Moolah Mobile is teaming up with SurgePhone Wireless to offer people a new way to pay their cell phone bills — by putting ads on their homescreens.

Moolah CEO Vernell Woods (pictured above) said the startup has already been offering gift cards and other rewards to users who view its homescreen ads. So this is a similar model, except instead of earning gift cards, the ads are subsidizing cell phone service from Surge .

The ads show up on users’ homescreens during interstitial moments between using apps, so the goal is to offer free service without consumers having to change their behavior. Woods said all that ad time adds up, with “the average person who’s using their phone on a consistent basis” viewing “easily between two to three hours” of homescreen ads each day. And that’s enough to pay for the “equivalent” of Surge’s $10 monthly plan.

On the other hand, if for some reason a subscriber isn’t hitting the necessary total, Woods said they can also earn more points by accepting offers or taking surveys.

Moolah isn’t the only company using advertising to make previously paid products free. Just last week, I wrote about PreShow, a startup promising a free movie ticket for watching 15 to 20 minutes of ads. (Not everyone was crazy about the idea.)

But Woods said he’s doing this because he wants to make wireless service more affordable to people in low-income communities. In the announcement, Moolah investor Tip “T.I.” Harris said it’s “one of the few tech companies I’ve seen who truly want to help everyday people have access to technology.”

But could this also be seen as a way to harvest personal data from a vulnerable population? Woods said he wants to protect against that with a blockchain initiative set to launch this fall, allowing users to see exactly what data is being shared with advertisers.

“No personal information should be going to advertisers without users knowing about it,” he said, adding that companies “definitely should not be making money off” personal data without giving users a cut of the profits.

The subsidized wireless service should be available on Surge Volt Android devices with Moolah install kits, as well as through SIM Starter Kits distributed by Surge. Moolah and Surge said they will roll this out in Florida, Virginia, Georgia and Texas initially, with an aim of reaching 40,000 locations by the end of the year.

Sramana Mitra: Before we move to the entrepreneurial discussions, could you talk a little bit about the three venture funds that have put Arka Ventures together. What do you envision would be their...

___

Today’s 437th FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Thursday, March 28, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/4 p.m. CET/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All are...

___

Today’s 437th FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Thursday, March 28, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/4 p.m. CET/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All...

___

According to a Transparency Market Research report, the worldwide market for email marketing is expected to grow at a CAGR of 19.6% from $4.51 billion in 2016 to $22.16 billion by the end of 2025....

___

Sramana Mitra: You put in context what might happen with the existing workflow of the drug development as we introduce more capability from a scalability point of view. Instead of a drug going...

___

Mark Selcow, General Partner at Costanoa Ventures, talks about the firm’s primarily B-to-B investment thesis and strong penchant for investing in companies that have grown up outside the Bay Area.

___

Direct-to-consumer mattress business Casper has secured a $100 million Series D investment from existing investors Target, NEA, IVP and Norwest Venture Partners.

The fresh infusion of capital values Casper at $1.1 billion, Bloomberg first reported and Casper confirmed.

“We are in the very early chapters of our growth story as demand for Casper products continues to expand across the globe,” Casper chief executive officer and co-founder Philip Krim said in a statement. “Today’s financing accelerates Casper’s vision to become the world’s largest end-to-end sleep company. Our growth will continue to be catalyzed by state-of-the-art sleep products, best-in-class customer experiences, and world-class leadership.”

Casper posted $373 million in net revenue in 2018, according to leaked financials published by The Information this week. In a press release issued today, however, Casper said 2018 revenue topped $400 million. The company, of course, isn’t profitable, with losses reaching $64 million last year, again per The Information. According to Casper’s projections, it will become profitable on an EBITDA basis in 2019 and is expecting revenues of $556 million this year.

Casper has previously raised $240 million in equity funding from celebrity investors Leonardo DiCaprio and 50 Cent, as well as institutional investors, including Lerer Hippeau .

Founded in 2014, the New York business will use the latest investment to expand overseas and open additional brick-and-mortar stores. Competing with other well-funded startups in the business of sleep, like the publicly traded Purple and the VC-backed Leesa Sleep, Casper has taken to physical retail to augment its following. The company opened its first store in New York City in 2018 and has detailed additional plans to open another 200 stores.

An initial public offering is likely the next step for the sleep products retailer, which sells pillows and an $89 sleep-friendly light, in addition to mattresses. Per a recent Reuters report, Casper is in the process of hiring underwriters for its IPO.

