Base coined the term “blanding,” but the international branding agency is anything but boring. With clients ranging from AI startup Rival Theory to e-commerce company Kidbox, Base leverages its broad portfolio of clients and designers from all around the world to help startups develop their individual personas. As they celebrate their 20th anniversary this year, we talked to Base Partner Geoff Cook about how the agency continues to evolve.

On Base’s culture:

“Base strives to have a profound cultural impact. Yes, we do strategy, and yes, we do identity, and all sorts of brand executions, but the end goal is to have a significant cultural impact for our clients. The end goal isn’t the product, it’s the result.”

On common founder mistakes:

“This may sound provocative, but I think the most common mistake is that there is a belief in the tech world that branding should be approached iteratively like their approach to product development. Having now been through that process of iteration with both startups and the largest tech companies, we’ve found that the results are often compromised. Oftentimes if you iterate or have different groups weighing in throughout the process, it can be detrimental to the end result. It’s a conversation we’re now having with founders to say, “We’ve tried both ways, we’ve seen these results, and we would ask that you go along for the ride and put your trust in us, and we’ll ensure that you will arrive someplace really compelling.”

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.

Interview with Base Partner Geoff Cook

Yvonne Leow: To kick things off, could you tell me about your backstory? How did you get into branding?

Geoff Cook: I actually came from DKNY, back in its heyday, and met Base’s Belgian partners through the world of fashion. I always joke that I wanted out of fashion and they wanted out of Brussels. So I invested in Base and brought it to New York City in 1999. My background is in marketing and strategy. When I was leading the International Menswear division at DKNY, I started realizing that I always had the most fun working with our internal branding group. So, when I left, I knew I wanted to pivot and go more in that direction. I think what appealed to me was the combination of creativity and the massive impact branding could have on the world. The intersection of those two things really drew me in.

The constant refrain in the tech world is that the world is about to be rocked by the combination of AI and robots. Therefore you’d think that startups that build either AI or robots would be onto a winner. However, there’s a serious misunderstanding going on.

What is becoming clear is that the closer companies are to actual robotics, the only way to compete will be in genuinely transformational hardware. The era where a robotic arm was considered innovative is long over.

Similarly, robotics as a sector won’t go anywhere without being married to powerful machine learning and visual systems.

Thus it is that startups that can do both AI and blend this with robotics, which might be either off the shelf robotic arms or tools, will position themselves far higher up the valuation stack.

So it’s significant that U.K.-based startup Karakuri has “opened the kimono” on its plans to do just that.

Karakuri uses a combination of robotics, machine learning, optics and sensors to deliver a robot that will make personalized, freshly prepared, high-quality meals. The advantage is that the robot can make something that matches exactly what the customer wants (no nuts and seed for instance, just this amount of dressing, etc.) and the result can also minimize food waste.

The startup comes at the right time. Research shows that almost two-thirds of consumers globally now follow a diet that limits or prohibits the consumption of some foods or ingredients due to food intolerance, as well as following a specific weight loss diet.

Karakuri’s technologies also allow restaurants to move away from mass pre-packaged meals and significantly reduce food waste.

Karakuri has now raised a £7 million seed investment, led by Ocado. The fundraise includes investments from Hoxton Ventures, firstminute Capital and Taylor Brothers, and will be used to further develop the company’s technology, strengthen its IP base and expand its team for global growth.

For Ocado, the investment means it can expand its value proposition in grocery, especially through Ocado Zoom, its new delivery arm.

Karakuri CEO and co-founder, Barney Wragg, says, “Consumer eating habits in and out of the home are changing rapidly as demand increases for healthier options that match specific dietary requirements. This growth in menu personalization is putting huge pressure on restaurants, cafes and other food retailers. These providers have historically relied on identically mass-produced meals to maintain their profit margins. By using robotics and machine learning, Karakuri’s systems provide localized micro-manufacturing within an existing restaurant, retail or commercial kitchen. Our systems prepare personalized meals onsite in real time to the exact requirements of each customer.”

