As containers and microservices have proliferated, a new kind of tool called the service mesh has developed to help manage and understand interactions between services. While Kubernetes has emerged as the clear container orchestration tool of choice, there is much less certainty in the service mesh market. Solo.io today announced a new open-source tool called Service Mesh Hub, designed to help companies manage multiple service meshes in a single interface.

It is early days for the service mesh concept, but there are already multiple offerings, including Istio, Linkerd (pronounced Linker-Dee) and Envoy. While the market sorts itself it out, it requires a new set of tools, a management layer, so that developers and operations can monitor and understand what’s happening inside the various service meshes they are running.

Idit Levine, founder and CEO at Solo, says she formed the company because she saw an opportunity to develop a set of tooling for a nascent market. Since founding the company in 2017, it has developed several open-source tools to fill that service mesh tool vacuum.

Levine says that she recognized that companies would be using multiple service meshes for multiple situations and that not every company would have the technical capabilities to manage this. That is where the idea for the Service Mesh Hub was born.

It’s a centralized place for companies to add the different service mesh tools they are using, understand the interactions happening within the mesh and add extensions to each one from a kind of extension app store. Solo wants to make adding these tools a simple matter of pointing and clicking. While it obviously still requires a certain level of knowledge about how these tools work, it removes some of the complexity around managing them.

“The reason we created this is because we believe service mesh is something big, and we want people to use it, and we feel it’s hard to adopt right now. We believe by creating that kind of framework or platform, it will make it easier for people to actually use it,” Levine told TechCrunch.

The vision is that eventually companies will be able to add extensions to the store for free, or even at some point for a fee, and it is through these paid extensions that the company will be able to make money. She recognized that some companies will be creating extensions for internal use only, and in those cases, they can add them to the hub and mark them as private and only that company can see them.

For every abstraction it seems, there is a new set of problems to solve. The service mesh is a response to the problem of managing multiple services. It solves three key issues, according to Levine. It allows a company to route the microservices, have visibility into them to see logs and metrics of the mesh and to provide security to manage which services can talk to each other.

Levine’s company is a response to the issues that have developed around understanding and managing the service meshes themselves. She says she doesn’t worry about a big company coming in and undermining her mission because she says that they are too focused on their own tools to create a set of uber-management tools like these (but that doesn’t mean the company wouldn’t be an attractive acquisition target).

So far, the company has taken more than $13 million in funding, according to Crunchbase data.

Measured is giving advertisers a new way to determine whether their ads are actually working.

Many of those advertisers currently rely on multi-touch attribution, an approach designed to measure how each channel and each ad contributed to a purchase decision. In fact, that’s what Measured CEO Trevor Testwuide offered at his last startup, Conversion Logic.

But Testwuide (who co-founded Measured with CTO Madan Bharadwaj) said this approach has serious limitations, particularly when it comes to measuring channels like Facebook, as well as offline channels like direct mail.

“I would say that multi-touch attribution, for nine out of the 10 brands that we see, is a fool’s errand because it measures such a small percentage of media,” he said.

Instead, Measured employs what it calls “steady-state test-and-control experimentation.” Testwuide described it as a sophisticated form of A/B testing that measures whether an ad will actually provide an incremental improvement in consumer behavior. He said this kind of testing is relatively straightforward when it comes to analyzing existing customers, but is “really, really hard” for finding new customers.

“How we deploy and manage a clean control for prospecting experiments without any bias — that’s where a lot of our breakthrough technology has been,” he said.

And while Measured is only coming out of stealth now, Testwuide said the company was founded back in February 2017 and is already working with 15 brands, including FabFitFun, Johnny Was, Hint, AB InBev, J.Jill, AARP and Soft Surroundings. In a statement, Johnny Was CEO Rob Trauber said the technology allows his team to “have a laser focus on the incremental contribution of paid media, providing us the data to make smarter investment decisions.”

Testwuide added that he and Bharadwaj initially funded the company with their own money, and that it’s now profitable.

