Expanse, a six-year-old, San Francisco-based company that helps its clients understand and monitor what it calls their “global internet attack surface,” has received a $70 million vote of confidence from its earlier backers, as well as some notable individual investors.

Previous investor TPG Growth led the Series C round, with participation from other earlier investors that include NEA, IVP and Founders Fund. But the company also drew checks directly from Founders Fund co-founder Peter Thiel, Michael Dell, former IBM CEO Sam Palmisano, media entrepreneur Arianna Huffington and Turner Enterprise CEO Taylor Glover.

Asked if Thiel has played a role in making introductions — Thiel famously advised Donald Trump leading up to his election as president, and Thiel’s former chief of staff, Michael Kratsios, is now the country’s chief technology officer — Junio says that all of Expanse’s investors have helped in making customer introductions and pours water on any suggestion that Thiel has done special favors for the company.

Meanwhile, though the company is known for its work in helping customers identify security risks they don’t know about on their networks — like an IoT device that hasn’t been patched — it’s now going after adjacent problems that are bigger-spend problems, including looking at its customers’ critical suppliers to be sure that they aren’t introducing vulnerabilities, including across their commercial cloud providers and co-hosting facilities.

Eventually, it’s easy to see a day when Expanse sells some of the aggregated data it’s seeing, perhaps on a sector by sector basis, though Junio says that Expanse “isn’t going in that direction” currently. For now, he says, the biggest trend that’s driving the business today is the digital transformation of every type of company, which is resulting in plenty of insecurity. As more businesses move to the cloud, there is always the danger that employees — their own or those acquired through mergers — won’t always know or follow policies, and that they’ll move sensitive data where they should not.

That it’s a trend with no end in sight goes a long way in explaining the momentum of Expanse. Already, the company has 150 employees across offices in San Francisco, Washington, DC, New York and Atlanta. With its newest round — a sum that brings Expanse’s total funding to $135 million altogether — the plan is partly to move into new international markets beyond where it already operates. Those markets include the U.K., Canada, Australia and Japan.

Labelbox, a provider of services to create, manage and maintain data sets for machine learning applications, has raised $10 million in a new round of funding.

The financing came from Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI-focused venture fund, with participation from previous investors Kleiner Perkins, First Round Capital and Sumon Sadhu, an angel investor.

Labelbox manages the process of outsourcing data labeling for organizations and provides toolkits for companies or organizations to manage the data they’re receiving and ensuring the quality of that data, according to chief executive Manu Sharma.

For the Labelbox founders — Sharma; Dan Rasmuson, the company’s chief technology officer; and Brian Rieger, the chief operating officer — the tools they developed are simply an extension of the services they’d needed at their previous employers — companies like DroneDeploy, Planet Labs and Boeing.

Financing from the round will be used to double the size of its team from 11 employees to 22, and build out its sales and marketing teams.

Labelbox counts around 50 customers for its service and charges them based on the volume of data that companies upload and the breadth of services they use, Sharma said. Some named customers include FLIR Systems, Lytx, Airbus, Genius Sports and KeepTruckin.

As we’d reported when Labelbox launched from stealth last year, anyone can use the company’s toolkit for free. Companies are charged once they hit a certain usage threshold. Lytx, for instance, uses Labelbox for its DriveCam, a system installed on half a million trucks with cameras that use AI to detect unsafe driver behavior so they can be coached to improve. And the media and publishing giant Conde Nast is using Labelbox to match runway fashion to related items in their archive of content.

“Labelbox substantially reduces model development times and empowers data science teams to build great machine learning applications,” said Sharma in a statement. “With the new funding, Labelbox will continue to double down on bringing data labeling infrastructure to the machine learning teams with powerful automation, collaboration, and enterprise-grade features.”

Gradient Ventures was interested enough in the technology to invest, and sees promise in the company’s ability to support the development of machine learning tools globally.

“Labelbox is well-positioned to fuel the industrialization of machine learning across many sectors, such as manufacturing, transportation and healthcare. In doing so, they will unlock the potential of AI for companies across the globe,” said Anna Patterson, founder and managing partner at Gradient Ventures.

UpCodes wants to fix one of the building industry’s biggest headaches by streamlining code compliance. But the Y Combinator-backed startup now faces a copyright lawsuit filed against it by the International Code Council, the nonprofit organization that develops the code used or adopted in building regulations by all 50 states.

The case may have ramifications beyond the building industry, including for compliance technology in other sectors and even individuals who want to reproduce the law. At its core are several important questions: Is it possible to copyright the law or text that carries the weight of law? Because laws and codes are often written by private individuals or groups instead of legislators, what rights do they continue to have over their work? Several relevant cases, including ones involving building codes, have been decided by different circuits in the United States Court of Appeals, which means the UpCodes lawsuit may potentially be heard by the Supreme Court.

Brothers Scott and Garrett Reynolds founded UpCodes in 2016. While working as an architect, Scott says he realized how laborious code compliance is for builders, who are required by law to follow codes that determine things like the height of handrails from the ground, minimum width of openings for bedroom windows, placement of light switches or how many electrical outlets to have in a hallway.

These details are important to ensure buildings are safe and accessible and an oversight may subject builders and property owners to legal penalties, fines and costly rebuilding. Firms that can afford to do so hire code consultants, but on an industry-wide level, the process of code compliance has been cited as a key reason for reduced productivity in the construction industry and rising home prices.

Scott decided to leave architecture to develop tools that would simplify the process, and was joined by his brother Garrett, then a software engineer at construction management software company PlanGrid. The two completed Y Combinator’s accelerator program in 2017 and so far have announced $785,000 in funding from angel investors, Y Combinator and Foundation Capital.

UpCodes’ first product, an online database, gives free access to codes, code updates and local amendments from 32 states, as well as New York City. For building professionals and others who want more advanced search tools and collaboration features, UpCodes sells individual and team subscriptions. In 2018, UpCodes released its second product, called UpCodes AI. Described as a “spellcheck for buildings,” the plug-in scans 3D models created with building information modeling (BIM) data and highlights potential errors in real time.

Just as technology has dramatically streamlined the compliance process in other highly regulated sectors, including finance and healthcare, Scott and Garrett Reynolds say tools like UpCodes’ can increase productivity in the building industry. The startup currently has more than 200,000 monthly active users, and has served over 10 million page views and 2 million users since launch.

It argues that its use of building codes is covered by fair use. The ICC, on the other hand, claims that products like UpCodes’ database harm its ability to make revenue and continue developing code. The ICC wants UpCodes to take down the building code on which it claims copyright, and has also sued for damages.