Every founder wants an eye-catching website or app, but it’s easy to overlook a basic fact: not all your potential visitors will experience your content with their eyes. If you haven’t considered whether a user with differing visual, motor or hearing abilities can easily navigate your software, it’s time to get serious about digital accessibility.

As tempting as it might be to prioritize a stunning visual and mobile experience over an accessible design, accessibility is a legal requirement—not an option—for many businesses.

Just ask high-profile founder Beyoncé Knowles. In January, Beyoncé’s Parkwood Entertainment was hit with a class-action lawsuit that includes “all legally blind individuals in the United States who have attempted to access Beyonce.com.” The lawsuit claims that the site’s lack of visual alternatives make the site inaccessible to blind users like the plaintiff and therefore illegal.

Failing to accommodate people with disabilities not only limits your market (blind people buy concert tickets and merchandise too), it can also bring legal and reputational consequences.

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires US businesses that serve the public to provide equal access and accommodations to everyone, whether through a physical building or a digital experience. Just as stores provide ramps as well as stairs, websites need to accommodate people with varying abilities, from movement disorders to visual and auditory impairments. The number of website accessibility lawsuits raised against private companies more than doubled last year. A single plaintiff won $100K in a similar ADA lawsuit in 2017.

While ADA is the enforcing legislation in the United States for the private sector, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) provide de facto global standards web designers should follow. The guidelines are based on four principles: content must be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust.

If you’re not sure whether your digital content (websites, apps, e-books, etc) is WCAG-compliant, have a certified accessibility consultant conduct an assessment immediately, and contact your legal team should you identify any risks.

However, simple compliance is only the first step. Understanding how accessibility is defined will broaden your understanding of the overall user experience, so you can create better content for all users.

This article is part of Extra Crunch’s exclusive “Startup Law A to Z” series, following previous articles on employment law, customer contracts, intellectual property (IP) and corporate matters. This series is designed to provide founders the information needed to assess legal risks in the areas common to most startups.

Should you identify legal risks facing your startup after reading this or other articles in the series, Extra Crunch resources can help. You can reach out to the Verified Experts of Extra Crunch, who focus on serving companies at your stage, for further guidance in the particular issues at hand.

The Web Content Accessibility Checklist:

PerceivableTime-based mediaText alternativesAdaptableDistinguishable (Use of color)OperableKeyboard accessibleNavigableInput modalitiesEnough timeSeizures and physical reactionsUnderstandableReadablePredictableInput assistanceRobustCompatible for various assistive technologies (Links can be programmatically determined)

Perceivable

A website must present content so that users of different abilities can perceive it. That means providing alternatives for any non-text content, like images or music.

For time-based media (audio and video), captions, content descriptions and sign language are acceptable options. 

What lies beneath the murky depths? SolarCity co-founder Peter Rive wants to help you and the scientific community find out. He’s just led a $7 million Series A for Sofar Ocean Technologies, a new startup formed from a merger he orchestrated between underwater drone maker OpenROV and sea sensor developer Spoondrift. Together, they’re teaming up their 1080p Trident drone and solar-powered Spotter sensor to let you collect data above and below the surface. They can help you shoot awesome video footage, track waves and weather, spot fishing and diving spots, inspect boats or infrastructure for damage, monitor acquaculture sites or catch smugglers.

“Aerial drones give us a different perspective of something we know pretty well. Ocean drones give us a view at something we don’t really know at all,” former Spoondrift and now Sofar CEO Tim Janssen tells me. “The Trident drone was created for field usage by scientists and is now usable by anyone. This is pushing the barrier towards the unknown.”

But while Rive has a soft spot for the ecological potential of DIY ocean exploration, the sea is crowded with competing drones. There are more expensive professional research-focused devices like the Saildrone, DeepTrekker and SeaOtter-2, as well as plenty of consumer-level devices like the $800 Robosea Biki, $1,000 Fathom ONE and $5,000 iBubble. The $1,700 Sofar Trident, which requires a cord to a surface buoy to power its three hours of dive time and two meters per second speed, sits in the middle of the pack, but Sofar co-founder David Lang things Trident can win with simplicity, robustness and durability. The question is whether Sofar can become the DJI of the water, leading the space, or if it will become just another commoditized hardware maker drowning in knock-offs.

Spoondrift launched in 2016 and raised $350,000 to build affordable ocean sensors that can produce climate-tracking data. “These buoys (Spotters) are surprisingly easy to deploy, very light and easy to handle, and can be lowered in the water by hand using a line. As a result, you can deploy them in almost any kind of conditions,” says Dr. Aitana Forcén-Vázquez of MetOcean Solutions.