“We have no plans to raise outside capital,” he said. “I won’t rule it out, raising some growth capital, but we’re a well-funded, organically growing business.”

According to a Market.Us report, the global accounting software market is estimated to grow at 7% CAGR from 2019-2028. The market was valued at $6.2 billion in 2018. Recently, cloud-based financial...

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American Express has today announced its intentions to acquire Resy, the CRM and reservation platform based out of New York. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Resy launched back in 2014 as a platform that allowed users to buy reservations from restaurants in situations where they’d usually have to book months in advance. For restaurants, it allowed them to offload unused inventory.

Over time, Resy realized the opportunity to provide software to restaurants. About a year ago, the company unveiled a new suite of tools for restaurant partners, including Resy Fly, Business Intelligence and Resy Surveys.

Resy Fly uses data to help restaurants understand how to manage their inventory, looking at signals like date, time, weather and the average time spent eating at a restaurant. Using this data, restaurants can be more agile in the way they offer their reservations and tables on an ongoing basis.

Business Intelligence lets restaurants take a look at information like KPIs, revenue and ratings from third-party sources like Foursquare. Resy Surveys, in a similar vein, gives restaurants an easy tool to send out surveys to existing customers to learn more about what they want.

In November, Resy acquired its smaller competitor Reserve for an undisclosed amount. As a result of the acquisition, Resy now serves approximately 4,000 restaurants across the U.S., and through partnerships with other reservation platforms, the company serves 10,000 restaurants worldwide.

The Amex deal will allow American Express to offer to its cardmembers further benefits and experiences that aren’t your standard points and rewards.

“Five years ago we set out to change the way the restaurant industry thinks about technology,” said Ben Leventhal, co-founder and CEO at Resy. “We have focused on delivering world-class hospitality software, thrilling diners with access and amazing experiences at great restaurants, and imagining and building the future of restaurant technology. These are the things we think about everyday and we believe joining Amex will provide us an opportunity to peruse these fundamentals with greater scale and deeper resources. It is a step-change moment for the hospitality industry as we bring the collective resources of American Express and Resy together.”

Resy has raised a total of $45 million from investors such as Vayner RSE, Lerer Hippeau Ventures and Airbnb. Resy says that its full staff of full-time and part-time employees, including co-founder and CTO Michael Montero and co-founder and CEO Ben Leventhal, will move over to Amex. The company also says that the Resy brand name will live on.

American Express has been on a slight shopping spree of late. In March, the company announced it would be acquiring LoungeBuddy to make the travel experience less hellish for cardmembers. Amex also acquired a Japanese restaurant platform called Pocket Concierge in January. Last year, Amex also quietly acquired a U.K.-based, restaurant fintech startup called Cake for a reported $13.3 million.

“Resy is a company that we at American Express have always admired and have always wanted to partner with,” said Chris Cracchiolo, SVP of Global Loyalty and Benefits at American Express. “In just five years Resy has become an essential part of consumers’ and restaurants’ dining experiences, connecting diners with the most sought-after restaurants across the world, and helping your restaurant’s partners grow. They share our passion for dining and also our commitment to helping restaurants thrive.”

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this story reported that Resy had raised a total of $15 million. It has been edited for accuracy.

A high demand for engineering talent in our digital world has driven companies that need to make these technical hires to cast their nets wider in the search for good people. Now, a company that has built a platform that it says helps companies do this in a more accurate and efficient way has raised a round of growth funding.

Karat — which takes on the process of technical interviewing on behalf of clients like Citrix, Roblox, InVision and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative by connecting already sourced candidates with live engineers to interview, test and evaluate the candidates for the next step of the recruitment process — has raised $28 million in funding, a growth round that is being led by Tiger Global Management, with participation from previous backers Norwest Venture Partners and Joe Lonsdale’s firm 8VC.

The company is not disclosing its valuation, but this latest round brings the total raised to $41 million, and in the last round, Karat had a modest valuation of $55 million, according to data in PitchBook. Given that the company has grown by quite a bit since then — it tripled the number of interviews conducted last year and will triple again this year; and while it doesn’t disclose the total number of clients or interviews, it says the biggest will run 10,000 interviews in a year through Karat — I’m guessing the valuation is now over $100 million, but possibly lower than $200 million.

