Single-use plastics are the scourge of the environment, which is why many lawmakers are working to eliminate them.

Today, a new brand is launching to try to eliminate single-use plastic in the area of personal care. With $4 million in seed funding led by Lerer Hippeau (with participation from Red Sea Ventures, BoxGroup, SV Angel, Great Oaks, SoulCycle co-founder Elizabeth Cutler, and CPO of Adobe, Scott Belsky, among others), By Humankind offers deodorant, shampoo and mouthwash.

But unlike your typical personal care products, the By Humankind portfolio products are rethought from the ground up to eliminate single-use plastic and be kind to the environment.

For example, the mouthwash doesn’t come in a big plastic container, but rather in tablet form. Users can drop a tablet into a small cup of water and the mouthwash, which is alcohol-free, dissolves into a liquid. With the shampoo, the By Humankind team decided to eliminate the plastic bottle by simply taking a page out of the old soap bar playbook, creating a shampoo bar.

Meanwhile, the By Humankind deodorant comes in a refillable plastic roller, with paper-pod refills (which the company calls KindFills).

The company says that its products eliminate single-use plastic by 90 percent when compared to other products in their respective categories. Moreover, By Humankind has designed its shipping packages with biodegradable, bamboo fiber-based materials.

“Keeping our packaging footprint to a minimum is an extension of our mission, which is enabling our customers to reduce their single-use plastic waste, while not sacrificing quality or convenience,” said co-founder and CEO Brian Bushell.

Bushell came from Baked By Melissa, where he was co-founder and CEO. A couple of years after leaving the company, Bushell went on a trip with his girlfriend to Southeast Asia. On a scuba excursion, he noticed a large amount of plastic trash in the ocean, which took him by surprise as he believed to be in one of the few untouched, idyllic parts of the planet.

“We went to the hotel into the bathroom and looked at the stuff we brought on the trip and realized that we were part of the problem,” said Bushell. “That’s when the idea was hatched to build a personal care brand that not only cared about ingredients but about the containers they come in.”

But Bushell knew that the mission would only be successful if the products performed well. That’s why the company spent time and resources creating high-performance formulas for its products, such as the By Humankind deodorant, which the company says kills odor-causing bacteria 40 percent faster than other leading natural deodorants.

According to By Humankind, customers that switch from their current products to all three By Humankind products, with normal usage, will save five pounds of single-use plastic over the course of a year.

In the era of #spirtual and #physical #wellness, everything needs to be Instagrammable, even dietary supplements.

Ritual, a subscription-based service that charges customers $30 per month for shipments of its women’s daily or prenatal vitamins, has effectively tapped into that Instagram crowd. The company admits its social media strategy has been key to harnessing a cult following of wellness enthusiasts. Since it was founded in 2015, the business has sold 1 million bottles of vitamins; today, it’s announcing a $25 million Series B funding led by Lisa Wu at Norwest Venture Partners, with participation from Kirsten Green at Forerunner Ventures and Brian Singerman at Founders Fund.

Wu, as part of the round, will join Ritual’s board of directors.

“We were the first to market in our space to have really built a direct-to-consumer brand in the vitamin supplement industry,” founder and chief executive officer Katerina Schneider told TechCrunch. “For us, that was about having direct touch points with customers online and, for instance, responding to every single question and statement on platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter with depth and purpose … There’s no comparing our product to any product out there. We have reimagined the formulation.”

The Los Angeles-based company, which launched during TechCrunch Disrupt New York three years ago, brought in a $10 million Series A financing in 2017. Including a seed round, Ritual has raised $41.5 million to date. Schneider declined to disclose its valuation but shared the startup has used the latest investment to make key additions to the management team, including the hiring of chief scientific officer Nima Alamdari, a Harvard-trained physiologist, and director of scientific and clinic affairs Mastaneh Sharafi.

Ritual also plans to launch two new products, a postnatal and a post-menopausal vitamin, in 2019: “Our vision is to be that single vitamin that she needs,” Schneider said.

