Epic Games, maker of the ultra popular Battle Royale game Fortnite, is putting up another $100 million in prize cash for competitive tournaments in 2019.

The company made waves in the esports world last year, announcing a $100 million prize pool for the 2018 competitive year, dwarfing every other competitive title in one fell swoop.

This year, a significant portion of the $100 million will be awarded to participants of the first-ever Fortnite World Cup. Each of the 200 players who qualify and compete will walk away with at least $50,000, with the winner taking home $3 million.

The Fortnite World Cup will take place July 26 – 28 in New York City, offering $30 million total in prizes. One hundred of the top solo players will be invited, along with the top 50 duos teams.

So how do you get in on this?

Fortnite is holding weekly open online qualifiers, each worth $1 million, from April 13 to June 16. Eligible players who consistently place well will have a shot at being one of those top 200 players.

This announcement comes at an interesting time for Fortnite. While the game still reigns supreme in terms of popularity, other Battle Royale games are picking up traction. Apex Legends (an EA and Respawn title), in particular, is growing in popularity. Several of the top Twitch streamers, including Ninja, Shroud, Timthetatman, High Distortion and Annemunition have started playing more Apex and participated in the first Apex Legends Twitch Rivals tournament.

Keeping the attention of these streamers is surely a priority for Fortnite, and for a game that pulls in some $300 million a month in in-game purchases, spending $100 million a year is a small price to pay.

Instagram is threatening to attack Pinterest just as it files to go public the same way the Facebook-owned app did to Snapchat. Code buried in Instagram for Android shows the company has prototyped an option to create public “Collections” to which multiple users can contribute. Instagram launched private Collections two years ago to let you Save and organize your favorite feed posts. But by allowing users to make Collections public, Instagram would become a direct competitor to Pinterest.

Instagram public Collections could spark a new medium of content curation. People could use the feature to bundle together their favorite memes, travel destinations, fashion items or art. That could cut down on unconsented content stealing that’s caused backlash against meme “curators” like F*ckJerry by giving an alternative to screenshotting and reposting other people’s stuff. Instead of just representing yourself with your own content, you could express your identity through the things you love — even if you didn’t photograph them yourself. And if that sounds familiar, you’ll understand why this could be problematic for Pinterest’s upcoming $12 billion IPO.

The “Make Collection Public” option was discovered by frequent TechCrunch tipster and reverse engineering specialist Jane Manchun Wong. It’s not available to the public, but from the Instagram for Android code, she was able to generate a screenshot of the prototype. It shows the ability to toggle on public visibility for a Collection, and tag contributors who can also add to the Collection. Previously, Collections was always a private, solo feature for organizing your bookmarks gathered through the Instagram Save feature Instagram launched in late 2016.

Instagram told TechCrunch “we’re not testing this,” which is its standard response to press inquiries about products that aren’t available to public users, but that are in internal development. It could be a while until Instagram does start experimenting publicly with the feature and longer before a launch, and the company could always scrap the option. But it’s a sensible way to give users more to do and share on Instagram, and the prototype gives insight into the app’s strategy. Facebook launched its own Pinterest -style shareable Sets in 2017 and launched sharable Collections in December.

Currently there’s nothing in the Instagram code about users being able to follow each other’s Collections, but that would seem like a logical and powerful next step. Instagrammers can already follow hashtags to see new posts with them routed to their feed. Offering a similar way to follow Collections could turn people into star curators rather than star creators without the need to rip off anyone’s content. Speaking of infuencers, Wong also spotted Instagram prototyping IGTV picture-in-picture, so you could keep watching a long-form video after closing the app and navigating the rest of your phone.

Public Collections could fuel Instagram’s commerce strategy that Mark Zuckerberg recently said would be a big part of the road map. Instagram already has a personalized Shopping feed in Explore, and The Verge’s Casey Newton reported last year that Instagram was working on a dedicated shopping app. It’s easy to imagine fashionistas, magazines and brands sharing Collections of their favorite buyable items.

