The Munchery saga continues.

In a new class-action lawsuit, former Munchery facilities worker Joshua Philips is claiming the startup owes him and 250 other employees 60 days’ wages, citing The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, a U.S. labor law that requires employers with an excess of 100 employees to give notice 60 days ahead of mass layoffs.

Munchery, a prepared meal delivery company headquartered in San Francisco, announced in an email to customers on January 21 that it would cease operations, effectively immediately. The abrupt shutdown not only came as a surprise to Munchery’s community of customers, but shocked vendors, many whom had been expecting payments from the business for several weeks. Munchery’s own employees were left in the dark, too, according to several former workers who spoke to TechCrunch about their debt and dissatisfaction with chief executive James Beriker.

Munchery ordered mass layoffs on January 21, per the lawsuit, the same day customers were notified the company would go out of business. In total, Philips is seeking equal to the sum of his and other affected employees’ “unpaid wages, salary, commissions, bonuses, accrued holiday pay, accrued vacation pay, pension and 401(k) contributions and other ERISA benefits, for 60 days, that would have been covered and paid under the then-applicable employee benefit plans.”

Munchery is deep in a pile of debt. The startup’s former vendors, which includes San Francisco-based Dandelion Chocolate and Three Babes Bakeshop, say they’re owed tens of thousands in overdue payments. Those businesses, and several other small vendors in San Francisco and Los Angeles that notified TechCrunch following the publication of this story, are still awaiting overdue payments, with one supplier claiming to be owed north of $100,000.

As of Monday morning, Munchery had yet to file for bankruptcy.

“They entered into a 14-month payment plan with us to cover nearly $150,000 in debt, but never had the intention of fulfilling their obligation,” an LA-based Munchery vendor, who asked not to be named, told TechCrunch. “The entire meal prep business is not sustainable on a grand scale like these companies envision.”

On top of its outstanding debts to vendors and facilities workers, Munchery also failed to send final paychecks to delivery drivers. Several Instagram messages provided to TechCrunch show a cluster of drivers in the San Francisco and Sacramento area are confused by the lack of communication from the venture-funded startup and are hopeful checks will arrive.

After arguing with Munchery employees, a delivery driver in Sacramento by the name of Sharon Howard said she finally received a “janky looking handwritten check” from the business on Monday and is hopeful it will clear.

“My co-workers up here in Sacramento have not received their final checks and are just um…waiting,” Howard wrote in an Instagram message shared with TechCrunch. “I sort of have the feeling that if they don’t speak up, they’re just gonna be forgotten about … It’s just not right to work with the expectation of getting paid and then just allow Munchery to turn a blind eye.”

Munchery had raised $125 million in venture capital funding at a peak valuation of $300 million from key investors e.Ventures, Infinity Ventures, Sherpa Capital and Menlo Ventures, as well as from Greycroft, M13, Northgate Capital and more since its founding in 2010 by Tran and Conrad Chu. Aside from a small $5 million check, all that cash was deployed under the leadership of Tran, who struggled to improve Munchery’s margins and was eventually replaced by Beriker, the former CEO of Simply Hired.

Munchery, however, struggled under Beriker, too, and ultimately shut down its Los Angeles, Seattle and New York operations and laid off 30 percent of its workforce. A former Munchery employee, who asked not to be named, said Beriker’s poor leadership is to blame for the startup’s failure.

“The CEO was very disconnected to the business,” the person said in a text message. “We would see him maybe once every other week and only for 15 minutes — if that. The kitchen staff didn’t even know who he was when he came to the facility. In my time with the company, he was rarely truthful or transparent about the current state of the business and the future direction. Not to mention his very hefty salary that compared to that of a publicly traded Fortune 500 company.”

“My heart goes out to all of the big and small businesses that Munchery’s closure has and will affect,” the person added. “I am also hopeful that the staff who had zero advance knowledge of the closure will find employment quickly.”

Beriker has not responded to multiple requests for comment from TechCrunch. We’ve reached out to Munchery’s investors for additional details surrounding the strange, sudden and silent shutdown.

