The market for technology and services for clinical drug trials is expected to reach $68.9 billion over the next seven years. The trials, which are necessary to bring new healthcare treatments to market, are by necessity prolonged, complicated affairs.

Several companies are vying for a piece of this multi-billion-dollar pie with the offer of new digital services that can scour anonymized patient records from hospitals and university research to optimize how candidates for trials are selected, and how trials are monitored and managed.

“A clinical trial is, on average, a journey of 12 years and $2 billion to $3 billion,” says Gadi Lachman, the chief executive of TriNetX — one company that’s working on making the clinical trial process more efficient. “In those 12 years more than half the trials get amended… We suggest trade-offs to the researcher that maximizes the amount of patients that they can find.”

Part of the issue is scope. The pharmaceutical business is global, and demands global input, which is why TriNetX, recently raised $40 million to expand its operations in Asia, Europe and Latin America. The first use of proceeds has been the acquisition of the European company Custodix, to integrate their candidate-matching toolkits for research in the U.S. and Europe.

Belgian-based Custodix is active in 12 countries across Europe with a service that complements TriNetX’s stateside offerings.

“The two companies have grown up in two separate geographies but are both committed to strong compliance, governance, and a global vision for clinical research,” said Lachman, in a statement. “We now offer the world’s largest platform for clinical research, providing a more powerful resource for pharma companies and healthcare organizations, and more hope for more patients. The expansion gives us local leadership, regional support, and increased resources in the European market.”

TriNetX installs its software in hospitals around the country (and increasingly around the globe) to hoover up information about patients who could be ideal candidates for clinical trials.

Through the Custodix acquisition, TriNetX now has a launchpad from which to start pitching services to geographies in Asia as well, according to the company.

As a result of the deal, the current Custodix chief executive, Brecht Claerhout, will become the managing director of TriNetX Europe — under the brand InSite, a TriNetX company.

To date, TriNetX has raised $102 million from investors, including Merck Global Health Innovation Fund (MGHIF) along with new investors Mitsui & Co., Ltd., ITOCHU Technology Ventures, ITOCHU Corporation, MPM Capital, F2 Ventures and Deerfield Management.

When everyone always tells you “yes,” you can become a monster. Leaders especially need honest feedback to grow. “If you look at rich people like Donald Trump and you neglect them, you get more Donald Trumps,” says Torch co-founder and CEO Cameron Yarbrough about our gruff president. His app wants to make executive coaching (a polite word for therapy) part of even the busiest executive’s schedule. Torch conducts a 360-degree interview with a client and their employees to assess weaknesses, lays out improvement goals and provides one-on-one video chat sessions with trained counselors.

“Essentially we’re trying to help that person develop the capacity to be a more loving human being in the workplace,” Yarbrough explains. That’s crucial in the age of “hustle porn,” where everyone tries to pretend they’re working all the time and constantly “crushing it.” That can leave leaders facing challenges feeling alone and unworthy. Torch wants to provide a private place to reach out for a helping hand or shoulder to cry on.

Now Torch is ready to lead the way to better management for more companies, as it’s just raised a  $10 million Series A round led by Norwest Venture Partners, along with Initialized Capital, Y Combinator and West Ventures. It already has 100 clients, including Reddit and Atrium, but the new cash will fuel its go-to market strategy. Rather than trying to democratize access to coaching, Torch is doubling-down on teaching founders, C-suites and other senior executives how to care… or not care too much.

“I came out of a tough family myself and I had to do a ton of therapy and a ton of meditation to emerge and be an effective leader myself,” Yarbrough recalls. “Philosophically, I care about personal growth. It’s just true all the way down to birth for me. What I’m selling is authentic to who I am.”

Torch’s co-founders met when they were in grad school for counseling psychology degrees, practicing group therapy sessions together. Yarbrough went on to practice clinically and start Well Clinic in the Bay Area, while Keegan Walden got his PhD. Yarbrough worked with married couples to resolve troubles, and “the next thing I know I was working with high-profile startup founders, who like anybody have their fair share of conflicts.”

Coaching romantic partners to be upfront about expectations and kind during arguments translated seamlessly to keep co-founders from buckling under stress. As Yarbrough explains, “I was noticing that they were consistently having problems with five different things:

1. Communication – Surfacing problems early with kindness

2. Healthy workplace boundaries – Making sure people don’t step on each others’ toes

3. How to manage conflict in a healthy way – Staying calm and avoiding finger-pointing

4. How to be positively influential – Being motivational without being annoying or pushy

5. How to manage one’s ego, whether that’s insecurity or narcissism – Seeing the team’s win as the first priority

To address those, companies hire Torch to coach one or more of their executives. Torch conducts extensive 360-degree interviews with the exec, as well as their reports, employees and peers. It seeks to score them on empathy, visionary thinking, communication, conflict, management and collaboration, Torch then structures goals and improvement timelines that it tracks with follow-up interviews with the team and quantifiable metrics that can all be tracked by HR through a software dashboard.

To make progress on these fronts, execs do video chat sessions through Torch’s app with coaches trained in these skills. “These are all working people with by nature very tight schedules. They don’t have time to come in for a live session so we come to them in the form of video,” Yarbrough tells me. Rates vary from $500 per month to $1,500 per month for a senior coach in the U.S., Europe, APAC or EMEA, with Torch scoring a significant margin. “We’re B2B only. We’re not focused on being the most affordable solution. We’re focused on being the most effective. And we find that there’s less price sensitivity for senior leaders where the cost of their underperformance is incredibly high to the organization.” Torch’s top source of churn is clients’ going out of business, not ceasing to want its services.

Here are two examples of how big-wigs get better with Torch. “Let’s say we have a client who really just wants to be liked all the time, so much so that they have a hard time getting things done. The feedback from the 360 would come back like ‘I find that Cameron is continually telling me what I want to hear but I don’t know what the expectations are of me and I need him to be more direct,’ ” Yarbrough explains. “The problem is those leaders will eventually fire those people who are failing, but they’ll say they had no idea they weren’t performing because he never told them.” Torch’s coaches can teach them to practice tough-love when necessary and to be more transparent. Meanwhile, a boss who storms around the office and “is super-direct and unkind” could be instructed on how to “develop more empathic attunement.”