Karat is taking an interesting approach to a problem that many others are chasing: how best to leverage the growth of tech tools to improve the antiquated hiring process, which had been one of the earliest verticals to get the dot-com treatment (many flash-in-the-pan, and some huge online job sites being rife in the first dot-com boom), but has seen surprisingly little innovation since then.

Yesterday, we reported that LinkedIn has now notched up 20 million job postings — a number it claims makes it now the biggest job site for professional jobs in the world — but when it comes to more targeted searching, and then the very big task of how to handle the volume of inbound interest (alongside more proactive recruiting) and find needles in that haystack, there is still a lot more to be done.

One specific area close to TechCrunch’s heart is technical recruiting — finding the right engineers and others in adjacent fields that are central to the growth of tech companies. Startups like Hired are working on building better candidate pipelines, while Triplebyte is building online coding tests to help better screen and sift people to different job opportunities. Even e-learning startups like Coursera are eyeing up how they can fit into the mix to better connect people with jobs. But it’s not just startups sizing up the opportunity — Google is also stepping up its game (as is Facebook).

Karat, interestingly, is taking a slightly analogue approach to the problem of technical recruitment: it focuses specifically on pairing up human interviewers — themselves engineers — with the candidates, lists of which have been provided to Karat by the companies themselves. Those interviewing engineers might be working full-time elsewhere and doing this on the side, or more likely taking a career break and using this to stay busy in a relevant way.

Indeed, Jeff Spector, who co-founded the company with Mo Bhende, described one of the company’s leading interviewers, which he said typifies the kind of contractor — they are all contractors, not full-time employees — who provides interviewing services to Karat. This particular engineer is ex-eBay and travels around “in his van,” using a blur-out technique to interview from the Airbnb where he happens to be staying. This particular engineer-interviewer has done 2,400 interviews.

“They love the flexibility,” Spector said. These interviewers are sourced globally, he says, which makes it possible to conduct the video calls in a 24-7 format to suit people’s busy lives (most might already be in jobs) and multiple locations.

Those interviewers, incidentally, are not left to wing it themselves: they are given careful scripts, Spector said, which are crafted after detailed conversations with the client around what it being sought.

“There is not a lot of autonomy in this area,” said Bhende. “We have a team of content engineers designing interview questions and battle testing them and figuring out scoring before handing them to the interviewers.”

Those scripts include problem-solving segments that increase in difficulty, and the idea is that the two engineers, candidate and interviewer, work on them together.

This is one reason why Spector said the company does not have plans to expand to have AI-based interviews. The person giving the interview is encouraged to give hints if there are problems, because part of the assessment is to figure out how the candidate works in group and collaborative situations. It’s a very clever aspect, which I have to admit I didn’t think about but makes a huge amount of sense.

This is part one of the interview service. The second part is the write-up the interviewer provides, which is turned into actionable information for the company client to decide whether to take the candidate into the next level of recruitment.

The third part is a large raft of data insights that Karat amasses from across the body of interviews: these are provided in a consultancy-like service to help the companies figure out their hiring strategies, whether they are offering competitive salaries, whether they should be looking for different skill sets, benchmarking against competitors, and so on.

Longer term, the plan will be to expand Karat to cover other kinds of job categories: a Karat for finance or a Karat for sales, said Bhende. That’s the future though: even with the huge surge of interest in tech and computing, a chronic shortage of engineers continues to loom large, and that makes the chase to find the right people faster and more accurate a golden opportunity for Karat.

Hot on the heels of Indian delivery startup BigBasket raising $150 million — at a unicorn valuation, no less — so its close rival Grofers has also pulled in capital after it announced a $200 million raise to battle its local competition and international giants Amazon and Walmart.

The round is the largest in India’s online grocery sector to date, and it was led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund, which continues to make major bets on the nation’s growing internet economy. KTB and existing investors Tiger Global and Sequoia Capital also took part.

