Glossier, known for its line of understated makeup products and a cult-following of millennial Instagrammers, is getting colorful with the launch of its first spin-off brand, Glossier Play.

The company — led by founder and chief executive officer Emily Weiss, who built the nearly $400 million business from a makeup blog called Into The Gloss — has raised a total of $92 million in venture capital funding from top-tier consumer investors Forerunner Ventures, Index Ventures and IVP. Stitch Fix founder Katrina Lake and Forerunner founder and general partner Kirsten Green, are among the company’s board members.

Weiss introduced Glossier in 2014 as a clean-skincare and natural beauty advocate. Today, the direct-to-consumer business boasts a growing line of barely there makeup, designed to mimic Weiss’s own subtle, au naturale vibe. The launch of Glossier Play, inspired by 1970s’ nostalgia, is its first foray into bright colors, glitter and, in the brand’s own words, “dialed-up extras.”

Glossier Play’s initial line-up of “extras” includes colored eyeliners ($15), highlighters ($20), multi-purpose glitter gel ($14) and the “Vinylic Lip” ($16). Customers can purchase “The Playground,” a set that includes each of the new products, for $60.

The advertising campaign for the Instagram -friendly line will be led by none other than Instagram star Donté Colley, as well as pop musician Troye Sivan. The new line and future spin-offs will help Glossier compete with beauty incumbents, Estée Lauder and L’Oréal, for example, in a market estimated to be worth $750 billion by 2024.

Glossier, headquartered in New York, counts 200 employees, meager in comparison to its nearly 2 million — and growing — social media following. The company surpassed $100 million in annual revenue in 2018, it tells TechCrunch, and acquired 1 million new customers. In total, Glossier retails 29 products across skincare, makeup, body, and fragrance.

The company won’t be introducing additional brands this year and clarified it is not a brand incubator.

Paris-based Shift Technology has raised another $60 million funding round. Bessemer Venture Partners is leading the round and existing investors Accel, General Catalyst, Iris Capital and Elaia Partners are also participating.

Shift Technology is all about detecting fraudulent insurance claims. There are 70 insurance companies around the world relying on its product, such as MACIF in France, Axa in Spain, and CNA and HyreCar in the U.S. And given the size of those companies, it means that Shift Technology is processing a ton of claims every day.

It’s easy to sell this kind of product, as fraudulent claims cost a ton of money. If Shift Technology can help you catch more fraudulent claims, you can spend a bit of money to save a lot of money.

The startup has already grown quite a lot since its previous funding round. They now have 200 employees, and customers all around the globe. In addition to its headquarters in Paris, Shift Technology also has offices in Boston, London, Hong Kong, Madrid, Singapore and Zurich.

With today’s funding round, the company plans to hire more people in Boston, including data scientists and developers. The company is also playing around with an automated claim-processing solution.

Shift Technology is creating a strong barrier to entry. Thanks to its huge data set, it can create an AI-powered detection model that is getting more and more accurate. A new company would have a hard time catching up.

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Daniel Keiper-Knorr was recorded in January 2019....

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Scytale, a startup that wants to bring identity and access management to application-to-application activities, announced a $5 million Series A round today.

The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, a return investor that led the company’s previous $3 million round in 2018. Bain Capital Ventures, TechOperators and Work-Bench are also participating in this round.

The company wants to bring to applications and services in a cloud native environment the same kind of authentication that individuals are used to having with a tool like Okta. “What we’re focusing on is trying to bring to market a capability for large enterprises going through this transition to cloud native computing to evolve the existing methods of application to application authentication, so that it’s much more flexible and scalable,” company CEO Sunil James told TechCrunch.

To help with this, the company has developed the open-source, cloud-native project, Spiffe, which is managed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). The project is designed to provide identity and access management for application-to-application communication in an open-source framework.

The idea is that as companies transition to a containerized, cloud-native approach to application delivery, there needs to a smooth automated way for applications and services to very quickly prove they are legitimate, in much the same way individuals provide a username and password to access a website. This could be, for example, as applications pass through API gateways, or as automation drives the use of multiple applications in a workflow.