Making building codes more accessible

Served on UpCodes in September 2017 by the ICC and the American Society of Construction Engineers (ASCE), the lawsuit also names each of the brothers as a defendant. (UpCodes settled out of court with the ASCE).

The brothers say they were shocked because they believed they were covered by the fair use doctrine. In the US, fair use is determined using four factors: the purpose and character of the use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount and substantiality of the portion taken and the effect of the use on the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. In one of the circuit court cases that involved building code, Veeck v Southern Building Code Congress International (2002), the judges ruled that when model codes are enacted into law, they enter the public domain.

“The people who are impacted are obviously architects, engineers, industry professionals, but also any homeowners or people living in a house or apartment are affected, too,” says Scott Reynolds. “If you want to do a renovation or move a wall or add an extension to your house, it is the exact same law that governs those as well. It’s a pretty dangerous precedent to set, copyrighting law in a democracy.”

The brothers see their database as an easy-to-use resource for anyone who wants to research building code. For example, they say they heard from an older couple who used UpCodes’ free access to confirm they had the right to demand a broken elevator in their building be fixed within a certain timeframe.

Formed in 1994 by the merger of three regional model code groups, the International Code Council is a nonprofit with 64,000 members headquartered in Washington DC. Its model codes and standards are developed by committees made up of volunteers from its membership and ICC staff. The ICC lobbies for the code to be enacted into law, and earns revenue by selling code books and running accreditation programs.

Some places, including Michigan, direct people who want to research building codes to buy the books from the ICC’s site. The ICC’s website has code posted for free viewing, but copy and paste, highlighting, printing and other functions are disabled unless users pay a subscription fee. Scott and Garrett Reynolds say this makes it more difficult to research code compliance, especially for non-professionals. UpCodes uploads building codes from various sources, including government websites, the ICC’s site and ICC code books ordered online, scanned and put into its database. The ICC argues that this violates its copyright and hurts the organization’s ability to raise revenue through code book sales.

“What is really at the crux of this lawsuit is that we develop the highest quality codes that are adopted and used by governments at essentially no cost to the taxpayers and UpCodes is misappropriating ICC codes to generate their for-profit business,” says Mel Oncu, ICC’s general counsel.

When adopting code, many jurisdictions look at what others are doing, which has helped increase the use of ICC’s code. But codes still vary between cities and states, with the Economist reporting in 2017 that American counties and municipalities use a combined total of 93,000 different building codes, and are updated frequently, adding another layer of complexity to the compliance process.

Corynne McSherry, legal director of digital liberties advocacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says at stake in the case is the principle of access to the law.

“Many of us don’t think about this area of law, but it’s one of the most influential to our daily lives. We think of law in terms of what we see onscreen, but not too many of us normally have to engage with a crucial constitutional problem like those portrayed in movies. Hopefully most of us don’t have to encounter criminal law that much. But building codes actually shape our daily lives in incredibly concrete ways,” McSherry says.

Because the codes are legally binding, “that makes a pretty significant difference under copyright law and under fundamental constitutional law. We have a very long tradition that in a society governed by the rule of law, people have the right to access the law by which they are governed,” she adds.

An issue that’s come up before

Questions surrounding copyright and access to the law have been litigated several times in the United States courts of appeals. Two cases in particular may help UpCodes’ argument: Building Officials and Code Administration (BOCA) v Code Technology (1980) and Veeck v Southern Building Code Congress International (SBCCI) (2002). Two more recent cases involving Public.Resource.org, a nonprofit group that publishes public domain materials to its website, may also bolster UpCodes’ position: Code Revision Commission v Public.Resource.org (2017) and American Society for Testing and Materials et al. v Public.Resource.org (2018).

BOCA (one of the three groups that merged into ICC in 1994) developed a model building code that was adopted by Massachusetts, with some minor modifications, which BOCA then published as the Commonwealth of Massachusetts State Building Code. When private publisher Code Technology began publishing and selling its own edition of the code, BOCA sued. The case made it to the First Circuit, which ruled in Code Technology’s favor, stating that it was “far from persuaded that BOCA’s virtual authorship of the Massachusetts building code entitles it to enforce a copyright monopoly over when, where and how the [code] is reproduced and made publicly available.”

Then more than two decades later, another case resulted in a similar ruling. The Southern Building Code Congress International, another one of the three regional groups that formed the ICC, published a model building code adopted by local governments, including the towns of Anna and Savoy in Texas. Peter Veeck, who ran a website with free information about North Texas, bought copies of the code from the SBCCI, then scanned and uploaded them.

When the SBCCI demanded he stop, Veeck responded in a court filing that posting the code did not violate the Copyright Act and was covered by fair use. The SBCCI counterclaimed for copyright infringement. While the district court ruled in the SBCCI’s favor, the appeal made it to the Fifth Circuit, where Judge Edith Jones wrote in her opinion for the nine-judge majority that “as law, the model codes enter the public domain and are not subject to the copyright holder’s exclusive prerogatives.” The SBCCI’s attempt to appeal to the Supreme Court was denied.

Building codes and copyright were also at the center of the two cases involving Public.Resource.org. A lawsuit filed by the state of Georgia’s Code Revision Commission in 2015 sought to stop it from publishing the Official Code of Georgia Annotated (OCGA) after founder Carl Malamud purchased a hard copy of the OCGA, scanned it and sent copies on USB sticks to Georgia legislators. The Code Revision Commission argued that the annotations they wrote placed it under state copyright, but the Eleventh Circuit ruled in Public.Resource.org’s favor last year.

In another recent case, six industry groups, including the American Society for Testing and Materials, sued Public.Resource.org for scanning and publishing building, fire and safety codes they considered their copyrighted property. After the District Court for the District of Columbia ruled against Public.Resource.org, the case went on appeal to the DC Circuit. In July 2018, a three-judge panel reversed the decision, and sent the case back to the district court for further consideration, stating that “in many cases, it may be fair use for PRO to reproduce part or all of a technical standard in order to inform the public about the law.”

One difference between the Public.Resource.org cases and UpCodes’ is that Public.Resource.org is a non-commercial group, a fact that strengthens their fair use argument. UpCodes, on the other hand, is a commercial company, which will become part of the fair use analysis if their case makes it to trial. But that is not a decider, says McSherry, who represented Public.Resource.org in both cases, and the judges are likely to consider the Public.Resource.org cases, as well as the Veeck and other building code cases.