The Ritual team has “reimagined the vitamin from the ground up,” Schneider says, sourcing new and different ingredients to create a best-in-class supplement. To distinguish its product from competitors and justify its $30 per month price tag, Ritual provides absolute transparency of its ingredients and benefits of the vitamins and cites multiple scientific studies on web pages created for each individual ingredient.

“Women deserve to know what they are putting in their bodies and why,” Schneider said.

For reference, a container of 150 Walgreens-branded women’s daily multi-vitamin is $11, significantly less than Ritual’s. Care/of, however, another venture-backed vitamin startup, charges $25 per month for packages of its women’s prenatal vitamin.

“If you were to bring together these individual ingredients together it would cost over $200 but because we are direct-to-consumer, we are able to stomach the costs of a product that wouldn’t otherwise be accessible to most women,” Schneider explained. “We are trying to create an iconic brand that is accessible for most women and we believe $30 a month — $1 a day — is an investment in your health and your long term future.”

$30 per month, however, isn’t accessible to most women. It is, however, comparable to other vitamin makers with high-quality ingredients. Ritual’s target audience, women interested in paying for subscription-based vitamins — an item that’s pretty easily accessible at your neighborhood grocery market — are less likely to be deterred by a $360 annual price tag. After all, the service will also send you a calendar invite to remind you to take your vitamins — the grocery market will certainly not provide that level of service.

Nayeem Islam spent nearly 11 years with chipmaker Qualcomm, where he founded its Silicon Valley-based R&D facility, recruited its entire team and oversaw research on all aspects of security, including applying machine learning on mobile devices and in the network to detect threats early.

Islam was nothing if not prolific, developing a system for on-device machine learning for malware detection, libraries for optimizing deep learning algorithms on mobile devices and systems for parallel compute on mobile devices, among other things.

In fact, because of his work, he also saw a big opportunity in better protecting enterprises from cyberthreats through deep neural networks that are capable of processing every raw byte within a file and that can uncover complex relations within data sets. So two years ago, Islam and Saumitra Das, a former Qualcomm engineer with 330 patents to his name and another 450 pending, struck out on their own to create Blue Hexagon, a now 30-person Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company that is today disclosing it has raised $31 million in funding from Benchmark and Altimeter.

The funding comes roughly one year after Benchmark quietly led a $6 million Series A round for the firm.

So what has investors so bullish on the company’s prospects, aside from its credentialed founders? In a word, speed, seemingly. According to Islam, Blue Hexagon has created a real-time, cybersecurity platform that he says can detect known and unknown threats at first encounter, then block them in “sub seconds” so the malware doesn’t have time to spread.

The industry has to move to real-time detection, he says, explaining that four new and unique malware samples are released every second, and arguing that traditional security methods can’t keep pace. He says that sandboxes, for example, meaning restricted environments that quarantine cyberthreats and keep them from breaching sensitive files, are no longer state of the art. The same is true of signatures, which are mathematical techniques used to validate the authenticity and integrity of a message, software or digital document but are being bypassed by rapidly evolving new malware.

Only time will tell if Blue Hexagon is far more capable of identifying and stopping attackers, as Islam insists is the case. It is not the only startup to apply deep learning to cybersecurity, though it’s certainly one of the first. Critics, some who are protecting their own corporate interests, also worry that hackers can foil security algorithms by targeting the warning flags they look for.

Still, with its technology, its team and its pitch, Blue Hexagon is starting to persuade not only top investors of its merits, but a growing — and broad — base of customers, says Islam. “Everyone has this issue, from large banks, insurance companies, state and local governments. Nowhere do you find someone who doesn’t need to be protected.”

Blue Hexagon can even help customers that are already under attack, Islam says, even if it isn’t ideal. “Our goal is to catch an attack as early in the kill chain as possible. But if someone is already being attacked, we’ll see that activity and pinpoint it and be able to turn it off.”