Yarbrough specifically designed Torch’s software to not be too prescriptive and leave room for the relationship between the coach and client to unfold. And for privacy, coaches don’t record notes and HR only sees the performance goals and progress, not the content of the video chats. It wants execs to feel comfortable getting real without the worry their personal or trade secrets could leak. “And if someone is bringing in something about trauma or that’s super-sensitive about their personal life, their coach will refer them out to psychotherapists,” Yarbrough assures me.

Torch’s direct competition comes from boutique executive coaching firms around the world, while on the tech side, BetterUp is trying to make coaching scale to every type of employee. But its biggest foe is the stubborn status quo of stiff-upper-lipping it.

The startup world has been plagued by too many tragic suicides, deep depression and paralyzing burnout. It’s easy for founders to judge their own worth not by self-confidence or even the absolute value of their accomplishments, but by their status relative to yesterday. That means one blown deal, employee quitting or product delay can make an executive feel awful. But if they turn to their peers or investors, it could hurt their partnership and fundraising prospects. To keep putting in the work, they need an emotional outlet.

“We ultimately have to create this great software that super-powers human beings. People are not robots yet. They will be someday, but not yet,” Yarbrough concludes with a laugh. IQ alone doesn’t make people succeed. Torch can help them develop the EQ, or emotional intelligence quotient, they need to become a boss that’s looked up to.

Scribd is moving into the original content business with the release of “Mueller’s War,” a book by journalist Garrett Graff looking at the prosecutor’s time as a marine in the Vietnam War.

CEO Trip Adler revealed earlier this year that the subscription e-book and audiobook service would be moving in this direction. Today, Scribd is actually releasing its first title and revealing more details about its plans.

Adler told me the initial lineup of Scribd Originals mixes fiction and nonfiction, with a focus on “the space between a magazine article and a book” — namely, pieces up to 50,000 words in length that are too long to run in a magazine but aren’t long enough to be published as a standalone book.

The hope is for Scribd to build a closer relationship with authors while offering something that’s “unique for our readers,” Adler said.

“We pay an advance similar for a traditional book,” he added. “There’s a period of exclusivity, [but] in some cases we will also be distributing books over time to other digital platforms … We’re still staying open-minded about those kinds of things.”

The plan is to release one original title (in both e-book and audiobook form) each month, and to that end, the company has brought on former Byliner editor-in-chief Mark Bryant as an editor. Upcoming originals include work from authors Roxane Gay, Mark Seal, Hilton Als, Peter Heller and Paul Theroux.

And while Amazon’s moves into publishing have been a source of tension between the e-commerce giant and traditional publishers, Adler said Scribd has already run its plans by some of its publishing partners: “We really expect them to embrace this. This is just a great way for their authors to keep in touch with their audience between books.”

He even suggested that in some cases, a successful Scribd Original could be turned into a full-length book that’s released by a traditional publisher.

Remember Fleksy? The customizable Android keyboard app has a new trick up its sleeve: It’s adding a store where users can find and add lightweight third party apps to enhance their typing experience.

Right now it’s launched a taster, preloading a selection of ‘mini apps’ into the keyboard — some from very familiar brand names, some a little less so — so users can start to see how it works.

The first in-keyboard apps are Yelp (local services search); Skyscanner (flight search); Giphy (animated Gif search); GifNote (music Gifs; launching for U.S. users only for rights reasons); Vlipsy (reaction video clips); and Emogi (stickers) — with “many more” branded apps slated as coming in the next few months.

They’re not saying exactly what other brands are coming but there are plenty of familiar logos to be spotted in their press materials — from Spotify to Uber to JustEat to Tripadvisor to PayPal and more…

The full keyboard store itself — which will let users find and add and/or delete apps — will be launching at the end of this month.

The latest version of the Fleksy app can be downloaded for free via the Play Store.

Mini apps made for messaging

The core idea for these mini apps (aka Fleksyapps) is to offer lightweight additions designed to serve the messaging use case.

Say, for example, you’re chatting about where to eat and a friend suggests sushi. The Yelp Fleksyapp might pop up a contextual suggestion for a nearby Japanese restaurant that can be shared directly into the conversation — thereby saving time by doing away with the need for someone to cut out of the chat, switch apps, find some relevant info and cut and paste it back into the chat.

Fleksyapps are intended to be helpful shortcuts that keep the conversation flowing. They also of course put brands back into the conversation.

“We couldn’t be more excited to bring the power of the world’s popular songs with GIFs, videos and photos to the new Fleksyapps platform,” says Gifnote co-founder, John vanSuchtelen, in a supporting statement.

Fleksy’s mini apps appear above the Qwerty keyboard — in much the same space as a next-word prediction. The user can scroll through the app stack (each a tiny branded circle until tapped on to expand) and choose one to interact with. It’s similar to the micro apps lodged in Apple’s iMessage but on Android where iMessage isn’t… The team also plans for Fleksy to support a much wider range of branded apps — hence the Fleksyapps store.

In-keyboard apps is not a new concept for the dev team behind Fleksy; an earlier keyboard app of theirs (called ThingThing) offered micro apps they built themselves as a tool to extend its utility.

But now they’re hoping to garner backing and buy in from third party brands excited about the exposure and reach they could gain by being where users spend the most device time: The keyboard.

“Think of it a bit like the iMessage equivalent but on Android across any app. Or the WeChat mini program but inside the keyboard, available everywhere — not only in one app,” CEO Olivier Plante tells TechCrunch. “That’s a problem of messaging apps these days. All of them are verticals but the keyboard is horizontal. So that’s the benefit for those brands. And the user will have the ability to move them around, add some, to remove some, to explore, to discover.”

“The brands that want to join our platform they have the option of being preloaded by default. The analogy is that by default on the home screen of a phone you are by default in our keyboard. And moving forward you’ll be able to have a membership — you’re becoming a ‘brand member’ of the Fleksyapps platform, and you can have your brand inside the keyboard,” he adds.

The first clutch of Fleksyapps were developed jointly, with the team working with the brands in question. But Plante says they’re planning to launch a tool in future so brands will be able to put together their own apps — in as little as just a few hours.

“We’re opening this array of functionalities and there’s a lot of verticals possible,” he continues. “In the future months we will embed new capabilities for the platform — new type of apps. You can think about professional apps, or cloud apps. Accessing your files from different types of clouds. You have the weather vertical. You have ecommerce vertical. You have so many verticals.

“What you have on the app store today will be reflected into the Fleksyappstore. But really with the focus of messaging and being useful in messaging. So it’s not the full app that we want to bring in — it’s really the core functionality of this app.”

