French startup ReachFive wants to become Stripe for account management. The company just raised a $10 million Series A funding round led by CapHorn Invest, with Dawn Capital and Ventech also participating — investment bank Avolta Partners handled the fundraising process.

When you buy something on an e-commerce website or app, chances are those companies asked you to create an account before entering your address and payment information. ReachFive creates the login module for dozens of e-commerce and transactional companies.

This isn’t just about storing an email and password. ReachFive lets you do interesting things with your customer database. For instance, ReachFive works across different channels.

If you shop on L’Occitane’s website and then purchase cosmetics in a store, they can find your account. This way, you get accurate information about your customers. ReachFive complies with GDPR.

ReachFive also supports social logins, such as Facebook Connect or “Sign in with Google.” The company also supports two-factor authentication. And, of course, you can integrate ReachFive with other services, such as a CRM, a CMS, a recommendation engine, etc.

If you’re creating a brand from scratch, you might rely heavily on newsletters and content. You can let people sign up to the newsletter without creating a full-fledged account. They can create an account when they make their first purchase later down the road — ReachFive will reconcile profiles.

Forty companies are using ReachFive, including Boulanger, Etam Group, L’Occitane, Hachette Group, Engie and La Redoute. The startup manages 40 million user accounts overall. The company uses a software-as-a-service pricing model, and you can be sure that each contract must be quite valuable.

ReachFive proves that an omnichannel strategy doesn’t just mean that you should merge your inventories and catalogs across your online and offline platforms. It also means that you should be able to provide a unified customer experience by understanding a customer from start to finish.

Big retail companies have already unified their user accounts — when you buy an Apple product in an Apple store, you can see the receipt in your online account. But ReachFive could become an essential widget for all mid-tier e-commerce platforms.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s say a company in your portfolio has reached a certain level of critical mass, let’s say $50 million in revenue. They want to acquire other SaaS companies that may be...

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Redpoint Ventures has led a $65 million Series B in Cityblock, a healthcare company focused on providing improved care to low-income neighborhoods.

The business launched roughly 18 months ago out of Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs, an urban innovation incubator known for projects like mobility data startup Coord, which itself raised a $5 million round in October.

“We’re a tech-enabled services company focused on caring for a population that has been traditionally overlooked by the innovation community and generally underserved across healthcare,” co-founder and chief executive officer Iyah Romm told TechCrunch. “We believe we can fundamentally redefine the way that health services are built across the country for low-income populations. These are populations that have never been prioritized.”

Romm has spent his entire career in the public health sector. Prior to joining Sidewalk Labs as an entrepreneur-in-residence in 2017, he spent one year as the chief transformation officer of the Commonwealth Care Alliance, a nonprofit medical care delivery organization.

Cityblock provides personalized medical and behavioral health and social services across a growing number of clinics on the East Coast. The company will use the investment to open additional clinics and continue the development of its core platform, Commons. The care delivery platform helps care workers collaborate and stay up to date on patients, with real-time hospital admission alerts to tools for tracking treatment progress.

Cityblock opened its first clinic, or “neighborhood hub,” in Brooklyn, New York after forging a partnership with EmblemHealth, a New York neighborhood health insurance business. They’ve since expanded to Connecticut via a partnership with ConnectiCare, a Connecticut insurance provider. Cityblock will open clinics in North Carolina later this year. Cityblock’s services come at no additional costs to members covered by partner insurance businesses.

The startup’s hope is to get these low-income demographics regular access to more affordable care. Preventative care, after all, is a whole lot cheaper than emergency room visits.

“People end up going to the ER when problems are really bad, for conditions that can be managed,” Redpoint partner and newly appointed Cityblock board member Elliot Geidt told TechCrunch. “There are 75 million people on Medicaid alone and a good portion of these people are living in the inner cities. It’s a problem that has a scope larger than most things that we see in the venture community. The big problem with this population is the existing healthcare system doesn’t work for them, it falls short on so many levels.”