Some damage may already be done, of course. It’s another reason to plan ahead, he says. “With automated attacks, you need automated techniques.” Deep learning, he insists, “is one way of leveling the playing field against attackers.”

Facebook (Nasdaq: FB) had a tough 2018 as it dealt with several concerns on privacy, fake news, and emotional well-being of its users. The stock had soared to a record high last summer before it...

___

Ike, the autonomous trucking startup founded by veterans of Apple, Google and Uber Advanced Technologies Group’s self-driving truck program, has raised $52 million in a Series A funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures.

Redpoint Ventures, Fontinalis Partners, Basis Set Ventures and Neo also participated in the round. Bain Capital Ventures partner Ajay Agarwal has joined Ike’s board. 

Ike’s funding round will help the company expand beyond its 30-person team as it drives forward with its mission to build a commercial product at scale. It’s a mission — expand and deploy — that sounds a lot like other autonomous vehicle startups. But that’s where the parallels end.

Ike’s three founders — Jur van den Berg, Nancy Sun and Alden Woodrow — aren’t pushing to have the first self-driving trucks on the road. It’s a declaration, and one the company outlined Tuesday in a blog post on Medium, that lies in contrast with a budding and cutthroat industry often described as being in a frantic race.

But then again, these founders were in the thick of those buzzy, heady days of 2016 and 2017, when startups were being snapped up by automakers and big tech companies and term sheets were raining down.

Van den Berg and Sun were both working at Apple’s special projects group when they left to join Otto, an autonomous trucking startup that was acquired by Uber in 2016. Woodrow, who was product lead of Google X’s Makani project, would also end up at Uber ATG by February 2017 as group product manager of its self-driving truck program.

By 2018, the last of Otto’s founders had left Uber and the self-driving trucks program was in free fall. Sun, Woodrow and van den Berg left Uber by spring 2018 to launch Ike. A few months later, Uber announced it would shutter its self-driving trucks unit to focus on autonomous cars.

In short, Ike’s founders have seen a thing or two, including missteps and exciting breakthroughs, splashy reveals and a heaping spoonful of hubris.

“The temptation when you’re working on this technology — because there’s so much potential and because there’s so much excitement for it — especially for small companies in the early stages, is to try and hack something together and try to get up and running really quickly,” Alden Woodrow, co-founder and CEO of Ike told TechCrunch in a recent interview.

That’s not what Ike is doing, Sun noted. Instead, the company is taking a systems engineering approach and sprinkling in a little Silicon Valley agility, Sun said.

What this means is Ike engineers aren’t focused just on quickly building out integrating self-driving software and sensors to get on the road. Instead, the company says it’s laser-focused on a systems-based philosophy. Ike is working on determining the design and architecture first before laying the foundation — to use a comparison to building a home.

It’s focused on an entire system that accounts for everything in the self-driving truck, from its wire harnesses, alternator and steering column to durable sensors designed for the highway, computer vision and deep learning that allows it to see and understand its environment and make the proper decisions based on that information. That systems approach also includes proper validation before testing on public roads.

This will likely mean Ike’s self-driving trucks will launch after others. But its founders believe that when they do hit the road at scale, it will be a validated and valuable product that won’t need constant tweaks or even a pivot.

There are trade-offs between all of these functional areas, Sun noted. “That’s why we need to get it right from a systems perspective and not over-rely on any one view.”

The heads down, systems approach is a reflection of broader changes within the industry, which has since sobered up. Many companies, even those “ahead” in the race to deploy autonomous vehicles, have discovered the problem is harder than expected. The days of time-lapsed self-driving videos, demos and bold claims have largely been replaced with a quieter let’s-get-to-work-now approach.

Ike’s plan for trucks

Ike, which is named after President Dwight D. Eisenhower and the U.S. interstate system he helped create when he signed the Federal Aid Highway Act, is trying to build a system that allows trucks to drive safely and reliably on the highway without a human driver.

However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for human drivers under Ike’s model. The company intends for its trucks to only drive autonomously on highways. From there, human truck drivers would move the loads between the highways.