OpenROV (it stands for Remotely Operated Vehicle) started seven years ago and raised $1.3 million in funding from True Ventures and National Geographic, which was also one of its biggest Trident buyers. “Everyone who has a boat should have an underwater drone for hull inspection. Any dock should have its own weather station with wind and weather sensors,” Sofar’s new chairman Rive declares.

Sofar will need to scale to accomplish Rive’s mission to get enough sensors in the sea to give us more data on the progress of climate change and other ecological issues. “We know very little about our oceans since we have so little data, because putting systems in the ocean is extremely expensive. It can cost millions for sensors and for boats,” he tells me. We gave everyone GPS sensors and cameras and got better maps. The ability to put low-cost sensors on citizens’ rooftops unlocked tons of weather forecasting data. That’s more feasible with Spotter, which costs $4,900 compared to $100,000 for some sea sensors.

Sofar hardware owners do not have to share data back to the startup, but Rive says many customers are eager to. They’ve requested better data portability so they can share with fellow researchers. The startup believes it can find ways to monetize that data in the future, which is partly what attracted the funding from Rive and fellow investors True Ventures and David Sacks’ Craft Ventures. The funding will build up that data business and also help Sofar develop safeguards to make sure its Trident drones don’t go where they shouldn’t. That’s obviously important, given London’s Gatwick airport shutdown due to a trespassing drone.

“The ultimate mission of the company is to connect humanity to the ocean as we’re mostly conservationists at heart,” Rive concludes. “As more commercialization and business opportunities arise, we’ll have to have conversations about whether those are directly benefiting the ocean. It will be important to have our moral compass facing in the right direction to protect the earth.”

Artiphon, the startup behind the electronic instrument that it’s dubbed the Instrument 1, has raised $2 million in seed funding.

We previously described the Instrument 1 as a symphony, rock band and DJ that you can hold in your hand. It’s a device that allows you to create the sounds of a guitar, violin, bass, piano or drum machine without any real training.

Back in 2015, Artiphon raised $1.3 million for the Instrument 1 on Kickstarter, blowing past its goal of $75,000. The new funding is a more traditional investment, led by Warner Music Group — in fact, it’s the first publicly announced investment from WMG Boost, Warner’s seed investment fund for music-related startups.

“As true innovators in music creativity, Artiphon is a strong example of the types of companies and products we seek to support,” said WMG’s head of innovation and emergin technology Jeff Bronikowski in a statement. “They’ve already expanded the concept of the musical instrument as a smart, connected device and we’re excited to help them drive the future of interactive music.”

Artiphon co-founder and CEO Mike Butera told me that his goal for the Instrument 1 is to remove skill as a barrier to entry for creating music. In fact, he recalled receiving responses to the Kickstarter campaign that said, “How dare you let anyone sound good? I worked so hard to sound good, and now you’re making that accessible to anyone.”

Butera’s response? “Welcome to the future.”

To be clear, he isn’t trying to replace traditional instruments — he said he still plays his classical violin. Nor does he think the product is just for beginners. Instead, he says the Instrument 1 (with pricing currently starting at $399) can also augment the skills of trained musicians, allowing them to make sounds they never could with a regular instrument.

While I spent more than a decade playing classical piano, it was basically half a lifetime ago — I think it’s fair to say that I fall closer to the beginner side of the spectrum.

So it was a real delight for me to try out the Instrument 1. With just a few pointers from Butera, I quickly found myself noodling around and making different instrument sounds. In some ways, it reminded me of playing Guitar Hero, but with far more expressiveness.

Butera, by the way, fully embraces that comparison. He told me, “We’re interested in making music as fun, or more fun, than playing games.”

While the product is called the Instrument 1, Butera told me the name is meant to emphasize the idea of many instruments in one — it doesn’t mean Artiphon is already working on an Instrument 2. The startup may release more hardware in the future, but he said he wants to move away from “a consumer electronics mindset” where you convince someone to buy a new gadget every year or two, and instead create an instrument “that could last for years.”

“We are committed to the quality of the Instrument 1,” Butera said.

So the next steps for Artiphon include exploring more distribution channels, as well as building more software.

Artiphon has already created its own app for the Instrument 1, and the device is also compatible with a wide range of music software like Garage Band, but he said, “Okay, what can we do to help people actually play a song? It starts with the instrument … This is the foundation, now we’re getting to design experiences for people around the instrument that are in software.”