Because the Veeck case never made it to the Supreme Court, that means it hasn’t heard a case on the copyright availability of legal codes, or codes with the force of law, in a very long time, says Joe Gratz, a lawyer who has litigated several high-profile internet copyright and trademark disputes and is representing UpCodes and the Reynolds brothers. This opens the possibility of the ICC lawsuit making it to the Supreme Court.

“So now you have at least three of the circuits — DC, Fifth and Eleventh — all totally lined up, effectively saying that Veeck was right,” Gratz adds.

The ICC’s argument

But the ICC’s position is that the Veeck case is “bad law,” says Oncu, adding that the decision was made two decades ago, before developments in technology allowed the organization to host free access to codes on its own website.

The ICC’s lawyers note that the organization also works with third-party distributors that license the code. “UpCodes could have come to ICC at any point and asked to lawfully reproduce the codes that we own. The idea that they can’t accomplish their mission without violating our copyright doesn’t make much sense to me,” says Oncu.

(In response, Garrett Reynolds says “It’s absurd to license the law.  ICC thinks they’re the gatekeepers and anyone wanting to share the law needs to pay their toll.  ICC doesn’t get to decide who’s allowed to create new innovations to help people follow the law.” UpCodes did not ask ICC to license the code.)

There are two copyright cases, decided in circuit court, that support ICC’s position, says lawyer Kevin Fee, a Morgan Lewis partner who is representing the organization: CCC Information Services v. Maclean Hunter Market Reports (1994) and Practice Management Information v. American Medical Association (1998).

In 1994, the Second Circuit sided with Maclean, publisher of used car valuation reference Red Book, which alleged CCC, a data and service provider for the automotive industry, violated its copyright by uploading information from the guide to its online network. In its decision, the court said “We are not prepared to hold that a state’s reference to a copyrighted work as a legal standard for valuation results in loss of the copyright.”

In the second case, Practice Management Information, a medical coding products company, sued the American Medical Association over the use of Current Procedural Terminology (CPT), a medical code set that is required by Medicare and HIPAA and appears in the Federal Register. Practice Management claimed that this meant AMA’s copyright was invalid, but the Ninth Circuit disagreed, writing in its 1997 decision that “the AMA’s right under the Copyright Act to limit or forgo publication of the CPT poses no realistic threat to public access.”

The ICC claims that its training and education certification business isn’t enough to fund code development.

“Copyright protection of our codes is essential to our ability to continue to update our codes,” says Oncu. She adds that the ICC believes if the lawsuit is ruled in UpCodes’ favor, it may potentially set a precedent that will make it difficult for it to have a revenue stream and continue creating high-quality codes.

Scott and Garrett Reynolds, however, say that the ICC appears to have healthy revenue. In its 2016 annual report, the ICC said its consolidated revenue in 2015 was $66 million, an increase of $4.3 million compared to 2014, and that it “consistently records over $1 million in sales per month” through its online store. Then from 2015 to 2016, ICC’s revenue increased by $12 million, according to a report presented by chief executive officer Dominic Sims at an annual meeting. (The ICC did not disclose an amount for consolidated revenue in its 2017 annual report, and hasn’t released its 2018 annual report yet.)

The UpCodes founders also note that Sims, the ICC’s CEO, was paid $709,000 in 2016, according to a tax filing, much more than the $104,000 median annual salary for nonprofit CEOs. (Oncu says that ICC’s salaries are comparable to other standards organizations.)

Potential implications for innovation

One of UpCodes’ angel investors, Cyrus Lohrasbpour, decided to back the company when he saw them present during Y Combinator’s Demo Day. Lohrasbpour says he was impressed by the accessibility of the website and its team collaboration tools.

“I immediately understood the value proposition of the company,” he says. “It was hard for me to understand why building codes didn’t have something like this already.” Lohrasbpour was one of two investors deposed by the ICC as part of the lawsuit, but despite being questioned for five hours by lawyers, he says the experience made him more determined to support UpCodes. “If you invest in a company that will disrupt an incumbent, there is always a chance that something like this occurs.”

Scott and Garrett Reynolds say that lawsuits like the one they are facing may potentially deter other developers from working on tools to automate building and safety processes, such as calculating fire resistance in walls. The UpCodes suit, and the other cases that came before it, aren’t just relevant to builders. Technology has been able to streamline the process of regulatory and legal compliance in several industries, but innovation may slow if would-be founders are unclear about how copyright law applies to them.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation takes on clients like Public.Resource.org pro bono because “lawsuits can be a way of shutting down innovation in its infancy,” says McSherry. “It can be intimidating to people trying to experiment in this space.”

ICC’s stance is that it is already making its code more accessible by putting it online.

“Code compliance has never been easier. If you wanted to access the codes before the internet, you had to buy a hard copy of the codes or go to the library to figure it out. Now ICC has made its codes available online for free. All you need is a phone in your hand or internet access to know what the codes say,” says Fee.

But UpCodes’ argument is that part of the value of their product is its ease of use, including the ability to cut, paste and highlight text, which ICC’s online codes lack unless you pay a subscription fee. At the same time, the government website of many municipalities direct residents to the ICC’s website to read or purchase code, including Michigan and California.

How much does transportation cost you?

In most cities, bus or subway fare might set you back $3 or so. A tank of gas, maybe $30 or $40 depending on your car. An hour of street parking? Sometimes it’s free, sometimes it’s a few bucks. And you can usually snag an economy seat on a round-trip U.S. domestic flight for less than $300.

These numbers probably ring true for most people. There’s just one problem: Everything you know about the cost of transportation is wrong.

Despite a massive infusion of venture capital into the transportation sector over the past few years, mobility startups are starting to learn what every transportation business has known for generations: transportation profits are elusive, and the system is mainly held together by subsidies. Will this be the first generation of transportation businesses to escape history?

Jumbo could be a nightmare for the tech giants, but a savior for the victims of their shady privacy practices.

Jumbo saves you hours as well as embarrassment by automatically adjusting 30 Facebook privacy settings to give you more protection, and by deleting your old tweets after saving them to your phone. It can even erase your Google Search and Amazon Alexa history, with clean-up features for Instagram and Tinder in the works.

The startup emerges from stealth today to launch its Jumbo privacy assistant app on iPhone (Android coming soon). What could take a ton of time and research to do manually can be properly handled by Jumbo with a few taps.

The question is whether tech’s biggest companies will allow Jumbo to operate, or squash its access. Facebook, Twitter and the rest really should have built features like Jumbo’s themselves or made them easier to use, since they could boost people’s confidence and perception that might increase usage of their apps. But since their business models often rely on gathering and exploiting as much of your data as possible, and squeezing engagement from more widely visible content, the giants are incentivized to find excuses to block Jumbo.