It’s worth remembering that Instagram launched its copycat of Snapchat Stories just six months before Snap went public. As we predicted, that reduced Snapchat’s growth rate by 88 percent. Two years later, Snapchat isn’t growing at all, and its share price is at just a third of its peak. With more than 1 billion monthly and 500 million daily users, Instagram is four times the size of Pinterest. Instagram loyalists might find it’s easier to use the “good enough” public Collections feature where they already have a social graph than try to build a following from scratch on Pinterest.

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Showfields, which helps online brands move into offline, brick-and-mortar retail, is announcing that it has raised $9 million in seed funding.

“Our thesis was simple: Make the process of becoming physical as easy as becoming digital,” co-founder and CEO Tal Zvi Nathanel told me.

I’ve written about other companies, like Bulletin, promising a more flexible approach to real-world retail. But one of the things that’s impressive about Showfields is the sheer size of its flagship space — Nathanel said the company has signed a lease for 14,000 square feet in New York City’s NoHo neighborhood.

When I visited the Showfields store last week, only the first floor was open, but it’s already home to a number of brands, ranging from mattress company Boll & Branch, to fitness company Cityrow, to toothbrush company Quip.

Each brand gets their own separate, dedicated space. For example, in the Cityrow space, I got to sit down and try out the rowing machine, while the Quip area had a mock-up bathroom sink to display the toothbrushes.

“This space is about [the brand], not about Showfields,” Nathanel said. “We really look at ourselves as a stage.”

He added that brands can sign-up online to create a pop-up store, providing input while Showfields designs and builds the space. The brand also decides which goods to sell in the store, and which ones to highlight via a touchscreen display. And they can choose whether to have a dedicated staff member, or to share staff with neighboring brands.

Nathanel said the spaces can be designed around different goals — one brand might focus on driving sales, while another might simply want to grow consumer awareness. In each case, Showfields will also provide data so they can see how the space is performing.

The brands pay Showfields a monthly fee, with a minimum four-month commitment. Nathanel emphasized that Showfields doesn’t make any money on the product sales, which he said allows the company to offer a more “curated” and “customer-centric experience.”

Ultimately, Nathanel said the Showfields approach can also result in a more varied and dynamic retail environment (after all, Showfields bills itself as “the most interesting store in the world”). And naturally, he’s hoping to bring this to additional cities, though he declined to offer specifics, beyond saying, “Before the end of the year, we’re hoping to have more Showfields.”

The seed funding was led by Hanaco Ventures, with participation from SWaN & Legend Venture Partners, Rainfall Ventures, Communitas Capital and IMAX CEO Richard Gelfond.

In a statement, Hanaco general partner Lior Prosor predicted the rise of “experiential retail,” which will be “focused on doing everything that e-commerce cannot do well – enabling discovery, trial, and the use of all five senses to come to a purchasing decision.”

“We truly believe that by being consumer-centric at their core, [Showfields’] founding team and product will make them a category leader in this space,” Prosor said.

Circle makes a fantastic screen time management tool and today the company announced a round of funding to help fuel its growth. The $20 million Series B included participation from Netgear and T-Mobile, along with Third Kind Venture Capital and follow-on investments from Relay Ventures and other Series A participants.

With this round of funding, Circle has raised more than $30 million to date, including a Series A from 2017.

According to the company, Circle intends to use the funds to expand its product offering and form new partnerships with hardware makers and mobile carriers.

The timing is perfect. Parents are increasingly looking at ways to make sure children and teenagers do not become addicted to screens.

Circle works different from other solutions attempting to limit screen time. It’s hardware based and sits plugged into a home’s network. It allows an administrator, like a parent, to easily restrict the amount of time a device, such as an iPhone owned by a child, is able to access the local network. It’s easy and that’s the point.

Circle sits in a small, but growing field of services attempting to give parents the ability to limit their child’s screen time. Some of these solutions, like Apple’s, sit in the cloud. And though Apple’s works well, it is limited to iOS and Mac OS devices. Others, like those on Netgear’s Orbi products, offer a similar network-wide net, but are much harder to use than Circle.

