Honestbee, the online grocery delivery service in Asia, is nearly out of money and trying to offload its business.

The company has held early conversations with a number of suitors in Asia, including ride-hailing giants Grab and Go-Jek, over the potential acquisition of part, or all, of its business, according to two industry sources with knowledge of the talks.

Founded in 2015, Honestbee works with supermarkets and retailers to deliver goods to customers using its store pickers, delivery fleet and mobile apps. The company is based in Singapore and operates in eight markets across Asia: Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines and Japan. In some markets it has expanded to food deliveries and, in Singapore, it operates an Alibaba-style online/offline store called Habitat.

The company makes its money by taking a cut of transactions from consumer transactions, while it also monetizes delivery services separately.

Despite looking impressive from the outside, the company is currently in crisis mode due to a cash crunch — there’s a lot happening right now.

From talking to several former and current staff, TechCrunch has come to learn that Honestbee is laying off employees, it has a range of suppliers who are owed money, it has “paused” its business in the Philippines, it has closed R&D centers in Vietnam and India, it isn’t going to make payroll in some markets and a range of executives have quit the firm in recent months.

The issue is that the company is running out of money thanks to a business model with tight margins that’s largely unproven in Asia Pacific.

One source told TechCrunch that the company doesn’t currently have the funds to pay its staff this month. A source inside the company confirmed that Honestbee has told Singapore-based staff that they won’t be paid in time, but it isn’t clear about employees based in other markets. Previously, staff have been paid inconsistently — with late salary payments sent as bank transfers happening twice this year, according to the source.

One reason that the Philippines business has closed temporarily — as Tech In Asia first reported this week — is that it is out money, and waiting on Honestbee HQ in Singapore to provide further capital. Already, the saga has proven to be too much for Honestbee’s head of the Philippines — Crystal Gonzalez — who has quit the company, according to a source within Honestbee Philippines.

Gonzalez helped build Viber’s business in the Philippines, where it is a top messaging player, and she was previously with Yahoo before launching Honestbee. She is said to have grown frustrated at a lack of funds when the Philippines is the company’s best-performing market on paper.

Indeed, the situation is so dire that suppliers and partners have been paid late, or left unpaid entirely, in the Philippines and other markets. Honestbee takes payment for grocery deliveries, after which it is supposed to provide the transaction, minus its cut, to its supermarket partners. But it has been slow to pay vendors, with two in Singapore — FairPrice and U Stars — cutting ties with the startup.

Unclear financing

On the subject of financials, Honestbee looks to be toward the end of its runway.

The company has always taken a fairly secretive line on its financing. On launch, it announced a $15 million Series A investment from Formation8, a firm which included Honestbee CEO Joel Sng as a partner, but it has said nothing more since. (It appears that Honestbee stake has transferred to the firm’s successor, Formation Group, according to its website.) Tech In Asia dug up filings last year that show it has raised a further $46 million from more Korean investors, but the startup declined to comment on its financing when contacted by TechCrunch.

It looks like that capital is nearly gone, at least based on what has been declared.

Internal numbers for Honestbee in December 2018, seen by TechCrunch, show that it lost nearly $6.5 million, with around $2.5 million in net revenue for the month. GMV — the total amount of transactions on its platform before deductions to partners — reached nearly $12.5 million in December, but costs — chiefly discounts to lure new customers and online marketing spend — dragged the company down. A former employee said that monthly retention is often single-digit percent in some markets because of the “outrageous” use of coupons to hit short-term revenue goals.

That internal data showed that the Philippines business accounted for around 40 percent of Honestbee’s overall GMV, which backs up Gonzalez’ apparent frustration at a lack of investment. That said, the Philippines unit remains some way from profitability, with a net loss of more than $1 million in December.

High burn rate

Three markets — Singapore, the Philippines and Taiwan — accounted for more than 80 percent of GMV and net income, making it unclear why Honestbee continues to operate in other countries, including the expensive Japanese market, when its funding level is perilously low.

More pertinently, operating at that burn rate would give Honestbee less than 10 months of runway if it used the $61 million capital float that it is known to have raised. That suggests that the company has raised more money; however, none of the sources who spoke to TechCrunch were able to verify whether there has been additional fundraising.

Current and former employees explained that Honestbee doesn’t have a CFO and that all high-level decisions, and particularly those around budgets and spending, are managed by CEO Sng and his right-hand man, Roger Koh, whose LinkedIn lists his current job as a principal with Formation 8.

Filings in Singapore indicate that Honestbee has $55.9 million in assets through two registered companies. A common shareholder across the two is Brian Koo, a member of the LG family who founded the Formation 8 fund, and the Formation Fund which launched after Formation 8 was shuttered.

Layoffs and a potential sale

While the financials are hazy, it is very clear that Honestbee is up against it right now.

The company released a statement earlier this week that makes some admissions around layoffs and restructuring but still glosses over current struggles:

In 2014, honestbee started in Singapore with the mission of providing a positive social and financial impact on the lives and businesses that we touch. Today, we are a regional business with footprints in Hong Kong, Thailand, Indonesia, Taiwan, Philippines, Japan and Malaysia.

Over the years, we have continued to be committed to our staff, partners and consumers. We have made good progress to implement new process and ways of working to remain efficient and relevant in the ever-changing business environment. The launch of habitat by honestbee in Singapore was a valuable lesson for us where it showed the potential growth in the O2O business and *it has been voted one of the must-see retail innovations in the world this year.

Following a strategic review of our company’s business, we are temporarily suspending our food verticals in Hong Kong and Thailand to simplify what we do and how we do it to better meet what our consumers want. Some roles within the organization will no longer be available. Approximately 6% of our global headcount in the organization are affected.

The status of honestbee in the remaining markets remain unchanged as we evaluate and we will continue to operate and contribute to honestbee Pte Ltd.

Sources close to the company told TechCrunch that more job losses are likely to come beyond the six percent in this statement. Executives who saw the writing on the wall have left in recent months, including the heads of business for Japan and Indonesia, a senior member of the team behind Habitat and the company’s head of people. One executive hired to raise capital for Honestbee quit within a month; he declined to comment and doesn’t list the company on his LinkedIn bio.