“Privacy is something that people want, but at the same time it just takes too much time for you and me to act on it,” explains Jumbo founder Pierre Valade, who formerly built beloved high-design calendar app Sunrise that he sold to Microsoft in 2015. “So you’re left with two options: you can leave Facebook, or do nothing.”

Jumbo makes it easy enough for even the lazy to protect themselves. “I’ve used Jumbo to clean my full Twitter, and my personal feeling is: I feel lighter. On Facebook, Jumbo changed my privacy settings, and I feel safer.” Inspired by the Cambridge Analytica scandal, he believes the platforms have lost the right to steward so much of our data.

Valade’s Sunrise pedigree and plan to follow Dropbox’s bottom-up freemium strategy by launching premium subscription and enterprise features has already attracted investors to Jumbo. It’s raised a $3.5 million seed round led by Thrive Capital’s Josh Miller and Nextview Ventures’ Rob Go, who “both believe that privacy is a fundamental human right,” Valade notes. Miller sold his link-sharing app Branch to Facebook in 2014, so his investment shows those with inside knowledge see a need for Jumbo. Valade’s six-person team in New York will use the money to develop new features and try to start a privacy moment.

How Jumbo works

First let’s look at Jumbo’s Facebook settings fixes. The app asks that you punch in your username and password through a mini-browser open to Facebook instead of using the traditional Facebook Connect feature. That immediately might get Jumbo blocked, and we’ve asked Facebook if it will be allowed. Then Jumbo can adjust your privacy settings to Weak, Medium, or Strong controls, though it never makes any privacy settings looser if you’ve already tightened them.

Valade details that since there are no APIs for changing Facebook settings, Jumbo will “act as ‘you’ on Facebook’s website and tap on the buttons, as a script, to make the changes you asked Jumbo to do for you.” He says he hopes Facebook makes an API for this, though it’s more likely to see his script as against policies.

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For example, Jumbo can change who can look you up using your phone number to Strong – Friends only, Medium – Friends of friends, or Weak – Jumbo doesn’t change the setting. Sometimes it takes a stronger stance. For the ability to show you ads based on contact info that advertisers have uploaded, both the Strong and Medium settings hide all ads of this type, while Weak keeps the setting as is.

The full list of what Jumbo can adjust includes Who can see your future posts?, Who can see the people?, Pages and lists you follow, Who can see your friends list?, Who can see your sexual preference?, Do you want Facebook to be able to recognize you in photos and videos?, Who can post on your timeline?, and Review tags people add to your posts the tags appear on Facebook? The full list can be found here.

For Twitter, you can choose if you want to remove all tweets ever, or that are older than a day, week, month (recommended), or three months. Jumbo never sees the data, as everything is processed locally on your phone. Before deleting the tweets, it archives them to a Memories tab of its app. Unfortunately, there’s currently no way to export the tweets from there, but Jumbo is building Dropbox and iCloud connectivity soon, which will work retroactively to download your tweets. Twitter’s API limits mean it can only erase 3,200 tweets of yours every few days, so prolific tweeters may require several rounds.

Its other integrations are more straightforward. On Google, it deletes your search history. For Alexa, it deletes the voice recordings stored by Amazon. Next it wants to build a way to clean out your old Instagram photos and videos, and your old Tinder matches and chat threads.

Across the board, Jumbo is designed to never see any of your data. “There isn’t a server-side component that we own that processes your data in the cloud,” Valade says. Instead, everything is processed locally on your phone. That means, in theory, you don’t have to trust Jumbo with your data, just to properly alter what’s out there. The startup plans to open source some of its stack to prove it isn’t spying on you.

While there are other apps that can clean your tweets, nothing else is designed to be a full-fledged privacy assistant. Perhaps it’s a bit of idealism to think these tech giants will permit Jumbo to run as intended. Valade says he hopes if there’s enough user support, the privacy backlash would be too big if the tech giants blocked Jumbo. “If the social network blocks us, we will disable the integration in Jumbo until we can find a solution to make them work again.”

But even if it does get nixed by the platforms, Jumbo will have started a crucial conversation about how privacy should be handled offline. We’ve left control over privacy defaults to companies that earn money when we’re less protected. Now it’s time for that control to shift to the hands of the user.

In 2007, Emily Heyward, JB Osborne, and Simon Endres began their own entrepreneurial journey and left their corporate jobs to start a brand design agency called Red Antler. They not only believed in the power of branding to drive growth and scale, but they also wanted to work exclusively with startups. Since then, Red Antler has become an industry powerhouse designing and launching brand identities for companies, like Casper and Brandless, into the world. We spoke with Emily, Red Antler’s Chief Brand Officer, to learn more about why they love collaborating with founders, what entrepreneurs can expect from partnering with them, and more.

Plus: Read Emily’s guest post about how branding drives success for early-stage companies.

Why Emily and her co-founders started Red Antler:

“We saw that there was an incredible opportunity to add value by thinking about brand from the very start. We started Red Antler with the vision, from day one, that brand could be a driver of business growth and that the earlier you think about brand, the better positioned you are to launch, compete, and scale.

On collaborating with entrepreneurs:

“My favorite thing about our clients is their passion. These are people who are starting companies because they believe that this company needs to be in the world and that it’s going to add value to people’s lives. We work with people who see a problem that they cannot help but devote their life to solving. To me, that energy is so infectious, and it’s what makes our jobs so rewarding. We’re able to put our creative power behind pursuits that are worthwhile.”

Below, you’ll find the rest of the founder reviews, the full interview, and more details like pricing and fee structures. This profile is part of our ongoing series covering startup brand designers and agencies with whom founders love to work, based on this survey and our own research. The survey is open indefinitely, so please fill it out if you haven’t already. 

Interview with Red Antler’s Chief Brand Officer Emily Heyward

Yvonne Leow: Let’s talk about your path to design. Could tell us a bit about your backstory?

Emily Heyward: I started my career in advertising right out of college as an account planner at a big, global agency, working on massive global brands like General Mills, Procter & Gamble and De Beers. While I learned an incredible amount and met some of the smartest, most creative people I know, I ultimately grew frustrated with solving the wrong problems. We were responsible for coming up with communications about a business, but we weren’t able to affect the business itself in any meaningful way.

With Red Antler, my co-founders and I wanted to make sure that we were actually helping to create things that the world needs, not just trying to come up with new stories about old, broken stuff.

Yvonne Leow: Right, and what inspired the creation of Red Antler?

