Earlier today, agents from the FBI searched the offices of uBiome, the medical testing company that sells analyses of an individual’s microbiome — the bacteria that live in the gut, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

The FBI is reportedly investigating uBiome’s billing practices, the WSJ reported.

“I can confirm that special agents from the FBI San Francisco Division are present at 360 Langton Street in San Francisco conducting court-authorized law enforcement activity. Due to the ongoing nature of the investigation, I cannot provide any additional details at this time,” a spokesperson for the FBI confirmed.

Stewart Butterfield. Slack

Whenever a security startup lands on my desk, I have one question: Who’s the chief security officer (CSO) and when can I get time with them?

Having a chief security officer is as relevant today as a chief marketing officer (CMO) or chief revenue boss. Just as you need to make sure your offering looks good and the money keeps rolling in, you need to show what your security posture looks like.

Even for non-security startups, having someone at the helm is just as important — not least given the constant security threats that all companies face today, they will become a necessary part of interacting with the media. Regardless of whether your company builds gadgets or processes massive amounts of customer data, security has to be at the front of mind. It’s no good simply saying that you “take your privacy and security seriously.” You have to demonstrate it.

A CSO has several roles and they will wear many hats. Depending on the kind of company you have, they will work to bolster your company’s internal processes and policies on keeping not only your corporate data safe but also the data of your customers. They also will be consulted on security practices of your app or product or service to make sure you’re complying with consumer-expected privacy expectations — and not the overbearing and all-embracing industry standards of vacuuming up as much data as there is.

But for the average security startup, a CSO should also act as the point-person for all technical matters associated with their company’s product or service. A CSO can be an evangelist for the infosec professional who can speak to their company’s offering — and to reporters, like me.

In my view, no startup of any size — especially a security startup — should be without a CSO.

The reality is about 95 percent of the world’s wealthiest companies don’t have one. Facebook hasn’t had someone running the security shop since August. It may be a coincidence that the social networking giant has faced breach after exposure after leak after scandal, and it shows — the company is running around headless without a direction of where to go.

Sam Altman’s little brother Jack is an entrepreneur, too.

Jack Altman, whose resume includes a stint as vice president of business development at Teespring, has raised $15 million in Series B funding for his startup, Lattice, a modern approach to corporate goal setting. Shasta Ventures led the round, with participation from Thrive Capital, Khosla Ventures and Y Combinator, the latter being the organization his brother led as president until very recently.

Lattice, used by high-growth companies like Reddit, Slack, Coinbase and Glossier, helps human resources professionals develop insights about their teams. Founded in 2015, Altman and Eric Koslow, like most entrepreneurs, developed the idea for Lattice out of their own pain points.

“We realized that with quarterly goal settings, OKRs, we would write them up and get the leadership together and then they would sit on a shelf and nothing would happen,” Altman told TechCrunch.

Lattice, a SaaS business, is a flexible platform that caters to startups and larger businesses’ specific cultures, management practices and varying approaches to employee engagement. The product, inspired by platforms like Gmail and Slack, is designed with consumers in mind. Lattice, the team hopes, has a look and feel that makes incumbent HR platforms feel antiquated. 

The product makes it simple for employees and their managers to complete engagement surveys, share feedback, arrange one-on-one meetings and complete comprehensive performance reviews with a larger goal of reworking the company goal-setting process entirely. No more once-yearly check-ins; Lattice enables businesses to check-in with their employees on a weekly basis. 

Lattice currently has 1,200 customers, 60 employees and was cash flow break-even for the first time in Q1 2019. With the latest financing, the San Francisco-based startup plans to invest in product development.

“Life is short,” Altman said. “You want to have work that you enjoy and an office that feels good to be at.”

Lattice has previously raised capital from investors including SV Angel, Marc Benioff, Slack Fund and Fuel Capital, Sam Altman, Elad Gil, Alexis Ohanian, Kevin Mahaffey, Daniel Gross and Jake Gibson. Lattice completed the Y Combinator startup accelerator in 2016.

Matthew Michela: The second thing we’re doing in this big trend in AI, which I think you’re going to see dramatically more of in 2019 to 2021, is adoption of AI. We spent this first generation of AI...

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Slack has filed to go public via a direct listing. Similar to what Spotify did last year, this means that the company won’t have a traditional IPO, and will instead allow existing shareholders to sell their stock to investors.

The company’s S-1 filing says it plans to make $100 million worth of shares available, but that’s probably a placeholder figure.

The S-1 offers data about the company’s financial performance, reporting a net loss of $138.9 million and revenue of $400.6 million in the fiscal year ending January 31, 2019. That’s compared to a loss of $140.1 million on revenue of $220.5 million for the year before.

The company attributes these losses to its decision “to invest in growing our business to capitalize on our market opportunity,” and notes that they’re shrinking as a percentage of revenue.

Slack also says that in the three months ending on January 31, it had more than 10 million daily active users across more than 600,000 organizations — 88,000 on the paid plan and 550,000 on the free plan.

In the filing, the company says the Slack team created the product to meet its own collaboration needs.