There are better employee perks than a ping-pong table. Seventy percent of Americans graduate college with student loan debt. That’s 45 million people who owe $1.6 trillion. So when employers use Goodly to offer $100 per month in student loan payback for a $6 fee, talent sticks around. The startup found 86 percent of employees said they’d stay with a company for at least five years if their employer helped pay down their student loans. Yet employers break even if workers stay just two extra months, and get a 5X return if they stay an extra year because it costs so much to hire and train replacement staff.

Now, Y Combinator-backed Goodly has raised a $1.3 million seed round led by Norwest. The startup hopes to capitalize on corporate America waking up to student loan payback as a benefit, which is expected to grow from being offered by 4 percent of companies today to 32 percent by 2021.

Goodly co-founder and CEO Greg Poulin knows the student loan crisis personally. “When I was in school, my father passed away very unexpectedly due to a heart attack. I had to borrow $80,000 for college at Dartmouth,” he tells me. His monthly payment is now $900. The stress that debt creates can poison the rest of your life. He says 21 percent of employees with student loan debt have delayed marriage, 28 percent have put off starting a family and 1 out of 8 divorces is now directly attributed to student loan debt. “I’ve seen first-hand how challenging it is for employees to save for retirement or start a family” when they’re strapped with debt, Poulin says.

He met his co-founder and CTO Hemant Verma when they started working at Zenefits’ founder Parker Conrad’s new employee onboarding startup, Rippling, in 2017. That taught them how simplifying the benefits sign-up process could become its own business. Typically it requires that benefits be integrated with a company’s financial software, like payroll, and be set up with proper provisioning access. It’s enough of a chore that companies don’t go to the trouble of offering student loan repayment.

Poulin and Verma started Goodly to create a “set it and forget it” system that automates everything. They charge $6 per month per participating employee and typically see adoption by 30 percent to 40 percent of employees. Rather than help with their monthly payment that includes interest, Goodly clients pay down their employees’ core debt so they can escape more quickly. Employees get a dashboard where they can track their debt and all of the contributions their company has made. Goodly hasn’t had a single customer churn since launch, demonstrating how badly employers want to keep job-hopping talent in their roles.

“We found that our people put off contributing to their 401ks and buying a house because of their student loan debt. We thought that offering a Student Loan Repayment Benefit would be a great low-cost and high-impact benefit to attract and retain talent while alleviating some of the stress and the financial burden on our employees,” says Kim Alessi, an HR generalist.

The business opportunity here is relatively young, but there are a few competitors. Boston-based Gratify was acquired by First Republic, which Santa Monica’s Tuition.io pivoted to offering student loan benefits. But Goodly’s connection to so many potential clients plus its new funding could help it make student loan repayment a ubiquitous perk. Along with Norwest and YC, the funding comes from ACE & Company, Arab Angel, Zeno Ventures and angel investors, including Optimizely’s Pete Koomen, DreamHost’s Josh Jones, ShipStation’s Jason Hodges, Fairy’s Avlok Kohli and Telly’s Mo Al Adham.

Beyond improving talent retention, Goodly may also help erase some of the systematic discrimination against minorities in our country. Women hold 66 percent of all student loan debt, black and Latinx Americans have 31 percent more student debt than their peers and LGBTQ borrowers owe $16,000 more than an average member of the population. Convincing employers to address student loan debt could give everyone more freedom of choice when it comes to what they work on and how they live their lives.

Sramana Mitra: If you get carried away and raise huge amounts of money, you better have a strategy of doing something that is going to get you to the right exit because all these investors also need...

___

[Editor’s note: This is part of a series we’re writing about branding for startups. Join our latest initiative to find the best brand designers and agencies in the world who work with early-stage companies by nominating a talented brand designer you’ve worked with.]  

Basecamp, maker of project management and team communications software, is a company that does things differently.

Co-founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson reject outside investment, make no long-term goals, ignore KPIs and forbid working on weekends. They focus on keeping the workday focused, enjoyable and short.

The company’s approach to work is an expression of its origin story, which revolves around frustration with poorly designed project management software. They created Basecamp in 1999 as a way to do things better.

A company’s brand identity can emanate from its origin story, which in Basecamp’s case might suggest simplicity and efficiency, perhaps a brand with a certain modern slickness. But Fried rejects that categorically. In fact, he comes close to rejecting the idea of brand identity altogether.

“For us, clarity is the most important thing,” he says. “We don’t have a visual guidelines saying ‘you can’t use this color next to that color.’ I feel like those exercises are mostly a waste of time.”