Emily Heyward: My co-founder JB and I were leading the New York office for a New Zealand ad agency that was looking to expand to the States. The startup scene in New York was just getting going, and because we were small, we started getting introduced to other small teams of entrepreneurs. We’d sit down with these founders, and what we realized is the last thing they should be thinking about at that stage was big ad campaigns.

Teeth straightening startup Candid has raised another $63.4 million in a Series B round from Greycroft, Bessemer, e.ventures and others. The new injection of cash brings its total funding to $90 million.

Candid, which 3D prints its FDA-approved aligners, is designed for people who need mild to moderate orthodontic work. The modeling kit costs $95, and then the actual aligners cost $1,900 upfront or $88 per month over two years, while braces can cost up to $7,000 and Invisalign can cost up to $8,000.

In addition to its at-home impression process, Candid enables people to come into a physical office to get their teeth scans completed. Currently, Candid operates 13 brick and mortar locations. By the end of this year, Candid aims to have more than 60 locations across the U.S.

In Candid’s physical locations, customers can get their teeth scanned and order aligners within 30 minutes. The studios, which are operated by Candid’s orthodontists and dental assistants, have attracted new customers, Candid CEO Nick Greenfield told TechCrunch.

“When we launch a market, we see so many people coming in and it opens up a totally different subset of people,” he said,

The physical locations also serve to provide more information to people who bought impression kits online.

“The at-home business and Candid Studio play really synergistically with each other,” Greenfield said.

Since last September, Candid has grown its revenues 4x.

“We’ve basically doubled from a revenue standpoint and doubled again in Q1,” Greenfield told TechCrunch. “That trajectory will continue at least for the next two quarters.”

With the funding, Candid plans to double its headcount from 275 to 550, open additional Candid Studios and develop new products.

“We will be launching a couple of new products within the clear aligner space and possibly outside of it,” Greenfield said. “But more to come on that front.”

Meanwhile, competitor Smile Direct Club is reportedly gearing up for an initial public offering. Following a $380 million investment in October, the startup hit a $3.2 billion valuation. Shortly after, SDC investor and maker of Invisalign, Align Technology, was forced to shut down its retail locations. As a result, Candid is taking over the leases on some of those locations.

“For us, it’s been generally positive and has put us in a position to be really successful,” Greenfield said. “Any time you have a player such as the largest competitor going public, it creates a market for this business in the public market. But it doesn’t really change any of our business plans. Anything that happens outside the walls of our company doesn’t change our plans.”

Editor’s note: This guest post is a part of our latest initiative to demystify design and find the best brand designers and agencies in the world who work with early-stage companies — nominate a talented brand designer you’ve worked with.

We’re in the midst of a startup explosion. The barriers to starting a new business have never been lower; the aura of the entrepreneur has never been hotter. As category after category gets disrupted, competition among this new crop of businesses has gotten much fiercer. It’s no longer just about taking share from established players – you also have to watch out for the three other startups with similar business models who saw the same opportunity as you did, and are launching at the exact same time. The difference of who prevails often boils down to brand.

When we launched Red Antler 11 years ago, many questioned the value of branding for a pre-launch startup. The pervasive attitude was that startups should be “lean,” they should establish “product-market fit,” they should iterate and test and worry about branding later. That may have worked in an era when innovation alone was enough to get people’s attention, and when “new” was enough to get people to care. But when incredible user experience design is table stakes, and when direct-to-consumer choices are popping up in every category, you cannot expect that success will just come because you have a smart idea, or because you’re offering better value.

We believe that the sooner founders start thinking about brand, the more set up they’ll be for scalable success. And when we say brand, we aren’t just talking about logos, colors, and fonts. Those are important articulations of your brand, and they help tell an overall story. But brand should be viewed as an organizing principle that guides everything a company does, internally and externally. A brand-led company is a company with clarity of purpose; a deep understanding of why it exists and why people should care.

What does this look like in tangible terms? There’s so much jargon in our industry, and so much confusion around what it takes to build a brand, that I’ll try to break this down as simply as possible. When we first start working with a new client, before we even think about typefaces, we start with a conversation around strategy. This does not mean business strategy, which our founders have typically already developed. Think of the business strategy as the story in your pitch deck – what your business offers, what problem is it solving, why is this defensible, how will you grow. The business strategy is an important input to the brand strategy, but it’s not enough to build a brand on.

The brand strategy, or positioning as it’s sometimes called, is the emotional concept that you want to stand for, beyond any single functional benefit. To use everyone’s favorites as an example, consider how Nike doesn’t stand for shoes, it stands for performance. Or Apple isn’t about electronics, it’s about creativity. Those are examples of brand strategy, which then informs the creation of the brand identity.

To use the example of one of our clients, when Casper first came to us, they had their business strategy. They knew they were going to disrupt the traditional mattress category by moving the purchase process away from the mattress showroom, and creating a direct-to-consumer brand that offered far better value, greater convenience, and of course, universally appealing comfort.

They had dedicated their waking hours (and some sleepless ones) to developing a mattress that could ship in a box and that was undeniably comfortable, but they didn’t want to be a “mattress company,” they wanted to be a sleep company. We looked at the competition, who were all stuck in the world of very functional, overly technical, pseudo-scientific benefits and trademarked materials, and we asked ourselves, why do people even care about sleep? It’s not for the hours they spend in bed when ideally they’re not even conscious. It’s for how they feel when they wake up. This insight led us to the brand strategy that better sleep leads to a more interesting life.

The brand strategy then informs how a brand looks, feels, and behaves – in other words, the brand identity. Brand identity describes the visual and verbal world of a brand: its name, logo, typefaces, color palette, illustration styles, photography, and messaging tone of voice. With Casper, we made sure in the early days to always embrace the duality between sleep and wake, offering glimpses of how sleeping on a Casper unlocked a richer, fuller waking life. This created a surprising world that moved far away from the traditional category images of people sleeping soundly in a dimly lit room. But even more important than any isolated design decision is how a brand makes people feel. It’s the connection you form with consumers by consistently grounding yourself in what you can do to make their lives better.

Sometimes people look around at the brand landscape today and their impression is that everything looks the same. If we only focus on the parts we can see, it’s true that there are certain design best practices, as well as trends, that influence a prevalent look. Of course, our role as a brand company is to continue to push the envelope and invent what’s next. But I also believe that a conversation centered only around aesthetics is missing the real meaning of brand, which is to stand for something that resonates in people’s hearts and keeps them coming back again and again.