Here’s a look at the full legal complaint:

Sapphire Ventures, formerly the corporate venture capital arm of SAP, has lassoed $115 million from new limited partners (LPs) to invest at the intersection of tech, sports, media and entertainment.

A majority of the LPs for the new fund, called Sapphire Sport, have ties to the sports industry, from City Football Group, which owns English Premier League team Manchester City, to Adidas, the owners of the Indiana Pacers, New York Jets, San Jose Sharks and Tampa Bay Lightning, among others.

The firm plans to do five to six investments per year, sized between $3 million and $7 million. So far, they’ve deployed capital to five startups: at-home fitness system Tonal, live soccer streaming platform mycujoo, digital sports network Overtime, ticketing and events platform Fevo and gaming studio Phoenix Labs. Sapphire began backing tech startups in 2008; in 2016, the firm closed on $1 billion for its third flagship venture fund.

Sapphire managing director and co-founder Doug Higgins is leading the effort alongside newly tapped partner Michael Spirito, who joined from 21st Century Fox, where he focused on business development and digital media for the Fox Sports-owned Yankees Entertainment and Sports (YES) Network, in September.

Higgins was an investment manager at Intel Capital for four years prior to co-launching Sapphire. Throughout his career, he’s managed the firm’s investments in LinkedIn, DocuSign, Square and more.

“We invest in anything that tech is disrupting,” Higgins told TechCrunch. “We were early investors in Fitbit, so we saw the beginning of digital fitness and how tech can impact the lives of anyone, not just high-performance athletes … We are also investors in Square, TicketFly and Paytm and what we’ve been seeing — the dream as a VC — is these massive markets in the sports, media and digital health world that are getting disrupted by tech.”

Sapphire is betting its traditional and well-established venture platform, coupled with the expertise of leading sports entities on board as LPs, will give it a competitive edge as it targets some of the best emerging sports tech companies.

“We see a lot of FOMO happening in this world, where everyone wants to have a play, but to make the best investment you need to have the widest perspective,” Higgins said. “So if you’re a team owner of a particular football team you are going to make better decisions if you are able to share perspectives with owners of other teams.”

“The best entrepreneurs, the ones we all want to invest in, there’s not a draft, they have to select you,” he added.

Investment in esports and gaming has skyrocketed, surpassing a total of $2.5 billion in VC funding in 2018. According to PitchBook, a handful of startups have already raised a total of $65 million in VC backing this year, including a $10.8 million financing for ReKTGlobal, a provider of esports infrastructure services.

“You can’t ignore the numbers on esports,” Higgins added. “They just continue to grow massively and people who have teenage kids, like myself, [those kids] want to grow up to be the next ninja, not the next Tom Brady .”

Kite, a San Francisco-based startup that uses machine learning to build what is essentially a very smart code-completion tool, today announced that it has raised a $17 million funding round. The round was led by Trinity Ventures, with personal participation from now-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. In addition to the funding, Kite also today announced that its tools are now significantly smarter and that developers can run them locally on their machines, even if they don’t have an internet connection.

As Kite founder and CEO Adam Smith told me, the idea for Kite is based on the simple fact that a lot of programming is repetitive. “That’s why [developers] spend so much time on Stack Overflow. That’s why they spend so much time debugging really basic errors and looking up documentation, but not so much time looking at how the solution should work,” he said. “We thought we can use machine learning to fix that.”

Standard code completion tools often still use alphabetical sorting, while Kite uses AI to infer what a developer is likely trying to do (though, to be fair, the likes of IntelliSense and others are also starting to get smarter). In its first iteration, Kite, which sadly still only works for Python code right now, sorted its hints by popularity. Unsurprisingly, that was already more useful than alphabetical sorting, and the right answer appeared in the top three results 37 percent of the time.

What’s interesting here is that if you can predict the next part of a line of code with high accuracy, you can start predicting a few more words ahead, too. And that’s exactly what Kite is starting to do now.