New investors 8VC, Echo Health Ventures and StartUp Health also participated in the latest round, as did existing investors including Sidewalk Labs, Thrive Capital, Maverick Ventures, Town Hall Ventures and EmblemHealth.

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Conversational AI and the use of chatbots have been through multiple cycles of hype and disillusionment in the tech world. You know the story: first you get a launch from the likes of Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Google or any number of other companies, and then you get the many examples of how their services don’t work as intended at the slightest challenge. But time brings improvements and more focused expectations, and today a startup that has been harnessing all those learnings is announcing funding to take to the next level its own approach to conversational AI.

Rasa, which has built an open-source platform for third parties to design and manage their own conversational (text or voice) AI chatbots, is today announcing that it has raised $13 million in a Series A round of funding led by Accel, with participation from Basis Set Ventures, Greg Brockman (co-founder & CTO OpenAI), Daniel Dines (founder & CEO UiPath) and Mitchell Hashimoto (co-founder & CTO Hashicorp).

Rasa was founded in Berlin, but with this round, it will be moving its headquarters to San Francisco, with a plan to hire more people there in sales, marketing and business development; and to continue its tech development with its roadmap including plans to expand the platform to cover images, too.

The company was founded 2.5 years ago, by co-founder/CEO Alex Weidauer’s own admission “when chatbot hype was at its peak.”

Rasa itself was not immune to it, too: “Everyone wanted to automate conversations, and so we set out to build something, too,” he said. “But we quickly realised it was extremely hard to do and that the developer tools were just not there yet.”

Rather than posing an insurmountable roadblock, the shortcomings of chatbots became the problem that Rasa set out to fix.

Alan Nichols, the co-founder who is now the CTO, is an AI PhD, not in natural language as you might expect, but in machine learning.

“What we do is more is address this as a mathematical, machine learning problem rather than one of language,” Weidauer said. Specifically, that means building a model that can be used by any company to tap its own resources to train their bots, in particular with unstructured information, which has been one of the trickier problems to solve in conversational AI.

At a time when many have raised concerns about who might “own” the progress of artificial intelligence, and specifically the data that goes into building these systems, Rasa’s approach is a refreshing one.

Typically, when an organization wants to build an AI chatbot either to interact with customers or to run something in the back end of their business, their developers most commonly opt for third-party cloud APIs that have restrictions on how they can be customized, or they build their own from scratch — but if the organization is not already a large tech company, it will be challenged to have the human or other resources to execute this.

Rasa underscores an emerging trend for a strong third contender. The company has built a stack of tools that it has open-sourced, meaning that anyone can (and thousands of developers do) use it for free, with a paid enterprise version that includes extra tools, including customer support, testing and training tools, and production container deployment. (It’s priced depending on size of organization and usage.)

Importantly, whichever package is used, the tools run on a company’s own training data; and the company can ultimately host their bots wherever they choose, which have been some of the unique selling points for those using Rasa’s platform, when they are less interested in working with organizations that might also be competitors.

Adobe’s new AI assistant for searching on Adobe Stock, which has some 100 million images, was built on Rasa.

“We wanted to give our users an AI assistant that lets them search with natural language commands,” said Brett Butterfield, director of software development at Adobe, in a statement. “We looked at several online services, and, in the end, Rasa was the clear choice because we were able to host our own servers and protect our user’s data privacy. Being able to automate full conversations and the fact it is open source were key elements for us.”

Other customers include Parallon and TalkSpace, Zurich and Allianz, Telekom and UBS.

Open source has become big business in the last several years, and so a startup that’s built an AI platform that has a very direct application in the enterprise built on it presents an obvious attraction for VCs.

“Automation is the next battleground for the enterprise, and while this is a very difficult space to win, especially for unstructured information like text and voice, we are confident Rasa has what it takes given their impressive adoption by developers,” said Andrei Brasoveanu, partner at Accel, in a statement.

“Existing solutions don’t let in-house developer teams control their own automation destiny. Rasa is applying commercial open source software solutions for AI environments similarly to what open source leaders such as Cloudera, Mulesoft, and Hashicorp have done for others.”