Five-year-old Grofers works with more than 5,000 stores in 13 cities in India. In an interview with TechCrunch, Albinder Dhindsa, co-founder and CEO of Grofers, said the startup will use the fresh capital to expand to new markets and bring its service to “hundreds of millions of Indian consumers,” although he didn’t specify exact launch cities.

Dhindsa said that Grofers does not want to expand to new cities for the heck of it. Instead, the startup focused on entering a city and growing its business profitable there. Grofers is already profitable in Delhi and will soon be profitable in Kolkata, he said. In Southern Indian markets such as Bengaluru, the startup is working to gain a foothold.

The startup is rivaled by a number of players, including BigBasket, which raised its round earlier this month from Mirae Asset-Naver Asia Growth Fund, the U.K.’s CDC Group and Alibaba. The duo also faces competition from hyperlocal player Dunzo, and delivery startup Swiggy, which recently entered this grocery delivery space.

However, more concerning for them is the growing ambitions of Amazon India and Walmart’s Flipkart, both of which are quickly expanding their businesses in India. Amazon’s Pantry and Prime Now services jointly have a presence in more than 100 cities, while Flipkart Group CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy has publicly expressed an intention to pilot a fresh foods business in the nation. Dhindsa argued that these players are not really a significant competitor to Grofers yet.

The foods and grocery market is growing in India. According to some estimates, it will reach $869 billion in sales in 2023, with digital-based services seen as an important vector for growth. This is likely only the start now that SoftBank’s Vision Fund has entered the space through this deal with Grofers.

Other investments in India from the near-$100 billion fund include budget hotel startup OYO, which has now ventured into Europe, Flipkart (although the fund exited after the Walmart sale), Paytm and PolicyBazaar. With reports suggesting the fund will open a dedicated office in India, you can bet there’s a lot more to come.

If you thought Uber’s disastrous initial public offering last week would deter fellow venture-backed technology companies from pursuing the public markets in 2019, you thought wrong.

CrowdStrike, yet another multi-billion-dollar Silicon Valley “unicorn,” has filed to go public. The cloud-based cybersecurity platform valued at $3.3 billion in 2018 revealed its IPO prospectus Tuesday afternoon.

The company plans to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “CRWD.” According to the filing, it intends to raise an additional $100 million, though that figure is typically a placeholder amount. To date, CrowdStrike has raised $480 million in venture capital funding from Warburg Pincus, which owns a 30.3% pre-IPO stake, Accel (20.3%) and CapitalG (11.2%).

As we’ve come to expect of these companies, CrowdStrike’s financials are a bit concerning. While its revenues are growing at an impressive rate, from $53 million in 2017 to $119 million in 2018 to $250 million in the year ending January 31, 2019, its spending is far outweighing its gross profit. Most recently, the company posted a gross profit of $163 million on total operating expenses of about $300 million.

CrowdStrike is not yet profitable. Its total losses are increasing year-over-year from $91 million in 2017, to $135 million in 2018 and $140 million in 2019.

Headquartered in Sunnyvale, the business was founded in 2011 by chief executive officer George Kurtz and chief technology officer Dmitri Alperovitch, former McAfee executives. CrowdStrike, which develops security technology that looks at changes in user behavior on networked devices and uses that information to identify potential cyber threats, has reportedly pondered an IPO for some time.

The business sells its endpoint protection software to enterprises on a subscription basis, competing with Cylance, Carbon Black and others. In its S-1, CrowdStrike makes a case for its offering based on the rise of cloud computing and the growing threat of cybersecurity breaches. It estimates a total addressable market worth $29.2 billion by 2021.

“We founded CrowdStrike in 2011 to reinvent security for the cloud era,” the company writes. “When we started the company, cyberattackers had a decided, asymmetric advantage over existing security products. We turned the tables on the adversaries by taking a fundamentally new approach that leverages the network effects of crowdsourced data applied to modern technologies such as artificial intelligence, or AI, cloud computing, and graph databases.”