The Yelp Fleksyapp, for example, only includes the ability to see nearby places and search for and share places. So it’s intentionally stripped down. “The core benefit for the brand is it gives them the ability to extend their reach,” says Plante. “We don’t want to compete with the app, per se, we just want to bring these types of app providers inside the messenger on Android across any app.”

On the user side, the main advantage he touts is “it’s really, really fast — fleshing that out to: “It’s very lightweight, it’s very, very fast and we want to become the fastest access to content across any app.”

Users of Fleksyapps don’t need to have the full app installed because the keyboard plugs directly into the API of each branded service. So they get core functionality in bite-sized form without a requirement to download the full app. (Of course they can if they wish.)

So Plante also notes the approach has benefits vis-a-vis data consumption — which could be an advantage in emerging markets where smartphone users’ choices may be hard-ruled by the costs of data and/or connectivity limits.

“For those types of users it gives them an ability to access content but in a very light way — where the app itself, loading the app, loading all the content inside the app can be megabits. In Fleksy you’re talking about kilobits,” he says.

Privacy-sensitive next app suggestions

While baking a bunch of third party apps into a keyboard might sound like a privacy nightmare, the dev team behind Fleksy have been careful to make sure users remain in control.

To wit: Also on board is an AI keyboard assistant (called Fleksynext) — aka “a neural deep learning engine” — which Plante says can detect the context, intention and sentiment of conversations in order to offer “very useful” app suggestions as the chat flows.

The idea is the AI supports the substance of the chat by offering useful functionality from whatever pick and mix of apps are available. Plante refers to these AI-powered ‘next app’ suggestions as “pops”.

And — crucially, from a privacy point of view — the Fleksynext suggestion engine operates locally, on device.

That means no conversation data is sent out of the keyboard. Indeed, Plante says nothing the user types in the keyboard itself is shared with brands (including suggestions that pop up but get ignored). So there’s no risk — as with some other keyboard apps — of users being continually strip-mined for personal data to profile them as they type.

That said, if the user chooses to interact with a Fleksyapp (or its suggestive pop) they are then interacting with a third party’s API. So the usual tracking caveats apply.

“We interact with the web so there’s tracking everywhere,” admits Plante. “But, per se, there’s not specific sensitive data that is shared suddenly with someone. It is not related with the service itself — with the Fleksy app.”

The key point is that the keyboard user gets to choose which apps they want to use and which they don’t. So they can choose which third parties they want to share their plans and intentions with and which they don’t.

“We’re not interesting in making this an advertising platform where the advertiser decides everything,” emphasizes Plante. “We want this to be really close to the user. So the user decides. My intentions. My sentiment. What I type decides. And that is really our goal. The user is able to power it. He can tap on the suggestion or ignore it. And then if he taps on it it’s a very good quality conversion because the user really wants to access restaurants nearby or explore flights for escaping his daily routine… or transfer money. That could be another use-case for instance.”

They won’t be selling brands a guaranteed number of conversions, either.

That’s clearly very important because — to win over users — Fleksynext suggestions will need to feel telepathically useful, rather than irritating, misfired nag. Though the risk of that seems low given how Fleksy users can customize the keyboard apps to only see stuff that’s useful to them.

“In a sense we’re starting reshape a bit how advertising is seen by putting the user in the center,” suggests Plante. “And giving them a useful means of accessing content. This is the original vision and we’ve been very loyal to that — and we think it can reshape the landscape.”

“When you look into five years from now, the smartphone we have will be really, really powerful — so why process things in the cloud? When you can process things on the phone. That’s what we are betting on: Processing everything on the phone,” he adds.

When the full store launches users will be able to add and delete (any) apps — included preloads. So they will be in the driving seat. (We asked Plante to a confirm the user will be able to delete all apps, including any pre-loadeds and he said yes. So if you take him at his word Fleksy will not be cutting any deals with OEMs or carriers to indelibly preload certain Fleksyapps. Or, to put it another way, crapware baked into the keyboard is most definitely not plan.)

Depending on what other Fleksyapps launch in future a Fleksy keyboard user could choose to add, for example, a search service like DuckDuckGo or France’s Qwant to power a pro-privacy alternative to using Google search in the keyboard. Or they could choose Google.

Again the point is the choice is theirs.

Scaling a keyboard into a platform

The idea of keyboard-as-platform offers at least the possibility of reintroducing the choice and variety of smartphone app stores back before the cynical tricks of attention-harvesting tech giants used their network effects and platform power to throttle the app economy.

The Android keyboard space was also a fertile experiment ground in years past. But it’s now dominated by Google’s Gboard and Microsoft-acquired Swiftkey. Which makes Fleksy the plucky upstart gunning to scale an independent alternative that’s not owned by big tech and is open to any third party that wants to join its mini apps party.

“It will be Bing search for Swiftkey, it will be Google search for Gboard, it will be Google Music, it will be YouTube. But on our side we can have YouTube, we can also have… other services that exist for video. The same way with pictures and the same way for file-sharing and drive. So you have Google Drive but you have Dropbox, you have OneDrive, there’s a lot of services in the cloud. And we want to be the platform that has them all, basically,” says Plante.

The original founding team of the Fleksy keyboard was acqui-hired by Pinterest back in 2016, leaving the keyboard app itself to languish with minimal updates. Then two years ago Barcelona-based keyboard app maker, ThingThing, stepped in to take over development.

Plante confirms it’s since fully acquired the Fleksy keyboard technology itself — providing a solid foundation for the keyboard-as-platform business it’s now hoping to scale with the launch of Fleksyapps.

Talking of scale, he tells us the startup is in the process of raising a multi-million Series A — aiming to close this summer. (ThingThing last took in $800,000 via equity crowdfunding last fall.)

The team’s investor pitch is the keyboard offers perhaps the only viable conduit left on mobile to reset the playing field for brands by offering a route to cut through tech giant walled gardens and get where users are spending most of their time and attention: i.e. typing and sharing stuff with their friends in private one-to-one and group chats.

That means the keyboard-as-platform has the potential to get brands of all stripes back in front of users — by embedding innovative, entertaining and helpful bite-sized utility where it can prove its worth and amass social currency on the dominant messaging platforms people use.

The next step for the rebooted Fleksy team is of course building scale by acquiring users for a keyboard which, as of half a year ago, only had around 1M active users from pure downloads.