Secondly, Honestbee’s temporary suspension of food services in Hong Kong and Thailand isn’t likely to have a huge impact on its overall business, as groceries are the primary focus and neither market is particularly huge for the company. While Habitat has gotten attention for its forward-thinking, a physical retail store will require significant capital and it is likely, in its early days, to only increase the burn rate. Sources in the company told TechCrunch that, already, it has switched suppliers for some items as invoices went unpaid.

Despite the chaos, the potential of a sale is real.

Fresh from a recent $1.5 billion Vision Fund investment with the promise of $2 billion more this year, Grab — which is valued at $14 billion — is on a spending spree.

The Singapore-based company has pledged to make at least half a dozen acquisitions in 2019 and a deal to boost its nascent food and grocery play in Southeast Asia has some merit. Grab has the challenge of competing with Go-Jek, its $9.5 billion-valued rival that built a strong offering in Indonesia and is expanding across Southeast Asia with an emphasis on its food delivery. Grab, meanwhile, is active in eight markets across Southeast Asia and is now actively expanding from transportation services to food and more.

Likely adding to the frustration for Honestbee, its rival HappyFresh this week announced a $20 million investment. HappyFresh has undergone tough times, too. It pulled out of markets in 2016 to make its business more sustainable and today its CEO Guillem Segarra told TechCrunch that it is now operationally profitable.

Honestbee declined to respond to a range of questions from TechCrunch on whether it has plans to sell its business, its financing history and whether it has delayed paying employees.

Update: The original version of this story has been updated to note that Formation Group is not the parent of Formation 8.

If you have a tip about this story or others, you can contact TechCrunch reporter Jon Russell in the following ways:

The never-ending quest to kill Comcast is poised to receive some renewed investment as an ambitious startup readies to secure some new cash.

Starry, a Boston-based wireless broadband internet startup, has filed to raise up to $125 million in Series D funding according to a Delaware stock authorization filing uncovered by PitchBook. If Starry closes the full authorized raise it will hold a post-money valuation of $870 million.

A spokesperson for the company confirmed it had already raised new capital, but disputed the numbers. The company has already raised over $160 million from investors, including FirstMark Capital and IAC. The company most recently closed a $100 million Series C this past July.

The internet startup takes a different approach from fiber-toting competitors by relying on radio tower and high-rise-mounted transmitters that dispatch millimeter wavelength signals to receivers connected to a building’s existing wiring. Customers with Starry’s slick touchscreen routers can whirl through setup, contact customer service, tailor parental controls and conduct speed tests. The company claims its solution can provide up to 200 Mbps up/download service for just $50 per month with no data caps or long-term contracts.

The technology is not without its skeptics; while laying fiber-optic cable has proven to be an expensive task for internet companies, going over the airwaves with the company’s high-frequency radio waves has its own set of problems. Signals can be affected by harsh weather and obstacles, though Starry has indicated they are content with their performance in less-than-ideal conditions.

“We’ve built a robust network in Boston and our technology is working well,” CEO Chet Kanojia told us last year. “We’ve gone through a full year of seasonality to test various weather and foliage conditions and we’ve been very happy with our network’s performance.”

Last year marked a major period of expansion for Starry, which expanded beyond its home market of Boston and now holds a presence in Los Angeles, New York City, Denver and DC.

Kanojia previously founded Aereo, which raised $97 million in VC funding with the dream of letting consumers watch live TV over the web. The company proved a little too disruptive for its time, and was shut down as the result of a Supreme Court case brought about by major broadcasting networks.

Carbon, the poster child for 3D printing, has authorized the sale of $300 million in Series E shares, according to a Delaware stock filing uncovered by PitchBook. If Carbon raises the full amount, it could reach a valuation of $2.5 billion.

Using its proprietary Digital Light Synthesis technology, the business has brought 3D-printing technology to manufacturing, building high-tech sports equipment, a line of custom sneakers for Adidas and more. It was valued at $1.7 billion by venture capitalists with a $200 million Series D in 2018.

Carbon declined to comment on its upcoming fundraising plans.

Redwood City-based Carbon is well-capitalized. To date, it’s raised a total of $422 million from investors like Sequoia, GV, Fidelity, General Electric, Hydra Ventures and Adidas Ventures, not including the incoming round of capital.

Carbon wants to help designers and manufacturers be more efficient, cut costs and waste less energy and materials. Under the leadership of co-founder and chief executive officer Joseph DeSimone, the company recently promoted Craig Carlson, their former vice president of engineering, to chief technology officer.

“We are at the forefront of digital manufacturing, creating a new standard for the industry. In order to continue pushing the boundaries of what our technology can do and to execute our global growth strategy, we need to have the best team at the top,” DeSimone said in a statement following news of the promotion.

Over the past few months, Sinemia has gone from promising MoviePass competitor to the source of frustration for moviegoers across the country. After rumors surfaced earlier this week that it would be backing away from its troubled subscription-based movie ticket offering, it posted official word tonight that it will be shutting down operations in the U.S.

“Today, with a heavy heart, we’re announcing that Sinemia is closing its doors and ending operations in the US effective immediately,” the company writes in a statement posted to its front page.

The service has also struggled with issues of monetization (not unlike MoviePass), leading onlookers to wonder ultimately how sustainable the subscription model is. Those issues have been coupled by increased competition from movie theater chains like AMC offering up their own services, even as Sinemia attempted to create a white label version for theaters.

In recent months, the company has been plagued by lawsuits from both MoviePass and moviegoers, the latter of whom took issue with app problems, hidden charges and policies of shuttering accounts.

“While we are proud to have created a best in market service, our efforts to cover the cost of unexpected legal proceedings and raise the funds required to continue operations have not been sufficient,” the company writes. “The competition in the US market and the core economics of what it costs to deliver Sinemia’s end-to-end experience ultimately lead us to the decision of discontinuing our US operations.”

Sinemia has expressed surprise at the breadth of negative reactions its received from users. In a recent interview CEO Rifat Oguz told TechCrunch, “We are taking it seriously. We are looking at every comment. We didn’t found the company a year ago. It started about five years ago. We are taking every negative comment very seriously.”

To that end, the company has set up multiple sites aimed at addressing user problems. Ultimately, however, operations were just not sustainable here in the States. The note doesn’t clarify whether the service will continue to operate abroad in places like the U.K., Canada, Australia and Turkey, where much of its staff is currently based. Nor is it clear when the end of operations in the U.S. will mean for those customers who are owed money on their accounts. From the note, however, it does sound as if active accounts will be terminated immediately.