In my household we use tools like Circle. The lure of the screen is just too great and these solutions, when used in combination with traditional parenting, ensure my children stare into the real world — at least for a few minutes a day.

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WaitWhat, the digital content production engine behind LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman’s Masters of Scale podcast, has secured a $4.3 million Series A investment led by Cue Ball Capital and Burda Principal Investments.

Launched in January 2017, WaitWhat will use the cash to create additional media properties across a variety of mediums, including podcasts.

Investors are gravitating toward podcast startups as consumer interest in original audio content skyrockets. Podcasting, though an infantile industry that hit just $314 million in revenue in 2017, is maturing, raking in venture capital rounds large and small and recording its first notable M&A transaction with Spotify’s acquisition of Gimlet and Anchor earlier this month. The music streaming giant shelled out a total of $340 million for the podcast production platform and the provider of a suite of podcast creation, distribution and monetization tools, respectively. It plans to spend an additional $500 million on audio storytelling platforms as part of a larger plan to become the Netflix of audio.

WaitWhat, for its part, dubs itself the “media invention company.” Founded by June Cohen and Deron Triff, a pair of former TED executives responsible for expanding the nonprofit’s digital media business, WaitWhat is today launching Should This Exist, a new podcast hosted by Flickr founder and tech investor Caterina Fake.  Fake will interview entrepreneurs about the human side and the impact of technology in the show created in partnership with Quartz.

“People don’t just transact with content; they want to feel connected to it through a sense of wonder, awe, curiosity, and mastery,” Cohen said in a statement. “These are contagious emotions, and research shows they stimulate sharing. Where many media companies aim for volume — putting out lots of content with a short shelf life — we’re building a completely distinctive portfolio of premium properties that are continually increasing in value, inspiring deep audience engagement, and creating opportunities for format expansion.”

Other investors in the round include Reid Hoffman, MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito and Liminal Ventures. WaitWhat previously raised a $1.1 million round from Victress Capital, Human Ventures, Able Partners, all of which have joined the A round.

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard friends lament how difficult it is to find a decent calendar app. The stock calendar apps are certainly serviceable, but there’s so much that they can’t handle in terms of managing and prioritizing tasks.

Sunsama, launching out of Y Combinator’s latest batch, is taking a crack at solving the calendar conundrum with a $10-per-month professionals-focused productivity planner.

Co-founders Ashutosh Priyadarshy and Travis Meyer began with the idea that the relationship between task managers and calendars were a mess. Devotees to “get things done” to-do apps end up re-typing tasks they’ve been assigned on project-based systems like Trello and Asana, which just leads to a whole lot of confusion. Sunsama’s third-party integrations make it easy to drag these tasks into your to-do list every morning and keep things updated as your tasks evolve and priorities need to shift.

The company takes some pretty clear design inspiration from existing enterprise apps. The influences from Google Calendar, Slack and Trello are pretty clear, but the resulting interface all works together very thoughtfully with a drag-and-drop organizational flow that lets you import projects from linked services. It all makes for a very friendly, pretty system that can enable you to fly through the often cumbersome work of populating your to-do list in the first place. The company currently supports integrations with Asana, Trello, Slack, GitHub, GitLab, Jira and Todoist.

While a lot of other task management apps rely on a freemium model or low annual subscription, Sunsama takes $10-per-month for their service. It’s definitely an expense, but the founders see apps like $30-per-month email service Superhuman as a sign that professionals are willing to drop some cash on a service that cleans up their digital life.

The company wants to snag individual users, but getting small teams onto the service could be their clearest route to wider adoption. When your entire team is on Sunsama, you’re able to check out what other members of your channels have on deck when they’re working on a particular project. There’s the risk of getting lost in the fray of other necessary platforms on the company level, but the founders think the deep integrations will keep people turning to Sunsama when they want to see how a project is going.

The startup seems to have taken more than a few on-boarding cues from Superhuman, which takes you off the waitlist only after they’ve gotten a chance to personally talk you through their service and see whether you’re a good fit. You can sign-up to request Sunsama access on their site now.