Armis is helping companies protect IoT devices on the network without using an agent, and it’s apparently a problem that is resonating with the market, as the startup reports 700 percent growth in the last year. That caught the attention of investors, who awarded them a $65 million Series C investment to help keep accelerating that growth.

Sequoia Capital led the round with help from new investors Insight Venture Partners and Intermountain Ventures. Returning investors Bain Capital Ventures, Red Dot Capital Partners and Tenaya Capital also participated. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $112 million, according to the company.

The company is solving a hard problem around device management on a network. If you have devices where you cannot apply an agent to track them, how do you manage them? Nadir Izrael, company co-founder and CTO, says you have to do it very carefully because even scanning for ports could be too much for older devices and they could shut down. Instead, he says that Armis takes a passive approach to security, watching and learning and understanding what normal device behavior looks like — a kind of behavioral fingerprinting.

“We observe what devices do on the network. We look at their behavior, and we figure out from that everything we need to know,” Izrael told TechCrunch. He adds, “Armis in a nutshell is a giant device behavior crowdsourcing engine. Basically, every client of Armis is constantly learning how devices behave. And those statistical models, those machine learning models, they get merged into master models.”

Whatever they are doing, they seem to have hit upon a security pain point. They announced a $30 million Series B almost exactly a year ago, and they went back for more because they were growing quickly and needed the capital to hire people to keep up.

That kind of growth is a challenge for any startup. The company expects to double its 125-person work force before the end of the year, but the company is working to put systems in place to incorporate those new people and service all of those new customers.

The company plans to hire more people in sales and marketing, of course, but they will concentrate on customer support and building out partnership programs to get some help from systems integrators, ISVs and MSPs, who can do some of the customer hand-holding for them.

According to a Global Market Insights report, the global video conferencing market is estimated to grow more than 10% annually to $20 billion by 2024. The growth is driven by continued globalization...

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Arihant Patni: I just had a breakfast session with a bunch of corporate venture folks. They’re all talking about how they want to evangelize startups, invest in them, work with them, and...

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Lemonade, the insurance startup founded by Daniel Schreiber and Shai Wininger, has today announced a $300 million Series D financing led by the SoftBank Group, with participation from Allianz, General Catalyst, GV, OurCrowd and Thrive Capital.

Lemonade uses an AI-powered bot to digitize the insurance-buying experience for renters and home owners. Users simply download the app and answer a few questions before getting a quote, which starts at $5/month but can surely go up based on a number of factors, including how much personal property one owns.

The company has also differentiated itself from traditional insurance providers by integrating a giveback system directly into the product. Lemonade takes a fixed slice of users’ monthly payment as revenue, and sets the rest aside for claims. Unclaimed premiums go to the user’s charity of choice.

The company has grown significantly since launch, last year hitting $57 million in revenue. Co-founder and CEO Schreiber says the company is on track to do $100 million in revenue this year, and that they’ve sold 500,000 policies to date.

The investment is meant to help Lemonade expand beyond the U.S., with sights set on Europe as a first step. Schreiber says that the company is also looking to hire in customer support, claims, engineering and data science.

“Our biggest challenge is managing the growth,” said Schreiber. “How do you create an organization that has to constantly morph? The organization we were two years ago and the one we are now have very little in common. We went from one product in one state to now thinking about multiproduct across continents and five office locations. How do you do that without straining the system and continue to provide good, high quality service?”

This latest round of funding brings total financing for Lemonade to $480 million.

Trint, the London-based transcription startup founded by Emmy-winning journalist Jeff Kofman, has raised $4.5 million in Series A funding.

The round includes follow-on investment from Horizons Lab, the Hong Kong-based seed fund operated by the managers of Horizons Ventures, with participation from TechNexus, and The Associated Press.

It brings total funding for Trint to $7.8 million since the company’s founding in December 2014. Original backers include Google Digital News Innovation Fund and the Knight Enterprise Fund.