Brent Hoberman, Karakuri’s founding chairman, co-founder of Founders Factory and general partner at firstminute Capital, says: “The time is now for robotics and AI to drive change in the restaurant and food services business. Barney and Simon have assembled a world-class team to go after one of the next large markets to be enhanced by this technology. We are delighted that Ocado, a global leader in robotics and distribution, has chosen to invest in Karakuri to lead the innovation in this sector.”

Hoberman says startups like Karakuri are going to become more significant as we reach the tipping point where manual workers are becoming less and less available to do the kinds of work that used to be done in restaurants.

Karakuri emerged out of the Founders Factory incubator, but the backstory to this startup is significant. Its advisory board includes industry experts from ARM, Ocado, Imperial College, Bristol Robotics Lab and Edinburgh Centre for Robotic.

Bristol Robotics Lab, in particular, has generated a world-class reputation for its robotics accelerator.

Today’s 443rd FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Thursday, May 9, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All are welcome!

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Edgewell Personal Care, which owns brands like Schick (razors), Banana Boat (sunscreen) and Wet Ones (moist wipes), is adding Harry’s to that list in a $1.37 billion acquisition.

Founded in 2013, Harry’s is part of the current wave of brands using the internet to sell products directly to consumers. (In addition to razors, it also sells shower and face care products, and operates the Flamingo brand of women’s razors.)

It’s a trend that the established consumer giants have noticed, with Unilever acquiring Dollar Shave Club and Procter & Gamble acquiring Walker & Company.

With the acquisition, Harry’s co-founders and co-CEOs Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider will become co-presidents of U.S. operations for Edgewell. (Speaking of direct-to-consumer brands: Raider is also co-founder of Warby Parker.)

“The combination of Edgewell and Harry’s is a pivotal step forward in further transforming our organization and strengthening our competitive position and ability to drive sustained growth and value creation,” said Edgewell’s president and CEO Rod Little in a statement. “Building on Edgewell’s and Harry’s complementary strengths, our combined company will have leading brands and omni-channel capabilities that are essential to meet the needs of the modern consumer and win in today’s market environment.”

Harry’s had previously raised around $375 million in funding, according to Crunchbase. Edgewell says the payment will break down to roughly 79% cash and 21% stock, giving Harry’s shareholders an 11% stake in Edgewell.

The deal is expected to close by the end of the first quarter of 2020.

Today’s 443rd FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Thursday, May 9, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All...

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According to a recent Gartner report on global smartphones, for Q4 2018, Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) reported its worst quarterly decline in phone sales since Q1 2016. With demand for entry level...

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Sramana Mitra: Pivot is a very tricky thing to manage. It’s a very tricky thing to manage from a cap table point of view. If you need to raise more capital to support a pivot, that means that your...

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Intello, the New York City-based SaaS management platform, announced a $2.5 million extended seed round today, along with some product enhancements.

The round was led by Resolute Ventures . Harrison Metal and Magnetico Ventures also participated, along with various individual angel investors, including Zane Lackey from Signal Sciences, Chris Smoak from Atrium and Zach Sherman from Timber. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $4 million, according the company.

Mike Hirshland, a partner at lead investor Resolute Ventures, saw Intello helping customers deal with a serious and growing issue inside companies. “They are solving the pain of SaaS sprawl that every organization is facing by empowering modern IT, finance and security teams with better visibility,” he said in a statement.

When everyone can sign up for these services for free or with a credit card outside the purview of IT, this can lead to potential issues around security and compliance. Since last year’s $1.3 million seed round, the startup has expanded beyond simply understanding which SaaS products a company has to include a compliance component, says Barak Kaufman, co-founder and CEO at Intello.

“We are really focused on what we view as end-to-end SaaS management, which includes spend optimization and mapping out unused products and licenses. We are still doing that, but as we are selling primarily to IT, and sometimes InfoSec directors, the product has evolved passed that to working on compliance,” Kaufman explained.

To help with that, Intello has updated the product to map redundant applications along with the ability to change, add or remove licenses for third-party applications. This gives IT more control over unsanctioned applications, including removing them from the system or limiting access to them if that is the goal.

