within a new landscape that is seeing automation becoming a major disruptor.

“This does not mean that there will be no accountants left in five years, but it means the industry has to change what services and value they bring to clients and that business models will have to change,” she says. “Any bookkeeper or accounting firm that still spends time on manual processes will likely be faced with questions from their clients and soon a rapidly declining customer base. Clients are starting to see that there are tools out there that can do the grunt work, so why would they pay an hourly fee to do the same thing over and over again every month?”

To that end, Roger generates revenue in a number of ways. Businesses pay the company a flat monthly subscription fee based on how many documents they process. Accountants are charged a base fee per client, and a price per document.

“Over time, monetizing our large transaction volume of payments will be a key driver of revenue along with other business models that double as cool features to help our network of Roger customers and vendors to run healthier businesses,” adds the Roger CEO.