We’ve reached out for additional clarification.

Uber is reportedly looking to sell shares between $44 to $50, aiming to raise $8 to $10 billion in the offering. This would value the company between $80 billion to $90 billion, Bloomberg reports.

Previous reports had pegged Uber’s valuation at around $120 billion. Still, that valuation is higher than its last valuation of $76 billion following a funding round.

It’s likely this decrease in valuation is influenced by Lyft’s performance on the public market. Since its debut on the Nasdaq, Lyft’s stock has suffered after skyrocketing nearly 10 percent on day one.

While Uber has yet to officially set the terms of its IPO, the company is reportedly expected to do so as early as tomorrow. Even if Uber seeks the low end of the expected range, it would be more than three times the amount of Lyft’s $2.34 billion IPO. It would also make Uber’s IPO the largest one in the U.S. since Alibaba’s in 2014.

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, is expected to list on the New York Stock Exchange in May.

The Markup appears to be facing a staff revolt — and its financial backers may be reconsidering their support — following the firing of editor-in-chief Julia Angwin.

When the site was announced last fall, it was backed by $20 million from Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, with additional funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The goal was to do data-driven journalism about the impact of technology on society.

Angwin and her co-founder Jeff Larson seemed particularly well-suited for the job — both are award-winning journalists who worked together at ProPublica, where they did impactful reporting around topics like Facebook’s ad practices.

However, Angwin was fired on Monday, a move she blamed in interviews on executive director Sue Gardner’s plan to turn the site into “a cause, not a publication,” with headlines like “Facebook is a dumpster fire.”

This, Angwin said, was at odds with her own dedication to “evidence-based, data-driven journalism.”

Larson, who’s now become editor-in-chief, offered a different account on Medium, where he said work had fallen “far, far behind” by the end of 2018: “Hiring was slow. Recruitment was slow. Even as of this month, we didn’t have stories banked. We didn’t have editorial processes in place to accept and develop pieces.”

He said that he and Angwin were both asked to take management classes, but she refused. (Angwin acknowledged that she may have had things to learn about being editor-in-chief, but she noted that she’s led investigative teams in the past, and she said, “There was never any attempt to guide me into that learning.”)

Larson also alluded to other issues that led to “a breakdown in trust between the three of us as co-founders.” He said there were attempts to find other roles for Angwin, but she “refused to discuss any role other than Editor in Chief, and would not consider any other configuration. So unfortunately we made the decision to remove her from that role.”

The editorial team has sided with Angwin, with all of them posting a statement supporting her and praising her “effectiveness as a manager and an editor.” Five of the seven editorial team members also resigned in protest.

As a result of all the controversy, Newmark and the other funders of The Markup have issued a statement of their own, saying that while they’re still “committed to the mission of The Markup,” they’ve also decided “it is necessary to reassess our support and we are taking steps to do so.”

If you’re a student at UC Berkeley, the diminutive rolling robots from Kiwi are probably a familiar sight by now, trundling along with a burrito inside to deliver to a dorm or apartment building. Now students at a dozen more campuses will be able to join this great, lazy future of robotic delivery as Kiwi expands to them with a clever student-run model.

Speaking recently at TechCrunch’s Robotics + AI Session at the Berkeley campus, Kiwi’s Felipe Chavez and Sasha Iatsenia discussed the success of their burgeoning business and the way they planned to take it national.

In case you’re not aware of the Kiwi model, it’s basically this: When you place an order online with a participating restaurant, you have the option of delivery via Kiwi. If you so choose, one of the company’s fleet of knee-high robots with insulated, locking storage compartments will swing by the place, your order is put within, and it brings it to your front door (or as close as it can reasonably get). You can even watch the last bit live from the robot’s perspective as it rolls up to your place.

The robots are what Kiwi calls “semi-autonomous.” This means that although they can navigate most sidewalks and avoid pedestrians, each has a human monitoring it and setting waypoints for it to follow, on average every five seconds. Iatsenia told me that they’d tried going full autonomous and that it worked… most of the time. But most of the time isn’t good enough for a commercial service, so they’ve got humans in the loop. They’re working on improving autonomy, but for now this is how it is.

That the robots are being controlled in some fashion by a team of people in Colombia (from where the co-founders hail) does take a considerable amount of the futurism out of this endeavor, but on reflection it’s kind of a natural evolution of the existing delivery infrastructure. After all, someone has to drive the car that brings you your food, as well. And in reality, most AI is operated or informed directly or indirectly by actual people.

That those drivers are in South America operating multiple vehicles at a time is a technological advance over your average delivery vehicle — though it must be said that there is an unsavory air of offshoring labor to save money on wages. That said, few people shed tears over the wages earned by the Chinese assemblers who put together our smartphones and laptops, or the garbage pickers who separate your poorly sorted recycling. The global labor economy is a complicated one, and the company is making jobs in the place it was at least partly born.

Whatever the method, Kiwi has traction: it’s done more than 35,000 deliveries at an increasing rate since it started two years ago (now up to over 10,000 per month) and the model seems to have proven itself. Customers are happy, they get stuff delivered more than ever once they get the app and there are fewer and fewer incidents where a robot is kicked over or, you know, catches on fire. Notably, the founders said onstage, the community has really adopted the little vehicles, and should one overturn or be otherwise interfered with, it’s often set on its way soon after by a passerby.

Iatsenia and Chavez think the model is ready to push out to other campuses, where a similar effort will have to take place — but rather than do it themselves by raising millions and hiring staff all over the country, they’re trusting the robotics-loving student groups at other universities to help out.

For a small and low-cash startup like Kiwi, it would be risky to overextend by taking on a major round and using that to scale up. They started as robotics enthusiasts looking to bring something like this to their campus, so why can’t they help others do the same?

So the team looked at dozens of universities, narrowing them down by factors important to robotic delivery: layout, density, commercial corridors, demographics and so on. Ultimately they arrived at the following list:

What they’re doing is reaching out to robotics clubs and student groups at those colleges to see who wants to take partial ownership of Kiwi administration out there. Maintenance and deployment would still be handled by Berkeley students, but the student clubs would go through a certification process and then do the local work, like a capsized bot and on-site issues with customers and restaurants.

“We are exploring several options to work with students down the road, including rev share,” Iatsenia told me. “It depends on the campus.”