Its strategy on this front is to target Android device makers to preload Fleksy as the default keyboard.

ThingThing’s business model is a revenue share on any suggestions the keyboard converts, which it argues represent valuable leads for brands — given the level of contextual intention. It is also intending to charge brands that want to be preloaded on the Fleksy keyboard by default.

Again, though, a revenue share model requires substantial scale to work. Not least because brands will need to see evidence of scale to buy into the Fleksyapps’ vision.

Plante isn’t disclosing active users of the Fleksy keyboard right now. But says he’s confident they’re on track to hit 30M-35M active users this year — on account of around ten deals he says are in the pipeline with device makers to preload Fleksy’s keyboard. (Palm was an early example, as we reported last year.)

The carrot for OEMs to join the Fleksyapps party is they’re cutting them in on the revenue share from user interactions with branded keyboard apps — playing to device makers’ needs to find ways to boost famously tight hardware margins.

“The fact that the keyboard can monetize and provide value to the phone brands — this is really massive for them,” argues Plante. “The phone brands can expect revenue flowing in their bank account because we give the brands distribution and the handset manufacturer will make money and we will make money.”

It’s a smart approach, and one that’s essentially only possible because Google’s own Gboard keyboard doesn’t come preloaded on the majority of Android devices. (Exceptions include its own Pixel brand devices.) So — unusually for a core phone app on Android — there’s a bit of an open door where the keyboard sits, instead of the usual preloaded Google wares. And that’s an opportunity.

Markets wise, ThingThing is targeting OEMs in all global regions with its Fleksy pitch — barring China (which Plante readily admits it too complex for a small startup to sensibly try jumping at).

Apps vs tech giants

In its stamping ground of Europe there are warm regulatory winds blowing too: An European Commission antitrust intervention last year saw Google hit with a $5BN fine over anti-competitive practices attached to its Android platform — forcing the company to change local licensing terms.

That antirust decision means mobile makers finally have the chance to unbundle Google apps from devices they sell in the region.

Which translates into growing opportunities for OEMs to rethink their Android strategies. Even as Google remains under pressure not to get in the way by force feeding any more of its wares.

Really, a key component of this shift is that device makers are being told to think, to look around and see what else is out there. For the first time there looks to be a viable chance to profit off of Android without having to preload everything Google wants.

“For us it’s a super good sign,” says Plante of the Commission decision. “Every monopolistic situation is a problem. And the market needs to be fragmented. Because if not we’re just going to lose innovation. And right now Europe — and I see good progress for the US as well — are trying to dismantle the imposed power of those big guys. For the simple evolution of human being and technology and the future of us.”

“I think good things can happen,” he adds. “We’re in talks with handset manufacturers who are coming into Europe and they want to be the most respectful of the market. And with us they have this reassurance that you have a good partner that ensures there’s a revenue stream, there’s a business model behind it, there’s really a strong use-case for users.

“We can finally be where we always wanted to be: A choice, an alternative. But having Google imposing its way since start — and making sure that all the direct competition of Google is just a side, I think governments have now seen the problem. And we’re a winner of course because we’re a keyboard.”

But what about iOS? Plante says the team has plans to bring what they’re building with Fleksy to Apple’s mobile platform too, in time. But for now they’re fully focusing efforts on Android — to push for scale and execute on their vision of staking their claim to be the independent keyboard platform.

Apple has supported third party keyboards on iOS for years. Unfortunately, though, the experience isn’t great — with a flaky toggle to switch away from the default Apple keyboard, combined with heavy system warnings about the risks of using third party keyboards.

Meanwhile the default iOS keyboard ‘just works’ — and users have loads of extra features baked by default into Apple’s native messaging app, iMessage.

Clearly alternative keyboards have found it all but impossible to build any kind of scale in that iOS pincer.

“iOS is coming later because we need to focus on these distribution deals and we need to focus on the brands coming into the platform. And that’s why iOS right now we’re really focusing for later. What we can say is it will come later,” says Plante, adding: “Apple limits a lot keyboards. You can see it with other keyboard companies. It’s the same. The update cycle for iOS keyboard is really, really, really slow.”

Plus, of course, Fleksy being preloaded as a default keyboard on — the team hopes — millions of Android devices is a much more scalable proposition vs just being another downloadable app languishing invisibly on the side lines of another tech giant’s platform.

After much anticipation, Lyft stock hit the public markets last week, with a nearly 10% pop on its first day of trading. However, concerns over the company’s lofty valuation, deep losses and uncertain path to profitability have caused the stock to fall flat in the days since.

TechCrunch’s resident transportation expert Kirsten Korosec and venture capital ax Kate Clark have been on the case, closely following the market’s reaction and the evolving theses around Lyft’s business… Today at 11:00 am PT, Kirsten and Kate will be helping Extra Crunch members understand how investors are thinking about Lyft and will be offering their views on where the company goes from here.

Tune in to join the Lyft debate as it unfolds, as well as for the opportunity to ask Kirsten and Kate any and all things Lyft, transportation, or venture.

To listen to this and all future conference calls, become a member of Extra Crunch. Learn more and try it for free.

Parker Conrad’s last startup, Zenefits, drowned in busy work. Now with Rippling, he wants to boil that ocean. Instead of trying to nail one thing then expand, “very counter to conventional wisdom, we took on something that’s a lot broader and more ambitious.” That meant spending two years with 40 engineers working in stealth to build integrations with nearly every popular business tool to combine HR, IT and single-sign on services. The result is that when you hire an employee, Rippling onboards them to all those services in a single click. Goodbye, busy work. Hello, gateway to the enterprise app ecosystem.

The past few years have seen a Cambrian explosion of startups building specialty software for office productivity and collaboration. But that’s left customers struggling to get their teams set up on all these fragmented tools. As such, Rippling had a very good first year on the market with rapidly growing revenue. So when Rippling went out to raise money, Conrad was signing term sheets in just over a week.

Forty-five million dollars. “I know that rounds are bigger these days, but still, for a Series A, that’s pretty substantial,” Conrad tells me with a wide grin over coffee at San Francisco’s Four Barrel. “We want to keep doubling down on the engineering, investing and putting more money into R&D, so we have real product advantages and technology advantages over other players in our space, even though a lot of them have been around a lot longer than we have.” The Information‘s Zoe Bernard had reported Rippling was raising at least $30 million.