Just three months after raising $40 million in a Series B funding, German HR and recruiting platform Personio is announcing it has acquired Rollbox, the Spanish startup that offers an API-based payroll solution. The two companies had been working together, but now Personio is bringing Rollbox’s tech and team in-house.

The full terms of the deal remain undisclosed. However, I understand the acquisition consists of a combination of cash and equity. This sees a number of Rollbox’s investors being issued shares in Personio, while others have exited entirely.

Founded in 2016, Rollbox was backed by SaaS investor Point Nine and Berlin-based VC La Famiglia, along with individual investors Paul Forster (founder of Indeed) and Brian Pietras (VP Strategy at Workday).

Meanwhile, I’m told Rollbox’s founders, Xavi Leal and Ismael Sanchez, are joining Personio and will be key members of the management team going forward. The Rollbox brand will be decommissioned and the tech merged into the Personio platform. Rollbox customers are being invited to move over to Personio.

“This deal will allow Personio… to extend is HR Operating System by [adding] a fully integrated payroll engine that can help customers fully automate payroll,” Personio co-founder and CEO Hanno Renner tells TechCrunch. Features include real-time validation, automated government, insurance and tax communication and on-the-fly payroll calculations.

Citing Rollbox’s international footprint — the company operates in Spain, U.K. and Germany — Renner also says the acquisition will help facilitate Personio’s internationalization across Europe, which began earlier this year.

On that note, Personio says it will retain both offices and all employees. Aggregated headcount will now sit at more than 200 employees: currently 190 employees in Personio’s Munich HQ and 25 employees in Madrid.

Sramana Mitra: It is very refreshing to hear that you’re willing to do a $4 million to $5 million round on pure team and concept and no line of code. But the truth is, most of the micro...

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Indian social commerce startup GlowRoad announced today that it has raised a $10 million Series B. The round was led by CDH Investments, a Chinese investment firm, with participation from returning investor Accel Partners.

GlowRoad’s last funding, a $2 million Series A led by Accel, was announced in September 2017, a few months after it launched. The startup’s founding team includes Sonal Verma, a physician who focused on community medicine before co-founding telemedicine company HealthcareMagic in 2008. During her medical work, Verma realized that many stay-at-home mothers and housewives resell products in their neighborhoods. GlowRoad was created to help them take their businesses online by drop-shipping products.

GlowRoad screens manufacturers before adding them to its platform, then GlowRoad’s sellers decide which items to add to their stores and how to market them. The company now claims more than 100,000 resellers, 20,000 suppliers and 300,000 buyers. One of its most notable competitors is reselling platform Meesho, which has raised a total of $65.2 million from investors, including Shunwei Capital, Sequoia Capital India, RPS Ventures, Y Combinator, Venture Highway, SAIF Partners and DST Partners, according to Crunchbase.

Mobile shopping startup Dote is announcing $12 million in new funding, as well as a new feature called Shopping Party.

Founder and CEO Lauren Farleigh said her initial goal was to create “a truly native mobile experience” that made it “easy to check out across a lot of different stores.”

Over time, recommendations from social media influencers have become a big part of the app. With Shopping Party, they’re taking center stage — the feature allows them to share live video while browsing different products on Dote and chatting with fans.

Farleigh said the idea came from a trip she took with Dote influencers to Fiji last fall. She described watching them shop and talk together at the airport, and in what she said was an “ah-ha moment,” she realized that there’s an experience that was “lost when we stopped going to the mall with our friends.”

She added that influencers embraced the idea, with some telling her, “We love going live on Instagram [but] it’s challenging because there’s no shared experience for us to have that meaningful interaction over. It usually turns into the same Q&A over and over again.”

Shopping Party offers one solution to that issue, because you’re actually browsing and talking about specific products in the Dote app. Apparently this was a real technical challenge — Shopping Party is leveraging Apple’s ReplayKit 2 framework to deliver two live streams (one from the phone camera, one from the Dote app) while also incorporating live chats.

Farleigh, who previously worked as a product manager at mobile gaming company Pocket Gems, also compared this to game streaming on Twitch, except for shopping.

To kick things off, Dote plans to host two Shopping Parties every hour from 6am to 10am Pacific time for the next two weeks. (The company says the average Shopping Party lasts about 15 minutes.) There also will be Shopping Parties sponsored by specific brands.

As for the funding, it was led by Goodwater Capital, with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Harrison Metal. Dote has now raised a total of $23 million.

“[Dote’s] customer-centric shopping platform uniquely blends innovative technologies such as live-streaming with relevant and fun social features, setting the standard for how all major brands and retailers will connect with Gen Z,” said Goodwater Managing Partner Eric Kim in a statement. “We’re thrilled to partner with them to accelerate this transformation.”

According to a P&S Market Research report, the Global electronic health record (EHR) market is estimated to grow to $30.4 billion by 2023 driven by the increasing need for advanced healthcare...

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Sramana Mitra: It sounds like you’re looking at the enterprise software opportunity that’s born in India, but with a global market. Is that an accurate observation? Arihant Patni:...

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There’s been a huge increase in the last decade of applications and services that rely on real-time notifications and other alerts as a core part of how they operate, and today one of the companies that powers those notifications is announcing a growth round. PubNub — an infrastructure-as-a-service provider that provides a real-time network to send and manage messaging traffic between companies, between companies and apps and between internet-of-things devices — has raised $23 million in a Series D round of funding to ramp up its business internationally, with an emphasis on emerging markets.

The round adds another strategic investor to PubNub’s cap table: Hewlett Packard Enterprise is coming on as an investor, joining in this round previous backers Sapphire Ventures (backed by SAP), Relay Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, Cisco Investments, Bosch and Ericsson.

Todd Greene, the CEO of PubNub (who co-founded it with Stephen Blum), said the startup is not disclosing its valuation with this round except to say that “we are happy with it, and it’s a solid increase on where we were the last time.” That, according to PitchBook, was just under $155 million back in 2016 in a small extension to its Series C round. The company has raised around $70 million to date.

PubNub’s growth — along with that of competing companies and technologies, which includes the likes of Pusher, RabbitMQ, Google’s Firebase and others — has come alongside the emergence of a number of use cases built on the premise of real-time notifications. These include a multitude of apps; for example, for on-demand commerce (e.g. ride hailing and online food ordering), medical services, entertainment services, IoT systems and more.

That’s pushed PubNub to a new milestone of enabling some 1.3 trillion messages per month for customers that include the likes of Peloton, Atlassian, athenahealth, JustEat, Swiggy, Yelp, the Sacramento Kings and Gett, who choose from some 70 SDKs to tailor what kinds of notifications and actions are triggered around their specific services.