So far they’ve sent 40 robots to the 12 campuses listed and will be rolling out operations as the programs move forward on their own time. If you’re not one of the unis listed, don’t worry — if this goes the way Kiwi plans, it sounds like you can expect further expansion soon.

Sramana Mitra: My next question is going to be about what trends are you seeing. How are your customers using data? Obviously you have a very rich dataset in your ecosystem. What are some unique and...

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A couple of weeks ago, when Pinterest filed its S-1, its AWS bills raised eyebrows and questions about cheaper alternatives for startups. Render is a small startup with a big idea to provide infrastructure services for developers, who might be looking for a cheaper and easier alternative to bigger, more familiar names. The company launched today with broad ambition and $2.25 million in seed funding from General Catalyst and the South Park Common Fund.

As developers work with increasingly complex sets of technologies, it often requires teams of people to launch an application and keep it running.”What we’re doing at Render is making it incredibly easy and quick for application developers to deploy their applications online without knowledge of servers, and without having a DevOps person with them,” Anurag Goel, founder and CEO, told TechCrunch.

Steve Herrod, managing director at General Catalyst and former CTO at VMware, knows a thing or two about infrastructure, and he sees a company that could provide a viable alternative to the established players in this space. “Render is building the logical next step to cloud infrastructure — making it disappear. Application developers clearly want to focus on the functionality and usability of their work, and not on server setup, deployment and scaling. Render is enabling exactly this focus and that’s why early developer users love it so much,” he said in a statement.

The company is going after companies like Salesforce and Heroku on the platform side and AWS, Azure, GCP and even DigitalOcean on the infrastructure side. It is not an easy market to ease your way into, but Goel believes he has come up with a solution that is cost-effective and easy to use, and that could help separate him from these established brands.

The complexity of today’s application environment requires teams of highly trained engineers to implement. While a company like Harness is trying to reduce that complexity by providing Continuous Delivery as a Service, Render is going at it from a different angle by providing a platform and infrastructure to launch and manage applications more easily.

“We’re focused, first and foremost, on developer experience and ease of use. And we’ve seen over and over again, that when you look at AWS and Azure and GCP, they force you to build out these large DevOps teams that take care of all the infrastructure needs,” he said. He believes part of the problem with the larger company approaches is that they put this expensive engineering layer between the developer and the application they created, and Render brings the developer closer to the process.

The company got the funding last year, but is announcing now because it wasn’t really ready to launch at that point, and didn’t want to announce the funding before it had a viable product.

Goel got his start as an early employee at Stripe, a company that made it simple for developers to add payment infrastructure to an application. He is hoping to bring that same level of simplicity to application hosting.

New Enterprise Associates, the 42-year-old venture capital firm, has invested in the $23 million Series B round for Mejuri, a startup capturing millennial women’s penchant for affordable and treat yo’ self type of jewelry rather than diamonds and precious stones for special occasions.

It’s the latest instance of startups drawing investor interest with their direct-to-customer retail model. Based in Toronto and Buenos Aires, four-year-old Mejuri designs, makes and sells jewelry directly to women primarily online in addition to two offline showrooms, bypassing middle-person costs. Besides striving for reasonable prices, Mejuri also wants to upend an entrenched practice in its industry.

Traditional jewelry, the startup points out, targets men for gifting and makes higher markups acceptable. With its D2C play, Mejuri believes it’s putting the purchasing decision back with women; indeed, it found 75 percent of its customers are buying for themselves. Its team of 120 employees, including an in-house crew of 25 people, is constantly on the watch for trends and consumer feedback, a strategy made possible by its online presence of more than 422,000 Instagram followers. Instead of releasing large batches of seasonal pieces, Mejuri adapts the so-called “drop” model that introduces only a small quantity of products each week, which allows it to timely translate customer sentiments into designs.

“Mejuri’s mission really hits home for me,” said NEA partner Vanessa Larco in a statement. “I noticed a shift in trends when none of my friends wanted to go to any of the traditional fine jewelry companies to purchase jewelry anymore, and I realized a lot of those big brands were in trouble.”

Natalie Massenet, founder of Net-a-Porter and partner at Imaginary, another venture fund that participated in Mejuri’s Series B, said the startup is set to “disrupt” the jewelry industry through supply chain standards that modern consumers demand, “like sourcing from conflict-free and socially responsible diamond suppliers and maintaining affordable prices to serve a consumer who is buying for herself and her friends.”

Another enabling factor is the company’s female-led team: 80 percent of the staff are women, headed by founder Noura Sakkijha, a third-generation jeweler and a former industrial engineer who scored the company’s latest capital when she was seven months pregnant with two twins. It wasn’t an easy route, but the fact that Sakkijha was visibly pregnant also paved her way for finding the right partners.

“I was nervous about how people would perceive me,” Sakkijha told TechCrunch. “If you have an issue with a pregnant, female CEO–Mejuri is not for you. My kids will always be a priority and part of the story. Knowing this left me feeling more vulnerable–but also liberated. It’s also introduced me to an amazing community; I’ve met so many amazing female investors and founders whose humor and shared experiences have been a huge relief. Seeing other women model that you can have both–not perfectly, not effortlessly–was a relief that I didn’t have to sacrifice my drive for motherhood.”

The user-centric focus has brought customer loyalty to Mejuri. The startup claims that 30 percent of its monthly transactions come from returning shoppers, and 70,000 customers are on the waitlist for its products. It’s accumulated a total of 20 million visitors to its website and released 1,500 designs since launch. Revenues have quadrupled year-over-year for the fourth consecutive year, and the company, one of TechCrunch’s favorite picks from 500 Startups’ Batch 15 Demo Day three years ago, said it’s on track to achieve the same level of traction in 2019.

The new proceeds bring Mejuri’s total funds raised to more than $29 million to date. Others in the new funding round include follow-on backers Felix Capital, BDC Capital, Incite Ventures and Dash Ventures. The company plans to spend its latest financial injection on offline expansion, push beyond its biggest markets Canada and the United States as well as the 33 countries it ships to, and investment in branding and customer experience.

The original story was updated with quotes from Sakkijha and other details of the business.

The Entrepreneurs’ Roundtable Accelerator is today presenting yet another batch of startups to the world at its Demo Day in NYC. ERA has already launched a total of 180 startups which have raised more than $300 million and are collectively valued at more than $2 billion.