Innowatts, an automated toolkit for energy monitoring and management targeting utilities, has raised $18.2 million in a new round of funding from investors led by Energy Impact Partners .

Previous investors Shell Ventures, Iberdrola and Energy and Environment Investment participated along with another new investor, Evergy Ventures.

As utilities respond to new, renewable power coming online and adapt to the challenges presented by natural disasters and intermittent energy sources stressing old power grid assets, they are increasingly turning to new software toolkits to adapt.

Innowatts and its software fit squarely into that category of offering.

“Competing in today’s complex and evolving marketplace requires utility companies use data and intelligence to drive business and customer value,” said Siddhartha Sachdeva, founder and chief executive of Innowatts, in a statement.

The company’s technology is used to analyze meter data from 21 million customers globally in 13 regional energy markets.

Innowatts boasts that it’s the largest body of customer intelligence data consumed by a software company. How that data will be used is an open question.

“We invest in companies driving the transformation of the energy sector towards an increasingly decarbonized, digitized, and electrified future – solutions that our utility partners can commercialize at scale and have the greatest impact,” said Michael Donnelly, partner and chief risk officer at EIP, in a statement. “Innowatts is poised to become a key building block in the software-driven, intelligent grid of the future, and we look forward to working closely with them alongside our utility partners.”

The company uses the data it collects to predict the potential for outages or problems created by surges in energy demand so that utilities can dispatch resources to meet that demand without sacrificing reliability for customers.

“Utilities have the opportunity to deliver more value to customers, at lower costs and with greater personalization than ever before, while helping streamline the complex energy marketplace,” said Geert van de Wouw, vice president of Shell Ventures.

This week on Extra Crunch, I am exploring innovations in inclusive housing, looking at how 200+ companies are creating more access and affordability. Yesterday, I focused on startups trying to lower the costs of housing, from property acquisition to management and operations.

Today, I want to focus on innovations that improve housing inclusion more generally, such as efforts to pair housing with transit, small business creation, and mental rehabilitation. These include social impact-focused interventions, interventions that increase income and mobility, and ecosystem-builders in housing innovation.

Nonprofits and social enterprises lead many of these innovations. Yet because these areas are perceived to be not as lucrative, fewer technologists and other professionals have entered them. New business models and technologies have the opportunity to scale many of these alternative institutions — and create tremendous social value. Social impact is increasingly important to millennials, with brands like Patagonia having created loyal fan bases through purpose-driven leadership.

While each of these sections could be their own market map, this overall market map serves as an initial guide to each of these spaces.

Social impact innovations

These innovations address:

TomboyX, a direct to consumer, gender-neutral underwear brand, has today announced the close of an $18 million Series B funding round led by Craftory. With this deal, Craftory becomes TomboyX’s majority shareholder.

TomboyX develops gender-neutral, size-inclusive underwear at a relatively affordable price point.

The company started when co-founder Fran Dunaway struggled to find herself a Robert Graham-style button-down shirt. Tomboy X originally started selling fun, dress shirts that fit all body types, and eventually transitioned to underwear and swimwear.

The D2C startup offers sizes from XS to 4XL; the classic TomboyX briefs start at $20/pair.

The company raised $4.3 million in Series A financing last year, which brings total funding to more than $25 million.

Here’s what co-founders Fran Dunaway and Naomi Gonzalez had to say in a prepared statement:

We are very excited to collaborate with the team at The Craftory as we continue in our mission to design inclusive and gender-neutral underwear for our diverse global audience. We are confident that their expertise in branding and consumer goods will complement our own creativity and disruption of traditional products.

As part of the deal, Craftory directors will join the board of directors alongside Pauline Brown, lead investor for TomboyX’s Series A round.

It’s just over two years since Yext debuted on the New York Stock Exchange, and to mark the occasion, I sat down with co-founder and CEO Howard Lerman for an interview.

As Lerman noted, Yext — which allows businesses to manage their profiles and information across a wide variety of online services — actually presented onstage at the TechCrunch 50 conference back in 2009. Now, it boasts a market capitalization of nearly $2.3 billion, and it just revealed plans to take over a nine-floor building in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, turning it into Yext’s global headquarters.