Spending time wisely is a defining value at Basecamp. Employees are encouraged to hold “office hours” to protect unbroken chunks of work time. The company doesn’t use digital meeting-scheduling software to prevent unnecessary meetings. And, of course, Basecamp software itself is all about making project management more streamlined.

This focus on helping people use their time well suggests a brand identity based on consideration of people’s experiences and needs at work: kind, attentive, supportive. When Fried finally comes around to describing Basecamp’s brand, he puts it like this: “We prefer to be cozy and approachable as opposed to sterile and museum-like. I feel like a lot of brands are overly slick; I think it’s intimidating and pushes people away.”

Basecamp, on the other hand, is all about bringing people in, about making them feel confident and well-cared-for. The company is designed to help people work smarter and happier, with the assurance that Basecamp has their back.  

The product itself and the product development cycle both reflect this perspective. The company focuses on making the simplest possible product with the fewest necessary features. It provides extremely straightforward pricing at $99/month for every customer. And it is known for a laser-like focus on improving its flagship product instead of developing other products, add-ons or features.

Every six weeks a management team decides on new projects to pursue based on ideas submitted by staff and customers. Such a short product development cycle means many people’s ideas can be implemented throughout the year and keeps the company nimble to pursue new things. The team emphasizes extreme care when developing and rolling out changes, concerned with the potential disruption to their customers’ work.

“We recognize that our customers who use Basecamp are managing projects with it, and those projects are ongoing and real,” says Fried. “And they have too much on their plate already to have the software they use change under them out of nowhere.”

It’s this focus on customer experience that is Basecamp’s special sauce — the core of its origin story; the center of its brand identity; the ethos behind its thoughtful product development procedures; and the force behind its workplace innovations that keep its 50 employees in 32 cities happy.

Placing high value on the perspectives of customers and employees is the most powerful way to align brand, product development and company culture. But it takes a dose of humility and a dollop of empathy.

“Real people use our stuff,” says Fried. “We are not the most important thing in their day. We are a tool they use to get their work done. Whatever we do, we should focus on doing the least disruptive thing for them.”

Kespry, a company that offers industrial users a subscription-based drone service, today announced that it has raised funding from Salesforce Ventures, marking that firm’s first hardware investment. With this, Salesforce and Kespry are also partnering around bringing Kespry’s drone services for the insurance industry to Salesforce’s own tools for this vertical. Sadly, the companies did not disclose the actual funding amount, but our understanding is that it’s a substantial amount that’s comparable to other Salesforce Ventures investments.

With its focus on industrial use cases, the company, which was founded in 2013, has developed a strong foothold in the mining and aggregates space, where it offers tools for doing volumetric measurements of stockpiles based on the imagery it captures from its drones, for example. In addition, though, the company also focuses on the construction, insurance and — most recently — energy sector.

Today, Kespry has more than 300 customers, the company’s CEO George Mathew tells me. More than 200 of those are in the mining and aggregates business and more than 40 of these signed up for the company’s services in the last 12 months alone.

So while drones may not be at the top of the hype cycle right now, those companies that found their niche early on are clearly thriving. “Drones are very much a vibrant and moving landscape in terms of how much activity has gone on,” he said. “For us, we’ve been largely and continuously focused on the commercial aspects of the market that we can solve for really difficult industrial challenges. […] But I think others have had some challenges because it’s not the most straightforward thing to figure out a viable business model for scale in the drone space.”

Mathew argues that Kespry’s subscription model and the fact that it offers an end-to-end hardware and software solution is one of the reasons the company is thriving today.

The Salesforce investment came about thanks to a chance encounter with that company’s CEO, Marc Benioff, at an industry event. As Salesforce was looking to offer more vertically oriented applications for the insurance industry, there was clearly a role for Kespry in this business. “We saw a lot of need in the insurance space to get a claim processed when it comes to physical damage that may have occurred after a catastrophic event,” Mathew said. In those cases, Salesforce’s tools may be used to dispatch adjudicators already and these claims adjusters often also use Kespry’s services to fly the drones to assess roof damage, for example.

Kespry also signed on to Saleforce’s Pledge 1% program; as part of this, it contributes one percent of its employees’ time to corporate social responsibility and charitable endeavors.

According to a Research and Markets report, the global enterprise collaboration software market is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 11% from $31.7 billion in 2018 to $53.8 billion by 2023. Smartsheet...

___

Sramana Mitra: If you look at all the things that they’ve been doing and all the product roadmap announcements that they’ve made, they’re going into clinical trials in a big way....

___