Personal homepage startup About.me has been acquired. Again! The company, once bought by AOL for a reported $35 million, decided a couple years after the deal to go it alone, and spun About.me back out to become an independent company. Today, About.me announced it’s being acquired by the Oakland-based startup Broadly.

About.me founder and True Ventures partner Tony Conrad called the deal “definitely a meeting of the minds,” as About.me has been more recently focused on helping people and companies showcase their professional talents and skills, while Broadly creates tools that help small businesses stay connected to their customers.

Today Broadly offers web chat, text, email, online review collection and team messaging — all in its own mobile app.

However, its biggest draw is its online review platform that makes it easier for happy customers to quickly leave the business a positive review on any review site, including Google, Facebook, TripAdvisor and others.

Last September, Broadly raised $10 million in Series B funding, co-led by original investor Foundry Group and new partner Calibrate Ventures. The funding was allocated toward further product development and hiring — both things which an About.me acquisition can now help to expedite. The company also last year launched its small business-focused web chat feature in its app, and snagged the No. 107 spot on the 2018 Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing private companies in the U.S., which cited its 2017 revenue as $4.7 million.

Terms of the About.me deal were not disclosed, but it is an all-stock acquisition we understand, and one Conrad feels positive about.

In addition, the majority of About.me’s team is joining Broadly as a result of the acquisition, which will bring Broadly’s total team to more than 75. This includes About.me’s CEO Mindy Lauck, whose background includes time at Adobe Systems, NBCUniversal and E*Trade Financial. She becomes Broadly’s vice president of Product following the deal’s closure.

Conrad said he wanted to find About.me a new home with a company that was a good fit.

“It was important to the About.me leadership team to join forces with a company that had a strong go-to-market strategy and a similar level of passion for serving small business owners, who are an integral part of
keeping our economy strong and vibrant,” said Conrad. “We found that in Broadly and see the very real potential for powerful future growth as a result of this alignment,” he added.

At Broadly, Lauck will be focused on expanding the company’s existing product suite to support the full range of the small business owners’ needs — that will include About.me’s technology. The plan is to offer the About.me pages to Broadly’s small business user base going forward.

“The About.me product is another frictionless mechanism for helping small businesses promote themselves and start capturing leads, which aligns well with our mission and brand,” said Josh Melick, CEO and co-founder of Broadly, in a statement. “More personally, we’re thrilled to welcome the About.me team to the Broadly family – we’re even stronger together,” he added.

A new streaming startup called Loop Media is announcing its first acquisition — a 30-year-old company called ScreenPlay.

While you may not have heard of ScreenPlay, the company has licensed a library of 200,000 music videos and movie/game/TV trailers, which it broadcasts in thousands of venues for partners like Hard Rock Cafe, Norwegian Cruise Line, Yard House, Buffalo Wild Wings and Caesars Entertainment.

This announcement comes just a week after Loop officially came out of stealth — and in fact, co-founder and CEO Jon Niermann (previously an executive at EA and Disney) said he’s always seen ScreenPlay’s content library as the foundation for Loop’s business.

It also sounds like this deepens an existing relationship, with Loop previously making a minority investment in ScreenPlay. The idea is to preserve and even grow ScreenPlay’s existing business — bringing video to out-of-home locations — while also introducing new technology into the mix, including a mobile app for short-form video.

“[ScreenPlay] is a company that generates millions in top-line revenue, it’s profitable,” Niermann said. “As technology has evolved and been updated, we want to come in with our team and really help them grow that.”

There are plenty of other mobile apps featuring short videos, but Niermann said Loop can now take advantage of ScreenPlay’s content library, and also connect the venue experience with the app. In addition, he said Loop is building “a very streamlined, slick app” that offers better curation than most video services, as well as “a strong social component.”

The acquisition was for an undisclosed price, combining both cash and stock. Niermann noted that “the ScreenPlay team remains intact,” with founder and chairman Mark Vrieling joining Loop as its chief content officer.

He added that existing ScreenPlay customers will not experience any interruption in their service. The plan is to launch the Loop app and an improved ScreenPlay screencast system in the next six months.

“[The business] is going to be a hybrid,” he said. “We wanted to continue to have the business roots, so to speak, but everybody’s mobile, everybody’s viewing everywhere. The question for us is, how do you create something that’s unique, that truly is a seamless experience?”