My interview with Lerman actually came before the announcement, though he managed to drop in a few veiled hints about the company making a big move in real estate.

More concretely, we talked about how Lerman’s management style has evolved from scrappy startup founder to a public company CEO — he described holding five-minute meetings with every Yext employee as “one of the best management techniques” he’s ever adopted.

Lerman also argued that as online misinformation has become a big issue, Yext has only become more important: “Our founding principle is that the ultimate authority on how many calories are in a Big Mac is McDonald’s. The ultimate authority on where Burger King is open is Burger King.”

Vowing that he will remain CEO of Yext for “as long as this board will have me,” Lerman ended our conversation with a passionate defense of the idea that “a company is the ultimate vehicle in America to effect good in the world.”

You can read a transcript of our conversation below, edited and condensed for clarity.

TechCrunch: To start with a really broad question, how do you think Yext is different now than it was two years ago?

Howard Lerman: One of the things that’s defined Yext over the years is our continuous willingness to reinvent ourselves. You started covering us in 2009 [at] TechCrunch 50, we were a launch company there.

And here we are now. One of the cool things about being public is: It’s a total gamechanger. It’s a gamechanger not just for access to capital, but it’s particularly important in global markets. And I’m not talking about capital markets, I’m talking about the markets in which we sell software. We have offices now from Berlin to Shanghai.

The broader AR market is made up of a lot of hype and excitement, but fundamentally it’s all based around the promise that waveguide displays can continue to stay wafer-thin while getting better and cheaper.

Waveguide-maker DigiLens is aiming to stay aggressive in lowering the costs of the expensive component. It has just closed a $50 million Series C led by Universal Display Corporation’s venture arm alongside Samsung Ventures. The company had previously disclosed that Pokémon GO-maker Niantic and Mitsubishi were making a strategic investment in this round. This brings the startup’s total funding to $85 million.

The Sunnyvale, Calif. startup most recently raised a $22 million round in early 2017, with investments from Foxconn, Sony and Panasonic.

Waveguide displays allow projected images to be “loaded” in from the side of a sheet of glass, thanks to etchings that bounce the light around to form a complete image in front of your eye. This is ideal for augmented reality, where you want as little hardware as possible directly in front of your eye. While optics that simply reflect an image onto a curved display are intensely cheaper, it’s going to take developments in waveguide tech to create consumer-friendly svelte designs that still showcase a high-definition image.

Aside from AR glasses, DigiLens is eyeing the automotive market as a market for its see-through displays.

In a statement, CEO Chris Pickett declared that his startup’s manufacturing process was building “the only waveguide that can get to a consumer price point.”

The startup will have to compete with major tech companies and other startups that are building their own technology. Magic Leap and Microsoft are designing their own waveguide displays for their latest AR headsets. Last year, Apple bought Akonia Holographics, a Denver startup building similar technology.

Voi Technology, the “micromobility” startup that operates an e-scooter service on the streets of a growing number of European cities, has unveiled a range of new scooters and a first e-bike more suited to rentals.

The company is also revealing plans to expand to another 150 cities and towns, having ratcheted up 2 million rides in eight months since launching. Voi currently operates in 18 cities in nine European countries — including Stockholm, Madrid, Copenhagen, Paris, Lyon and Lisbon — and will open up in Germany, Belgium, Poland and Italy this summer.

In a call, Voi CEO and co-founder Fredrik Hjelm told me the new hardware rollouts are part of the Swedish company’s plans to become a broader micromobility play with a range of travel options that meet the demands of people living in urban areas and the sustainability concerns of city and town authorities. The new e-scooters have been designed and engineered in-house using data collected (and other learnings) from riders during Voi’s relatively short lifespan.

Voi’s main new model, dubbed “Voiager 2,” is said to be designed for maximum durability as well as future recycling (when it falls apart or is superseded). The body is cast in one single piece of 5mm high-grade aluminium, coupled with performance enhancements thanks to a custom electric powertrain and 10″ wheels. There’s also a kickstand to prevent the e-scooter from falling over when parked (a common sight in some cities) and a three-wheel version particularly suitable for slippery conditions.