Ike stands apart from other self-driving truck startups in other ways too, namely its decision to license autonomous delivery company Nuro’s vehicle software stack. The copy of Nuro’s autonomous vehicle stack was a “hard fork,” Woodrow explained, meaning Ike doesn’t have an ongoing technical connection with the company. Nuro does have a minority stake in Ike.

Instead, Ike gained a copy of relevant items (and the IP rights to it) that Nuro built, including some hardware designs, the autonomous software stack and the core infrastructure, which includes data logging, maps and simulation.

“We’re making a lot of progress today on hardware, software, systems engineering without driving trucks on the road,” Woodrow said. “That’s partly because of the team we’ve assembled, but it’s also due to the licensing agreement with Nuro that has given us a set of really robust tools.”

Ike won’t be staying off the roads for long. The company is planning to begin testing its self-driving trucks (with human safety drivers behind the wheel) on public roads this year.

Still, Ike’s founders aren’t set, or even focused yet, on where it will first deploy commercially.

“Because our road map is measured in years, we’ve got some time to get that right,” Woodrow said.

Connected-car service provider Vinli today announced it closed a $13.5 million Series B financing round. The company says this infusion of capital allows it to broaden its mobility services and integrations as it attempts to connect cars around the world.

The funding came from new and existing investors and brings the total amount the company raised to more than $20 million.

Based in Dallas, TX, Vinli launched in 2014 in TechCrunch Startup Battlefield as a direct consumer company that allowed owners to add cloud services to automobiles. It was a clever concept, and when it launched it was ahead of the curve. Now, in 2019, the focus of the business is different as the company seeks to provide deep data intelligence to auto makers and transportation providers.

“The investment validates our place in the industry. In the last five years, we have seen the industry unfold and evolve into an industry driven by digital services,” said Mark Haidar, CEO of Vinli, in a press announcement released to TechCrunch. “Companies today need viable data solutions — not only to support the growing number of data sources but to deliver on the multiple service offerings to their end customers. We’re focused on making it easier for large fleets and automakers to access smarter data intelligence. Helping those partners scale and be successful is what we look forward to most at Vinli.”

Now, with the latest round of investment, Vinli is looking to integrate its platform with electric vehicles, and turned to an energy company, E.ON, to examine the market. Vinli says it will expand its offerings for electric mobility and fleets of electric vehicles.

Vinli’s approaching a largely untapped market. As vehicles become more connected, there are countless data points that can be examined and expanded. With Vinli’s deep background in vehicle intelligence, it’s well suited to continue to grow and provide rich data sets of vehicle information.

U.K. home health analysis kit startup Thriva is adding three more products to its range later this month: A saliva-based cortisol stress test and two female hormone kits.

The Seedcamp-backed U.K. startup has been offering blood-prick-based health monitoring kits since 2016, and says it’s had more than 50,000 customers sign up to stab their own finger with its spring-loaded plastic lancet and massage a drop of blood into a tube to post away for lab-based analysis.

The new saliva kit lowers the barrier to entry for DIY “quantified selfers” by only requiring the recipient chew on a piece of material, and remember to do so four times the same day, before sending it away for analysis of their cortisol levels — with a result promised within 48 hours.

Thriva says the idea is to offer a snapshot of a person’s stress levels across the day to “help users to understand if their cortisol level is outside the normal range, and at what points of the day this is occurring.”

Though clearly the test isn’t going to offer a comprehensive monitoring of cortisol levels, and Thriva only suggests the test “could help” identify parts of the day which are “causing a lot of stress, or explain why someone is finding it hard to get up in the morning or get to sleep at night.”

The price for its Stress Test — £79 — does therefore seem steep — though users get four pieces of fabric, so they can perform the “snapshot of a day” stress test a full four times (at ~£20 a pop).

Thriva confirmed to us that subscription pricing is not being offered for this kit.

The Stress Test kit is available now.

Female hormone testing kits

Thriva also has two female hormone tests in the pipe (these are available from February 18, though they are also operating a waitlist).