“Since our public launch in 2014, it has become apparent that organizations worldwide have similar needs, and are now finding the solution with Slack,” it says. “Our growth is largely due to word-of-mouth recommendations. Slack usage inside organizations of all kinds is typically initially driven bottoms-up, by end users. Despite this, we (and the rest of the world) still have a hard time explaining Slack. It’s been called an operating system for teams, a hub for collaboration, a connective tissue across the organization, and much else. Fundamentally, it is a new layer of the business technology stack in a category that is still being defined.”

The company suggests that the total market opportunity for Slack and other makers of workplace collaboration software is $28 billion, and it plans to grow through strategies like expanding its footprint within organizations already using Slack, investing in more enterprise features, expanding internationally and growing the developer ecosystem.

The risk factors mentioned in the filing sound pretty boilerplate and/or similar to other internet companies going public, like the aforementioned net losses and the fact that its current growth rate might not be sustainable, as well as new compliance risks under Europe’s GDPR.

Slack has previously raised a total of $1.2 billion in funding, according to Crunchbase, from investors including Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Social Capital, SoftBank, Google Ventures and Kleiner Perkins.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week Kate Clark and Alex Wilhelm dug into the latest, namely big news on the fund front from folks you know, two China-based companies going public on domestic exchanges and what’s next in the long-running sagas of getting Uber and Slack public.

First up, Kate talked us through the latest at Kleiner Perkins and Mary Meeker’s new growth fund, called Bond Capital. Alex has some more great context on that here, for interested parties; Kate has more here.

Next, we turned to the F-1 filings of Luckin Coffee and DouYu, two China-based companies joining the list of firms from the country that have chosen to go public here in the United States. With Luckin’s filing, we have a fascinating look into the costs of building a hyper-growth company; as you can imagine, Luckin is running pretty steep deficits, but is adding revenue incredibly quickly on a year-over-year basis. DouYo is fascinating for a different reason, namely that it only recently began generating gross profit. And in 2018, when it did begin to create some margin to cover its operating costs, it didn’t make much.

DouYu works in the live-streaming and esports worlds, places where Twitch and Huya (another China-based company that went public in the States) have found success.

Finally, we had two domestic public offerings to dig into. Slack, an exit we’ve long anticipated, is supposed to drop its S-1 today. If that’s the case Alex and Kate will be back at their mics to bring you the highlights from that filing. And then there’s Uber .

To cap off a fun show, we chatted through the impending Uber debut. We expect the company to set a price range tomorrow, but if early reports are correct, the firm could be sandbagging a bit in hopes of raising its price next week. Lyft reports earnings on May 7, giving Uber a somewhat tight window to jump through if it wants to control its own narrative. (If Lyft’s earnings fall short, for example, and Uber hasn’t gone public by that point, it could be forced to lower its own pricing.)

That’s all we have for now. We’ll probably be back later today with an Equity shot. Stay cool!

Facebook (Nasdaq: FB) continues to have a tough year with users, media and regulatory authorities continuing to question the company’s privacy policies. Earlier this month, Facebook admitted that it...

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Uber, the transportation-on-demand behemoth, today filed its much-anticipated updated S-1, where it announced that it would be pricing its initial public offering at $44-50 per share.

Selling 180 million common shares, Uber plans to raise between $7.9 billion and $9 billion ahead of its public debut on the NYSE, valuing it at $84 billion — squarely in the middle of the $80-90 billion that was projected as late as yesterday. With the greenshoe, shareholders selling shares in the IPO, it could raise as much as $10.4 billion.

Separately, there were two surprise announcements in the S-1. First, PayPal said it would make a $500 million investment in the company in a private placement, as part of an extension of the partnership between the two, where they will develop new digital wallet services. Second, Uber said it expects to post a loss of between $1 billion and $1.1 billion for the first quarter of this year, a huge swing from net income of some $3.7 billion a year ago.

PayPal has been working with Uber providing payment services since 2013 and is its lead processing partner in the U.S. and Australia (but not the only one globally).

This is the second big pre-IPO investment that Uber has announced this month. Last week, it announced a strategic $1 billion investment from SoftBank, Toyota and auto parts maker Denso, which valued the company at $7.25 billion.

The $500 million placement is being made at the same valuation as the IPO price range, Uber said.

“In April 2019, we entered into a stock purchase agreement with PayPal, Inc. (‘PayPal’), pursuant to which PayPal will purchase $500 million of our common stock from us in a private placement at a price per share equal to the initial public offering price,” Uber notes. “The sale of the shares in the private placement is subject to certain closing conditions, including the closing of this offering and certain regulatory approvals. Concurrently, and subject to the closing of the private placement, we and PayPal extended our global partnership through the execution of an addendum to our existing commercial agreement. We and PayPal intend to explore future commercial payment collaborations, including the development of our digital wallet.”

“This is another significant milestone on our journey to be a platform partner of choice, helping to enable global commerce by connecting the world’s leading marketplaces and payment networks,” said PayPal president and CEO Dan Schulman in a statement. This is the second-biggest investment ever made by PayPal since its eBay spin-out. The biggest is MercadoLibre in Latin America, in which PayPal invested $750 million in March.