Rippling’s round was led by Kleiner Perkins and its enterprise guru Mamoon Hamid. As Conrad tells me, “Many of the metrics you use to evaluate SaaS companies were invented by Mamoon. He really knows his stuff. He’s also just a really great person.” Kleiner was his dream partner for Rippling. “I remember when I was in high school, Kleiner Perkins was the only VC firm I’d ever heard of. When I was a little kid, I thought ‘Oh that’d be cool some day.’ ” The round was joined by Initialized Capital, Threshold Ventures (formerly DFJ) and Y Combinator.

A source confirms the round was a stunning $270 million valuation. Hamid was also skeptical about Rippling trying to integrate with everyone before launch. But, he says, “What was a concern a few years ago is now something we like about the company.” After getting pitched so many piecemeal enterprise solutions, it suddenly clicked for Hamid why customers would want “one stop for everything. You need an independent party to be that glue layer.” 

Typically, enterprise software is an unglued mess. Apps don’t talk to each other, so when you hire a new employee, you have to manually add them, their role, their team, their manager, their permissions and more to every single tool your team uses. There are HR systems that control payroll and benefits, IT systems that determine what equipment you’re issued, productivity and collaboration apps like Slack and Dropbox and department-specific tools like Salesforce or GitHub. Conrad believes manually updating these with each hire, fire or promotion is the source of almost all administrative work at a company.

The willingness to slog through office chores rather than strategically nullify them is why Zenefits grew so fast, then suddenly hit a wall. What can be begrudgingly brute-forced at 50 employees becomes impossible to manage at 500 employees. That’s why, he says, “We don’t want to have anything that’s not software end to end in the product.” If it requires a client to call Rippling’s operations team for help, it could be built better. That maniacal focus actually allowed Conrad to temporarily hold Rippling’s only role responding to user complaints, which he also credits with propelling rapid iteration. The CEO wants to remain in that mindset, so he still lists his job title on LinkedIn as “Customer Support.”

Conrad seems to have convinced investors that though he was pushed out of his $4.5 billion-valuation HR startup Zenefits, he was more responsible for its rise than its fall. Conrad had built a script that allowed Zenefits staffers to stay logged in to the study portion of their insurance exam. Conrad insists it played no part in helping them study for or pass the certification test. Still, regulators got involved, leading to his departure and a combined $1 million SEC fine for him and Zenefits. The desire to speed things up was another symptom of busy work draining the company’s time.

There were also culture issues, with Zenefits once having to tell employees not to have sex in the office stairwells. A more measured pace and a deeper commitment to diversity are a few other ways Rippling hopes to avoid the culture troubles of Conrad’s last venture.

Rippling only truly began hiring more than engineers when it came out of stealth a year ago. Now the startup has established two lucrative business models. First, it earns reseller fees from other enterprise tool makers when people buy them through the Rippling gateway. Any developer with a well-established brand becomes an integrated Rippling partner. It’s not going to try to out-build Zoom or Mailchimp. “As Rippling is successful, what I think it can do is bring a lot of customers to these other businesses. If you can bring down the marginal cost of adding an N+1 business system, there’s a lot less hesitation about adding products.” Customers want more utility, just without the headache.

Meanwhile, Rippling develops its own in-house versions of undifferentiated parts of the HR and IT stacks, like PTO management or commuter benefits. Customers aren’t loyal to a brand in these areas yet, so it’s easy for Rippling to swoop in. And it can charge a similar rate, but beat competitors on convenience because its homegrown systems integrate directly with Rippling’s source of truth on employee details. Upstarts in the single-sign on space like Okta and LastPass claim to be identity layers, but are really just password managers. And their early growth has spurred SaaS companies to build API endpoints on which Rippling’s version RPass can piggyback.

For a while I thought Slack would emerge as the enterprise identity provider because chat is such a ubiquitous need that it could be the start of a cross-app profile. But HR and IT are an even more foundational layer, and Slack doesn’t feel like a natural place to gather employee details like Rippling is. “For slack, communication and collaboration in general are a big enough opportunity to not let identity get in the way of the core business there,” says Hamid.

Now with Rippling’s business revving up and plenty of cash to fuel the engine, Conrad tells me his biggest concern is hiring the right people. “The really challenging thing in a company is when the headcount grows too quickly. I’m making sure we don’t do things like more than double headcount in a 12-month period,” he tells me. While Zenefits was a mad blitz for scale, Conrad has tried to bias Rippling toward action without being so impulsive that the company makes mistakes. “It’s never easy, but we’re not yet at the scale where things become really scary. We have a little bit more time to hit milestones. We’re growing at a healthy clip, but nothing that’s straining things in any way and we see that because we track our NPS very closely,” he says of trying to run a business at a more livable pace while being an active dad, too.

Luckily, Zenefits taught him how to avoid many of the pitfalls of entrepreneurship. Conrad concludes that he’s happy to have gone from “playing video games on impossible mode versus medium mode.”

Identity management software provider Okta, which went public two years ago in what was one of the first pure-cloud subscription-based company IPOs, wants to fund the next generation of identity, security and privacy startups.

At its big customer conference Oktane, where the company has also announced a new level of identity protection at the server level, chief operating officer Frederic Kerrest (pictured above, right, with chief executive officer Todd McKinnon) will unveil a $50 million investment fund meant to back early-stage startups leveraging artificial intelligence, machine learning and blockchain technology.

“We view this as a natural extension of what we are doing today,” Okta senior vice president Monty Gray told TechCrunch. Gray was hired last year to oversee corporate development, i.e. beef up Okta’s M&A strategy.

Gray and Kerrest tell TechCrunch that Okta Ventures will invest capital in existing Okta partners, as well as other companies in the burgeoning identity management ecosystem. The team managing the fund will look to Okta’s former backers, Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz and Greylock, for support in the deal sourcing process.

Okta Ventures will write checks sized between $250,000 and $2 million to eight to 10 early-stage businesses per year.

“It’s just a way of making sure we are aligning all our work and support with the right companies who have the right vision and values because there’s a lot of noise around identity, ML and AI,” Kerrest said. “It’s about formalizing the support strategy we’ve had for years and making sure people are clear of the fact we are helping these organizations build because it’s helpful to our customers.”

Okta Ventures’ first bet is Trusted Key, a blockchain-based digital identity platform that previously raised $3 million from Founders Co-Op. Okta’s investment in the startup, founded by former Microsoft, Oracle and Symantec executives, represents its expanding interest in the blockchain.