To do this, the team had to build its own machine learning models that worked well for code. As Smith told me, Kite first looked at using standard natural language processing (NLP) models, but it turns out that those don’t really work well for code, which has a different structure. As training data, Kite fed the system all the Python code on GitHub .

Looking ahead, what Smith really wants to achieve is what he calls “fully automated programming.” “It’s that Star Trek vision of where you tell computers in a high-level language what to do,” he said. “If it’s ambiguous, the computer will ask questions.”

It’ll take a few more breakthroughs in AI to realize that vision, but for the time being, Kite’s tools are freely available and come with editor plugins for Atom, Sublime Text3, VS Code, Vim, PyCharm and IntelliJ. Currently, about 30,000 Python developers use its tools.

With today’s release, developers can also use these models locally, without the need for an internet connection. That’s a sign of how efficient the models are, but as Smith also acknowledged, running the model locally means his company doesn’t have to manage a complex cloud infrastructure either. This should also make the tool more appealing to more developers — especially in larger corporations — given that the original tool would send all of your code to Kite’s servers (and in that context, it’s worth noting the company managed to create its own little scandal around some open-source contributions that favored its auto-completion engine).

The company plans to use the new funding to build out the team, which mostly consists of engineers. It’ll also build out its product, with a special focus on supporting more languages.

As for its business model, it’s worth noting that Kite did test a subscription service last year, but as Smith argues, that was mostly to test if the company could monetize the service. “Now we want to optimize for growth,” he said and noted that the focus of the company’s monetization strategy will be on enterprise users. Indeed, that’s a common refrain I hear from startups that focus on developers. It’s very hard to sell subscriptions to individual developers, it seems, so most start to focus on enterprises sooner or later.

For the past few years, China has been rolling out a Black Mirror / Harry Potter-esque social rating policy known as the Social Credit System (SCS). Far from just a credit score in the financial sense, an SCS score can determine whether a person can buy business class tickets on trains (or take the train at all) or have access to flights. Apps are rumored to exist that would tell users whether they are standing near someone with a debt listed in the system, so … they can walk away I guess.

This is a massive undertaking, and researchers are finally starting to collect good data on the system’s operation, such as a MERICS report looking at the implementation of this complex system, which involves companies and all levels of the Chinese government. Westerners have also increasingly explored the generally positive reception of the system by Chinese citizens, which would seem at odds with typical desires for privacy.

Yet, one of the biggest and most obvious open questions is what exactly will get you rewarded or punished by the SCS? Now, we are finally starting to get answers.

In a new paper that will be presented this week at the ACM FAT* Conference on algorithmic transparency, a group of researchers investigated how positive and negative points were assessed by downloading a large corpus of hundreds of thousands of entries from the Beijing SCS website and analyzing it with content analysis machine learning tools.

They found that Beijing was remarkably clear about what will get you punished, but vague about what will get you positive points. For instance, the vast majority of the blacklist was made up by people who had failed to pay their debts, or who had committed a traffic violation. Meanwhile, the people on the redlist (the positive list) were there because they were, say, great volunteers, but with no criteria on how to get that status or why they were listed at all.

“It’s very difficult to pinpoint the exact degree of transparency,” of SCS said Severin Engelmann, one of the lead researchers based at the Technical University of Munich. Far from being just an experimental startup, SCS is already quite advanced. “Blacklisting and redlisting are already in place, and they clearly indicate what behavior is bad … but not what behavior is actually good,” he said.

Even more interesting, there are more companies on the blacklist and redlist than there are individuals within the Beijing corpus, indicating that while the government is certainly concerned about citizens, it’s bringing its social control mechanism onto companies perhaps more aggressively.

Jens Grossklags, another of the researchers, noted that this level of transparency — while inconsistent — was unusual in the West. “It is really fascinating from a data science perspective to see how much information is being made available not just to individuals but to the general public,” he said. He noted that public shaming has been common with the Chinese system, while Western consumers have a hard time accessing their own scores let alone the scores of others.

The study is one of the first to look at the actual implementation of SCS and reverse engineer its algorithm, and the researchers are potentially following up by investigating regional variations and further changes to the system.