Greene said that while some of the bigger services in the world have largely built their own messaging platforms to manage their notifications — Uber, for example, has taken this route — that process can result in “death by 1,000 paper cuts,” in Greene’s words. Others will opt for a PubNub-style alternative from the start.

“About 50 percent of our customers started by building themselves and then got to scale, and then decided to turn to PubNub,” Greene said.

It’s analogous to the same kind of decision businesses make regarding public cloud infrastructure: whether it makes sense to build and operate their own servers, or turn to a third-party provider — a decision that PubNub itself ironically is also in the process of contemplating.

Today the company runs its own business as an overlay on the public cloud, using a mixture of AWS and others, Greene said — the company has partnerships with Microsoft Azure, AWS, and IBM Watson — but “every year we evaluate the benefits of going into different kinds of data centres and interesting opportunities there. We are evaluating a cost and performance calculation,” he added.

And while he didn’t add it, that could potentially become an exit opportunity for PubNub down the line, too, aligning with a cloud provider that wanted to offer messaging infrastructure-as-a-service as an additional feature to customers.

The strategic relationship with its partners, in fact, is one of the engines for this latest investment. “Edge computing and realtime technologies will be at the heart of the next wave of technology innovation,” commented Vishal Lall, COO of Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, said in a statement. “PubNub’s global Data Stream Network has demonstrated extensive accomplishments powering both enterprise and consumer solutions. HPE is thrilled to be investing in PubNub’s fast-growing success, and to accelerate the commercial and industrial applications of PubNub’s real time platform.”

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 439th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, April 11, 2019, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious...

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It’s been a year since All Raise emerged with the support of dozens of venture capital’s most powerful women. The 34 founding members had a lofty goal: Double the capital going to female founders in five years and double the representation of female VCs in 10 years.

After a few experiments, some trial and error and the first-of-its-kind Women Who Venture Summit, All Raise cemented its reputation as a force for change in Silicon Valley. In the last 12 months, the organization has connected high-profile VCs with female founders through its Female Founder Office Hours, lifted up founders who value diversity with the Founders for Change campaign and connected male general partners with nascent female investors with its VC Champions program.

Now, the 501(c)(3) is ready for its next act. As part of a push to formalize the organization and garner more support in the form of cash, All Raise has hired its first chief executive officer, seasoned Silicon Valley operator Pam Kostka (pictured). Kostka — the former CEO of Loop, a now-defunct social media app for college students, and of the Andreessen Horowitz-backed startup Bluebox Security — joins just one other full-time All Raise employee, director of communications Steffi Wu, who joined at the beginning of March after six years at Gusto.

They are hunting for office space in San Francisco large enough to fit their growing team — All Raise plans to hire five to six people imminently — and to host events that can accommodate all their members. For now, they are establishing temporary offices at various partner VC firms. When I met with Kostka and Wu last week, they were operating out of a conference room inside Reach Capital’s San Francisco office.

Kostka and Wu are working a lot of nights and weekends, too, they said, because that’s when the rest of the All Raise community, a group of busy, full-time investors, are able to draft feedback to initiatives and otherwise offer direction: “We are two people, and yet we have these amazingly connected, capable resources who amplify the organization. It’s amazing,” Kostka told TechCrunch during a sweeping conversation on All Raise’s future plans, edited below for brevity and clarity.

All Raise appears lean, but its founders, including Cowboy Venture’s Aileen Lee, Sequoia Capital’s Jess Lee and Forerunner Venture’s Kirsten Green, are passionate and committed. Aileen Lee tells TechCrunch Kostka was the person they were waiting for after a lengthy, nine-month CEO search. “She’s product-oriented, with business savvy and a history of scaling with a small team. She can take All Raise to the next level,” Lee said.

“What we are trying to do is quite different than other nonprofit models,” Lee explained. “If we are lucky, it might have some similarities to TED. TED has a big conference where they bring together a lot of people and share lots of ideas, and you can go to TED.com and watch a talk. We want to make All Raise accessible like that so people can learn from us and be inspired, or they can host a workshop or a book club regardless of where they are.”

Lee says part of All Raise’s maturation and expansion efforts include a heightened focus on diversity, something she admits the organization hasn’t spent enough time on. Backstage Capital’s Lolita Taub and Zume Pizza co-founder Julia Collins are leading this effort through an All Raise intersectionality task force. Meanwhile, as All Raise ruminates on national and, eventually, international expansion plans, it’s looking to its members to offer their expertise where appropriate. Dream Machine founder and former TechCrunch editor-in-chief Alexia Bonatsos, for example, is donating her journalism chops to help All Raise hone its content strategy.

The VC and startup ecosystem is bound to see a lot more unfold this year, as Kostka puts All Raise’s growth efforts into overdrive. Here’s more from TechCrunch’s chat with All Raise’s first-ever CEO.

Kate Clark: All Raise is a nonprofit organization, but it walks and talks like a startup…

Pam Kostka: Yes, we run it like a startup, which is how it ties into my background. It feels very startup-oriented. We have key objectives, we have OKRs that we’re implementing, we’re using a lean process methodology of testing, refine, pilot, test, refine, pilot, test, refine before we roll things out. There’s probably way more going on under the covers right now than is actually visible. We’ll be rolling a lot out in 2019.

KC: Sounds like you’re at the right place then. Still, All Raise is a 501(c)(3), not a for-profit business. What made you decide to leave the startup world behind?

PK: I hit a milestone birthday a while ago and I thought, what is it that I want to do with my next 10 to 15 years in Silicon Valley? What is the most important work that I could do? I really wanted to do something that was personally meaningful to me and I had been following All Raise since their launch. I don’t think you can be a woman in Silicon Valley without being tied to this cause. For me, there’s no more meaningful thing I could be dedicating my time to and it kind of pays back some of the success and support I’ve had throughout my career, and I hope to amplify that for generations to come. I have a nine-year-old daughter. She’s interested in STEM. Should she elect to come in this direction, I want it to be different for her.

KC: When did you come to Silicon Valley?

PK: I started my career here over 20 years ago, in 1995 — the dot-com era — and I did a series of roles at different startups, from product management to marketing to sales, usually on the enterprise side, but really focusing on companies that were doing something disruptive. [All Raise] is probably one of the biggest challenges that I’ve taken on because it’s not about changing a company or changing an industry but changing an ecosystem.

KC: Now that All Raise has its first CEO, does it have big hiring plans?