This sixteenth class is comprised of 13 companies across a variety of sectors, all of whom have received $100K in investment from the accelerator.

So without any further ado, here’s a look at the startups launching out of ERA today:

Apteo is a platform that helps financial institutions &mash; analysts, equity researchers, asset managers, etc. — make sense of all the data at their fingertips without actually hiring a data scientist. The key features of the product include continuously updated data (on the interval of your choice), automatically cleaned and normalized data, and easy-to-use access to troves of publicly available datasets.

CareSwitch matches home care agencies with qualified professionals. The platform gives agencies a reliable and steady stream of candidates to match supply with demand, and gives home care professionals the chance to work more flexibly across multiple agencies. The platform also manages payroll, benefits and employee records.

Cloudonix is a CRM platform that facilitates and aggregates conversations between businesses and their consumers via voice, text, and video over IP.

Confetti is a product that helps companies with their various events. Event planners can specify the requirements around their event and then be matched with vendors. Confetti also generates proposals for the various vendors and handles the logistics for customers.

Riding the wave of investment in eco-friendly food, HoneyFlower Foods is offering plant-based, grab-and-go meals that are sold both through physical retailers or sold wholesale to offices.

Iterate Labs is a hardware company that has developed the Delta-1 wearable focused on improving workplace safety. The wrist-worn wearable tracks repetitive wrist and arm movement and lets managers track the safety of their employees from the moment they walk out on the floor for the first time.

Maverick Retirement offers customers a special bank account, either as an alternative or a compliment to an existing IRA, that allows those customers to choose their investments in assets such as real estate, technology startups, etc.

Moon is a new payments platform that allows online retailers to accept cryptocurrency for purchases. The Moon browser extension gives users the chance to attach their Coinbase account or other wallet to make transactions in crypto. For now, Moon is only operational on Amazon.com, but the company says it will soon roll out to “any of your favorite ecommerce websites.”

Pawlicy Advisor, a pet insurance broker, allows pet parents to select a plan that makes the most sense for their specific breed of animal and its respective health risks.

Piecewise is looking to make a different in the student debt crisis. The payment platform lets universities and financial institutions lower student loan default rates and manage their loan portfolios. Borrowers can save toward their loan payments via round-ups and auto-save features, as well as refinance their loans.

Scopio is looking to take on Shutterstock with its own platform of high-quality commercial images taken by social media users. The platform looks to offer a steady stream of fresh new images to clients at a fraction of the cost while allowing anyone to submit their own photos and make some extra cash.

Soundmind is a system that lets senior care providers manage and customize voice assistants to better serve their customers. The platform gives seniors the ability to simply ask about their daily schedule, what’s on the menu at dinner, or make a request from the staff. These queries are centralized for the organization’s staff so they can spend less time organizing and more time serving their clients.

Yogi is a tool that helps businesses aggregate and understand all the feedback that comes back about its product. This includes product reviews, customer interviews and survey results, usability tests and more. This information is pulled from all its various sources and translated into actionable insights.

Coursera, an online learning startup that offers free and paid short courses, skills certifications and complete degrees in partnership with universities and businesses, has raised another $103 million to scale out its business into new geographies, subject areas and products — a Series E led by a strategic investor, the Australian online recruitment and course directory provider SEEK Group, with participation from Future Fund and NEA.

Coursera currently offers 3,200 courses and 310 specializations, with partners including Columbia University, Johns Hopkins and the University of Michigan. Some 40 million people have now taken online classes through the startup — a significant jump on the 26 million figure Coursera noted when it last raised money, in 2017 (a $64 million Series D).

Also jumping is Coursera’s valuation, which had been around $800 million and is now “well over” $1 billion, according to a source close to the company.

Coursera’s growth is coming at a key time in the e-learning sector.

Online education has, overall, become an increasingly viable alternative and complement to in-person learning — bolstered by improvements in technology and methodology, demand for skills that hasn’t been met by more traditional channels and the economic challenges posed by higher education for a large number of people.

On one side, there have been some significant consolidations that speak to the opportunity. Just two weeks ago, 2U (which, like Coursera, works with universities to build online degree programs) acquired Trilogy — which provides training and bootcamps primarily for tech skills — for $750 million.

On the other, there have been some significant stumbles. Udacity, another online education startup valued at $1 billion, recently laid off 20 percent of its staff as part of a wider restructuring, with the aim of curbing costs while still expanding its business focused on “nano degrees.”

Coursera’s aim, said CEO Jeff Maggioncalda (who joined the company in 2017), is to steer a course that offers a range of learning alternatives as diverse as the mass market it’s hoping to continue targeting.

“We long ago realised that having a range of learning options, from open, free courses to masters degrees and everything in between such as microcredentials, bachelor’s degrees and certifications, is the way to go,” Maggioncalda said. “We look at that as our product portfolio.”

Coursera had its start by opening up the world of university learning to a wider population by putting courses online; it has more recently moved into working with companies and other organizations to build courses for them and to build courses to help train people in specific vocational areas, such as this program it developed with Google for IT certifications last year, and the health vertical that it introduced in January of this year. That is something it plans to continue developing, too.

“Beyond the nobility of providing great access to higher education to a world of people who otherwise wouldn’t have it, there is another imperative,” Maggioncalda said. “The future of work and learning are converging, and companies are realising that there are a lot of jobs that are getting automated, so finding an inexpensive but high-quality way to retrain is turning out to be a historic challenge. We need to get better at making high-quality education accessible.”

The SEEK investment is coming at a timely moment as a complement to this mission. Maggioncalda notes that Coursera is going to start working more directly on developing what you might think of as the next step after you learn something on its platform, which will be getting a job.

“This investment reflects our commitment to online education, which is enabling the up-skilling and re-skilling of people and is aligned to our purpose of helping people live fulfilling working lives,” said SEEK co-founder and CEO Andrew Bassat in a statement.

He noted that to date, some 190 million people have posted resumes on SEEK, with some 900,000 organizations using the platform to recruit for job openings. “It’s not coincidental that we think they’re a great investment partner,” he said.

But the first steps, Maggioncalda noted, will be working with the companies that are already turning to Coursera to build training programs.

“We absolutely see an opportunity to expand what we are doing with them,” he said. “If we are teaching skills to students, it’s not too hard to imagine us saying to that company or related employers, ‘we can introduce you to people with these skills.’ And you can imagine us doing this with others courses that we teach.” That could mean, for example, offering help with job placement for those paying Coursera to get their master’s or bachelor’s degrees.