TechCrunch is experimenting with new content forms. This is a rough draft of something new – provide your feedback directly to the author (Danny at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) if you like or hate something here.

Share your feedback on your startup’s attorney

My colleague Eric Eldon and I are reaching out to startup founders and execs about their experiences with their attorneys. Our goal is to identify the leading lights of the industry and help spark discussions around best practices. If you have an attorney you thought did a fantastic job for your startup, let us know using this short Google Forms survey and also spread the word. We will share the results and more in the coming weeks.

Stray Thoughts (aka, what I am reading)

Short summaries and analysis of important news stories

Hustling to nothing

Erin Griffith has a great piece on the increasing pervasiveness of hustle culture. This is part of a long-running debate in Silicon Valley between the work-your-ass-off crowd and the productivity-peaks-at-35-hours crowd. The answer in my mind is that we should see work in phases — running at 100 MPH all the time is most definitely not sustainable, but neither frankly is working a very stable number of hours per week. The vagaries of life and work mean that we need to surge and recede our efforts as dictated, and always track our own health.

Nvidia’s troubles continue

We’ve talked a lot about Nvidia over the past few months (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). Well, the bad news train just continues. As my colleague Romain Dillet reports, Nvidia is cutting its revenue outlook, and now the stock is falling again (another 14% as I write this). It cites lowered demand particularly from China, which is experiencing a major slowdown in its economy.

Can Chinese startups subsidize customers forever?

The Financial Times asks an important question about the “China model” of startups: should founders heavily subsidize customers in order to buy market share and fight competitors? They point to bike sharing startup Ofo’s collapse, although I would point to the expensive rise of Luckin Coffee as perhaps the latest example. It’s a lesson that Munchery’s investors also have had to learn: at the end of the day, those unit economics better turn positive if a company is to survive.

What’s next

This newsletter is written with the assistance of Arman Tabatabai from New York

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

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Parsley Health has just opened a new, fully redesigned space on Fifth Avenue in New York City, marking the first true Parsley Health Center.

Since launch, the startup has been operating out of clinics in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. But TechCrunch got the chance to check out Parsley’s new Fifth Avenue location, which marks the company’s first space designed from the ground up as Parsley Health.

Founded by Dr. Robin Berzin, Parsley Health is a healthcare membership, where customers are offered a holistic approach to their health by a team of doctors and health coaches, complete with 24/7 unlimited messaging.

The idea stemmed from the troublesome reality that the average American spends less than 20 minutes a year with their doctor, who more often than not treat symptoms instead of the root problem.

Parsley members spend around four hours/year with medical professionals, including five doctor visits a year and five health coach visits. Plus, Parsley offers 24/7 communication with your doctor and health coach. The hope is that Parsley doctors can better diagnose and treat their patients’ issues if they have the time to get the full story. Plus, Parsley doctors have the benefit of advanced biomarker testing alongside their focus on functional medicine, where root issues are prioritized for treatment rather than symptoms.

Part of giving the highest-quality treatment is creating an open relationship between doctor and patient. That, in many ways, can be influenced by the physical space.

The new Parsley Health Center takes into account the principles of biophilic design. In other words, the space is designed specifically to make people feel healthier and better. The lighting, for example, is built to mimic natural light by using ribbed glass partition systems in the smaller rooms of the space. The space is also full of plants, as being in connection with nature reduces stress and improves mood.

The company even paid attention to the details of designing a main hallway where the halls that sprawl off the main corridor are somewhat hidden by overhanging walls. This pattern, of visually implying a mystery waits around the corner, is supposed to provoke a strong pleasure response.

Beyond the design itself, Parsley also took into account the look and feel of the waiting room.

Rather than a sterile room with old magazines and no light, the Parsley waiting room is more of a communal living room, with plenty of couches and a kitchen, complete with draught kombucha and healthy snacks for purchase.

The hope is that Parsley can use this room for community events around learning how to optimize health across all parts of life, including food, sleep and behavior.