The product is also now integrated with popular single sign-on tools, Okta and Onelogin, to help companies map the usage of all the SaaS tools being used, whether free or paid, through their SSO tools.

The company offers more than two dozen integrations out of the box so far, including popular SaaS tools like Salesforce, Box, Zendesk, Google, Slack and Office 365. It plans to use some of today’s funds to build dozens more with a goal of having 100 integrations by the end of this year.

Intello currently has 12 employees and 900 companies using the free and paid versions of the solution. Customers include InVision, Sprinklr and Instacart.

Hotels are convenient but rarely homey. Short-term rentals through Airbnb or HomeAway are often comfy but can be a pain to book and check-in. Business travelers often have to pick the best of two lousy options. Mint House is summed up best by Tige Savage, Revolution Venture managing partner: “Mint House is the best of a hotel without the worst of a hotel and the best of an Airbnb without the worst of an Airbnb.”

The New York-based Mint House is today announcing a $15 million financing round led by Revolution Ventures, with participation from other investors and hotel industry veterans. The influx of capital and industry connections should go a long way in allowing the company to expand its offering that caters to business travelers looking for apartment-style accommodations with the predictability and reliability found in top-tier hotels.

Mint House is entering a crowded market dominated by Airbnb and monstrous industry incumbents. Mint House founder and CEO, Will Lucas, explained to TechCrunch how the company stands apart from hotels and short-term rentals. He said the company strives to provide the business traveler with a comprehensive hotel experience.

The service works a lot like a modern hotel. Travelers book online and proceed with their trip. Once the traveler arrives in the area or lands at the airport, a geofence is tripped, triggering directions to enter the building and room. The traveler doesn’t have to find someone to give them the key; their phone unlocks the door to an apartment-style room. Lucas says this takes a lot of stress off the property owner as the traveler does not need to bother anyone in the building — tenets or management alike.

Right now Mint House is focusing on markets in the U.S. besides the top markets of New York City, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Mint House is available in Indianapolis, Denver, Nashville, Miami and Detroit. Lucas said he feels there are opportunities in these markets and often there are even worse accommodations available than in the busiest cities. Still, the total offering is relatively small: there are 200 rooms in operation, and 200 are scheduled to open by summer 2019. Travelers can book a Mint House through their app, website, or on travel sites like Expedia, Booking.com or Airbnb.

Mint House leases buildings from property owners, and Lucas was adamant that it’s the company’s goal to be a preferred partner with the real estate industry. He says that so far properties are receptive to Mint House’s business plan, and to be a global brand, the real estate community company needs to welcome Mint House. Each property, even though some might be residential or mixed-use, have a dedicated staff of cleaners and management employed by Mint House. Likewise, each city Mint House operates in has a dedicated staff in-market overseeing the local operation.

“We understand that we have two customers — the multifamily developers and the business traveler — and by prioritizing both we’ve been able to secure A+ properties and deliver a top-rated guest experience,” Lucas said.” We have also formed a team of investors and advisors that are perfectly suited to help us differentiate ourselves in this lucrative market. With expertise and relationships in growing cities, as well as how to build world-renowned hospitality brands and services, we are confident that we can continue to build and expand alongside landlords and hospitality partners.”

Each market offers different regulations that Mint House has to follow. Lucas says the company supports whatever regulation they need to follow. It’s clear he’s trying to keep Mint House on the right side of regulation. And he has help. Mint House has attracted the attention of several industry veterans that know how to grow a hospitality company.

Several notable hospitality veterans also participated in the financing round, including Tom Mangas, the former CEO of Starwood Hotels; Carl Sparks, the former CEO of Travelocity; Kerry Hatch, the former president of St. Regis Hotels; and Rob Stewart, the executive vice chairman of JBG Smith. Philippe Bourguignon, vice chairman of Revolution Places, former CEO of Club Med and Euro Disney and former president of Accor Hotels, Asia Pacific will join the board.