Counting some of the world’s largest media organizations as customers — including The Associated Press, Vice News, The Washington Post and Der Spiegel — Trint uses machine learning and speech-to-text technology to automate transcribing, which is a significant pain-point for journalists and other content producers, such as video makers.

The web-based software also combines an audio/video player and text editor, with the outputted transcription synced to the audio player’s playhead. This then makes it easy to manually correct any mistranscriptions, which, in turn, helps Trint get smarter. There’s an iPhone app too, for mobile transcription of phone calls and recordings.

I’ve used the software a number of times in my own work and found the automation to be fairly accurate. However, as with similar systems, it is quite dependent on the audio quality you feed into it.

On that note, Trint says it will use the additional funding to enhance the AI transcription software and enable customers to extract more value from recorded audio and video and unlock what it describes as “the emerging voice economy.”

Over the next few months, the company will launch collaboration features to suit the workflow of large teams working with audio and video. The idea is to enable teams to work together on editing transcripts and publishing content.

Trint will also release a new video player with interactive transcript features so recorded content can be “searchable, discoverable, and shareable” online.

“We’ve created Trint to go far beyond automated transcription, building the world’s first enterprise product for managing the workflow of the spoken word,” says Kofman. “Trint is focused on serving the needs of video production, brands, news organizations and researchers, allowing them to unlock the value of the spoken word like never before.”

Meanwhile, since launch Trint has grown from four to 45 employees. This includes opening a North American headquarters in Toronto, where seven employees are posted.

Shedul, the online booking platform for salons and spas, has raised $20 million in Series B investment, valuing the company at $105 million.

The round was led by Paris headquartered VC Partech, with participation from Berlin-based Target Global, Dubai-based BECO Capital and New York’s FJ Labs. In addition, a personal investment was made by entrepreneur Niklas Östberg, founder and CEO of Delivery Hero.

I also understand the fundraise was oversubscribed, and on top of the $20 million included $3 million on secondary funding. The Series B brings the total amount raised by Shedul to $32 million to date.

Launched in 2015, Shedul describes itself as a “SaaS-enabled marketplace” for salons and spas globally. Its core — and free product — is a SaaS designed to help salons and spas manage their day-to-day sales and operations. Features include managing bookings, point-of-sale, customer records, inventory and financial reporting.

Running in tandem is the more recently launched Fresha.com, a B2C marketplace for salons and spas. The idea is to enable merchants using the free SaaS to run their businesses to also be able to connect to consumers online. The consumer-facing mobile app and website supports online bookings and automated marketing, including via integrations with Instagram, Facebook and Google.

In other words, come for the free SaaS and stay for the revenue-generating marketplace — which is how Shedul also generates revenue through taking a commission on each booking.

Explains Nick Miller, Shedul co-founder and chief of product: “The market is highly competitive, crowded with legacy software providers who charge excessive fees to simply access their products. We’ve re-invented the business model by offering our business software totally free of charge, and instead monetise online bookings made through our marketplace. This strategy helps us consolidate the industry, building up a vast global network of merchants for our marketplace.”

To that end, Shedul is disclosing that 8 million appointments are booked on its platform each month, at a value of more than $270 million. Growth in active merchants is expanding at an average rate of 20 percent quarter-on-quarter. The current customer base of merchants spans more than 120 countries, mainly in the U.S., U.K., Australia and Canada.

The company says it is on track to process $6 billion worth of appointment bookings by the end of 2019. “We solved the chicken and egg problem of reaching marketplace liquidity, letting us rapidly scale and monetise the network,” adds Miller.

Today InVision announced even deeper integrations with Jira, letting users embed actual InVision prototypes right within a Jira ticket. The company also announced the Jira app for InVision Studio, letting designers in Studio see interactive Jira tickets in real time.

InVision has already had lighter integrations with Atlassian products, including Jira, Confluence and Trello. It’s also worth noting that Atlassian participated in InVision’s $115 million Series F funding round.