Doctors’ offices and exam rooms are rethought to ensure a more comfortable relationship between doctor and patient. There are no desks that separate patient from doctor, instead featuring a couch with a small side table to write on.

Observation tables have been redesigned to fit in with the room instead of standing out like a giant piece of “medical equipment.” Doctors’ instruments all fit into a small set of drawers off to the side.

Even the lab is built adjacent to a restroom where patients can pass their specimen through a small compartment in the wall instead of walking it through the hallways.

In 2017, Parsley raised $10 million led by FirstMark Capital, with participation from Amplo, Trail Mix Ventures, Combine and The Chernin Group. Individual investors such as Dr. Mark Hyman, M.D., director of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine; Nat Turner, CEO of Flatiron Health; Neil Parikh, co-founder of Casper; and Dave Gilboa, co-founder of Warby Parker, also invested in the round.

Membership to Parsley costs $150/month.

Are more Theranos -style scandals looming for investors in healthcare startups?

A team of researchers associated with the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford thinks so. They’ve published a paper warning investors in life sciences startups that a systemic lack of transparency exists in their portfolio companies — creating the possibility for more multi-billion-dollar implosions and scandals like the one that toppled Theranos and its charismatic founder, Elizabeth Holmes.

Indeed, one of the study’s authors, Dr. John Ioannidis, the co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford and director of the University’s PhD program in Epidemiology and Clinical Research, was  among the first people to identify the risks associated with Theranos and its “stealth research.”

Now Dr. Ioannidis and his co-authors, Ioana A. Cristea and Eli M. Cahan, have published a study surveying the publicly available research from the largest privately held companies in the healthcare space, and found them lacking. 

Most of the highest-valued startups in healthcare have not published any significant scientific literature, the study found. Nearly half of the publications from companies worth more than $1 billion came from only two startups — 23andMe and Adaptive Biotechnologies, according to the paper.

“Many years ago I was the first person to say that Theranos had a problem,” says Ioannidis. “The problem that I had then was that Theranos did not have any peer-reviewed evidence to show.”

In an interview and in their paper, Ioannidis and Cahan warn that investors have overlooked systemic problems created by the lack of transparency among healthcare startups.

They write:

It would be tempting to dismiss the Theranos case as just one rotten apple. However, we worry that the focus on fraud puts aside a more fundamental concern. Fraud is making waves in the news, but stealth research may have a more detrimental impact.

According to the study’s findings, more than half of the healthcare startups that are worth more than $1 billion have published no highly cited papers at all. For companies that were acquired or are publicly traded that number is around 40 percent.

In all, healthcare startups that are currently valued at more than $1 billion published 425 Pubmed papers. And of those papers only 34 (8 percent, including two reviews) were highly cited. For companies with valuations of more than $1 billion that had been acquired or are publicly traded on stock exchanges, the researchers counted 413 papers, of which 47 (11 percent, including nine reviews) were highly cited.

Digging deeper into some of the companies that had high valuations but little or no published research revealed scores of operational and technological issues for the researchers.

For instance, StemCentrx, which was bought for $10.2 billion in 2016 by AbbVie, had published 16 papers — and only one highly cited paper. Since the acquisition, the Food and Drug Administration had imposed a delay on the readout of the company’s phase II trial for its Rova T targeted antibody drug for cancer treatment. In December, a Phase III trial for Rova T as a second-line treatment for patients with advanced small cell lung cancer was halted because the treatment wasn’t working, according to a report in Targeted Oncology.

Acerta Pharma, another healthcare-focused startup focused on cancer treatments, was bought by AstraZeneca for $7.3 billion. That company published nine articles and had one highly cited paper for a very early study of a potential treatment for relapsed chronic lymphocytic leukemia. Acerta received accelerated approval for a drug called acalabrutinib, which treats a rare form of lymphoma called mantle cell lymphoma. Two years ago, AstraZeneca had to retract data and admit that Acerta falsified preclinical data for its drug.