Webscale companies like Google and Netflix have developed mechanisms to make this work in-house, but it’s been out of reach of most large enterprise companies. Scytale wants to bring to any company this capability to authenticate services and applications.

In addition to the funding announcement, the company announced Scytale Enterprise, a tool that provides a commercial layer on top of the open-source tools the company has developed. The enterprise version helps companies that might not have the personnel to deal with the open-source version on their own by providing training, consulting and support services.

Bain Capital Venture’s Enrique Salem sees a startup solving a big problem for companies that are moving to cloud-native environments and need this kind of authentication. “In an increasingly complex and fragmented enterprise IT environment, Scytale has not only built Spiffe’s amazing open-source community but has also delivered a commercial offering to address hybrid cloud authentication challenges faced by Fortune 500 identity and access management engineering teams,” Salem said in a statement.

Based in the Bay Area, Scytale launched in 2017 and currently has 24 employees.

It seems that on a regular basis, we hear about massive data breaches or companies sharing highly personal information with third parties without a consumer’s permission or knowledge. Tide Foundation wants to change that by giving consumers complete control over their personal data on the blockchain by allowing them to manage their own encryption keys.

The startup wants to take that notion a step further by giving users the ability to sell that personal information in an open marketplace that the company is announcing today.

“The overall concept is that when a consumer engages with a business and provides that business with personally identifiable information, the Tide Protocol encrypts that information and provides the consumer with the only key to decrypt it,” Tide co-founder Issac Elnekave told TechCrunch.

With full control over their data, companies could not transfer any information to a third party without the consumer granting permission first. The marketplace provides a way for companies that need data, the vendors that manage that data and the consumers who ultimately own the data to negotiate a fair market value for access to it. What’s more, the companies buying the data know that they are getting much more valuable and accurate information, delivered with the full knowledge of the consumer.

In the event of a massive data breach like Equifax or Marriott, if customers had been using Tide Protocol, the hackers couldn’t have actually used the PII in the breached databases because consumers would control the keys to decrypt it, rendering it useless to the data thieves.

Technically, the protocol works in a kind of standard business blockchain fashion. “Tide Protocol uses forked EOS nodes, smart contracts and additional proprietary decentralized layers to manage permissioned access to encrypted consumer data stored by businesses (vendors),” the company explained in a statement.

As for consumers controlling encryption keys, the company says it has created a patented technology to simplify the process of managing those keys in order to put that process within reach of anyone, one that passes what they call “the Grandpa Test.”

“We have developed a layer, a decentralized way to dumb down blockchain to a ubiquitous user experience on the web,” Yuval Hertzog, the other company co-founder, explained. He said the idea is to simplify the highly complex and make key management a typical kind of web experience.

Elnekave says the company has also found a way to comply with GDPR, the strict EU privacy regulations that went into effect last year that includes the right to be forgotten. Because the protocol gives consumers full control over the encryption keys, the user simply has to stop giving access to the business, essentially throwing away the encryption key and blocking access, he explained.

Tide launched three years ago in Sydney, Australia and developed Tide Protocol, the basis of its blockchain data privacy solution, two years ago. Today it has 13 employees. The company raised a $2 million seed round in November.

The startup believes data ownership should be a basic human right in a similar fashion to Hu-manity.co, the startup that wants to provide a similar set of tools as Tide, but focused on medical information.

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

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U.S. ride-hailing giants Lyft and Uber are going public in the U.S. imminently, but in Southeast Asia, the two largest on-demand companies are still madly fueling up on investment capital.

The latest update to that story today saw Go-Jek, the Indonesian ride-hailing firm aiming to go regional in Southeast Asia, announce that it has pulled in $100 million from conglomerate Astra, an existing investor, as part of the Series F round it is raising right now. We know Go-Jek is aiming to bring in at least $2 billion from that round — and that it has closed around half of that capital — so the addition from Astra is likely one of many that will take it toward that target.

There’s also a strategic component to this deal.