The Voiager 2’s display features “Advanced Rider Assistance System (ARAS) functions,” such as navigation support, alerts and notifications. The idea, explained Hjelm, is to avoid riders having to juggle looking at their mobile phone or to continuously stop to navigate. The Internet of Things (IoT) Telematics unit is integrated into the body of the scooter.

Hjelm says the Voiager 2 is Voi’s first scooter based on the Voi modular scooter architecture (VOI MSA), which allows for easy service, repair and upgrades. There’s also a swappable battery to reduce scooter downtime, as well as to reduce the environmental impact and cost of charging scooters.

Overall, the design is not just intended to improve the e-scooter experience for consumers and city authorities but should go some way to addressing concerns around the questionable unit economics of micromobility services.

See also: Voi Technology, the European e-scooter rentals startup, raises an additional $30M

In a bid to launch at speed and test the market, companies have used off-the-shelf consumer-grade e-scooters that aren’t durable enough to withstand the battering they receive through shared commercial use and being left outside in varied weather conditions. They’re also not designed with rental logistics in mind, and even something as simple as a hot swappable battery can reduce the cost of running an e-scooter service, as more scooters remain in motion, potentially increasing revenue per scooter. There’s also a reduction in the cost of collecting dead batteries for re-charging as they are de-coupled from the scooter itself.

A second model, the new “Voiager 1” has been designed for the German market. This month the German government will greenlight e-scooters for use on its roads. Hjelm thinks Germany will quickly become one of the world’s biggest e-scooter markets and its new rugged scooter features brakes and indicator lights that meet strict German regulations, which the Voi CEO believes are likely to be adopted elsewhere.

Voi is also unveiling the Voi Bike and Voi Cargo. The former is an e-bike that has been adapted for sharing and meets European e-bike regulations. It can travel at 25km/h fully assisted and is suitable for longer distances than e-scooters. Voi Cargo is a three-wheel electric cargo bike that caters specifically to riders who have to carry bulky loads, such as groceries or children. The bike has a large box on the front, which features three-point seatbelts.

Meanwhile, Voi isn’t the only European e-scooter startup developing its own hardware. Flash — the stealthy mobility startup from Delivery Hero and Team Europe founder Lukasz Gadowski — has talked up its own hardware product plans, while Berlin’s Wind Mobility is also developing a proprietary model of electric scooters specifically designed for the sharing market.

Other competitors in Europe include Tier and Taxify’s Bolt. Silicon Valley’s Bird and Lime also operate in Europe.

As a former entrepreneur turned independent designer, Phil Weiner gets the startup life. He often describes himself as a second co-founder for his clients, unafraid of 2AM phone calls and prepping pitch decks for investors. He’s a “full stack” creative director based in Oakland, CA with a passion for tackling cultural tension. Learn more about why design runs in his blood, his branding philosophy, and more.

On his ideal client:

“There are certain values that we have to have in line. The number one value is that they don’t view their people as resources, they view them as people. If I start to get the inkling that a founder isn’t necessarily great at managing their teams and their people, empowering them or removing obstacles, it’s probably going to be difficult for us to figure out customer empathy. Number two, design is an investment, not an expense.”

On the power of branding:

“I get to be able to shape culture because that’s what brands are able to do. You can build a really great product and introduce it into the market and that’ll have it’s own life cycle until trends change. Brands can last a lifetime. I think that’s the only way that I can make a mark on the world, even if my name isn’t on the company. If it’s contributing to the brand, I’ve scaled my potential impact in the world.”

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 brand designers and 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.

The Interview

Yvonne Leow: Tell me about your background. How did you get into design and branding?

Phil Weiner: So I actually didn’t study design. I’m self-taught designer. I come from a pretty cool line of designers. My grandfather drew the “I Love Lucy” heart and did album artwork for Motown Records, and typography. My mom’s also a graphic designer. She’s been with The Washington Post and The NY Daily News for years. She just retired.