The partnership makes sense. Atlassian provides a parallel product to InVision, except instead of serving designers, Atlassian serves engineers.

But it brings up an interesting challenge for InVision, last valued at $1.9 billion. The company went from creating its own market with a paid prototyping and collaboration tool to competing with giants and startups alike as it introduced new products.

InVision Studio, for instance, is meant to compete with the likes of Adobe XD, Sketch, and Figma, among others.

At the same time, InVision’s strategy has always been to become a connective tissue for the broader design landscape. CEO Clark Valberg has said in the past that he sees InVision becoming the Salesforce of the design world, with a broad array of partnerships and integrations across the industry to handle each, nuanced fraction of the process in a single, fluid place.

“Up until now we’ve been a fairly horizontal player,” said VP of Product Mike Davidson. “We created the market for prototyping. There was no paid market for a prototyping tool until InVision came along. Now that you see us provide a more vertical stack of tools, we don’t want to lose the great thing we’ve built with the InVision Prototyping tool. It’s been more popular than we could have ever imagined.”

Davidson added that InVision now serves 100 of the Fortune 100 companies.

And since its launch in 2011, InVision has maintained that original strategic course of staying open, particularly with Atlassian. But InVision isn’t just friendly with Atlassian. The company also introduced an App Store and Asset Store in InVision Studio (partnerships include Slack, Dribbble, and Getty), with plans to launch a developer API so anyone can build apps for InVision Studio. Plus, InVision has made a handful of acquisitions, and launched the Design Forward Fund, which allocates $5 million toward investing in design startups.

VP of Partnerships and Community Mike Davidson believes that balancing this open garden philosophy with the desire to provide the very best products across the entire process (automatically putting InVision in competition with other design startups) is one of the company’s greatest challenges.

“We want to provide a first-cclass experience from beginning to end but we also want to provide a system that’s open enough where you can use your tool of choice for any one of the particular functions,” said Davidson. “It’s a difficult balance. We want to allow for designers and developers to choose which tools they use for whatever job they’re trying to do, but we also want to be the best choice for each one of those functions.”

Bump, the Y Combinator-backed marketplace for streetwear, is announcing that it has raised $7.5 million in Series A funding.

Bump’s Jack Ryder told me that even before starting the company, he and his co-founder Sam Howarth were active in buying and selling streetwear and sneakers — but he admitted that it took several tries before the startup found the right model. (He described a previous iteration, involving a reverse marketplace where people post the items they’re interested in buying, as “the world’s worst idea.”)

Now, however, Ryder said Bump has nearly 2 million registered users. It allows them to buy and sell jackets, T-shirts, sneakers and more among themselves. They can sort through the marketplace based on brand, color and size, and can chat one-on-one or in groups.

The startup relies on moderators and crowdsourcing to determine when a listing looks fake — apparently there have been issues with less than 2 percent of listings in the app, and Ryder said most of the time it’s just young, inexperienced sellers “who didn’t understand how to ship the item.”

Ryder sees Bump’s social side as the real opportunity for growth. While he said the startup still has “tons of room in streetwear to keep going,” he suggested that the “bigger and more important mission” is to turn online shopping into “a multi-player experience.”

“There’s tons of places where you can buy streetwear online … but the real unique thing about Bump was the social side,” he said. “The average age of our users is 15 years old — that’s actually way younger than the demographic of people interested in sneakers and streetwear. The problem we’re solving isn’t making it easier to buy streetwear; it’s how teenagers, how Gen Z shops with their friends online.”

Ryder said that when he was at YC, he was told to shy away from the idea of social shopping, because there’s “almost like a graveyard” of failed startups. In his view, however, those startups were just “adding a like button or adding a follow button,” rather than really bringing the social and shopping experiences together.

Meanwhile, Instagram and other social networks have been adding shopping capabilities, but he said they face the need to juggle different kinds of content and users.

“We think people are getting a way better shopping experience [on Bump], just because it’s a marketplace first,” Ryder said.