That in itself could prove to be an interesting way of luring more students as online learning starts to get more competitive itself — not unlike how universities today are partly evaluated by students based on how helpful it will be to leverage those names when looking for jobs.

Other areas where we may see Coursera developing ahead is in its efforts to add a more diverse range of types of courses to its offering. The Trilogy acquisition by 2U highlights a rising demand for “bootcamps” to learn specific skills to enhance one’s work prospects. The growth of Triplebyte (itself also recently raising money) highlights how there is yet another bridge to be built between education and job hunting, in the form of “tests” to help screen and place the right people with the right job opportunities. And Lambda School has had a strong run so far in its model of offering nine-month, very career focused online training sessions in a variety of coding areas.

“It reinforces that people learning different skills need different environments,” Maggioncalda said. Given the right business model, cyberspace has no boundary, and the same might be said for online education.

During the last quarter, ERP giant SAP (NYSE: SAP) has been in the news on account of the large scale restructuring and management reshuffle announcements. Despite the departures, the company...

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The insurance industry is archaic and offers much room for re-engineering. Kyle discusses how he is going about it. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are...

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The competition is intense for great tech talent, and it’s even harder to find the most qualified people who are also the right fit for your company

This article shares some practical processes that you can add to your human resources function in order to accelerate the programmer pipeline, based on the years I have spent as a hiring focused software engineer at growing startups and now running my own recruiting firm.

Our recruiting strategy is surprisingly simple, and boils down to optimizing various segments of the sourcing funnel: awareness, pageviews, and application submits.

What ties these tactics together, though, is you, your company, what you’re offering, and how you approach the people you want to hire. If you want to build a strong, diverse team, you need to develop a thoughtful, empathetic and proactive approach before you can optimize.

Within the article we cover:

In the article’s appendix, I also provide our company’s 2019 checklist process — eighteen steps that we delegate to manage our sourcing process.

Last week, at TechCrunch’s robotics event at UC Berkeley, we sat down with four VCs who are making a range of bets on robotics companies, from drone technologies to robots whose immediate applications aren’t yet clear. Featuring Peter Barrett of Playground Global, Helen Liang of FoundersX Ventures, Eric Migicovsky of Y Combinator and Andy Wheeler of GV (pictured above), we covered a lot of terrain (no pun intended), including whether last-mile delivery robots make sense and how much robots should be expected to do without human intervention.

We also discussed climate change and how it factors into their bets, and why the many private enterprises focused on creating fully automated vehicles may need to do much more to empower the cities in which they plan to operate. You can find excerpts of our talk below. And for access to the full transcript, become a member of Extra Crunch. Learn more and try it for free.

TC: How do you think about investing in the here and now, versus the future (which is complicated for VCs, given that venture funds need to produce returns within a ten-year window, typically):

PB: One of the challenges with investing in robotics is that robotics companies do tend to take a lot longer to mature than your average enterprise SaaS company. There are some classes of investments that we know the technology works; it’s just a question of commercializing it and bringing it to market, and Canvas [a Playground-backed company that makes autonomous warehouse carts and was just acquired by Amazon] did an extraordinary job of finding a market that existed and had technology in hand that would solve that problem.

There’s other stuff like the amazing work that the folks are doing at Agility [Robotics] with a biped that can operate for many hours in unstructured human environments that today is really, candidly, a research robot, and to reach its long-term aspirations, there’s a whole other set of technologies that we’ll need to develop as the company matures.

We think about blending the stuff that’s very impactful but is going to take a long time because it’s fundamentally a new science and technology that needs to be created, [with] immediate applications of technologies that are proven today, that we’re deploying against real markets.

AW: As for whether we try to build a portfolio where there are exits at different stages, generally, when I’m looking to invest in a robotics thing, I understand that the timeframes can be fairly long, and so what we’re looking for are things that really are going to be very large opportunities — that can generate billion-dollar-plus exits.

TC: A growing number of small last-mile delivery robots has attracted funding. Helen, your firm is an investor in one of these startups, Robby. What’s the appeal?

HL: We look at where we see a pain point in the market. During our team meetings on Fridays, we always use DoorDash. It feels awkward when we order a $100 meal, and the delivery person has driven a long way. We’ll give him a $15, but it’s still [tricky for that person] in terms of economics. If you have a central station for the food delivery, and robots can handle that last-mile delivery, we think that’s a more cost-effective approach.

Robby has partnered with PepsiCo [to delivering snacks to students attending the University of the Pacific in Stockton, Ca.] that makes it more like a vending machine, and we think that’s an interesting market, too. We’ll see how fast adoption will happen.

EM: YC is an investor in Robby as well, and we think of this as kind of the perfect example of how hackers can get into a fairly complex industry. When you look at some robotics and specifically autonomous vehicles, you see extremely large investments going into some of the some of the big players, but then at the same time, you see groups and hackers that are able to use off-the-shelf technology to solve real problems that affect businesses or people, and build services or products that that are valuable. We’ve seen this over and over.

You don’t have to be looking for a large VC investment to compete in the space. It is possible to stay frugal stay nimble and build something on a small scale to demonstrate that you found a problem that people are willing to pay money to solve. Then, if you’re interested, [you can] pursue larger VC investment or not. It’s kind of open right now.

TC: VCs we’ve talked with in the past have suggested that in robotics, they often see cool ideas for which there isn’t necessarily a market or big market need. Is this also your experience?

PB: This is a common pattern where there was some mechanism, some capability of the robot, some feat of dexterity or something [and founders think, ‘That’s really cool, I’m going to make a company out of it.’ But we think about it in terms of, what do you want from the robots? What’s the outcome that everybody agrees is worthwhile? And then, how do you find and build companies to achieve those goals?

One thing we’re struggling with right now is that there’s no real hardware or software platforms. You think about 10 years hence [and] the kinds of things we’ll be investing in, [and it’s] robotics applications that are aggregates of neural networks and some explicit software bound together in some form that can be delivered, so a large enterprise can use an application and not have everybody start from first principles. Because right now, when you built a robotics application, you make all the hardware, you make all the software. All the intellectual and actual capital [money] gets dissipated, building and rebuilding those same things. So robotics applications over time will be investable, much more like the way we invest in software, and that will allow smaller units of creativity to produce useful products.