A few weeks ago, we told you that former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick looks to be partnering with the former COO of the bike-sharing startup Ofo, Yanqi Zhang, to bring his new L.A.-based company, CloudKitchens, to China. Kalanick didn’t respond to our request for more information, but according to the South China Morning Post (SCMP), his plan is to provide local food businesses with real estate, facilities management, technology and marketing services.

He might want to move quickly. Kitchens that invite restaurants to share their space to focus on take-out orders is a concept that’s picking up momentum fast in China. And one company looks to have just assumed pole position in that race: Panda Selected, a Beijing-based shared-kitchen company that just raised $50 million in Series C funding led by Tiger Global Management, with participation from earlier backers DCM and GenBridge Capital. The round brings its total funding to $80 million.

Little wonder there’s a contest afoot. China’s food-delivery market is already worth $37 billion dollars, according to the SCMP, which says 256 million people in China used online food ordering services in 2016, and the number is expected to grow to 346 million this year.

And that’s still a little less than a quarter of the country’s population of 1.4 billion people.

Panda Selected is wasting little time in trying to reach them. While SCMP says that online delivery services already blanket 1,300 cities. Panda Selected, founded just three years ago, says it already operates 120 locations that cover China’s biggest centers, including Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen and Hangzhou. It claims to work with more than 800 domestic catering brands, including Luckin Coffee, Kungfu and TubeStation. The company also says that its kitchens are typically 5,000-square-feet in size and can accommodate up to 20 restaurants in each space.

With its new funding, it expects to double that number over the next eight months, too, its  founder, Haipeng Li, tells Bloomberg. That’s going to make it difficult to challenge, especially by any U.S.-based company, given overall relations between the two countries and the ever-changing regulatory environment in China.

Then again, this may be just the first inning. Stay tuned.

Delivery company DoorDash is announcing that it has raised $400 million in Series F financing.

Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported that the company was looking to raise $500 million at a valuation of $6 billion or more. In fact, DoorDash now says the funding came at a $7.1 billion valuation.

The round was led by Temasek and Dragoneer Investment Group, with participation from previous investors SoftBank Vision Fund, DST Global, Coatue Management, GIC, Sequoia Capital and Y Combinator.

DoorDash has been raising money at an impressive rate, with a $535 million round last March followed by a $250 million round (valuing the company at $4 billion) in August.

Co-founder and CEO Tony Xu told me the round is “a reflection of superior performance over the past year.” Apparently, the company is currently seeing 325 percent growth, year-over-year, and it points to recent data from Second Measure showing that the service has overtaken Uber Eats in U.S. market share for online food delivery — DoorDash now comes in second to Grubhub.

“I think the numbers speak for themselves,” Xu said. “If you just run the math on DoorDash’s course and speed, we’re on track to be number one.”

He attributed the company’s growth to three factors: its geographic reach (3,300 cities in the United States and Canada), its selection of partners (not just restaurants — Walmart is using DoorDash for grocery deliveries) and DoorDash Drive, which allows businesses to use the DoorDash network to make their own deliveries.

He added that DoorDash has been “growing in a disciplined way, turning markets towards profitability.”

The funding, Xu said, will allow the company to continue investing in Drive, in its DashPass subscription service (where you pay $9.99 per month for free deliveries on orders of $15 or more from select restaurants) and in more hiring. And while DoorDash is currently available in all 50 states, Xu said there’s still plenty of room to cover additional territory in the U.S. and especially Canada.

“To me, this round … really changes the position of the company, not only as we march towards market leadership, but as we go beyond restaurants and become the last mile for commerce,” he said.

Not all of DoorDash’s recent news has been good. Along with Instacart, the company has been under scrutiny for subsidizing its driver payments with customer tips.

When asked about the criticism, Xu said the current compensation system was tested “not in a quarter, not in a month, but tested for months” before being implemented in 2017, and since then, there’s been a “significant increase” in retention among “dashers,” along with improved dasher satisfaction and on-time deliveries.

“When it comes to this pay model that has been in the press, the most important thing, I would say, is looking again at the facts and results,” he said.