With the new round, Bump plans to relocate from New York to London, where it already employs some contractors, and where Ryder and Howarth were initially based.

The funding was led by e.ventures, with the firm’s Brendan Wales joining the Bump board. Kleiner Perkins, Y Combinator and undisclosed angel investors also participated.

“Having been early investors in both Farfetch and TheRealReal, we have seen firsthand how luxury and streetwear have converged over the past five years,” said Wales said in a statement. “Bump is at the intersection of both, with a social product that enables Gen Z buyers and sellers of high-end streetwear to transact globally in a peer-to-peer fashion. Jack and Sam of Bump, exemplify founder authenticity for this category, and we are grateful to be partnering with the entire team going forward.”

Online used car startup Shift Technologies has tacked on another $40 million in equity funding, hired a new COO with Amazon and Enjoy roots and scaled up its engineering staff — all in the past several months — as the company aims to double its revenue this year.

The recent activity, along with what executives have told TechCrunch is a diligent focus on unit economics, is all directed toward a larger objective to take the company public sometime in 2021.

Shift, which is based in San Francisco, serves car buyers and sellers. The company, founded in 2013, has built a software platform that lets customers shop for cars, get financing and schedule test drives. Car owners can use the platform to sell their vehicle, as well. Shift says any car it buys must pass a “rigorous” 150+ point inspection.

Shift generated $135 million in revenues in 2018. The company is projecting revenues between $220 million and $240 million in 2019, Shift co-CEO Toby Russell told TechCrunch.

An IPO is an aspirational goal, but one both Russell and founder George Arison believe is achievable. They both pointed to Carvana, an online used car company that went public in 2017.

In just a few years, Niantic has evolved from internal side project into an independent industry trailblazer. Having reached tremendous scale in such a short period of time, Niantic acts as a poignant crash course for founders and company builders. As our EC-1 deep-dive into the company shows, lessons from the team’s experience building the Niantic’s product offering remain just as fresh as painful flashbacks to the problems encountered along the way.

As we did for our Patreon EC-1, we’ve poured through every analysis we could find on Niantic and have compiled a supplemental list of resources and readings that are particularly useful for getting up to speed on the company.

Reading time for this article is about 9.5 minutes. It is part of the Extra Crunch EC-1 on Niantic. Feature illustration by Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch.

I. Background: The Story of Niantic

Google-Incubated Niantic, Maker of Ingress, Stepping Out on Its Own | August 2015 | In August of 2015, Niantic announced that it would spin out from Google and become an independent company. As discussed in WSJ’s coverage of the news, Niantic looked at the spin out as a way to accelerate growth and collaborate with the broader entertainment ecosystem.

Uber is reportedly making its S-1 publicly available tomorrow, according to Reuters. According to the IPO paperwork, Uber will sell around $10 billion worth of stock, Reuters sources say. If true, Uber’s IPO would be one of the G.O.A.T. (greatest of all time) in the tech industry since Alibaba’s 2014 IPO.

While previous reports have pegged Uber’s valuation at around $120 billion, Uber is reportedly seeking a valuation of between $90 billion and $100 billion. That decrease is reportedly influenced by Lyft’s performance on the public market. Still, that valuation is higher than its last valuation of $76 billion following a funding round.

The expected arrival of the S-1 tomorrow puts Uber on track to begin its IPO roadshow at the end of this month, and list on the New York Stock Exchange in early May. TechCrunch has independently learned Uber is indeed expected to list next month.

We’ve reached out to Uber and will update this story if we hear back.

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to ask you something based on what we just talked about with your background as the head of platforms at Salesforce.com. My assessment is that there are probably a...

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Last year, Hadoop services providers Cloudera (NYSE: CLDR) and Hortonworks merged under the Cloudera umbrella. The $5.2 billion merger was completed earlier this year. The combined entity announced...

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Sramana Mitra: You were okay with them coming to you with a business model hypothesis or a use case hypothesis, but not necessarily a completely validated use case hypothesis? Arihant Patni: Yes,...

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