“Blockchain as a backdrop for identity is cutting edge if not bleeding edge,” Gray said.

Okta, founded in 2009, had raised precisely $231 million from Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock, Khosla Ventures, Floodgate and others prior to its exit. The company’s stock has fared well since its IPO, debuting at $17 per share in 2017 and climbing to more than $85 apiece with a market cap of $9.6 billion as of Tuesday closing.

Two of the issues limiting blockchain adoption in the enterprise has been lack of scalability and privacy. Offchain Labs, a startup that spun out of research at Princeton, wants to help create more scalable smart contracts while shifting part of the process off of the public blockchain to increase privacy. Today, the company announced a $3.7M seed round led by Pantera Capital.

Compound VC, Raphael Ouzan of Blocknation, Jake Seid, managing director at Stone Bridge Ventures and other unnamed investors also participated.

The startup has created a protocol called Arbitrum that helps developers scale smart contracts in a way that’s difficult to do right now, says company co-founder Ed Felten. “We’re working to build a platform for smart contract development that provides what we think developers want, a combination of scalability so that you can scale to more transactions per second, more users, and to contracts that have more code and still have more data in them,” he explained.

In addition to scalability, the company believes that companies want a way to business without sharing everything they are doing, as is required on a public chain. “The second thing we think people want is privacy, meaning control over who gets to see what’s happening in their contract. So you don’t have to publish everything about your contracts, your code and everything it does on a public chain in order to get your work done.”

The last piece related to that is trust. “Our platform offers what we call the ‘Any Trust Guarantee’, which means that when you launch or deploy your contract, you specify a set of validators for it. And the guarantee we give you is that as long as at least one validator is acting honestly, your contract will execute correctly, no matter how evil or inattentive the other validators are,” Felten said.

The company was born out of research at Princeton University and began with what Felten called an academic prototype created in their labs. Felten is a computer science professor at Princeton, and also served as Deputy CTO to the White House under President Obama,

Those credentials and the prototype showed enough to attract investors. Today, the company is hoping to use the money to complete a Beta version of Arbitrum. He wouldn’t commit to a timeline, but said the product is close.

While Felten recognizes he is competing with giants like IBM and SAP in the enterprise blockchain space, he believes that the startup has come up with a solution to a persistent problem for blockchain developers, and they are releasing the protocol as open source to make it even more attractive.

Tel Aviv’s Run.AI, a startup that is building a new virtualization and acceleration platform for deep learning, is coming out of stealth today. As a part of this announcement, the company also announced that it has now raised a total of $13 million. This includes a $3 million seed round from TLV Partners and a $10 million Series A round led by Haim Sadger’s S Capital and TLV Partners.

It’s no secret that building deep learning models take a hefty amount of GPU power or access to specialized AI chips. Run.AI argues that the virtualization layers that worked so well for in the past don’t quite cut it for training today’s AI models.

“We believe that we’re only scratching the surface of the full potential of deep learning,” Run.AI CEO and co-founder Omri Geller told me. “But the computational infrastructure needs of deep learning are a totally different ballgame. […] The rise of deep learning is triggering a new era of compute.”

Traditionally, Geller argues, virtualization was all about being generous and sharing the resources of a single machine for workloads that typically only run for a short time or use a small amount of resources. Deep learning workloads, however, are very different and are essentially selfish in that they want to take over all the available compute resources of a given machine. These training sessions also typically run for hours or days. At its core, what Run.AI offers is a new virtualization layer for distributed machine learning tasks that can across a large number of machines.

“We built a compute abstraction layer that bridges the gap between the new form of workloads and the new hardware that is evolving,” said Geller. “By using this abstraction layer, we can achieve 100x faster compute using distributed computing. We can double the resource utilization of the hardware and we can bring to companies the control over time and cost regarding deep learning.” That’s 100x faster than using a single resource, though that’s a bit aspirational as Geller also tells me that the team is seeing about a 10x speedup in production right now, though he’s confident that the team will get to 100x over time. Either way, though, the promise here is that the service will allow you to optimize the utilization of your deep learning workloads.

That’s only one part of the company’s solution, though. In addition, the company’s tools also analyze the model in order to break it down into smaller models that can then run in parallel across these servers. With that, the service can understand how many resources a workload would need and what machines to best send the given workloads to. In doing this, the system takes into account everything from available compute resources to network bandwidth, as well as the data pipeline and size.

The company also argues that this allows it to train large models that are bigger than the individual GPU memory capacity of a single machine.

There’s a financial aspect to this, too, because users can determine whether they want the service to prioritize cost savings over training speed, for example. The platform supports both private and public cloud deployments. In private clouds, cost savings are obviously less of a factor but the premise of increased utlization of the existing hardware investment will likely be a draw for many of these users.

The company, which was founded by Geller, Dr. Ronen Dar and Prof. Meir Feder, was founded in 2018. While still in stealth, it signed a number of early customers and opened a U.S. office. 

Identity access management company Okta (Nasdaq: OKTA) recently announced stellar fourth quarter results. Its record performance for the quarter outpaced market expectations. However, the market...

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Aqua Security, a startup that helps customers launch containers securely, announced a $62 million Series C investment today led by Insight Partners.

Existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, M12 (Microsoft’s venture fund), TLV Partners and Shlomo Kramer also participated. With today’s investment, the startup’s investments since inception now total over $100 million, according to the company.

Early investors took a chance on the company when it was founded in 2015. Containers were barely a thing back then, but the founders had a vision of what was coming down the pike and their bet has paid off in a big way as the company now has first-mover advantage. As more companies turn to Kubernetes and containers, the need for a security product built from the ground up to secure this kind of environment is essential.

While co-founder and CEO Dror Davidoff says the company has 60 Fortune 500 customers, he’s unable to share names, but he can provide some clues like five of the world’s top banks. As companies like that turn to new technology like containers, they aren’t going to go whole hog without a solid security option. Aqua gives them that.

“Our customers are all taking very dramatic steps towards adoption of those new technologies, and they know that existing security tools that they have in place will not solve the problems,” Davidoff told TechCrunch. He said that most customers have started small, but then have expanded as container adoption increases.

You may thank that an ephemeral concept like a container would be less of a security threat, but Davidoff says that the open nature of containerization actually leaves them vulnerable to tampering. “Container lives long enough to be dangerous,” he said. He added, “They are structured in an open way, making it simple to hack, and once in, to do lateral movement. If the container holds sensitive info, it’s easy to have access to that information.”