When I interviewed Parrot founder and CEO Henri Seydoux at TechCrunch Disrupt back in 2016, he surprised everyone when he said he was working on a new kind of T-shirt — nobody knew for sure whether he was joking or not. But the connected T-shirt is real, and it’s called wearTRBL.

While the project started as a Parrot subsidiary, the company was spun off in July 2018. Seydoux is still credited as co-founder and Olivier Levy acts as co-founder and CEO. And, wearTRBL expects to launch its first product in a few months.

The team has been working on a flexible E Ink display that you can seamlessly embed into a T-shirt. Thanks to a mobile app and Bluetooth Low Energy, you can change the image on the display and make a statement.

You can store up to 20 images on the display and the battery should last around four days. That doesn’t mean you’re supposed to wear your T-shirt for four days straight, because that would be incredibly gross. But you can remove the display and put it into another T-shirt, sweatshirt or accessory.

If you’re thinking about this product with the expectations of a consumer electronics enthusiast, you’re going to be disappointed. This is a fashion product, a way to express yourself with your T-shirt and show some of your personality using what you wear.

The original idea behind this T-shirt started after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January 2015. Many people wanted to express themselves by replacing their online profile pictures with drawings. People wanted to write “Je Suis Charlie” on giant banners.

Indeed, wearTRBL wants to create a community and a curated library of pictures. You’ll be able to browse a collection of designs and download it to your T-shirt. You’ll also be able to attract followers and broadcast content to other users.

The startup eventually wants to become a brand of iconic clothing items that are all compatible with the E Ink display. It’s an ambitious bet, but Seydoux wasn’t joking when he said “I’m working on a T-shirt that you’ve never seen before.”

Powtoon, an online platform that allows its users to easily create videos for digital marketing, YouTube ads or business presentations, today announced that it has acquired Tel Aviv-based Showbox.com, a cloud-based video-editing platform for amateurs that had raised $12.4 million before this acquisition and currently holds six video technology patents.

Powtoon, which says that it has more than 25 million users, plans to integrate into its own products many of Showbox.com’s features, including its green-screen technology.

This is quite a departure for Powtoon, which always focused on letting its users create videos without having to ever appear in them. That made it great for explainer videos, but also limited its appeal. To gain market share and expand its feature set, Powtoon clearly recognized Showbox.com as a logical acquisition, given that its focus is squarely on making amateur video look good.

“When the possibility arose for us to acquire the company, we jumped on this unique opportunity,” said Ilya Spitalnik, Powtoon’s founder and CEO. “This acquisition positions Powtoon to deliver so much more value to our customers. Our users will soon be able to create videos using dynamic green-screen technology, making it appear as though they were produced in a professional studio, even if they were shot at their office desk or in their basement.”

A company using advanced technologies to grow and harvest mealworms (larval beetles) at scale is on track to become one of the venture capital industry’s oddest billion-dollar investments.

Ÿnsect, (pronounced ‘insect”) is a Paris-based producer of insect protein that has just closed on $125 million as the company looks to expand into North America selling bug-based nutrients to fish farms, animal farms and the everyday harvesters of vegetables. 

The company isn’t worth $1 billion… yet. But that’s clearly the goal as it bulks up for a global expansion effort.

According to the company’s chief executive Antoine Hubert, a former agronomist turned bug-farm maven, the company grew out of efforts to promote sustainability in the food system and companies across France.

“We thought we could make a bigger impact by developing not only education but production,” in the realm of novel proteins for agriculture, Hubert says. 

Because agriculture is a leading producer of carbon dioxide and methane emissions that contribute to global warming, any steps that are taken to reduce those emissions by making supply chains and production more efficient would be good for the environment.

“The food system has an impact on greenhouse gas. We decided to develop a proper technology to produce large volumes of proteins at competitive prices,” Hubert says. 

The company borrows automation and sensing technologies from areas as diverse as automotive manufacturing and data center heating ventilation and cooling and applies it to the cultivation of mealworms. The company actually has 25 patents on the technologies it has deployed and is on track to book more than $70 million in revenue this year.

Bugs are clearly big business.

Why mealworms, though? Because Hubert says they’re the highest-quality insect for pound-for-pound protein production.

The company said that it raised this $125 million (€110 million) Series C round to scale up production. Ÿnsect intends to build the world’s biggest insect farm in Amiens Metropole, Northern France and will begin expanding its presence in the North American market. 

The deal, led by Astanor Ventures with participation from Bpifrance, Talis Capital, Idinvest Partners, Finasucre and Compagnie du Bois Sauvage, is the largest agtech deal to date outside of North America, and should plant a flag for the role of insect cultivation in the animal feedstock and fertilizer market, which is a combined global market of $800 billion.