PK: We are absolutely going to hire more people. So there’s one open position right now that’s actively being recruited, which is for a data strategist. We think data is core to what we do. We need to report on the numbers and how we are doing and how we’re impacting and moving the needle for women in VC and female funding.

KC: I know All Raise brought in $4 million in donations last year from Melinda Gates via Pivotal Ventures, Silicon Valley Bank, EY and some others, but are there any plans to raise additional capital?

PK: Yes, the intent is in a couple of months, once I have my sea legs underneath me, to go back out and raise. I’ve been a fundraiser and I think part of my appeal was that I could understand what it means to sit in the operator chair, as well as to be able to interact with the venture community. I have empathy for both sides of the equation and I’ve also personally experienced the struggles of being a woman in tech trying to raise money.

KC: What can we expect from All Raise in 2019?

PK: So right now we’re focused on both the funders and the founders, and providing all kinds of programs, initiatives, education and outreach that really helps women in these two communities rise, but that also brings these two communities together in more meaningful ways. That’s what the short-term focus is and there are lots of things that we’re considering for the long term. This year, you’ll see a lot of the work that was invested in 2018 come to fruition and be exposed.

KC: Last year, All Raise hosted its inaugural Women Who Venture Summit, which I’ve been told was an incredibly magical and historical moment that put more female VCs in the same room than ever before. Will that return in 2019?

PK: Yes, we’re planning to bring that event back and amplify it even more. It was great and I call it a great Year One. We’re now going through all of our lessons learned from that and trying to widen it. I think there were 400 people who were able to attend that event. We want to make a bigger event and invite more and more people and be that kind of inclusive tent under which everybody can come. We’re also going to be doing a parallel one for founders and then trying to weave those two groups together, again, to create this empathy between these two entities. It’s an absolutely seminal event and you’ll see us doing it on an annual basis going forward.

KC: How do you feel about the state of funding for women entrepreneurs and the number of women in venture?

PK: I think it’s no coincidence that All Raise started a year ago and we’ve since moved the needle, but we’re not done, not by a long shot. In 2018, we moved from 9 percent representation of female investing partners to 11 percent. That being said, of the 720 venture firms in the United States, 70 percent still don’t have a single female partner around the table.

KC: Let’s talk about diversity. All Raise has supported hundreds of women, but the majority of VCs are white and Asian. Can All Raise do more to promote other underrepresented groups? 

PK: We need to have more diversity around the table. By doing that, we’re going to uncover opportunities we just don’t have right now because we’re not reflective of the population. Intersectionality is one of our initiatives moving forward in 2019 and it’s a big one. It’s one that’s important to me; I’ve enjoyed privileges that just aren’t accessible to women of color. So we’ve actually started an intersectionality working group within our organization with Julia Collins [co-founder of] Zoom Pizza and Lolita Taub from Backstage Capital. Those two are helping us determine a whole series of programs and initiatives, events and partnerships that can bring intersectionality into our conversation.

One of the things we are thinking about right now is how do we eliminate the need for a warm intro for people who don’t even begin to have access to the network? How can we introduce those people to the venture community, no matter what gender or race? How can we get those introductions for Latinx and people of color to the venture community?

KC: What’s your goal for 2019?

PK: To bottle up and amplify this community. I think there’s a stereotype out there that women don’t help women. There is some of that that does happen in pockets, and understandably so. But there was something so special every time I interviewed and came in for the job at All Raise. I just felt this kind of warm embrace that left me thinking, where have you all been my entire life. I would attend all these meetings and just walk away with this feeling like if you had been in my career, I would have felt way less lonely, way less alone. And I would have had this network of people to go ask questions, get advice from and who could have helped me in my career.

KC: Where would you like to see All Raise in five years?

PK: I’d like to see us hitting our metrics and our goals. We have these two key initiatives, which is to double the representation of female VCs around the table in 10 years and to double the funding that’s going to woman in five years. We’ve got to keep on driving towards those goals and we’re measuring ourselves every day.

KC: Where did All Raise get all this momentum? Why now?

PK: There was a group of women who were tired of the status quo, who were looking around and seeing the headlines and said, it’s time to do something. I’ve seen the email streams, it was instantaneous, the response [Aileen Lee] got from her female peers. It’s so night and day from when I came to Silicon Valley in 1995 to now. I don’t think we’re in a moment. I think we’ve created a movement.

Cashfree, an India-based startup that specializes in making corporate banking services more accessible and easier to use, has closed a $5.5 million Series A round.

The deal is led by Smilegate Investment — the fund affiliated with Korean games firm Smilegate — with participation from Y Combinator, the U.S. accelerator program from which Cashfree graduated in 2017. The startup previously raised an undisclosed seed round from investors that include former U.K. Finance Minister George Osborne, and Vellayan Subbiah, who was previously managing director of Cholamandalam Investment, both of whom joined this new round.

Founded in 2015 by Reeju Datta and Akash Sinha, Cashfree started out as a payment gateway before it pivoted to tackle the more pertinent issue of moving money in India. Today, its service is used by more than 12,000 businesses to disperse bulk transfers for things like vendor payments, wages, reimbursements, refunds and more. Those customers include recognizable names like Xiaomi, Tencent, Zomato, Cred, Club Factory, ExxonMobil and Dunzo, the concierge service backed by Google.

“While developing the payment gateway, we realized there are a lot of problems operating corporate bank accounts in India, especially when you have to handle a lot of transfers on a daily basis,” Datta told TechCrunch in an interview.

Cashfree helps its customers connect their corporate banking services via a single interface. Aside from enabling disbursements to bank accounts, via India’s UPI system or to wallet accounts like Paytm, the system allows analysis, such as calculating top vendors, aggregate payouts and other business intelligence that would take hours of manual work using corporate bank services.

Datta said the company currently processes $4.5 billion annual recurring volume. That’s not take-home revenue — Cashfree makes its money on a per-transaction basis — but he said it is profitable and has been since it graduated YC 18 months ago.

The current thesis is to work with banks rather than against them, Datta explained, but there’s always the potential that Cashfree itself might offer banking services. Right now, that isn’t possible — Datta said Cashfree will need to “wait for the regulatory climate to clear up” — but it isn’t beyond the scope of possibility that it could emerge as a challenger bank in the future. Beyond clearer regulation, “a couple more fundraises” might be necessary for that evolution, the Cashfree co-founder added.

Still, Cashfree will use this new money to double down on its banking services — those attached to banks, that is — with a new solution with increased integrations set to ship to customers soon. It is also building up its presence in Delhi and Bombay, where it has begun hiring business development teams to expand its work.