Astra, for those who are not aware of it, is a $20 billion conglomerate that specializes in manufacturing, automotive and infrastructure industries. It plans to start a joint venture with Go-Jek to equip its cars with Astra’s fleet management system to help improve the way Go-Jek manages its fleet and on-demand services. The rollout will start with “thousands” of Go-Car drivers.

The capital is being raised to expand Go-Jek’s services in Southeast Asia.

The company recently went official with the launch of its Thailand-based Get business. It has also expanded to Vietnam and Singapore over the last year and it is primed to offer its services in the Philippines soon.

Grab, meanwhile, Go-Jek’s key adversary, recently raised $2 billion for its recent Series H round. The company is working to extend that figure to $5 billion with a planned investment of up to $1.5 billion from SoftBank’s Vision Fund in the offing.

According to a MarketsAndMarkets report, the cloud backup market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 26.1% from $1.30 billion in 2017 to $4.13 billion by 2022. A leading player in the space is data...

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Moka, a startup that wants to make talent acquisition a little more data-driven for China-based companies that range from smartphone giant Xiaomi to Burger King’s local business, announced Monday that it has raised a 180 million yuan ($27 million) Series B round of funding.

The deal was led by Hillhouse Capital, an investor in top Chinese technology companies such as Tencent, Baidu, JD.com, Pinduoduo — just to name a few. Other investors that took part include Xianghe Capital, an investment firm founded by two former Baidu executives, Chinese private equity firm GSR Ventures and GGV Capital.

Moka claims more than 500 enterprise customers were paying for its services by the end of 2018. Other notable clients are McDonald’s and one of China’s top live-streaming services, YY. It plans to use its new capital to hire staff, build new products and expand the scope of its business.

Founded in 2015, Moka compares itself to Workday and Salesforce in the U.S. It has created a suite of software aiming to make recruiting easier and cheaper for companies with upwards of 500 employees. Its solutions take care of the full cycle of hiring. To start with, Moka allows recruiters to post job listings across multiple platforms with one click, saving them the hassle of hopping between portals. Its AI-enabled screening program then automatically filters candidates and makes recommendations for companies. What comes next is the interview, which Moka helps streamline with automatic email and message reminders for job applicants and optimized plans for interviewers on when and where to meet their candidates.

That’s not the end, as Moka also wants to capture what happens after the talent is on board. The startup helps companies maintain a talent database consisting of existing employees and potential hires. The services allow companies to keep close tabs on their staff, whose resume update will trigger a warning to the employer, and alerts the recruiter once the system detects suitable candidates.

Moka is among a wave of startups founded by Chinese entrepreneurs with foreign education and work experiences. Zhao Oulun, whose English nickname is Orion, graduated from the University of California, Berkeley and worked at San Francisco-based peer-to-peer car-sharing company Turo before founding Moka with Li Guoxing. Li himself is also a “sea turtle,” a colloquial term in Chinese that describes overseas-educated graduates who return home to work. Li graduated from the University of Michigan and Stanford University, and worked at Facebook as an engineer.

When the founders re-entered China, they saw something was missing in the booming domestic business environment: effective talent management.

“Businesses are flourishing, but at the same time many of them fall short in internal organization and operation. To a large extent, the issue pertains to the lack of digital and meticulous operation for human resources, which slows down decision-making and leads to mistakes around talents and company organization,” says chief executive Zhao in a statement.

Moka’s mission has caught the attention of investors. Jixun Foo, a partner at Moka backer GGV Capital, also believes China’s businesses can benefit from a data-driven approach to people management: “We are positive about Moka becoming a comprehensive HR service provider in the future through its unique data-powered and intelligent solutions.”

This feature from TechCrunch covers the highlights of the Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona last week. Notable trends included 5G handsets, foldable displays, AR/VR, and security. For this...

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Well, that didn’t take long. Just three months after raising $50 million in Series A funding, e-scooter rentals startup Voi Technology has added another $30 million to its balance sheet. The new round sees existing investors Vostok New Ventures, Balderton Capital, LocalGlobe and Raine Ventures participate again, alongside new investors Project A and Creandum.