That’s good news for competitors like Protix, AgriProtein, EnviroFlight and Beta Hatch, which are all building insect kingdoms of their own with eyes on the same, massive, global market. In fact, before Ÿnsect’s big haul, Protix held the title of the venture-backed bug business with the most cash. The company raised $50 million in financing back in 2017 to expand its insect empire.

Ÿnsect’s bug protein has already found its way into pet and plant food, fish food for aquaculture and other applications, but as demand for sources of high-quality proteins continues to grow alongside a rising global population, the company sees one of its largest opportunities in fish and shellfish farming.

“By offering an insect protein alternative to traditional animal and fish-based feed sources, Ÿnsect can help offset the growing competition for ocean fish stock required to feed two billion more people by 2050, while alleviating fish, water and soil depletion, as well as agriculture’s staggering 25 percent share of global greenhouse gas emissions,” says Hubert. “Our goal is simply to give insects back their natural place in the food chain.”

It was this ability for Ÿnsect to slot itself into the global food chain that attracted Talis Capital as an investor, according to the firm’s co-founder Matus Maar.

“With the global population expected to grow to nine billion by 2050, current aquaculture and animal feeding practices are unsustainable.” Mar said in a statement. “Ÿnsect taps into a huge, yet highly inefficient global market by offering a premium and — above all — sustainable insect-derived product through a fully automated, AI-enabled production process.”

For entrepreneurs interested to meet and chat with Sramana Mitra in person, please join us for our bi-monthly and informal group meetups. If you are living in the San Francisco Bay Area or are just...

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In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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According to a recent report, the global online survey software market is estimated to have grown 12% annually over the period 2014 to 2018 to $2.8 billion in 2018. The industry is estimated to grow...

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There’s plenty of speculation right now around apparently disgruntled investors in SoftBank’s Vision Fund, but the drum continues to beat and the checks continue to be written. The latest deal for the $100 billion mega-fund is Clutter, an on-demand storage company that pulled in $200 million in new financing for growth.

Eagle-eyed viewers will recall that TechCrunch broke news of an impending SoftBank-led round of that size back in January, and now it is official.

The startup is one of a number of companies that provide storage options for consumers who don’t want to part with items but equally don’t have the capacity to keep it where they live. The service is based around an app that is used to summon Clutter staff to pack up, take away, store and (later) return possessions, but it can also be used for regular house moving, too.

Competitors in the space include MakeSpace, Omni, Trove, Livible and Closetbox.

Joining SoftBank in the deal are existing Clutter investors Sequoia, Atomico, GV, Fifth Wall and Four Rivers, which fronted the company’s last round, a $64 million raise nearly two years ago. This new capital means that Clutter has raised $297 million from investors to date.

There’s no confirmation of a valuation for the startup, but our well-placed sources previously told us that this round would value Clutter at between $400 million and $500 million. One thing that is confirmed, however, is that SoftBank’s Justin Wilson will join the board.

The money will go toward expansion in the U.S. as Clutter explained in an announcement, but there are hints that it harbors overseas ambitions, too:

This funding will accelerate the company’s expansion into new markets in 2019, including Philadelphia, Portland and Sacramento. It’s also doubling down in its existing markets in the greater areas of New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, San Diego, Orange County and northern New Jersey, as it marches toward a goal of operating in America’s largest 50 cities and expanding internationally.

“We believe that storage is a vast and traditional market with huge potential for disruption, and Clutter’s technology and superior customer proposition will help facilitate future growth in expanding urban communities where space is at a premium,” said SoftBank’s Wilson in a statement.

Sramana Mitra: How much money have you raised? Camilla Ley Valentin: Original funding from the seed/incubator ended up around $500,000 to $600,000 depending on the currency rate. We bought those...

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Citymapper is becoming a fintech startup, sort of. The company announced a prepaid card called Citymapper Pass for users based in London. This new product is both a subscription service to aggregate all your transportation subscriptions and a plastic card to pay for your rides.

According to Wired, Citymapper will start with two weekly subscription packages. For £30 per week, you’ll get full access to zone 1 and 2 on TfL’s network. For an additional £10 per week, you’ll also get unlimited Santander bike rides and two rides using Citymapper’s ride-sharing service.

This isn’t exactly revolutionary for London commuters, but it’s a start. Eventually, the startup wants to add more transport methods, from dockless bikes to e-scooters and other private networks. But this is going to be a bit more complicated as the startup needs to sign a deal with each company.