In addition to the 180 million shares in the IPO, Uber notes that the underwriters have the option to purchase up to an additional 27 million shares of common stock from the selling stockholders solely to cover over-allotments, if any.

Additionally, Uber notes that it requested the underwriters to reserve up to 5.4 billion shares — three percent of the 180 million — through a directed share program to certain qualifying drivers in the United States.

Bumpy and long road ahead

Uber’s pricing is more than three times the amount of Lyft’s $2.34 billion IPO, making it one of the largest IPOs in the U.S. since Alibaba’s debut on the public markets in 2014.

But the company has a long road ahead of it in its efforts to bring the business into profitability. The S-1 contains preliminary figures for the most recent quarter that ended March 31, and in them Uber said it expects its net income to be a net loss, with the range of between negative $1 and $1.11 billion. As a point of comparison, Uber’s positive net income in the same period a year ago was $3.748 billion.

Uber noted that the “expected net loss” came from several areas. First and foremost, it’s spending a huge amount of money on what it describes as incentives and promotions — that is, offers both to drivers to keep working for Uber rather than, say, Lyft, and for passengers to continue riding with Uber — marketing in the face of heavy competition from Lyft and a variety of local competitors in other markets.

On top of that, Uber noted that the positive bump in the quarter a year ago came from its sales of operations in Southeast Asia (to Grab) and Russia (to Yandex), plus an unrealized gain of $2 billion on an investment in Didi.

“Our incentive and promotion spend varies widely from period to period and within various markets based on competitive dynamics and other factors,” Uber notes. It doesn’t note exactly what these dynamics factors might be, but they potentially include spend levelled by competitors for the same ends, as well as seasonal surges that might bring about specific promotions, and so on.

Uber also noted that monthly active platform consumers went up to 93 million from 70 million a year before, while revenues were up to between $3 billion and $3.1 billion, versus $2.6 billion a year ago.

In 2018, Uber reported 2018 revenues of $11.27 billion, net income of $997 million and adjusted EBITDA losses of $1.85 billion. Uber, which filed for its IPO two weeks ago, will list on the New York Stock Exchange in May.

More to come.

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London-based startup Wheely has raised a $15 million Series B round led by Concentric, with Oleg Tscheltzoff, Misha Sokolov and other investors also participating. The company wants to build an Uber competitor focused on the luxury market.

It’s a bit ironic when you think about it, as Uber started as a luxury company. But everybody knows someone with horrific Uber stories. That’s why Wheely is building a reliable and predictable ride-hailing experience.

The company is currently live in London, Moscow and St. Petersburg — Paris is coming this summer. It works with 3,500 drivers and currently has a run rate of $80 million in gross bookings.

Wheely doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel, as the company works with third-party partners and doesn’t employ its drivers. Similarly, the company takes a 20 percent cut on each ride.

But the startup insists on its strict recruitment process. For instance, you can’t become a Wheely driver from day one. The company requires at least three years of previous chauffeur driving experience. You also need to pass multiple tests, including driving tests and etiquette tests. Only one in four UberBlack drivers pass the exam.

There are currently three different classes — a normal one with Mercedes-Benz E-Class cars, a fancy one with Mercedes-Benz S-Class cars and a van category with Mercedes-Benz V-Class vehicles.

Minimum rides cost £12 with the entry-level class, £16 in an S-Class and at least £40 for a van. You then pay more depending on distance traveled and time spent in the vehicle.

And it’s been working well, as Wheely now represents around 11 percent of gross bookings in London. Given that each ride is more expensive than a traditional ride-hailing ride, it makes sense that Wheely already captured a good chunk of the money pie. Now let’s see if the company can find enough cities with affluent people to scale its business.

RosieReality, a startup out of Zürich developing consumer augmented reality experiences, has raised $2.2 million in seed funding led by Redalpine. Other backers include Shasta Ventures, Atomico partners Mattias Ljungman and Siraj Khaliq (both of whom invested in a personal capacity) and Akatsuki Entertainment Fund.

Founded in early 2018, RosieReality’s first AR experience is designed to ignite kids interested in robotics and programming. The smart phone camera-based app is centred around “Rosie,” a cute AR robot that inhabits a “Lego-like” modular AR world within which you and your friends are tasked with building and solving world-size 3D puzzles.

The kicker: to solve these 3D-puzzle games requires “programming” Rosie to move around the augmented reality world.

“By developing Rosie the Robot, we created the first interactive and modular world that exclusively lives in your camera feed,” RosieReality co-founder and CEO Selim Benayat tells TechCrunch. “We use this new computational platform to enable kids to creatively build, solve and share world-sized puzzle games with friends and families – much like modern-day Lego.”

Describing Rosie the Robot’s typical users as teens that “like the challenge of intricately crafted puzzles,” Benayat says part of the inspiration behind the AR game was remembering how as a kid he used to love spending time building stuff and then inviting friends over to show them what he’d built.

“Kids today are not that different,” he argues, before adding that AR makes it possible for them to have the same tangible and contextual sensation while giving them a bigger outlet for their creativity.

“We see the camera as a tool to teach and enable [the] next generation of creators. For us gaming is the ultimate creative, social and educational outlet,” says the RosieReality CEO.