Then there’s Intarcia, the developer of a device for diabetes treatment that’s worth $5.5 billion. That company had its device rejected by the FDA and was forced to lay off staff and halt a couple of later-stage trials. It had only published six papers — none of them very highly cited.

Ultimately, the researchers concluded that highly valued healthcare startups don’t contribute to published research and that the valuation of these companies by investors is divorced from any externally validated data.

For the researchers (and for investors) this should present a problem.

“Many unicorns may be overvalued [21] and subject to unrealistic scientific expectations,” the study’s authors write. And they reject the argument that simply applying for — and receiving — patents is enough to prove that a technology in the healthcare space has been thoroughly vetted. “[Patents] do not offer the same level of documentation as peer-reviewed articles. For example, Theranos had over 100 patents [1], but these were unable to supplant the vacuum in their evidence,” the researchers wrote. 

Even if companies want to protect their technology, there are still ways for them to be more transparent about the results or benefits of their technology. The authors acknowledge that publishing isn’t the primary mission of startups. They can, however publish a few high-value articles, secure their technology through patents and then work with researchers, universities or hospitals to validate the technology and have those organizations publish results of the tests, the authors argue.

As the authors conclude:

Start-ups are key purveyors of innovation and disruption. Consequently, holding them to a minimal standard of evaluation from the scientific community is crucial. Participation in peer review, with all its limitations, is the best way we have to uphold this standard. We are not arguing that start-ups should divert excessive resources to having peer-reviewed papers. However, when their products are destined to affect patient health, they should neither be solely doing marketing. Confidential data sharing with potential investors or regulators cannot replace more open scrutiny by the scientific community.

Subscription e-book and audiobook service Scribd says it’s grown to more than 1 million subscribers.

It still has a long way to go before reaching the heights of Netflix (nearly 150 million subscribers) or Spotify (87 million paying subscribers), but the announcement should help put any lingering doubts to rest around whether there’s a sizable audience willing to pay an $8.99 subscription fee for books.

The company also says it’s been profitable since early in 2017, and that it’s currently bringing in $100 million in annual recurring revenue.

Scribd started as a document-sharing service before moving into the subscription e-book business in 2013, when it signed its first deal with a major publisher — namely, HarperCollins. Since then, the service has added other big publishers and moved beyond older “backlist” titles. In fact, last year HarperCollins released the latest book from “Divergent” author Veronica Roth on Scribd, on launch day.

Chantal Restivo-Alessi has been chief digital officer at HarperCollins for the duration of the Scribd partnership. Via email, she praised the company’s “willingness to monitor, analyze, learn and adjust – something that clearly it has been doing in the past years.”

“We have continued to learn and adapt together,” Restivo-Alessi said. “We expected the digital ebook market to be a bigger part of our and their business now, and we have been positively surprised by the uptake in digital audio. We have continued to calibrate our catalog offer in line with the evolution of Scribd’s platform and customer base. And we continue to be pleasantly surprised by the depth of exposure that the platform provides to our backlist.”

The adjustments to which Restivo-Alessi alludes include Scribd’s pricing model — it initially offered subscribers unlimited access to its library, then capped them at three e-books and one audiobook per month, then went back to a modified version of its unlimited plan last year. (Apparently the most voracious readers and listeners might still encounter a cap.)

Asked whether we can expect the Scribd offering to continue changing, co-founder and CEO Trip Adler said, “I don’t think there will be any big changes. We’re always optimizing … We’re constantly improving the way we find the right balance for readers and for publishers.”

Adler credited audiobooks as a key ingredient to the service’s growth, with engagement growing 100 percent year over year. Surprisingly, he also said Scribd’s old document-sharing business continues to be crucial, because it helps the service attract between 100 million and 200 million visitors each month (mostly from search engines), who can then be converted into paying subscribers.

“That’s kind of the key thing we’ve figured out,” Adler said. “We use the [user-generated content] to attract users and use premium content to retain them.”

Scribd has raised a total of $47.8 million in funding, according to Crunchbase.