The deep network of industry insiders should help Mint House carve out a space of their own in the competitive hospitality world. It’s a tough market. Mint House has to get buy-in from business travelers and property owners alike. It’s a two-front battle. But as a frequent traveler myself, Mint House’s value proposition is compelling. I don’t need a hotel lobby or lackluster gym; I want a bed, couch and a TV without the terrible hotel menu system.

Sramana Mitra: Innovation in your industry is also happening on another vector – in treatment. I actually introduced a company from our portfolio to Heidi a few months ago that has a...

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Coalition, a cybersecurity insurance company, has raised $40 million in its latest round of funding.

Fintech investment giant Ribbit Capital led the investment with participation from Greenoaks Capital and Hillhouse Capital.

Coalition’s insurance covers expenses incurred from liabilities related to third-parties, such as fines and penalties — as well as fraud, breach response, extortion and ransomware recovery, device replacement and more. The company also aims to give U.S.-based customers an at-a-glance look at their cybersecurity posture — from alerts, threat intelligence and advice on what to improve, such as vulnerability fixing.

With its Series B, the company said it’s planning to expand its data analytics platform used to assess a company’s security posture. The funding will also expand its engineering and incident response team.

Coalition, which declined to state its valuation, previously raised $10 million in February 2018.

Cybersecurity insurance remains a fickle area. Amid an ongoing threat of breaches and data exposures, having an insurance policy in place to get a company back on its feet is smart. But many companies previously believed to be covered by cybersecurity insurance are not. When shipping giant Maersk was knocked offline by ransomware during the NotPetya attack, incurring more than $300 million in damages, its insurer Zurich declared the Russian-backed attack was an act of war and didn’t pay out.

Even when companies do pay out, it’s not a silver bullet.

Coalition’s proactive security efforts to try to prevent data breaches — and subsequent costs — is one way to save paying up. Will that scale up to another global cyberattack? Let’s hope we never find out.

Uber has partnered with bicycle sharing platform Yulu in India as it looks to grab a piece of the growing e-bikes market that is increasingly posing a challenge to taxi services in the nation.

The San Francisco-headquartered firm, which is expected to go public later this week, said it will provide its users in Bengaluru with Yulu’s e-bikes and bicycles as part of a pilot. The announcement, financial details of which were not disclosed, comes days after users in Bengaluru began to spot Yulu’s e-bikes and bicycles options in Uber app. Uber did not say what it intends to do after the pilot. This is the first time it is venturing into e-bikes space in India, however.

Bengaluru-based startup Yulu, which was launched by InMobi cofounder Amit Gupta, operates about 500 e-bikes and 4,500 bicycles on its platform. The two-year-old startup has raised about $7 million in funding from a number of big profile names including Blume Ventures, 3One4 Capital, Flipkart cofounder Binny Bansal, and Freshworks cofounder Girish Mathrubootham.

Today’s announcement, one of the handful Uber has made in India in last one year, comes as the future of its business in the country appears clouded with uncertainty, a person familiar with the matter said. The service, still available in under three-dozen cities, competes with Ola, which has presence in over 100 cities. Amit Jain, who ran Uber India and was promoted to oversee the company’s APAC business last year, left the company last month.

Uber, which once committed to investing $1 billion in India and which has left Southeast Asia market after selling the local business to Grab, appears to have put its foot off the paddle in the APAC region. It said Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty, who heads the firm’s EMEA business, will replace Jain to oversee the APAC business.

Ola, which leads the ride-hailing market in India, has made bigger bets on e-bikes in the nation. The company, which like Uber is backed by SoftBank, invested $100 million in scooter rental startup Vogo late last year. Vogo, which operates in Bengaluru and Hyderabad, said it will use the capital to add an additional 100,000 scooters to its platform.

Vogo competes with Bounce, which offers more than 6,000 bikes. The market of two-wheelers has grown in India despite the proliferation of taxi services in the country in recent years. With major cities in India grappling with ever growing traffic congestions, the future of two-wheelers seems brighter than ever. 2019 could be the year when e-bikes gain serious momentum in the nation, Jayanth Kolla, an analyst with research firm Convergence Catalyst said.