One is targeted at women of child-bearing age who want to monitor their fertility levels; and another for women approaching menopause who wish to check whether their hormones are within the menopausal range.

Both are blood-prick-based tests. Each test also requires the user to answer seven questions — on topics such as fertility, physical symptoms and type of contraception used — to provide additional context for the lab that analyzes their blood.

“The questionnaire allows the doctors to tailor the interpretation of your blood results (hormone levels) to your particular symptoms/needs. It also ensures that any other relevant symptoms (e.g. irregular periods) are considered in line with the results so that recommendations of when to seek further treatment from a health professional are correct (e.g. for PCOS),” a Thriva spokeswoman told us.

The Female Hormones baseline kit tests a range of female hormones to see if levels are “in normal range.”

Tracked hormones include:

FSH and Luteinising hormone, which it says are essential to ovulation

Oestradiol, the primary female sex hormone

Testosterone, the primary male sex hormone

SHBG, which affects the availability of other hormones

plus hormones produced by the thyroid, which controls the body’s growth and metabolism

Similarly, the menopause kit tests hormones including FSH and Luteinising hormone (high levels of which can be menopausal symptoms) and Oestradiol (which it says is indicative at low levels).

It also checks for thyroid problems, with Thriva saying symptoms can mimic those of menopause. And testers’ Vitamin D levels are also checked — with the company saying deficiency is common among women of this age.

As with all the kits Thriva offers, results are reviewed by “a UK-qualified GP” within 48 hours, and users are given recommendations for additional care to seek, where necessary.

Thriva suggests the home testing kits offer women a way to learn more about their bodies. Though the same hormone tests could always be requested via a GP — and would be free, under the U.K.’s National Health Service. These kits are (also) priced at £79 apiece, with no subscription offers for the female hormone tests either.

The startup suggests women can benefit from obtaining hormone test results beforehand in order to have “informed discussions with healthcare professionals to improve their health and and quality of life.”

But as with many such products that pledge personal physical insight via lab-based analysis, core to the proposition is to sell the notion that the buyer gets to choose — and therefore control — the process of testing themselves. Though that “choice” clearly comes with a price attached.

This report was updated with a correction after the company initially gave us the wrong date for the availability of the Stress Test

Sramana Mitra: What kind of job did you get in Richmond? Andrew Rose: That was my big break from chemical engineering. I had ended up getting a Master’s in Project Management from George Washington...

___

Two dog walking and sitting startups are merging: HouseMyDog, the U.K.-headquartered online community that enables dog owners to find and book local trusted dog walkers and sitters, has agreed to join forces with Gudog, a similar offering based in Spain.

I understand that HouseMyDog and Gudog will continue to operate under their existing brands for now, but will consolidate into a single brand in “early 2019.” The combined companies also say the roll up creates what they claim is the largest platform of its kind in Europe.

Specifically, the merger seeds the combined platform with more than 25,000 approved dog sitters and walkers in more than 70 cities across eight European countries, including the U.K., Ireland, Spain, France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Belgium.

Gudog is said to be the market leader in Spain and “growing rapidly” in France and Germany, adding to HouseMyDog’s strong foothold in other parts of Europe (HouseMyDog has offices in London, Dublin and Berlin). I’m also told that Gudog founder’s Loly Garrido and Javier Cuevas are staying on, taking up the company-wide roles of CPO and CTO, respectively.

Meanwhile, the combined entity has a current headcount of 21, but expects to more than double revenue in 2019 and plans to grow the team to 35 to drive further European growth.

James McElroy, co-founder of HouseMyDog, comments: “We’ve had a close relationship with the Gudog team since we met in 2016. We admire what they have achieved and their passion for the community they have built. While today’s announcement makes strategic sense in combining our market share to accelerate our growth, we are also delighted to be working with a team that shares the same values and vision for the future of pet services in Europe.”

Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal’s next act is aimed at helping the next generation of startup founders in India.