The inclusion of Project A won’t be entirely new news to close readers of TechCrunch. Based on my own sources, I reported that the Berlin-based early-stage VC was in the running in late October, and it was a surprise not to see the firm on the list of backers when VOI announced its Series A a month later. This new round sees those loose ends tidied up nicely.

A number of angel investors also participated. They include Cristina Stenbeck (Kinnevik), Justin Mateen (co-founder of Tinder), Keith Richman (board member, Grubhub), Jeff Wilke (Amazon), Sujay Jaswa (founder of WndrCo), Sujay Tyle (CEO Frontier Car Group), Diego Piacentini (Former Head of International Business, Amazon) Christian Leone (founder of Luxor Capital) and Spencer Rascoff (ex-CEO of Zillow).

Voi says the new capital will be used to ramp up expansion across Europe and invest in R&D. The company is also now claiming to be the leading “home-grown” e-scooter rentals company in Europe — as opposed to U.S.-founded Lime and Bird. In seven months, Voi says it has garnered a customer base of over 400,000 riders, who have taken a total of more than 750,000 rides.

Other competitors operating in various parts of Europe include Flash — the stealthy mobility startup from Delivery Hero and Team Europe founder Lukasz Gadowski that recently raised €55 million in Series A funding — as well as Berlin’s Wind Mobility ($22 million) and Tier (€25 million).

Taxify has also announced its entrance into e-scooter rentals, and Silicon Valley’s Bird and Lime not only operate in Europe but have received substantial investment from three of Europe’s top venture capital firms. Index and Accel have backed Bird, and Atomico has backed Lime.

Staying on message, Voi says that key to its success to date is working collaboratively with city authorities across the continent, including developing a Code of Conduct in Stockholm “to help the city’s multiple scooter-sharing operators work more safely and efficiently together”. However, that didn’t stop Voi having its license temporarily revoked in Madrid, alongside Lime and Wind after a change in the law required a change in the way e-scooter firms operate. It returned to the Spanish city in February.

Meanwhile, the company says its strongest markets so far are in the Nordics. Namely, Stockholm, Gothenburg, Malmö, Lund, Uppsala and Copenhagen, most of which it says will reach profitability in Q1. The e-scooter rental service is also live in Paris, Lyon, Madrid, Malaga, Zaragoza, Murcia, Lisbon and Faro. Today also sees a launch in Oslo, with Helsinki and other cities launching later this month. Italy, Germany, Norway and France are named as near-future expansions.

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Joshua Strebel: We really enjoy those complex, harder, and out-of-the-normal WordPress workflow cases. There’s also this site called bringatrailer.com. These are a couple of entrepreneurs that...

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I’m publishing a new series on LinkedIn called Colors to explore a topic that I care deeply about: the Renaissance Mind. I am just as passionate about entrepreneurship, technology, and business, as I...

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Startups reporters everywhere rejoiced Friday morning when the first unicorn S-1 of 2019 emerged from under lock and key for us all to unpack, analyze and enjoy. The TechCrunch office, at least Megan Rose Dickey’s and my corner, was buzzing with excitement, and Crunchbase News editor-in-chief, (my Equity co-host), apparently had to make himself a cup of Earl Grey tea to calm down post-S-1 deep dive.

I’ve already said a lot about the filing on Equity’s latest episode, available here, and in my story on the document, so I will keep this short. Here are the nuts and bolts:

Lyft’s revenue grew from $1.06 billion to nearly $2.2 billion from 2017 to 2018. Lyft’s costs rose dramatically during 2018, compared to the year prior. In fact, Lyft’s total cost profile rose from $1.77 billion in 2017 to a staggering $3.13 billion in 2018. And as far as losses, the business posted a net loss of $911 million in 2018 and $688 million in losses the previous year.

Onwards.

VCs want to help you get pregnant 

This week, I published a sweeping report on startups focused on improving various pain points in a women’s fertility journey. I spent months reporting on the space, learning from the founders of FertilityIQ, Kindbody, Nurx, Natural Cycles and more. Check it out here and be warned, you need an Extra Crunch subscription to read the entire piece. You can purchase an Extra Crunch subscription here.