You could imagine creating a custom package with your favorite transportation methods and pay once for all services. More interestingly, the plastic card is a good old prepaid card. You can top up your balance just like you’d top up your Revolut account and use that card if you’re traveling to a different zone.

The card should be compatible with Apple Pay and Google Pay. If you travel a lot, Citymapper lets you pause your subscription whenever you want — there’s no long-term commitment.

As urban mobility becomes more fragmented, Citymapper wants to act as an aggregator. Many people already rely on the app to calculate itineraries. But the startup now wants to go beyond mapping. It could be a way to monetize the service as well. You’ll be able to subscribe to Citymapper Pass in March or April.

Sramana Mitra: What constitutes the profile of a founder that you would want to found a company with? Navid Alipour: If it’s not a corporate founder, whether it’s a very large public insurance...

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Meet Typology, a new Paris-based startup that designs and sells directly to consumer quality skincare and cosmetics products. The startup has been founded by Made.com co-founder Ning Li and is officially launching today.

“Typology is a relatively ambitious project. We want to challenge FMCG [fast-moving consumer goods] brands with a digital pure player,” Ning Li told me. “I spent all my career working in e-commerce. I’ve seen a lot of industries move from offline to online. But some industries, such as cosmetics, food and do-it-yourself, have been migrating to online channels more slowly.”

And it starts with a list of values. Typology wants to differentiate itself from cosmetics giants with simple lists of ingredients and no dangerous product for your skin or the environment. The company also promises that all its products are vegan, cruelty-free and made in France.

So the startup ticks all the right boxes. But if you’ve been following up-and-coming skincare companies, there are countless brands that make the same promises.

The main difference is that Typology doesn’t want to become yet another small-batch beauty brand. The team wants to create an e-commerce giant with multiple sub-brands, hundreds of products and an aggressive e-commerce strategy.

“Unilever, L’Oréal and P&G represent over 50 percent of the market. And on the other side, you have a ton of independent brands that are quite small and will probably never stand out,” Ning Li said.

Typology plans to launch 10 different product lines over the coming months. Each line will have its own concept and its own sub-brand. Everything has been developed in-house.

Today, the startup is launching three sub-brands. “Raw” is all about mixing products at home. You can order a kit and you’ll get oils, powders, spoons and a small box to create your own mask, hair oil, beard oil, etc. You can also order each product individually — Raw products are only made using one ingredient.

In the “Lab” product line, you’ll only find cosmetic serums. The company has launched six different tiny bottles for now. Each serum has its own set of properties depending on your needs.

Finally, “Ten” products are basic skincare products with less than 10 ingredients. The company is starting with face, hand and body moisturizers. Soon, the startup will also launch shower gels, shampoos, micellar water and a makeup remover.

When it comes to branding and packaging, Typology is betting everything on a minimalist design. I’m sure branding experts will tell you that clean, white labels mean transparency and simplicity. It’s also worth noting that Typology is a unisex brand.

The company wants to use recyclable packaging as much as possible by relying on glass and aluminum — you’ll get plastic bottles if you order bigger products though.

For now, Typology is only available in France, but the company plans to expand to other European countries very quickly. And they probably mean it as they have raised a significant seed round.

The startup has raised a $10 million funding round from Alven Capital, Marc Simoncini, Xavier Niel and Firstminute Capital. There are now 12 people working for Typology.

Some sub-brands will likely be instant hits while others might not attract that many customers. Typology is taking advantage of its bank account to try many different things and experiment when it comes to positioning. It’s going to be interesting to see how the product lineup evolves over the years.

Today’s 432nd FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Wednesday, February 20, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/5 p.m. CET/9:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All are...

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Today’s 432nd FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Wednesday, February 20, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/5 p.m. CET/9:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join....

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At the end of 2016, Plain Vanilla founder Thor Fridriksson left the company he founded with the intent to take at least a year off of work.

His product QuizUp, a social trivia game that raised more than $40 million and said it had more than 100 million users, never truly found a way to monetize. After a few missteps, including a proposed TV deal that eventually got cancelled, Plain Vanilla was acquired by Glu Mobile for a deal reportedly valued at $7.5 million.

Fridriksson was only a few weeks into his planned yearlong vacation when he became restless and asked a few members of his core team at QuizUp — Gunnar Holmsteinn, Johann Thorvaldur Bergthorsson and Ymir Finnbogason — to start brainstorming with him about the future of mobile gaming.