TC: Andy, how long do you think it’s going to take until we get there?

AW: I think I think we’re making we’re making steady progress on that front. To your earlier question, this space has a lot of folks that are building technology a bit in search of a problem. That’s a common thing in startups generally. I would encourage everybody who’s looking to build a startup in the space is to really find a burning business problem. In the course of solving those [problems], people will build these platforms that Peter was talking about, and we’ll eventually get there in terms of [founders] just having to focus on the application layer.

TC: There are so many buckets: delivery robots, self-driving trucks. Both relate in ways to the overarching problem for our age, which is climate change. How much do you factor climate change into the investing decisions that you make?

PB: When we look at applications and robotics in agricultural, a lot of [our questions are] around how do you deal with a minimum carbon footprint, [and] how you replace workers who are missing. And dealing with climate change will be increasingly be a central thought in what we want from our robots. [After all] what we want from them is the ability to maintain or improve the lifestyles we have without further unwinding the environment.

TC: We talked backstage, and you think we are over-indexing on autonomy as the answer.

PB: When we think about autonomy, it’s not clear how autonomy helps cities. . . There are absolutely applications for autonomy, [including] on a farm or in a logistics environment. I think we still really don’t know how to do Level 5 [which is complete automation, requiring zero human assistance]. And I don’t think we know whether it’s exponentially hard or asymptotically. I think it’s decades before there’s any significant Level 5.

[In the meantime, if] we cared about safety, we’d install roundabouts or lower the blood alcohol limit and not try and make a sentient vehicle that drives on the road the way we do, right?

I’d much rather see having the city collaborate with the vehicles and instrument the city to collaborate with clever vehicles for the benefit of everybody who lives there. But that’s not Level 5 autonomy as the way we think of it

EM: It’s slightly interesting that autonomous vehicles, specifically the individual passenger car, evolved in America, because it’s one of the countries that has the least public transport per capita. And that that’s one of the things that the industry has to acknowledge — that there are other options that can be blended into the transport solutions for cities.

It seems like it might be happening because it’s something that an individual can take somewhat control over. You can’t own a bus, but you can own or [rent] a self-driving car.

PB: Or [an electric] scooter or a bike, right. The future of mobility is going to be a blending of all of these things. But not taking advantage of a logistics platform in a city means you’re kind of doing it the hard way, trying to make a robot to have all the human priors required to drive safely. And it’s just not clear that we know how to do that yet.

TC: Andy, GV is a big investor in Uber. What what’s your thinking? Does the city need to be a kind of central brain in order for these private enterprises to work effectively?

AW: I don’t think it’s a strict requirement at all. We’ve seen success with with self-driving trials where the city is not super involved from an infrastructure perspective, I do think it makes it a lot easier if that’s the case, though.

Pinterest is a great place to find digital art but a terrible place to sell it. The fact that anything online is infinitely copyable makes it tough for artists to establish a sense of scarcity necessary for their work to be perceived as valuable. Yash Nelapati saw this struggle up close as Pinterest’s first employee. Now he has started MakersPlace, where creators can generate a blockchain fingerprint for each of their artworks that proves who made it and lets it be sold as part of a limited edition.

Similar to Etsy, MakersPlace allows artists to sell their creations while the startup takes a 15 percent cut. Collectors receive a non-fungible cryptocurrency token connoting ownership of a limited-edition digital print of the artwork that they can store in their own crypto wallet or in one on MakersPlace. The MakersPlace site officially launches today after a year of beta testing.

“At Pinterest, we noticed that there are millions of digital creators that are spending countless hours creating digital artwork, but they struggle with basic things like attribution,” says MakersPlace co-founder Dannie Chu, who spent six years leading growth engineering at Pinterest. “Their work is getting printed, copied, shared and ultimately they make very little money from it being put online. If you can’t create a sustainable model for digital creators to create, you’re not going to have art.”

If software is eating art, Uncork Capital wants a seat at the dinner table. It has led a $2 million seed round for MakersPlace, joined by Draper Dragon Fund and Abstract Ventures, plus angels from Pinterest, Facebook, Zillow and Coinbase. They see the crypto-tokenized digital photo of a rose that sold for $1 million last year as just the start of a thriving blockchain art market. “That was a light-bulb moment for us. People are actually valuing digital creations like physical creations,” says Chu.

Hiscox estimates there were $4.64 billion in online art sales (though mostly of traditional offline art) in 2018, compared to Art Basel‘s estimate of $67.4 billion in total art sales for the year. MakersPlace could be well-positioned as more art is sold online and more of it becomes truly digital. “MakersPlace has already partnered with thousands of incredible digital artists selling their unique artwork, a testament to the easy-to-use platform they’ve built,” said Uncork Managing Partner Jeff Clavier. “They’ve also created a seamless and fun, one-stop-shop for discovering and collecting digital artwork.”

The startup’s technology is designed so artists fingerprinting their work don’t need extensive blockchain experience. They just upload it to MakersPlace before sharing it elsewhere, verify their identity through an integration with Civic where they take a photo holding their driver’s license, and an Ethereum-based token is generated with the creator’s name, the art’s name, its impression and edition number and the date. An Ethereum token name, ID, contract ID and creator’s ID are all assigned so there’s a permanent record of authorship.

Art collectors can browse MakersPlace’s categories for animation, photography, drawings, pixel art and 3D creations; explore recent and popular uploads; or search by specific artist or art piece. They can buy art with a credit card or with Ether; use, display or distribute it for non-commercial purchases; or resell it on the secondary market. MakersPlace assumes no ownership of the art it hosts.

One major concern is that artists unaware of MakersPlace might have their works fraudulently fingerprinted and attributed to a thief. Chu says that “We use a mix of website, email and identity verification services to do this (we use civic.com). This is a strong deterrent to uploading and establishing attribution for stolen digital creations.” But you could still imagine the headache for less-tech-savvy artists if their creative identity gets hijacked.

There’s plenty of other blockchain entrants into the art world, from Blockchain Art Collective‘s NFC stickers for registering physical art to artist tipping platform ArtByte. Many startups are trying to solve the art attribution problem, including Monegraph, KnownOrigin, Bitmark, CodexProtocol, Artory and more. MakersPlace will have to hope its talent, Silicon Valley funding and focus on digital works will differentiate it from the pack.