Investors include Khosla Ventures, with Khosla’s Keith Rabois on the Scribd board. In an emailed statement, Rabois said, “Scribd has one of the largest libraries of content in the world — which reaches millions of readers every month, giving the company exceptional data and the unique ability to help readers discover content uniquely suited to them. Scribd hitting one million subscribers is just the beginning of Scribd transforming how we choose what books to read and how we read them.”

And now that Scribd has reached the 1 million subscriber milestone, Adler said he’s already thinking about how it can get to 10 million. His plans include further international expansion in markets like Latin America, Europe and India (apparently half of Scribd’s subscriber base is already outside the United States), working with publishers and authors to create original content, and continuing to add new formats.

“We started out by offering documents, then e-books, and then audiobooks, magazines and sheet music,” he said. “We’re just getting started. There’s going to be a lot more new types of content in the coming years.”

Sumner Douglas is Managing Director and Venture Partner at BoomStartup, a Utah-based accelerator that offers pre-seed funding.

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Alireza Rahnema, Principal and General Partner at 7 Gate Ventures, talks about the Vancouver startup eco-system and his firm’s investment thesis.

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Contentsquare, the cloud-based software that helps businesses understand how and why users are interacting with their app, mobile and web sites, has raised $60 million in further funding.

Leading the Series C round is global investment company Eurazeo. It adds to $42 million in Series B funding raised around a year ago, and includes participation from existing investors Canaan, Highland Europe and H14.

Described as a “fully automated digital experience insights platform,” Contentsquare’s SaaS analyses customer behavior through the tracking of “billions of digital touch and mouse movements” to provide brands with insights into how to increase engagement, reduce operational costs and maximise conversion rates.

In other words, Contentsquare claims it can tell a company why conversion rates are low and, most importantly, what can be done to improve them. This can include making changes to specific page or content elements, or a combination of the two.

Related to this, Contentsquare has developed an AI engine to analyse behavioural data and offer automatic insights. In addition, the “AutoZone” feature replaces content tagging and tag configuration with automatic element identification. This means that Contentsquare automatically recognises different page or app elements and can therefore track changes more easily to feed into the aforementioned AI engine.

More recently, the company has released two new solutions for customers: CS Live and AI Alerts, which deliver customer experience information in real time. CS Live provides Contentsquare’s clients with a way to immediately identify consumer metrics on their websites without the need for a dashboard. AI Alerts, Contentsquare’s newest monitoring system, enables businesses to “detect and react to improve customer engagement without manual effort.”

To that end, Contentsquare is used by digital, content, product, analytics, acquisition, IT and UX teams inside numerous companies. Its customers include Walmart, Samsung, Sephora, Tiffany, LVMH, AccorHotels, Goldman Sachs, Avis, GoPro, Ikea, Nissan and others.

Meanwhile, Contentsquare says the new capital will help Contentsquare increase research and development focused on AI and predictive analytics. It also will be deployed for further expansion across the Americas, Europe, Asia and Middle East.

Carol explains certain SaaS-enabled BPO opportunities within the value-based healthcare domain. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Relias. Carol Clayton:...

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Curve, the London fintech that lets you consolidate all of your bank cards into a single Curve card and app to make it easier to manage your spending, has added support for Amex cards.

In effect, the feature is being re-instated, having existed fleetingly when Curve was in testing back in 2016 before being unceremoniously blocked by American Express. The two companies appear to have finally settled their differences, which is undoubtedly good news for Curve customers who also have a U.K. Amex card.

Technically in beta, the new Amex feature lets Curve customers add their Amex cards to Curve and spend with Amex anywhere the Curve Mastercard is accepted. This, says the fintech startup, solves the annoyance Amex card members face with some retailers not accepting Amex cards due to the card’s higher fees.

Presumably, Curve is happy to swallow these fees to better serve its customers, although we don’t know the specific terms of any commercial agreement, if indeed there is one.

In further good news, Curve says that Amex card members will continue to earn American Express Membership Rewards points when they spend with their Curve card linked to Amex, and will simultaneously earn Curve Rewards points, too. Curve itself offers rewards at 50 major brands, including Amazon, Uber, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose, Ocado, Selfridges, BP and more.