WeWork sheds weak talent

Despite its mountain of venture capital funding, WeWork confirmed layoffs that affected 3 percent of its global workforce on Friday. The company told TechCrunch the cuts were part of an annual performance review process and that they still plan to wildly increase the size of their workforce in 2019. And while we’re on the subject of layoffs, Rackspace, the hosted private cloud vendor, let go of around 200 workers, or 3 percent of its worldwide workforce of 6,600 employees.

Deal of the week

SoftBank’s Vision Fund is pouring $1.5 billion into online car trading group Chehaoduo, which literally means “many cars” in Chinese. The startup, based in Beijing, operates peer-to-peer online marketplace Guazi for used vehicles, and Maodou, which retails new sedans through direct sales and financial leasing. TechCrunch’s Rita Liao reports “the sizable funding round arrived at a time when China’s softening economy is sapping consumer confidence, but the company’s two-pronged strategy makes sure it covers a broad range of consumer demands.”

Binary Capital’s implosion

You thought it was over; Binary Capital has shut down after all. But here’s the latest: Binary co-founder Justin Caldbeck has sued his former co-founder Jonathan Teo, alleging breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty, fraud and more. Caldbeck, accused of sexual harassment and unwanted sexual advances in 2017, took an indefinite leave of absence from Binary, leaving to Teo all the responsibilities of the $175 million fund. Shortly after, Teo offered to step down in a last-ditch effort to keep the firm afloat. Ultimately, neither of them could save the fallen firm.

Startup cash

Sequoia-backed Medallia raises $70M at a $2.4B valuation
SoFi founder Mike Cagney’s new company Figure just raised another $65M
ThirdLove, the direct-to-consumer lingerie startup, gets a $55M boost
Zum, a ridesharing service for kids, raises $40M
ClassDojo, an app to help teachers and parents communicate better, raises $35M
Presto raises $30M to bring its AI platform and tabletop ordering hardware to restaurant chains
Two Chairs nabs $7M for its client-therapist matching app and brick-and-mortar clinics
Dipsea raises $5.5M for short-form, sexy audio stories

Senior tech

I think tech for seniors will be amongst the hottest sectors for venture capital investment in the next few years, and HAX Labs looks to be on top of the trend. The accelerator program, located in San Francisco and Shenzhen, announced the launch of an initiative targeted at helping startups advance the state of tech for people over the age of 65. The program will invest $250,000 in the startups, as well as provide mentorship, office space, education and the other standard accelerator offerings.

Can a term sheet be too long?

Short answer: No. According to TechCrunch’s Danny Crichton, a shorter term sheet isn’t always better, despite popular beliefs. “Here’s the thing, term sheets have an incredibly important purpose, which is to set forth in clear language the terms of a deal. Unfortunately in modern venture capital, there are a lot of terms that have to be negotiated in any equity round, from financial terms to option pools, to board structure, to voting rights on major business decisions like selling the company, and much more. Simpler term sheets either relegate many of these items to ‘standard venture capital terms apply’ or some other vague language, or just wholly don’t mention them at all.” Keep reading here.

Uber and Lyft’s discount war

OK, just a little more on the ride-hailing giants before we close out. If you’ve been wondering why Uber and Lyft have been sending you push notifications complete with sweet discounts, here’s the deal: To gain market share in the final weeks ahead of their respective IPOs, Uber and Lyft have been deploying discounts to riders to encourage them to take additional rides. The strategy appears to be working; Lyft reportedly increased its market share from 30 to 34 percent amid the discount campaign.

Listen to me talk

If you enjoy this newsletter, be sure to check out TechCrunch’s venture-focused podcast, Equity. In this week’s episode, available here, Crunchbase editor-in-chief Alex Wilhelm, TechCrunch’s Silicon Valley editor Connie Loizos and I chatted with NEA’s Jonathan Golden about female-founded startup cash, Lyft and Uber’s discounts and more.

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