As we move to a culture where so many of the things that represent our identity, from photographs to music, have become endlessly replicable, the concept of possession has lost its meaning. Yet we’re still hoarders deep down, scared of not having enough. “Collecting is an innate human behavior, but as people become more urban, mobile and minimalist, physical keepsakes have become less appealing,” Nelapati concludes. “Our mission is to create a platform that incentivizes creators by giving them ownership over the work they produce.”

[Featured Image: bunny style by Chocotoy]

Last year the Gosu.ai startup, which has developed an AI assistant to help gamers play smarter and improve their skills, raised $1.9 million. Using machine learning, it analyzes matches and makes personal recommendations, and allows gamers to be taught by a virtual assistant.

Because they have this virtual assistant they can now do some interesting research. For the first time ever, we can actually peer over the shoulder of a gamer and find out what makes them good or not. The findings are fascinating.

Gosu.ai surveyed nearly 5,000 gamers playing Dota 2 to understand which factors separate successful and less-successful gamers.

They found that although only 4 percent of respondents to the survey were women, it turned out that those women that responded had a 44 percent higher win rate on average than the men.

Does this suggest women are better gamers than men? This isn’t a scientific study, but it is a tantalizing idea…

The study also found that the higher your skills in foreign languages, the slower your skills improve. They also found that people without a university degree, people who don’t travel and people who play sports increase their game ratings faster. Similarly, having a job also slows growth. Well, duh.

Gosu.ai’s main competitors are Mobalytics, Dojo Madness and MoreMMR. But the main difference is that these competitors make analytics of raw statistics, and find the generalized weak spots in comparison with other players, giving general recommendations. Gosu.ai analyzes the specific actions of each player, down to the movement of their mouse, to cater direct recommendations for the player. So it’s more like a virtual assistant than a training platform.

The startup is funded by Runa Capital, Ventech and Sistema_VC. Previously, the startup was backed by Gagarin Capital.

With the latest desktop version of the Brave browser, users can now opt-in to the Brave Ads program.

Brave is an ad-blocking web browser startup led by Brendan Eich, creator of the JavaScript programming language and former Mozilla CEO. He’s long maintained that the vision is “bigger than an ad blocker,” with a goal of finding new ways to compensate online publishers.

Brave Ads are a crucial part of that vision. The company says users who choose to participate in the program will receive 70 percent of the revenue generated by the ads they see. Their rewards will take the form of Basic Attention Tokens (BAT), a cryptocurrency that the users can, in turn, share with the creators of the content that they’re watching.

Eich told me that the browser is set by default to donate a user’s BAT at the end of the month to their most-visited sites, but the company also plans to let users exchange BAT for rewards like hotel rooms and restaurant vouchers (through the TAP Network created by the startup Hooch). They should also, eventually, be able to cash out with regular “fiat currency” through exchanges like Coinbase and Uphold.

Brave has been testing ads since January, and Eich said that more than 40 percent of desktop users have been opting in. Certainly, some Brave users may simply want to use the browser for its ad-blocking capabilities, but he suggested that the more “ecologically minded ones” will want to participate, rather than getting a “free ride.”

“A lot of users don’t want to cash out [when they receive BAT],” he added. “It’s not a huge amount of value for most people, so they may prefer to just use it to give back. And that’s the real idea: A browser with the user steering it is replacing the ad tech complex.”

The ads are also supposed to protect user privacy. There is a degree of targeting, but Eich said all the data and “decision-making” happens on the device, so Brave and the advertiser never get access to it. (Brave does aggregate anonymized, high-level data so that advertisers can see who viewed their campaigns.)

The ads appear in the browser and don’t replace a previously blocked ad. Brave says the ads are coming from partners like Vice, Home Chef, ConsenSys, Ternio BlockCard, MyCrypto and eToro.

The company also has plans to work with publishers that want to run ads when their site is viewed on the browser, with the revenue then split between Brave, the publisher and the user.

Aaron Patzer launched Mint to help consumers organize their finances. Now he’s raised $5.2 million from investors to launch Vital to bring that consumer-focused mindset to emergency rooms and hospitals to help them organize patient flow.

Patzer co-founded the company with his brother-in-law Justin Schrager, a doctor of emergency medicine at Emory University Hospital. The serial entrepreneur invested a million dollars and two years of peer-reviewed academic study and technical research and development to create Vital, according to a company statement.

Investors in the seed round include First Round Capital and DFJ, Bragiel Brothers, Meridian Street Capital, Refactor Capital and SV Angel. Alongside angel investors Vivek Garipalli, the chief executive of CloverHealth and Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg, the founders of Flatiron Health, these investors are hoping that Patzer can repeat in the healthcare industry the magic he brought to financial services.

“The HITECH* Act was well-intentioned, but now hospitals rely on outdated, slow, and inefficient software – and nowhere is it more painful than in the emergency room,” said Patzer, in a statement. “Doctors and nurses often put more time into paperwork and data entry than patient care. Vital uses smart, easy tech to reverse that, cutting wait times in half, reducing provider burnout and saving hospitals millions of dollars.”

Vital isn’t so much replacing the current system of electronic health records as providing a software integration layer that makes those systems easier to use, according to the company.

It’s basically a two-sided application with a survey for incoming patients. An admitting nurse begins the record and as a next step a patient receives a text to add details like height, weight, recent surgeries, medications and allergies, just as they would on a paper form. Patients can also submit a photo of themselves and their insurance card to expedite the process.

The information is then fed back into a tracking board that doctors and nurses use to prioritize care. A triage nurse then reviews the data and affirms that it is correct by taking vital signs and assessing patients.

All of that data is fed into an algorithm that analyzes the available information to predict a course of treatment and help staff in the emergency room prioritize who needs care first.

Vital’s selling the service to emergency rooms with a starting sticker price of $10,000 per month.

“Vital successfully built software with a modern, no-training-required interface, while also meeting HIPAA compliance. It’s what people expect from consumer software, but rarely see in healthcare,” says First Round investor Josh Kopelman, who’s taking a seat on the company’s board of directors. “Turning massive amounts of complex and regulated data into clean, easy products is what Mint.com did for money, and we’re proud to back a solution that’ll do the same in life and death situations.”

In some ways, Vital looks like the patient-facing admissions side of a coin that companies like Qventus have raised tens of millions of dollars to solve at the systems level.