The first thing they actually told me was “Don’t go to school for design. Go to school for business. Because if you don’t understand business, you don’t understand design.” So I went to school for econ and math. I studied design in “the streets”. I started my first company when I was 21 years old. It was an early version of Hired.com. When you don’t have any money, you have to do things yourself and be creative so I learned everything from basically failing. I know a lot about what startups are going through, whether it’s designing a pitch deck, selling a product, A/B testing, or trying to convert traffic on a webpage. I ended up selling that first company, which was a recruiting business that was based on scraping Linkedin for what we call, “The most placeable candidate.”

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Sumant Mandal was recorded in March 2019. Sumant...

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Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is ramping up stablecoin support around the world. Customers can now trade USD Coin (or USDC for short) in 85 countries — USDC support was only available in the U.S., excluding New York. You can trade USDC on both Coinbase and Coinbase Pro.

The company has been aggressive when it comes to international expansion. Coinbase is currently available in more than 100 countries — 85 out of 103 countries support USDC. But there’s a trick. Many countries can only exchange crypto assets for other assets — there’s no crypto-to-fiat conversions.

As the name suggests, a USDC is a token that is worth exactly 1 USD. Its value is stable against USD. That’s why people call this type of assets stablecoins. Coinbase and other USDC partners store USD in a bank account every time they issue a token.

And it’s clear that many customers living in countries suffering from inflation are going to love USDC. For instance, Argentina had a 47% inflation rate in 2018 alone. Rents, mortgages and basic goods end up costing a lot more than before. Your savings also represent a smaller sum of money if you convert it to USD.

Many people have already been using cryptocurrencies to avoid inflation. But it also creates tremendous risks as most cryptocurrencies still suffer from price fluctuation.

USDC could be part of the solution. You could use an exchange to convert some bitcoins into USDC and then store them on a secure wallet.

Here’s a list of new countries with crypto-to-crypto trading: Angola, Armenia, Aruba, Bahamas, Bahrain, Barbados, Benin, Botswana, Brazil, British Virgin Islands, Brunei, Cameroon, Cayman Islands, Costa Rica, Curaçao, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Ghana, Guatemala, Honduras, Jamaica, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Macau, Maldives, Mauritius, Mongolia, Montenegro, Namibia, Nepal, Nicaragua, Oman, Panama, Paraguay, Rwanda, Serbia, South Africa, Taiwan, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Turkey, Uganda, Uruguay, Uzbekistan and Zambia.

Correction: A previous version of this article said USDC was already available in 35 countries and expanding to 50 additional countries. USDC was only available in the U.S. (excluding NY) and is expanding to 84 new countries today.

Disclosure: I own small amounts of various cryptocurrencies.

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Tempo Automation, a San Francisco-based startup that helps shorten the time from prototype to production for electronics manufacturers, announced today that it has raised a $45 million Series C led by returning investor Point72 Ventures. The round also includes new investor Lockheed Martin and existing investors Lux Capital and Uncork Capital.

The company’s turnkey solution allows manufacturers to upload a CAD and have it turned into a circuit board in as little as three days. Founded in 2013, Tempo Automation’s services are tailored for low-volume manufacturers and include customers in a broad range of industries, including aerospace, consumer electronics, automotive and medical tech.

Tempo’s last funding round was $20 million Series B in 2018. In its latest funding announcement, the company said its Series C will be used for hiring and to develop software that will make its manufacturing process quicker and more accurate.

“Tempo is reinventing electronics manufacturing by putting software automation at the center of what they do. Tempo’s interconnected smart factory is modernizing the manufacturing process, which allows them to deliver a far superior customer experience. We see considerable market opportunity for Tempo, and we are pleased to support their continued growth,” said Point72 partner and Tempo Automation board member Sri Chandrasekar in a press statement.

According to a recent published report, the global big data analytics market is estimated to grow at 30% annually to $40.6 billion by 2023. San Francisco-based GoodData is making a mark in the...

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