Aqua scans container images for malware and makes sure only certified images can run, making it difficult for a bad actor to insert an insecure image, but the ephemeral nature of containers also helps if something slips through. DevOp can simply take down the faulty container and put a newly certified clean one quickly.

The company has 150 employees with offices in the Boston area and R&D in Tel Aviv in Israel. With the new influx of cash, the company plans to expand quickly, growing sales and marketing, customer support and expanding the platform into areas to cover emerging areas like serverless computing. Davidoff says the company could double in size in the next 12-18 months and he’s expecting 3x to 4x customer growth.

All of that money should provide fuel to grow the company as containerization spreads and companies look for a security solution to keep containers in production safe.

This morning, Forbes wrote a lengthy profile of Andreessen Horowitz, the now 10-year-old venture firm that its rivals love to hate but nevertheless tend to copy. It’s a great read that revisits some of the firm’s wins and losses and, interestingly, regrets, including the founders’ early predisposition to talk trash about the rest of the venture industry.

As Ben Horowitz tells reporter Alex Konrad, “I kind of regret it, because I feel like I hurt people’s feelings who were perfectly good businesses . . . I went too far.”

The story also suggests that Andreessen Horowitz — whose agency-like model has been widely replicated by other big venture firms — is re-shaping venture capital a second time. It’s doing this, says Forbes, by turning itself into a registered investment advisor.

But the firm isn’t alone is morphing into something very different than it once was, including an RIA. SoftBank is already one. Foundry Group is one. General Catalyst appears to be in the process of registering as one, too. (It recently withdrew its status as a so-called exempt reporting advisor.) Other big firms with a range of un-VC-like products are similarly eyeing the same move.

They don’t have much choice. While VCs have traditionally been able to dabble in new areas through their limited partner agreements with their own investors, they’ve also faced what’s traditionally been a 20 percent cap on these activities, like buying in the public markets, investing in other funds, issuing debt to fund buyouts and acquiring equity through secondary transactions.

Put another way, 20 percent of their capital could be used to experiment, but the rest had to be funneled into typical venture capital-type deals.

For Andreessen Horowitz, that cap clearly began to grate. An early and enduring believer in cryptocurrencies, marketplaces and applications, the firm grew particularly frustrated over its inability to invest more of its flagship fund into crypto startups. It raised a separate crypto fund last year so it could move more aggressively on opportunities, but according to Forbes, the constraints that came with creating that separate legal entity gave rise to new aggravations.

By becoming a registered investment advisor, Andreessen Horowitz will no longer have to limit its stakes, including in its general fund — the newest of which it’s expected to announce shortly. It will also have the freedom to invest any percentage of its fund that it wants in larger high-growth companies, to buy shares from founders and early investors and to trade public stocks, as Forbes notes.

It’s the same reason that SoftBank is a registered investment advisor and other big firms with more assets will invariably be, as well. As longtime startup attorney Barry Kramer observes, “Like the now-giant operating companies that VCs once funded, like Google and Apple and Amazon, each of which used to play in discrete market segments and now overlap, hedge funds, mutual funds, secondary funds, and venture funds that used to play in discrete market segments are starting to overlap, too.”

The opportunity to shop for secondary stakes alone could drive a venture firm to restructure. “Secondary markets are eating” the public markets, observes Barrett Cohn on the investment bank Scenic Advisement, which helps broker sales between equity buyers and sellers. Cohn has a vested interest in this turnabout, but it’s also hard to argue he’s wrong, considering how long startups remain private, and how much more secondary activity now takes place before companies are acquired, go public or conk out.

Little wonder the powerful venture capital lobby group — the National Venture Capital Association — has been trying to talk the SEC into changing its definition of what constitutes a venture capital firm. It recognizes that it will lose more and more members if venture firms aren’t afforded more flexibility.

Still, becoming an RIA isn’t without its downsides — a lot of them, notes Bob Raynard, the managing director of the fund administration services company Standish Management in San Francisco.

Though he thinks many firms like Andreessen Horowitz may not have a choice past a certain point (“I think there are a lot of other growth equity and venture firms that should be registered for their own sake”), the new rules to which it will be adapting can “be quite onerous,” including a complete lack of privacy, as well as associated expenses. One estimate we found suggests that the median annual compliance costs are eight times higher for RIAs than for exempt registered advisors.

“If [Andreessen Horowitz] is becoming an RIA, its cost structure just went way up,” says Raynard, explaining that a compliance officer will have to sign off on everything an employee at the firm does, as well as the investing decisions that its partners’ spouses, children and even parents make. “As a VC, you don’t have to report your trades,” Raynard notes, but an RIA has to ensure that nothing and no one with a pecuniary interest in the firm creates an expensive misstep.

It also could conceivably create headaches for limited partners, who typically like to invest in distinct asset classes, whether venture capital or private equity or hedge funds. If Andreessen Horowitz, among other firms, starts to look like an amalgamation of all three, how will it be viewed? In which bucket will it land?

The firm declined to answer that question and others of ours today, saying it’s focused for now on completing the process of registering as an RIA.

Raynard meanwhile pushes back on the idea that its new look might throw off the institutions that have long funded it. “I think regulators will view it as a good thing, and I think most LPs would view it as a favorable shift, because of the increased outside scrutiny involved.” He thinks a bigger issue for venture firms that become investment firms more broadly — beyond the expenses and the added layers of management needed and an eagle-eyed SEC watching more closely — could be that it becomes harder to recruit.

Despite widespread interest in working for a brand-name firm, “if you’re a junior-level person and you’re being recruited by a firm that’s a registered investment advisor versus a venture firm where your deals are not being scrutinized and you have some privacy,” says Raynard, “it’s something you’re going to think about.”

According to Industry Reports, Global Project Management Software Market is expected to grow from $2.3 billion in 2007 to $7 billion by 2026 at a CAGR of 14.93%. Basecamp is a mostly bootstrapped...

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Sramana Mitra: Are you investing in media as well? Swapna Gupta: Yes, but our perspective is slightly different. We’re looking at technology which is changing. Media is changing as well....

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Entrepreneurs are invited to the 438th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, April 4, 2019, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/4 p.m. CET/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur,...

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Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Rebecca Kaden was recorded in February 2019....

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Sqreen has raised a Series A round of $14 million. Greylock Partners is leading the round, existing investors Y Combinator, Alven and Point Nine are also participating.