Visual search engine Pinterest has joined a long list of high-flying technology companies planning to go public in 2019. The business has confidentially submitted paperwork to the Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering slated for later this year, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

Pinterest declined to comment.

Founded in 2008 by Ben Silbermann, earlier reports indicated the company was planning to debut on the stock market in April. In late January, Pinterest took its first official step toward a 2019 IPO, hiring Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase as lead underwriters for its offering.

The company garnered a $12.3 billion valuation in 2017 with a $150 million financing.

Touting 250 million monthly active users, Pinterest has raised nearly $1.5 billion in venture capital funding from key stakeholders Bessemer Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, FirstMark Capital, Fidelity and SV Angel. The business brought in some $700 million in ad revenue in 2018, per reports, a 50 percent increase year-over-year.

Pinterest employs 1,600 people across 13 cities, including Chicago, London, Paris, São Paulo, Berlin and Tokyo. The company says half its users live outside the U.S.

Pinterest will likely follow Lyft, Uber and Slack to the public markets, which have all filed confidential paperwork for IPOs or, in Slack’s case, a reported direct listing, expected in the coming months.

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Scooter share, bike share and ride hailing are quickly becoming staple commodities in cities all over the world. As companies in those respective spaces try to improve their economics, Zoba is aiming to contribute to those goals by predicting demand for scooters, bikes and, eventually, rides in particular areas. To support Zoba’s mission, the company has raised a $3 million seed round led by CRV with participation from Founder Collective, Mark Cuban and others.

Using spatial analytics, Zoba aims to better understand the relationships between different phenomena in order to improve the efficiency of cities. Mobility is Zoba’s first focus, Zoba co-founder Dan Brennan told TechCrunch. More specifically, Zoba looks to better understand the relationship between demand and environmental data (e.g. weather), as well as city layout. From there, Zoba helps mobility companies determine the best places to put their vehicles.

“The key is this type of spatial analytics and machine learning is very specific,” Brennan said. “You don’t see a lot of data scientists trained in this. What we do is say, ‘no matter what skill set of your data scientist, you can look at all this spatial and temporal stuff.’ We’ll make it like you have three really highly trained spatial data scientists.” 

Zoba would not disclose which companies it’s working with, just that it’s working with some of the industry leaders in bike, scooter and car share. Down the road, Zoba also envisions working with on-demand delivery companies, as well as urban logistics companies.

“The world is experiencing a Cambrian explosion of smart mobility and logistics services, all requiring geo-based forecasting and optimization,” CRV general partner and Zoba board member Izhar Armony said in a statement. “We knew after meeting with the Zoba founders that they’re the best team to tackle this hard problem. What they’re doing will change the way we live and we’re excited for what’s to come.”

Flexport, a 5.5-year-old, San Francisco-based full-service air and ocean freight forwarder, says it has raised $1 billion in fresh funding led by the SoftBank Vision Fund.

Earlier backers of the company, including Founders Fund, DST Global, Cherubic Ventures, Susa Ventures and SF Express, all participated in the round, which reportedly pegs the company’s post-money valuation at $3.2 billion.

According to Forbes, which broke the news, Flexport generated revenue of $471 million last year, up from $224.8 million in 2017, thanks in part to some customers who the company says spend more than $10 million a year at Flexport for its help in managing their supply chains.

The company is apparently moving so fast, it hasn’t had a chance to update its marketing materials. CEO Ryan Petersen tells Forbes the company now employs 1,066 people across 11 offices and four warehouses around the world. Its site states it has 600 employees.

Axios reported last week that Flexport was in talks to raise money in a deal led by SoftBank that would value the company in the $3 billion range.

It had previously raised $305 million across five rounds, including, most recently, in April 2018, according to Crunchbase.

Flexport competes with numerous other freight forwarding online marketplaces that are focused on price comparison, as well as helping their clients book and track shipments. But its goal, seemingly, is to compete more directly with heavyweights like DHL, FedEx and UPS. In late 2017, it said it was beginning to charter its own aircraft. Petersen tells Forbes that Flexport now has four warehouses around the world, too.

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