This should mean that Curve customers who switch the Curve app to charge their Amex card under the hood will receive twice the rewards — once from Curve and once from Amex, per qualifying transaction.

Curve says it has been trialing Amex compatibility with its platform in closed beta since November. During beta testing, at least 500 Curve users spent more than £1 million on their Amex cards by paying with Curve, apparently.

Adds Curve founder and CEO, Shachar Bialick, in a telling statement: “Ensuring Amex compatibility with Curve was one of our priorities and most asked for features by our customers. However, bringing Amex back to Curve was not an easy feat. There were challenges around brand and commercials, some of which still exists.”

In a brief call, Bialick paid tribute to his team for getting Amex support across the line and to the “progressive regulatory and competitive landscape” in Europe and the U.K., which he says is fostering competition in the payments and financial space and enabled Curve to bring Amex into its platform. “We hope Amex will continue to support the interest of their customers,” adds the Curve founder.

In other words, this is likely evidence of a startup pushing up against the boundaries of open banking and PSD2 to innovate on behalf of customers and finding that the regulation holds water. Hopefully we’ll see more innovation to come in the months and years ahead as other fintech startups do the same.

Monzo, the U.K. challenger bank that now boasts 1.5 million current account customers, has partnered with fintech startup Flux to bring itemised receipts and loyalty points to its banking app.

Due to be officially unveiled at a joint event in London on Wednesday, the new functionality means that if you’re a customer of Monzo — and once you’ve opted in — Flux will deliver digital receipts, rewards and loyalty to the Monzo app in real time, whenever you spend at a Flux partner merchant. Currently this includes EAT, Costa Coffee (announced but not yet live), itsu, pod and pure, while I understand a number of other major merchants are in the pipeline and could be announced quite soon.

In the long-term, Flux wants to become the proprietary technology platform for the interchange of item-level digital receipt data, but has always faced a chicken and egg problem: It needs bank integrations to sign up merchants and it needs merchant integrations to sign up banks. As I wrote when the company raised its Series A in December, cracking this problem has clearly started to gather momentum.

Noteworthy is that Monzo had actually been trialing Flux in a very small closed beta since 2017, but progress had stalled while the challenger bank built out its current account offering and figured out its “marketplace banking” strategy. Related to this is the question of how deep third-party integration should go and how wide the Monzo marketplace should cast its net in terms of the number of competing third-party products vying for attention.

To that end, the Flux integration feels pretty wholehearted. This includes a call-to-action within the Monzo app to link your account to Flux when you spend in a Flux partner merchant. On-boarding users to Flux in context — i.e. right after the point of purchase — and therefore unlocking itemised digital receipts immediately and retroactively will very likely make opting into the feature a no-brainer.

Flux’s integration with the Barclays Launchpad app works in a similar fashion. However, within challenger bank Starling, the other Flux bank partner, no such call-to-action exists. Instead, it can only be enabled within the Starling Marketplace, which at two taps deep feels slightly buried for now.

Meanwhile, although the current focus is building receipt infrastructure, the Flux vision is much broader. By bridging the gap between the itemised receipt data captured by a merchant’s point-of-sale (POS) system and what little information typically shows up in your bank statement or mobile banking app, the startup can not only power loyalty schemes and card-linked offers, as well as give merchants much deeper POS analytics, it could also offer new types of enriched experiences for consumers.

This could in the future include letting you easily track your eating out habits, right down to item-level rather than just merchant category, as part of your general health goals. Or providing much deeper spending analytics to help you improve financial well-being. In other words, there’s a great deal more latent value in item-level receipt data to be unlocked yet.

Cue Matty Cusden-Ross, CEO and founder at Flux: “Flux’s mission is to liberate the worlds’ receipt data in order to enrich trillions of experiences globally. Today we’re excited to be expanding our partnership with Monzo to bring automated receipts and rewards to even more people. Monzo shares our vision of the future and as Flux continues to scale across bigger and bigger merchants we can’t wait to make Flux available everywhere.”

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