The startup wants to improve security when it comes to web applications and cloud infrastructure. Sqreen doesn’t require you to alter your code or put up a firewall. It works a bit like performance management companies, such as New Relic, AppDynamics or DataDog.

“Many strategic tasks are now handled with an engineer-driven approach — performance, deployment, log monitoring, error management… but not security,” co-founder and CEO Pierre Betouin told me.

If you don’t have enough time or money to build a team of security experts, Sqreen can already help you identify and fix many issues in your application. First, you install a library package on your server and add a few lines of code to require the Sqreen module in your application.

This way, Sqreen’s microagents are always running and monitoring your app. You can identify security holes in the Sqreen dashboard. You can also optionally activate real-time protection modules.

And Sqreen has expanded its service and now handles more than weaknesses than before. In addition to its self-protection module against SQL and XSS injections, Sqreen now provides an in-app Web Application Firewall, protections against account takeovers, bad bots, etc.

That’s why Sqreen is calling its platform Application Security Management as you can activate and deactivate modules depending on your needs. Sqreen gives you an overview of your cloud infrastructure so that you stay on top of security.

Sqreen currently works with web applications in Node.JS, Ruby, PHP, Python, Java and Go. There’s a small CPU overhead once you deploy Sqreen. Clients now include Le Monde, Algolia, Y Combinator and Y Combinator.

In 2007, Stefania Mallett and Briscoe Rodgers conceived of ezCater, an online marketplace for business catering, and began building the company in Mallet’s Boston home, mostly at her kitchen table.

Recently, sitting at that same table, Mallett negotiated with Brad Twohig of Lightspeed Venture Partners the final terms of a $150 million Series D-1 at a $1.25 billion valuation. Lightspeed, alongside GIC, co-led the round, with participation from Light Street Capital, Wellington Management, ICONIQ Capital and Quadrille Capital.

“Raising money or getting to unicorn status, it’s all nice validation but that’s not the purpose, the purpose of being in business is to grow a very successful company with happy customers and happy employees,” Mallett, ezCater’s chief executive officer, told TechCrunch. “We are going to have cupcakes with unicorns on them. That will take us about a half hour, then we will get back to work.”

Mallett compares ezCater to Expedia . The travel company doesn’t own and operate hotels, nor do they create them. EzCater, similarly, works with 60,500 restaurants and caterers around the U.S. to fulfill orders, but at no point do they work directly with food nor make any deliveries themselves.

Since its inception, the ezCater marketplace has grown considerably, expanding 100 percent annually for the last eight years, Mallett tells us. Though, like most unicorns, ezCater isn’t profitable yet.

Both Mallett and Rodgers are software industry veterans, establishing engineering careers prior to tackling business catering. The pair bootstrapped the company until 2011, when they secured a small Series A investment of $2.7 million. That same year, U.S. foodtech startups raised $176 million, per PitchBook. EzCater would go on to raise more than $300 million in equity funding, including its latest round, and VC interest in foodtech would explode. Already this year, U.S. foodtech startups have brought in $626 million after pulling in a whopping $5 billion in 2018.

EzCater has benefited from this boom. The company raised a $100 million Series D just 10 months ago.

“We really didn’t need the money, we have quite a lot of money in the bank from the last round,” Mallett said. “There was so much talk of a funding winter and a recession coming so we said maybe we should try to raise money and then people jumped on it so we thought OK, why not? If there is a funding winter, we’re set; if not, well, we are still set.”

The investment comes hot off the heels of ezCater’s acquisition of Monkey Group, a cloud platform for take-out, delivery and catering. Mallett declined to disclose terms of the deal but said the partnership makes ezCater the indisputable market leader in catering management software. The company will use its recently expanded war chest to accelerate its international expansion and, potentially, continue its M&A streak. As for the future, an initial public offering is amongst the possibilities.

“We certainly are considering it,” Mallett said. “As we’ve grown, we’ve become more sophisticated and mature; that puts us in a good position to continue operating as a successful standalone company or be acquired by a public company or go public if we see an opportunity to do that. We are not wedded to any of these outcomes.”

Just since months after raising $7 million in Series A funding, German SME banking provider Penta has been acquired by Finleap. Terms of the deal remain undisclosed, although I understand that the acquisition sees Finleap and Penta’s co-founders becoming the challenger bank’s sole owners, with all other shareholders exiting.

Launched in late 2014 by Hitfox Group and Ramin Niroumand, Finleap has developed 16 ventures from scratch, as well as acquiring a number of fintechs. Companies in its portfolio include banking platform solarisBank, of which Penta is a customer, and digital insurer Element, to name just two.

Penta says that becoming part of the Finleap “ecosystem” will help the SME banking provider increase the speed at which it expands internationally. This will include launching in Italy in partnership with Beesy, a Finleap portfolio company focusing on digital business banking for freelancers.

“Penta has a great product and a great team, serving especially the digital industry, which matches perfectly [with] Finleap’s focus on vertical banking,” FinLeap co-founder Niroumand tells me. “Additionally, with Pair Finance for digital debt collection and Perseus for cybersecurity, there are already two other players in the Finleap ecosystem offering services to a similar customer group like Penta, so they form a real value chain for the digital industry”.

To date, Penta counts over 5,500 digital businesses as customers, such as AirHelp, bepro11 and Global Digital Women. The banking fintech set out to fix SME banking, enabling customers to open a business bank account in just a few minutes online. Other features include a real-time overview of a business’ finances, debit cards with individual limits for employees, and accounting integration. Over the next year, Penta plans to add direct debits, SME loans, international transfers and more.

“The decision to go with Finleap was a strategic one,” says Penta co-founder Luka Ivicevic. “By becoming part of the finleap ecosystem, we’re able to accelerate our growth inside and outside of Germany at an unprecedented pace”.

Meanwhile, Niroumand says Penta will remain an independent business and that Finleap will not be part of the operational management of Penta. However, Penta will be able to benefit from Finleap’s resources and expertise. Penta will be able to get strong support from Finleap’s team of top talents,” he says.

“For example to accelerate their hiring efforts and to solve back-office tasks, so that the Penta team can focus completely on the development of the product and new features, like loans and direct debits. In terms of funding, Penta can also tap into Finleap’s network of corporate financial partners”.

Adds Ivicevic: “This is not an exit, but the next step of our growth, Finleap is the right partner for it”.