That’s where the seed was planted for what would eventually become Teatime.

“The main thing we kept focusing on, and it seems straightforward and common sense but these things often do in retrospect, is why people play games,” said Fridriksson. “One of the main value propositions of playing a game is not about the game itself but about the human interaction you have while playing with someone — talking to the people you’re playing with and seeing their reactions.”

Teatime Live is a mobile gaming platform that allows users to interact with one another, face to face, while playing games on their phone through a built-in video chat. On top of the video chat, Teatime Live offers users Snapchat-style face filters called Game Faces, that are unique to each individual game on the platform. Players can take their earned game faces from one game to other games, and eventually, Fridriksson sees the opportunity for these items to be collectibles.

Most forms of games or sports have a social element built in. Whether it’s board games or physical sports or even video games, players have been able to communicate with one another in some way shape or form. That simply hasn’t been the case on mobile, which means that it’s still unclear what the best possible game for this platform looks like.

Teatime is debuting the platform with Hyperspeed, a simple racer game that the company developed in house. Teatime will continue to operate as a studio and build out other titles on top of the Teatime Live platform, but it also plans to work alongside other game developers as a publishing partner.

There are obvious concerns around enabling live video chat among strangers across the internet, and Teatime has tried to take steps toward preventing abuse.

To start, users are not allowed to play Teatime games as a guest. All players must sign up with Facebook, Gmail or a phone number, which means bad actors will have a more taxing time getting back on the platform with a new username.

More importantly, Teatime’s game-face filters require facial recognition technology, which means that the system knows when there is no face visible in the camera. Unless a user is playing with someone that they’ve friended, Teatime will blur the picture whenever a face isn’t visible in the camera.

As per usual, Teatime also has a team of moderators going through profile pictures, etc. and a user reporting system.

Teatime hopes to build games around relatively proven models in mobile gaming to earn revenue on its own games, while sharing revenue with other game developers who build on the platform.

Teatime has raised $9 million in Series A funding from Atomico and Index Ventures.

Mike Sepso has joined the board of directors for 100 Thieves, an esports and content creation brand.

Sepso co-founded Major League Gaming in 2002, bringing the first true semblance of infrastructure to competitive gaming. MLG became the biggest independent esports league in the world, and played a big part in the evolution of esports as we know it today. In fact, MLG secured the first televised esports series ever with NBC sports, and eventually launched its own esports streaming platform.

MLG was acquired for $46 million by Activision Blizzard in 2016, but still lives as an esports content hub for Activision Blizzard titles like Call of Duty and Overwatch.

Sepso joins the 100 Thieves board alongside 100 Thieves founder and CEO Matthew “Nadeshot” Haag, president and COO John Robinson, Jake Cohen from Detroit Venture Partners and Scooter Braun (entertainment industry mogul who represents Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande).

“Mike is the godfather of esports,” said Haag. “The most influential thing that happened in my career was seeing Halo 2 competitions on Major League Gaming on TBS on the weekends. It was just mind-blowing that kids like me could play games competitively.”

Currently, Sepso serves as chairman and co-founder of the Electronic Sports Group, which is an advisory firm for executives across the finance, media, advertising and sports industries as they navigate esports deals.

“[Haag] been able to move quickly and build something that transcends esports and esports teams and has become an increasingly significant mainstream brand, and that opens up a lot of business opportunities,” said Sepso. “The strategy that 100 Thieves has put in place, using esports and gaming personalities as a way to bring this brand to market, I think it could eventually be much more than that.”

Before founding 100 Thieves, Haag was a decorated pro player in his own right and continues to be a popular Twitch streamer and YouTuber. Many esports orgs are founded by former pros, but Haag has taken a Silicon Valley approach to building out 100 Thieves, at least with regards to pace.

100 Thieves built out professional teams for a variety of titles very quickly. The company also secured capital from the likes of Sequoia, Marc Benioff, Drew Houston, Dan Gilbert, Tao Capital and Advancit Capital. Alongside traditional VCs and tech angels, 100 Thieves has also gotten investment from Scooter Braun and Drake.

Total funding for the org is $25 million.

Beyond titles and professional teams, 100 Thieves is diversifying its product early as well, with a content creator house and a line of apparel coming this spring.

The company recently signed a deal with Totino’s (yes, the pizza rolls) that includes an upcoming docuseries that offers a look behind the scenes at the 100 Thieves Call of Duty team.