Bansal already etched his name into India’s startup history after U.S. retail giant Walmart paid $16 billion to take a majority stake in Flipkart’s e-commerce business to expand its rivalry with Amazon. Things turned sour, however, when he resigned months after the deal’s completion due to an investigation into “serious personal misconduct.”

In 2019, 37-year-old Bansal is focused on his newest endeavor, xto10x Technologies, a startup consultancy that he founded with former colleague Saikiran Krishnamurthy. The goal is to help startup founders on a larger scale than the executive could ever do on his own.

“Person to person, I can help 10 startups, but the ambition is to help 10,000 early and mid-stage entrepreneurs, not 10,” Bansal told Bloomberg in an interview.

Bansal, who started Flipkart in 2007 with Sachin Bansal (no relation) and still retains a four percent share, told Bloomberg that India-based founders are bereft of quality consultancy and software services to handle growth and company building.

“Today, software is built for large enterprises and not small startups,” he told the publication. “Think of it as solving for startups what Amazon Web Services has done for computing, helping enterprises go from zero to a thousand servers overnight with no hassle.”

“Instead of making a thousand mistakes, if we can help other startups make a hundred or even a few hundred, that would be worth it,” Bansal added.

Bansal served as Flipkart’s CEO from 2007 to 2016 before becoming CEO of the Flipkart Group. He declined to go into specifics of the complaint against him at Flipkart — which reports suggest came about from a consensual relationship with a female employee — and, of the breakdown of his relationship with Sachin Bansal, he said he’s moved on to new things.

It isn’t just xto10x Technologies that is keeping him busy. Bansal is involved in investment firm 021 Capital, where he is the lead backer following a $50 million injection. Neither role at the two companies involves day-to-day operations, Bloomberg reported, but, still, Bansal is seeding his money and experience to shape the Indian startup ecosystem.

Databricks, the company founded by the original team behind the Apache Spark big data analytics engine, today announced that it has raised a $250 million Series E round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Coatue Management, Green Bay Ventures, Microsoft and NEA, also participated in this round, which brings the company’s total funding to $498.5 million. Microsoft’s involvement here is probably a bit of a surprise, but it’s worth noting that it also worked with Databricks on the launch of Azure Databricks as a first-party service on the platform, something that’s still a rarity in the Azure cloud.

As Databricks also today announced, its annual recurring revenue now exceeds $100 million. The company didn’t share whether it’s cash flow-positive at this point, but Databricks CEO and co-founder Ali Ghodsi shared that the company’s valuation is now $2.75 billion.

Current customers, which the company says number around 2,000, include the likes of Nielsen, Hotels.com, Overstock, Bechtel, Shell and HP.

While Databricks is obviously known for its contributions to Apache Spark, the company itself monetizes that work by offering its Unified Analytics platform on top of it. This platform allows enterprises to build their data pipelines across data storage systems and prepare data sets for data scientists and engineers. To do this, Databricks offers shared notebooks and tools for building, managing and monitoring data pipelines, and then uses that data to build machine learning models, for example. Indeed, training and deploying these models is one of the company’s focus areas these days, which makes sense, given that this is one of the main use cases for big data, after all.

On top of that, Databricks also offers a fully managed service for hosting all of these tools.

“Databricks is the clear winner in the big data platform race,” said Ben Horowitz, co-founder and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, in today’s announcement. “In addition, they have created a new category atop their world-beating Apache Spark platform called Unified Analytics that is growing even faster. As a result, we are thrilled to invest in this round.”

Ghodsi told me that Horowitz was also instrumental in getting the company to re-focus on growth. The company was already growing fast, of course, but Horowitz asked him why Databricks wasn’t growing faster. Unsurprisingly, given that it’s an enterprise company, that means aggressively hiring a larger sales force — and that’s costly. Hence the company’s need to raise at this point.

As Ghodsi told me, one of the areas the company wants to focus on is the Asia Pacific region, where overall cloud usage is growing fast. The other area the company is focusing on is support for more verticals like mass media and entertainment, federal agencies and fintech firms, which also comes with its own cost, given that the experts there don’t come cheap.