In a statement, Uber said Yulu’s e-bikes can clock up to 25km/hr, something which is “faster than your average traffic speed.” The other charm of Yulu’s e-bikes is that, like other e-bikes, users don’t need to get a license to ride one of these. Those who participate in the pilot program will be able to avail Yulu’s e-bikes by unlocking a QR code from the Uber app.

“Along with being environment and traffic friendly, these self-ride e-bikes are also pocket friendly, taking into account the varying needs and budgets of the consumer,” the company said in a statement. “We understand that the push towards electrification has to be multi-modal, and the collaboration with Yulu only goes to demonstrate the intent therein.”

The African no-fee, cross-border payment startup Chipper Cash has raised a $2.4 million seed round led by Deciens Capital.

The payments company also persuaded 500 Startups and Liquid 2 Ventures — co-founded by Joe Montana — to join the round.

Chipper Cash’s Ugandan chief executive, Ham Serunjogi, pitched the U.S. football legend directly. “He was quite excited about what we’re doing and his belief that the next wave of [tech] growth will come from…Africa,” Serunjogi told TechCrunch.

Chipper Cash went live in October 2018, joining a growing field of fintech startups aiming to scale digital finance applications across Africa’s billion-plus population.

The venture Serunjogi co-founded with Ghanaian Maijid Moujaled offers no-fee, P2P, cross-border mobile-money payments in Africa.

Based in San Francisco — with offices in Ghana and Nairobi — Chipper Cash has processed 250,000 transactions for more than 70,000 active users, according to Serunjogi.

In conjunction with the seed round, Chipper Cash is launching Chipper Checkout: a merchant-focused, C2B mobile payments product.

This side of the startup’s offerings isn’t free, and Chipper Cash will use revenues from Chipper Checkout — in addition to income generated from payment volume float — to support its no-fee mobile money business.

Sheel Mohnot, who led 500 Startups’ investment in Chipper Cash, likened the company’s model to PayPal.

“When PayPal started it was just a consumer to consumer free app. It still is free for consumer to consumer, but they monetized the merchant side. That model is tried and tested. It just doesn’t exist in Africa, so Chipper has the opportunity to do that,” he told TechCrunch.

In addition to Kenya’s M-Pesa — the global success story for digital payments — there are a number of mobile money products in Africa, from MTN’s Mobile Money in Ghana to Tigo Pesa in Tanzania.

The limiting factor, though, according to Chipper Cash’s CEO, is interoperability, or that mobile-money transfers across product platforms, currencies and borders generally don’t work.

“Our tech settles cross-border currency transactions in real time, and that’s part of the value proposition of the platform,” he said.

The startup will expand beyond its current operations in Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda within the next 12 months. Chipper Cash also plans to tap the global remittance market for Sub-Saharan Africa, a large pool of roughly $38 billion, in the near future.

Remittances won’t be the firms’ top focus, however. Serunjogi believes there’s more volume to be found within Africa. “Demographics, migration and regional economic-integration within the continent means there’ll be an infinitely growing amount of cross-border commercial activity within Africa,” he said. “When it comes to payments, the pie is growing and…the percentage of that pie that is digital payments will also grow.”

The journey for Chipper Cash’s founders from Africa to founding a startup and pitching to Joe Montana passes through Iowa. Serunjogi and Moujaled met when doing their undergraduate degrees at Grinnell College. Stints at Silicon Valley companies followed: Facebook for Serunjogi and Flickr, Yahoo! and Imgur for Moujaled.

Chipper Cash was accepted in 500 Startups’ Batch 24 in 2018 and their demo day for the accelerator program gained the attention of Liquid 2 Ventures.

The VC fund’s Rocio Wu invited them to pitch to Joe Montana and the team in March 2019.

“Africa is extremely fragmented with different languages, cultures and currencies, Chipper Cash is uniquely positioned to tackle cross-border mobile payments with interoperability,” Wu told TechCrunch on the investment.