Ghodsi likes to call this “boring AI,” since it’s not as exciting as self-driving cars. In his view, though, the enterprise companies that don’t start using machine learning now will inevitably be left behind in the long run. “If you don’t get there, there’ll be no place for you in the next 20 years,” he said.

Engineering, of course, will also get a chunk of this new funding, with an emphasis on relatively new products like MLFlow and Delta, two tools Databricks recently developed and that make it easier to manage the life cycle of machine learning models and build the necessary data pipelines to feed them.

Festicket, the U.K.-headquartered festival booking platform, has picked up another $4.6 million in funding, an extension of the startup’s $10.5 million Series D late last year. The new backing comes from Edge Investments, the creative industries investor that counts music industry veteran Harvey Goldsmith as a director.

Edge joins an existing roster of Series D investors that includes venture capital firm Beringea, Jaguar Land Rover’s venture capital fund InMotion Ventures, Channel 4’s Commercial Growth Fund, Lepe Partners, U-Start and ex Spinnin’ Records CEO Eelko Van Kooten. The company was previously backed by Lepe Partners, Wellington Partners, PROfounders and Playfair Capital, among others.

Founded in 2012, Festicket set out to make booking various festival experiences across Europe as easy as booking a package holiday. The platform — or marketplace — lets you discover and book festival tickets and the related travel itinerary. Fast-forward to today, the company works with more than 1,200 festivals and 4,500 suppliers across 50 countries, serving more than 2.5 million customers worldwide.

Most recently, Festicket integrated with Spotify to help you discover music festivals based on the music you listen to. Dubbed “Festival Finder,” the new feature requires you to connect your Spotify account to Festicket using Spotify login. After doing so, the platform pulls in data on your favourite artists and displays 10 upcoming festivals that it deems will match your music tastes.

Meanwhile, Festicket says the additional capital will be used to support Festicket’s entrance into new markets, primarily North America and Asia. The company is also planning to invest in its underlying tech platform and grow its “community” of passionate festival fans around the world. Notably, this will include building an exclusive membership tier with added benefits in 2019.

French startup Lunchr is raising a $34 million funding round (€30 million) from Index Ventures, with existing investors Daphni, Idinvest and Kima Ventures also participating. The company raised $13 million 7 months ago (€11 million).

In France, companies of a certain size have to support employees in one way or another when it comes to their lunch break. Big companies usually build out a cafeteria while small companies hand out meal vouchers.

Lunchr focuses on meal vouchers. Originally, employees received paper vouchers at the beginning of each month. But meal voucher companies, such as Edenred or Sodexo, now also provide an alternative to paper vouchers. You can get a payment card to pay some or all of your food using a card reader.

While this is a a good idea on paper, many restaurants and supermarkets still don’t accept meal voucher cards, as they must update their card terminals. Apps also don’t work that, well so it’s hard to know if you have money left on your account.

Lunchr wants to provide a better experience. And it starts with a card that works in more places. Restaurants don’t need to do anything as long as they already accept paper meal vouchers. Lunchr currently supports 200,000 places in France.

The company also takes advantage of the fact that a company is going to switch everyone to Lunchr, not just some employees. It means that everyone has a Lunchr account, the Lunchr app and a Lunchr card.

That’s why you can also use the Lunchr app to order food around your office. Other employees can add stuff to your order and one employee can pick up the order for everyone. Lunchr has negotiated discounts with restaurants — you unlock discounts on big orders. On average, people who order food via the app get an 18 percent discount.

With today’s funding round, the company wants to attract 200,000 by the end of 2019. Redbull in France, LeLynx.fr, Spotify in France, Qonto and Payfit use Lunchr already.

While Lunchr is competing with bigger companies, 85 percent of meal vouchers in France are still paper vouchers. Companies will consider switching to payment cards in the coming years and it presents a big opportunity for Lunchr.