Wu will join Chipper Cash as a board observer. The startup is the second Africa investment for the fund. Liquid 2 Ventures is also an investor in logistics startup Lori Systems, the 2017 Startup Battlefield Africa winner.

Startups building financial technologies for Africa’s 1.2 billion population are gaining greater attention of investors. As a sector, fintech (or financial inclusion) attracted 50% of the estimated $1.1 billion funding to African startups in 2018, according to Partech.

By a number of estimates, the continent’s 1.2 billion people represent the largest share of the world’s unbanked and underbanked population. An improving smartphone and mobile-connectivity profile for Africa (see GSMA) turns this scenario into an opportunity for mobile-based financial products.

As more startups enter African fintech, Chipper Cash believes it can compete on its cross-currency and no-fee offerings and the growing size of the market. “It’s so large that it is unlikely to be a zero-sum game in terms of who wins. There will be multiple successful players,” said Serunjogi.

Chipper Cash also joins a list of African-founded, Africa-focused fintech firms that have chosen to set up HQs in San Francisco with offices and operations on the continent. Payments gateway company Flutterwave and lending venture Mines.io (both with Nigerian founders) maintain SF headquarters with operations in Lagos. Serunjogi touts the benefits of this two-continent organizational structure for access to both VC and developer markets in the U.S. and Africa.

As for Chipper Cash’s continuing relationship with investor Joe Montana, “Having access to a someone with the leadership qualities of Joe to provide advice and guidance…that’s something that’s priceless,” said Serunjogi.

It’s easy to push a narrative of fintech upstarts versus the big incumbent banks, but the more subtle reality is that as well as competing on numerous fronts, there are partnerships being formed across the board. The latest such move sees Tink, the Sweden-based banking platform that raised €56 million in new funding in February, partner with British bank NatWest.

The agreement gives NatWest access to Tink’s Personal Finance Management (PFM) and “Data Enrichment” products, which will be integrated into NatWest’s core mobile banking app. This will allow NatWest to improve its mobile banking offering by giving NatWest customers personalised insights into their finances based on transaction history. The features built with Tink’s technology are planned to go live in Q4 2019.

The bigger picture is that by partnering with Tink, NatWest is aiming to meet increased customer expectations with regards to digital financial services. Undoubtedly, a plethora of fintech startups and challenger banks have raised the UX and feature bar significantly in the U.K. and right across Europe, not least via high quality mobile apps and better use of data, while incumbent banks have been scrambling to catch up.

“Historically banks have tried to build everything themselves, but we are now seeing a big shift where they want to partner with the best to propel development, quickly launch new features and stay competitive,” Tink co-founder and CEO Daniel Kjellén tells me.

“Today more and more banks choose to leverage the external building blocks that’s available to them and add in-house uniqueness on top of that. We’ve seen the same development when it comes to hosting – banks are now choosing cloud-based solutions such as AWS instead of on-premise solutions”.

To that end, although originally launched in Sweden in 2013 as a consumer-facing finance app with bank account aggregation at its heart, Tink has since repositioned its offering to provide the same underlying technology and more to banks and other financial service providers.

Through various APIs, Tink provides four pillars of technology: “Account Aggregation,” “Payment Initiation,” “Personal Finance Management” and “Data Enrichment.” These can be used by third parties to roll their own standalone apps or integrated into existing banking applications.

Along with NatWest, Tink has partnerships with a number of other banks including Klarna, BNP Paribas Fortis, ABN AMRO, SEB and Nordea.

Meanwhile, PFM (personal finance management) functionality in some form or another can now be found in numerous banking apps and fintech chatbots, and I put it to Kjellén that a PFM feature is now a commodity. He pushes back.

“It’s true that customer’s expectations on digital banking services are increasing and incentivising the incumbents to develop their PFM tools at a more rapid pace than before,” he says. “But the future where PFM is completely data-driven and where product recommendations, advice and decisions can be put on autopilot is still very far from a commodity”.

“The most advanced players are now building products that… take their PFM apps from being read-only to data-driven and actionable. It’s this combination of functionalities that will be game-changing for the industry”.